Hit the Road, Jack

Dear Intelligent American,

The kiddies are kiddies no longer, and the family vacation trips to Maine, packed into a minivan, are of long ago. But the memories are vibrant and happy, including of the six-hour journeys themselves, filled not so much (actually, never) with are we there yet? whines, but replete with the relentless sounds of eclectic music and youthful crooning—The Eagles and The Sons of the Pioneers (cigareets and whiskey and wild wild women), The Killers and The Mills Brothers (across the alley from the Alamo lived a pinto pony and a Navajo), Bob Dylan and Don McLean (bye bye Miss American Pie . . .), Green Day and Roy Orbison, Queen and Weird Al (go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog), Elvis and Ray Charles.

Ray: His greatest hits were . . . wow. The gang sang them all: Georgia, the whole day through . . . my bills are all due and the babies need shoes but I’m busted (you don’t know Busted?) . . . and anyone can tell, you think you know me well but you don't know me . . . and of course, given the name of the minivan’s driver, hit the road Jack and doncha come back no more no more no more no more . . .

It was the stuff of Julys and Augusts: Long but wondrous road-hitting on early Saturday mornings. They should have been appreciated more in the moment—they sure are now in hindsight.

 

A One and a Two and a Fourteen

 

1. At Religion & Liberty Online, Michael Matheson Miller explains how America’s exceptionalism is anchored in its refuting of the radical. From the essay:

The American founders also drew deeply from English tradition. The most obvious is the Magna Carta of 1215. But Adams and Jefferson and many others were students of the common law tradition and the writings of Fortescue, Coke, and Blackstone. The Declaration did not just argue for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; it argued in favor of preserving the “traditional rights of Englishmen” that had been violated by Crown and Parliament. Americans did not have to read Montesquieu to understand why powers must be separated, any more than they had to read Adam Smith to understand the benefits of free trade and the division of labor. They knew this from their own experience with over 160 years of colonial self-government.

None of this is to say that America is not exceptional. Indeed, it is. One of the things that makes it exceptional is precisely that, unlike so many revolutions, the American founding was not a political ideology contrived out of thin air or an unreflective rejection of tradition. It is the exceptional distillation of ancient Western ideas and principles that have enabled the American republic to endure for 250 years. If we forget what the founders knew, we risk losing what they fought to preserve.

 

2. At The Frank Forum, David Churchill Barrow gets caustic about those who try to dodge jury duty. From the piece:

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville noted a peculiarity in the New England towns that gave the selectmen (the executives under a town meeting system) the unique power to decide who was fit to be placed in the drawing of names for jury duty. This practice survived at least into my younger days, and so it was that my father, a selectman, arranged for my name to be drawn that summer between college and law school. This was easy to arrange, since service was for an entire month, and anyone with a full-time job could plead hardship. He knew that once I was a lawyer, there would be little chance I would be allowed on a jury (because it would taint the laymen quality of a jury, and thus its purpose) and he thought it would be a valuable experience. It was that, and much more. I served on cases ranging from kids stealing beer to attempted murder.

One case was a real estate agent charged with carrying a gun outside that he had just sold to an undercover ATF agent. That act carried a one-year mandatory. This was the 1970s, and I looked just like Ted Neeley in Jesus Christ Superstar. If you got drawn for the 1st chair closest to the judge, you were automatically the foreman, unless you declined. Did you know juries sometimes get to bring the evidence in with them for deliberations? At the conclusion of the trial, the judge said to me:

“Here is the gun,” as the bailiff handed it to me. “Here are the bullets. Do not put the bullets into the gun. Do you understand me, son?”

 

3. At The Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley sees socialism as another assault on the black family. From the article:

But socialists such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dismissed the traditional family as a tool of oppression that advanced the patriarchy by exploiting the domestic labor of women. Similar thinking informs today’s politicians and policymakers who want to expand the welfare state to address economic inequality. For them, nuclear families in general, and fathers in particular, were an obstacle to central planning schemes. Ultimately, the state is promoted as the best provider and dads are seen as superfluous, if not part of the problem. The upshot is that preserving the family and its autonomy is less important to socialists than preserving their own ability to tell other people how to live their lives.

One of the real-world experiments with this approach is the black family, which has been in disarray for more than a half-century and is the subject of an important new book, “The Vanishing Black Family: How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable.” The author is Delano Squires, a black husband and father who focuses on marriage and parenthood at the Heritage Foundation. He spent more than a decade employed by the District of Columbia in a program aimed at reducing gun violence. The book offers something many others can’t, which is scholarly analysis alongside the astute observations of a practitioner who has lived and worked with the people he’s discussing.

 

4. At National Affairs, Daniel Stid explains the collapse of federal funding of nonprofits. From the essay:

The critiques of the non-profit-government partnership surveyed thus far have focused on problems and unanticipated consequences within the system. But two more recent lines of criticism zero in on problems this system generates in our democracy.

The first arises from the conservative Madisonian perspective of John DiIulio. In a spirited 2014 polemic titled Bring Back the Bureaucrats: Why More Federal Workers Will Lead to Better (and Smaller!) Government (which had begun as an essay in these pages two years earlier), DiIulio took as his point of departure a remarkable discrepancy: While the federal government's budget had (adjusting for inflation) increased by a factor of five since 1960, its civilian workforce over that same period had remained more or less constant at approximately 2 million.

Though elected officials in both parties pride themselves on keeping bureaucracy and big government at bay, DiIulio argued, they have in fact created a "Leviathan by Proxy." Government in America is not in fact that small. When factoring in all its levels, our system of government now borrows and spends a similar amount per capita as its ostensibly more statist European peers.

But what Americans get from their big government is much spottier, primarily—this was DiIulio's key point—because elected officials have outsourced the administration of federal policy to proxies beyond the national government, most notably to for-profit contractors and the non-profits it funds through contracts and grants. This has enabled politicians to pose as enemies of bureaucracy even as they create more diffuse, unaccountable, and thus pernicious forms of it.

 

5. At Claremont Review of Books, the great Charles Kesler explains what distinguishes the American Declaration from the British and French. From the book:

The English Bill of Rights is not addressed to the world as such. It is addressed by Englishmen to Englishmen. By contrast both the Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen are rhetorical shots heard—and meant to be heard—around the world. They are emphatically documents of natural right. The English Bill of Rights makes no appeal to the idea of nature at all. On the contrary, its whole point might be said to be to blur the distinction between natural and prescriptive (or historical) right. This prudent confusion, which Edmund Burke would later develop into a whole account of politics, enabled the supporters of the Bill of Rights to disguise the Revolution as a succession crisis, thus avoiding the principled debate between parliamentary and prerogative power that had launched the English Civil War, and permitting them to settle the religious question without resolving the kind of sectarian disputes over revealed truths that had roiled Tudor and Stuart England. Through artful indirection, the peculiar legitimacy of the English monarchy, which rested on the king’s position as head of the church, was preserved and transformed into a new regime of toleration. That it was a new regime, based on a new but unarticulated argument for toleration, can be seen in the complete absence of any language of divine right. God is invoked to witness the new oaths of allegiance and is thanked for making the prince of Orange “the glorious instrument for delivering this kingdom from popery and arbitrary power” and for protecting the “royal persons.”

 

6. At City Journal, Jake Altman explains that it’s not your father’s DSA. From the article:

Well, I know the DSA, and as someone who was a member and served in local leadership, I can say that Chait has it right: today’s DSA is not a harmless organization. It includes disciplined, radicalized networks that have methodically expanded their power over the last decade in pursuit of extremist goals. . . .

For decades, the DSA was mostly composed of a cohort of aging Boomers left over from its founding in 1982. It prioritized open debate and political tolerance. Following in the tradition of founder Michael Harrington, members viewed the DSA not as a revolutionary vanguard but as a reformist bridge to mainstream labor-liberalism, and they prioritized parliamentary process and pluralism.

But in the mid-2010s, the character of the organization began to change. I was in Boston at the time and witnessed the last days of the “old” DSA. New, younger members began to enter the organization, while Senator Bernie Sanders and the socialist magazine Jacobin grew their followings.

 

7. At Plough Quarterly, Debby Applegate refreshes our memories about the consequences of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. From the piece:

Her plan came to her in a vision that February, while sitting in church one Sunday. She would create an emotional and spiritual portrait of slavery that would transcend fruitless constitutional and biblical bickering. “My vocation is simply that of a painter, and my object will be to hold up in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible slavery, its reverses, changes, and the negro character,” Stowe told her editor. “There is no arguing with pictures, and everybody is impressed by them, whether they mean to be or not.”

She entitled her manuscript Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or The Man That Was a Thing. The book is a 600-page emotional rollercoaster, brimming with colorful characters who embody all aspects of the slavery debate. It climaxes with the murder of the enslaved hero, Uncle Tom, who, like Christ, sacrifices his life when he is whipped to death for refusing to betray two fugitives; and the flight of the beautiful Eliza, who escapes the slave catchers by bounding from ice floe to ice floe across the Ohio River with her baby in her arms. Through the power of imagination alone, Stowe enticed readers into putting themselves in the shoes of the slave.

 

8. At HistPhil, Benjamin Soskis rallies behind “prudential pluralism.” From the essay:

Prudential pluralism has been a key strain running through the recent conservative defense of civil society, more generally. “Some conservatives are cheering on Mr. Trump,” the Wall Street Journal warned in an April 2025 editorial, responding to President Trump’s threat to revoke Harvard’s tax exemption. “They might not like it when President Ocasio-Cortez is in charge . . . A Democratic President could declare a think tank that opposes its climate or transgender bathroom rules to be acting contrary to ‘established public policy.’” Similarly, the Philanthropy Roundtable, in a statement against a proposed foundation endowment tax, warned, “Lawmakers should remember they aren’t just setting policy, they are setting precedent.” Or as one Indiana lawyer opined in the New York Times, “Today Harvard is the target. Tomorrow it could be your church.”

To some extent, this logic follows in the grand tradition of liberal toleration, which emerged out of the bloody religious wars of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. One can also hear echoes of the restraining Cold War theories of mutually assured destruction and hints of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance. Or perhaps it borrows more from the examples of mutual deterrence threading throughout our daily lives, when we refrain from escalation—going there, crossing lines—for fear of blowback. Whatever its roots, it seems that prudential pluralism is especially well adapted to a period of hyper-polarization like the present. It might just be the sturdiest plank in the broad-based bulwark being established to protect and preserve civil society.

As I came to give it more attention, it became clear that prudential pluralism rests on the maintenance of a delicate historical equilibrium, one in which past grievances are close at hand and at the ready to be balanced against those of one’s ideological, partisan, or sectarian antagonists.

 

9. At Minding the Campus, Wenyuan Wu opines that a restoration of the academies will require an “unlikely alliance.” From the article:

The far left’s decades-long institutional march to capture higher education imposes practical obstacles and legal risks for ambitious reform proposals. A conservative takeover is sadly not feasible in the short run, at least not on a scale sufficient to effect systematic change. The best one can hope for, in the effort to meaningfully return higher learning to its intended goals of truth-seeking and critical thinking, is incremental progress.

Judging by the debilitating blowback against legislative mandates, as in Florida’s “Stop Woke Act,” and against top-down policy changes, as in the UC case, we should take another step to anchor incremental progress in alliance-building between conservative and liberal professors. After all, the anti-learning, anti-fact-seeking, anti-merit, and anti-reality quagmire facing higher education was singlehandedly brought on by a loud minority of radical scholar-activists, who skew the faculty viewpoint diversity index to the sharp left, and with whom both conservative and center-left academics have ample grounds to disagree. Although they possess vast differences in high politics, the two sides have much common ground to explore, from supporting free speech to upholding academic rigor.

Resuming standardized testing can be a great starting point for this proposed alliance.

 

10. At StoryAliz on Substack, Anne Bauer says it’s a lie that people are reading. From the spiel:

But the real culprit, if you ask me, is politics. When identity and partisanship become your defining feature, when you adhere to rigid ideas and philosophies—and fear anything that challenges your beliefs—reading becomes dangerous. All those random ideas floating around? Problems that have no easy answers? Bah! Who needs that?

So here’s where we are: reading for enjoyment has fallen by 40% in the past 20 years. And despite bullshit feel-good essays about how we’re not really reading less, it just seems that way—and online influencers who hawk the classics without a single specific detail about plot, theme, or character—literacy in every single cohort is falling off a cliff. Publishing is becoming narrower, more ideological and preachy. The books that face out in shop windows reinforce pat answers instead of asking hard questions. And the world seems smaller, because it is.

Séances, circuses, live music, theater, art . . . they’re all on the decline. Instead we have performative costumed protests and Netflix shows that are contractually bound to restate their plot three to four times for the benefit of distracted viewers.

 

11. At National Review, Stanley Kurtz laments the ideological leadership of the Smithsonian Institution. From the piece:

A venerable institution is taken over by leftists who loathe America, free enterprise, religion, and the founding ideals of the institution itself. Plucky conservatives expose the stunning coup. Elites fire back: “It’s all lies and hysterical exaggeration. We’re harmless nonpartisan custodians of tradition who just want to keep up with the times.” Within a decade, more or less, it’s so obvious that the institution has been co-opted by the hard left that no one bothers to argue anymore. The only questions are just how extreme things will get, and how damaged the rest of society will be.

Who now doubts William F. Buckley Jr.’s warnings of encroaching leftism and irreligion at Yale? Who now accepts the soothing reassurances of Stanford’s administration that the study of Western civilization remains safe? Who now bothers to deny the political biases of the networks or the New York Times? Who now wastes breath insisting that conservative ideas can be freely expressed on campus? Who now claims that America’s cities are safer and cleaner than ever? For that matter, who now contends that socialists are in no position to take over the Democratic Party? Yet these were great debates in their day.

 

12. At Brownstone Institute, Mollie Engelhart emphasizes the importance of third spaces and the societal need to reclaim them. From the reflection:

Third spaces also offer something many of us are now missing: identity flexibility. They are places where we are not reduced to our roles. Not just a parent. Not just a worker. We are simply human among other humans. Without that middle space, identity collapses inward. Life becomes dominated by home and work alone. The brain narrows. Thinking becomes more rigid. Anxiety and loneliness increase, even when we are constantly connected online.

As I sat with this, I realized something uncomfortable. Many of us, myself included, no longer have a third space. And in many cases, we have also lost the second space entirely.

I work from home. I live where I work. I host where I live. My domestic identity, my work identity, and my social identity are all compressed into the ranch. There is very little physical or neurological separation. The nervous system never fully resets. Home is no longer purely restorative, and work never truly ends.

In some ways, public speaking, conferences, and book signings have become my second space. When I travel, when I step outside the land, I feel that shift. But that realization led me to a deeper question. If I am missing a third space, how many others are as well?

 

Lucky 13. At Commentary Magazine, Seth Mandel targets the leftist efforts to justify October 7th. From the analysis:

It isn’t atypical of Palestinian groups who have hijacked their local religious institutions to urge the Jews be treated with medieval dehumanization. But it would be atypical of the modern Church of England to participate. It should be obvious why the Church of England should not entertain a request to boycott the Jewish people, and I have too much respect both for the Church of England and for myself to engage in that debate here.

But there are less obvious reasons the document is problematic, beyond simply its barbaric premise. And that is the assertion of a principle that’s been increasingly mainstreamed in left-of-center ideological spaces, especially but not limited to college campuses: “[Israel’s] claim of ‘self-defense’ cannot stand. How can a colonizer defend itself against those it has colonized and expelled from their land?”

This is, in part, why the “decolonization” discourse is not abstract. Jewish indigeneity in the Holy Land is not in dispute. So why do progressives and academics cling to an obvious lie? Why spend so much time and energy and resources pushing the idea that Jews are colonizers in their own land, when it is the equivalent of evangelizing the idea that the earth is flat?

 

Bonus. Coolio, Not: At Quillette, Maarten Boudry explains Europe’s acceptance of death-by-heat air-conditioner hate. From the article:

So why does Europe recoil from a technology which the rest of the developed world (and even large parts of the developing world) takes for granted? Part of the answer is historical and cultural. Northern Europe in particular, with its cool climate and mild seasonal swings, had little need for cooling until a few decades ago. But that excuse no longer cuts much ice. The deeper cause is an ideological “less is more” sensibility, more potent in Europe than anywhere else, which frames artificial cooling as a decadent indulgence—something for profligate Yankees with oversized SUVs and backyard pools.

That this instinct is especially rampant among European progressives is even more puzzling. Leftists of old such as Karl Marx and Sylvia Pankhurst dreamed of universal abundance and denounced the scarcity mindset; they wanted the masses to share in the comforts once reserved for the rich, not to ration them in the name of nature or virtue. Today's green gospel of restraint quietly inverts that aspiration, with comfort itself becoming suspect.

In practice, Europeans of all ages are told to suck it up and sweat it out. France would sooner close its schools in a heat wave than fit them with devices that demonstrably improve concentration and learning. In the Swiss canton of Geneva, installing an air conditioner requires a doctor's certificate. During the recent energy crisis, Spain and Italy barred public buildings from cooling below 27°C—hot enough to dull your cognitive powers by 5 percent.

 

Department of Bad Jokes

Q: What did the husband who was lousy at directions do after he was insulted by his wife?

A: He packed up his bags and right.

 

A Dios

The reading from Mass last Sunday—from Romans 8—should be of immense relief: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us.” What a short, sweet pep talk. All creation aspires to this fulfillment and triumph, and our tests and challenges and burdens cannot alter such. Which makes one think of the terribly abused, political term “the right side of history,” and the implied need to be on it—and even thought it claims a “right” side, the preferred position is the “left.” So say the ideologues. But History has not sides but a destination, one of divine glory, and the arc toward it was foretold in the original six days (the seventh being of rest) of creation, whose rocks and chasms and waters, like those of us made from clay in the image and likeness of I Am Who Am, are compelled to seek it.

May We Be Rich Soil for The Sower,

Jack Fowler, who ponders the persistence of crabgrass at jfowler@amphil.com.

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