America was right to abolish slavery. It bound men by force and corrupted the manners of those who held them. Jefferson called the traffic between master and slave a perpetual exercise of unremitting despotism on one side and degrading submission on the other. No free people should want that relationship back. He also understood what…
Month: October 2026
Sand Builders
Humanity has always lived at the edge of the sea and mistaken the temporary for the eternal. Men raise walls and call them cities. They cut roads through forests, drag stone from the earth, erect towers, lay pipes beneath streets, codify laws, build courts, markets, libraries, museums, schools, power stations, archives, and cathedrals. Because these…
Narratives Make Stupid
They say idle hands make the devil’s work. The saying is incomplete. Boredom starts the trouble, envy gives it a target, and a narrative supplies the alibi. A story is cheaper than competence and much easier to repeat. It takes a private failure and recasts it as a public crime committed by somebody else. A…
Agency Is Essential
There is a peculiar superstition in declining societies that saying something is approximately equivalent to doing something, and the superstition becomes stronger precisely as the society becomes less capable of accomplishing anything difficult. A committee announces a strategy and behaves as though it has pursued one; an institution publishes a declaration and congratulates itself for…
Seeking Alignment with Leftists
One of the recurring errors made by people who build things is the assumption that everyone else is engaged in the same basic enterprise. The engineer sees a defective system and asks how it can be repaired; the activist often sees the same defect and asks what moral significance can be extracted from it, who…
Competing with China
The most useful way to think about American competition with China is not through the language of moral theater, which is how almost every domestic political question is now presented, but through the older and less flattering language of power. Civilizations rise because they accumulate capacity, and they decline because they lose it. Capacity means…
Let the Tech Giants Be Gnawed
There is a certain justice in watching the American technology industry discover that the creatures it fed are not house pets. For years, the great platforms imagined themselves extraordinarily sophisticated political actors. They possessed money, data, distribution, prestige, and direct access to the nervous system of public life. They could decide which arguments traveled at…