Does history have a sense of humor?

Can it appreciate irony?

These questions occurred to me while reading King Charles III’s address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on, since I am writing this on Saturday, May 2, as the British would say, Tuesday last. Displaying his wry sense of humor, Charles pointed out that Britain and America’s “destinies as nations have been interlinked.” Quoting Oscar Wilde, he said, “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.” [1]

Charles is only the second British monarch to address Congress (Queen Elizabeth II did in 1991). I did not pay much attention to his speech, thinking it would be the usual blend of bland banalities and platitudes common to such events.

I was wrong.

My first clue was an article in The Guardian quoting President Donald Trump, who called it “fantastic” whilst (there’s that British influence again) noting that “Democrats cheered references to Magna Carta (as) the joint session of the U.S. Congress came together in giving it a standing ovation.” [2] Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post detailed how Charles rebuked Trump by speaking “about the importance of protecting NATO, Ukraine, and the natural environment.” [3] Keith Duggan in The Irish Times, no fan of either Britain or Charles III, nonetheless opined that the King had given Trump and the U.S. Congress a sly rebuke by deftly pointing out the need for checks and balances on executive power. [4] But the clincher moving me to read Charles’s address was when a friend shared a post from Mark Clavier’s blog Well-Tempered. Clavier noted “What made the address distinctive wasn’t simply that it defended democratic values. It was the way it grounded those values not in abstract principles or contemporary necessity, but in history, inheritance, and a shared constitutional order.” [5]

“Wow, I thought, the King of England lectured the U.S. Congress on democratic values!” Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, which excoriated King George III for crimes and misdeeds aimed at enslaving America, his fifth great-grandson explained to the U.S. Congress assembled, the meaning and origin of their own heritage, as our 18th^-century Founders would have said.

I asked myself, “What would those Founders have thought about that?” John Adams would have relished the irony, and Benjamin Franklin would have chuckled at it; George Washington, concealing his thoughts, would have smiled his enigmatic smile; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would have been appalled; and Alexander Hamilton would have been pleased by a genuine king quietly lecturing an elected executive and his minions on the limits of executive authority and the need for checks and balances. Anchoring his comments in America and Britain’s shared heritage, Charles observed that “Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not the least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” [6]

Both King Charles III in his address to Congress and President Trump in his remarks at the state dinner welcoming Charles and Queen Camilla illustrated one of, if not the, primary responsibilities of a leader. As I say in my book How to Be a Highly Effective Leader: A Primer, every leader’s first responsibility — rooted in their organization’s culture, values, and origin — is to articulate a vision defining what it is and what it can become.

While agreeing that America’s cultural and linguistic roots are inarguably British, Trump’s and Charles’s visions of America and its future were very different. In doing so, they tapped into the main thesis of my The American Tapestry Project. [7] That thesis argues that there isn’t one American story, but a tapestry of American stories whose many threads when woven together tell the story of America. More importantly, I believe that two threads –– one might call them the meta-threads –– dominate the story.

They have been present since America’s beginning. They reveal the conflict at the heart of the American story. They are the key to America’s current political and cultural polarization. They are the two sides of the American soul Pat Buchanan said the culture wars are all about. They go by several names: oligarchy versus democracy; white nationalism versus inclusivity; a nativist, blood-and-soil America versus America as an idea –– what became known as the American Creed.

In The American Tapestry Project, I identify them as a nativist, blood-and-soil, white, Christian nationalist vision of America versus the idea of America as a Creedal Nation open to all. The American Creed, as we discovered in Book Note #220 several weeks ago discussing Walter Isaacson’s The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, is the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. It says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” [8]

American history’s competing visions describe an America seeking two things history suggests are both rare and exceedingly difficult to do: a) self-government of, by, and for the people –– as in “We the People,” while 2) continually expanding the definition of who is included in “We the People.”

The nativist, white, Christian nationalist claim frequently rejects self-government by the people in favor of government by an elite cadre while at the same time restricting inclusion in “We the People” to white, Christians of European ancestry.

The Creedal idea of America holds firmly to the belief in government of, by, and for the people while also continuously increasing who is included by welcoming, admittedly sometimes grudgingly and after great domestic strife, indigenous Americans, Black Americans, and wave after wave after wave of immigrants from almost every nation and culture on Earth.

These two visions of America have collided since before there was a United States of America. Their contest is what 21st^-century politics and culture wars are all about. They ask who will rule America: an oligarchic elite anchored in a narrow, nativist definition of who is American, or the people themselves in whose name the United States of America was founded — The people speaking in “We hold these truths,” “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union.”

The great irony of President Trump’s greeting to King Charles III is that as the elected president of the republic inspired by the creedal ideas in the Declaration of Independence explicitly rejected the notion that America is an idea. While, on the other hand, in Charles’s address to Congress he subtly and deftly identified that creed’s ideas as one of America’s greatest gifts to the world.

While Trump’s welcome was better than many of his critics want to admit, he still rejected the belief in America as an idea. He said, “In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, (emphasis added) but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice.” [9] He elaborated on this by saying, “Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character … this land was settled and forged by men, women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. …The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true. …Fate drew a long arc from the meadow at Runnymede to the streets of Philadelphia.” [10]

Without ever mentioning any claims to blood kinship, it took the fifth great-grandson of the king that Americans deposed to quietly explain what America means and what makes it great. In addressing Congress, King Charles III said, “I come here today with the highest respect for the United States Congress, this citadel of democracy created to represent the voice of all American people (emphasis added). … The Founding Fathers were bold and imaginative rebels with a cause. … They united 13 disparate colonies to forge a nation on the revolutionary idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (emphasis added) [11]

He continued, “They carried with them and carried forward the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment, as well as the ideals which had an even deeper history in English common law and Magna Carta. These roots run deep, and they are still vital. Our Declaration of Rights of 1689 was not only the foundation of our constitutional monarchy, but also provided the source of so many of the principles reiterated, often verbatim, in the American Bill of Rights of 1791.” [12]

Based on that arc, Trump noted running “from a meadow at Runnymede to the streets of Philadelphia,” Charles noted that the Magna Carta signed at Runnymede sets limits on rulers and symbolizes Britain and America’s “shared resolve in support of liberty,” which “is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse, and free societies that give(s) us our collective strength.” [13] Noting the Easter season, Charles reiterated that our “Christian faith is a firm anchor and daily inspiration that guides us …(as) two nations (whose) generosity of spirit and duty (is) to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding, and to value all people of all faiths and of none.” [14]

This book note began by asking if history could recognize the irony of the current president of the republic founded on the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” rejecting that “idea” for a vision of a shared heritage of blood and soil, while the monarch of the realm that president’s republic was born rebelling against voiced a vision for a shared future based upon that rebellious republic’s founding values of liberty, equality, and opportunity.

In the interest of full transparency, although white, of European heritage, and as the grandson of immigrants, I believe in the Creedal America that holds “These truths to be self-evident” and that by welcoming the stranger has made the American story one of the great stories in the history of Western Civilization, if not also in the history of the world.

Speaking of history, one of history’s great speeches is the Athenian king Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” in which, at a low point in the Athens war with Sparta, he reminded the Athenians who they are by calling them to be true to their heritage and to their better selves. I am not sure Charles’s speech rises to that level, but it rises to a very high level as it quietly reminds Americans who they are and the ideas and values that make them great.

***

The complete text of Charles’s address can be found here.

The complete text of President Trump’s welcome to King Charles III and Queen Camilla can be found here.

***

For more about leadership and leaders’ responsibility to articulate a vision of the future for their organizations and followers, consult my book How to Be a Highly Effective Leader: A Primer published by the Jefferson Educational Society in April. Copies can be purchased at Books - Jefferson Educational Society or by calling 814-459-8000.

Photo Credits

“Vice President Vance attended King Charles III’s joint address (2).jpg” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Vice President Vance attended King Charles III’s joint address (2).jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed May 2, 2026.

End Notes

1. King Charles III, “Address to U.S. Congress” in Sean Boynton, “Read the full transcript of King Charles III’s speech to U.S. Congress,” at Global News available at Read the full transcript of King Charles III’s speech to U.S. Congress - National | Globalnews.ca accessed May 2, 2026.

2. “How King Charles’s speech was written – and how to read it,” in Explainer at The Guardian (29 April 2026) available at How King Charles’s speech was written – and how to read it | King Charles III | The Guardian accessed May 2, 2026.

3. Parker, Kathleen, “How King Charles Tamed Trump,” in the Washington Post (April 30, 2026) available at Opinion | King Charles teaches Washington about civility - The Washington Post accessed May 2, 2026.

4. Duggan, Keith, “Charles gives slyly provocative speech to Congress amid bipartisan applause and laughter,” in The Irish Times (April 29, 2026) available at Charles gives slyly provocative speech to Congress amid bipartisan applause and laughter – The Irish Times accessed May 2, 2026.

5. Clavier, Mark, “The King’s Speech,” in Well-Tempered available at (2) The King’s Speech - by Mark Clavier - Well-Tempered accessed May 2, 2026.

6. King Charles III, cited above.

7. My The American Tapestry Project consists of numerous Book Notes, in particular those titled “Seeds of Our Discontents,” “Sports In American Society,” “Women’s Rights,” and “The American Way of Christmas,” which can be found here Book Notes - Jefferson Educational Society; presentations at the Jefferson Educational Society which can be found here Digital Programs - Jefferson Educational Society; and a podcast which can be heard at WQLN Public Radio which can be found here The American Tapestry Project and at other podcast sites, including Spotify which has the complete series and can be found here The American Tapestry Project | Podcast on Spotify.

8. “Declaration of Independence,” at National Archives available at Declaration of Independence: A Transcription | National Archives accessed May 2, 2026.

9. Trump, Donald, “Trump’s speech welcoming King Charles III on state visit,” in the Washington Examiner (April 28, 2026) available at READ IN FULL: Trump’s speech welcoming King Charles III on state visit accessed May 2, 2026.

10. Ibid.

11. King Charles III, cited above.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

How many wars have anti-war, pro-peace works of art actually prevented?

What is it about humans knowing that wars are self-destructive, vicious sources of enduring pain, yet cannot help themselves waging them again and again and again and again?

These thoughts occurred to me while preparing some remarks for a WQLN roundtable about the war poems of Wilfred Owen and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, which The Erie Philharmonic will perform on May 9 at 7:30 p.m. at the Warner Theatre. Tickets can be purchased at Events for Erie Philharmonic or by calling 814-452-4857.

England’s first composer of international stature since Henry Purcell in the 17th century, Britten completed the War Requiem in 1961 at the height of Cold War nuclear tensions; 1961 was the year of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the construction of the Berlin Wall. In an era suffused with nuclear dread, it debuted on May 30, 1962. It marked the reconsecration of the new Coventry Cathedral resurrecting the 14th century cathedral destroyed by German bombers during World War II. Seeking to signal rebirth and permanence in the face of catastrophe, the new cathedral adjoins the ruins of the old.

With the Catholic Church’s Mass for the Dead as scaffolding, Britten interlaces his requiem with nine war poems by Wilfred Owen to create, as Michael Steinberg said, “the collision of innocence with wickedness and corruption, innocence outraged by it.” [1] “Innocence outraged” is the liturgy’s quiet promise of peace colliding with the terrible beauty of Owen’s depictions of war’s cruelty.

The Introit, the First Movement “Requiem aeternam …” (“Eternal Rest”), begins with the chorus and boys choir (Innocence) singing the traditional Latin text — “Eternal rest give to them, O Lord … let perpetual light shine upon them (Psalm 64. 2-3) … all flesh shall come to Thee. Eternal rest give unto them. …” [2] Britten counters with a solo tenor singing Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” In the first stanza, Owen captures the mechanical violence of modern warfare and then links it with “bugles calling from sad shires” to the second stanza’s contrasting funeral customs that shine in the eyes of the youthful dead as “holy glimmers of goodbyes.”

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.                                          Orisons = prayers

No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, —
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. [3]

***

Who was Wilfred Owen and why is he important?

Along with Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg, Owen was one of the foremost poets to emerge from the carnage and chaos of World War I. Over the course of the 20th century, he became acknowledged as the English language’s pre-eminent anti-war poet. For many, he remains so to this day. Anti-war, however, is not quite right. I agree with Britten’s implied insight and prefer to think of him as a pro-peace poet who refuses to glorify war.

Why?

Owen shattered the romantic myth of war. Before him, almost all English language poetry glorified patriotic sacrifice. Think of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” or Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” that typify the style. Brooke, who joined the Royal Navy as the guns of August erupted into World War I in 1914, died in 1915 aboard a hospital ship on the way to the landings at Gallipoli. From high school English class, you might still hear a faint echo of Brooke’s famous opening line:

from The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
     That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England….” [4]

In his most famous poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” (one interestingly enough, Britten does not use), Owen counters:

from Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue…

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in …
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer …

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.* [5]

*From an ode by the Roman poet Horace, the phrase means “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

***

Raised in a lower-middle-class family and strongly influenced by his mother’s religious zeal, Owen was educated in English public schools. He developed a talent for literature and thought of becoming a poet by the early age of 10. Lacking the finances to attend university, he tutored and began to seriously write poetry in France for two years before enlisting in the British Army in 1915. Commissioned as a second lieutenant, in January 1917 he was sent to the Western Front. Enduring constant artillery shelling and the harsh mud and cold of the trenches, over the winter months he led his men in repeated charges and hand-to-hand combat with the German enemy. Wounded, he spent several days in a near frozen shell crater sleeping with the bodies of his dead comrades. Rescued, he was sent to Scotland’s Craiglockhart Hospital suffering from “shell shock,” what we now call PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder.

At Craiglockhart Hospital he met Siegfried Sassoon, an officer in the British Army and combat veteran. Sassoon was also an accomplished poet whose war experience led him to write a letter to Parliament renouncing the war and affirming his pacifism. His poem “Attack,” in which he wrote “… clumsily bowed With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear,/ Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire…” spoke to a new way to write about war. [6] Encouraged by Sassoon, Owen resumed writing poetry, shifting from the era’s conventional pastoral poetry to a realistic anti-war voice. Fusing technical mastery with moral purpose, Owen pioneered psychological realism. Not for him the fine phrases of headquarters; he gave voice to the common soldiers, to the men in the trenches’ front lines. Developed at Craiglockhart, his signature techniques were pararhyme (or half-rhymes like “groined/groaned”), vivid, shocking imagery, and the ironic use of Biblical and classical allusions.

He did not write sweet idylls about some plot of land that would be forever England; instead, he wrote “Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death,/Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland/Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand./We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath. …” Owen focused his art not on himself but on the suffering (the “pity”) of soldiers. In a draft of an essay that was later used as a Preface to a volume of his poetry, he said, “My subject is War, and the pity of War.” [7]

Exempt from further combat and not required to go back to France, Owen, nonetheless, chose to return to active duty. Spurred by loyalty to his men, he also thought not returning would label him a shirker undercutting his poems’ moral stature. In September 1918, he returned to the trenches in France. That fall, he was awarded the Military Cross for valor in recognition of “an act or acts of exemplary gallantry during active operations against the enemy.” [8]

On Nov. 4, one week before the Armistice on Nov. 11, 1918, Owen was killed in combat while leading his troops to safety across the Sambre-Oise Canal in France.

He was 25 years old.

In an ironic symbol of the war’s senselessness, his family learned of his death as church bells rang celebrating peace.

His poems were published posthumously.

***

Owen’s poetry enriches Britten’s score. At each stage of the Mass, Britten uses Owen’s poetry to give voice to innocence’s outrage.

At the Offertory, the part of the Eucharist when the bread and wine are ceremonially placed on the altar symbolizing Christ’s sacrifice, Britten’s baritone sings from Owen’s Parable of the Old Man and the Young:

		Behold,

A ram caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son … [8]

At the Agnus Dei, which means “Lamb of God” and refers to Jesus Christ as the sacrificial lamb who takes away the sins of the world, the liturgy asks, “have mercy on me” and “grant us peace.” In counterpoint, Britten’s chorus and the tenor sing:

from A Calvary near the Ancre

The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate. [9]

The poems title refers to an incident in a chapel near the Ancre, a tributary of the Somme, when Owen saw a crucifix of the crucified Christ and used it as a symbol of the permanence of war and the suffering of its victims.

Britten’s most powerful use of an Owen poem is in the Libera me, which means “Deliver me.” Sung at the absolution of the dead beside the coffin after the Requiem Mass has ended and just before burial, the text asks God to have mercy upon the deceased at the Last Judgment. As commentary on the text, Britten deploys Owen’s “Strange Meeting.” In it the narrator has entered the afterworld and encountered the dead. He describes escaping battle “down some profound dull tunnel …” where he encounters “encumbered sleepers” who “groaned … too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.” One of the dead speaks to him.

from Strange Meeting

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now … [10]

****

Earlier I asked, “Why is Wilfred Owen important?” and answered my own question saying that he shattered the romantic myth of war; he exposed war not as noble adventure, but as mud, gas, blood, panic, and exhaustion. He rejected Victorian heroism to expose war’s brutality showing compassion for the troops who suffered it. Giving voice to the common soldier, he democratized war literature. Like Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Owen foreshadowed Ernest Hemingway’s poignant World War I novel A Farewell to Arms, Norman Mailer’s World War II masterpiece The Naked and the Dead, Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers and James Webb’s Fields of Fire about America’s war in Vietnam, and films too numerous to mention.

Britten’s War Requiem does not answer the one essential question: Why is it humans have never learned war’s one essential message – war is futile. He ends the Requiem with the dead meeting in the afterworld, but earlier he used Owen’s “Futility” in the second movement’s Dies Irae –– “Day of Wrath” the opening words of the Latin hymn on the Last Judgment.

from Futility

Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown,
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know. [11]

****

And, yet, war goes on

As of 2026, there are approximately 56 active armed conflicts worldwide, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. At least 10 major wars are causing significant casualties and displacement. The deadliest ongoing conflicts include the Russia-Ukraine war (since February 2022, 500,000-plus casualties), the Sudan civil war (since April 2023, 150,000-plus killed, 10 million-plus displaced), and the Gaza conflict (since October 2023, 40,000-plus killed). [12]

As Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim said in Slaughterhouse-Five, “So it goes.”

Photo Credits

“Benjamin Britten, London Records 1968 publicity photo for Wikipedia (restored).jpg” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Benjamin Britten, London Records 1968 publicity photo for Wikipedia (restored).jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed April 20, 2026.

“Coventry cathedral.jpg” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Coventry cathedral.jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed April 20, 2026.

“Wilfred Owen 2.png” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Wilfred Owen 2.png - Wikimedia Commons accessed April 20, 2026.

End Notes

1. See Steinberg, Michael, “War Requiem,” at Boston Symphony Orchestra available at BSO | War Requiem and Anonymous, “The War Requiem” at Caltech available at The War Requiem both accessed April 20, 2026.

2. “Mass for the Dead,” at Franciscans of the Immaculate Maria USA Delegation at Mass for the Dead: Mass, Absolution, and Burial accessed April 20, 2026.

3. Owen, Wilfred, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” in the public domain.

4. Brooke, Rupert, “The Soldier,” in the public domain.

5. Owen, Wilfred, “Dulce et Decorum est,” in the public domain.

6. Sassoon, Siegfried, “Attack,” at Englishverse.com available at Attack, by Siegfried Sassoon accessed April 26, 2026.

7. “Wilfred Owen 1893-1918” at The Poetry Foundation available at Wilfred Owen | The Poetry Foundation accessed April 25, 2026.

8. “The Military Cross,” at Identify Medals available at The Military Cross - British Medals & Awards, WW1, The Great War accessed April 21, 2026.

9. Owen, “Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” in the public domain.

10. _____, “At a Calvary near the Ancre,” in the public domain.

11. _____, “Strange Meeting,” in the public domain.

12. _____, “Futility,” in the public domain.

13. “Every active war and armed conflict in 2026,” at The World Now available at War Today — Every Active Conflict on the Globe, Live (2026) accessed April 26, 2026.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

In her wonderful, short book, What’s in a name, Susan Amussen tackles the Shakespeare authorship controversy, whose advocates allege that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did not write the works of “Shakespeare.”

Which leads to the question, “Who did write ‘Shakespeare?’”

You might then ask, “Why is that even a question?”

In asking, your instincts would be correct.

For almost all of the time since he died on April 23, 1616 –– 410 years ago today to the date –– there was no question that the plays, poems, and sonnets of William Shakespeare, son of John Shakespeare, a glovemaker, and Mary Arden Shakespeare, daughter of an old, affluent, and established family, were written by the “Stratford man.”

Then in the middle of the 19th century, American scholar Delia Bacon “concluded there was an inexplicable gap between the Shakespeare biography and the philosophical understanding to be found in the works.” [1] Bacon herself represents an interesting case study. Mentored by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sister Catharine, she was a teacher on the fringes of the great New England intellectual life of the 1840s until she became embroiled in a romantic scandal. As one author says, “Humiliated, Delia fled to Ohio, where she spent several years in study and seclusion.” [2] Returning to Boston some years later, she re-established herself as a teacher, and in 1857, with the support no less of Nathaniel Hawthorne, published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere (sic) Unfolded. She argued that the plays were actually written by Sir Francis Bacon “to promote (his) reformist social and political philosophy.” [3] For her trouble, she suffered a breakdown and died in 1859 in a mental institution. Ralph Waldo Emerson called her “a genius, but mad.” [4]

No relation to Francis Bacon and “mad” or not, Delia Bacon initiated “the Shakespeare authorship question.” Now a full-blown conspiracy movement, its champions have claimed at different times that Shakespeare’s works were written by, take your pick: Christopher Marlowe, the seventh Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere, Sir Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and others. My favorite, at least for originality, is that Shakespeare was a woman. Elizabeth Winkler started it in an Atlantic article discussing Oxford historian A.L Rowse’s suspicion that Emilia Bassano was Shakespeare’s mistress and the “dark lady” of the sonnets. [5] Bassano, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s and daughter of a Venetian immigrant musician living in London, “was one of the first women in England to publish a volume of poetry.” [6]

In Shakespeare’s time, much like writing movie and TV scripts in ours, playwriting was a collaborative endeavor. Shakespeare was known to collaborate, borrow, and rework older plays and scripts, and generally to use what sources and material were in the air in an era when copyright and authorial ownership were vague and inconsistently recognized. So, if Bassano was his mistress, it is very possible he took some of her work, filtered it through the furnace of his own imagination transforming it into art. The gist of the belief that Shakespeare was a woman rests on the undeniable proto-feminist nature of many of his great women characters and the delicacy and depth of the female friendships he describes, which raises the insulting question that for some answers itself, “Could a man possibly be that sensitive?”

More to the point, how did this faux controversy bloom into a full-blown conspiracy industry churning out papers, magazine articles, and even books? Well, Winkler’s experience offers a hint. She parlayed her Atlantic article into a book Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature. She did not claim that Shakespeare was a woman but instead challenged conventional scholarship encouraging a reconsideration of the historical evidence. As noted on her website, she is interested in “the larger problem of historical truth –– and how human imperfections … shape our construction of the past.” [7] In short, as Winkler illustrates, controversy can be good for your career as it generates book sales, podcast and speaking appearances, and other professional opportunities. If one is a university professor, it can get you tenured. More generally, for writers, speakers, and publishers, it’s good for business; a sentiment the Bard would have understood and heartily endorsed.

How did this bloom into a conspiracy theory and a cottage industry of hangers-on? Well, how far do you think you’d get peddling a book proposal that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare? Not far, but cast some doubt, conjure a centuries-old coverup involving spies, gender reversal, and the secret lives of aristocrats ancient and modern, and you have the makings of an academic eEntertainment scandal.

Scandal sells, but where do conspiracies originate?

According to the American Psychological Association, “People can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations, including relying strongly on their intuition, feeling a sense of antagonism and superiority toward others, and perceiving threats in their environment.” [8] An updated study stated it more succinctly, “people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others.” [9]

Regarding Shakespeare’s authorship, two phrases are key: “a need to understand” and “a need to feel like the community they identify with his superior to others.”

What needs understanding?

At root, most, not all, of the Stratford deniers find it hard to believe that one person could have done what Shakespeare did. In their minds, it does not seem plausible that one person could have such a wide and vast range of knowledge coupled with an unparalleled command of the English language. More to the point, this leads to two other strands of doubt. One is, as with Delia Bacon, an unspoken belief that the common son of a glovemaker without a university education could not have written King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, et. al. plus the sonnets and the two great long poems “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece.” Bacon’s is essentially a blend of intellectual and social snobbery asserting that such a no one from nowhere could not possibly be the language’s greatest artist.

This combines with the other strand, what I call the “wannabe aesthetic strand.” In our post-Romantic but romantic besotted age, artists are supposed to starve in a garret honing their art and, like van Gogh, sacrifice themselves to its perfection. They’re not supposed to, as Shakespeare did, use their art to earn a fortune, then cash out, retire to a life of ease in Stratford, and never write another word. To these doubters, it seems like sacrilege. Like Winkler, ignoring the evidence, they assert what is known about him describes not a writer but a highly successful businessman –– “a mercenary impresario of the Renaissance entertainment industry.” [10]

Which he was, but he was also a writer.

How do we know?

The evidence tells us so.

First, curiously, other than to just baldly assert that it was a cover for another anonymous author, no one challenges the fact that Shakespeare’s two long poems were written by him and published during the period from 1592 to 1594 when the theaters were closed due to plague. They are both narrative poems, i.e., like a play, they tell a story. They were published by Shakespeare’s friend from Stratford, Thomas Field, a well-known printer of the era. All accounts suggest Shakespeare himself personally oversaw their printing. [11] Remember, this was a time long before anything remotely resembling our media-soaked age; it was a time when the literate actually read for entertainment. Both poems were published over Shakespeare’s name. They were bestsellers. And, without dispute, his contemporaries credited them to him. [12]

Similarly with the sonnets; although not published until 1609 when Shakespeare was still alive and working in London, they had circulated, as was the custom of the time, in manuscript form among, as Francis Meres said in 1598, “his priuate friends.” [13] Two other sonnets were printed in 1599. The sonnets’ 1609 publication might have been without Shakespeare’s approval. In his world, copyright laws were non-existent and possession constituted ownership. So, when Thomas Thorpe published them, Shakespeare had little recourse since by the standards of the time, the publication was legal and ethical. They were published as “Shakespeares sonnettes,” the assumption being his name made them saleable and thus valuable. [14]

Tracing out the back and forth between those who think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare and those who don’t comes down to eight notions:

1. The paper trail is too thin; no diaries, letters, or manuscripts survive.

2. A man with Shakespeare’s grammar school education, critics argue, could not have written such learned artworks.

3. The plays display deep knowledge of court life, law, and elite culture, seemingly beyond that of a country rube.

4. Some claim Shakespeare was a front name for another author.

5. The leading alternative candidate is Edward de Vere, the seventh Earl of Oxford — though he died in 1604, before many of the major tragedies were written (a complication his supporters tend to overlook).

6. Shakespeare’s will listed no literary assets.

7. Skeptics argue that no one definitively credited him in his lifetime, despite contemporary references like the testimony of Edward Meres, who as early as 1598 praised Shakespeare by name, and Ben Johnson’s dedicatory poem to the First Folio Shakespeare colleagues published after his death.

8. Others suggest that Shakespeare’s fame and legend grew only after his death, a claim that also conflicts with the recognition he received from his contemporaries.

So, the whole thing is, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare himself, “much ado about nothing.”

Picking up Winkler’s challenge to study the history of the period to understand whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, Susan Dwyer Amussen supplies an answer in What’s in a name? Why historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare. [15] A wonderful short book (the actual text is only 178 pages, but her annotated bibliography is also worth reading) she places Shakespeare solidly within the culture of his times. Unlike most Shakespeare biographers, she does not use Shakespeare’s plays and poems to infer biographical information otherwise lacking. A cultural historian, Amussen understands that not only politics, but just about everything is downstream from culture.

If you want to understand the politics of a time, examine the culture that sprouted them. If you want to understand how a people became who they were, do as I do in The American Tapestry Project and explore the culture that created them. If you want to understand a person, first understand the culture that bred and nurtured them. More to our point, if you want to understand the English Renaissance’s greatest artist, then you need to understand English culture in the early modern period between roughly the death of Henry VIII in 1547 and the beginning of the English Civil War in 1642. As Amussen points out in great detail, rather than an enigma, William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon might be that era’s greatest exemplar.

Why?

Amussen systematically explodes each of the eight claims against Shakespeare by showing in great detail the reality of life in the early modern period and how it formed the boy from Stratford into the actor, playwright, and theatrical impresario he became. First, rejecting the notion that the paper trail is too thin, in a detailed analysis of Shakespeare’s publication history and business dealings, she situates him both in Stratford as a leading citizen and in London as a major figure in its theatrical world.

She next explains how the era’s creation of England’s public school system and its classical curriculum trained generations of young men in the arts of rhetoric and literary composition steeping them in a wide knowledge of ancient literature. Two from Stratford’s school became major literary figures in London: Shakespeare and his friend, printer and publisher Thomas Field.

Regarding the claim that no commoner could know so much about courtly life, she details Shakespeare’s documented participation in both the Lord Chamberlain’s and the King’s Men’s theatrical troupes, of which he was both part-owner and principal playwright. More to the point, the troupes frequently performed at court and had intimate knowledge of royalty’s social norms. She points out that the fact he had no literary assets at the time of his death would have been typical of the age. His plays did not belong to him; they belonged to the company for whom he wrote them. His other writings had already been pirated. She then reminds us, all of this notwithstanding, that after his death, his partners made an explicit point to gather his works and publish them under his name. This is the legendary First Folio published in 1623 by John Heminges and Henry Condell.

Regarding Shakespeare’s sensitivity to women’s issues, Amussen’s treatment of the role of Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway as his business partner in Stratford reveals an old truth now forgotten. That old truth is that despite legal obstacles restricting women’s property rights, in the pre-industrial age, almost all commerce was home-based. An accomplished maltster, one who makes malt, an important ingredient in brewing beer, Anne Shakespeare was her husband’s partner. She oversaw his real estate ventures in Stratford and frequently visited him and helped with his London-based activities. More to the earlier point about Shakespeare’s sensitivity to women, Amussen details with great precision the lengths he went to to protect his wife and daughters’ interests in all of his estate. He ensured that they were his chief beneficiaries in an age when that was not common.

Read Asmussen –– her knowledge of the times shows how they made Shakespeare Shakespeare.

Most importantly, however, her vivid descriptions of 16th and 17th century theatrical life illustrate the fundamental Shakespearean truth.

He was a man of the theater.

His linguistic genius is just that –– “genius,” a word we use to denote that which we cannot explain. How did he master the English language, the modern version of which it can be said he created? How did he coin over 1,700 new words? All one can say is, based on his attentive ear to the language of the streets he walked, the works he read, and the actors he heard, he just did.

But the rest?

Well, he was acknowledged to be one of the finest actors of his time (in our vernacular a “star”), a director, a playwright, and a producer. Shakespeare never claimed to be a philosopher. He was putting on a show.

Shakespeare was the transcendent master of illusion. As he said, “The play’s the thing” and when it ends, “These our actors/As I foretold you, were all spirits, and/Are melted into air, thin air…”

To end where we began, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. He understood better than anyone:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts …

Photo Credits

“William Shakespeare by John Taylor, edited.jpg” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:William Shakespeare by John Taylor, edited.jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed April 15, 2026.

“Blurred Shakespeare with superimposed “?” created by ChatGPT5 on Andrew Roth’s personal account at OpenAI.

End Notes

1. Holderness, Graham, “Delia Bacon and Shakespeare’s Authorship,” at Shakespeare Birthplace Trust available at Delia Bacon and Shakespeare’s Authorship accessed April 16, 2026.

2. Schiff, Judith, “A genius, but mad,” in Yale Alumni Magazine (Nov/Dec 2015) available at “A genius, but mad” | Old Yale | Yale Alumni Magazine accessed April 16, 2026.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Winkler, Elizabeth, “Was Shakespeare a Woman?” in The Atlantic (June 2019) available at Who Was Shakespeare? Could the Author Have Been a Woman? - The Atlantic accessed April 16, 2026.

6. Ibid.

7. _______________, “Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies,” at Elizabeth Winkler available at Elizabeth Winkler accessed April 16, 2026.

8. “Why some people are willing to believe conspiracy theories,” at American Psychological Association available at Why some people are willing to believe conspiracy theories accessed April 16, 2026.

9. Ibid.

10. Winkler, Was Shakespeare a Woman?” in The Atlantic cited above.

11. “Understanding Shakespeare,” in Britannica available at William Shakespeare - Poet, Playwright, Dramatist | Britannica accessed April 16, 2026.

12. “Venus and Adonis,” at Shakespeare Documented available at Venus and Adonis, first edition | Shakespeare Documented accessed April 16, 2026.

13. “Shake-speares sonnets,” Shakespeare Documented available at Sonnets, first edition | Shakespeare Documented accessed April 16, 2026.

14. Ibid.

15. Asmussen, Susan Dwyer. What’s in a name: How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2026.)

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

As the picture above from Part IV: “The Immigrant’s Tale” of my The American Tapestry Project illustrates, anti-immigrant bias has an old and rich tradition in the fabric of America’s many stories. The picture specifically introduces the history of the rabid anti-immigrant bias of mid-19th^-century America that gave rise to the American Party. It was a nativist political party defending the supremacy of the original Anglo-Saxon settlers against what they described as a tide of filthy, pagan Irish and German Catholics threatening the nation’s cultural survival.

You might have never heard of the American Party, but you almost certainly remember from middle school or high school history class the name they gave themselves. Ashamed of their bigotry, when asked if they knew about the American Party, members would reply, “I know nothing.” Hence, in a rich and accurate irony, they were the “Know-Nothing Party.”

All of this came to mind as I began to research a three- or four-part series of Book Notes on the intellectual foundations of Trumpism and the New Right based on Laura Field’s book Furious Minds. The series will begin later this month with an analysis of Michael Anton’s essay “The Flight 93 Election,” which American commentator Rush Limbaugh read in its entirety during a September 2016 radio show he titled “The Shaming of the Never Trumpers.” [1]

Anton’s essay is sometimes called the “ur-MAGA” text because it states with great urgency the case for Donald Trump as an American savior fending off America’s certain decline and death should Hilary Clinton get elected. As Anton said, “The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stance on the right issues – immigration, trade, and war – right from the beginning.” [2]

I was struck by the vehemence of his anti-immigration language. Labeling it the “most important” issue, Anton asserts that a major cause of American decline is that “the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows … less traditionally American with every cycle.” He maintains that the “sacredness of mass immigration is the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes” whose “answer is always the same. Just like Angela Merkel after yet another rape, shooting, bombing, or machete attack. More, more, more!” Anton says immigration “hasn’t made sense since World War I.” A staunch advocate of Trump’s building a wall, Anton states that it “will help enormously, by cutting off the flood of newcomers.” Or, as he asks rhetorically, “a million more Syrians, anyone?” [3]

As always, I like to know something about the person whose work I am reading, so I looked into Anton’s background. Not exactly surprised, but I was amused and perplexed to discover that he tends to be tightly lipped about his heritage. He acknowledges that he is of Italian and Lebanese ancestry, with some sources also suggesting he might be Greek. [4] Which means, of course, that he is a descendant of immigrants. Given the specific ethnicities noted, he is almost certainly descended from people who entered the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during the great wave of southern and eastern European immigration. It was an immigration wave, by the way, that the anti-immigration bigots of that era characterized as “the mongrel scum of southern and eastern Europe.”

To be fair, however, Anton, in other less polemical writings and interviews, has a slightly less vitriolic attitude toward immigrants and immigration. In a 2017 interview with the editors of “American Greatness,” when asked if he really believes that immigration inevitably hurts the U.S, he replied “Of course not. Immigration, like most policies, is contextual, tactical. There are times and circumstances when it benefits the country and times when it doesn’t.”

Acknowledging his own heritage, he continued, “The fact is that America benefited enormously from the Ellis Island wave — my ancestors were part of that — but also benefitted from the post-World War I restrictions, which vastly aided and speeded assimilation and forged a coherent national identity out of these recent arrivals. Doing that again would do enormous good in my view.” [5]

Those post-World War I restrictions, Anton notes, were the Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924, the latter of which instituted nationality quotas that radically reduced Italian and other Mediterranean, Asian, and South American immigration for the next 40-plus years until the Immigration Act of 1965’s family reunification provisos reopened the door. Explaining all of that is for another time.

What jarred me about Anton is how he almost perfectly embodies the arc of immigration in American history.

What is that arc?

First, I should, in the interest of full transparency, note that, like Anton, I am a grandson of those late-19th^h century immigrants vilified by the bigots of their era. I do not believe in “open borders.” I think that immigration should be legal but adhere to a well-defined path people of goodwill can follow. It should be open to anyone. And, lastly, America should continue to offer asylum and refuge to those fleeing oppression and terror. Honorable people can disagree honorably about the specifics of how that should be done, but from my vantage point that should be our basic policy and strategy.

Back to the arc of American immigration. America is a nation of immigrants. Although many have forgotten it or want to forget it, everyone here is descended from someone who came from somewhere else, with the exception of Native Americans. The immigrants’ story and the story of their families’ assimilation into American culture follows a familiar arc. The arc follows a simple path of three or four steps.

In the first step, the grandparents (or great-grandparents) somehow manage to get to America. Once landed, they cling to the lower levels of society, find a job, and manage to secure a foothold and to raise a family. The first generation values education highly and demands their children go to school.

While honoring their parents and their ethnic heritage, those children, the second generation, benefiting from the education their parents struggled to provide them, moves upward and secures positions in the working class and even the middle class. A few manage to climb even higher. If they can, the second generation helps others in the family’s “old country” to come to America. They, too, demand that their children are educated.

In the third generation, now completely assimilated into American culture, some but not everyone –– this is not a fairy tale of endless upward mobility –– rise to levels of community and political leadership. They have memories of their grandparents and have heard the stories of the immigrant experience, but those stories are not central to their identity except in a colloquial favoring of old-style foods they associate with grandma.

Now completely Americanized, some members of the fourth and fifth generations prosper; some do not. They have no memory of or identification with the immigrant experience; the stories, if they ever heard them, are a faint recollection of a world they never knew. Many of them want the ladder of entry into American society pulled up, thinking that America should be reserved for Americans.

And then the cycle repeats itself.

It has for centuries.

It is one of the major threads in the story of America.

It might be the major thread.

Anyway, thinking about all of this made me want to put the Michael Antons of the world aside for a moment. I asked myself, speaking of stories, what are the great American novels and stories about the immigrant experience? There are many. A short list might include Henry Roth’s (no relation) Call It Sleep, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Ole Rolvaag’s Giants of the Earth, and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic. There are many others.

Recently, my colleague Ben Speggen and I have been kicking around the idea of a “Book Notes Reading Club: The Deeper Dive,” or some such title. It would be offered once or twice a month for three to four months with the reading focused on a specific theme. Some themes we bounced around included “The Moral Arc of American Literature” (which sounds awfully pretentious), “Reflections on the Experience of High School Classics After a Lifetime of Experience,” “Women and Men Together (or Not),” “The Quest: The Hero’s Journey,” and others.

It occurs to me a great theme would be “The Immigrant’s Tale” explored through reading eight to 10 of the very best American novels on the topic. It could be done in-person at the JES or maybe even virtually via Zoom. Enrollment would be limited to no more than 15.

Does that interest anyone? Let us know at roth@jeserie.org or speggen@jeserie.org

In any event, I thought I’d conclude this week’s “Note” with a poem about immigration. It turns out there are scads of them, most suffering from sentimentality and a definite recency bias. One that caught my notice, however, touches on the recent surge of immigration after the 1965 Immigration Act. It also has deeper, much deeper roots going back to the 19th century. It never mentions it but brings to mind the vehement anti-Chinese west coast bigotry that gave birth to America’s first two attempts to control and restrict immigration: the 1875 Page Act aimed at prohibiting Chinese women from entering the United States and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned all Chinese and Asian immigration.

The poem is “I Ask My Mother to Sing” by Li-Young Lee. an American poet. Lee’s family, which escaped Mao’s China for Indonesia, fled Indonesia in 1959 to escape anti-Chinese bigotry. Journeying for five years through Hong Kong and Japan, Lee’s family arrived in the United States in 1964. By that time, a third-generation American, I was a freshman in college as the larger cycle continued to repeat itself. Lee himself attended the Universities of Pittsburgh, Arizona, and SUNY Brockport. He began writing poetry at Pitt and is an established Asian American poet.

His poem speaks quietly of the “old country” he never saw, but that remains the emotional foundation of his family’s identity.

I Ask My Mother to Sing

She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.

I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song. [6]

I’m not particularly a fan of Amazon.com, but almost all of Lee’s books of poetry can be found here. First, however, I suggest you check our local bookshops Werner’s, Pressed, and Barnes and Noble. Read Lee. He’ll reward you.

Photo Credits

“Immigration collage” created by Andrew Roth for his “The American Tapestry Project.”

“Li-Young Lee 7271417.jpg,” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Li-Young Lee 7271417.jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed April 13, 2026.

End Notes

1. Field, Laura. Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025 Kindle Edition), p. 29.

2. Publius Decius Mus (Michael Anton), “The Flight 93 Election,” at the Claremont Review of Books (Sept. 5, 2016) available at The Flight 93 Election - Claremont Review of Books accessed April 10, 2026.

3. Ibid.

4. Styrna, Pawel, “Mass Immigration and the Squeezing of the American Middle and Working Class,” in Immigration Reform.Com available at Mass Immigration and the Squeezing of the American Middle and Working Class | ImmigrationReform.com accessed April 13, 2026.

5. The Editors, “Decius Out of the Darkness: A Q&A with Michael Anton,” at American Greatness available at Decius Out of the Darkness: A Q&A with Michael Anton › American Greatness accessed April 13, 2026.

6. Lee, Li-Young, “I Ask My Mother to Sing,” at Library of Congress available at I Ask My Mother to Sing | Library of Congress accessed April 13, 2026.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

This is going to be a mini-Book Note in which I figuratively (and literally since many of the words are his) give the page/stage to “The Boss” — Bruce Springsteen.

What is a protest song?

Well, for one thing, regardless how you define them, they are, to borrow a phrase from the poet William Carlos Williams, “deeply in the American grain.” As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his last speech, “The greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.” [1]

We discussed all of this as long ago as August and September 2021 in a series of Book Notes that can be found here.

Protest songs are as American as you can get. As I wrote almost five years ago,

American protest songs are actually older than the country itself, with some dating to the American Revolution. The most famous of which is Yankee Doodle. Yankee Doodle started out as a British insult aimed at rustic –– let’s say rube-like — American colonials the British thought dumb and oafish. “Doodle” being an English word derived from the German doedel meaning fool or simpleton.

The Americans had the last laugh.

They adopted the song, made it a marching tune and threw it back in the Brits’ faces. Usually played as a children’s song, Yankee Doodle was originally an Army marching song played by a fife and drum corps. [2]

Usually associated with the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s, protest songs began in earnest in antebellum America as anti-slavery abolitionist songs. The first and justifiably most famous is the Hutchinson Family Singers’ “Slavery Is a Hard Foe to Battle.” An actual farming family from New Hampshire, they sang about rural life and social issues, temperance, abolition, politics, war, and women’s suffrage. Focusing on idealism, equal rights, and moral improvement, it can be argued the Hutchinson Family Singers invented the American tradition of protest music. [3]

In that same Book Note, I said, “(Protest songs) have three purposes: 1) to expose a wrong; 2) to draw attention to the movement seeking to right that wrong, and 3) to energize the movement’s supporters.” Sadly, the need for such songs never seems to end. In the 19th century, abolitionist, labor union, and women’s rights songs appeared. In the 20th century, abolitionism was succeeded by civil rights anthems such as “We Shall Overcome,” “Strange Fruit,” “A Change Is Gonna Come,” women’s rights songs such as “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves” and “I am Woman,” and populist songs like Woody Guthrie’s classic singing of the rights of common folk, “This Land Is Your Land.”

Now, in the 21st century with Americans taking to the streets to remind those in power that the most American sentiment of all is “No Kings,” Bruce Springsteen has breathed life back into this venerable American tradition of singing songs of freedom. On March 28, in St. Paul, Minnesota, Springsteen performed his “Streets of Minneapolis.” He was introduced by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who said “It’s my pleasure to be able to welcome somebody who has spent a lifetime giving voice to the working class, expressing our hopes and dreams, our fears, all of the things that makes us human, and has done that with a voice that resonated across generations. … I have to tell you we’re damn sure about this. We need no damn kings. But I’ll tell you what I’m glad we have. We do need a Boss. Please welcome Bruce Springsteen. ...” [4]

Last September, I wrote in Book Notes #210 about “The Poetry of Bruce Springsteen” which can be found here, so I won’t repeat my appreciation for “The Boss’” art, but in an era with an administration in Washington characterized by “chaos, cruelty, and corruption,” [5] Springsteen’s support loudly resonates for the people of Minneapolis who took a “stand for this land/And the stranger in our midst.”

Frequent readers of these notes know my reluctance to explicate a poem or song’s lyrics, so without commentary here is Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis:”

Through the winter’s ice and cold
Down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice
‘Neath an occupier’s boots

King Trump’s private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes

Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night

And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets,
Alex Pretti and Renee Good

Oh, Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst

Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of ‘26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Trump’s federal thugs beat upon
His face and his chest
Then we heard the gunshots
And Alex Pretti lay in the snow dead

Their claim was self-defense, sir
Just don’t believe your eyes
It’s our blood and bones and these whistles and phones
Against Miller and Noam’s dirty lies

Oh, Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Crying through the bloody mist
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Now they say they’re here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is Black or brown, my friend
You can be questioned or deported on sight

In our chants of, “ICE out now!”
ICE out! (ICE out!) ICE out! (ICE out!)
Our city’s heart and soul persist
ICE out! (ICE out!) ICE out! (ICE out!)
Through broken glass and bloodied tears
ICE out! (ICE out!) ICE out! (ICE out!)
On the streets of Minneapolis
ICE out! (ICE out!) ICE out! (ICE out!)

Oh, Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ‘26

We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

ICE out! (ICE out!) ICE out! (ICE out!)
ICE out! (ICE out!) ICE out! (ICE out!)
ICE out! (ICE out!) ICE out! (ICE out!)
ICE out! (ICE out!) ICE out! (ICE out!) [6]

Singing deeply in the American grain, demonstrating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s exhortation that “the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights,” the official lyric video of Springsteen performing “Streets of Minneapolis” can be found here:

Photo Credits

“Streets_of_Minneapolis_cover.jpg” at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, available at Streets_of_Minneapolis_cover.jpg accessed March 31, 2026.

“Bruce Springsteen” at Wikimedia Commons available at Bruce Springsteen 2025 - Category:Bruce Springsteen - Wikimedia Commons accessed March 31, 2026.

End Notes

1. King, Jr., Martin Luther, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” at American Rhetoric Top 100 Speeches available at American Rhetoric: Martin Luther King, Jr. - I’ve Been to the Mountaintop (April 3 1968) accessed April 2, 2026.

2. Roth, Andrew, “Book Notes #71: Songs of Freedom, Songs of Protest, Part One” at Book Notes available at Book Notes 71 (1).pdf accessed April 2, 2026.

3. Morley, Anders. “The Famous NH Family You’ve Never Heard Of (Probably), New Hampshire Magazine (July 18, 2016) available at https://www.nhmagazine.com/the-famous-nh-family-youve-never-heard-of-probably/ accessed April 2, 2026.

4. Jordan, Chris, “Bruce Springsteen rocks Minnesota No Kings. See what he said,” USAToday available at Bruce Springsteen performs anti-ICE song at Minnesota No Kings rally accessed April 2, 2026.

5. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in conversation with Steve Scully discussing Shapiro’s book “Where We Keep the Light” at the Jefferson Educational Society, Erie, Pa., March 31, 2026.

6. Springsteen, Bruce, “Streets of Minneapolis, lyrics” for non-commercial use only, data from Musixmatch available at new Springsteen song lyrics - Search accessed April 2, 2026.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

Building on her 2021 essay “The Bad Guys Are Winning,” [1] Anne Applebaum’s brilliant Autocracy, Inc. remains one of the most important books you’ll read not only this year but in any year. It is, in that hackneyed expression that still carries a bit of a punch, “a must read.”

Why?

Are you familiar with the concept of Occam’s Razor? Named after medieval theologian William of Occam, who said that when we have more than one answer or solution to a problem, “we should choose the one that makes the fewest assumptions since that option is most likely to be correct.” [2] Basically, it means that the simplest answer accounting for the most variables is usually the correct answer.

What has that to do with Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc.? Occam’s idea occurred to me while reading Applebaum’s meticulous and chilling account of how, during the past quarter-century, an international network of nonideological autocrats has taken shape. The reason? Applebaum’s framework indirectly explains the otherwise frequently incoherent motivations and actions of President Donald Trump.

How? Because without intending to do so, her book illustrates how Trump’s desire to be an autocrat explains his actions.

What’s the line –– “follow the money?”

It is Trump’s cupidity (a fancy word for an “inordinate desire for wealth”) that defines him. Cupidity comes from the Latin “cupere,” which means “to desire” and its cognate “cupiditas” means “yearning and desire.” In English, it came to mean “lust” and its English version “concupiscence” means sexual desire. Its root gave us Cupid, our watered-down version of Eros, the Greek God of erotic love. [3] Isn’t that the essence of Trump –– the perfect marriage of erotic and financial lust? An insecure man flouting his conquests both female and financial and discovering that the last conquest is never enough because his ego and the crowd’s approval need to be continually fed.

The point is that what drives Trump is not ideological.

Yes, he has certain core beliefs. He is almost certainly a racist and misogynist; he might believe his tariffs actually work; but his moral sense is entirely transactional. For him, the good is whatever is good for him. Neither political ideology nor cultural wars but only the art of the deal motivates Trump. That should come as no surprise, although many seem to have forgotten it, because he told us so as long ago as 1989 in his New York Times #1 bestselling book The Art of the Deal. [4]

What, for example, do you think he fears in the Epstein files? Revelations about his concupiscence –– his sexual peccadilloes? For at least three reasons, I think the answer to that question is no. First, I find it hard to believe that he is a pedophile. He doesn’t seem the type. While it has been alleged that he met his wife Melania in a transactional encounter in Epstein’s orbit, his record of disposing of wives who become problematic suggests he is not protecting her. And, lastly, he does not fear salacious scandals, because from his vantage point, they only enhance his image.

No, the simplest answer — the Occam Razor’s answer — about what Trump fears is exposure of the network that he either joined with “eyes wide shut” was ensnared by, or both. Regardless, it is a network he has no interest in leaving; in fact, he dreams of dominating it. Therefore, to understand Trump, one needs to understand for him Job #1 is protecting the origin of his access to the connections that make all of his deals possible.

One repeatedly hears the question, “What does Russia’s Vladimir Putin have on President Trump?” The Occam’s Razor answer may simply be nothing at all but a shared interest in maximizing each other’s wealth. In her chapter “The Greed That Binds,” Applebaum offers a detailed analysis of how several Russian oligarchs participated in the hollowing out of the steel industry in nearby Warren, Ohio. She notes the loophole in American real estate law that makes it “possible to buy property anonymously, through shell companies. One in five condos in Trump-owned or Trump-branded buildings is owned anonymously. … At least 13 people with proven or alleged links to the Russian mafia are known to have owned or done business in condos in Trump-branded properties.” [5]

Although in her preface to the book’s new Vintage Paperback edition, Applebaum gives a detailed summary of Trump’s actions during the first year of his second term, [6] she does not explicitly make the hypothetical case I just described. She does, however, describe the origins, prime movers, features, and leading characters of the network into which Trump has led America.

What network?

Applebaum argues that the central geopolitical story of our time isn’t simply “democracies vs. dictatorships,” but the emergence of a transnational system of autocrats and their enablers scheming together across borders to enrich themselves, duck the consequences, and, in the process, weaken their mortal enemy, liberal democracy. While there have always been autocrats who conspired together, among many others, think of the World War II fascist axis of Germany, Italy, and Japan or half-a-millennium or so earlier the Holy Roman Empire, Applebaum says 21st century autocrats neither share a uniform ideology nor create formal blocs and alliances.

Instead, they build and sustain a loose network knitted together by avarice and technology. As she says, “Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists, and theocrats. … Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group … (is) not bound by ideology but rather by a single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power.” [7] As the often fractious bedfellows of Russia, China, Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Belarus, Turkey, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, et. al. bond together against the democratic west, “their bonds … are cemented not through ideals but through deals –– deals designed to take the edge off (western) sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.” [8]

For Applebaum, then, 21st century autocrats and their authoritarian states are better understood not as a uniform ideological axis but as networks of nation-based corrupt business interests, security services, professional propagandists, and legal/financial specialists. In her model, autocrats don’t need to love each other, share a worldview, or even trust each other. Recognizing their common interests, these flexible networks are more opportunistic cartels than a formal political or military alliance.

Applebaum’s core claim is that modern autocracies run on kleptocracy –– systems in which political power and personal enrichment are fused. Contemporary kleptocrats don’t function like political cartoon characters with suitcases of cash exchanged by operators in dark suits at midnight. Modern kleptocrats rely on the sophisticated tools of international finance, such as shell companies, opaque real-estate markets, permissive trade regulations underpinned by elite lawyers, accountants, consultants, and PR firms that can clean reputations and move money. Think of freelancers like Paul Manafort and retired Gen. Michael Flynn in Ukraine in the 20-teens. More vital than these freelancers to autocratic survival are what Applebaum calls marginal democracies like Turkey facilitating the clandestine transferring of funds and Iran’s clandestine oil dealings enabling both the Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro regimes to maintain power in a collapsing Venezuela. [8]

Not merely a foreign problem, autocracies are partially sustained by the incentives and loopholes inside free societies. Applebaum describes these networks reaching outside of their own borders to plug into democratic systems via the globalization of finance and its “hiding places” for wealth. Opaque banking laws, loose real estate laws, and a willingness not to ask too many questions are how British real estate agents in Sussex, steel makers in Warren, Ohio, willing to unload a failing factory, and bankers in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, can “accept mystery deposits from mystery clients … (helping) to undermine the rule of law in their own countries and around the world.” [10] Applebaum believes these actions threaten democratic survival. Democracies often assume they can “name and shame” dictators, sanction a few officials, and move on. Current history is proving the naivete of those assumptions.

In an ironic twist, globalization works, but not the way its first proponents imagined.

Autocracies not only benefit from gaps in democratic societies’ financial regulations; Applebaum also shows how autocracies share coercive tactics and mimic one another’s use of communications technology to control and shape the minds of citizens at home and in democratic societies. She describes how China sought to avoid a replay of the Tiananmen Square freedom movement by creating the Great Firewall of China to control both external internet sources and Chinese social media. She notes, “Chinese social media was allowed to flourish, but only in cooperation with the security services, which engineered it from the beginning to enable the surveillance of users.” [11]

But autocracies do not deploy coercive technology tactics only against their people. Applebaum details how autocratic governments trade with one another in the “how-to” of repression. Police and security services in China and Russia, for example, have armed, equipped, and trained counterparts in other states by sharing surveillance systems designed for crowd control and other techniques for infiltrating opposition groups. She describes in depth how the Chinese helped the autocratic regime in Zimbabwe fend off an internal threat by sharing surveillance and communications technology.

Why would China do that?

The shared interest was not ideological but transactional. As Applebaum writes, “China got minerals for export to its battery factories; Zimbabwe got broadband deals and Chinese surveillance technology.” [12] From Applebaum’s perspective, this sharing of coercive technologies illustrates how the regimes work in tandem to ensure each’s mutual survival because “repression” is not just an internal policy choice. It can also be an exportable service, part of an authoritarian marketplace. As it turns out, peddling coercive technology like facial recognition systems and community camera systems are vastly profitable.

So, too, is both information technology and the messaging programs such technology enables; for example, think of the glut of political messaging sites cluttering social media. Because autocrats understand that information (and misinformation) shapes minds, Applebaum details their cooperative efforts in spreading propaganda and disinformation. They teach each other the themes, memes, and techniques of our internet-connected world that work to undermine their enemies, chief of which are liberal democracies like the United States and the European Union.

In her review of Russian interference during the 2016 American presidential election, she notes how such efforts targeted the citizens of existing democracies “to smear not just activists who promote democracy but the system itself.” [13]

Why?

Because all autocrats have the same goal –– undermining democracy. All their messages converge on a unified theme. The message’s details differ to fit different national audiences and even different audiences in the same nation, but the core message is identical. They all sing some variation of the toxic story that democracy is chaotic and weak; America is hypocritical or evil; “human rights” talk is a cover for imperialism; independent journalists are enemy foreign agents; and all opposition leaders are traitors. As Applebaum says, “If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights … to the dream of freedom, then those ideas have to be poisoned.”[14]

In the face of this anti-democratic onslaught, Applebaum’s writing includes a critique of democratic complacency. She illustrates that in the 1990s after the Cold War ended, many democratic governments assumed that trade, globalization, and integration would gradually liberalize authoritarian regimes. She says that strategy backfired because it provided autocrats with economic leverage against the West. Think of Germany and western Europe buying gas from Russia, and the United States’ commercial embrace of China. In her view, the West was too eager to treat them as normal partners rather than strategic rivals with hostile values and goals. The result has been that over the past two decades, the autocrats have been agile, transactional, and cunning in pursuit of their goal while the democratic West has naively thought free markets would somehow magically fix the problem.

Although the book’s many accounts of the intertwined business and political profiteering of the 21st century’s autocrats is alarming, Applebaum is not fatalistic. Democracies can protect themselves, but time is running short. Her suggestions strike me as basic but essential. She suggests aggressive anti-money laundering enforcement, trade and financial sanctions that actually work because they are enforced, reining in social media and information technology companies, developing a counter-disinformation capacity, and rallying support for democratic civil society.

None of which, she admits, will be easy.

To end where we began, as President Trump pursues his art of the deal with the world’s autocrats while showing, at best, indifference and, at worst, contempt for America’s historic democratic allies while also threatening centuries old democratic norms at home, the question of the moment is: Does the United States still have the political will to preserve its democracy by adopting some version of Applebaum’s common sense solutions?

As Occam might point out, the question involves multiple complexities, but the challenge is simple: will America’s 250th birthday be a requiem or will it be the occasion for a renewed determination to preserve government “of, by, and for the People?”

Read Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc. – it’s more than important; it’s vital!

Photo Credits

“Anne Elizabeth Applebaum.jpg” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Anne Elizabeth Applebaum.jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed March 22, 2026.

End Notes

1. Applebaum, Anne, “The Bad Guys Are Winning,” at Anne Applebaum available at The Bad Guys Are Winning – Anne Applebaum accessed March 22, 2026.

2. Yashinsky, Dalia, “15 Occam’s Razor Examples,” at HelpfulProfessor.com available at 15 Occam’s Razor Examples (2026) accessed March 22, 2026.

3. “cupidity,” at Merriam-Webster available at CUPIDITY Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster accessed March 23, 2026.

4. Trump, Donald and Tony Schwartz. The Art of the Deal (New York: Random House, 1989).

5. Applebaum, Anne, Preface in Autocracy, Inc. (New York: Vintage Press Paperback version, 2025), p. 37.

6. Ibid., pp. xv-xxii.

7. Ibid., p. 2.

8. Ibid., p. 3.

9. Ibid., p. 53.

10. Ibid., p. 42.

11. Ibid., p. 67.

12. Ibid., p. 62.

13. Ibid., p. 85.

14. Ibid., p. 73.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

Today is Major League Baseball’s Opening Day (yes, there was a game Wednesday night in San Francisco between the Yankees and the Giants), but Opening Day shines best when played in the warm, (well, not always warm) shadow-dappled sunlight of an early spring afternoon. There are 11 games slated today.

Even now with our era’s sports-saturated calendar, no other sport can match it. The NBA debuts sometime in late October but no one pays any attention until Christmas Day and then casual fans tune out until the playoffs begin in April; the NHL’s opening a national secret, it remains a faint buzz in the sporting background; and even with its media savvy turning something as mind numbing as Draft Day into an event, the NFL can’t match the energy of baseball’s Opening Day.

Why?

Connecting some “Dots,” here are 10 reasons why baseball’s Opening Day remains important in American life.

Dot #1: Opening Day is a national ritual of renewal.

One of the few recurring events in American life that still feels like a civic liturgy, Opening Day announces winter’s end and its fans’ hope for a better future as the lifecycle rekindles. In a fractious culture, Opening Day is America’s shared moment to believe in fresh starts.

Once upon a time, Opening Day was always on a Monday and always in Cincinnati, the city whose 1869 Red Stockings were baseball’s first fully professional team. In Cincinnati, Opening Day spills into the streets through the Findlay Market parade, a tradition with roots in the 19th century. In 2025, an estimated 130,000 people either saw it or participated in it. [1]

Dot #2: Speaking of hoping for a better future, Opening Day reveals Americans’ ability to embrace hope against all evidence to the contrary.

In another life, I used to compare the feel-good atmosphere of new student orientation to spring training: no one’s taken a test yet and everyone’s a pennant winner. On Opening Day, every fan imagines that this is the hometown team’s year. This is a deeply held American attitude: the belief that tomorrow can be better than yesterday, that reinvention is always possible, and that failure is not final.

For years, the Chicago Cubs were everyone’s lovable losers until they won the 2016 World Series by beating my Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) when in the bottom of the 10th inning of Game Seven Cleveland manager Terry Francona had only the marginal sub Michael Martinez left to pinch hit. Continuing Cleveland’s World Series tradition of being on the wrong side of history, Martinez promptly grounded out to third baseman Kris Bryant ending the Cubs 108-year World Series drought. [2] In 1954’s World Series between Cleveland and the then New York Giants, it was Cleveland’s Vic Wertz who hit the ball in what became the most famous catch in baseball history: Willie Mays’ back to the ball, over the shoulder, running catch of Wertz’s drive to the deepest part of the old Polo Grounds.

Still, this springtime hope continues because with only the flimsiest evidence, I firmly believe that if not this year, then next the Cleveland Guardians will end Cleveland’s now MLB leading World Series drought of 77 years and counting!

Dot #3: Opening Day links, if only in a nostalgic haze, the present to memories of better days.

Opening Day is never only about this year’s roster. Bringing all the cliches to life, it is a cultural archive disguised as a game, evoking memories of fathers and grandfathers, transistor radios, scorecards, school days, city neighborhoods, old ballparks, and remembered voices. I remember listening with my mother to broadcaster Jimmy Dudley’s radio voice describing Cleveland Hall of Famer Early Wynn’s 3-2 victory over the Chicago White Sox in 1952.

More than any other sport, baseball weaves itself into both family and community memory. As if to prove William Faulkner correct that “the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past,” in St. Louis the weaving is overt. The Cardinals’ home opener player introductions feature Cardinal Hall of Famers, living legends in their famous red jackets, presented alongside the current roster, turning the game into a ceremony of cultural inheritance linking the past to the present: Dizzy Dean to Stan “The Man” Musial to Albert Pujols to 2026 phenom J.J. Wetherholt. [3]

Dot #4: More than any other sport, baseball is profoundly local.

Even in our transient culture with its national media and fantasy leagues, Opening Day still belongs to cities, neighborhoods, and regions. It reminds us that American identity’s roots are in attachment to a place: Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles. Opening Day celebrates Americans’ stubbornly clinging to their old loyalties. People gather in sports bars in Phoenix and other sunbelt cities with other locals from the old hometown to watch a game being played on the south side of Chicago or in a ballpark alongside Pittsburgh’s Allegheny River.

Boston shows how Opening Day can also honor a place, the ballpark itself. Fenway Park has been the Red Sox’ home since 1912. It remains the oldest active MLB ballpark and is inseparable from the Fenway neighborhood around it. A Fenway opener celebrates not only the “Sox” but also a deep sense of Boston pride.

Dot #5: Opening Day preserves the value of permanence in a culture addicted to change.

Boston and Fenway Park make the point. MLB describes Fenway as remaining much like it did when it opened in 1912, which is precisely why a Red Sox opener feels like a small rebellion against modern life’s disposable spirit. In a culture that disposes of anything it can’t “upgrade,” Opening Day at Fenway celebrates the older customs of permanence and tradition.

Just as at Fenway Park, Opening Day elsewhere not only celebrates the start of a season but the survival of an older sense of time, an older rhythm: long games, long seasons, slow motion conversations whose only point is the conversation itself, and the daily ritual of reading box scores. Honoring tradition over novelty, Opening Day reveals baseball’s countercultural nod to a slower, quieter America. The America where baseball-mad Katie sang if you really want to take me out on a date, then forget about “clubbing” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Dot #6: Opening Day and baseball dramatize America’s cultural tension between individualism and community.

Baseball is full of individual acts: one pitcher, one batter, one fielder facing the moment alone. But just as I note in my book How To Be a Highly Effective Leader, no one wins alone. [4] Opening Day illustrates that success in almost any endeavor requires that individual excellence melds itself into teamwork in pursuit of a common goal.

Ironically, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Shohei Ohtani vividly illustrate the point. Ohtani, arguably the greatest player who ever lived –– in current vernacular, the GOAT –– never won a title while playing for the crosstown Los Angeles Angels. Despite his personal accomplishments, he needed a team to win a championship. The defending World Series champion Dodgers have won two in a row and begin their quest for a third tonight against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Dot #7: Opening Day is a democratic gathering place.

On Opening Day, plutocrats and ordinary workers, retirees and schoolchildren, lifelong season-ticket holders and casual fans all enter the same symbolic space: once called “the greensward” and still called the ball park. Baseball doesn’t now and never did perfectly embody the American democratic spirit of which Walt Whitman sang, “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game.” But baseball, and to be fair, all sports, keep alive the possibility that diverse people can gather on common ground united in a common cause.

Sadly, in our time, that truth is under assault. It was probably always true, but in our time, the seating hierarchy in modern stadiums illustrates our culture’s economic divisions. From the everyday fans in the bleachers, to young professionals gathered in indoor/outdoor bars located throughout the venue, to club seats with waiters and waitresses for those with a few extra bucks to spend, to the suites and loges of the one percent, modern ballparks are paradigms of American class structure.

One town, however, is trying to hold onto the old virtues. In Detroit, the home opener is often described locally as an unofficial holiday, with downtown filling up as fans of all ages pour in. The day is experienced less as an elite event than as a broad civic gathering. The game becomes a temporary public square where office workers, families, retirees, and students all occupy the same symbolic space. [5]

Dot #8: Opening Day shows how Americans turn commerce into culture.

Baseball is a business, but on Opening Day, Americans christen commerce with a patina of civic meaning. Tickets, concessions, jerseys, sponsorships, and television rights all surround the game, yet what people cherish is the experience and the Tshirt emblazoned with the hometown’s name. Opening Day is one of the clearest examples of how Americans use the marketplace to make cultural meaning.

Like Detroit, San Diego transforms commerce into civic pride. Petco Park has been widely credited with helping reinvigorate downtown, and on Opening Day, the surrounding Gaslamp Quarter turns the opener into a neighborhood-wide economic and social festival, with restaurants and bars opening early and building specials around the game. The transactional nature of the experience is obvious, but so is the meaning people make of it. [6]

Dot #9: Opening Day reflects America’s immigrant and pluralist story.

As we have discussed in numerous earlier Book Notes about sports and the immigrant’s tale in my The American Tapestry Project, baseball is both an assimilation tool and a stage for cultural change. Opening Day commemorates that history. The game belongs not only to old-stock Americans but also to immigrants and newcomers that remade the sport and were remade by it. It is a reminder of the dynamism of American culture.

As an illustration of that energy, Pittsburgh is hard to beat. In the early 20th century, such Black baseball powerhouses as the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays called Pittsburgh home. Then, in 1971, the Pittsburgh Pirates fielded the first all-Black and Latino starting lineup in MLB history. In the ensuing years, the city has marked that achievement as a civic milestone, not just a baseball one. When Pittsburgh celebrates baseball’s return, it does so by honoring a local history that made the game more representative of America than it had been before. [7]

Dot #10: Opening Day is a public display of gratitude for ordinary pleasures.

Opening Day in Cleveland frequently means the joy of frost bite, but every year, regardless of the weather, the game is a sellout. For many years when Cleveland’s team was a perennial loser, Opening Day and its raucous crowd of 80,000 at old Municipal Stadium almost amounted to a one-day season. In doing so, Opening Day illustrated that not every cultural celebration needed to be solemn or grand. It taught that society depends not only on great moments but on shared pleasures (or disappointments –– see Dot #2) to make a crowd into a people feeling at home in the world.

Now, a comparatively new tradition in Cleveland, coinciding with the newly christened Cleveland Guardians’ revival as a competitive threat to win year after year, captures the quieter side of Opening Day. Highlighting how baseball dignifies simple shared pleasures, the new Ohio City pregame celebration celebrates the kinds of ordinary pleasures that make baseball culturally evocative: cookout food, local vendors, music, mascots, family fun, and a parade to the ballpark across the Hope Memorial Bridge, whose “Guardians of Traffic” gave the team its new nickname. [7]

Sum-of-the-dots: Linking all these dots together suggests that Opening Day remains one of the year’s hinge moments not merely because baseball returns, but that in its return America reveals its better self.

Americans keep returning to baseball’s first day because they keep wanting to believe that the country, like the season, can begin again. It is America’s premier holiday of optimism as hope, memory, place, continuity, democracy, commerce, immigration, family, and the longing for renewal all join the game. Less grandiose, Opening Day also looks past the national media hype to the grace of local pleasures: Cincinnati gives you renewal, Chicago hope, St. Louis memory, Boston continuity and place, Los Angeles the lone hero becoming a public event, Detroit civic democracy, San Diego market society turned festive, Pittsburgh pluralism, and Cleveland the joy of ordinary pleasures.

Play Ball!

Photo Credits

“Play Ball” image created by ChatGPT5 at A. Roth’s personal account at OpenAI.com.

“Findlay Market Parade 2024” at Findlay Market available at Findlay Market Parade accessed March 19, 2026.

“Fenway Park01.jpg,” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Fenway Park01.jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed March 20, 2026.

“Opening Day in Detroit,” at VisitDetroit.com available at opening day in detroit - Search accessed March 20, 2026.

“Opening Day in the Gaslamp,” at Gaslamp Quarter available at It’s Time for Padres Baseball in Gaslamp accessed March 19, 2026.

“Guardians of Traffic (51348648960).jpg” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Guardians of Traffic (51348648960).jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed March 20, 2026.

End Notes

1. “Opening Day Findlay Market Parade” at Findlay Market available at Findlay Market Parade accessed March 19, 2026.

2. “Watch: Chicago Cubs win first World Series since 1908” at Sports Illustrated available at Watch: Chicago Cubs win first World Series since 1908 accessed March 19, 2026.

3. Denton, John, “For Cards on Opening Day, ‘the past is still very much present,’” at MLB News available at Cardinals honor their history on Opening Day accessed March 19, 2026.

4. Roth, Andrew. How To Be a Highly Effective Leader: A Primer. (Erie, PA: The Jefferson Educational Society, 2026).

5. “Opening Day’s Impressive Impact,” at Downtown Detroit Partnership available at Opening Day’s Impressive Impact - Downtown Detroit Partnership accessed March 19, 2026.

6. Aarons, Jared, “Petco Park celebrates 20 years of reinvigorating downtown” at ABC New 10 San Diego available at Petco Park celebrates 20 years of reinvigorating downtown accessed March 19, 2026.

7. “50^th Anniversary of the all-Minority Lineup,” at Let’s Go Bucs available at First All-Minority Lineup 50th Anniversary Celebration | Pittsburgh Pirates accessed March 19, 2026.

8. “Opening Day in Ohio City,” at Ohio City.org available at Opening Day in Ohio City accessed March 19, 2026.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

Granted, I’m two days late, but after more than a month of serious Book Notes, I thought it time for a bit of a breather (not that poetry is escapism) and asked myself, “Are there any good, if not great, poems about St. Patrick’s Day? Silly me. A simple internet query generated over 6,370 hits — a modest number by cyber standards, but still ample for my purposes.

At a site called “Stressless Country,” the first thing to pop up was:

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“On this lucky day,
Joy blossoms like
Shamrocks in the spring.” [1]

It was immediately followed by:

The Wearin’ O’ the Green

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“Today is the day fer the wearin’ o’ the green.
Today is the day when the little people are seen.
Today is St. Patrick’s Day, so if ye’r Irish me lad,
Join the celebratin’ fer the grandest time ta’ be had.
Ya’ put yer hand up in the air, the other hand on your hip.
Ya’ tap yer toe, ya’ tap yer heel, ya’ bounce yer knee a wee bit.
Ya’ prance ‘n dance around the room, n’ circle one two three.
The saints be praised, I must admit, ya’ all look Irish ta’ me.” [2]

Which, it turns out, is not the original poem “The Wearing of the Green.” The real thing dates from 1798 and the Irish Rebellion inspired by the successful American Revolution of two decades earlier. In a turn that might surprise uninitiated observers of Irish political history, the rebellion’s main motivating force was the Society of United Irishmen led by Wolfe Tone and others. Begun by Irish Presbyterians in Belfast who opposed the Anglican establishment, they sought to create a republic by aligning with Ireland’s Catholic majority. They were crushed by their British overlords, but wearing green became the symbol of Irish identity and solidarity. [3] In the 20th century, when the Irish Republicans led by Michael Collins gained their independence, one of their first acts was to paint all the mailboxes in Ireland green — the national color — like the one shown here from Tralee in County Kerry.

The original rebel lyrics begin:

from The Wearing of the Green

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“O Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that’s going round?
The Shamrock is forbid, by laws, to grow on Irish ground
No more St. Patrick’s day we’ll keep, his colour last be seen
For, there’s a bloody law agin the Wearing of the Green.

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Oh! I met with Napper Tandy, and he took me by the hand,
And he says; How is Poor Auld Ireland, and does she stand?
She’s the most distressed Country that ever I have seen
For, they are hanging men and women for the Wearing of the Green.

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And since the colour we must wear, is England’s cruel red,
Auld Ireland’s sons will ne’er forget the blood that they have shed.
Then take the Shamrock from your hat, and cast it on the sod
It will take root, and flourish still, tho’ under foot ’tis trod …” [4]

Forgetting politics for a moment, let’s turn to “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Written in 1912 and first introduced in a stage production, “The Isle O’ Dreams,” by one of its composers Chauncey Olcott. From Buffalo, New York, Olcott’s other hits included “My Wild Irish Rose.” [5] The tune gained fame during World War I when sung by Irish lyric tenor John McCormack. Used as the opening song on the 1930s era American radio program, “Duffy’s Tavern”, the song has become a St. Patrick’s Day staple. Its chorus sings:

from When Irish Eyes Are Smiling

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“When Irish eyes are smiling.
Sure it’s like a morn in Spring,
In the lilt of Irish laughter
You can hear the angels sing.
When Irish hearts are happy,
All the world seems bright and gay,
And when Irish eyes are smiling,
Sure, they steal your heart away.” [6]

Covered by a multitude of performers, a fine but slower tempo version sung by Bing Crosby can be found here.

There are oceans of doggerel poetry celebrating Irishness and St. Patrick’s Day; as I said, a simple internet query will find them for you. So, switching focus a bit, what are some of the finest poems celebrating the spirit of being Irish?

At Poemverse, they list three, of which two are among my personal favorites, and the third might soon join that list. They are William Butler Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” Louis MacNiece’s “Dublin,” and Seamus Heaney’s “When All the Others Were Away at Mass.” [7]

The third that might soon join my list of favorites is MacNiece’s “Dublin.” It shouldn’t have been, but it was new to me. Born in Belfast, son of an Anglican clergyman, MacNiece, like Yeats, was a member of the Irish Ascendancy. Educated at Oxford and living most of his life in England, Dublin was never MacNiece’s town. He died at 55 in London in 1963, so the Dublin he remembers hearkens back to James Joyce’s “Dubliners” and J.P. Dunleavy’s “The Ginger Man.” Readers of the Irish Times in 1999 voted it one of Ireland’s 100 favorite poems for MacNiece’s evocation of Dublin’s beauty and history. [8] He writes:

from Dublin

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“Grey brick upon brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals ––
O’Connell, Grattan, Moore ––
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse …” [9]

An Irishman once told me W. B. Yeats wasn’t a real Irishman. Like MacNiece, he was protestant and descended from the Irish Ascendancy, which for over 300 years ruled Ireland, dominating its politics and economy. I can’t speak for MacNiece, but Yeats would have fought over that, because he was one of the prime movers in the Irish Celtic Revival at the turn of the 20th century, seeking to restore Irish language, literature, and folklore. Considered the greatest Irish poet of the 20th century, not counting his poems “The Wanderings of Oisin” and “The Rose” about Irish mythology that inspired the Celtic revival, at least two of his poems are essential reading about the Irish Rebellion that led to Ireland’s partition and the rise of the Irish Republic in the south: “Easter, 1916” and “The Second Coming.” After “The Wild Swans at Coole,” however, my personal favorite is the one Poemverse included –– “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” It has nothing to do with St. Patrick’s Day and everything to do with what 21st^-century vernacular calls “chill” and I think of as being present-to-the-present.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

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“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

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And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

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I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” [10]

For most of my life, I would have told you Yeats was my favorite Irish poet, but for the past 20 years or so, I have developed a deeper and deeper appreciation for Seamus Heaney. Along with Jack Gilbert, Mary Oliver, and Louise Glück, I consider Heaney one of the great poets of our generation. If you ever wondered why you were tormented in high school English class reading Beowulf, then you need to read Heaney’s magnificent translation. I met him in that sort of pre-poetry reading reception way you meet people at a cocktail party, when he gave a reading of his work for Town Hall in Cleveland sometime in the 20-oughts. I complimented him on his Beowulf and asked him which was his favorite, there being three: the young, fearless Beowulf who slays Grendel; the middle-aged but wary Beowulf who slays Grendel’s mother; and the aged and resigned to his duty Beowulf who slays the dragon. You can find his answer in Book Notes #17 here.

In Heaney’s 1987 poetry cycle “Clearances,” written in honor of his mother, Margaret Kathleen Heaney, his memories evoke the intimacy and bond between him and his mother. It is an indelible evocation of being present-to-the-present and transmuting that moment into a lasting image that transcends time.

from Clearances

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“When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

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So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath mine, our fluent dipping knives –
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.” [11]

Happy Belated St. Patrick’s Day and Happy Birthday to my wife Judy, who was born on St. Patrick’s Day!

Photo Credits

1. “File: Saint Patrick Catholic Church (Junction City, Ohio) – stained glass, St. Patrick-detail.jpg” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Saint Patrick Catholic Church (Junction City, Ohio) - stained glass, Saint Patrick - detail.jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed March 2, 2026.

2. “File: Happy St. Patrick’s Day!.jpg” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Happy St. Patrick’s Day!.jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed March 2, 2026.

3. “File: Guinness.jpg,” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Guinness.jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed March 3, 2026.

4. “File: Post-Box-1090810, Tralee, Co. Kerry, Ireland.jpg” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Post-Box-1090810, Tralee, Co. Kerry, Ireland.jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed March 3, 2026.

End Notes

1. “On this day…” at Stressless Country available at 25 St. Patrick’s Day Poems, Wishes of Irish Wisdom and Luck accessed March 3, 2026.

2. “The Wearin’ O’ the Green,” at Stressless Country available at 25 St. Patrick’s Day Poems, Wishes of Irish Wisdom and Luck accessed March 3, 2026.

3. Cr. “The Wearing of the Green – Irish Song Lyrics” at Irish History available at The Wearing Of The Green - Irish Song Lyrics - IrishHistory.com and “Irish Rebellion of 1798” at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, available at The Wearing Of The Green - Irish Song Lyrics - IrishHistory.com both accessed March 3, 2026.

4. “The Wearing of the Green,” at Irish History available at The Wearing Of The Green - Irish Song Lyrics - IrishHistory.com accessed March 3, 2026.

5. Gunn, Marc, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” at Irish & Celtic Song Lyrics available at WHEN IRISH EYES ARE SMILING - Lyrics, Chords, Music | Irish Song Lyrics accessed March 4, 2026.

6. “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, lyrics,” at AZlyrics.com available at Celtic Thunder - When Irish Eyes Are Smiling Lyrics | AZLyrics.com accessed March 3, 2026.

7. “Poetry Reflecting the Irish Spirit: Celebrating Irish Heritage through Verse,” at Poemverse available at Poetry Reflecting the Irish Spirit: Celebrating Irish Heritage through Verse - PoemVerse accessed March 4, 2026.

8. MacNiece, Louis, “Dublin,” at Ireland Calling available at Dublin is a popular Irish poem accessed March 4, 2026.

9. Ibid.

10. Yeats, William Butler, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” in W.B. Yeats: The Poems, Ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman’s Library, 1990), p. 60.

11. Heaney, Seamus, “Clearances,” in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 285.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

It seems almost quaint, in our time, with the “American Experiment” currently wounded, to ask what are America’s essential, foundational documents?

What is “American scripture?”

As Thomas Paine said in the very first sentence of one of those scriptural documents, Common Sense, “Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor.” [1] Or, more ominously for the now almost 250-year-old American Experiment, perhaps they have gone out of favor. Regardless, to me, expressing those sentiments never seemed more important; in fact, with the possible exception of 1860, never seemed more urgent.

Why?

As we’ve discussed in the previous three Book Notes, since the very beginning of the American Experiment, there has been a gap between America’s founding ideals and its actions. Closing that gap has been the most important thread in the tapestry of America’s many stories. In fits and starts, interrupted by long interludes of seeming peace, America made immense progress over the past 250 years in closing that gap by extending the blessings of equality and liberty to an ever more inclusive “We”, as in: “We hold these truths …” and “We the People …”

Then, literally, only in the past 10 to 15 years, it began reverting to an older, less inclusive, and one might even say a narrower, meaner version of itself. There are numerous instances, but two institutional ones stand out: the Supreme Court rulings in Holder v. Shelby County (2013), which effectively gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade (1973) –– the first time in American history a right granted to the American people had been taken back, cancelled. Grave as the Dobbs ruling was for women’s bodily autonomy, the former is far more threatening to the American Experiment’s survival.

Why?

Because as Susan B. Anthony and the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis could tell you, in America, power comes from voting, and without the vote, you have no power. In a democracy or representative republic, all power resides (or, once upon a time, resided) in the ballot box. Access to the ballot box is the essence of the American experiment. Without it, one’s ability to partake in the blessings of America’s founding ideals –– “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” lies in the hands of others. In short, without it, you are at the mercy of those with it.

It was through the ballot box those first excluded from the benefits of America’s founding ideals gained access to them.

How?

Not by rejecting them, but by appealing directly to them as the excluded –– women, Black Americans, and wave after wave of immigrants beginning with the despised Irish Catholics in the 19th century –– did for the past now almost 200 years by exhorting Americans to simply be true to what they said on paper.

What did America “say on paper?”

Well, it’s a long story, but its essentials are Paine’s rejection of monarchy; the Declaration of Independence’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights …;” the U.S. Constitution’s Preamble, Bill of Rights, and 14th Amendment; Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” challenging the future to finish the founders’ “unfinished business” so that government “of, by, and for the people shall not perish from this earth;” Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural” recognizing that we are all in this together as he sought to bind the wounds of a great civil war “with malice towards none and charity for all;” Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms: Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Want, Freedom of Speech, and Freedom to Worship;” and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” in which he envisioned a future America where everyone would be judged not by their race, gender, ethnicity, or religious beliefs but by the content of their character.

If we are to ever resolve the “great contradiction” Joseph Ellis described, if we are ever to enjoy the benefits Isaacson noted in the “greatest sentence ever written,” if we are to finish the work Lincoln tasked us with at Gettysburg, then, like King, we need to understand that we are all in this together.

Ironically, Americans should have never needed to be reminded of that simple, fundamental truth –– we are all in this together –– because the oldest, one might say original piece of American scripture made the point clearly and irrefutably. I refer, of course, to an often quoted, almost never read sermon by John Winthrop: “A Modell of Christian Charity.”

As any good teacher can tell you, repetition lies at the heart of effective learning. Five and a half years ago in Book Notes #26, we first met John Winthrop. Because I am going to take the liberty of paraphrasing and quoting myself at length, I will not use quotation marks. [2] In that note, much like today, we were trying to work our way through America’s discontents circa late-summer 2020 by parsing an argument about whether America remains exceptional –– a city on a hill, or, as Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter Peggy Noonan recast it, “a shining city on a hill.” The origin of the phrase “a city on a hill” is John Winthrop’s now almost 400-year-old sermon. [3] As I said all those years ago, “It is arguably the most important sermon in American history that almost no one has actually read; in fact, it might be the most important sermon in American history –– period.”

Why?

Because a phrase from it became a touchstone of American culture –– “for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us.” [4] This phrase has been read as the seed that generated American culture, in particular that strain of American culture that sees America with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Dutch sailor’s eyes as “a fresh, green breast of the new world … face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” [5]

Although for most of the 400 years since Winthrop preached his sermon, it was ignored. At its worst, partisans of various stripes would occasionally resurrect it in support of their nationalist or globalist claims; At its best, it spoke to the idea of America as the world’s beacon of freedom, equality and opportunity. It speaks to what Thomas Paine meant when he said, “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind” and “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” [6] In the late 20th century, however, it was used to validate a hubristic assertion of American national superiority.

Twenty-first-century Americans seem to have forgotten that what makes America exceptional is its commitment to an ever-expanding definition and inclusiveness of the “We” in our founding documents. The genius of America has always been its understanding – contentious as it might have been, as challenged as it frequently was — that we are all in this together.

As in The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the People in order to found a more perfect Union;” as in The Declaration of Independence’s “We hold these truths …”

As Lincoln said at Gettysburg “… a new nation conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

In that “all” he meant “We …”

As Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to be breathe free…send these… to me.”

She meant “We …”

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said “When we allow freedom to ring … when all God’s children will be able to join hands and sing ‘Free at last, Free at last …”

He meant “We …”

I have wandered a bit from Isaacson’s “greatest sentence,” Ellis’ “great contradiction,” and Garry Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg exhorting us to finish the founders’ unfinished project, but I think going back to first principles can be restorative, beginning with what John Winthrop actually said about being “… as a City upon a Hill, the eies of all people are upon us.”

Winthrop made his famous assertion aboard the ship Arbella in 1630 on Massachusetts Bay addressing his fellow Puritans as they prepared to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He understood that his people faced an extreme challenge –– the forest primeval before them, the howling North Atlantic behind them. What did Winthrop say the Puritans had to do to survive? And, by extension, what 21st^-century Americans must do to survive?

What did Winthrop say his fellow Puritans had to do to be a “model of Christian charity,” to be “as a city upon a Hill?”

Winthrop said, “wee must brotherly love without dissimulation, wee must love one another with a pure heart … wee must beare one another’s burthens, wee must not looke only on our owne things, but allsoe on the things of our brethren.” [7]

Or, in sum, quoting Matthew 7:22, Winthrop exhorts, “Whatsoever Ye would that men should doe to you do yee the same to them allsoe.”[8]

If they did that, then they shall be as a city upon a hill, a light for all.

But if they failed to do this, if they betrayed their creed, if they betrayed their values they would still be as a city upon a hill. As Daniel Rodgers explains in his wonderful study of Winthrop’s sermon, As a City On a Hill, Winthrop and his followers saw themselves as entering into a new covenant with God. They were the new Israel. [9]

As a covenanted people, they would be like a city on a hill exposed to God’s eyes, exposed to the eyes of all others who would know whether they were faithful to their creed. In Winthrop’s vision, they would not be some bright shining thing for others to envy and emulate.

No, as a city on a hill they would be exposed, incapable of hiding from the eyes of God who would know their virtue, or their lack of virtue. As a covenanted people to whom much had been given, they were bound by trust to be true to their creed. If they betrayed it, like many current Christian hypocrites, they would discover why Dante reserved the lowest circle in hell for traitors.

If they were not, if they betrayed their creed, as Winthrop continued in the part that is never quoted, they would be “an evil story in the mouthes of our enemies … wee shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses and wee be consumed out of the land.” [10]

In short, if America is to continue its experiment in freedom, equality and opportunity, then America and Americans need to understand We are all in this together.

Winthrop’s betrayal of the covenant warning rings true even today as institutional rollbacks via the Shelby County and Dobbs court cases threaten that “We” language and its promises. In the face of those eroding rights, the recommitment to unifying values isn’t optional and carries a sense of urgency.

If America is to survive, if America is to be a “shining’ city upon a Hill,” if America is to be a model of Christian charity, if America is to be Lincoln’s “last best hope of earth,” then Americans must love and care for one another.

John Winthrop had no vision of a United States. He died over 100 years before the American Revolution. Still, he exhorted his proto-Americans to reaffirm their common ground, to renew their commitment to the commonwealth, and to renew their commitment to one another.

Why? Because together they prosper; apart they perish and will “be consumed out of the land.”

So, what does a 400-year-old sermon almost no one has ever read, but many erroneously misquote tell us about 21st^-century America?

It tells us that we need a renewed commitment to the idea of America; that we need a renewed commitment to an ever more inclusive understanding of the “We…” at the heart of the American Experiment.

An understanding that “We the people” are truly ‘e pluribus unum’ –– out of many one.

Because whether one likes it or not, we are all in this together!

And together we can correct Ellis’ “great contradiction,” finish the work Lincoln tasked us with, and make Isaacson’s “greatest sentence ever written” great again by once and for all closing the gap between what America says it is and what it actually is.

End Notes

1. Paine, Thomas, “Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America,” in Paine: Collected Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1995), p.5.

2. The entire Book Note on John Winthrop can be found at Roth Book Notes--Winthrop.pdf

3. Winthrop, John, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr., Ed. Michael Warner. (New York: The Library of America, 1999), p. 28-43.

4. Ibid., p. 42.

5. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. (New York: Scribner’s Classics, 1992. Originally Published 1925), p. 154.

6. Paine, cited above, p. 5 and 52-53.

7. Winthrop, cited above, p. 40.

8. Ibid.

9. Cf. Rodgers, Daniel T. As a City On a Hill. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), pp. 207-209.

10. Winthrop, cited above, p. 42.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

The Gettysburg Address (1863)

In the past two Book Notes, I said the central challenge in American history is to close the gap between the profound ideals stated in the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence –– what Walter Isaacson called “the greatest sentence ever written” ––with the U.S. Constitution’s compromises made in the interest of political unity –– what Joseph Ellis called “the great contradiction.”

At Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln made the most important attempt in American history to close that gap. The Declaration proclaimed the universal truths of human equality, unalienable human rights, and government by consent while the Constitution that Declaration inspired tolerated slavery, entrenched exclusions, and deferred justice in the name of unity. Needing to reconcile conflicting interests to sustain that unity, America’s founders spoke about universal human values while their institutions restricted who could enjoy them. That difference between stated values and subsequent behavior created America’s structural contradiction: the gap between what it claims to be and what it actually is.

Lincoln came to Gettysburg in the middle of a war spawned by that contradiction, and in 272 words strove to make the nation true to its own deepest moral claims. In his classic Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, Garry Wills says Lincoln came to Gettysburg “to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt. He would cleanse the Constitution … by appeal(ing) from its letter to the spirit” that founded it. Lincoln at Gettysburg made the spirit of the Declaration’s values America’s founding creed and in the process, “revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.”2

Lincoln did not deny the gap. Wills notes that throughout the 1850s Lincoln “repeatedly relat(ed) all the most sensitive issues of the day to the Declaration’s supreme principle … if all men are created equal, they cannot be property … their equality cannot be denied if the nation is to live by its creed.”3 The Address’s power emerges from Lincoln’s acknowledgement that America was not yet what it promised to be. He declared the crisis of the Civil War a test. The nation, he said, was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and the war tested whether such a nation can endure. With those words, Lincoln transcended politics. He lifted the war into a metaphysical realm of first questions: What was America? What was it meant to be?

Lincoln transformed the Declaration’s creed into the standard by which America itself must be judged. The war was no longer only about restoring the Union. Lincoln elevated it into a test of whether a republic built on equality could survive its own contradictions. Lincoln did not erase the distance between ideal and reality; he converted closing that gap into the nation’s moral duty.

Wills says that at Gettysburg Lincoln remade the nation’s meaning. He asserts that Lincoln shifted the interpretive center of American identity from the Constitution’s compromises to the Declaration’s announcement of universal human values –– all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights. The Constitution was essential to governance, but stained by accommodating slavery. The Declaration, by contrast, stated an ideal –– the principle of human freedom. Wills says that Lincoln’s believed “Government by the people cannot exist where those who believe in equality are asked to sacrifice that belief (and its expression) in the name of social concord.”4

Lincoln’s genius brought that ideal to life. He reached back past the constitution to “four score and seven years ago.” He set the nation’s founding not in 1787, but in 1776. That chronological choice was also a philosophical choice. By grounding the legitimacy of the nation in a moral claim before grounding it in legal machinery, Lincoln, in effect, said that the United States was more than a mere contract among states. He said it was a sacred project animated by an idea. If the idea fails, the government loses its purpose, its reason for being.

The problem was never simply that Americans fell short of their ideals; every nation falls short of its ideals. America’s problem, the “gap,” was that the language of its highest ideals could be treated as ceremonial while public policy and daily life proceeded on other terms. Lincoln refused to accept that separation. He took the “says” of America, its creed of equality and liberty, and made it the measure of what America “is.” This is not mere sentimental rhetoric; this is moral pressure. Once equality becomes the nation’s defining value, institutions, laws, and practices that deny equality are no longer unfortunate inconsistencies; they are threats to the nation’s own identity.

Speaking amid freshly dug graves on a battlefield turned into a cemetery, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address narrowed the distance between creed and reality by making the creed the nation’s inescapable moral foundation. In appealing to the nation’s founding ideals, Lincoln transformed a political speech into a public act of mourning amid mass slaughter. In this setting, a mere political speech would dishonor the war dead; a philosophical speech about abstract values would have sounded empty.

Lincoln’s great achievement lay in making his philosophical argument answer the emotional and moral demands of the setting. He refused cliched pieties and easy consolation. He did not rationalize the soldiers’ deaths, nor did he claim to consecrate the ground by speech alone. Instead, he said, “we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”

This humility is not a rhetorical gesture.

It establishes an ethical order: sacrifice demands action. Once Lincoln yields the honor to the dead, he turns to the living and assigns them a task. The soldiers’ deaths mean that the living must be dedicated to finishing the soldiers’ unfinished work. The phrase “unfinished work” bridges the gap between what America professes to be and what it is. The founding was unfinished. The Union was unfinished. Freedom itself, as experienced by millions of enslaved people, was unfinished in the most brutal way possible.

Lincoln’s Address does not describe American history as a completed project but as a demanding inheritance. Profoundly challenging, the Gettysburg Address tells Americans they have inherited a mission greater than their institutions have yet realized. The war dead now commands them to seek its full realization. The gap between what America is and what it says it is will not disappear through words alone; it is narrowed through its people’s dedication to the task.

Lincoln’s language masterfully summons that dedication.

Crucial to that summons is what Wills calls Lincoln’s “revolution in style.” His compression, balance, and clarity make the speech feel almost inevitable. As Wills says, “Lincoln’s remarks anticipated the shift to vernacular rhythms that Mark Twain would complete twenty years later…all modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address.”5 Seeking to build common ownership of a national ideal, Lincoln’s plain language makes it memorable, easy to recite, teachable and accessible across generations. Lincoln’s accessible language closes the gap. If equality is the nation’s moral standard, it cannot remain the property of lawyers, philosophers, or political parties.

It must enter civic memory.

In its brevity, the speech is not merely elegant; it is democratic. It creates a clear and shared measure by which citizens can judge the nation and themselves. Lincoln’s style gives the proposition that “all men are created equal” a form the public can carry forward. Ever since it has inspired reform movements and civic rituals. Lincoln did not solve the contradiction at Gettysburg. Lincoln gave later generations a more exacting version of America. The nation can still betray that version, but it can no longer do so without confronting its own language; without confronting and then denying its own ideals.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address connects Isaacson’s and Ellis’s ideas. Isaacson emphasizes the enduring power of the Declaration’s equality sentence because it creates a moral vocabulary that outlives its framers. Ellis emphasizes the tragic contradiction at the founding because the framers’ statecraft required compromises that postponed justice and embedded conflict. Lincoln was first to see both the vocabulary and the contradiction. At Gettysburg, he did not choose between celebrating the founders or condemning them. He did something far subtler and far more valuable: he retrieved the founders’ highest principle and deployed it as an appeal to finish the founders’ unfinished work.

In doing so, he created the classic American reform policy –– appeal to the creed to correct the condition: full civil rights for women, minorities, and wave after wave of immigrants beginning with the Irish in the 19th century and all those that followed. Lincoln achieves that at the highest possible level, during the nation’s greatest crisis. In doing so, he binds that policy to sacrifice, grief, and democratic survival.

Why does this matter?

Because the gap between ideals and reality transcends politics. Citizens must care enough to accept the task of finishing the founders’ project. Ritual, memory, and sacred language help nurture and sustain that care. Lincoln, the most spiritual of American presidents, understood this. For Lincoln, Wills surmises, “The Declaration of Independence … (became) an instrument of spiritual rebirth.”6 Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” is not just policy language. It is the language of renewal and regeneration. He gives a war-weary people a way to imagine that suffering can yield not merely restoration of the old Union, but a better Union — one more faithful to its ideals. Reform politics requires such an imaginative shift to transform sacrifice into rebirth.

At Gettysburg, with this “new birth of freedom,” America was born again.

The Address remains powerful in our time because in his brevity, Lincoln avoided triumphalism. Lincoln did not proclaim that the “new birth of freedom” had already happened. He placed it in the realm of possibility, dependent upon what the living now do. Lincoln accepted the burden of bringing the ideals to life and passed that burden forward to future generations when he said, “It is for us … that we here highly resolve … that this nation … shall have a new birth of freedom.”

For Lincoln’s listeners, that national identity is not self-fulfilling. America is not what it says it is by automatic inheritance. It becomes what it says through public steadfastness and sacrifice building institutions shaped to match its self-proclaimed ideals. Lincoln closed the gap between national language and national responsibility. He makes it harder to enjoy the words without also accepting the duty to make them real.

For understanding American history, the Address’ deepest lesson is that the gap between creed and reality is not an accidental flaw that appears only in moments of crisis. It is a recurring danger, an inherent threat to democratic life that some will cynically assert “the ideals are fake” or others, in a smug, triumphalist piety, claim “the ideals are already achieved.”

Lincoln rejects both.

A disciplined act of civic hope, Lincoln’s Address treats the ideals as real and binding precisely because reality falls short. He says, in effect, that America’s words can still be true, but only if Americans allow those words to judge them and their institutions by their faithfulness to the American Creed. As Wills says, “When (Lincoln) spoke at the end of the Address about government ‘of, by, and for the people,’ he was not just praising popular government … he was saying that America is a people addressing (the) great assignment” they accepted in the Declaration.7

Lincoln at Gettysburg attempted to close the gap between what America says it is and what it actually is not by resolving the contradiction in a single speech, but by making closing the gap the central duty of American citizenship.

It still is.

As he said, “It is for us the living … to be dedicated … to the unfinished work …to the great task remaining before us … that these dead shall not have died in vain –– that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom –– and that government of the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

What “great contradiction,” what gap, lies at the heart of the American experiment?

Last week’s Book Notes discussed Walter Isaacson’s The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, and the “gap between what America is and what it says it is.”

What does America say it is?

Calling them “the fifty-six most important words in American history,”1 Joseph Ellis in his The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding quotes the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.

Despite those stirring words, Ellis argues that the gap has been there from the beginning.

Ellis shows that the American experiment rests on two paradoxical truths. He calls this double reality the “great contradiction.” The founders created a republic they justified in the name of the universal human rights of freedom and equality, but, nonetheless, they also built legal and political structures that protected slavery and opened the floodgates of continental expansion at the expense of the indigenous people.

Why did the founders do that?

They were not hypocrites; the story is far more nuanced.

In Ellis’ telling, they did it because they were not demigods but people and practical politicians trying to build a new nation by accommodating multiple competing interests. Quoting John Adams’ grandson Charles Francis Adams, Ellis wants us to recognize that “the patriots of former days were men like ourselves … (and) to ascribe to them … superhuman qualities … robs their character of consistency and their virtues of all merit.”2

Neither a glorifier nor a debunker, Ellis’ telling of the American founding is a story in which gifted leaders recognized moral truths, articulated lofty principles, and then fell short of meeting their own ideals. They fell short because of the political dynamics required to build a new nation out of competing colonies with radically different value systems, colonies that were also jealous and wary of one another. The story’s tragic implications are sharpened by the founders articulating the most radical words the modern world had yet heard about equality and liberty and then, in order to unify the American colonies into the United States of America, the founders drew boundaries around who was included in those words’ benefits.

Two hundred and fifty years later, the challenge of who is “included in those words’ benefits” still bedevils American politics.

Ellis rejects 21st century partisans of the left and the right who see the founders as culture war “trophies,” either hypocrites or transcendent geniuses. From his vantage point, they were neither. Instead, he seeks to understand how they actually thought about slavery and Native American policy. He argues that in order to achieve unity, the founders intentionally wove ambiguity into America’s founding documents.

That ambiguity is the Declaration of Independence’s human-rights language declaring new, universal values that later generations treated as sacred. Yet, at the moment of creation, the founders deferred those values enforcement to the future and left their implications unspoken. In effect, to build a coalition government uniting North and South, the founders simultaneously launched an all-encompassing moral vocabulary and postponed applying it.

What was postponed?

In Ellis’ view two things: reckoning with slavery and how to deal with the indigenous American tribal cultures. In this short note, I will only focus on slavery. The final reckoning with slavery came 80 years later in the Civil War. It continues down to today as Americans still struggle to build a multiracial society.

For Ellis, the ambiguity began with the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. He remarks that at the Continental Congress, the delegates, thinking it a mere rhetorical flourish, did not even discuss the second paragraph’s call for universal human rights. They did, however, debate and delete an entire paragraph in which Thomas Jefferson awkwardly tried to include slavery in the Declaration’s indictment of George III. The effect was to shove slavery into the background. For Ellis, however, slavery is not a background stain; it is the glaring test of the Revolution’s meaning. On the eve of independence, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people lived in the colonies, which made the patriot rhetoric of liberty immediately ring hollow.

Why did the founders not hear that hollow ring?

Because, as Ellis said in an interview, “unlike historic revolutionaries like Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao, ‘the leaders of the American resistance were not utopian visionaries, but, rather, an assemblage of pragmatic statesmen accustomed to negotiating the space between ideals and realities in their respective colonial governments.’3 Within that mindset, slavery became a “taboo topic” capable of detonating unity. Even after many people conceded slavery was morally indefensible, Ellis argues that “moral considerations had no role to play” because the overriding priority was national survival and political unity.4 Seeking unity to confront the British, the founders couldn’t risk addressing such a divisive topic.

Slavery became the thing that could not be named. For the founders, defeating the British was paramount.

For Ellis, the lack of discourse surrounding slavery explains how the founders produced the Declaration’s moral genius and yet repeatedly avoided confronting wrongdoings. To understand this, Ellis broadens the discussion beyond the 13 colonies to emphasize that the Atlantic slave trade was a massive, multi-century, multinational system so lucrative that “moral blindness” on all sides masqueraded as common sense –– what Ellis calls the “long-silence.” For several centuries, no one anywhere confronted slavery’s morality. The long silence ruptured in the middle of the 18th century when Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire, Hume, and Locke, and religious voices (notably Quakers and “New Light” evangelical ministers), began condemning slavery as a moral abomination.

As a result, America’s revolutionary generation lived at a hinge moment in western history when the long silence still held enormous power, but new moral challenges arose that made the founders’ stalling historically far-reaching. In a very real sense, for all their Enlightenment genius, history passed the founders by. As a result, Ellis says the Declaration became a kind of time capsule of principles that outgrew the founders’ intentions.

Explaining how that happened, Ellis focuses on the Continental Congress’s editing process, which deleted Jefferson’s attempt to indict the king for slavery but left the human-rights paragraph intact. Leaving that paragraph intact also preserved Jefferson’s most important contribution. In Ellis’ telling, Jefferson “inserted covertly antislavery language into that futuristic paragraph” by altering John Locke’s famous trinity of “life, liberty, and property” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”5 As Ellis says, “By dropping ‘property’ altogether, Jefferson deftly deprived slaveholders of the claim that owning slaves was a natural right protected by law. On this score, there can be little doubt that Jefferson knew what he was doing.”6

The point is not that Jefferson became an abolitionist in 1776, but that the founding language contains deliberate moral triggers that future reformers could pull.7

If the Declaration of Independence defined America’s fundamental political values, then the U.S. Constitution created the political structure in which those values would either flourish, wither, or become a tangled web of debates about what those values meant and whom they benefited.

Ellis begins his discussion of the Constitution by asserting that the 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War is America’s greatest diplomatic triumph.

Why?

Because, first, it achieved recognition of American independence and, second, it acquired the eastern third of the North American continent –– “a landmass larger than England, France, and Spain put together.”8

It also presented the founders with the challenge of how to govern that vast territory.

Essentially a treaty between 13 independent colonies/states, the Articles of Confederation was inadequate to the challenge. In its simplest phrasing, the challenge was whether those 13 independent states were simply a loose alliance of sovereign entities or a consolidated nation-state.

Which raises the question, what is a nation-state?

That question is one of the ambiguities the founders created whose unknotting is a major thread in the American story. Historian Jill Lepore brilliantly argues that Americans from the beginning got it backwards and trying to get it right is American history’s central puzzle. Briefly, a nation as distinct from a governing-state is a group of people with a common culture who share a language, customs, values, and beliefs that have evolved over time. They –– the people, the nation –– unite to create a governing state to do two things: to protect themselves from external adversaries and to organize how they will interact among themselves.9

In Lepore’s telling, again, Americans got it backwards; Americans created a governing-state before they had come together as a nation with a common culture. All of our internal political arguments in the intervening 236 years flow out of the constitutional convention creating a governing state for a society that had not yet converted its New England Yankees, “Yorkers,” as New Yorkers were once called, Pennsylvania “Dutch” and Quakers, Virginia Cavaliers, and Carolinians into an American nation. That is, the colonial British-Americans had not yet become Americans.

Ellis agrees.

Similar to the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, which supplied the founding ideals, Ellis says the U.S. Constitution created a sustainable but fractious government because the Constitution’s compromises saved the Union by postponing justice and protecting slavery.

Why did the founders agree to protect slavery?

And how did they do it?

First, the why. Ellis wants 21st-century Americans to understand the founders as real people trying to make the best of a complicated situation. They were people, both North and South, beginning to see slavery as a moral horror. In the Ordinance of 1784, in which Virginia ceded its claim to the lands north of the Ohio River, Jefferson sought to abolish slavery everywhere no later than 1800. It failed passage in the Confederation Congress by one vote.10 In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, slavery was banned in the new territories formed north of the Ohio River.11 Still, given the racial biases of the time, the founders refused to discuss slavery. That thwarted them. As they drafted the Constitution, Ellis says slavery remained “the Ghost at the Banquet”

There were other practical realities limiting the founders. Today we think of America as a continent spanning colossus, but its 18th-century reality was far more modest. It consisted of 13 colonies squeezed between the Allegheny Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. To its north, the British occupied Canada, and to its west, they had not yet abandoned their Great Lakes forts. To the south and southwest, the Spanish controlled Florida and the Mississippi valley. And, of course, throughout were indigenous people protecting their territories.

The nascent United States was a small, fragile, weak player in a game of continental geopolitics. New England and the Middle Atlantic states were heavily agricultural with budding merchant and manufacturing economies. The South was both richer and more populous. Contemporary Americans have forgotten that Virginia was the largest and richest of the states followed closely by South Carolina’s rice and indigo plantations.

Had either North or South attempted to go it alone, they would have failed. If they had survived, they would be very different countries than the current United States. So, not particularly liking or respecting one another, but being practical men of affairs, the founders made a deal. The northerners agreed to set slavery aside for the future to solve. Gaining that concession, the South joined the infant Union.

What were the concessions?

Without ever using the word “slavery” and substituting the phrase “those bound to service,” the founders postponed the end of the slave trade to 1808 and included both a fugitive slave clause requiring that escaped slaves be returned to their owners and the 3/5th’s clause that apportioned population for congressional elections. The “3/5th’s clause” did not define Black Americans as “3/5th’s of a person,” but it did permit the southern states to count 3/5th’s of their slaves to determine the number of U.S. representatives. Which is why the South controlled Congress in the early republic and, because of the Electoral College, why five of the first seven presidents were southerners.

Having set aside slavery as an issue, the founders effectively “kicked the issue down the road.”

The story of American history is not only about America’s journey down that road –– the displacement of the indigenous people, women’s rights, and wave after wave of immigrants are also key threads in that story –– but one can say that even in 2026, Americans have not reached that story’s –– that road’s –– end.

In traveling that road, Ellis insists that the American founding cannot be told as either pure triumph or pure betrayal.

Its greatness is real.

Its constitutional revolutions and human-rights language changed the world.

But the same founding generation that declared the unalienable rights of human equality and liberty and created government “of, by, and for the people,” to use Lincoln’s later phrasing, also protected slavery and could not prevent the settler dispossession of the indigenous people. Ellis insists that these are not two separate stories, founding glory over here, founding shame over there, but one braided, one woven tapestry revealing the gap between what America says it is and what it is. American history ever since has been the struggle to close that gap.12

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

Is it possible, based upon one’s original intention, to set in motion a sequence of events that go further than one could have ever imagined?

Is it possible, like a prophet or a poet, to speak truths greater than you yourself understand?

In his The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, a short, tightly argued meditation on the second line of the Declaration of Independence – “We hold these truths…” – Walter Isaacson asserts that is exactly what Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adamas did as they crafted the most radical and morally important sentence in modern political history. It did not merely justify the American colonies separation from Britain; it announced the moral standard by which America would be judged, especially by Americans themselves.

The Declaration’s genius, according to Isaacson, lies in the way it couples political legitimacy to a universal claim about human equality and people’s inherent rights. That coupling is what made the American experiment unusually dynamic: it invites continual self-correction, because it creates a gap between what the nation is and what it says it is. That is, what the United States of America exists as, and what the Declaration of Independence envisions it to become.

In Isaacson’s telling, the sentence became a permanent challenge to every American generation.

It became the touchstone of our national conscience. Published widely for all to hear and see, it held Americans accountable for being faithful to the American experiment’s foundational values.

What is “the American experiment”?

As I have asserted in my The American Tapestry Project, it is America’s ongoing, but now threatened, experiment in self-government, a project history shows rarely endures, while simultaneously expanding the definition of the “We” in its founding documents: “We hold these truths…’ and “We the People…” Seeking to be true to their founding values, it is the story of a people continually wrestling with what is and what this document proclaims the nation, and its people, to be.

And that wrestling has emerged over time. As we will discover in the next Book Notes installment discussing Joseph Ellis’ The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, it has been there since the beginning – and this is important to the understanding of the American narrative since the Founders set it in motion. As we have learned in numerous earlier Book Notes, efforts to narrow the gap have been made over the centuries by those first excluded from the benefits of America’s founding values. They have done so not by rejecting them, but by fighting for their inclusion by appealing to those very values. While, ironically, at the same time those who would exclude them deny those values’ legitimacy.

What are those values which have been contested since the very beginning?

Equality.

Life.

Liberty.

The pursuit of happiness.

Those who would set aside the sentence’s moral imperative, often assert that it was a mere rhetorical flourish not meant to be taken seriously. Sometimes they simply say that Jefferson was wrong, like Alexander Stephens in his “Cornerstone Speech” justifying slavery and southern secession during the Civil War.1

Isaacson, on the other hand, treats the sentence not as a ceremonial flourish but as a precision tool. He emphasizes how much is packed into its structure. It begins with a collective voice (“We hold…”), claims certainty (“self-evident”), asserts equality (“all men are created equal”), grounds dignity in a source deeper than government (“endowed…with certain unalienable Rights”), and then specifies what those rights secure (“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”).2

Isaacson, a former editor of Time magazine and an accomplished biographer of Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci, portrays Jefferson not as a lone genius creating from nothing, but as someone steeped in Enlightenment thought and Anglo-American political traditions, selecting phrases and concepts current in the era’s political discourse then combining them into a form that was unusually memorable and forceful. The sentence Isaacson suggests, while carrying a very high intellectual charge, succeeds partly because it speaks in plain language.

As Isaacson points out, grounded in the Enlightenment’s vocabulary of natural rights and universal moral values, the Declaration’s claim that rights are not granted by kings or parliaments, in fact, are not granted by government at all, puts the American rebellion on a different footing than a typical power struggle. The result is that this very local, intra-empire struggle between colonies and Crown, justified by its Declaration’s glowing avowal of human rights grew into a global awareness that any legitimate government must respect people’s innate, pre-political human dignity.

This was genuinely revolutionary. It was what Thomas Paine meant when he said, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”3

Why?

Because that claim’s truth – that people have innate rights that precede any government’s authority – was self-evident.

Jefferson had first written “sacred and undeniable,” but it was Franklin who pointed out that “undeniable” left room for refutation. A friend of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, Franklin edited the line to “self-evident” because a “self-evident” truth is irrefutable.

Why?

Because, according to Hume, there are two kinds of truth: synthetic truths, which are statements contingent on empirical evidence and observation, and analytic truths that are true by reason and definition. For example, the statement “All bachelors are unmarried” is true by definition; i.e., it is self-evident. Franklin argued that the Declaration’s truths were self-evident by definition and not open to refutation. They are truths so fundamental that they do not require proof.4

In doing so, Franklin moved the argument from the realm of negotiable policy into the realm of moral bedrock. Anchored in that moral bedrock, American history shows how women, Black Americans, and wave after wave of immigrants fought for their inclusion in the American experiment by appealing to those universal, self-evident, and unalienable rights.

At the sentence’s center is the word “equal,” which Isaacson treats as its most revolutionary assertion. Frequently misunderstood by both its defenders and its deniers, equality here is not sameness of talent or outcome. No, people are no more equal in talent than they are all the same height.

That is not what Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams meant at all.

They meant that all people possess equal dignity, equal standing before the law, and an equal claim to their innate human rights. One of America’s great triumphs is that later generations of Americans – abolitionists, suffragists, civil-rights leaders, labor reformers, and many others – would use that claim as political leverage as they fought for inclusion. As Isaacson says, “It was, and remains, a constant American struggle to make the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ truly inclusive.”5

Isaacson’s short book does not treat the Declaration as a triumphal ending. He treats it as a beginning with a wound, a flaw, a contradiction at the center. He asks the same questions Ellis asks in The Great Contradiction: If “all men are created equal,” how could the same society asserting that value tolerate slavery and deny the vote and full legal equality to free Blacks and women? As the question with which this Book Note began asked, Isaacson notes that Founders’ values set in motion a quest for human dignity far greater than they perhaps understood. He does not see this contradiction, however, as a reason to discard the sentence but as a reason to take it seriously.

Why?

Because whether intended or not, the sentence created the standards that would later condemn those injustices. In this way, the Declaration became a paradoxical instrument. Written within a world of exclusions, it contained a universal claim expansive enough to attack those exclusions.

Isaacson emphasizes this moral drama: the Founders’ failure to apply their own ideals does not erase those ideals’ force. The Founders’ personal failures demonstrate how difficult moral progress is, and how necessary the Declaration’s aspirational language has been. Historically, the sentence has served simultaneously as an indictment and a beacon.

Treating the sentence as a text that later generations returned to when the nation confronted its own hypocrisy, Isaacson traces how the sentence became central to America’s reform movements. As we will see in a future Book Note about Garry Wills’ Lincoln At Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln would use it to announce, “a new birth of freedom.”

Isaacson shows how the sentence is not locked in 1776. As an expression of living values, it keeps getting reinterpreted and repurposed for new generations of Americans. His narrative becomes, in effect, a mini history of American political and moral evolution. The Declaration’s equality clause became ammunition in the struggle against slavery; its claim of inherent rights inspired movements for broader citizenship; its promise of liberty and dignity animated demands for civil rights.

As I have pointed out in The American Tapestry Project, Isaacson underscores that these movements did not invent new American ideals from scratch. Just as in his last speech Martin Luther King, Jr. exhorted Americans to live up to what they said on paper, Isaacson shows how the excluded – Blacks, women, and others – appealed to the Founders stated values in their quest for full inclusion in the American experiment. One of the reasons Isaacson calls it the “greatest” sentence is that it creates the conditions for dissent that are not anti-American but instead deeply American. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in that same speech, “the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights.”6

Isaacson devotes special attention to the phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” As I wrote in Book Notes #185, which can be found here, the wording does not promise happiness as a guarantee; it promises the freedom to pursue a life of meaning and fulfillment. Isaacson reads it as a bridge between political freedom and personal flourishing in which the government protects the individual’s right, as in the old Army ad, to be all they can be.7

Isaacson also suggests that this phrasing gives American politics a particular tone. If politics is partly about securing the space for personal and communal thriving, then it is not merely about order or hierarchy; it is about enabling life projects. Over time, the phrase has been interpreted in many ways: economic opportunity, religious liberty, family life, education, creativity, safety, mobility. Isaacson doesn’t limit it to any single goal or series of goals; instead, he highlights its openness as a strength, because while still affirming human dignity, it allows pluralism to flourish.

Why does Isaacson think the sentence matters now?

Although he analyzes the sentence’s historic composition, Isaacson’s purpose is contemporary. He argues that the country’s current polarization and cynicism can be met, at least partially, by returning to our shared foundational principles. He’s not naïve; he doesn’t suggest that simply quoting the Declaration will magically resolve our polarization. Rather, he treats the sentence as common ground. For him, the sentence is a reminder that Americans have a tradition of arguing fiercely while still acknowledging their shared commitment to equality and human rights.

He recognizes those values are now threatened.

In interviews and descriptions of the book, Isaacson makes his “civic repair” motive explicit. He sees the sentence as defining the “common ground we share as a nation,” and invites readers to measure today’s debates against the sentence’s promised values.8 Invoking the heritage of Benjamin Franklin, he sees the Declaration as a kind of institution, a rhetorical institution echoing founding values benefiting the common good.9 His underlying claim is that democracy requires more than institutions; it requires a shared moral vocabulary that people can invoke even when they disagree on policy. For Isaacson, the Declaration’s great sentence is one of the few pieces of language that still has the potential to do that work.

He ultimately argues that the Declaration’s famous line is not a relic to revere on the Fourth of July and then set aside.

No, for Isaacson it is a living standard demanding allegiance.

It is the greatest sentence ever written not because America has always honored it, but because it set the bar so high that it made progress morally both thinkable and possible.

As I noted at the beginning, the sentence transcends its authors. It belongs to later Americans who widened the circle of equality, and to present-day Americans who must decide whether it still means what it says and whether they believe it.

From that perspective, in 2026 on America’s 250th birthday, Isaacson’s book is both a celebration and a challenge. It celebrates the courage of claiming universal equality in a world built on hierarchy, and it challenges 21st^-century Americans to admit the work remains unfinished. The sentence is revolutionary precisely because it refuses to let the country rest. It is a perpetual moral goad asking the same question, generation after generation:

If these truths are self-evident, why are they not self-evident in our laws, our lives, and our treatment of one another?

In The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, Isaacson reminds us of the sentence’s greatness. In the poetry of its language, like all great prophecies, it is America’s moral engine holding us accountable to our fundamental values. In 2026, 250 years after it was first penned, it is still running, still pushing, still inspiring Americans to be true to their own ideals.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

“… Whoever draws too close,

… and catches the Sirens’ voices in the air…

The high thrilling song of the Sirens will transfix him…”1

Is it possible to be too present-to-the-present?

Or, phrased another way, is it possible to be so absorbed by a “present,” a “now,” so soaked with the sirens’ song of data-data-data, that you’ve become distracted and missed the actual “present” in which your life unfolds? Have you become like the person absent-mindedly scrolling Instagram reels of autumn scenes and failing to attend to the autumnal blaze just outside their window?

Have you, like our Instagram scroller, lost control over what you “attend” to?

A cottage industry of media commentators has sprung up arguing that “Yes, we have indeed lost control of our attention.” A simple internet search on “attention crisis” generated 21,800 results featuring articles titled “The Attention Crisis: A Wake-Up Guide,” “The Attention Crisis Is Just a Distraction,” “The Attention Crisis: Why We Can’t Focus,” and “The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films.”

Chris Hayes agrees.

And he doesn’t think it’s an accident.

Why?

Host of MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes,” Hayes’ new book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource argues that “attention” has quietly become the defining scarce resource of modern life and that a handful of immensely profitable systems have been built to mine it. Rather than treating distraction as a personal failure (weak willpower and/or poor time management), Hayes frames the problem as an economic and political transformation. He asserts that we now live in the “attention age” in which massive, for-profit companies compete to capture and monetize the focus of millions, and in the process reshapes culture and democracy.2

Hayes uses the Sirens from Homer’s Odyssey, whose irresistibly tempting song pulls sailors to their doom, as an organizing metaphor. For Hayes, 21st-century sirens are not mythical singers, but high-tech environments like our smartphones and their apps, update feeds, dinging notifications, and the incentive structures behind them designed to compel our attention. He acknowledges that mediated grabs for our attention are as old as Socrates’ complaint that the invention of writing ruins people’s memories down to more recent complaints about newspapers then magazines then radio then TV draining people’s attention.

What Hayes says has changed in our time is that temptation has been industrialized. The sirens now beckon us at all hours of the day and night, dinging their alerts. Literally as I was typing that sentence, a notification popped up on my screen from my computer security app telling me about additional benefits it can provide for a price.

Unlike many of the articles my quick internet search discovered, Hayes’ book doesn’t simply encourage us to be more disciplined in our media consumption. Instead, he offers a deep analysis about how the new digital environment arose and why the struggle to break its hold feels so imbalanced. He doesn’t think it’s a fair fight. Pitted against the average person is an attention industry seeking profits by using big data and experimentation to continuously refine their offerings to sharpen the allure of whatever snares our notice. Whenever you hit that “Like” or “Share” button, you’re telling whatever app you’re using to give you more. In doing so, you’ve begun to cede control of your attention to the app’s algorithm.

Hayes shapes his analysis around six key concepts: 1) attention as a scarce resource; 2) the industrialization of temptation (the Sirens Metaphor); 3) the three forms of attention; 4) attention as power; 5) alienation from one’s own attention; and 6) the attention crisis is a structural problem requiring collective action.

In building his argument that attention has become a scarce resource, Hayes uses Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon’s justly famous 1971 lecture “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” in “which Simon argued that attention was the key to understanding the information age.”3 Hayes quotes Simon’s core insight:

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.4

In short, attention is a zero-sum game; if you are attending to “X” (not the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, per say, but “X” as “something in general”) then you cannot attend to “A, B, C, or anything else” that might be important to you. Thus, your attention becomes a scarce resource. And scarcity determines value, making your attention valuable for whomever or whatever can attract and hold it.

After the internet’s initial rich promise of a world where information would be plentiful, leading to an increase in cultural wisdom (in hindsight, a mind-foggingly naïve premise, but that’s an idea for another day), internet entrepreneurs pivoted. Needing to generate income to convert their paper value into actual financial value, search firms like Google and apps like Facebook turned to advertising as their path to economic success.

What could they possibly sell to potential advertisers?

Your attention.

What is “attention?”

Using a cocktail party as a brilliant example, Hayes explains that attention comes in three flavors: voluntary, involuntary, and social. In the cocktail party setting, if you’re mannerly and want other people to reciprocate your attention, you focus your attention on the person or people with whom you are chatting “suppressing everything other than what you’re focused on.”5 Beyond social settings, artists, athletes, and anyone seeking to master a task understands this willful blindness, this intense focus on the subject or task at hand. That’s called voluntary attention because you choose where you focus it.

Since, on the other hand, as a survival mechanism we humans subconsciously and continuously monitor our environment for threats and opportunities, involuntary attention occurs when something outside our focus suddenly breaks it. As in Hayes’ cocktail party example when a waiter drops a tray of glasses whose crashing sound instantly pulls our attention to it. More pointedly, when we hear our name mentioned by someone in the group standing just next to us, we involuntarily turn to it, note it, and want to understand what was said.

It turns out that humans are exquisitely tuned to hearing their own names.

Why?

That “why” leads to the third form of attention – social attention. Social attention is something we desire; we want others to notice and approve of us. It is the fourth human motivation in Maslow’s hierarchy. After ensuring our survival and gaining acceptance into a group, humans want to be valued. Anything that promises to enhance our sense of self-worth or, conversely, threatens it, immediately grabs our attention. In short, as far as capturing our attention, either praising or threatening us does the trick.

Understanding the nature of attention, the challenge for internet marketers seeking to sell your attention to advertisers becomes how to attract it. Which turned out to be comparatively easy. What things do people find most interesting? Conflict, sex, food, gossip about other people, and anything that seems to affirm their self-worth – in particular, the sound of their own name. That led to the second challenge – how to hold your attention.

It turns out that there are two approaches to that. First, tell a story like the old-time magazine serials in which each chapter ends on a cliffhanger, bringing you back for the next. In the current world, that is like the “Breaking News” trailers scrolling across the bottom of your TV screen. But that’s cumbersome, and it didn’t take long for the new lords of attention-harvesting to figure out that attention can be broken down into in ever smaller bits like the slot machine image Hayes uses so well in which the never-ending unreeling of new stimulants as you swipe up or across your tablet or phone’s screen become a self-sustaining attention magnet. In the end, the user stops seeking “information” as such and becomes rapt in an endless scrolling exercise.

As a result, you’ve lost control of your attention and ceded it to the app’s algorithm. We’ve all experienced this phenomenon of going down a YouTube, or Instagram, or pick-your-app rabbit hole. I admit my own vulnerability. I am apt to follow a thread of cooking demonstrations, old movie clips, or YouTube videos of Borscht Belt comics until I somehow recapture my own attention and ask myself, “Whoa, what are you doing here?”

The result is that our attention has been captured by an attention industry designed specifically to capture it and sell it to interested others. In our time, the largest corporations are not manufacturers or even information companies, but finance and attention companies – Apple, Microsoft, Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram), Alphabet (owner of Google which also owns You Tube).6 These companies are the Sirens of our time – constantly tempting us with endless distractions fracturing our attention spans so that now, even at elite colleges, faculty complain about students who can’t read entire books but only excerpts, and film students who can’t watch an entire movie without their attention wandering off, captured by the latest ding on their smartphone.

At this point Hayes himself pivots from describing the phenomenon to why it’s important. Hayes understands that whoever holds our attention controls our attention. Controlling our attention enables them to control what we think about, care about, and treat as real or urgent. We have not only ceded to our internet overlords our attention, Hayes points out we have also ceded to them the ability to define our reality because whatever dominates attention defines both our personal and our public reality.

This, as Hayes takes great pains to explain, has enormous political consequences. Remember, the heart of drama is conflict, and humans love drama – who is right, who will win, what will happen. Like those glasses crashing to the floor, what attracts attention is the loud flash and bang, the outrage of an argument. He who first grabs the crowds notice seizes control of what the crowd “attends” to. The more outrageous and aggressive the accusation, the more attention it garners. If a political actor loudly and repeatedly claims that an election was stolen from him, he seizes control of the public reality.

Why?

Two reasons. First, the flamboyance and the inherent conflict of the accusation draw our attention just like those crashing glasses. Constantly repeating the claim only intensifies the attention it draws, swallowing any attempts to counter it.

Why?

Because it is extremely difficult and tedious (the exact opposite of dramatic) to prove a negative, i.e., that the election was not stolen. No matter how many cases the pro-theft faction loses, they do not claim public attention because reading legal briefs is tedious and lacks all the drama of the original accusation’s spectacle.

This has immense implications for democracy because democracy depends upon shared, sustained attention, which the attention economy systematically undermines. Those legal briefs might be absolutely correct, but they may lack the flash and bang of mediated conflict – they lack the excitement of the slot machine version of news: short, staccato sound bits of dramatic energy.

Humans want to see conflict; they, as a rule, do not want to engage in philosophical analysis. It’s the phenomenon that explains why Fox News flourishes, and C-SPAN and other thoughtful sources come limping after.

Because in our internet, mediated reality the power between the attention gatherers and the people is so out of balance, Hayes thinks personal coping strategies are insufficient. He argues that the commodification of attention, like the commodification of labor in the 19th century, requires collective protection. It is the least convincing section of the book because his proposals for public action do not seem sufficient to meet the current problem.

Regardless, Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call is an extremely valuable read for his identification and analysis of the problem of our attention-challenged era. Its essential takeaways are that attention is the central scarce resource of modern life. Why? Because in an information-saturated world, attention, not information, is the binding constraint on our ability to think and decide for ourselves about how we shape our culture and our politics. This single insight explains why media, platforms, politics, and even social life reorganize themselves around capturing our attention in short bursts rather than in deliberate, in-depth attempts to understand the truth behind those mediated bursts of shouts and images.

How? His second key takeaway is that attention has been systematically extracted by engineered systems resulting in modern environments designed to seize attention automatically, bypassing deliberation and exploiting human cognitive limits. In his view, temptation has been industrialized. The Sirens are no longer occasional; they are optimized and everywhere. Attention capture is not accidental—it is the business model.

It is why news shows focus on images and not substance. It is why the current outrage over a president posting to a social media account pictures of a former president’s and his wife’s heads pasted on the bodies of two apes commands both the airwaves and the internet while thoughtful, in-depth attempts to grasp the horror of such vile behavior on the part of a sitting president and the racist assumptions of both he and his followers languish. Why? They lack the snap, crackle, and pop of the images. In an attention-challenged world, like those students who can’t read entire books anymore, it is the snap, crackle, and pop of scrolling images that captures attention.

Why is this important?

Hayes asserts that attention is political power, and democracy depends on protecting it because whoever controls attention controls agendas, priorities, and public reality. As a result, attention has become a political resource, and its extraction endangers democratic self-government. Why? Because democracy requires sustained, shared attention to common problems. An attention economy optimized for fragmentation, outrage, and engagement systematically undermines those conditions.

Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call is a siren in its own right – not a mythical creature luring you to destruction, but, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, “a fire bell – a siren – in the night” alerting us to the danger of our hypermediated, attention fractured reality.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

Sunday marks Super Bowl LX. Almost 200 million Americans are busily planning the entire day around the game. Originally, I had meant this Super Bowl Book Note to explore football poetry, but discovered there isn’t any! Oh, any number of internet sites are littered with mediocre scribbles about the gridiron game, but they only amount to an odd mixture of adolescent-seeming, male musings written by non-football players ogling cheerleaders while mixing envy and disdain for the actual players.1 If you know any great football poems I missed, please share them with me at roth@jeserie.org.

With poetry cast aside for the moment, why will those millions and millions of Americans gather ’round their flat screen TVs Sunday evening?

The Roman numerals hint at the reason.

But first, why is it called the “Super Bowl?”

When the old AFL merged with the NFL in 1966, the old rivals and now partners needed a name for their new championship game. Then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle suggested it be called “The Big One,” the already used “Pro Bowl,” and even “World Series of Football.” For a variety of reasons, these were all quickly dismissed. He landed on the accurate but clunky “The AFL-NFL Championship Game.” It was Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt who suggested “Super Bowl” riffing off a kids’ toy of the era, the SuperBall. The owners wanted a spin on college football bowl tradition, while one-upping it. Hence, the name “Super Bowl.”2

The Roman numerals came when the game reached Super Bowl V for a simple reason: the regular season was played in one year and the championship game in the next. Which year’s champion was being decided? To eliminate confusion, the owners decided to number the games. It was also Hunt who promoted Roman numerals. He thought they added an aura of grandeur to the game.3

Hunt was right. Roman numerals lifted the game out of the present and connected it, or seemed to connect it, to a stream of antiquity and cultural significance larger than a mere single season’s championship. Roman numerals confirmed an aura of specialness and timelessness. Not anchored to a specific “now,” to a specific year, Roman numerals empowered the game to satisfy two innate human yearnings: the need to compete and the desire to transcend one’s own time. Even if it’s only been 60 years, a speck of archeological time, Roman numerals give the game a hint of something larger, a hint of the eternal.

In my The American Tapestry Project, which can be found on all podcast sites, I developed a sub-series “‘Americans and Their Games’: Sports in American History & Culture.”4 It began with Book Note #133, which can be found here, reviewing Randall Balmer’s Passion Plays: How Religion Shaped Sports in North America. Balmer never did convince me that religion shaped sports, but he did make a compelling case that in our secular society for many people, especially white males, sports has assumed a quasi-religious role.

With church attendance dwindling “across nearly all demographic groups”5 it’s hard to argue that Americans’ obsession with sports has not in part at least filled that gap. Among sports football reigns supreme. Its holiest day is Super Bowl Sunday. If one uses the metric of most-watched TV shows of all time, it is impossible to deny football’s cultural importance. The Top 10 most-watched broadcasts are all Super Bowls!6

In a polarized and fractious America, Super Bowl Sunday may well be America’s last, shared communal moment.

Why?

What needs does it satisfy?

Why would a couple hundred million people plan their entire Sunday around one game?

Perhaps the easiest way to explain it is this: the Super Bowl isn’t just a sporting event. If popular music, as I have asserted in The American Tapestry Project, is a window into the American soul, then the Super Bowl is not only a window into American culture’s attitudes, values, and beliefs. It is also a kind of mirror in which Americans watch themselves seeing all the things they value and believe compressed into one loud, emotional, and commercial communal night.

How does the Super Bowl do that?

In 12 “notes,” each of which could serve as the topic of its own Book Note, let me outline how that happens.

Note #1. Community ritual: an unofficial modern national holiday

You don’t have to watch football to participate in the Super Bowl. Many Americans don’t watch a game all season and still show up for this night. Why? Because it works like a ritual in which people gather, specific foods appear (wings, pizza, nachos, chili), friends text in groups, strangers talk about it the next day at work.

In a very large, very diverse country, shared rituals matter. The Super Bowl creates a common reference point: “Did you see that?”

Underlying value: Belonging matters, even (especially?) in a culture that prizes individualism.

Note #2: Competition: a kind of national faith

At its core, the Super Bowl is a championship in which the winner takes the crown, and the loser goes home. This reflects a deeply American cultural attitude that admires competition, respects excellence under pressure (Hemingway said courage is “grace under pressure”), and loves a clear-cut outcome.

Even if you don’t like sports, you’ll recognize the broader pattern. Americans often treat life as a series of “big games:” school, careers, business, politics, personal achievement. The Super Bowl dramatizes that mindset.

Underlying belief: Success is earned, and the moment of proof matters.

Note #3: Teamwork and specialization: the “corporate” beauty of the game

American football is not just about talent, it’s about roles. A team is a system that includes head coaches, coordinators, quarterbacks, linemen, receivers, defenders, specialists, and analysts. To an outsider, it can resemble a high-stakes organization where each person has a narrow job, execution must be precise, and mistakes are costly.

This reflects a core American value: the power of coordinated teamwork, especially when built around planning, leadership, and accountability. In my book How to Be a Highly Effective Leader: A Primer, which the Jefferson Educational Society is publishing this March, because no one does anything alone, I identify the ability to build teams as one of leadership’s cardinal principles.

Underlying belief: In addition to inspiration, big goals require discipline, structure, and collaboration.

Note #4: Individualism inside the team story

American culture has a love-hate relationship with individualism. Football is a team sport, but the Super Bowl also builds mythic individuals: star quarterbacks, heroic receivers, legendary coaches, and redemption arcs and underdogs.

It’s very American to celebrate both the group effort (“we won”), and the standout hero (“he carried them”).

Underlying belief: We want to belong to a team, but we still dream of being the person who changes everything. We still fantasize that we are (or can be) our version of Tom Brady or pick the legend of your own childhood. Growing up in Ohio in the 1950s and 1960s, I still do not believe it is possible to be better than Jim Brown.

Note #5: The celebration of “clutch” performance under pressure

The Super Bowl is famous for defining careers in one moment: one pass, one catch, one missed kick. In Buffalo and western New York, understanding the phrase “wide right” and its attendant pain identifies you as a native.

Americans have a special admiration for people who perform in “the big moment.” People who stay calm, take risks, and deliver when everyone is watching.

This is part of our broader cultural fascination with the pressure of job interviews, pitches, auditions, elections, public speaking, those moments when the whole story seems to balance on a single attempt. Somehow, even people who have never heard of Hemingway, intuitively understand what he meant about courage and what Paul Tillich said in a religious context about “the courage to be.”

Underlying value: Competence under stress demonstrates courage.

Note #6: Strategy and technology: intelligence is part of the spectacle

The Super Bowl isn’t only about strength or speed. It’s also chess-like play calling, constant adjustments, analytics, and technology-heavy broadcasting (replays, camera angles, data overlays).

Americans love the idea that smart planning beats brute force or at least belongs in the same room with it. It’s not an accident that all sports, football in particular, increasingly feel engineered for optimized execution.

Underlying attitude: Winning is a science as much as a performance.

Note #7: Entertainment and seriousness are intertwined

Many cultures separate “art” from “competition.” The Super Bowl blends them.

The halftime show is not a side note. It’s central. The commercials aren’t just ads. They’re a form of national storytelling. The very best become part of American folklore like the Budweiser horses, the 1984 Apple “Big Brother” ad, the “E*Trade baby, and numerous others. What’s your favorite all-time Super Bowl ad?

The message is very American: seriousness should be fun, achievement should be dramatic, and even institutions should entertain.

Underlying attitude: If it matters, it should also be exciting.

Note #8: In a consumer culture, the Super Bowl is a festival of buying

If you want to see American capitalism with the lights bright and the volume turned up, the Super Bowl is it. The broadcast is a premium product. Commercials are treated like “mini movies.” Brands compete for attention the way teams compete for points.

People genuinely rank commercials afterward like game highlights. This is a telling American characteristic because we don’t only consume products, we consume experiences and narratives built around products.

Even if you find it excessive, it reveals the reality that Americans are comfortable with commerce in public life, we expect entertainment to be sponsored, and we often treat big moments as market moments.

Underlying belief: What’s popular is what earns attention and increasingly in American culture attention determines what is valuable.

Note #9: Identity, hometown pride, and regional rivalry

Although one country, the United States is also a tapestry of many cultures bringing to life its original national motto of e pluribus unum: out of many one. Sports teams become symbols of local identity like a city’s pride, a region’s style, and a community’s sense of itself.

Once, at a luncheon meeting of Cleveland’s City Club, a journalist asked me why Pittsburghers possessed such intense community pride. I said because the Steelers (and the Penguins) win. He looked at me askance and replied, “Do you mean if the Browns won all would be well in Cleveland?” I said, “No, but Clevelanders wouldn’t have such a hang-dog attitude if the Browns won. And with that positive mindset taking pride in the region, they might be more enthusiastic about civic improvement.”

In my years in higher education, one of the central truths that drives some faculty members to distraction is that there is no better, faster, or more intense way to create school spirit than through athletics basketball and football, in particular. Look at Indiana University’s new burst of pride after winning college football’s national championship. I wish I could tell you it’s the band or the chess club or the outstanding chemistry department, all very valuable things, but sports programs build pride faster, more intensely, and with greater staying power than any other community or school endeavor.

That’s true even if fans move away. They keep their team loyalty like a piece of home.

Underlying attitude: Place still matters, even in a mobile, modern society.

Note #10: Pageantry and patriotism: a kind of “civic religion”

The Super Bowl often includes the national anthem, military flyovers, flags, and ceremonial language. For many Americans, this feels natural. They are happy with sports as a stage for national unity and gratitude. For others, it can feel political or uncomfortable.

Either way, the culture belief is visible as Americans mix patriotism with mass entertainment. In another time it was John Wayne movies and movie stars on USO tours, but in today’s more cynical world sports remains, not the last, but the most visible entertainment medium boosting American patriotism.

Attaching national meaning to big events, we look to athletes as stars to validate our national identity. When they appear to not do so, for some people it can seem like betrayal as in the Colin Kaepernick experience.

Underlying belief: The nation is not just a government; it’s a story, and we retell it in public.

Note #11: Escapism with emotional permission

Foreign visitors are often astonished at how hard Americans work, and any number of stand-up comics have made a career parodying Americans’ tendency to worry about almost anything, and all Americans now live under the pressure of a constant information overload as their smartphones ding a seemingly constant demand for their attention.

The Super Bowl provides a socially acceptable “off switch” permitting an intense focus on something immediate, emotional release, shouting, cheering, and laughing for a few hours where the stakes are simple.

Even people who claim not to care about the game may care for one night because caring together feels good. It’s not the game; it’s being together and sharing a moment caring about something that seems culturally important.

Underlying attitude: We need shared escape and we’re not shy about it.

Note #12: Contradictions on full display

An honest cultural portrait of the Super Bowl must include its tensions: community vs. commercialism (togetherness sponsored by corporations); meritocracy vs. inequality (the dream of fair competition inside a society where opportunity is uneven); celebration vs. violence (a physically brutal sport packaged as family entertainment); and unity vs. polarization (one event trying to gather a divided nation, and sometimes failing).

The Super Bowl reveals American culture.

Underlying belief: We can celebrate our ideals even while living with our imperfections.

******

There are a dozen reasons why the Super Bowl has become America’s most popular unofficial holiday. While I remain unconvinced that the Super Bowl qualifies as a religious feast day, its power as a mirror of American life and cultural meaning can be summarized in one sentence:

The Super Bowl is America’s biggest shared night of competition, entertainment, storytelling, advertising, and community where Americans turn a game into a national spectacle celebrating performance under pressure.

In closing, trying to answer my beginning question (“Why do millions and millions of Americans set aside an entire Sunday to watch the Super Bowl?”), let’s do a thought experiment.

You’re visiting the United States for the first time and want to understand the Super Bowl. How do you do that? A friend suggests that the best way to do that isn’t by learning the rules of football. It’s by watching people.

So try this:

Go to a watch party and notice how food and jokes matter as much as the game. Listen for the language of pressure: “This is it.” “He’s a stud who always comes through in the clutch.” “They choked.” Watch how commercials become conversations. Pay attention to the emotional rhythm of tension/release/celebration/disappointment. Notice the blend of sincerity and irony as people care deeply, and also make fun of how much they care.

Try it; let me know what you discover.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

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What will America look like in 2076, a scant 50 years from today on the 300th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence?

I won’t be there to answer my own question, and I am all but certain that none or very few of you reading this Book Note will be there either. But our grandchildren will be there; my oldest grandchild is 22 years old; in 2076 he will be 72 years old – seven years younger than I am now.

What will their world look like?

What will the American Experiment look like after 300 years?

In summer 2025, I did a series of five talks about the future of the American Experiment for Chautauqua Institution’s Roads Scholars program. Riffing off my The American Tapestry Project, I focused on the politics of the past 50 years to understand how we got here and the current xenophobic fury of the new right. I crafted several scenarios about how our current politics might play out prior to the presidential election of 2076, including the possibility that there might not be an election.

In short, my focus was political.

Although Peter Frase and I ended up in the same place, realizing that politics will decide the future, we got there by different routes. Frase, a board member at the Jacobin, which terms itself “a leading voice of the American left,”1 describes himself as a “lapsed academic sociologist” and a “democratic socialist.”2 Although not explicitly about the American future, he has been asking himself a similar question since before the 2016 publication of his book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism.3

A small book, Frase’s Four Futures: Life After Capitalism does not predict the future or prescribe a single alternative to capitalism. Instead, Frase asks a more focused question: what kinds of futures are structurally possible, given the pressures already shaping the present? Neither utopian nor dystopian and not focused explicitly on the politics of our current moment, his answer provides a framework that forces readers to confront the political stakes embedded in the intertwined issues of technology, ecology, and inequality.

Frase’s organizing insight speculates that our post-capitalist futures can be mapped along two axes. The first concerns material conditions: abundance versus scarcity. Will automation and technological development make it possible to meet human needs with relatively little human labor, or will climate change and ecological limits impose hard constraints? The second axis concerns social organization: equality versus hierarchy. Will future societies distribute resources and power broadly, or will they entrench elite control?

From these axes emerge four futures: Communism (abundance with equality), Rentism (abundance with hierarchy), Socialism (scarcity with equality), and Exterminism (scarcity with hierarchy).

Frase presents these not as speculative fantasies, but as coherent social orders already suggested by contemporary economic and political conditions.

The effect is sobering.

In reading Four Futures, you do not imagine a distant tomorrow; the attentive reader recognizes patterns already present in 21st^-century American culture.

One of Frase’s defining characteristics is restraint. He doesn’t overstate. He resists both technological determinism (the assumption that technology alone will drive the future) and historical inevitability (the assumption that because something “is” today, it will dominate tomorrow).

For Frase, nothing is preordained.

Abundance does not automatically yield justice; scarcity does not automatically yield brutality. Technology, in Frase’s account, has no intrinsic moral direction. It is only a tool. Its impact on society depends upon how it is used; i.e., its impact depends upon who owns it, how it is regulated, and who holds the political power to make those decisions. Rather than the fanciful musings of many futurists, Frase’s approach grounds his insights firmly in political economy.

Quick Aside: “Political economy” treats the economy as a contested social order; it is not politics or economics alone that determines the future. It is the interaction between the two. It asks certain core questions: Who owns what? Who decides? Who benefits and who bears costs? By what rules? To what ends? In short, instead of treating economics as an independent, neutral reality (the invisible hand of free market fantasists), political economy studies economic life as a system of power: how material production and distribution are governed by political decisions, social structures, and ethical assumptions.

As we shall see, creating the future is a political decision.

Frase’s conceptual framework clarifies the issues. By limiting the number of possible futures, he denies us the comfort of vague optimism. His four futures are not exhaustively detailed, but they exhaust the conceptual possibilities. Any plausible post-capitalist society, he suggests, will fall somewhere within this grid. The question is not whether capitalism ends, but how it ends and for whom?

Which begs the question: will capitalism end? For the purposes of Frase’s book, let’s use that old economist’s dodge — “Let us assume…” — and assume that capitalism cannot forever escape its own contradictions and will eventually mutate/evolve into some other system.

If it does, what follows it?

Frase has four possibilities.

Communism

Frase’s first future, Communism, pairs technological abundance with social equality. My first reaction to this section was purely rhetorical. The word “communism” is so poisoned in most minds that its mere utterance short-circuits thought. As a result, it is a political nonstarter. This is not what Frase means. He is not referring to the bureaucratic socialism of the 20th century in which totalitarian overlords pursuing some theoretical ideal massacred the innocent. As Ben Tarnoff said in a review in The Guardian, “Frase restores {communism} to its original meaning. For Marx, communism meant not an authoritarian one-party state but the idyll that awaits us after a long period of social and technological transformation.”4

For Frase, the term means a post-scarcity society in which automation (technology) has eliminated the necessity of compulsory labor. Machines perform most productive work; human beings are freed from wage labor as a condition of survival (which would have thrilled Thomas Jefferson.) The social significance of this future lies less in leisure than in security. Survival is guaranteed as a social right, not contingent upon employment. People will choose to work or not. Work becomes voluntary and meaningful, not an inescapable survival necessity. People may still labor, create, and compete, but not under the threat of starvation.

Importantly, Frase does not present this future as frictionless or maudlin. He does not see this as some “kumbaya”-soaked culture of eternal peace and quiet. He understands the oft quoted comment by Nietzsche. To paraphrase Nietzsche, in Notes from Underground, he said something to the effect that “In paradise people will stick golden pins in their chest to break the boredom.” In effect, as did Nietzsche, Frase recognizes that humans being humans, conflict, ambition, and status do not disappear. Technology has not changed human needs; it has only met Maslow’s two basic needs: survival and security. As a result, what disappears is material scarcity defining the structure of social life. Communism, in this sense, is not paradise. It is a society that has removed fear of scarcity as its primary engine. Frase is shrewd enough to note that leaves human ego and its need for self-assurance and recognition.

Rentism

If communism is abundance shared, rentism is abundance as an enclosed and exclusive preserve of the few. Here, technology produces extraordinary wealth, but its ownership of algorithms, platforms, patents, and machines is concentrated in the hands of only a few. Income flows not from the classic economic virtues of productive labor or investment risk, but from control over access to existing technologies. Elites extract rents simply by owning the infrastructure of life. Frase uses “rent” to mean the income derived from factors such as monopolies, scarcity, or asymmetric information (one side knows more than the other about how the object of exchange actually works).

Simplistically, it is the landlord/tenant model writ large.

Without getting bogged down in economic terminology, Frase is using the word “rent” here in a way that is both obvious –– you rent an apartment or lease a car –– and obscure. You actually did not acquire the physical reality of the apartment or car; you rented or leased its use. You do not own the apartment or car. The most immediate impact of that is that you cannot modify or alter them without the owner’s permission.

More importantly, you do not own them. Not owning them, you have no authority or power over them. Since they are not your assets, you cannot leverage them. A simple and clarifying example: who “owns” your Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or whatever “page?” More to the point, who owns the information you post to it? Who has the right to sell or lease it to secondary or tertiary parties (leverage) it?

In short, in a “rentier” society, the renter has little or no power because they do not own the things they use. All power rests with the owner. Can you, for example, fix your iPhone? Can you change its battery? What happens when the battery dies and can no longer hold a charge? Can you change the oil in your car? In short, as one who “rents,” you’ve ceded power to the renter. U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state gets this. She proposes a politics of the “right to repair.” As reported in The New York Times, her politics “(i)n its simplest form, is a call for manufacturers to make smartphones and farm equipment and headlights that can be fixed and tinkered with at home –– so it’s possible to truly own them, unlike the disposable products or subscription services that surround us today.”5

This future is unsettling precisely because it feels so familiar. Frase’s analysis builds on trends already visible in intellectual property regimes, digital platforms, and the financialization of the American economy. As technology reduces the importance of human labor, the claims of the worker weaken. Those without ownership become economically superfluous, even as society remains materially rich. Most people are reduced to dependency upon a flow of goods over which they have increasingly less and less control. In short, they are no longer producers in any sense of the term, but merely consumers. Using the jargon of the moment, they are no longer “prosumers,” i.e., those who make what they consume, but merely “consumers” of others’ products and services which a sophisticated marketing and promotional system has convinced them they need whether, in fact, they need it at all or merely want it because they have been culturally conditioned to think they need it.

This is true not only of individuals, but also of entire communities. In a sense, technology has only accelerated an innate feature of free market capitalism. As any elementary economics text will tell you, an initially free market of many competitors naturally evolves to an oligopoly of fewer and fewer competitors finally resulting in a monopoly of one decisive competitor. Some of you might consider this a stretch, but what local influence do consumers and even local government have to constrain the actions of Amazon, CVS, or the media platforms that have replaced locally owned newspapers and radio and TV stations?

Rentism need not be overtly violent. Minimal provision, entertainment, and surveillance may suffice to maintain stability. Inequality becomes extreme but manageable, so long as political and coercive power remains aligned with ownership. Freedom persists, but primarily as consumption rather than agency. Frase’s treatment of Rentism may be the book’s most persuasive and most disturbing because it suggests that post-capitalism can be worse than capitalism without looking worse. Material plenty without power; material abundance without dignity: this is domination by comfort rather than by force. Or, as we noted in an earlier Book Note, this is the logical culmination, as Neil Postman said, of “amusing ourselves to death.”6

If “rentism” as a term seems opaque, then simply substitute “landlordism” and you’ll get the picture. In “rentism,” you’ve been reduced to a tenant.

Socialism

Socialism emerges in Frase’s schema when scarcity meets equality. This future assumes that ecological limits (climate change, resource depletion, environmental degradation) cannot be wished away. Growth slows or reverses. Hard choices become unavoidable. The moral question becomes how burdens are shared, which history tells us are always difficult conversations. “Difficult” in this sentence being a huge understatement.

Frase’s socialism is ecological and democratic rather than expansionist. Prosperity is redefined away from accumulation and toward sustainability, security, and social unity. Consumption is constrained (even President Trump says no child needs 34 dolls),7 but dignity is preserved. Inequality is limited not only for ethical reasons, but because hierarchy, which corrodes social cohesion under conditions of scarcity, has been rejected.

This future is demanding. It requires several things Americans have historically never been particularly good at except when under attack (cf. the World War II era): collective decision-making, high levels of trust, and cultural acceptance of limits. Work remains necessary and socially valued. The appeal of socialism here is not ease, but coherence. It offers a way to remain humane in a world of material limitations.

I have the same problem with socialism as I did with communism. In the current American political landscape, they are nonstarters. Even with socialism’s minor but historic success in the late 19th- and early 20th-century American progressive movement, particularly in the upper middle west of Wisconsin and Minnesota, the word, like communism, has been demonized in American culture since the failed Russian soviet experiment. I could, however, be wrong about that. Witness Bernie Sanders’ continuing bipartisan appeal and the recent victory in the New York City mayoralty race by avowed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.

Exterminism

Exterminism is the darkest of Frase’s futures, and he confronts it directly without mincing words. This is scarcity combined with hierarchy: a world in which elites respond to ecological and economic crisis by fortifying themselves and abandoning or eliminating those deemed surplus. It is the world of gated communities and luxury boxes at stadiums and arenas. I have been tempted to write a Book Note about how one can describe the stratification of American society by simply identifying the seating options at an any MLB, NFL, or NBA stadium and arena, in which, in a great ironic inversion of the old order, the seats highest up are for the “hoi polloi” and the seats at courtside for the “haute bourgeois.”

For Frase, “Exterminism” functions here both literally and metaphorically. It includes mass violence, but also social death: exclusion from food, healthcare, mobility, political participation, and even recognition as fully human. Militarized borders, privatized security, and automated violence enforce separation between protected enclaves and disposable populations. Again, pop culture supplies a readily available example: note the Facebook “Reels” of pop stars and political figures arriving at any venue or hotel surrounded by bodyguards usually dressed in black.

This is what gives “Exterminism” its force, its recognizability. To glimpse its features, simply watch the evening news. Climate refugees, mass incarceration, drone warfare, and fortified borders already sketch its outlines. Technology does not mitigate brutality; it streamlines it. Automation serves surveillance and control rather than liberation.

In our current political reality, it appears most blatantly in the work and words of J.D. Vance’s mentor and key supporter Peter Thiel. Thiel is a Silicon Valley “tech bro.” Arguably, he is the Silicon Valley “tech bro.” Founder with Elon Musk of PayPal, financial backer of Palantir, which “secured a $30 million dollar contract to build “ImmigrationOS,” a system for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to help … identify and deport unauthorized immigrants,” Thiel is a major Republican Party donor.8 He has gone on record as saying “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible … the 1920s were the last decade in American history during one could be genuinely optimistic about politics … the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women … rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”9

As Thiel unwittingly reveals and Frase illustrates, “Exterminism” represents not a failure of creative intelligence confronting our current social challenges, but a failure of solidarity or phrased less dramatically, a failure of a sense of shared societal responsibility. It is the logical endpoint of hierarchy under pressure.

Across all four futures, Frase sees a single thread: technology and ecology force decisions that are inherently ethical and political questions. Automation can free humanity or render it disposable. Climate change can provoke cooperation or justify exclusion.

There are no neutral outcomes.

This refusal to console or to offer a glib “but there are other options for the future” is the book’s greatest strength. Four Futures does not reassure you that progress will save us. Instead, it clarifies the stakes of the present. As we have seen, elements of all four futures already coexist: open-source abundance, rent-seeking platforms, egalitarian planning, and exterminist borders. The future is emerging piecemeal, often under the veil of technical necessity.

Frase leaves you with an uncomfortable recognition: the end of capitalism does not guarantee justice, and the future will not be decided by technology alone. The four futures are not destinations waiting to be discovered. They are competing directions already being chosen through policy decisions and changing ownership patterns – perhaps, most importantly in the recent and ongoing consolidation of American media. One could argue that we already live in a “Rentier” (landlord) society and that there are those in power unafraid of an “Exterminist” future.

If the book offers hope, it is a sober one. The future remains open, but only to the extent that we recognize that what appears inevitable is often merely unexamined. Current shifts in America’s political winds suggest people are beginning to see this as opponents of our current political direction have secured wins in numerous off-cycle elections.

Still, Four Futures does not tell us what to believe. It tells us what we can no longer afford not to see.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

When reading fiction, people frequently ask “What is the moral of the story?” As we mentioned last week, paraphrasing Joan Didion, we tell ourselves stories to make sense of our experiences.

We look for the moral in the story.

What do we mean when we say a story is “moral”? Do we mean it offers a list of virtues, like some sort of Virtue for Dummies? Do we mean it points its finger with a list of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots?” Or do we mean something subtly deeper: that gradually and almost invisibly, stories shape our moral sense by placing us inside the lives of other people with all their messy, inconsistent, and often ambiguous behavior?

Simplistically, when people ask what is the “moral in the story” they mean what does it tell us about right and wrong and the goodness and badness of human character.

These questions were prompted by several readers’ reactions to last week’s Book Note #215 about Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, which can be found here. In that “note,” I referred to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to distinguish fiction from history. I noted that if you want to know about the 19th century cult of true womanhood, more frequently referred to as the cult of domesticity, and how reaction against it spawned the women’s movement, then you should read history. But if you want to know what living in such a culture felt like, then you need to read Alcott’s Little Women, which I wrote about in Book Note #128, which can be found here.

What I did not write about last week was the moral world either Alcott or Keegan depicts. Thinking about it, I grasped that they perfectly depict the two pole points of a changed moral order. Alcott wrote before the 20th century’s political and cultural revolutions; Keegan writes in their aftermath. Alcott wrote an expansive domestic novel for an audience comfortable with the language of virtue and the moral authority of church, school, and home. Keegan wrote a compressed late-modern novella for readers suspicious of institutional authority and allergic to moralizing.

Since I’m not qualified, I’ll not comment on the trajectory of Irish culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as it shed or, maybe more accurately, seriously rethought its Roman Catholic heritage. As Keegan said, “I wasn’t setting out to write about misogyny or Catholic Ireland.”1 On the other hand, seeking to understand how Americans became so polarized, in my The American Tapestry Project I have written extensively about the arc of American history from Alcott’s time to ours.

Yet, upon reflection, I realized that these two superficially vastly different novels thematically very much resemble each other. They both insist that character and moral life are not forged in political slogans or abstract cultural principles. Each examines something more profound –– the character of its society’s people. Each understands that any culture’s bedrock is its people’s character. Each understands that character is formed by individual moral choices. Each understands that character is fashioned through habit, memory, attention, and the accumulated weight of small choices.

Each understands that character is not a pose. It is a practice.

Alcott and Keegan share an old moral imagination that predates them. It believes character is like a muscle. It is trained through repetition, strengthened by use, and weakened by neglect. That older notion understands that most of life’s decisive moments arrive quietly, in the guise of the ordinary, and by the time we recognize them, we have already been preparing for them for years.

Alcott shows that preparation happening inside a largely trusted moral order. Alcott’s world is the 19th century home and a culture that assumes moral improvement is possible and admirable. Keegan shows what happens when that world has hollowed out, when institutions are compromised, when a culture’s moral language has become a costume for fear, and when responsibility falls squarely on the solitary individual.

The difference between them is not that one believes in morality and the other does not. The difference is that Alcott wrote in a world that still respected institutional authority: parents, ministers, and teachers. Keegan writes in a time when all forms of institutional authority have become suspect, and the individual conscience must teach itself.

Let’s see if we can connect some dots to illustrate that point.

Dot #1: Moral Formation Through Habit, Not Heroism

Our age loves moral melodrama. We live in an age starring comic book and video game superheroes. We want villains and heroes, exposés and climaxes. We love the moment when the character “becomes” who they are: the brave, defining, triumphant moment. But Alcott and Keegan understand a deeper truth: most defining moments do not create character.

They reveal it.

Alcott’s March sisters are not heroic figures. They are not storming battlefields. They are arguing about gloves and vanity, scolding one another, failing, repenting, trying again. Their moral life is like the ordinary life most of us actually live: full of jealousy, impatience, pride, resentment, and fatigue. Their moral anchor is their mother Marmee, but she is not a plaster saint floating above human weakness. She is a woman who admits that she is still struggling; That she is still working on mastering her own character. In her most famous confession, she tells Jo: “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo, but I have learned not to show it.”2

Puncturing the illusion that virtue is effortless, that sentence suggests that goodness is not innocence but the fruit of experience. It is learned. And it comes at a cost. At the novel’s very beginning, Alcott brilliantly makes the point. When Marmee encourages the sisters to give their Christmas breakfast away to a poorer family, it is not depicted as an easy virtue. It is a choice that costs the sisters something. They’re hungry. They notice their hunger. And yet they give their breakfast away. That, in miniature, is moral formation: you want one thing, your conscience another, and you must decide which will rule.

So, too, with Jo’s recurring attempts to tame her temper: her regret, her shame, her constant effort to master herself. Alcott refuses the post-modern fantasy of instant transformation through downloading an app. Her characters do not learn a lesson once to be cured forever. She shows them learning the same lesson again and again, because building character is not a switch you flip. It is a road you walk.

Keegan’s character Bill Furlong grows the same way, only without the voice of domestic authority guiding it. Bill does not have a Marmee. He has routine. He has work. He has memory. He has the quiet weight of a life built through responsibility. He rises early. He delivers coal. He provides for his wife and five daughters. He navigates the small social rituals of a town where everyone knows everyone, and politeness is a form of law. And under that everyday life, he carries the knowledge of his own precarious origin: son of an unwed mother, a boy who could easily have been shamed, discarded, and erased.

Keegan does not present Bill as a man whose character suddenly blossoms. She presents him as a man whose character has been forming for decades. He remembers Mrs. Wilson, the woman who sheltered his mother. He remembers what it meant for his mother to be shown kindness in a society prepared to punish her. That remembered kindness is not a “lesson” he was taught. It is an inheritance. It becomes, in the deepest way, part of who he is.

And then when human cruelty becomes visible, not as rumor, not as background noise, but as a human being in front of him, cold, terrified and desperate, Keegan’s point is the same as Alcott’s. When the moment arrives, when your character is tested, the choice you make will not be made from nowhere. It will be made out of what you have become.

Dot #2: Home as a Moral Classroom — and the Classroom’s Collapse

In Little Women, home is an institution. It is the novel’s moral engine. It is the place where one learns sympathy, responsibility, and gratitude. This is easy to miss in our own time because we tend to hear “domestic” and think “small,” “private,” “unimportant.” But for Alcott and a 19^th-century culture that placed women outside formal power, the home was not a retreat from moral life. Home was where moral life happened most relentlessly. It was where character was formed.

The daughter, Beth, illustrates how seriously Alcott takes “home.” Beth does not “achieve” in any public way. She does not conquer anything. She becomes, instead, the moral center of the family through attention and care: the one who notices, comforts, and quietly absorbs others’ burdens without demanding recognition. Beth’s goodness is not dramatic. It is gravitational.

Beth’s illness and death reveal Alcott’s moral imagination’s essence: her conviction that a life’s significance is not measured solely by public accomplishment. It is also measured by how deeply one has loved, how faithfully one has cared, and how consistently one has chosen gentleness over cruelty.

Keegan’s world contains a home too, but it does not trust the home as a protected moral space. Bill Furlong’s home is a place of love and decency, but it is also a place of risk. When Bill tells his wife Eileen about the suffering girl he has seen, she replies, “What has that to do with us?”

Alcott’s domestic sphere reinforces moral choice. Keegan’s domestic sphere complicates it.

Bill is a husband and father. His moral calculations are inseparable from his responsibilities. He knows what it costs to be vulnerable and to have people dependent on you. So, when he begins to see the injustice at the convent, he is not thinking only as a solitary soul. He is thinking as a provider. What happens if he speaks? What happens if he acts? What happens if he loses customers? What happens if his family pays the price?

Keegan’s genius is that she refuses to romanticize moral courage. She shows its weight. Bill’s dilemma is not staged as melodrama but as the painfully ordinary tension between doing what is right and protecting what is ours.

In Alcott, moral formation happens within a moral community. In Keegan, moral formation happens when the moral community has failed and the individual must decide whether to be shaped by the community’s silence or to break it.

Dot #3: Sympathy as Moral Knowledge

Alcott is often accused of sentimentality. But Alcott’s moral method depends on emotion because moral judgment without sympathy easily becomes cruelty. She assumes that we do not treat human beings justly unless we can feel their humanity.

Alcott encourages your sympathy by immersing you in the March sisters’ interior lives. She invites you to understand before you judge. When Amy burns Jo’s manuscript, Alcott does not condemn Amy as a villain. She lets you see the childish resentment that motivates her even as she makes you feel the devastation Jo experiences. Your sympathy becomes the groundwork for discernment. That is moral education, not by lecture, but by imaginative participation.

Keegan does something similar, but in a radically different key. Her prose refuses the emotional cues Alcott often supplied. She does not tell the reader what to feel. She does not underline the moment in red ink. She writes with restraint so severe it almost feels like silence. And that is precisely the point.

In Keegan, sympathy arises not from rhetorical flourish but from proximity. The suffering is shown plainly, stripped of decoration. The lack of commentary forces you to do moral work. You must supply the response. Along with Bill, you, too, must feel.

Keegan’s quietness is not minimalism for its own sake. It is a moral strategy. She writes like a person who understands that in a culture both wary and weary of instruction, the most powerful moral pressure is the one you experience as your own.

Alcott’s sympathy is warm, enveloping, and maternal. Keegan’s sympathy is stark, unadorned, and piercing. But Alcott and Keegan share the same conviction: the heart is not the enemy of moral judgment. It is one of its essential instruments.

Dot #4: Silence, Self-Governance, and the Moral Cost of Being “Good”

In Alcott, self-governance is a virtue. It is a way of winning moral victories that look, from the outside, like nothing at all. Jo learns when to restrain herself. Marmee restrains her anger. Meg restrains her vanity. Amy restrains her selfishness. Alcott celebrates restraint because she understands that the ability to hold one’s temper and curb one’s ego is not small. It is the difference between harmony and misery. Life is made or broken by “small things.”

But Keegan places that same ideal under terrible pressure. In Small Things Like These, silence is not merely personal restraint. It is a social system. It is the town’s operating principle. It is the grease that keeps the machinery running. Everyone knows, at some level, what happens at the convent laundry. People may not know details; they may not speak it aloud. But they know. They sense it. They feel it. But they avoid looking too closely.

Why? Because silence is rewarded; silence allows you to keep your business, allows you to keep your standing. Keegan’s moral vision and sense of character is unsparing: the town’s “goodness” is, in part, a performance. Politeness becomes complicity. Respectability becomes cowardice.

This is where Keegan exposes the limits of Alcott’s moral framework, not because Alcott is wrong, but because history has changed the moral landscape. There are moments when restraint is virtue, but there are also moments when restraint becomes cooperation with evil. Bill’s crisis, then, is not whether he recognizes injustice. He does. The crisis is whether he will break the silence when silence is the town’s currency.

In Alcott, character often means learning not to lash out; in Keegan, character means learning when not to remain quiet.

That shift is enormous. It is the shift between a world where moral improvement happens inside a basically decent order, and a world where the order itself is corrupt and therefore the person of conscience must rebel.

Keegan’s point is that Bill is not a Marvel movie hero. Bill is not charging barricades. He is not making speeches. He is simply doing the hardest thing many people will ever confront: refusing to participate in a lie.

Dot #5: “Small Things” as a Moral Theology

Although Keegan never quotes scripture, the phrase “small things like these” alludes to the parable of the servant in the Gospel of Luke (16:10): “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with very much.”3 Keegan wants you to realize that what matters most are not the grand gestures. It is the daily choices no one applauds.

In that sense, Keegan’s title could serve as a subtitle for Little Women. Because what is Little Women if not a book about small things? A sister giving away her breakfast. A girl swallowing a cruel remark. A mother confessing anger. A family learning to live with less. A child choosing generosity over pride.

Alcott’s moral theology of smallness is rooted in the domestic and Christian-inflected moral culture of her time. Virtue is often presented as a form of self-denial. Keegan’s moral theology of smallness is rooted in a darker world. Keegan’s world, our 21st^-century world, is a world where institutions that claim moral authority may themselves be abusive.

But both Keegan and Alcott converge on the same insight: moral greatness is not primarily a matter of grand achievement. To use a simple metaphor: most of life is not lived on mountaintops. It is lived in the valleys. It is lived in kitchens, workplaces, streets, and quiet rooms. That is where character is formed. That is where one’s moral life either grows or collapses.

Alcott shows virtue forming through repetition, supported by a community that values it.

Keegan shows virtue forming through repetition, threatened by a community that punishes it.

In Alcott, small acts accumulate into a life; in Keegan, small acts accumulate until one act becomes unavoidable.

Dot #6: Moral Memory and Moral Rehearsal

Alcott and Keegan show us how moral memory preserves emotional knowledge. Little Women preserves a record of how moral formation was imagined in a 19^th-century American home: the language of self-improvement, the belief that conscience can be trained, the assumption that family life is the primary school of virtue. Even when the March sisters fail, the culture around them assumes that failing is not the end. It is the beginning of learning.

Small Things Like These preserves a record of something else. It shows what moral courage looks like when society discourages it. It preserves a record of the way institutions can weaponize shame. It preserves the truth that evil often survives not because most people are actively cruel, but because most people are quietly afraid.

Alcott reminds us that moral life can be cultivated. Keegan reminds us that moral life must sometimes resist cultivation by the wrong hands. Both remind us that we are always being formed by something: by habit, by memory, by culture, by silence, by courage, by avoidance.

Dot #7: Not What to Think, but How to See

So, ending where we began, what is the “moral” of these two very different yet similar books? Or, phrased a bit differently, which is the “moral” book? Is it Little Women, with its explicit language of virtue, its domestic lessons, its motherly instruction? Or is it Small Things Like These, with its bleak landscape of complicity, its quiet rebellion against silence, its moral courage enacted without speeches?

Alcott helps you recognize the moral significance of ordinary life. She helps you see that self-governance matters. That virtue is practiced. That love is discipline. That the smallest acts, the tone of a voice, the gift of a breakfast, the restraint of anger, build character.

Keegan shows you that the ordinary is not always innocent. That quietness can be either virtue or cowardice. That self-governance without courage becomes complicity. That goodness is sometimes tested not by the temptation to do wrong, but by the temptation to do nothing.

Alcott shows how moral formation begins. Keegan shows what it costs when it is finally tested.

They also show that it’s not what you say that counts. Virtue is not revealed in words, but in action. When the decisive moment arrives, it will not ask you what you posted online or what you said you believed.

It will ask you what you did.

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

Do you read fiction?

Why?

It seems like a simple question; perhaps even a banal question. Yet at a recent luncheon when someone posed the question to the group, I was unable to answer it. Not because I didn’t have an answer. I found myself tongue-tied with too many answers, all of which were undercut by the fact that for the past many years, I have not read much, if any, fiction.

Which, upon reflection, puzzled me.

Once upon a time, I read fiction voraciously. It was a passion of mine. I began my professional career in Gannon University’s (nee College’s) English Department.

But then, as Mae West once said about her virtue, I drifted.

I became enmeshed in film and media studies, which led to an interest in advertising and marketing, and that led to a career in higher education enrollment management and senior administration.

I’ll not tire you with the details of the serpentine career path that led me to that luncheon table, unable to answer why people read fiction and why I now rarely do, but my stammering alerted me to an irony: all of the work I have been doing these past 10 years on The American Tapestry Project and its many off-shoots is predicated upon the notion that the current polarization in American society primarily results from Americans no longer agreeing about the meaning of the American story.

What is a story?

It is a fiction.

Which does not mean that it is false.

Sometimes stories are “truer” than history, if by history one means the “facts,” “just the facts, ma’am,” as Sgt. Joe Friday uttered on the old TV detective show Dragnet. I’m not interested here in an argument about the philosophy of history, but great stories, great fictions, begin where history’s accounts end. If you want to know the condition of life for middle-class American women in the mid-19th century that sparked the women’s movement, you can read historians like Barbara Welter and Lillian Faderman. But if you want to know what it felt like, if you want to experience its day-to-day emotional resonance, then you need to read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Welter, Faderman, and other excellent historians will tell you about it, but Alcott, like all great artists, doesn’t tell you about it. She shows you in a way that enables you to feel and sense it. She goes beyond understanding it intellectually, enabling you to experience the actual “fact” of the matter. Alcott brings it to life.

We don’t read fiction simply to be entertained, informed, or distracted. We read fiction because stories shape our moral awareness, preserve emotional memory, encourage empathy, and give meaning to ordinary experiences.

All of this was brought back to me through a gift this Christmas season from my sister-in-law Jill, who gave me a copy of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. Keegan’s short, spare novella, set in a small Irish town in 1985 during the weeks just before Christmas, offers a concentrated illustration of why fiction matters. The novel resonated for me because in 1985 in the weeks just before Christmas, I was in Ireland. It reminded me about something only the savviest travelers know: you can be in a place, visit its sites and monuments, and still miss “it.” You can be “in” a place, but to be “of” a place, you need to understand its people. That understanding only comes in two ways: 1) either from long residence and even then, as an Irish immigrant woman to America once told me, you can still miss it, or 2) through the eyes of an artist sensitive to their culture’s ways whose technical skill in whatever medium they choose allows them to share their insights.

Let’s connect some dots illustrating how Keegan is just such an artist: emotionally acute and a technical virtuoso of her medium short fiction.

Dot #1: People Read Fiction to Make Sense of Experience

In my The American Tapestry Project, I quote Joan Didion on why we tell ourselves stories:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live … The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with candy will lead the children into the sea. … We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or the moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely … by the imposition of narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.1

As we move through life, our experience is episodic, uneven, and often morally confusing. It can seem like, as Toynbee said somewhere about history, “just one damn thing after another.” We can’t bear that, so we tell ourselves a story about our experience to make it make sense. We do that almost unconsciously, but artists do it with intention. They seek the meaning in all that seemingly random activity. In their fictions, the best impose shape without falsifying simplicity. They do not simplify life so much as render life intelligible.

Without ever moralizing, without ever explaining, Keegan does that by showing us one life unfolding in a particular place and time. Keegan shows us Bill Furlong’s moral imagination forming and moving toward action after witnessing the cruelty the nuns of the Good Shepherd (a name rich in moral irony) inflict upon the poor, unwed mothers they keep virtually enslaved in the convent high on the hill just outside of town.

Such laundries were known as Magdalene Laundries; they took in unwed girls, fed and housed them through their pregnancy, then orphaned off their babies as the girls worked in torturous conditions to pay for their room and board. The laundries had existed for decades and decades. Furlong’s experience in 1985 was just before the convents were exposed for the cruelty they imposed, a cruelty that only survived because of a society-wide complicity of silence. Their exposure and that of the priestly abuse of young boys brought an end to the ancient partnership between church and government that ruled Ireland since time immemorial. Keegan’s story is the story of one man’s dawning moral consciousness and his decision to no longer be part of the conspiracy of silence.

But Keegan doesn’t tell it to you as I just did. She shows it as her novella follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in New Ross, through a handful of winter days. On the surface, very little happens: deliveries are made, family routines observed, weather endured. Small Things Like These opens with:

In October there were yellow trees. The clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.2

Yet this tight perspective allows Keegan to show how meaning quietly accumulates. The novel’s power lies in its rejection of spectacle. No superheroes here; just people. Just folks. In restricting her narrative to the ordinary actions of ordinary people, Keegan shows that moral significance does not require dramatic circumstances. It is already present in daily life, waiting to be acknowledged.

Because she portrays life as it is actually lived, Keegan draws you in. Most people do not see themselves as actors in epic plots. They experience life as participants in some version of a known routine in which they are constrained by custom, responsibility, and societal expectation. Small Things Like These reassures you that your life is not morally thin. On the contrary, it is precisely where ethical meaning takes shape. As Keegan shows when Furlong tries to tell his wife Eileen about the suffering girl he saw:

That night, in bed, Furlong considered going over no part of what he’d witnessed at the convent with Eileen, but when he told her, she sat up rigid and said such things had nothing to do with them, and that there was nothing they could do, and didn’t those girls up there need a fire to warm themselves, like everyone? And didn’t the nuns always pay what was owing and on time unlike so many who would put everything on the slate until you had to put the squeeze on, and there the trouble would come.3

Dot #2: People Read Fiction to Practice Empathy

Unlike history and social science, fiction places you inside another person’s consciousness. Empathy in fiction is not abstract sympathy; it is sustained attention to how another life feels from the inside. Keegan accomplishes this through restraint. Bill Furlong is not rendered psychologically overstated. His thoughts are simple, often inarticulate, shaped by memory rather than analysis. As Furlong thinks to himself while creaming the butter helping Eileen with the Christmas cake:

Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same or would they just lose the run of themselves?4

After he has seen the girl at the convent, you inhabit Furlong’s hesitations, his unease, his gradual awareness that something is wrong long before he can name it. When he encounters evidence of abuse at the convent laundry, you feel shock, confusion, and moral pressure with him.

As soon as he got into the lorry, he pulled the door closed and drove on. Further on the road, he realized he’d missed his turn and was heading in the wrong direction with his boot to the floor and he needed to tell himself to settle, and go easy. He kept picturing the girls down on their hands and knees, polishing the floor, and the state they were in.5

This is Keegan’s art at work. Empathy is not produced by argument. It is produced by proximity. You experience Furlong’s moral quandary growing not by being told about it, but by sharing it with him. Keegan never instructs you how to judge the Magdalene Laundries she has shown you. Like Furlong, she allows you to feel the cold, the hunger, the fear, and, most importantly, the weight of knowing something is wrong while recognizing the cost of acknowledging it. Fiction trains empathy not by telling us to care, but by making it difficult not to.

Dot #3: People Read Fiction to Explore Moral Questions Without Dogma

Fiction excels at moral inquiry precisely because it does not argue like philosophy or legislate like law. It dramatizes ethical tension but does not resolve it. Small Things Like These never presents a moral thesis. Instead, it stages a dilemma: What does one owe to others when social consensus depends on silence? Bill’s community is not ignorant of injustice. It is organized around not speaking about it. Keegan shows that moral failure often consists not of cruelty, but of accommodation. As with Mrs. Kehoe, owner of the restaurant Bill frequents with his employees, who asks Bill,

‘You’ll put me right if I’m wrong, I know, Bill – but did I hear you had a run-in with herself above at the convent?’ Furlong’s hand tightened round the change and his gaze dropped to the skirting board, following it along the base of the wall, to the corner. ‘I wouldn’t call it a run-in but I had a morning up there, aye.’ ‘’Tis no affair of mine, you understand, but you know you’d want to watch over what you’d say about what’s there? Keep the enemy close, the bad dog with you and the good dog will not bite. You know yourself?’6

You turn to fiction for this kind of moral exploration because it respects moral intelligence. Keegan shows how conscience develops under pressure, shaped by memory, fear, and responsibility. The reader is left to wrestle with the implications: What would I do? What have I already accepted? Where have I chosen ease over courage?

Dot #4: People Read Fiction to Experience Beauty and Pleasure

Even when fiction confronts painful subjects, readers are drawn to the pleasure of language and form. Beauty, in literature, is not decorative. It is a way of sharpening attention. Keegan’s prose is famously spare. Each of her sentences is almost a work of art unto itself. Every sentence carries weight; every image is earned. Her austerity creates its own kind of beauty mirroring the moral seriousness of the subject.

The rhythm of Keegan’s language slows the reader down. She wants you to linger, to notice, to dwell. This artistic discipline matters because Keegan resists moral sensationalism. She does not exploit suffering for emotional effect. Instead, she creates a style that honors the seriousness of her story. Keegan reminds you why literature endures: it creates conditions for reflection that the clash and bang some other forms of storytelling undermine.

In addition, for American ears accustomed to an Irish idiom that is a caricature of genuine Irish speech, Keegan is the authentic sound of Ireland. There is absolutely no blarney in her; her voice is the voice of Ireland.

Dot #5: People Read Fiction to Escape — and Return Renewed

Fiction offers a temporary removal from one’s own circumstances, but that removal is purposeful. It allows readers to return to their lives with an increased understanding.

Although rooted in a specific historical context, Small Things Like These does not feel remote. You recognize its dynamics immediately: the pressure to conform, the fear of social exclusion, the quiet bargains people make with themselves. In reading Keegan, one quietly engages in an internal moral review. You step into Bill’s situation, confront its costs, and then return to your own life with a heightened awareness.

This is not escapism as avoidance. If escape it is, it is escape restoring moral attention dulled by habit and inattention.

Dot #6: People Read Fiction to Understand How Societies Remember and Forget

Fiction often preserves forms of truth that official histories suppress. Like the novels of Toni Morrison, Keegan’s novella functions as cultural memory. The Magdalene Laundries existed for decades, supported by church, state, and community. Their cruelty was widely known and rarely challenged. Small Things Like These does not catalog facts; it restores the emotional reality of complicity. It shows how silence is maintained through politeness, gratitude, and fear of standing out.

Great fiction remembers what institutions prefer to forget or choose not to know. Like the novels of Morrison I mentioned a moment ago, her novel Beloved makes it impossible to rationalize away the horror of slavery. The most consequential work of fiction in American history is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which in the 19th century made it impossible for Americans to continue to be complicit in what James Madison called America’s “original sin of the African trade.” Great storytellers like Keegan, Morrison, and Stowe transmit moral knowledge across generations, ensuring that past failures do not become abstractions but remain, like a pebble in the shoe, irritants spawning moral awareness.

Dot #7: People Read Fiction to Feel Less Alone

Perhaps the quietest but most enduring reason people read fiction is recognition. Stories tell you that your unease, confusion, or moral hesitation is shared. Furlong’s uncertainty is profoundly recognizable. He is not sure what he can afford to do. He is not confident that action will be rewarded. He feels the weight of responsibility: to his family, his livelihood, and his place in the community. In reading Keegan, you recognize this tension because it is common. Moral life rarely presents itself as a clean choice between good and evil. It presents itself as a series of small compromises that slowly become character. Life, it turns out, really is all about the choices you make.

In sharing this experience, artists like Keegan reduce your isolation. She assures you that moral difficulty is not personal failure, but a common, universal feature of human social life.

Dot #8: Why ‘Small Things Like These’ Is an Ideal Example

Keegan’s novella, only 115 pages long, is a powerful example of why people read fiction because it is:

Short, yet morally expansive;

Quiet, yet ethically forceful;

Local, yet universally legible;

Restrained, yet emotionally exact.

Keegan shows that fiction does not need complexity of plot to achieve complexity of meaning. It needs only to show how people live, remember, and choose.

Dot #9: Why Fiction Endures

Keegan’s short novel reminded me why I once set out to make my life’s work the study of stories. I drifted for a while, a long while, as it turns out, but Keegan reminded me we read fiction because it performs moral and emotional labor that no other form reliably accomplishes. Stories, at their best, whether on the printed page, or in the sound-bytes of an audible book or podcast, or in the flickering images of a movie or TV show, make experience intelligible, inspire empathy, explore ethics without coercion, preserve cultural memory, and reassure readers that they are not alone in their moral uncertainty.

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is the work of a modern master. It reminds us that moral life is not formed by slogans or systems, but by remembered kindnesses, ordinary labor, and the courage to refuse silence when silence is easier.

In reminding me of my scholarly roots and the power of fiction, Keegan has prompted me to begin research on a new thread in The American Tapestry Project tracing what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the moral arc of the universe” through the canon of American literature from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation and Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of Captivity and Restoration … in the 17th century to the 21st century and Marylynne Robinson’s Gilead and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. She did that, in part, because in an interview when asked what work of fiction by another artist she would have most liked to have written herself, after demurring for a moment, she replied, “The Great Gatsby.”7

Andrew Roth, Ph.D., is a Scholar-in-Residence at The Jefferson Educational Society. Reach him at roth@jeserie.org.

Last week, we ended a lengthy series of Book Notes “Classics” about autumn harvest festivals, the origins and backstories of classic Christmas carols, a short history of “The American Way of Christmas,” and concluded with some observations about Robert Burns’ “Auld Lang Syne” in which Burns exhorts us not to forget old times, old friends, and in remembering them to “tak a cup of kindnesse.”

Which I hope you did.

But now –– I almost said “tis” (that’s the Burns’ influence seeping in) –– it’s time to set the “Classics” aside (at least for a while) and face the new year. I had originally intended to do that by sharing a new poet (or, at least, new to me) I found while sorting through the poetry shelves at Pressed, a local bookstore –– Brad Modlin.

This was going to be one of those short-short Book Notes in which I share a favorite poem or two by a favorite poet, but then I received an email from a friend in Cleveland sharing with me a post I had missed in the New York Times. So, this note will be a bit longer, but still under 2,000 words, including end notes and photo credits! Let’s first set the scene for Modlin.

The article in the Times I had missed was about the trove of recordings the 92nd Street Y had just released of poets reading their own work at the Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. [1] It contains several great vignettes, such as Tom Wolfe talking about not fitting in, Arthur Miller noting the need to remember the possibility of catastrophe, and James Baldwin describing how an idea comes along and then not suddenly but almost suddenly there’s this story “you gotta tell.”

In that Times article, what struck me in our news and information –– fake and otherwise –– drenched times were clips about two of my favorite writers –– Joan Didion and Mary Oliver. They were very –– that’s an understatement –– different people, but both touched on the same insight: the need to be present-to-the-present. As readers of these “Notes” know, I think the primary purpose of all art is to help us to be more present-to-the-present, or, using a phrase that has now sadly become hackneyed, to be here now. In our time, with our culture seemingly overwhelmed with the bleating and whining of an aged, petulant, and solipsistic adolescent, the need to be present-to-the-present acquires a sense of urgency.

For Didion, being present-to-the-present occurs only as an after-the-fact awareness resulting from the attentionnailing impact of a catastrophe. It’s that frisson –– that sudden, strong feeling; that emotional clutch –– that trauma induces that infuses much of her work with its signature neurotic energy. Granted, “her daughter’s grave illness and the sudden death of her husband” would stun even the staunchest stoic, but Didion’s awareness of the “ordinary,” which constitutes almost all of life, seems only to blossom into consciousness as she, like the rest of us when “confronted with sudden disaster, focuses on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell.” [2]

But it is those “unremarkable circumstances” –– those “ordinary moments” –– that are life.

If we miss them and are only alert to them when bludgeoned into awareness by catastrophe and disaster, then we’ve missed most of life. I think the hollowness that many sense at the center of much of Didion’s work results from her having missed the “ordinary moments.” Which is to say, results, in the final tallying, from her, distracted by the aberrant, having missed much about those “unremarkable circumstances” that make up her life and ours.

Fortunately, not everyone misses them. Three poets drawing our attention to the present are Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert, and Brad Aaron Modlin, each of whom gifts us “notes” (or poems) to help us to remember not to forget, as I once wrote long ago, a summer lakeshore’s breeze’s “fine saltshaker sifting sound.”

Mary Oliver said it better. You can hear her reading “Wild Geese” in the Times’ article linked in the End Notes.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. [3]

We’ve read more than a bit of both Oliver and Jack Gilbert these past five years in a number of Book Notes. I’ll neither explicate their work nor say much about them I haven’t already said in those Book Notes, but paying attention to the ordinary may never have been better “noted” than in Pittsburgh native Jack Gilbert’s “Highlights and Interstices.” Michiko referred to in the poem was Gilbert’s wife who died from cancer.

Highlights and Interstices 

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with that other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember. [4]

In this Note’s first or second paragraph, I began by saying I wanted to introduce you to a new poet I recently discovered. He is Brad Modlin, who I first found in an anthology “50 Poems to Open Your World” edited by Irish poet Padraig O Tuama. [5] Tuama offers a wonderful accompanying essay to each poem he includes; he mingles explication with his personal reflections in so fine a fashion the essay becomes a small work of art in its own right. As you know, that violates my sense that explication can kill a poem. I choose upon first, second, third and further readings until I think I’ve got it to let the poem speak for itself. Then, and only then, might I check to see what others have thought.

Modlin is that rare thing: a very readable academic poet. I say “rare,” but in fact there is more than one but still not very many academic poets worthy of a second or third reading. Modlin is a professor of creative writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney, where, as he says on his website, “he teaches undergraduates & grad students, coordinates the visiting writer’s series, & keeps ‘healthy’ snacks in his office filing cabinet.” [6]

Reading Tuama’s choice of Modlin’s work, I then purchased Modlin’s collection of poems “Everyone at This Party Has Two Names,” which begins with what I think one of the best short poems I have ever read helping one focus on the present: “What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade.” In it, Modlin notes how one day a gifted teacher threw away the lesson plan and helped her students understand how to pay attention –– how to be present-to-the-present.

What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else —

something important — and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something. [7]

Remember: Mary Oliver’s

“Instructions for living a life.

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.” [8]

Dr. Andrew Roth
Scholar-in-Residence
Jefferson Educational Society
roth@jeserie.org

Photo Credits

“Mary Oliver,” This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC
“Brad Aaron Modlin,” at Everyone At This Party Has Two Names: Brad Aaron Modlin available at Brad Aaron Modlin | Writer | Absent from Fourth Grade accessed Dec. 9, 2025.
“Jack Gilbert,” This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC

End Notes

1. Harris, Elizabeth A. and Aliza Aufrichtig, “Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut Had Something to Say. We Have It on Tape,” in The New York Times (Dec. 19, 2025) available at Hear James Baldwin, E.E. Cummings, Mary Oliver, and More - The New York Times accessed Dec. 22, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Oliver, Mary, “Wild Geese,” in Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (New York: Penguin Press, A Division of Random House, 2017), p. 347.
4. Gilbert, Jack, “Highlights and Interstices,” in Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 2017), p. 176.
5. O Tuama, Padraig. 50 Poems to Open Your World. (New York: W.W. Norton, Co., 2023).
6. You can find this and other musings by Modlin at “Brad Aaron Modlin” available at Brad Aaron Modlin | Writer | Absent from Fourth Grade accessed Dec. 22, 2025.
7. Modlin, Brad Aaron, “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade,” in Everyone At This Party Has Two Names (Cape Girardeau, MO: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2016), p.13.
8. Oliver, Mary, “Sometimes,” in Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), pp. 104-105.

Book Notes #213

You can say a lot of things about Roger Ailes, the sexual harassing [1] founder of Fox News, but the one thing you can’t say is that he was wrong.

Ailes, who, among other things, was the media consultant to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, is credited with saying that Nixon would be the last politician elected president. All the rest would be entertainers. Nixon has had nine or 10 successors (depending upon how we count President Donald Trump and his two non-consecutive terms). Some were more overt than the others, but all sported a dash of entertainer.

Gerald Ford never looked comfortable in front of a camera, but what we remember best about him is that disembarking from Air Force One, he fell down the steps. Jimmy Carter could play the country parson better than most country parsons and, of course, before he became a politician, Ronald Reagan was a highly accomplished Hollywood actor. Two of the nine, Reagan and Trump, were authentic media stars before they became politicians. Reagan made his mark in the movies (“Bedtime for Bonzo”) and on TV (“General Electric Theater” hawking General Electric appliances sauced with a dash of conservative bromides).

On TV’s “The Apprentice” Trump played the tycoon he only sort of was in real life. In “real life,” he tended to go bankrupt with startling frequency.

George H.W. Bush was a one-termer primarily because he couldn’t match Bill Clinton’s charm and never played the saxophone for Arsenio Hall, which Clinton did. The mediagenic Barack Obama rose to prominence on the strength of one televised speech and George W. Bush played “the good old boy” with folksy charm camouflaging his patrician pedigree and elite education (Yale BA in history and Harvard MBA). No one ever accused Joe Biden of being an entertainer, but one disastrous TV debate ended his career offering ironic if negative support for Ailes’ assertion.

Speaking of Ford, Ailes also originated the “Orchestra Pit Theory” of political news coverage. He thought the sensational always trumped (I use the verb intentionally) the important and factual. He quipped, “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?” [2] Actually, that is giving Ailes too much credit. William Randolph Hearst anticipated him by a century with “yellow journalism” (yellow because one of his tabloids was printed on yellow paper) as he gathered readers by taking them on a cruise through the sleazier realms of late-19th^-century America. Hearst was Fox News’ Rupert Murdoch before the Murdochs. We could go back as far as the venerable Benjamin Franklin, who pumped circulation for his brother James’ New-England Courant by penning witty and satirical newsletters critiquing the social issues of the time under the pen name Silence Dogood.

So, it seems the news has always had a dollop of the theatrical and entertaining about it. In the electronic era, however, “infotainment” now swamps the disinterested and nuanced treatment of information crucial to the survival of democratic government.

President Trump fleeing the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein by promoting false flag incursions into American cities reminded me of all of this — incursions which the electronic media treats as visual spectacles with little or no analysis of their Constitution-battering implications. For the mainstream media, which Trump accurately characterized as “lamestream,” it was all just a show much like the WWE wrestling Trump adores. His Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, co-owned WWE with her husband Vince McMahon. It is now owned by something called TKO Group Holdings, which is a subsidiary of Endeavor Group Holdings which is itself a part of a Matryoshka (nesting dolls) of interrelated investment groups. [3] Unraveling that thicket would test the wits of Hicks McTaggart, Thomas Pynchon’s latest schlemiel of a detective trying to unknot a knotted world’s labyrinth of conspiracies. [4] Adding another Pynchonesque touch to it, Vince McMahon departed the company in 2024 after a former employee sued him for sexual assault and sex trafficking her. [5]

You can’t make this stuff up, but in America in 2025, it happens every day.

As numerous Book Notes these past five years have noted, it has been happening for a long, long time. As long ago as September 2020, we discussed all of this in Book Note #25 reviewing Kurt Andersen’s “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire.” It can be found here. Multiple other Book Notes analyzing modern media’s affect upon the American psyche and American society have tried to parse how American’s abandoned, in Karl Rove’s memorable phrase, “the reality based world” to dwell in the mediasphere. [6] You can find them with a bit of scrolling here.

In a Book Note two weeks ago about ChatGPT, I mentioned Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” It is one of the foundational books necessary to begin to understand what modern media has done to the American psyche. In my The American Tapestry Project, when discussing mediated America, I introduce the topic with this slide:

Marshall McLuhan got a lot of things wrong (not as many as some of his detractors claim), but he got the big thing 100% correct: media are not neutral. I’m not going to turn this into a lecture on communications theory, but a medium (of which media is the plural) is a channel of communication connecting a message’s sender and receiver. McLuhan’s brilliant insight was to document that media (channels) are not neutral. They impose their own ways of seeing the world upon the message and shape how it is transmitted, received, and understood. They shape how the sender and receiver experience and understand the world.

Print is linear, sequential, and logical. It fosters argumentation, not in the sense of dispute, but in the sense of martialing evidence in support of a thesis. It is biased, if you will, toward fact and reasoning. In short, it is rational. Visual media, on the other hand, is imagistic. You know the cliché: a picture is worth a thousand words. In fact, it might take a thousand words to convey what an image can do in an instant. Images are all surface-level. Unlike print, they are not discursive and do not make an argument supported by nuanced evidence; that is, they do not advance a thesis. But they can make a point. Inherently emotional, they short circuit rational analysis replacing it with feelings, mood, and disposition. [7]

Daniel Boorstin’s 1962 “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America” took McLuhan’s premise as a starting point as Boorstin tried to understand how modern media images functioned. He discovered that contemporary society is increasingly dominated by visual images rather than a rational, discursive analysis of reality (pace Karl Rove). Boorstin’s thesis argued that images serve as powerful models, distorting our perceptions and understanding of the world. He said they find their most widespread usage in pseudo-events created solely for media consumption and distribution. Writing over 60 years ago, he used televised presidential debates as an example. In 1960, when candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon met in the first ever presidential debate, those who heard it on radio (which then was still a medium of some substance) thought Nixon had a better grasp of events and won the debate. But those who saw it on TV thought the handsome, articulate, and mediagenic Kennedy, who looked like a movie star, prevailed.

Image trumped substance.

Just as in Chicago in 2025, a town allegedly under siege by illegal aliens and other desperados. ICE is on the march and so, too, the National Guard. But amidst the siege, over 54,000 runners took part in the 2025 Chicago Marathon on Sunday, Oct. 12, with tens upon tens of thousands of peaceful spectators cheering them on. As the Chicago Sun-Times quoted one, “I’m so grateful to be in so many community spaces where strangers come together and support one another…the fact that we have people from across the world who will show up for an event like this in our city just goes to show that this (Chicago) is no ‘hellhole’”. [8]

So, who are you going to believe: random images of apparently illegal search and seizures, or your own lying eyes?

In the “Media, Media, Media” photo above, the figure in the middle is a statue of a cowboy at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. It portrays movie star John Wayne looking resolute and macho armed with a six-gun and rifle.

The utter image of a “cowboy.”

Except John Wayne was never a cowboy, and cowboys didn’t win the West.

Farmers won the West. If you’re going to use images to understand how the West was won, think “Little House on the Prairie” and wave after wave of farmers who settled the land.

John Wayne was actually from Glendale, California. His real name was Marion Morrison, the son of a pharmacist, and a football player at Southern Cal. When he hurt his back surfing and couldn’t play football anymore, Morrison and some buddies went across town to Hollywood to see if they could earn some beer money as extras. Strikingly handsome, the camera loved the young Morrison. After a few fringe appearances in minor films and a name change, he emerged from the cast of thousands of extras to snag a role in 1930’s “The Big Trail.” His star dimly glimmered throughout the 1930s, but in 1939 he got the lead in John Ford’s classic western “Stagecoach” and, as they say, the rest is history. In fact, Wayne and other stars like Gary Cooper and much later Clint Eastwood swamped the historical cowboys, who were actually migrant farm laborers of whom about 25% were Black Americans.

Image triumphed over reality.

Trying to ride that triumph, Barry Goldwater donned a cowboy hat and ran for president in 1964. Sixteen years later, another movie cowboy, Ronald Reagan, won the presidency.

Jumping ahead for a moment, in his 2011 “The Shallows,” Nicholas Carr analyzes the impact of the internet on human intelligence and our ability to think. Carr argues that the rapid flow of information and the emphasis on multitasking lead to a shift in our thinking processes, favoring shallow, scattered thinking over deep, focused contemplation. Carr thinks our brains are literally being rewired (reprogrammed) to value efficiency over complex, nuanced thinking. He believes this may diminish (has diminished?) our ability to think critically (analytically) and to experience emotional depth as we click from link to link in search of the latest buzz. Like McLuhan, and we will shortly see, Postman, he fears the efficiency above all else learning style of the computer age will thwart the literary mind’s ability to think inferentially and in depth.

Last February’s Book Notes #197, which can be found here. examined Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.” While in the process of researching a book on the impact of social media and the internet on American culture and politics, Haidt discovered what he called a profoundly disturbing correlation between the rise of mental illness among young Americans since 2012 and the introduction of the smartphone. As I have pointed out in other spaces and Haidt agrees, the smartphone you carry in your pocket or purse isn’t a “phone.” It is a powerful minicomputer orders of magnitude more powerful than the computer guiding Apollo11 to the moon. The constant barrage of alerts and notifications fractures attention; carried around all day at school, it short-circuits student learning.

More critically, social media platforms with their “Like” and “Share” buttons have created a hellscape for young people seeking to craft a coherent sense of identity. Haidt details with copious data the correlation between smartphone usage and rising rates of hospitalization for self-harm and attempted suicide among the young. The impact has been particularly profound on young girls. In some ways, Haidt documents the impact of the merging threads of a web of mediated connections stemming from the power of images to sweep aside more nuanced and reflective learning and self-awareness. Consumed by the need for endless distraction (“entertainment”), large numbers of young people and increasingly their elders find it harder and harder to stay in the “reality-based world” as they slip away into an endlessly entertaining world of images and images and images.

Afterall, what is a “meme” if not a metastasizing image?

In his 1985 “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” which despite focusing on TV is, if anything, even more relevant today, Neil Postman takes McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message” a step further saying “the medium is the metaphor”: each medium supplies a way of seeing the world. As a result, it makes certain types of discourse possible and other kinds improbable. Postman argues that when the logic of entertainment (TV, and by implication all visual and digital media) becomes society’s primary way of receiving information, the serious discussion and analysis of current social issues – politics, education, news, religion – devolves into spectacle and triviality.

In books like “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” “Building a Bridge to the 18^th Century,” and “Amusing Ourselves to Death” Postman created the notion of media ecology: the view that technologies and media constitute environments that shape human thought and social organization – mediaspheres. The printing press invented typographic culture, which valued argument, factuality, and extended public reasoning. Print culture – books and newspapers – reared citizens who could think, deliberate, and act rationally. But the rise of visual culture, in particular movies and TV, transformed the sharing of information into entertainment. The newspaper became the newscast characterized by a series of visually vivid but context-light segments; politics became image driven (sound bites and debates judged as performances – see Nixon v. Kennedy in 1960 or Trump v. Biden in 2024. In fact, Trump, who is extraordinarily media savvy, refused to debate Kamala Harris a second time after she exposed his shallowness and contradictions in their first debate.) In Postman’s world, education becomes entertainment and religion and advertising blend into an infomercial on the TV chapel or tent revival of your choice.

In every domain of human activity Postman thinks TV’s aesthetic values – brevity, spectacle, and surface coherence – have driven print’s argumentative logic, evidence, and critical judgment out of the marketplace of ideas. Image triumphs over substance. Think for a moment about cable news network programming. First, they are not news programs, but “debates” in which Blowhard #1 posits an “idea” which Blowhard #2 immediately attacks with their own “idea” and Blowhard #3 talks over both trashing their nonsense. Information is not the point; spectacle is and its accompanying adrenaline rush as audiences passively watch the faux combat seeking some sort of escape from – escape from what? Their own dreary lives or their increasingly addictive need for more adrenaline-laced facts and factoids. In Postman’s view, TV, and its heirs (computer screens, smartphone screens, tablet screens: it’s screens, screens, screens all the time as more and more people seek an adrenaline fix) have reshaped all programming, even allegedly serious programming, to attract continual attention by reshaping content to emphasize affect, novelty, and spectacle.

Postman framed his concern for the culture damaging impact of this media fixation by comparing two dystopian dreamscapes: George Orwell’s “1984” in which an authoritarian regime maintains its power by censorship with Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” in which the authoritarian regime maintains its power by seducing its subjects with an endless stream of entertainment. Huxley imagined wall-mounted radios with picture screens (i.e., he imagined TV before TV existed) in each home seducing and subjugating a stupefied populace with trivial pleasures. Nowadays, the wall mounted fictional screens have become everyday realities accompanied by platoons of little screens distracting and amusing the masses with endless entertainment 24/7/365 on, if not infinite, innumerable screens offering every diversion imaginable.

What Postman did not anticipate is an authoritarian (or wannabe authoritarian) regime that does both, and doing both weaves them into one ongoing serial program of endless entertainment. From candidate Trump in fall 2024 swaying to the music of his own playlist as his adoring devotees vicariously joined him, to a flooding of the daily zone with innumerable actions that only a scant 10, 15, 20 or more years ago would have been unthinkable: extorting universities into meek submission; masked agents roaming American cities looking for illegal aliens and scooping up both illegals and citizens alike; the government shutting down; the military shooting boats out of the water under questionable pretense in the Gulf of Mexico (or is it the Gulf of America?); freeing former U.S. Rep. and serial liar George Santos because prison was taxing for him; and on and on. Government as an unending WWE world-wide professional wrestling show making even the NFL seem puny in comparison.

Large swaths of the populace endlessly diverted by the angst of an “other” they once called neighbor threaten the end of the American experiment while another large swath takes to the streets chanting “No Kings” while yet other swaths of even greater numbers – supine in their stupefied pleasure – watch the show in the comfort of their mortgaged living room in, as NBC once said, “living color.”

The medium is, indeed, the message, if not the metaphor.

If message, what message is it sending Americans in 2025?

If metaphor, what implied comparison to times past or times future does it foretell?

Or, phrased another way, what happens when the mediated world finally collides with Karl Rove’s “reality-based world”? Or, like what happened to Roger Ailes, what happens when someone with at least a toe still planted in reality calls them on their transgressions?

Stay tuned – as they used to say on all night TV infomercials: “All this and more!”

Author’s note: To learn more about mediated America, Larry Sabato will appear at the Jefferson Global Summit at 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 14, at the Jefferson Educational Society, 3207 State St.

Dr. Andrew Roth
Scholar-in-Residence
Jefferson Educational Society
roth@jeserie.org

Photo Credits

“Amusing Ourselves to Death,” This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA
“Neil Postman,” This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC
“John Wayne in Riders of Destiny (1933) 02.png” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:John Wayne in Riders of Destiny (1933) 02.png - Wikimedia Commons accessed October 18, 2025.

End Notes

See Grynbaum, Michael M. and John Koblin, “Fox Settles With Gretchen Carlson Over Roger Ailes Sex Harassment Claims,” The New York Times (Sept. 6, 2016) available at Fox Settles With Gretchen Carlson Over Roger Ailes Sex Harassment Claims - The New York Times and Gabriel Sherman, “Fox News Host Andrea Tantaros Says She Was Taken Off the Air After Making Sexual-Harassment Claims Against Roger Ailes,” Intelligencer (Aug. 9, 2016) available at Andrea Tantaros Made Harassment Claims Against Roger Ailes both accessed October 8, 2025.
Bogus, Carl T., “The Death of an Honorable Profession,” Indiana Law Journal (Fall 1996 v. 71 n. 4), pp.935-936 available at The Death of an Honorable Profession accessed October 8, 2025.
“WWE” in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, available at WWE - Wikipedia accessed October 12, 2025.
See Pynchon, Thomas. Shadow Ticket. (New York: Penguin Press, 2025).
Draper, Kevin, “Vince McMahon Cuts W.W.E. Ties After Sex Trafficking Accusation,” the New York Times (Jan. 26, 2024) available at Vince McMahon Cuts W.W.E. Ties After Sex Trafficking Accusation - The New York Times accessed October 12, 2025.
Suskind, Ron, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush” in The New York Times Magazine (October 17, 2004) available at Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush - The New York Times accessed November 17, 2024.
For a more complete discussion of this see Book Note #28 “Mediated America Part Two: Who Was Marshall McLuhan & What Did He Say?” available Roth Book Notes--McLuhan.pdf accessed October 12, 2025.
Washburn, Kaitlin and Casey He, “Runners and their cheerleaders turn out for Chicago Marathon: ‘This is our Super Bowl,’” in Chicago Sun Times (Oct. 12, 2025) available at Runners and their cheerleaders turn out for Chicago Marathon: ‘This is our Super Bowl’ - Chicago Sun-Times accessed October 18, 2025.

Two or three months ago, I read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance” in anticipation of writing a Book Note about it. Various other projects intruded, including my new series on the history of popular music as a window into the American soul. I never quite got around to writing the review. As things have a way of unfolding, this Saturday a book group to which I belong will be discussing the book. I thought this a good time to revisit it, highlight all the passages I had checked with pencil for a second look, and finally write the “note.”

Klein is an Opinion Page writer for The New York Times. His articles and podcasts tilt progressive, but he is meticulous about trying to give voice to all sides. If I had to slot him, I’d describe him as a progressive with centrist tendencies. A self-described progressive, Thompson previously wrote for The Atlantic and hosts a podcast. He now writes his own newsletter on Substack titled, simply enough, “Derek Thompson.” [1]

As I began to sketch an outline, I agreed with their warnings to Democrats and the progressive left that if they ever again expect to win elections, they need to accept their share of the responsibility for the difficulty Americans have building anything. Focusing on the housing industry but also glancing at other sectors of the economy, Klein and Thompson lay the cause of our economic challenges at the feet of over a half-century of well-intended but ultimately misbegotten regulations. I happen to think the financialization of the economy also contributed mightily to the fact that if today the United States wanted a new battleship, we would have to buy it from South Korea, but it’s obvious the regulatory octopus commands the stage stifling growth and innovation.

Sounding as if they had channeled their inner-Ronald Reagan, Klein and Thompson essentially prescribe a slightly camouflaged return to the neo-liberalism of Presidents Bush I & II and a well-known cast of others. The camouflage they deploy does contain more than a few progressive modifications of the neo-liberal world view. The result is that the sum of their point-of-view has merit. Their account of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s leadership rebuilding the I-95 bridge in Philadelphia presents a case study of how effective leaders get things done.

Yet, as I sat down to write this more detailed “note” about the topic, I found their prescriptions “wistful.”

Why “wistful”?

Perhaps “naïve” is a better word.

Why naïve?

Because the political solutions they prescribe assume that America’s polarized politics still function as it once, if inconsistently, did in a world of compromise and bargaining; in short, in a world of small “d” democratic politics.

In the past nine months, however, America has changed dramatically.

A year ago (written in 2024 and published in March 2025) when Klein and Thompson wrote the book, American politics, though polarized, were still marginally “normal.” Well, to be honest, I am not sure our politics have been normal since – then. Or maybe not since the 1980s when President Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill met to find a middle way.

Now, however, as Klein recently noted in “Stop Acting Like This Is Normal,” these are not normal times, and what we witness every day is not normal politics. [2] Or, as David Brooks, a center-right conservative said last April, “What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent, or Republican.” [3]

Although the current right-wing, neo-authoritarian administration controlling all three branches of the government leads the assault, left-wing progressives have not been innocent – note New York City’s current mayoralty race. Much of this assault is driven by AI-fueled social media algorithms that increasingly fracture our society into narrower and narrower pods of people nursing their grievances at the expense of the common good.

Setting aside the provincialism of our petty grievances, it is more than possible that AI or AGI (artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence) are really the two great menaces of our time.

In 500 years, if anyone still writes history, historians will deem the technological revolution in communications media the real story. Our sordid politics will merely be that larger story’s illustrative details.

Most people know what a printing press is, but how many understand that it exploded the medieval worldview and ignited religious (cultural) wars that decimated Europe for two centuries? It is not too much of a stretch to assert that our current cultural wars are the lingering aftermath of those religious wars.

Regardless, for us AI and social media’s civilizational transforming impact are the story of our times.

I have written about this in numerous Book Notes and intend to pick up the story of literacy’s decline in a future “note” about Neil Postman’s classic “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” In the meantime, you can learn more about the media revolution during Global Summit XVII on Friday, Nov. 14 when Larry Sabato discusses “The Medium Is the Message: Media’s Impact on National Politics.”

Speaking of AI, at my Tuesday morning breakfast group this week, amid the usual smorgasbord of topics, the conversation turned to the social impact of ChatGPT, AI, and their ilk. Several of the breakfast group members are lawyers. They noted the effect, mostly but not entirely negative, that AI, ChatGPT, and their brethren have had on the legal profession. As many of you reading this know, I spent my career in higher education. It, too, is a profession roiled by the influence of AI on teaching, learning, and scholarship. And, if you are a regular reader of these “notes,” you know I have written a great deal these past two years about ChatGPT. Those Book Notes can be found here.

In education at all levels, there is growing anxiety that AI and tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft’s “Co-Pilot,” Google’s “Gemini,” and others will completely reshape teaching and learning. Already studies reveal that students no longer know how to read in depth and inferentially. Even at the most academically elite institutions, faculty report that students literally cannot read the texts assigned. [4] There has been a precipitous drop in literacy since the introduction of the smartphone a mere dozen or so years ago. [5] Now, students simply submit “cut-and-paste” AI-generated articles as coursework. In an ironic turn of events in these high-tech times, many faculty have retreated to requiring handwritten assignments and tests to avoid the AI plague. It’s the return of the venerable “Blue Book.”

Almost all people outside of the language-dominated professions (education, law, journalism, etc.) are only now beginning to be aware of AI’s growing social influence.

As I mulled all of this over, I thought, “Aha! Here is an opportunity to share with my very knowledgeable audience just what an AI-generated essay looks like.” For those of you who were once teachers and college faculty but perhaps have had no experience with the likes of ChatGPT, the first exposure to the product might be a surprise.

Although it writes in a bland, almost “flat-voiced tone, “Chat” is good; at least at first glance, “Chat” is very good.

But as I have written elsewhere, “Chat” also makes mistakes, makes stuff up, and frequently fails to cite its sources.

If “Chat” is good, is this really a problem?

The answer to which is “Yes and No.”

The “Yes,” however, is colossal and the “No” a mere whisper. Colossal because if young people do not learn to read and think inferentially in school, then where will they learn it? If they never learn it, then democratic society is doomed. A functioning democracy requires — more accurately, demands — an educated citizenry. An educated citizenry is one that can think inferentially and shares a common knowledge base. AI eliminates an individual’s need to think and social media fractures them into ever smaller pods of narrowminded people incapable of thinking for themselves and sharing only social banalities (sports, fast food, and, well, and “what?”) in common with others outside their pod.

What is good about AI? Let me think about that a bit.

With those caveats in mind, I asked “Chat,” which I think of as a bright but at times unreliable research assistant, to write a 2,500-word review of “Abundance” citing any resources it consulted. It required very little thinking on my part, and unlike a shortcut-seeking undergraduate, I had actually read the book.

My assumption is that the average student wouldn’t challenge “Chat” as I did and would accept its first output about the topic. I, however, rejected its first effort and gave it several additional requirements to improve its work. We went back and forth through several iterations. It offered to produce the essay in any format I wanted. When we were finished, it produced the essay reprinted below.

The final product is enough to make an old professor weep.

While its language at times is a bit “studied” and hints at some intellectual posturing, it hits the high points and makes some interesting evaluative comments.

It is good. Based on having read over 10,000 student papers during the past half-century, minimally I’d put it in the top quarter; maybe even the top decile.

So, while not perfect, “Chat” is more than passable. Although it flirts with over-generalizing, it always lands on specific examples. Its conclusion hits the right notes.

Any teachers reading this who might have perchance read “Abundance,” what would you grade it? For the very particular among you, “Chat” did supply a bibliography for the references cited in the “notes.” If you want it, email me at roth@jeserie.org.

My final takeaway, since “Chat” will do most of the thinking for us at some point in the next (not 100 years) maybe 50 years (actually, I am “highballing” these numbers because I think that inflection point much nearer in time), what will humans do?

Oh, by the way, it took less than five minutes, including my old-fashioned challenges, for “Chat” to produce the following essay.

Note the change in style. I asked my editors to print it just as “Chat” wrote it.

Here is ChatGPT on Klein and Thompson’s “Abundance:”

An Analysis of Ezra Klein’s Abundance: What Progress Takes by ChatGPT [6]

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance: What Progress Takes (2025) represents a distinctive intervention in contemporary political and cultural discourse. Where much recent writing about American society has emphasized decline, polarization, and gridlock, Klein and Thompson attempt to reframe the national conversation around what they call an “abundance agenda.” Their central claim is that the United States is not doomed to scarcity, stagnation, or dysfunction, but is instead caught in self-imposed bottlenecks that prevent the realization of progress. If institutions could be reoriented to enable building, experimentation, and scaling of solutions, the authors argue, the United States could confront challenges like climate change, housing shortages, and health care costs with renewed optimism.¹

The book emerges at a moment of deep political pessimism. Trust in government institutions is near historic lows, populist movements have disrupted conventional politics, and major social indicators—from housing affordability to life expectancy—appear stagnant. In this climate, Klein and Thompson seek to inspire imagination rather than resignation. They argue that abundance is not simply a matter of material goods but a political orientation: a belief that the future can be better than the present, and that collective action can bring such futures into being.² As the Washington Post editorial board put it in its review, Abundance “offers Democrats, and indeed anyone worried about the future of liberal democracy, a new way to think about growth, justice, and hope.”³

Scarcity and the Politics of Fear

A recurring theme throughout Abundance is the contrast between scarcity and abundance as political frameworks. Scarcity, Klein and Thompson argue, is the mindset that dominates American politics today. It is visible in budgetary “pay-fors,” in zero-sum arguments about redistribution, and in the way policy debates are framed as questions of dividing limited resources rather than expanding overall possibility. Scarcity breeds defensive politics, in which parties fight over the scraps of a shrinking pie rather than collaborating to enlarge it. In this sense, the authors suggest, scarcity is not merely an economic condition but a cultural and ideological stance.⁴

The scarcity mindset has been particularly evident in debates about entitlement reform, immigration, and higher education. Politicians often warn that the Social Security trust fund will “run out” by a given year, or that immigrants will “take” jobs from native-born workers, or that expanding access to college will “dilute” its value. Each of these arguments assumes a world of fixed, limited goods. Yet, as Klein and Thompson argue, history shows that when societies invest in infrastructure, education, and innovation, the pie can in fact grow dramatically.⁵ The post-World War II boom, which combined government investment in highways and research with rapid expansion of higher education, is presented as an example of abundance politics in action.⁶

The scarcity mindset also contributes to polarization. When groups believe resources are fixed, they are more likely to perceive others’ gains as their own losses. This zero-sum mentality feeds resentment and erodes trust. By contrast, an abundance agenda encourages the belief that progress is possible without undermining others’ well-being. Abundance thus offers not just an economic framework but a potential antidote to social fragmentation.⁷

Institutional Bottlenecks and the Failure to Build

A central claim of Abundance is that the United States possesses the technological and financial capacity to solve many of its major problems, but that institutional bottlenecks prevent these solutions from scaling. Klein and Thompson describe a paradox: “abundance in theory but scarcity in practice.”⁸ This is perhaps most evident in housing policy, where restrictive zoning laws and local veto points prevent the construction of sufficient housing units even as rents and homelessness soar. Despite overwhelming evidence that increasing supply lowers costs, NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) politics consistently block projects.⁹

Health care provides another example. The United States spends far more per capita on health care than any other developed country, yet outcomes are often worse. Klein and Thompson argue that this is not primarily a technological failure—American medicine is among the most advanced in the world—but a problem of political will, regulatory capture, and fragmentation of delivery.¹⁰ Similarly, in climate change policy, renewable energy technologies have become dramatically cheaper, but permitting delays and fragmented regulatory systems slow their deployment.¹¹

This argument resonates with themes in contemporary political science. Francis Fukuyama has described the United States as suffering from “vetocracy,” a system in which too many veto points prevent decisive action.¹² Legal scholar Ganesh Sitaraman has likewise argued that the U.S. political system is designed for stability but has become paralyzing in the face of modern challenges. Klein and Thompson’s contribution is to frame this not only as a problem of governance but as an obstacle to abundance itself. Institutions designed to protect against overreach now prevent society from building what it desperately needs.

Abundance and the Progressive Imagination

One of the most distinctive features of Abundance is its attempt to reframe progressive politics. Klein, long associated with the center-left through his work at Vox and The New York Times, and Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic, argue that progressives have become trapped in defensive politics. Too often, they write, progressives focus on protecting existing programs or preventing harm rather than articulating bold visions of the future. This defensive posture reflects the scarcity mindset: the belief that resources are too limited, the opposition too strong, or the politics too intractable to imagine real transformation.¹³

Abundance, by contrast, offers a positive agenda. Rather than asking, “How can we prevent things from getting worse?” progressives should ask, “What can we build to make things better?” This orientation echoes strands of American political thought from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to John F. Kennedy’s moonshot. In both cases, leaders articulated visions of abundance—whether in social welfare or space exploration—that galvanized public imagination. Klein and Thompson argue that progressives today must recover this tradition.¹⁴

The abundance agenda also seeks to bridge divides within progressive politics. Some progressives emphasize redistribution, while others stress growth. Klein and Thompson argue that this is a false dichotomy: abundance requires both. Growth without equity fuels resentment and inequality, while equity without growth risks stagnation. Only by combining the two—building more housing, decarbonizing the economy, expanding access to health care—can society achieve genuine abundance.¹⁵

The Role of Technology and Innovation

Technology plays a central role in Abundance. The authors are not techno-utopians, but they insist that technological innovation is essential to solving the problems of the twenty-first century. For instance, they highlight how solar and wind energy have become cheaper than fossil fuels, offering the potential for rapid decarbonization. Yet without institutional reforms to speed permitting and construction, these technologies cannot scale quickly enough to meet climate targets.¹⁶

Similarly, Klein and Thompson discuss biomedical innovations, from mRNA vaccines to gene therapies, which demonstrate the power of science to deliver breakthroughs. The rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines illustrates how coordinated investment and regulatory flexibility can accelerate progress. But the slow rollout of testing and the uneven distribution of vaccines show how institutional failures can squander technological advances.¹⁷

The authors thus propose a dual strategy: embrace technological optimism while reforming institutions to enable scaling. In this, they echo arguments from writers like Mariana Mazzucato, who has emphasized the role of the state in shaping markets and driving innovation.¹⁸ For Klein and Thompson, technology alone is insufficient; it must be paired with governance structures that facilitate experimentation, investment, and deployment.

Critiques of the Abundance Framework

While Abundance has been praised for its optimism, it has also attracted critiques. Some reviewers have suggested that the framework risks oversimplification. Noah Smith, for instance, argued that while the abundance agenda is appealing, it may underestimate the depth of political polarization and the difficulty of reforming entrenched institutions.¹⁹ Others have noted that abundance rhetoric can obscure questions of power: who decides what is built, who benefits from growth, and who bears the costs.²⁰

There is also the risk that abundance becomes a slogan rather than a program. As critics point out, simply declaring the need for abundance does not resolve the political coalitions, trade-offs, and conflicts required to achieve it.²¹ Without clear policy roadmaps, abundance risks remaining an inspiring but vague concept. Nonetheless, Klein and Thompson attempt to ground their framework in concrete policy areas—housing, climate, health care, and immigration—where abundance politics can be enacted. Their proposals may not resolve all challenges, but they offer a direction for reimagining politics.

Conclusion: The Promise of Abundance

Abundance: What Progress Takes is not merely a policy book but a cultural intervention. It seeks to change how Americans think about politics, shifting from scarcity and defensiveness to abundance and imagination. In this sense, it belongs to a tradition of works that aim to reshape political imagination, from FDR’s Four Freedoms to Kennedy’s New Frontier. Klein and Thompson’s distinctive contribution is to link this tradition to the practical challenges of twenty-first century governance: how to build more housing, decarbonize the economy, reform health care, and unlock technological potential.

The book’s strength lies in its optimism. At a time when declinist narratives dominate public discourse, Abundance offers a reminder that the United States has repeatedly reinvented itself through investment, innovation, and reform. Its weakness lies in its vagueness: the abundance agenda is easier to describe than to implement. Yet perhaps this is precisely the point. Before political change can occur, cultural change is necessary. Before policies can be enacted, imagination must be rekindled. In this sense, Abundance succeeds: it invites readers to see scarcity not as destiny but as a political choice—and abundance as a future worth fighting for.

Dr. Andrew Roth
Scholar-in-Residence
Jefferson Educational Society
roth@jeserie.org

Notes

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance: What Progress Takes (New York: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2025).
Klein and Thompson, Abundance, 15–20.
Editorial Board, “Abundance Is What Democrats Need,” The Washington Post, July 3, 2025.
Klein and Thompson, Abundance, 34–41.
Klein and Thompson, Abundance, 59–61.
Ibid., 72–75.
Ibid., 85–92.
“Build, Interrupted: A Conversation with Ezra Klein,” 99% Invisible, Episode 629, 2025.
Foreign Policy Staff, “The Book that Wants Progressives to Build More,” Foreign Policy, May 9, 2025.
Klein and Thompson, Abundance, 121–129.
Ibid., 140–148.
Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 487.
Klein and Thompson, Abundance, 163–168.
Ibid., 172–177.
Ibid., 180–188.
Klein and Thompson, Abundance, 195–202.
Ibid., 210–215.
Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State (London: Anthem Press, 2013).
Noah Smith, “Book Review: Abundance,” Noahpinion, Substack, May 12, 2025.
Review in Boston Review, “Who Decides What Counts as Abundance?” August 2025.
Smith, “Book Review: Abundance.”

****

What did Shakespeare say in “The Tempest” about a brave new world? With a wee bit of paraphrasing, the Bard said,

Oh wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous AI is! Oh brave new world,
That has such (what exactly is a large language learning model?) in’t.’

Photo Credits

“Ezra Klein in 2020 cropped.jpg” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:Ezra Klein in 2020 cropped.jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed October 2, 2025.
“Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, cover,” at Ezra Klein Books available at Abundance by Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson - Ezra Klein Books accessed October 2, 2025.
“ChatGPT circuit board (52917380933).jpg” at Wikimedia Commons available at File:ChatGPT circuit board (52917380933).jpg - Wikimedia Commons accessed October 2, 2025.

End Notes

Thompson, Derek, at “Derek Thompson” on Substack available at About - Derek Thompson accessed October 2, 2025.
Klein, Ezra, “Stop Acting Like This Is Normal,” The New York Times (September 7, 2025) available at Opinion | Stop Acting Like This Is Normal - The New York Times accessed October 2, 2025.
Brooks, David, “What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal,” The New York Times (April 17, 2025) available at Opinion | What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal. - The New York Times accessed October 2, 2025.
Horowitch, Rose, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” The Atlantic (November, 2024) available at The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books - The Atlantic accessed October 4, 2025.
Harrington, Mary, “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good,” The New York Times (July 28, 2025) available at Opinion | How Smartphones Are Breeding a New Kind of Inequality - The New York Times accessed October 4, 2025.
ChatGPT’s essay is on my personal account at OpenAI which is not available to the general public.