End of History

THE NEXT PRESIDENT HAS SUCH A REAGANESQUE OPPORTUNITY:

The United States at 250: Renewal Is the Real American Tradition (Roy Swan, 07/03/26, NY Observer)

At 250 years old, the United States of America is the most ambitious brand ever conceived. Like every great institution, it lives or dies by how well it practices what it preaches.

Fifteen years ago, leadership scholars Doug Ready and Emily Truelove called the animating spirit of powerful brands “collective ambition” in a seminal Harvard Business Review article. They captured how great leaders inspire divided people to unify for the common good through a seven-element model that stands the test of time: purpose, vision, promise, values, targets, priorities and the daily behavior of the people who carry the name. What makes great companies great can make great nations greater. Alignment endures. Misalignment rots.

Two hundred and fifty years ago in Philadelphia, imperfect men drafted the blueprint for a more perfect Union. They named a promise: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They invoked Nature’s God. They committed to values worth dying for. They admitted the nation was imperfect on day one, yet expected it to achieve the perfection they could not deliver.

Perfecting is a verb, not an adjective. The Founders trusted us to keep building.

The tragedy of Joe Biden was that he did not have much quarrel with most of Trumpism: Identitarianism, protectionism, state capitalism, etc.

Our next president can renew the promise of the nation by undoing the damage.

CAPITALISM/DEMOCRACY/PROTESTANTISM:

What happens when liberalism loses? (Mani Basharzad, 9 June 2026, CapX)

Liberalism loses when it attaches itself only to economics. Yes, it is easy to blame the populist movements of both Left and Right that seek to undermine liberalism. But on one point, liberals should look at themselves. A liberalism that defines itself solely in terms of economic freedom cannot win the battle of ideas. Free markets are part of classical liberalism, but they are largely a by-product of the more important principles and institutions of a free society. When you have the rule of law, you can have property rights and effective contract enforcement. When you have the liberal attitude of tolerance, you can have the Royal Exchange, of which Voltaire wrote that when you enter, ‘all nations assemble for the advantage of mankind’, and ‘the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian bargain with one another as if they were of the same religion, and bestow the name of infidel on bankrupts only’.

To win the battle for liberalism, liberals must not confine themselves to the material benefits of free markets, but also emphasise the moral superiority of free societies. Hayek met Churchill only once, after ‘The Road to Serfdom’ had gained popularity. Churchill knew of him because of that book. When they were introduced, Churchill was, as Hayek put it, ‘stock drunk’. Churchill said to him: ‘You are completely right [about ‘The Road to Serfdom’]; but it will never happen in Britain’. As Hayek continued, ‘Half an hour later he made one of the most brilliant speeches I ever heard’.

Why, despite travelling some distance down the road to serfdom, did Britain never lose its political freedom? Why, in Churchill’s words, would this ‘never happen in Britain’? Because there is something more to liberalism than economics. Those deeper foundations resisted the road to serfdom in Britain, and they enabled its revival through Thatcher’s conservative revolution.

Liberals have failed to shape the climate of opinion and practical politics, relying too often on what Russell Kirk described as soulless ‘pleasure and pain equations’. China today is the example of a state that, viewed solely through an economic lens, appears impressive, yet has become a threat to freedom.

THE SYSTEM IS THE CENTER:

The Center Can Hold: How Jews can rebuild a middle-ground politics (David Bernstein, June 9, 2026, Sapir)

The center is not a point on a graph. Most Americans, even today with the high number of political independents, identify with one of the two major political parties. On many concrete policy questions, that center is defined not by rigid ideology but by a blend of instincts. On immigration, for example, large majorities of Americans say immigration is good for the country, roughly two-thirds support a path to legal status, and yet many of those same voters also favor stronger border enforcement and reject permissive approaches. This “both/and” pattern — combining order and openness, rights and limits — appears in issues and reflects a more nuanced public than our polarized politics suggest.

The center can also be understood as a set of people, coalitions, and norms capable of sustaining pluralism. It includes citizens and leaders who may disagree on policy but who remain willing to engage despite differences, deliberate in good faith, and operate with a shared commitment to democratic rules. The political center, then, is not simply equidistant from the Right and the Left; it is the combination of both/and thinking and the civic capacity to translate that thinking into cooperation and governance.

American Jews have flourished in a system defined by liberal democratic norms: constitutional protections, equal citizenship, religious liberty, and a culture of pluralism. Our security has never depended on numerical strength but rather on the strength of the system itself.

THE eND OF hISTORY ROLLS ON:

People Worldwide More Satisfied With Their Freedom in Life: More than four in five adults globally are satisfied with freedom to choose what to do with their lives (Benedict Vigers, Gallup)

Globally, more people are satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives than were satisfied two decades ago, with gains driven largely by countries where those satisfied with this freedom were once in the minority.

I HURT MYSELF TODAY, TO SEE IF I STILL FEEL:

The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained (David French, 5/31/26, NY Times)

[M]illions upon millions of people are enduring democracy as “the worst form of government” without the necessary balanced understanding (that citizens in the mid-20th century had gained through firsthand observation) of “except all those other forms that have been tried.”

So even fascism and communism — for some people, at least — are no longer avatars of atrocity, but dynamic alternatives to a sclerotic present. In their frustration, all too many people are attracted to the theoretical benefits of authoritarianism, and they don’t have the experience or the education to understand its actual and inevitable defects.

They do not understand the link between their fashionable and transgressive ideologies and the oceans of blood that fascism and communism spilled across the globe.

In this ahistorical context, even political violence can seem justified — perhaps even a bit daring and romantic — unless you’ve lived through, say, the riots that swept American cities in the 1960s, a cataclysm that was far more violent, deadly and prolonged than anything that happened in the United States in 2020.

The compromises and restraints of diplomacy, which can often mean granting painful concessions to terrible regimes, can seem like a fool’s errand, unless you’ve witnessed the indescribable horrors of world wars.

The problem is rather different than Mr. French describes: it is the atavism of the Last Men. Life is so affluent and boring, thanks to the triumph of liberalism, that these people are willing to embrace violence just to make their lives more exciting.

HUMAN EXISTENCE IS THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN SECURITY AND FREEDOM:

The Future of Dynamism with Virginia Postrel (hosted by G. Patrick Lynch, Law & Liberty Podcast)

Virginia Postrel :
[T]he basic distinction is between dynamism, which is open-ended discovery and progress that is driven by bottom-up problem solving, bottom-up problem defining, innovation, and feedback, also. So not every new idea is a good idea, not every idea of how to solve a problem actually solves the problem. And there is this constant process of discontent also, because whatever you have, you see what could be better about it. And that’s one reason that this progress is open-ended, but it’s very much an idea of discovery, sort of a liberalism that centers discovery and curiosity and learning. “Learning” is what I say in the book. On the other side, you have what I call stasis and I talk about two different forms. One, which is the easier to understand, is people who really center stability. Their ideal society is one that doesn’t change and often they have an ideal located somewhere in the past.

It could be the Middle Ages, it could be the 1950s, it could be before the agricultural revolution. There are many different forms of that type of stasis, which I call reactionary in the book. The other form of stasis is more subtle, and much more pervasive, which is the idea of, no, we like change, we like progress, we like discovery, but we want it to look exactly the way we want it to look. And this is what I call technocracy. So this is a form of stasis that is about control. So it’s not about “nothing changes,” it’s about very directed change. And since at least the beginning of the twentieth century, technocracy has dominated liberal democracies. There was a rise of thinking that, “Wow, look at all these great things that railroads and steel mills, all these corporations that have to plan these giant enterprises, we should plan the economy the same way.”

And obviously looking back on it and especially through the lens of some of Hayek’s work, this seems obviously wrong, especially in the forms that you find it in the early twentieth century or late nineteenth century where it really is like every single bit of the economy would be planned, but it wasn’t stupid. It wasn’t stupid people saying this. It was people drawing the wrong lessons from the world that they were living in. And so I see this continuing struggle between ideals of an open-ended discovery-oriented society that is very bottom up also. So no one is in charge, no one is in control. It doesn’t mean you have no rules. You need rules, but they need to be very general and you need to be able to have nested levels of rules so that McDonald’s can say every menu has to be the same, and somebody’s one-off restaurant can have different food every night depending on what’s fresh in the market.

The genius of liberalism is republican liberty, which allows us to balance the two by granting exactly as much freedom to others as leaves us secure ourselves.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

The ‘warrior ethos’ promises victory — history says it leads to defeat (John Broich, May 21, 2026, The Conversation)

Democracies don’t necessarily fight clean wars. During World War II, the Allies firebombed cities, created internment camps and dropped atomic bombs.

What distinguishes fascist powers from democracies is their contempt for rules based on their sense of superiority. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced that the Nazis would claim the absolute right to override democratic constraints. “This contemptible parliamentarianism … is gone,” he said.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said it more bluntly in 1936: “We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”

But rules of engagement function as a control system that ties tactical decisions to strategy, law and the risk of escalation. Discarding them tends to produce the atrocities and strategic blowback that lose wars.

Democratic procedure does similar work: Political scientists who studied 197 conflicts from 1816 to 1987 found that democracies won about 76% of their conflicts and non-democracies 46%, in large part because accountable leaders and public access to information force a government to notice when a plan isn’t working.

A fascist regime that treats democratic constraints as obstacles is likely to decide inconvenient information is an obstacle too. Because of this, in fascist governments, loyalists rank higher than experts. Fascist systems don’t remove people for being wrong; they remove them for insufficient loyalty. The man who tells the leader what he wants to hear rises. The man whose report contradicts the leader’s views endangers himself.

Maybe the silliest trope of the 60s/70s was that democracies had inherent disadvantages in fighting totalitarian regimes when the exact opposite was true. It has always led folks to wildly overestimate the strength of our opponents, as witness in Iraq, Ukraine, etc. Disastrously, it led to a prolonged Cold War rather than simply settling the USSR’s hash immediately.