There’s nothing Congress likes better than not legislating. The legislative process in theory still takes place in Congress, but the results, which have the name and form of law, are in reality not law, properly understood. Legislative policy is still made in America, but it overwhelmingly takes forms other than laws enacted by Congress according to the process set forth in Article I of the Constitution. By conferring legislative power on others and leaving vital public issues unaddressed through congressional action, members of the legislature are effectively failing to carry out their constitutionally designated duties.

The importance of this change in the American political system cannot be overstated. Delegation—Congress’s abdication of its core legislative function—is key to understanding both the modern Congress and the crisis of constitutional government in America. Congress’s regular use of delegation has led to two seismic consequences: institutional failure on a massive scale and, more fundamentally, a transformation in the very character of the American regime.

Congress and the Legislative Power

The Constitution’s first substantive provision in Article I states that “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” The Legislative Vesting Clause reflects the belief that the legislative power is distinct from other powers. A specific institution, Congress, is entrusted with a specific power: the legislative power, or the power to make laws.

So what is a law? In Federalist 62, James Madison defines it as “a rule of action,” while Alexander Hamilton similarly holds in Federalist 75 that laws are prescribed “rules for the regulation of society.” A law, properly understood, authoritatively communicates to its subject what he must do and must not do. By implication, law also communicates to its subject what he may do, but is not required to do.

As the powers of government are fundamentally distinct by nature, each power under the Constitution has a discrete characteristic. In the case of the legislative power, that characteristic is deliberation. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asserts that deliberation is a particular kind of thought; “We deliberate,” he writes, “about things that are up to us and are matters of action.”

Ultimately, deliberation is the active form of prudence, or practical judgment. The deliberator must prioritize competing, or mutually exclusive, goals and determine which takes priority. The choice will favor one course of action over another or seek to balance or compromise between multiple courses of action. The deliberator’s choice reflects the regime’s priorities and how best to achieve them in a given situation.

Progressivism, Delegation, and the Administrative State

Congressional delegation of legislative power began almost by accident, in response to a concrete problem, and with little theoretical reasoning surrounding it. Near the end of the 19th century, widespread concern about the corruption of railroads, especially regarding rates, led to calls for federal intervention. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 created the Interstate Commerce Commission and charged it to set “reasonable and just” rates, while prohibiting what the act called “personal discrimination”: granting special rates, or free transportation, to favored individuals.

The growing Progressive movement latched on to delegation and gave it a principled argument. The people and their elected representatives, the Progressives maintained, are handicapped in the legislative policymaking process in two main ways. First, policymaking in modern, industrial nations is more complex and requires more technical knowledge than ever before—which is precisely what the people and their representatives lack. In “The Study of Administration,” Woodrow Wilson argues that “Directly exercised, in the oversight of the daily details and in the choice of the daily means of government, public criticism is a clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling delicate machinery.”

The second problem with allowing the people and their representatives to legislate directly on complex, technical subjects is that it is hard to keep the overarching goal in view. Everyone wants clean air, but as David Schoenbrod notes in Power Without Responsibility, crucial questions must be answered such as “How clean?” and “At what cost?” For example, to achieve a certain level of clean air, are we willing to tolerate massive increases in energy costs? How about rolling blackouts? What are the national security implications of our policies? Are we willing to allow our nation to become dependent on foreign energy sources?

In a sophisticated, modern society, then, another model of legislative policymaking is needed. This involves partitioning legislative power into two separate activities. Wilson explains that “The distinction is between general plans and special means.” The task of the people and their representatives is to declare the purposes they want the state to accomplish in a particular policy area. Devising and implementing the means to achieve these ends is to be left to a commission of experts, who can apply their expertise to a given policy area.

Over time, the federal courts ratified congressional delegation and integrated it into the constitutional order. In 1928, the Supreme Court asserted that so long as “Congress shall lay down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to fix such rates is directed to conform, such legislative action is not a forbidden delegation of legislative power.” The “intelligible principle” test effectively means that, so long as a reviewing judge can reasonably discern what Congress wanted the administrative entity to do, the delegation is legitimate. It remains the standard to this day.

Institutional Failure

Delegation has allowed members of Congress to satisfy their ambitions, upon which the constitutional system of separation of powers depends, by means the Constitution has largely precluded.

Serving multiple terms as an elected representative can be a significant challenge. The member will have cast numerous votes and taken many public positions over the course of his career, some of which are bound to be controversial. These votes and positions therefore provide plenty of fodder for potential challengers, who can offer voters a real alternative to the incumbent.

Delegation offers legislators a way out. As Morris P. Fiorina has described, delegation allows a member to take positions on broad issues that are popular with voters. He then votes for legislation, which instructs the bureaucracy to devise and implement rules to achieve a popular goal. Congress transfers to the bureaucracy the odium incurred by whoever makes the difficult choices that impose costs and burdens on others. Members get credit for achieving a noble, crowd-pleasing goal, while the bureaucracy absorbs the blame for creating the burdensome rules and regulations necessary to achieve it.

Delegation has altered the distribution of incentives for members of Congress in a second way. As Fiorina notes, the growth of the administrative state creates ever-increasing opportunities for individuals to get caught in the web of bureaucracy. When they do, the individual needs someone on the inside to help him, and his congressman is perfectly positioned to provide that service. By helping his constituents, a congressman builds goodwill, which translates into votes. This is why individual members allocate a significant portion of their staffing resources to constituent services.

As the nation has become increasingly polarized ideologically and as Congress has effectively abandoned control of the federal budget, which gives the individual member influence with the bureaucracy, members have increasingly engaged in catering to the ideological predilections of their districts. In response to constituent pressure, they take strident public positions on major issues, and thus build support within them.

Regime Change

In any political system, knowing where the legislative power is located and how it is exercised is critical for understanding the nature of that regime. The American Founders created a republic rather than a pure democracy, and thus legislative power is exercised by the people’s elected representatives. Congress, like all the other institutions of our government, is a creature of the Constitution. The American Congress can legislate only on subjects, and in ways, specified in the Constitution. The Constitution therefore does not simply create a republic; it creates a constitutional republic.

The Progressives despised the founders’ constitutionalism. They saw it as unable to cope with modern policy issues and as an inaccurate description of how political systems actually operate. As an operating principle, they substituted for the separation of powers a system that Frank J. Goodnow called “politics and administration.” Politics, including all political institutions, were to be brought into ever-closer contact with the will of the people. The president would represent the whole country, while Congress would be an assembly of the various local interests within the community.

Simultaneously, real power would be put in the hands of administrators. Legislative power—the power to make rules for the regulation of society—would be transferred from the people’s representatives and given to experts who were to be substantially insulated from the electoral process. Additionally, Goodnow explains that these experts would also exercise the traditional executive and judicial powers, and what he ambiguously terms “administrative” powers.

While the Progressive system may appear to be more democratic, the reality is anything but. Powers vested in the officers of the separate branches would be delegated to a new elite class, specially qualified to rule and largely placed beyond electoral control.

The regime the Progressives sought to create, whatever their protestations to the contrary, is an aristocracy. It is not a traditional aristocracy of land, birth, and titles, but an aristocracy of the credentialed, those who attended elite universities have the training and experience to deal with the complexities of modern government and modern social problems.

Our present political reality is far from the Progressive model. Instead of being a technical and scientific elite, a self-selecting aristocracy of the competent, our ruling class has hardened into exactly that: a class. This class is defined by three salient characteristics: first, our elites have contempt for those whom they govern. Second, our elites are not very good at ruling. Finally, our elites rule in their own interest, rather than that of the country as a whole. The aristocracy has collapsed into an oligarchy.

If Congress is to be compelled to return to legislating, the motive force must come from outside. The electorate will not do it; the issue is far too obscure and procedural to resonate with most voters. Perhaps the president could do it, but only if Congress becomes so unhappy with presidential action that it decides to legislate for itself. Nevertheless, the advantages of delegation for congressmen are still too great. That leaves the federal courts, which could force members of Congress to legislate by ending their toleration of delegation. Justice Samuel Alito’s concurrence in Gundy v. U.S. suggests the possibility that the Court might be ready to resurrect the non-delegation doctrine.

The future of constitutional republicanism in America—and therefore of American liberty—depends upon restoring Congress, as the people’s elected representatives, to its constitutional legislative function.

The post Congress and the Collapse of Constitutional Republicanism in America appeared first on The American Mind.

The American Mind’s 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.

The Crisis of America is the Crisis of the West | The American Mind Podcast ft. Steve Hayward

Steve Hayward, senior fellow at Claremont and author-podcaster at the “Political Questions” Substack, joins the guys this week to discuss the political and intellectual significance of Harry Jaffa’s teachings. His understanding of America’s creed and culture remains critical amid our rolling crises of immigration and ideological revolution. Jaffa’s articulated the necessity of Judeo-Christian virtues and morality to the survival of America. But can today’s resurgence in spirituality be channeled to revive our dysfunctional social and political orders?

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Over the past few weeks, Old Guard conservatives have been making a concerted effort to attack Vice President JD Vance and the New Right.

Many were critical of Vance’s support for a Trump Administration proposal to allow federal dollars to go to stay-at-home parents. Dana Loesch suggested that those who accepted such funds weren’t “man enough.” Another conservative called it a “scheme” and “a longstanding tenet of the Postliberal/Orbanist policy agenda.”

Old Guard critic Jay Caruso mocked Vance for saying the administration would not “let” companies exchange American workers “with cheap foreign labor,” accusing the vice president of turning his back on the free market. Simultaneously, a chorus of Old Guard conservatives have been blasting Vance for supposedly refusing to distance himself from Nazis and groypers—and from a group of trinitarian Christians, the Society for American Civic Renewal.

These tantrums stem from the Old Guard’s belief that history was meant to unfold differently. Many conservatives mock the Left for their notion that America had reached an “end of history,” epitomized by the expected crowning of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as successor to Barack Obama, an outcome that would have solidified progressive rule for at least a generation.

But many fusionist Old Guard conservatives have their own version of an end of history, which the unlikely rise of Donald Trump has so far prevented. And as the date of the resurgence is pushed further back, their impatience is crystallizing into fury.

Santorum and Trump

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency—the first openly progressive Democrat since Lyndon Johnson—sent a jolt of fear through conservative voters in 2008. This gave way to the Tea Party wave of 2010, which produced astounding results: the Republican Party recaptured the House of Representatives, winning its largest majority since the late 1920s and a bevy of governorships.

Many groups behind these candidates, such as the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and the free-market-oriented FreedomWorks, were libertarian in nature and pushed dogma like Grover Norquist’s “No New Taxes” pledge. The resulting victories convinced them that their time was near. Voters had responded to their message, and in 2012 they would ride it all the way to the White House. But Obama was re-elected in 2012, easily besting Mitt Romney.

Though he did not quite fit the Tea Party mold, Romney matched well with its economic orthodoxy, especially against Rick Santorum, his spirited opponent in the Republican primaries. In mid-February 2012, the former Pennsylvania senator had surged to the top of several polls, briefly pulling ahead of Romney. Though the media focused on Santorum’s social conservatism, particularly his fervent opposition to gay marriage, his skepticism of free trade made him stand apart from the other Republican hopefuls. At the time, free trade orthodoxy was a key plank of the Republican Party.

Shortly after Santorum reached first place, attacks on this front started rolling in. “Economic Conservatives Question Santorum’s Record” read one headline. A New York Times piece, bearing all the hallmarks of an opposition hit piece, lambasted Santorum for supporting the domestic steel industry. Romney joined in, critiquing Santorum for backing what he termed a “bailout” of the sector. However, Santorum refused to yield, noting that many of his voters had lost jobs and livelihoods as the industry was enticed to leave the country.

Romney’s defeat of Santorum gave the original Tea Party relief from temporary heartburn. After winning the House in 2010, Tea Party leaders clearly had a vision: they would wrest control from the “compassionate conservatives” who had governed during the George W. Bush years and finally get one of their own in the White House.

Six years later, those plans turned to ash. All the Tea Party presidential candidates of 2012, and their most promising candidate of 2016, Ted Cruz, were crushed by the insurgent candidacy of businessman and television star Donald Trump. Announcing his presidential campaign, Trump delivered a stemwinder of a speech, addressing four key themes: the need to build a wall and deport illegal aliens, to confront China, to replace free trade with fair trade, and to ensure Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon.

On some issues, such as taking on Iran and ISIS or border security, Trump shared ground with the Tea Party, which believed Obama was too weak. But he went much further. While Cruz talked about building a fence and leading an international coalition to defeat ISIS, Trump spoke about constructing a “great wall” on the southern border and bombing “the sh*t out of” the terrorist group. And on issues such as free trade, Trump totally rejected GOP orthodoxy, like Santorum had four years previously. Unlike Santorum, however, Trump made it a centerpiece of his campaign—and GOP voters rewarded him for it.

The Latest Target

The Tea Party sought to make the best of the first Trump Administration. Many of its major figures were Tea Partiers. Mike Pompeo, elected to the House in 2010 on the Tea Party wave, later served as secretary of state. Mitt Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, was a Tea Party-aligned Republican who became Speaker of the House, helping shepherd the first major legislative win of Trump’s term: tax cuts, a GOP staple since Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Vice President Mike Pence, who served in the Tea Party Caucus in the House, worked with figures like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, to channel and redirect Trump’s energies. Pence himself was repeatedly dispatched to Europe to deliver the increasingly difficult-to-believe message that the United States would remain enmeshed in Cold War-era thinking.

Tea Party and small-government conservatives had to grit their teeth through a fair amount of Trump’s policies, such as his early steel tariffs. After he left the White House in 2021, however, many Old Guard conservatives believed the Trump moment was over. They had always viewed him as an accident of history: Trump had decisively put an end to the Obama era by dispatching Hillary Clinton, but now they could get back to marching toward their goal.

During the Biden Administration, Paul Ryan called for GOP voters to reject Trump’s politics. Mick Mulvaney and Nikki Haley, two Tea Partiers who served in Trump’s first administration, said Trump should not run in 2024. Erick Erickson called for shooting the January 6 protesters and barring Trump from running for office again.

But the Old Guard’s hopes for a Trump challenger failed to materialize. Ron DeSantis fizzled, and Nikki Haley won only the D.C. and Vermont primaries. Trump stormed back to the nomination. Along the way, he picked JD Vance as vice president over then-North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum because, as many political observers concluded, Vance could be a potential heir, whereas Burgum would serve only as a seat warmer and was less ideologically aligned with Trump.

Trump, significantly more powerful in 2025 than in 2017, was less restrained by the party’s establishment. During the Biden interregnum, Trump had a hand in Speaker Mike Johnson’s rise to power, urging House members to pick him amid endless balloting. In 2025, Johnson returned the favor by blocking motions to rescind Trump’s tariffs—significantly expanded from the steel tariffs of 2018—and supporting other policies that his predecessor, Paul Ryan, would have strongly opposed.

The 47th president’s popularity with the base after his comeback put Tea Partiers in a bind. Republicans and movement conservatives who still wanted to work with the administration could no longer openly lambaste the president; doing so would make their message dead on arrival for the base. The direction Trump had taken the party was also clearly popular with Republicans.

Their answer, as demonstrated by Erick Erickson’s recent screed, is to attack Trump’s ideological successor instead: Vice President Vance.

Fukuyama’s Children

Those who predict an end of history are wrong. Democrats were wrong to predict decades of dominance with Hillary Clinton’s coronation in 2016. The Old Guard was likewise wrong for assuming that a politics of the 1980s would never expire.

The Old Guard’s genuine incomprehension at the poor position they find themselves in is demonstrated by their lackluster complaints of socialism, when it comes to using government to strengthen the pillars of civilization, and Nazism, when it comes to terminating the endless stream of cheap foreign labor. As Vice President Vance has argued, screaming “Socialist!” will not sway young voters if the alternative is unaffordable housing, unsafe streets, and a country they no longer recognize.

The truth is, the Old Guard’s pull-up-your-bootstraps, hyper-meritocratic politics, which forces Americans to compete against the world for jobs in their hometown, is a failure. Fusionist Old Guard conservatism has not won the presidency on its own terms since 1984—before most Millennials were even born. It failed in 2008 and failed in 2012. GOP voters rejected it in 2016, 2020, and 2024. And there is no reason to expect a different result in 2028. While there is still room in the coalition for skeptics of Trump and Vance, they must understand that their time of dominating the coalition has passed.

The train has switched tracks and is heading in a different direction. Old Guard conservatives can stay on and help the engineer, possibly negotiating the speed. But they cannot change direction without derailing it.

They have two years to decide which path they want to take.

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Increasing numbers of Americans are deeply opposed to building more data centers.

Over the summer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro imposed the strictest data center rules in the country, Kathy Hochul ordered a statewide moratorium on hyperscale construction, and Greg Abbott paused new approvals in Texas pending a grid audit. At the local level, dozens of county and municipal fights have followed no reliable partisan pattern. Polling from Heatmap and Embold, collected by the anon Cremieux, shows data center popularity plummeting over the last year.

Though Cremieux argues the opposition is fundamentally driven by NIMBYism, I’m unconvinced. The polling seems to follow the pattern you’d expect if NIMBYism were the primary driver, but posing the problem as a generic national issue produces substantially less opposition. Something else is going on that NIMBYism can’t fully explain.

The arguments most central to the anti-data center cause, namely complaints about the effect on utility costs, seem to generate an outsized amount of discourse relative to their actual effect. For example, in Virginia—the world’s data center capital and the state where I live—the State Corporation Commission estimated that shifting capacity and distribution costs from households to the large-load rate class would lower a typical residential bill by about 3.4%, or roughly $5.52 a month. In other words, the effect is something on the order of a Subway sandwich in 2008.

I want to be scrupulous, because the complaints about data centers are often not literally false. Households are indeed suffering from a pecuniary externality created by increased demand. But it is hard to reconcile the mostly muted effects with the surging level of emotional response.

Americans’ growing dislike of data centers stems not from animus toward any single company or product but from a cumulative reaction to the momentous technological changes of the past couple of decades. Because AI is the latest harbinger of those changes—and offers revolutionary potential—it has inherited our culture’s immune response. This means these problems cannot be adjudicated simply by changing utility regulations or even bribing local communities.

Three further factors have combined with the populist anti-tech feeling to make AI, and by extension data centers, unusually unpopular.

First, AI faces a particularly unfavorable coalition of constituencies. Its association with California and the tech industry has deeply soured much of conservative America toward it, and its association with billionaires and big business has soured many progressives. Even many techies feel personally threatened by the technology. In other words, few natural constituencies exist outside of capital holders and lab researchers.

Second, those most aggressively advocating for data centers are not building them in their own backyards. Palo Alto, where I lived while attending grad school, has spent years fighting small-cell installations. One of the most prestigious retirement homes in the U.S., Channing House, recently fought to have wireless equipment removed from its roof. In January, the city of Palo Alto wrote to the FCC opposing a rule that would speed up wireless approvals, while at the same time supporting the infrastructure needed to run AI-enabled services, so long as it retains the power to veto unwanted projects.

When the group that appears to benefit most from a technology is also most averse to its consequences, it is natural for the public to wonder what the tech world might be hiding. Polimath, writing in Marginally Compelling, gets closer to the underlying problem by viewing it as another front in the culture war, an outworking of long-simmering discontent with tech culture.

Third, much of the tech world itself seems increasingly concerned about the existential risk AI might pose to humanity. For example, earlier this month Jacob Coxon, a researcher who spent three years doing pretraining work at OpenAI and then Anthropic, publicly resigned, writing that both companies were racing toward self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.” Evan Hubinger, an alignment lead at Anthropic, replied that he agreed and put the odds of AI killing everyone within the decade above 10%. From talking to my friends at these labs, the modal person really does seem to think they are summoning the machine god. That prospect naturally feeds public opposition to AI.

Taken together, these factors help explain the public’s anger. The lines of the current debate have already hardened, and the grievances far predate the specific events of the day. Any actions seen as forcing data centers on voters who do not want them will only aggravate them further.

But the centers will be built regardless. Demand is so enormous, and suitable locations are sufficiently plentiful, that only a small number of permissive communities, such as Loudoun County, are needed. If localities want to opt out, I see little reason to stop them.

However, the industry could take an important step if it wants to win broad American support.

Specifically, Big Tech should make a visible effort to build data centers near the communities where its executives and employees live. This would give them a way to begin convincing Americans that data centers are an asset worth having, not a liability worth dodging.

Concerns about water and electricity are simply not what most people are worried about, and addressing them will do nothing to solve the larger problem. Since these reasons are selected ex post to justify pre-existing opposition, defeating any single point will merely invite a hundred more.

If you are opposed to data centers, my guess is that saving $5 on your monthly utility bill wouldn’t be enough to change your opinion.

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President Trump’s America First foreign policy asks a simple question of every foreign engagement: What does it do for the American people? A trifecta of developments in July 2026 highlights a threefold answer to this question in regard to Bosnia and Herzegovina, the central European country formed by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the Balkan War and created two legal entities: Republika Srpska, consisting mostly of Serbian Orthodox Christians; and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, consisting mostly of Muslims (called Bosniaks), with a significant minority of ethnically Croat Roman Catholic Christians.

First, on July 1, 2026, as we were celebrating 250 years of independence from a tyrant named King George III, a non-elected German “High Representative” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Christian Schmidt, who, like George III, has been enacting what our July 4, 1776, Declaration called “Acts of pretended Legislation,” resigned.

Second, our 250th commemoration of the beginning of our Revolutionary War reminds us that wars happen, and our security can never be taken for granted.

Third, on July 13, 2026, leaders of two political parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one representing Serb Orthodox Christians (the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, also known as “SNSD”) and one representing Croat Roman Catholic Christians (the Croatian Democratic Union, also known as “HDZ”), in a joint public statement essentially agreed with the February 13, 2026, Opinion of the Constitutional-Law Committee of the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina that “the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina does not possess constitutional authority to enact laws.” According to one press report, “SNSD leader Milorad Dodik and HDZ BiH leader Dragan Čović stated in Mostar that they agreed all decisions imposed by the High Representatives should be annulled.”

Apropos this first-of-its-kind Serb Orthodox-Croat Roman Catholic joint statement, the first encyclical by the first American-born pope, Magnifica Humanitas: Humanity In Its Grandeur by Pope Leo XIV, highlights one of the keys to solving 30 years of failed nation-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina: “The principle of subsidiarity…encourages us to move beyond any form of paternalistic or welfare-based management of social life, but instead to promote a culture of shared responsibility in a State that values citizens’ initiative, and…decisions are made at the closest level possible to the persons involved.”

To elaborate on why Bosnia and Herzegovina matters to the American people, American security is at stake: according to The 9/11 Commission Report, two of the 19 terrorist hijackers on September 11, 2001, were Saudi nationals who “had traveled together to fight in Bosnia in a group that journeyed to the Balkans in 1995.” According to Giorgio Cafiero’s article, “In the Rearview Mirror: The Case of Iranian Influence in Bosnia”: “During the 1992-95 Bosnian War…Iran’s government intervened to stop the carnage. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati coordinated assistance to the Bosniaks and justified the intercession as keeping with the Islamic Republic’s concept of defending the mostazafan (oppressed) across the world, from Palestine to South Africa.”

Today, the three distinct peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina offer three strategic relationships waiting to be cultivated: Catholic Christian Croats, kinsmen of our NATO ally Croatia; Orthodox Christian Serbs, who have repeatedly elected a pro-Trump leader named Milorad Dodik; and the Muslim Bosniaks, whose prosperity is better secured by American trade and investment than by the patronage of Turkey, the Gulf states, or Iran. A sovereign, self-governing, and prosperous Bosnia and Herzegovina means new markets for American energy and capital, new sources of the strategic minerals the American people need, and one less breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.

For nearly three decades, this European country of three distinct peoples has been governed not by the leaders those peoples elect, but by a non-elected foreign bureaucrat known as the High Representative—for the last five years a German former politician—wielding the same model of unaccountable, top-down bureaucratic rule that has given Europe stagnant economies, energy dependency, de-industrialization, and the managed decline of its middle class. The results are predictable: the U.S. State Department’s 2025 Investment Climate Statement describes a country whose “complex and fragmented legal and regulatory framework,” weak judiciary, and political instability drive away investors, while a single 2005 decree of the High Representative freezing the disposition of “state property” has locked up an estimated “$15 billion in potential investment…a sum approaching half of the country’s 2026 GDP.” American taxpayers have underwritten this failed nation-building experiment since 1995; they are entitled to ask what it has bought them, and what’s in it for Americans going forward.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a place where American economic and strategic interests converge. Republika Srpska, according to Mining Weekly, holds one of Europe’s richest deposits of critical minerals, resources essential to America’s industrial and defense base, which Brussels and Beijing are already maneuvering to control.

Most importantly, these developments in Bosnia and Herzegovina have opened the door for President Donald Trump to reciprocate the support he has received repeatedly from President Milorad Dodik; if he does that, America will have in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in our ongoing global competition for critical strategic resources, a new Central European friend and partner.

Read the rest here.

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Conservative blogger Erick Erickson published an essay last week on Substack, “The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off a Cliff,” maligning the Claremont Institute, one of our donors, and a few of our fellows and alumni.

Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Steve Hayward published the first in a promised series (“Is Conservatism In Crisis?”) on his Political Questions Substack, criticizing the tone, rhetorical tactics, and substance of Erickson’s essay. As Hayward shows, Erickson relies on guilt-by-association smears and innuendo that let the juxtaposition do the arguing. Many of his citations come from untrustworthy and hostile sources, like The Guardian, which has published numerous hit pieces against Claremont. Erickson’s essay is a mile-wide, inch-deep bit of motivated reasoning.

At the top of his essay, a headnote by Erickson explains that he “worked on this for weeks.” We could have cleared up a lot of Erickson’s errors during those weeks had he followed the standard journalistic practice of reaching out to any of the parties or organizations he named for comment. He did not. By his own account, Erickson let AI find the sources for his claims: “I wrote the piece and Claude found the links relevant to my claims. When Claude thought I was making weak claims or arguments, it challenged me to improve and clarify my writing and claims to match information in provided linked [sic].” That may explain why so many of his sources come from hostile outlets.

As a result, some friends of Claremont who are not close students of the internecine social media wars on the Right are confused. I write to offer some clarity. The short version: Claremont’s mission remains, as it was when we were founded in 1979, “to restore the principles of the American founding to their rightful, preeminent place in our national life.” The core of that work remains what Harry Jaffa called “the scholarship of the politics of freedom.” Many of our critics mistake the application of that scholarship to present circumstances for abandoning our principles.

Answering every insinuation in Erickson’s essay would be tedious; correcting the most serious is not. Consider four of his claims: about a donor, about a fraternal organization, about an essay in The American Mind, and about Nick Fuentes.

Erickson’s first target is Charles Haywood, a retired industrialist and philanthropist who runs The Worthy House website, where he routinely reviews, in spirited fashion, books on all manner of topics. Readers of Haywood know that he has a dim view of the prospects for the medium-term survival of the current American regime. He has constructed his city in speech, what he hopes will be a successor regime, in his “Foundationalist Manifesto.”

Erickson regards Haywood’s Manifesto as too statist. He wants us to gasp with him at Haywood’s deprecation of democracy. What Haywood favors, however, would not have been foreign to thinkers and statesmen from the American Founding up through the turn of the 20th century: a republicanism with aristocratic elements, like elections and representatives rather than direct popular involvement in decision-making. Erickson objects that Haywood assigns to the central government “unlimited means,” but fails to include the rest of the sentence, which reads in full, “In pursuit of its limited ends, it will have unlimited means.” Claremont has always thought that the political philosophy of the founding, properly understood, should guide our constitutional analysis and reform. Haywood’s assessment is not the same as Claremont’s position, and reasonable people can dispute it. But it’s clear that Erickson wants merely to cherry-pick the document to stoke outrage with his readers.

This outrage is a setup to suggest that because Haywood donates low six figures annually to Claremont and has an honorific “advisory” title common in the think tank philanthropic world, Claremont’s mission is now being subverted in favor of Haywood’s Foundationalism. No donor sets our agenda, and Haywood has never tried. He supports institutions on the Right for the work they’re doing, in line with their own missions, to recover constitutionalism and defend the American way of life.

Erickson’s second target is closer to home: me. He indicts my involvement in the founding of a Christian fraternal organization, the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), and in so doing makes a serious charge that demands correction. One of SACR’s founding documents, writes Erickson, “describes the members as ‘un-hyphenated Americans’…. The hyphen is there to screen for lineage, and it tells you the racial mindset of the organization.” This is false. The membership requirement for “unhyphenated Americans” is a reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1915 call for immigrants to assimilate and embrace American citizenship without qualification. SACR welcomes trinitarian Christian men of any race or ethnicity.

Fittingly, Roosevelt gave that speech to the Knights of Columbus, itself a Christian fraternal order. Few things are more American than Christian fraternal organizations, which have been around since our country’s founding. The founding board of SACR in 2020 agreed with the theme of Yuval Levin’s book, A Time to Build. We thought a decentralized fraternal organization for values-aligned men would be a useful institution in an ideologically divided and institutionally corrupt America. It has been gratifying to see lodges founded in several states, centered on friendship, shared love of country, and the many benefits such networks provide for local collaboration and mutual aid.

Erickson’s charge against The American Mind is more serious still. He claims that “Claremont’s American Mind has published the argument that conservatives must now be willing to commit violence of their own.” The essay in question, Hillsdale College Professor Kevin Slack’s 2023 article, “The Constitution, Citizenship, and the New Right,” does no such thing. The passage Erickson appears to be describing reads:

Many conservatives have now become convinced that, unless they are willing to allow their churches to be desecrated, their sacred services cancelled, their property and liberty taken away, and their children indoctrinated or chemically castrated, they must be willing to engage in violence of their own.

Slack ends with a warning, not a call to arms:

Finally, the use of actual violence, which underlies the enforcement of all laws, including the natural law, has quickly become part of our machinations. And while I sympathize with any defense of natural right, I also fear it. Our first civil war was between states, but this new terrible war would be city against country, neighbor against neighbor, in the aisles of grocery stores, restaurants, and churches. I would not choose to live in this world, but America is fast becoming no country for old men. I still hope that we can appeal to genuine nationalism, celebrating America’s principles and its remarkable achievements, rejecting a false patriotism and tribalism.

In other words, Slack is describing what many conservatives have come to believe, not arguing that they are right. Erickson turns a description into a prescription.

Erickson throws Nick Fuentes and his “groypers” into the mix for good measure in the final third of the piece. He is careful to state that he doesn’t think anyone named so far is “coordinating with Fuentes.” (Quite right! I suspect Fuentes would object to any coordination with Claremont, as he has said publicly that we are untrustworthy because our chairman is Jewish.) But Erickson’s presentation is meant to leave the reader with the impression that this constellation of projects, writings, tweets, and people represents different flanks of a movement to overthrow the American Constitution.

While Erickson’s essay was making the rounds, I was on my way to Mount Vernon with Claremont colleagues to celebrate Constitution Day and honor Charles Kesler with the Salvatori Prize in the American Founding. The evening featured short speeches from our Washington Fellow Matthew Peterson, praising George Washington’s magnanimity and prudence; from our Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding, Glenn Ellmers, on the meaning of the Declaration at 250 after a century of progressivism; and from me, on the significant scholarly, editorial, and teaching achievements across Kesler’s five decades (and counting) of work.

It was an evening celebrating the work of the Claremont Institute and its scholars, surrounded by the Claremont family of alumni, supporters, and friends. That work, not the caricature in Erickson’s essay, is what Claremont is about. We look forward to a good-faith debate with serious and honest interlocutors—let iron sharpen iron. The stakes are nothing less than the fate of America and the West.

The post What Claremont Is For appeared first on The American Mind.

The American Mind’s 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.

How the Left’s Climate Agenda Caused the West’s Economic Downfall | The American Mind Podcast ft. Rupert Darwall

Coming out of the 2008 recession, the globalist order envisioned a green recovery. Rupert Darwall, author of the forthcoming The Age of Error and the West’s Undoing, joins the hosts to discuss the West’s unforced error in trying to achieve net-zero emissions amid a resurgence in business activity in the Global South and China—where economic ambition takes precedence over climate concerns, at the expense of Europe and America. Meanwhile, the narrative concocted by the CCP and Western epidemiologists to cover up COVID’s origins unveiled the West’s inability to block foreign influence. Plus: Nikole Hannah-Jones, the progenitor of the 1619 Project, sent her daughter to a black-majority NYC school as a test of racial ideology, only to discover the failures of a liberal education system.

The post How the Left’s Climate Agenda Caused the West’s Economic Downfall | The American Mind Podcast ft. Rupert Darwall appeared first on The American Mind.