Celebration of the semiquincentennial will not be complete without remembering the only president of the United States born on the Fourth of July: Calvin Coolidge, our 30th president, who was born on July 4, 1872.

It is charming that Coolidge was born on the date of the American Declaration of Independence that we have been celebrating for 250 years now. It is almost providential when we reflect that he joins John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln as a president who emphatically took all his political bearings from the principles of the Declaration; and he joins Adams and Lincoln as a president who became one of the great expositors of those principles.

Like the 6th and 16th presidents, Coolidge saw all of America’s blessings of liberty flowing essentially from the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. And like his two predecessors, he understood that when we cease to understand and live by these principles, we will cease to enjoy those blessings as a people.

“Silent Cal,” as Coolidge came to be known, fondly and otherwise, was actually quite eloquent. He was a student of Demosthenes and Cicero from his early days. In the evenings of his mature years, he enjoyed translating selections from Cicero’s orations. He regarded his Latin as serviceable for translation but not strong enough for composing. He also enjoyed translating Dante. A foreign diplomat quipped that Silent Cal could be “silent in five languages.” His English prose was known during his day, even among his critics, for its clarity and economy. He loved the poetry of Homer, Shakespeare, and the Bible.

Coolidge was president when the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence came about 100 years ago on July 4, 1926. The speech he gave to commemorate the occasion is the one most remembered for its exposition of the principles of the American Revolution. He delivered the speech at Independence Hall on July 5. He called it “The Inspiration of the Declaration.”

About the significance of the Fourth of July for Americans and the world, he said on that occasion, “It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history.” The principles themselves were immortal and universal. What was new was proclaiming them as the grounds of the political life of a particular people. As Coolidge stated:

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world.

The passage most frequently quoted from Coolidge’s speech, for good reason, is this:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary.

This passage is so deserving of being requoted and remembered because already in Coolidge’s time—and continuing in our own time—the doctrine had come to prevail among the most authoritative intellectuals that there were no final truths that could be guides to political and moral life. There was just “progress” or “history,” which ultimately came to mean there is just “change.” As a result, eminent progressive historians like Carl Becker could sneer that “To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.”

Progressive historians caricatured Coolidge as being a tool of big business and believing that the accumulation of wealth was the ultimate purpose of America and the ultimate end of life. To the contrary, as Coolidge insisted:

We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy.

To introduce yourself to Calvin Coolidge, you can’t do better than to start with his own Autobiography, written with his characteristic clarity and economy soon after he was president. Then, to immunize yourself against the distortions of the progressive historians, you should read the great Tom Silver’s book, Coolidge and the Historians, republished by Hillsdale College Press. As Amity Shlaes (author of the highly acclaimed Coolidge) says of it:

This is the volume that turned America’s eyes to a forgotten president. Through accurate and precise scholarship, Silver showed just how wrong the old evaluation of Coolidge was. In the process, Silver also demonstrated the power of a substantive rebuttal—to change minds, and to change history. Coolidge and the Historians is must reading for anyone interested in Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge was a humble man—a worthy American hero who well understood and eloquently articulated the importance of heroes in a few fine speeches:

Great men are the ambassadors of Providence sent to reveal to their fellow men their unknown selves…. When the reverence of this nation for its great men dies, the glory of the nation will die with it…. It is only when men begin to worship that they begin to grow. A wholesome regard for the memory of the great men of long ago is the best assurance to a people of a continuation of great men to come.

The post Calvin Coolidge and the Fourth of July appeared first on The American Mind.

I live in Loudoun County, Virginia, about a mile from the largest concentration of data centers on earth, which has given the online discourse around them a vaguely odd character. At worst, they are large concrete squares that are indistinguishable from any other industrial park, except that they produce less noise or pollution. My utility bill is ordinary, if slightly below the national average, and my roads are as nice as any in the country. But to hear online activists talk, my community should be on the verge of running out of water.

Loudoun County hosts roughly 200 operating data centers; Northern Virginia’s cluster draws some 4,140 megawatts, more than double Beijing’s, the world’s second-largest market. Since the data centers began being built in the late 1990s, Loudoun County has been able to spend lavishly on infrastructure and public schools, all while cutting its real property tax rate. In fact, the county calculates that every dollar of services it provides the industry returns some $26 in taxes.

When I noticed the glaring difference between this reality and the online discourse, I realized that this is a recurring pattern I have seen my entire life. When I was growing up in the early 2000s, there was a set of beliefs in American society that were viewed as non-political and weren’t debated by either side. They acted as an ideological background radiation of sorts. I like to call this the “Boomer Truth Regime,” after both the Boomer generation and the boom time after World War II.

You can take the American 20th century as one huge emotional and moral arc. Starting in 1900 and continuing for the ensuing 45 years, our country had its optimism for the future hammered out of it. It was in this era that Jim Crow intensified, the Depression battered the country, and we fought two world wars.

But beginning in the 1940s, American society, and to a lesser extent the whole world, began a process of upward movement—and as a result acquired a feeling of almost inevitable, rapid, transformative salvation. Start with almost any evil, real or perceived, of that century—sexism, colonialism, segregation—and trace it forward, and you will find a satisfying narrative conclusion by 1999.

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel called the resulting mood “indefinite optimism”: the belief that things simply get better without anyone having to decide how. And so we bundled all the changes of that era together and sanctified the whole package. For decades, it has been taken for granted that basically all societal and cultural shifts in the second half of the 20th century were good—and that they existed as a single, inseparable package.

Among the sanctified conclusions was not only indefinite optimism for the future but also a deep fear of the dangers of new technology. In short, the Boomer Truth Regime permanently fused the word “machine” with the word “gun,” as they were in the world wars. This was largely a traumatic response to the misuses and abuses of the cornucopia of technology by tyrants during that era.

In the early 20th century, the world had at its fingertips an inventory of wonders such as nitrogen fixation, airplanes, automobiles, submarines, rockets—and every one of them was first used at scale for murder. So when our society looks at a new power, what we see is the face of the murderer. We see Hiroshima, or the tank, or the B-2. It is this same reflex that has killed the creation of new nuclear or hydroelectric power, because we have been taught to be more afraid of the side effects than excited about the potential.

The Boomer Truth Regime decided that anything capable of doing huge things is, on its face, terrifying and must be vigorously opposed.

You can see the degree to which this belief is highly influential in America and other Western countries in the polling data around AI. In Ipsos’s 2026 global survey, 83% of Chinese respondents and 79% of Indian respondents say AI products make them excited; in the United States, the figure is only 33%, compared with 29% in Britain. Or take, for example, that when asked whether AI’s benefits outweigh its drawbacks, 85% of Chinese respondents and 80% of Indians say yes, compared to only 38% of Americans. Pew also finds that about half of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI, and only one in ten is the reverse.

It is possible that the data centers in Loudoun County will begin to drive up costs. Virginia’s own legislative auditors project that data-center growth could add $14 to $37 a month to a typical residential bill by 2040—but the size of the effect is nowhere near the emotional reaction you see in American society right now. The same report found that data centers currently pay their full cost of service and have no history of cost-shifting to households.

For decades, doubting any piece of the Boomer Truth Regime package was the equivalent of a kid complaining about his bedtime. Dissidents could say whatever they wanted, in whatever register they wanted, precisely because there was no chance the thing they were calling for would ever be implemented. Every critique of the Boomer Truth Regime was essentially powerless. But that era will soon end as the generation raised in the 21st century inevitably takes over. It isn’t that younger generations stopped believing in pieces of the package, but that the idea of viewing it as a sanctified whole is dissolving.

And when the sanctity eventually falls away, everything will be reexamined at once—not just the parts you dislike. The whole package, from nuclear power to civil rights law, will be on the table in our lifetime. It is up to us to defend the parts we value and reject the parts we don’t.

One part I reject is the idea that we can no longer, and should no longer, do incredible things. AI is one such thing. It of course has dangers, but it also has almost incalculable potential—and I know which side I’m betting on.

The post The Crackup of the Boomer Truth Regime appeared first on The American Mind.

When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani referred to the African National Congress’s (ANC) Freedom Charter as a key inspiration during his inaugural address, it prompted a pointed question: Will New York City undergo “South Africanization” under his watch?

If Afghanistan is famously referred to as the graveyard of empires, South Africa surely qualifies as the laboratory of empires. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the phenomenon of toppling statues, which originated in South Africa with the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement. At the University of Cape Town in March 2015, Chumani Maxwele threw human feces at the bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes, the 19th-century prime minister of the Cape Colony, sparking a movement that eventually succeeded in having the statue removed. From there, this phenomenon spread to campuses across the West, becoming one of the defining political spectacles of the following decade.

Whether it’s cash-in-transit heists in Italy, the escalating theft of copper cable in the United States, Mamdani urging New Yorkers to limit their air-conditioning use to support a strained power grid, or increasingly brazen race-based policies in Britain, Westerners can’t help but notice that their countries are becoming more like South Africa.

To understand the consequences of this trend, we need to ask: What does South Africanization look like as a political phenomenon and as a policy framework in practice?

De-development in South Africa

What one might call South Africanization is characterized by chronic decay of infrastructure and public spaces due to a lack of maintenance and the deterioration of state capacity to provide basic services. Parks, monuments, cemeteries, and sidewalks are the canaries in the coal mine. They start being stripped of all metal objects, then become polluted, neglected, and unsafe. Even war memorials are not spared, being the most visceral example of a nation’s heritage literally being scrapped for drug money.

Recently, the South African X account Jozi vs Jozi went viral for effectively exposing the country’s urban decay under ANC rule by comparing Google Street View images of Johannesburg from the mid-2000s with those from 2026. Shocking, even apocalyptic, scenes of urban degradation stunned onlookers worldwide. South Africa appears to have introduced a new category to geopolitics: a de-developing nation. To quote a popular South African joke: “What did South Africans use before candles? Electricity.”

South Africanization also entails a fusion of the ruling party and government, blurring the dividing lines between them. The vehicle for the ANC’s iron grip on state power for the past 30 years has been the policy of “cadre deployment.” This is when party loyalists are inserted into every level and facet of the government and public service apparatus.

Beyond rewarding loyal party members, family, and friends with sinecures, cadre deployment primarily serves to bring the government leviathan under the ruling party’s total control. This process of state capture has been one of the top priorities, if not the top priority, of the ANC since gaining power in 1994. This helps explain why some interpret criticism of the ANC as criticism of the country, and why threats to the ANC’s power are regularly framed as threats to South Africa—even as “treason.”

Unsurprisingly, corruption has become an embedded feature of the system. As investigative journalist James Myburgh has noted, “The point about corruption in South Africa is not that it is and was condoned, but that it has become compulsory. You can’t legally do business with the state or state-owned enterprises without essentially cutting in some or other ANC faction.” This state of advanced kleptocracy, where corruption becomes so normalized that businesses budget for it under “facilitation fees,” logically flows from the policy of cadre deployment. The ANC is fundamentally incapable and unwilling to effectively fight corruption, because by attacking corruption, they would attack themselves, and their allies would be caught in the crossfire.

Then there is the ever-increasing centralization of state power. The ANC has an insatiable drive to expand the government’s power, influence, control, and reach. This is the obligation imposed on them by their Cold War-era National Democratic Revolution (NDR) dogma. The ANC government has relinquished power only by a court order or, more commonly, as a result of the deterioration or even collapse of government capacity.

The increasing centralization of state control manifests itself in the vast and ever-expanding social grant patronage system, which has rendered more than 50% of citizens dependent on some form of government assistance. The emergence of this welfare-industrial complex is by design. The ANC has no incentive to combat poverty or the unemployment rate, which currently exceeds 43%, because a decrease in either would result in less state dependence among the populace. This dependence, in turn, helps to strengthen the party’s grip on power through the electoral leverage it provides, allowing the NDR to march on unimpeded.

Finally, there is the relentless and fanatical commitment to a top-down race-based social engineering agenda. The ANC refers to this discriminatory program as “transformation,” which demands that every facet of society, from corporate boardrooms to primary school sports teams, be altered to reflect the demographic makeup of the national population, under threat of government sanction. The ANC prioritizes this racialist agenda—the right to discriminate “positively”—above even the pressing need to provide basic services such as an uninterrupted electricity and water supply.

This racialist agenda serves as a moral veneer to facilitate and also obscure the other features of South Africanization. Under the guise of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), those with the right skin color, family ties, political connections, and loyalties obtain government jobs, tenders, and positions on corporate boards. BEE and transformation are the moral cudgels used to justify cadre deployment, which is the vehicle facilitating the NDR. All of this leaves a trail of de-development in its wake.

The Zimbabwe Endgame

If the ANC’s policies are inspiring Western politicians, which regimes and policies inspire the leadership of South Africa? You don’t need to dig deep to find the answer. Speaking in Zimbabwe in 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa heaped praise on the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front’s (ZANU-PF) policies, labeling the late dictator Robert Mugabe’s violent land confiscations as “ambitious” and “essential.” He emphasized that the South African government seeks to copy ZANU-PF’s policies so that the country can be more like Zimbabwe.

The Mugabe regime’s land policies of the early 2000s involved chaotic and often violent invasions and seizures. Private property rights were severely violated, as thousands of white farmers and their families were driven off their land and attacked. Some were even tortured and murdered. Mugabe’s Fast Track Land Reform Programme resulted in mass human rights violations and the collapse of the Zimbabwean agricultural sector and economy. This caused millions of Zimbabweans to flee ZANU-PF’s “utopia,” some swimming across crocodile-infested rivers to reach South Africa.

Under Mugabe, the breadbasket of Africa was turned into the continent’s basket case. South Africanization is a stepping stone toward the final phase of de-development: Zimbabwefication.

From Disorder to Order

Fortunately, the ANC’s modus operandi contains the seeds of its own defeat. Over the past few decades, the South African government’s capacity and reach have been collapsing under the weight of chronic mismanagement, the rejection of merit-based appointments, skyrocketing expenditure, endemic corruption, abysmal service delivery, and a shrinking tax base.

From the dust of this collapse, decentralization of power, state-proof solutions, private-sector initiatives, community-based organizations, and a selfdoen (do-it-yourself) ethos are emerging as counterweights. Where government fails, civil society organizations, the private sector, and communities are picking up the slack. In doing so, they are creating growing oases of order amid a desert of disorder, to borrow Professor Koos Malan’s metaphor.

Notably, both the virtuous and the nefarious sense opportunity as a power vacuum opens due to deteriorating state capacity. It is therefore not surprising that both organized crime and organized communities are thriving in the “new” South Africa. Additionally, the South African private security sector has become one of the largest, most innovative, and competitive globally, with personnel significantly outnumbering the police and military combined. Private sector and community-based organizations are seeking to fill the gap faster than criminals can. Fortunately, that seems to be happening.

The bad news is that many Western nations seem doomed to continue down the pothole-pocked road of South Africanization. The good news is that effective responses are already being pioneered and stress tested at ground zero in South Africa. My advice to Westerners is to start researching, reaching out, and taking notes from organizations like AfriForum and the Solidarity Movement, which are at the forefront of developing state-proof solutions to these trends.

South Africa is once again a new frontier, and on the frontier, not only surviving but thriving favors the bold.

The post How Third-Worldism Can Destroy the West appeared first on The American Mind.

Europeans often tease Americans that they live in a young country that’s barely 250 years old. But after spending two weeks traveling across the American East Coast as part of the U.S. Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program, I came away more convinced than ever that these clichés miss something essential. The United States is not a country without memory. Quite the opposite.

In America, storytelling is not reserved for intellectuals or academic elites. It is a civic practice woven into public life—the task of the people, done by the people, for the people. You are expected to know how to explain who you are, where you come from, and what you stand for. American institutions operate the same way.

Alongside fellow Hungarian colleagues, I visited sites dedicated to preserving the past, such as the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Department of the Interior. What struck me most was not simply the scale of these efforts, but the coherence behind them. Each featured an exhibit, collection, or carefully curated display explaining not only what the institution does, but why it exists. Perhaps that is the real difference between America and Europe.

In Europe, history is often treated as inheritance—something assumed, a given. In the United States, however, history must constantly be articulated, packaged, and retold. Identity is not passive; it is an active civic project.

Of course, this instinct can sometimes become excessive. Contemporary America is full of competing identity narratives, many of them divisive. And there certainly have been efforts to erase parts of American history that are deemed awkward, inconvenient, or too complex for the modern mind. But what deserves attention is the seriousness with which Americans preserve and communicate their national story—and they do it exceptionally well.

American museums are remarkably practical and accessible. They are designed not to overwhelm visitors, but to guide them. The exhibitions are clear, organized, and visually compelling. One leaves with the sense that the curators understand something very important: history that cannot be understood by ordinary people will eventually cease to matter. Simple, yet brilliant.

Another important difference is that many American museums, memorials, and historical collections rely heavily on private philanthropy, donations, civic support, and sales. Museum shops certainly exist in Europe as well, but the remarkable breadth and creativity of offerings in American museum stores reflect more than commercial abundance: they serve as hubs of cultural exchange, translating history, heritage, and collective memory into objects that can become part of everyday life.

Historical preservation is not viewed solely as the responsibility of the government, but as a shared cultural duty. Millions of Americans contribute financially each year to preserve and sustain the nation’s most important historic sites—a remarkable expression of civic pride and cultural stewardship.

Perhaps this is why so many Americans maintain a surprisingly vivid relationship with their national past. They encounter it constantly: in museums, monuments, archives, reenactments, public ceremonies, exhibitions, school trips, and civic rituals. History is not hidden away in academic institutions. It is integrated into everyday life. For all their supposed historical shallowness, Americans understand something profoundly important—and especially meaningful in the nation’s 250th year: a nation flourishes only when it continues to tell its story, renew its memory, and pass its ideals confidently from one generation to the next.

As a historian, I was naturally drawn to the vast collection of the Library of Congress, where countless books and manuscripts on Hungarian subjects conceal stories still waiting to be discovered. The library of the Daughters of the American Revolution appeals to me for a different reason: its rich trove of family histories preserves the individual threads that, woven together, form the fabric of American society across generations. And then there is the National Archives and Records Administration, whose holdings often contain the missing pieces of historical puzzles that connect America to my own Central European past.

As an overseas visitor from a landlocked country, I found the historical sites of the American East Coast, connected to rivers and the sea, the most captivating. The open-air exhibits at Jamestown Settlement include a pier along the James River and replicas of 17th-century ships. During my visit, only the Godspeed and the Discovery were on display, accompanied by a smaller fishing vessel—yet the exhibit offered something extraordinary. Standing aboard the ships, one cannot help but reflect on the hardships, determination, faith, and endurance of those who crossed the Atlantic in such remarkably small vessels. They ventured across the “sullen seas” toward the “dark forests,” as Jack London so evocatively described the New World. When we consider the magnitude of that journey, it is difficult not to feel a profound sense of humility and admiration for America’s early settlers.

The USS Yorktown in Charleston and the USS Olympia in Philadelphia offer far more than attractions for enthusiasts of steel warships and military technology. They provide visitors with a deeper understanding of the forces that shaped American history and power. The Yorktown, in particular, helps make tangible the often-used but rarely understood concept of “power projection.” Walking its decks, one begins to grasp how the United States developed the ability to influence events far beyond its shores through naval and air power.

The USS Olympia offers a very different experience. The elegance of pre-1914 naval warfare is striking, and the ship’s beauty—both inside and out—is truly breathtaking. Throughout the vessel, visitors encounter numerous interpretive panels that explain not only the functions of individual compartments but also the broader historical context in which the ship operated. One of these panels contains a particularly thought-provoking reflection:

Imagining scenarios from the past can help us imagine new futures. Though we cannot change the past, dreaming of what the future could have been allows us to see opportunities for change and growth. As you continue your journey on board, think about the other layers of history to be explored.

That message captures something essential about the purpose of historical memory. Museums and historic sites are not merely places where artifacts are preserved; they are spaces where the past can inspire new ways of understanding the present and imagining the future.

For Hungarians—and indeed for many Central Europeans—these are not merely intellectual exercises. They are deeply personal questions. We know all too well what it means to look back on history and wonder what might have been.

My hope is that our grandchildren will not have to regard our own era as a lost opportunity, a future that could have been. That is why preserving our sovereignty matters. Without the freedom to shape our own destiny, future generations are left only with speculation about roads not taken.

In this regard, the United States has much to teach us. Through its civic attitude and historical experience in cultivating a shared narrative of the past, American institutions have devoted enormous effort to preserving memory, interpreting history, and connecting citizens to a common story. Such a sovereign understanding of the past helps strengthen social bonds in the present and gives a nation greater confidence in charting its future. The work of historical memory is therefore not an exercise in nostalgia. It is an investment in sovereignty itself.

The post Sovereignty on Display appeared first on The American Mind.

In a calamitous capper to its most recent term, the Roberts Court blessed birthright citizenship for the hundreds of thousands of children born annually in the U.S. to illegal aliens and “birth tourists.” Would that same Court be willing to abide by the removal of the birthright babies’ parents, along with millions of fellow illegal aliens, from the census figures used to apportion House seats, redistrict, and distribute trillions in federal funds?

Trump v. Barbara begs that question. Given several notable parallels between immigration-related exclusions to birthright citizenship and cases poised to arise concerning immigration-status-related exclusions to the apportionment base, it is fair to examine what a future case may hold based on the Court’s ruling in Barbara.

If the Supreme Court were to take a similar tack, it would prove disastrous for our country. It would legitimize the further twisting of the Constitution and a Reconstruction-era amendment to grant millions of non-citizens representation in our political system—a prospect never contemplated by the 14th Amendment’s drafters. It would distort the American political map, dilute Americans’ voting power, and incentivize still more illegal immigration and sanctuary policies.

Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution directs that representatives be “apportioned among the several States…according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons…and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” Section 2 of the 14th Amendment did away with the three-fifths compromise, instructing that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.”

Congress empowered the Commerce Department to conduct the count via a census every ten years and to report the figures to the president, who would then transmit a statement to Congress detailing the population totals in each state and the number of representatives allocated to each state. This is a process that the Trump Administration asserted—and that the Supreme Court has suggested and some scholars have argued—gives the president discretion over the apportionment base, including to modify it to reflect “the whole number of persons in each state” as the president understands it.

As a matter of practice, chief executives have “affirmatively” included illegal aliens in the apportionment base since at least the Carter Administration—which took explicit measures to count this population. The rules and regulations have dictated that the Census Bureau count citizens and non-citizens alike based on their place of “usual residence,” or where they primarily live and sleep.

This has disproportionately increased the Democrats’ political power and has directed largesse toward those states and areas harboring substantial non-citizen populations, namely sanctuary jurisdictions. This corrupting of representation impacts not only the balance of power in Congress, but also presidential elections through the distribution of Electoral College votes. Permitting such foreign influence in the apportionment base is an affront to our republican system.

The first Trump Administration tried but failed to remedy these issues by cross-referencing administrative records with the census to identify and remove the illegal alien population from the apportionment base. But it was stymied by litigation and slowed by COVID-19-related delays. The Biden Administration then revoked that policy and transmitted the illegal alien-inclusive apportionment figures to Congress.

At the conclusion of Biden’s presidency, however, several states filed related suits that challenged, on various grounds, including constitutional ones, the administration’s inclusion of illegal aliens and temporary visa holders in the census and apportionment base. In ongoing litigation, the Trump Administration has suggested that it is devising Census Bureau regulations that may address the states’ concerns. President Trump has said directly that “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS.”

Given Congress’s inability even to pass the SAVE Act, if the president is to make good on his word, his administration will almost certainly have to act as it did during his first term. Such efforts to ameliorate the corrosive effect of mass illegal immigration via modifying the census apportionment base will almost assuredly be challenged in the courts.

If Trump v. Barbara is any guide, that could make for an uphill battle.

A Disastrous Precedent

Start with the fact that the majority opinion in Barbara ignored the fundamental relationship between the Constitution and the 14th Amendment. The Constitution was established with the consent of a distinct political community: “We the people of the United States.” It was not established for the benefit of Mexicans, Chinese, Somalis, or any other people.

The 14th Amendment aimed to provide the full protections of our Constitution to former slaves, making citizens and full members of the American political community of those brought to the U.S. under duress, forced into often backbreaking labor, and otherwise subjugated as property. Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, the crux of the birthright case, recognized that the freed slaves had the same rights and protections as all Americans. Section 2 of the amendment, the crux of any apportionment case alongside the Constitution’s Enumeration Clause, not only rectified that clause to reflect the freed slaves’ status as citizens but also created a deterrent for those states that would seek to disenfranchise them.

Yet despite this history, the Court found in Trump v. Barbara that the 14th Amendment applied to the newborn children of those outside our political community who arrived on our shores by the millions, often from hostile nations, without our consent. It seems questionable whether the Court will take a narrower view when it comes to counting illegal alien parents of birthright citizens for apportionment.

Also consider the Roberts Court’s expansive textual analysis of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment. It interpreted those born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States to encompass the children of parents here illegally or temporarily. In so doing, the majority ignored the fact that the clause’s drafters were referring to “full and complete jurisdiction,” in the words of Senator Jacob Howard, who introduced the text. As Justice Thomas noted in his dissent, jurisdiction flows from parents’ domicile, which “meant [a] legal home” where one intends “to permanently remain.”

The Court’s elastic interpretation of “jurisdiction” will likely prove relevant when it comes to its understanding of Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, which requires defining what a “person” is, as in the “whole number of persons in each State.” Historically, again, administrations have counted as “persons” those primarily residing in the U.S., irrespective of their immigration status, while omitting temporary visitors. As I previously reported, plaintiffs challenging the “usual residence” standard, including Missouri, have presented

a compelling case, based on an extensive review of legal precedent and history, that the “whole number of persons” in each state refers to a state’s “inhabitants;” that a state’s inhabitants consist of those “legally domiciled” therein; and that to be so domiciled, a person must have a “lawful intent to permanently remain” in a state, and an ability under the law to do so. Illegal aliens and temporary visa holders therefore may not be counted for purposes of apportionment.

And as detailed in a report at RealClearInvestigations that anticipated the second Trump Administration’s effort to exclude illegal aliens from the apportionment base, I recounted that the first Trump Administration likewise argued in a 2020 memorandum that

the “persons in each State” that the 14th Amendment refers to had long been interpreted to mean “inhabitants.” Inhabitants, it asserted, do not include “every individual physically present within a State’s boundaries at the time of the census,” noting that past administrations had excluded temporary aliens and foreign diplomatic personnel for apportionment.

Is a Supreme Court that dismissed the connection between jurisdiction and domicile going to accept the connection between “persons,” inhabitants, and legal domicile?

Another parallel raises further doubts. In Trump v. Barbara, the Court acknowledged several exceptions to the Citizenship Clause—for example, those born to foreign leaders on U.S. soil. But it claimed that these represented a “closed set.” Similarly, there have been historical exceptions (namely, temporary visitors) regarding who qualifies as a “person” for purposes of the census count and apportionment. Administrations have also used their authority to include or exclude cohorts such as overseas federal personnel from the population counts of their home states. Would the Court rule that these exceptions are a “closed set” too?

The vehicle by which the issue of excluding illegal aliens comes before the Supreme Court would naturally dictate the contours of any ruling. Timing would play a role too, as illustrated by Trump v. New York, in which the Court declined to hear a late first-term challenge to the administration’s ultimately shelved apportionment policy, deeming the case unripe and declining to rule on the merits.

If and when the Court does rule on the merits, it may do so more narrowly than in the birthright citizenship case. It could avoid constitutional issues by focusing on statutory or procedural questions—for example, who may determine whether a population ought to be omitted from the apportionment base and how, rather than whether a president or Congress may exclude an immigrant population from that base.

And it may be that, given the political impact of non-citizens on the apportionment base, the Court will have to deviate from its analysis in Trump v. Barbara to account for the implications for voting rights and the political representation of citizens more broadly. Plaintiffs have challenged the inclusion of illegal aliens and temporary visa holders in the apportionment base on grounds that it violates Americans’ right to equal representation—a powerful argument that distinguishes the apportionment base from the Court’s findings in Barbara.

But it is hard to have faith in the Roberts Court. And that is not only because it rendered such a disastrous opinion in the birthright citizenship case.

In Commerce Department v. New York, a ruling on a directly related matter, Chief Justice Roberts fashioned what Justice Thomas called an “administration-specific standard” that prevented the first Trump Administration from merely reinstating the question “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” on the census. While finding that presidents may pose such a question, the Roberts Court surmised that the administration’s stated rationale for reinstating the query was disingenuous, and therefore rendered the policy legally deficient.

That “unprecedented” ruling—again in Justice Thomas’s words—came amid hysteria from the Left, which claimed that such a question would chill large percentages of people from participating in the census, leading to an alleged unconstitutional undercount. The Left’s anger over the purported “6-to-3 conservative Court,” as well as threats to Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, has grown exponentially since that time.

Were the Trump Administration to pursue the far more consequential effort to exclude the illegal alien population from the next apportionment base, one could expect Dobbs-level political heat. Successful execution could significantly alter the political map, likely to the detriment of the blue jurisdictions where illegals are concentrated; Republican states with large illegal alien populations such as Texas and Florida would also be affected. Migration flows out of blue states and into red ones, and the redrawing of political maps to remedy racial gerrymanders would further magnify the political implications—to say nothing of state efforts to exclude illegal aliens from the population figures used in redistricting. The cumulative shift in political power could therefore prove seismic.

A Roberts Court that’s acutely sensitive to its political standing may prove no friend in this fight.

The post After Barbara: Illegal Aliens and the Census, Part I appeared first on The American Mind.

The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.

Marco Rubio to the Globalists: Get Lost | The Roundtable Ep. 326

This week, Marco Rubio declared a crusade against the International Criminal Court, citing the ICC’s aim to deny America its sovereignty on behalf of globalist elites. But the New York Times recently reported that the U.S. is managing Venezuela’s oil export revenue. Does the “Donroe Doctrine” run against the administration’s wider outlook on nationalism? Meanwhile, two fatal ICE shootings, in Maine and Houston, call into question if the public can stomach immigration enforcement ahead of the midterms. Plus: Thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey and Young Washington.

The post The American Mind Podcast: The Roundtable Episode 326 appeared first on The American Mind.

On June 30, the Supreme Court affirmed in Trump v. Barbara that the 14th Amendment says that if you are born on American soil, you are an American citizen. Chief Justice Roberts, citing Calvin’s Case from 1608, called citizenship “the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community.”

The ruling settled the question of birthright citizenship in the courts—for now. But it opened a harder one: If citizenship is unconditional, what holds a nation of citizens together?

For most of American history, civic identity was a set of specific commitments, transmitted through institutions everyone belonged to and enforced by law. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this in 1831: “Without ideas held in common, there is no common action, and without common action, there may still be men, but there is no social body.” He viewed Protestantism as a political habit of mind that held the American republic together: every citizen is competent, no priestly caste is required, and individual conscience is the final authority. To Tocqueville, that was the epistemology that made America’s self-governance thinkable.

John Jay added to Tocqueville’s description a fuller list of the ties that bound Americans together in Federalist 2: “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” Common schools read the King James Bible daily. Militia service was compulsory civic formation. Sunday laws, oath requirements, and opening prayers in legislatures reinforced a highly visible civic religion.

A concern with preserving the homogeneous culture Jay described explains why most of the 13 original states enshrined religious tests for officeholding, though the Constitution barred such tests federally. It was also why the Naturalization Act of 1795 required that an applicant be of good moral character, “attached to the principles of the constitution of the United States, and well disposed to the good order and happiness of the same.” Thomas Jefferson warned that immigrants from monarchies would “bring with them the principles of the governments they leave”—the naturalization process existed to screen for exactly that.

You could adopt the American way of life. You could accept that certain offices were closed to you and still participate in politics. You could leave. What you could not do was pretend that this cultural consensus didn’t exist or that the nation didn’t need it—and then work to dismantle it.

The four dissenting justices in Trump v. Barbara saw the importance of upholding this cultural architecture. In his dissent, Justice Thomas quoted Frederick Douglass describing what bound Americans together: “speaking the same language and being of the same religion, worshipping the same God, owing our redemption to the same Savior, and learning our duties from the same Bible.” This is John Jay’s thesis restated 80 years later by a man born into slavery who understood the demands of American citizenship.

Justice Gorsuch framed the entire dispute as feudal birthright versus “a distinctly American settler’s view of citizenship.” Justice Alito called American citizenship “precious” and warned that the majority opinion allowed a person born to a birth tourist, raised abroad, and “inculcated with hatred of this country” to be a citizen who “can enter and leave the country as he pleases” and “cannot be deprived of his status.”

The majority, by contrast, rejected what was left of the founding cultural framework, completing what the Supreme Court had started in the 20th century.

Between 1947 and 1967, the Court incorporated the First Amendment against the states in cases dealing with school prayer (Engel v. Vitale), Bible reading (Abington v. Schempp), religious tests for office (Torcaso v. Watkins), and loyalty oaths (Keyishian v. Board of Regents). Whatever one thinks of those decisions individually, the cumulative effect was the elimination of most of the mechanisms the founders used to transmit shared civic identity.

Meanwhile, the population the founders built that architecture for was changed beyond recognition—and mostly against the people’s will. America’s foreign-born population grew from roughly 10 million in 1965 to over 50 million today. The religious landscape that Tocqueville described as “the foremost of the political institutions” has fractured; the share of Americans identifying as Protestant fell from 69% in 1948 to roughly a third today.

America’s original levers for producing shared civic identity are gone. So what fills the gap?

The New Civic Religion

In place of the founders’ cultural framework is a sprawling institutional apparatus that is funded by roughly a billion dollars through the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and dozens of smaller foundations. It operates through iCivics (145,000 teachers, nine million students), New Pluralists ($30 million in funding), PACE (more than 80 funders coordinating on civic messaging), InterfaithAmerica, Define American, and hundreds of grantee organizations.

They call what they’re building “shared democratic norms.” But of the dozens of “norms” this ecosystem promotes, only a few are representative of the American tradition: losers accept election results, power transfers peacefully, and federalism is respected. The rest inculcate a left-wing worldview.

A review of material published in the Journal of Democracy, the publication of the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies, attests to this fact.

Francis Fukuyama argues that cultural communities making group-rights claims—that is, demanding exemptions from common family law, establishing independent religious schools, excluding outsiders from public events—“do not deserve equal protection in a modern liberal democracy.” His examples are Muslim immigrant communities in Europe, but the principle he establishes applies to any traditional religious community that claims moral authority apart from the liberal consensus.

Kanchan Chandra proposes “reformulating our understanding of democracy itself to render it a minoritarian system.” Larry Diamond defines the boundary: any organization that “seeks to monopolize a functional or political space in society, claiming that it represents the only legitimate path, contradicts the pluralistic and market-oriented nature of civil society.” Religious communities claiming moral authority need not apply.

This effort goes beyond politics into identity itself. Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment urges philanthropists to fund “narratives that let people exist in their full complex identities”—a call to identity engineering via DEI. Jennifer Butler of the Faith in Democracy Initiative calls conservative religious infrastructure the main vehicle of “the authoritarian right” and demands competing philanthropic investment in progressive faith leaders. Alfred Stepan’s “twin tolerations” framework requires religious communities to accept democratic outcomes even when they violate their deepest moral teachings, but it imposes no equivalent constraint on secular actors. “Religious institutions should not have constitutionally privileged prerogatives that allow them to mandate public policy to democratically elected governments,” Stepan writes. They may participate only if they accept liberal-democratic supremacy over religious moral authority.

Against George Washington’s admonition of the importance of religion in supporting republican self-government, former Clinton Administration official Bill Galston contends, “Today, ‘we the people’ is understood to mean all citizens, regardless of religion, manners and customs, and length of citizenship. The people is an ensemble of individuals who enjoy a common civic status.” Galston then quotes John Jay’s formula from Federalist 2, declaring it superseded.

Against John Adams’s contention that there exists “eternal and immutable truths,” Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution contends that “the great breakthrough that lies behind modern science and reason, collective reason, is fallibilism,” which is validated by “networks and professionals and institutions, places like the NIH and the newsroom.” Knowledge is determined by consensus; truth is produced by credentialed networks.

Against Alexander Hamilton’s teaching that since the “safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment,” to admit foreigners indiscriminately “would be nothing less, than to admit the Grecian Horse into the Citadel of our Liberty and Sovereignty,” George Soros told Bloomberg in 2015, “Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.” The founding-era goal of cultural cohesion must be explicitly dismantled.

The modern creed prescribes which cultures deserve protection, which identities are legitimate, which version of masculinity is acceptable, and which forms of political participation count as democracy. We didn’t eliminate civic religion. We replaced our country’s traditional self-understanding with the views of left-wing philanthropists.

Forming Citizens

The majority in Barbara cited Edward Coke’s “dual and reciprocal tie” between sovereign and subject—protection in exchange for allegiance—to establish birthright citizenship. But they kept the protection half and discarded the allegiance half. Yet the justices who joined that ruling are the same ones who have spent years warning that democracy cannot survive without civic formation.

Chief Justice Roberts called it the area where the rule of law is “most endangered.” Amy Coney Barrett said the Constitution “commits us to tolerance.” Brett Kavanaugh called civic education “the number one thing.” They cannot simultaneously believe democracy requires shared commitments and rule that citizenship requires none—unless they believe someone else will do the forming.

And someone else already is.

Ford, Carnegie, and Open Society began that project more than 20 years ago—and they have been delivering the new civics catechism ever since. Galston’s “populism is the enemy of democracy” is already a civic norm. Chandra’s minoritarian system is already the design goal. Kleinfeld’s DEI identity engineering is already the method.

John Jay’s descriptions of American culture in Federalist 2 need to become prescriptive. Not every element of it can be as true of America now as it was in the 18th century. But English language primacy and civic education laws rooted in the obligations of self-governance are constitutionally available—and Florida, Texas, Arizona, and New Hampshire are already testing them. The point is to force the Court to answer the glaring question it left unanswered in Barbara: Who holds the authority to form citizens?

The post Born in America, Formed by Open Society appeared first on The American Mind.

Narcissism has given itself a new name: socialism. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the generation that has grown up scrolling through social media feeds tends to be self-obsessed. This is evident in fewer marriages, lower birth rates, and a greater likelihood of mental illness. Politically, it is reflected in the alarming percentage of young people who have favorable views of socialism.

Over the past few months, members of the Democratic Socialists of America have found success in political races across America. Whether it’s Zohran Mamdani’s cadre of candidates in New York City or Colorado’s Melat Kiros, it seems like no place is safe from the DSA’s growing influence.

The party’s prospects improved markedly after Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race last year. When he launched his campaign in October 2024, the DSA’s city chapter maintained a steady membership of about 5,000, and had only about 50,000 members nationally. But after Mamdani’s victory, NYC’s chapter tripled, while the national party doubled, hitting the 100,000 mark in February. This happened as the DSA shifted its recruitment strategy, no longer relying on anger but preying on the egocentrism of today’s youth as it ramped up its focus on college campuses.

The Mamdani campaign’s many viral moments helped turn out the youth vote. His strong social media presence carried him across the finish line in America’s largest city. Other DSA candidates such as Claire Valdez and Abdul El-Sayed adopted Mamdani’s winning strategy. They are gaining social status and expanding their voting blocs by putting themselves at the forefront of their campaigns.

The DSA candidates are having success because they aren’t painting themselves as politicians—they’re becoming influencers. Their rallies look like nightclubs; they surround themselves with celebrities; and their TikToks show them enjoying an idyllic, manicured vision of the cities they represent. Their young followers aren’t being shown homeless encampments or violent drug addicts attacking their fellow citizens. Instead, DSA candidates shield them from the dangerous effects of the failed policies they would only accelerate.

I often hear older conservatives who grew up during or shortly after the Cold War ask the question, “Can’t these socialist kids see their city crumbling around them?” Indeed, they can. They see the graffiti, the unsafe public transportation, and the street takeovers. They choose to ignore these realities or blame them on “capitalism” as they look with awe at Zohran Mamdani joyfully walking shoulder to shoulder with his fellow New Yorkers on his way to get a poppy seed bagel. They’re caught up in his smile as he reads to a class of preschool children or encourages people to relinquish private property for the greater good.

The DSA operates like any social media influencer, showing its audience how good life could be if they buy the right product, and in this case, that product is a trendy, Instagram-ready brand of socialism.

Perhaps no one has embodied the socialist influencer mindset more robustly than Hasan Piker. He has amassed a large following through daily, hours-long live Twitch streams, where he talks about communist theory and chats with his ever-growing group of followers. Piker has been constantly seen with liberal elites and even made an appearance at Vanity Fair’s Oscar party, where he dressed like a chic Chairman Mao. He posts photos of himself thoughtfully “reading” Lenin or wearing expensive suits at Free Palestine rallies.

But for all of Piker’s radicalism, such as saying that the streets should “soak in red capitalist blood,” he could fairly be described as a Communist MrBeast.

Piker and Mamdani represent the sinister narcissism underpinning the burgeoning socialist movement. Young people are obsessed with themselves: a recent Morning Consult poll found that 86% of respondents want to be influencers, the fourth most popular career aspiration for Americans between the ages of 13 and 38.

Socialism is rising in popularity because it allows today’s youth to engage in the self-absorption of influencer culture while also enjoying the faux-moral superiority of Communist propaganda. It is a match made in hell. Kids looking to build audiences need only post about abolishing ICE or implementing rent control. Never mind that their iPhones and Instagram feeds were created by the very people and corporations they rail against. What matters is that they see their own image reflected in every inch of the world.

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