The Empty Inventory: Elon Musk Through Stephen P. Turner on Tacit Knowledge

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

When I hear Elon Musk, I hear a charlatan. When I look at Elon Musk without emotion, I see a complicated trillionaire who resists easy dismissal.

In my social circle, Musk is often dismissed as a grifter.

My fellow underearners love to dismiss successful people as grifters. We love to say, “My own life is a failure, but at least I see through the bullshit.”

My social circle loves to dismiss AI. It’s fraudulent. It’s going bankrupt. It’s all hype. I’ve drunk the Kool Aid.

Most people I know have a negative frame on life. We’re heading for catastrophe. I’m the most optimistic person I know well. I think AI is great and America has a great future and Elon Musk does some great things (though it would not shock me if his story ended in failure and disgrace).

I think we are all wired to dismiss people. We’re wired to say no to everything unless we have a compelling reason to say yes so we can concentrate on those rare persons who add value to our lives.

Elon Musk makes a stupid post on X and I feel embarrassed saying anything positive about the man. Elon Musk gives a bad interview. He repeats slogans. He laughs at his own memes. Asked about history or politics, he produces the takes of a man who read three Reddit threads on the subject. Critics conclude from this that he is a fraud who lucked into his companies or stole credit from his engineers. The conclusion follows from a false premise almost no one examines: that what a man knows shows up in what he says.

Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) spent a career attacking that premise from the other side. In The Social Theory of Practices and Understanding the Tacit, he argues that the knowledge that makes skilled performance possible never exists as propositions in the first place. It exists as trained capacities built up in an individual nervous system through feedback, one correction at a time. There is no shared mental object called “the practice” that gets copied from head to head. There are only individuals, each of whom assembles his own version of a skill through his own history of trial, error, and adjustment. Two engineers in the same building running the same procedures hold different tacit inventories, because each one learned through a different sequence of mistakes.

Apply that to Musk and the puzzle dissolves.

Start with where his knowledge came from. Musk did not learn rockets from books, though he read them. He learned by sitting in design reviews several days a week for over twenty years, asking questions, getting answers, watching which answers preceded failures and which preceded launches. Each review was a feedback cycle. An engineer tells him a valve needs six months of qualification testing. Musk pushes. Sometimes the pushed schedule holds and sometimes the rocket blows up, and either way his discriminations get a correction. Run that loop ten thousand times and you produce a man who can smell a padded estimate the way a horse trainer reads a fetlock. The trainer cannot tell you what he sees. He sees it.

Turner gives us the right description of this. The knowledge is real, causal, and individual. It sits in Musk’s trained responses, not in any statement he could make. When he walks a Tesla production line and stops at one station out of two hundred, the stopping is the knowledge. Ask him why he stopped and he produces a sentence after the fact. The sentence is a label pasted on a discrimination that ran without words.

This explains the strange status of Musk’s famous five-step algorithm: question every requirement, delete the part, simplify, accelerate, automate last. Engineers inside SpaceX treat it as scripture. Outsiders who read it find banalities. Both reactions make sense in Turner’s terms. Explication transforms tacit knowledge into a new object, a verbal token, and the token does not carry the capacity. A SpaceX engineer who hears “delete the part” after three years of watching Musk delete parts attaches the slogan to a trained sense of which parts can go. An outsider who reads the same words attaches them to nothing. The words are a mnemonic for people who already hold the skill. They transmit nothing to people who lack it. This is why every founder who recites Musk’s principles fails to become Musk. They copied the explication and missed the inventory, because the inventory cannot be copied. It can only be rebuilt, one feedback cycle at a time, in a new nervous system.

The same logic explains his hiring and firing. Musk interviews engineers by asking them to walk through problems they solved, then drills into details. He is not testing their propositional knowledge. He is sampling their tacit inventories, checking whether the discriminations are there, because a man who solved the problem can answer the third follow-up question and a man who watched someone else solve it cannot. The brutal firings serve the same function from the other side. An organization built on tacit competence has no paper credential that certifies the skill, so the only test is performance, and the only enforcement is removal. Turner’s picture of knowledge as individual and local predicts an organization that looks like SpaceX: thin on process documents, thick on apprenticeship, ruthless about demonstrated capacity.

Turner also explains the part of the puzzle that embarrasses Musk’s defenders: why he sounds like a teenager when he leaves his domain. Tacit knowledge does not travel. The trained discriminations that work on rocket engines work on rocket engines. They confer nothing about Roman history, epidemiology, or the politics of Britain. A man whose entire cognitive strength consists of domain-built tacit inventories has no general verbal facility to fall back on, because he never built one. He never needed one. So when a podcast host asks Musk about civilizational decline, he reaches for whatever propositions float nearest, and the nearest propositions on his timeline are memes. The shallowness of his talk and the depth of his work come from the same source. He invested his learning hours in feedback loops with hardware, and the return on those hours sits where he spent them and nowhere else.

This also tells you why interviews with Musk fail as a genre. The interviewer comes to extract the knowledge in portable form. Tell us your principles. Tell us how you think. Musk obliges with first principles talk, and the interviewer leaves with a bag of tokens, and viewers who study the tokens learn nothing operational. The knowledge stayed in the building. Walter Isaacson got closer than the interviewers because he watched Musk work for two years, and watching is the channel through which tacit knowledge moves, when it moves at all. Even then, Isaacson acquired the spectator’s version, the way a man who watches surgery for two years learns what surgery looks like and still cannot cut.

The frame makes a prediction about succession, and the prediction looks right so far. If SpaceX ran on explicit knowledge, Musk could write the manual and retire. It runs on his inventory plus the inventories of the people trained in proximity to him, which means the company’s continuity problem is an apprenticeship problem. Gwynne Shotwell (b. 1963) functions as she does after more than two decades of shared feedback cycles, and Tom Mueller built the engine knowledge in parallel through his own decades of test stands. The people who can extend the capability are the people who built their inventories inside the loop. The company can hire a thousand credentialed engineers, and it does, and each one starts with an empty inventory and fills it the slow way. There is no shortcut, because there is no object to transfer. Turner’s denial of collective tacit objects sounds like academic hairsplitting until you watch a company try to scale a founder’s judgment and discover that the judgment does not scale. It replicates only through contact.

One more payoff. The frame sorts Musk’s evaluators into two errors. The critics score his talk, find it weak, and conclude the man is weak. They assume the verbal inventory samples the whole. The fans make the mirror mistake. They score his talk, find it oracular, and conclude that the memes carry the genius, so they study his tweets the way Confucians studied the Analects. Both camps treat his words as the site of his knowledge. Turner says the site is elsewhere. It is in the 2 a.m. factory walk, the deleted part, the impossible deadline that turns out to miss by only thirty percent because twenty years of feedback taught him how much pad lives in every engineering estimate. The words are exhaust. The engine runs somewhere the microphone cannot reach.

The general lesson cuts against the people most likely to write about Musk. Writers know one kind of knowledge, the kind that lives in sentences, and they grade everyone by it because it is the kind they can see. Turner’s work stands as a long warning that the graders are sampling the wrong inventory. Musk is the largest case in public life of a man whose talk and whose competence have almost nothing to do with each other. Judge the talk and you miss the man. Watch the hands.

The Grader’s Portfolio: Elon Musk Through Bourdieu’s Scholastic Fallacy

Watch any long interview with Elon Musk and you watch a genre fail. The interviewer arrives with the standard equipment of his trade: the request for a worldview, the invitation to reflect, the question that begins with “how do you think about.” Musk shifts in his chair, produces a slogan, makes a joke about memes, and the interviewer leaves with footage of a man who seems smaller than his companies. The footage then circulates as evidence. Here is the mind behind SpaceX, and look how little it contains.

Pierre Bourdieu spent his last decade explaining why this scene was rigged before anyone sat down. In Pascalian Meditations, he names the error he considers the deepest in the human sciences: the scholastic fallacy, the scholar’s habit of stuffing his own relation to the world into the heads of the people he studies. The scholar lives in skholè, the leisure that universities institutionalize, a standing exemption from practical urgency. Nothing in his day forces a decision before the data arrive. His job consists of turning the world into discourse about the world, so when he looks at a man acting, he assumes the action executes a theory, then asks the man for the theory, then grades him on it. Bourdieu calls this placing a scholar inside the machine, and he means it as an accusation. The reconstruction is the scholar’s artifact. The actor never held it.

Bourdieu’s alternative runs through The Logic of Practice. Skilled agents operate on practical sense, the feel for the game that a habitus acquires through long immersion in a field. The tennis player does not compute trajectories. He moves to where the ball will be, and the moving is the intelligence. Ask him to state his theory of return position and he produces banalities, because the question translates his competence into a register where it never lived. The translation loses everything and the questioner then attributes the loss to the player.

Now run Musk through this. His habitus formed across twenty-five years inside two fields, manufacturing and aerospace, fields whose stakes are physical and whose feedback is brutal. The rocket flies or it explodes. The line produces or it stalls. A man shaped by that feedback develops a feel for the game of hardware: which estimate carries pad, which part can go, which engineer believes his own schedule. The feel operates the way the tennis player’s does, in real time, below articulation, as a trained orientation toward the next move. Then a journalist sits him down and asks for his philosophy, and the question performs the exact operation Bourdieu warned against. It demands that practice present itself as theory. Musk has no theory to present, because his competence was never stored in that format, so he reaches for whatever discourse lies nearest, and what lies nearest is the meme pool of his own timeline. The interviewer mistakes the reach for the mind.

So far this overlaps with what a theory of tacit knowledge might say. Bourdieu adds the part no theory of knowledge contains: the class interest behind the grading.

Verbal facility, in Bourdieu’s scheme, is capital. Linguistic capital, a subspecies of cultural capital, convertible into degrees, bylines, tenure, panel seats, and deference. The people who evaluate public figures for a living, journalists, professors, critics, essayists, hold their entire fortunes in this one asset. Their position depends on a favorable exchange rate, on the social agreement that fluent talk indexes intelligence and that intelligence legitimates standing. Every instrument they use to measure other people, the interview, the profile, the review, the seminar question, was built by their class and measures their asset. This is not a conspiracy. It is what Bourdieu means by a field: a market whose incumbents defend the value of the capital they hold, mostly without knowing they are doing it, because the defense feels like standards.

Musk threatens the exchange rate. Here stands a man with the largest fortune on earth, command of the most advanced hardware programs in private hands, and the verbal presence of a bright fourteen-year-old. If he counts as intelligent, then verbal facility and intelligence come apart, and the asset every intellectual holds loses its backing. The cheapest defense is to mark him down. Call him a fraud, a lucky inheritor, a front man for his engineers. Each of these verdicts protects the grader’s portfolio, and each one arrives dressed as judgment, which is how symbolic power works. Bourdieu’s point cuts past hypocrisy. The intellectual who scores Musk low is sincere. His sincerity is the product of a habitus that cannot perceive competence without a verbal face, because every competence he has ever been rewarded for had one.

The frame then explains something the standard accounts of Musk’s media war miss. Musk did not merely complain about coverage. He bought the instrument. The Twitter purchase, read through Bourdieu, is a move in a struggle between fields over conversion rates. Journalism’s power rested on its monopoly position in consecration, the capacity to decide who counts as serious, and that capacity ran through a platform journalists had colonized. Musk converted economic capital into ownership of the consecration machine, then changed its rules, demoted the verified class, and elevated his own register, the meme, to the house style. Intellectuals experienced this as vandalism. In field terms it was a devaluation. He used money to attack the currency his graders are paid in, and their fury since has the unmistakable pitch of a holding class watching its asset slide.

Bourdieu would not let Musk off, though, and the frame earns its keep by cutting him too. The scholastic fallacy has a mirror. The practical actor who projects his own relation to the world onto every domain commits the same error from the other side, and Musk does this on schedule. He treats government as a badly run factory, social trust as a software problem, journalism as content with bad engagement metrics. His DOGE period read every institution through the deletion heuristic that works on rocket parts, and the results showed what happens when one field’s practical sense gets exported to a field with different stakes. Bourdieu’s framework predicts this failure as firmly as it predicts the intellectuals’ failure to read Musk. Each habitus universalizes itself. The engineer inside the machine of state is as misplaced as the scholar inside the machine of practice.

There is a last twist. Musk craves the very capital his existence devalues. He performs erudition, drops Latin, cites history badly, polls his followers on civilizational questions, and visibly wants standing as a thinker, not only as a builder. Bourdieu would find this familiar. Dominant agents in one field routinely seek consecration in the field that ranks above it in symbolic prestige, the way nineteenth-century industrialists bought paintings. The hunger confirms the hierarchy. Musk’s memes are bids for intellectual standing made by a man without the capital to bid properly, on an exchange he had to buy because the existing one refused his currency. The intellectuals laugh at the bids, and the laughter is the one judgment of theirs the frame ratifies, though for a reason they might not enjoy: in this single market, the one they own, their pricing is sound.

What the frame predicts going forward is stasis. The misjudgment of Musk cannot correct itself through better interviews or fairer profiles, because the error sits in the instruments, and the instruments sit in the interest of the class that runs them. Perceiving practical competence as intelligence would cost the intellectual class the premium on its own asset, and no class prices its asset down voluntarily. Musk will keep sounding empty to the people whose job is listening, and the rockets will keep landing, and each side will keep reading the other’s scoreboard as broken. Bourdieu’s bleak gift is to show that both scoreboards work. They just price different capitals, held by classes with no reason to honor each other’s currency.

The Wrong Test: Elon Musk Through the Psychometric Tilt Research

In 1971, Julian Stanley (1918-2005) began hunting for mathematically gifted children at Johns Hopkins. His method was blunt: give twelve-year-olds the SAT, a test built for seventeen-year-olds, and see who scores like a college freshman. The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth grew into five cohorts and more than five thousand participants, tracked across their whole adult lives. David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow now run it at Vanderbilt, and it stands as the longest, deepest record we have of what becomes of exceptional minds. Fifty years of follow-up. Careers, patents, publications, income, tenure. No other frame on Musk can produce a longitudinal table.

The finding that bears on Musk concerns the shape of ability, not its height. Take a child in the top one percent and look at the gap between his math score and his verbal score at age thirteen. That gap, the tilt, predicts the domain of his adult work decades later. A 2007 paper by Gregory Park, Lubinski, and Benbow followed participants for twenty-five years and found the split clean at the extremes. The math-tilted earned the patents, the STEM doctorates, the engineering careers, the startups. The verbal-tilted wrote the books, won the humanities posts, produced the essays and the criticism. Both groups were brilliant by any normal standard. They were brilliant in different directions, and the direction set at thirteen held for life.

Later work added a third axis the SAT never measured. Jonathan Wai, Lubinski, and Benbow showed that spatial ability, the capacity to rotate and assemble structures in the head, predicts engineering and invention beyond what math and verbal scores explain. They call it the neglected dimension, because schools do not test it, admissions offices do not see it, and the culture has no prestige category for it. A child can sit at the 99.9th percentile in spatial reasoning and pass through the entire education system unmarked, since every instrument the system uses is a verbal instrument. The spatially gifted become machinists, surgeons, architects, and chief engineers, and they remain invisible to the class that writes about talent, because the class that writes about talent cannot measure what they have.

Now place Musk against this grid. We have no SAT score for him at thirteen, so the placement is behavioral, and the caution stands. But the signature is hard to miss. He taught himself to code at twelve and sold a game. He took degrees in physics and economics, then built his career on design review, the work of holding a machine in the head and finding the part that should not exist. Engineers who sit in those reviews describe a man who reasons through structures, loads, and costs in real time, at a level that keeps specialists honest. Then watch him in a seminar setting and the same man fumbles a question about history that any graduate student might handle. The profile reads as an extreme math-spatial tilt: a mind near the ceiling on two axes and ordinary on the third, the axis that happens to be the only one an interview can see.

That is the frame’s first payoff. An interview is a verbal test. So is a profile, a panel, a podcast, an essay. The entire apparatus through which public intelligence gets assessed consists of instruments built along one axis, administered by people selected on that axis. Run a spatially tilted mind through a verbal instrument and the instrument returns a low score, and the score is accurate about the axis and worthless about the mind. The SMPY data say these axes come apart at the extremes, and come apart hard. The further out you go, the rarer the balanced profile becomes. Expecting the man who designs the rocket to also charm the seminar misreads the distribution. At that altitude, the population mostly splits.

The second payoff concerns the graders. Who evaluates public figures? Journalists, critics, professors, essayists, the verbally eminent. The SMPY frame describes them as the other tail of the same distribution, the verbal-tilted who converted their axis into careers, exactly as the data predicted they might. Each tail then does what every human does: it tests strangers with its strong suit. The writer probes a subject with questions and reads the answers as the mind. The engineer probes a subject with problems and reads the solutions as the mind. Each test is fair on its own axis and blind on the other, so each population sits in a lifetime of evidence that the other population is overrated. The writer meets engineers who cannot write a paragraph and concludes they are narrow. The engineer meets writers who cannot read a balance sheet and concludes they are decorative. Both inferences feel empirical. Both sample one axis and bill it as the whole.

This makes the misjudgment of Musk a structural product, not a failure of fairness. The people assigned by our division of labor to assess him are drawn from the population least equipped to register his strengths and most equipped to register his weaknesses. Their verdict that he is unimpressive is true along the axis they measure. The error sits in the unstated premise that their axis is the measure, and the premise is invisible to them because their own success confirms it daily.

The frame then turns on Musk. His running contempt for the humanities, the cracks about college as four years of fun, the suggestion that journalists produce nothing, the engineer’s smirk at any field without equations: this is the identical error with the sign flipped. The SMPY verbal-tilt sample includes people of his own rarity who built their eminence in language, and his instruments cannot see them any better than theirs can see him. When he wades into history or political theory and performs at meme level, he demonstrates on himself the exact point his critics miss about him, that competence is axis-bound. He just draws the wrong conclusion, that the other axis does not exist.

SMPY found that tilt predicts not just careers but values and tastes. The math-tilted score high on theoretical values and prefer working with things; the verbal-tilted score high on aesthetic values and prefer working with people and symbols. The tilt sorts whole lives, friendships, politics, reading habits. By adulthood the two tails inhabit separate worlds with separate scoreboards, and each world’s scoreboard hangs where its members can see it. Musk and his graders are not having a disagreement. They are reporting from different instruments, calibrated in childhood, stable for fifty years in the data, with almost no one positioned to read both.

The frames has limits. Tilt findings come from within the top one percent, where everyone has high absolute ability on every axis, and Musk’s actual scores are unknown. The frame cannot prove anything about one man. What it offers is a base rate and a prediction. The base rate says minds at the extreme usually point one way. The prediction says a verbal class will keep scoring a spatial man as empty, and a spatial man will keep scoring a verbal class as fake, and both will keep mistaking their instrument for the world. On fifty years of evidence, that is how the tails behave. Musk and his critics are running the experiment again, with cameras.

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The Anthropology of Sean Hannity

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Sean Hannity is the purest specimen Mearsheimer‘s anthropology could ask for, because in Hannity there is no residue of the liberal man at all. No performance of reason, no individualist interior, no gap between the socialized self and the broadcast self. The infusion runs all the way down.

Start with the infusion. Franklin Square, Long Island, Irish Catholic, grandparents off the boat. A father who worked as a family-court probation officer, a mother who worked in a county jail. Altar boy, seminary schooling at Sacred Heart and St. Pius X. The home’s code: God, cops, country, family, loyalty, and respect for the uniform. Mearsheimer says a man’s moral code arrives before his critical faculties do, installed by family and surrounding society, and that reason arrives later as a junior partner. Hannity’s adult worldview is the Franklin Square code without one alteration. He came of age at nineteen as Ronald Reagan won the presidency, took his political identity from that moment, and has not revised a premise since. He did not reason his way to anything. He is what the home made, broadcasting nightly, and his sign-off is the Gospel of John: let not your heart be troubled. The seminary boy still closes with scripture, consoling the congregation.

Now the form of the show, which separates Hannity from every rival. Rush Limbaugh performed argument. Tucker Carlson performed thinking, the furrowed brow, the dissident intellectual. Hannity performs neither. His program is recitation: the same phrases, the same villains, the same loyalties, repeated nightly like a catechism, and his critics have spent thirty years calling him dumb for it. Mearsheimer’s frame says the critics grade him on the wrong scale. Hannity is not in the reason business and has never pretended to be. He said it himself in 2016: I’m not a journalist, I’m a talk show host. That sentence, like John Laws‘s version of it, declines the liberal role outright. The liberal anthropology says a broadcaster serves the audience’s reason. Hannity serves the audience’s solidarity, knows it, and says so, which makes him more honest about his function than the colleagues who dressed the same function in the costume of inquiry.

His political career is a chain of attachments to chiefs. Reagan formed him, Newt Gingrich (b. 1943) elevated him, George W. Bush commanded his war years, and Donald Trump completed him. The nightly phone calls, the advice, the rally stage in Missouri in 2018, the texts to the White House. And here the Dominion discovery, which damaged everyone else, distinguishes him. Carlson’s texts revealed a private self that loathed Trump, a gap between the tribal broadcast and the individual underneath. Hannity’s texts revealed concern, management, loyalty, the same man inside and out. He told lawyers he never believed Sidney Powell‘s (b. 1955) fraud claims for one second, yet his on-air accommodation of the tribe’s belief was not cynicism layered over a hidden self. It was the member subordinating his own judgment to the group’s need, which Mearsheimer says humans have always done, because the group is how they survive. Hannity holds his private opinions the way a man holds opinions inside a family: they yield to the family.

His foreign policy record shows ideology trailing the tribe, exactly as the anthropology predicts. Under Bush he was the loudest crusader on cable, and his 2004 book title joined terrorism, despotism, and liberalism as the trinity of evil. The war talk wore some universalist clothing, but the engine was tribal: our country, our troops, kill our enemies. When the tribe’s chief changed and Trump turned the movement against the wars, Hannity adjusted without visible strain, kept the hawkishness where the tribe kept it, on Iran, and dropped it where the tribe dropped it. The doctrine moved. The constant was membership. A man whose positions derive from reason shows friction when the positions reverse. A man whose positions derive from the group shows none, because nothing fundamental changed.

His bond with the audience is membership authority rather than intellectual authority. He tells the dishwasher stories, the bartending, the construction jobs, the college he never finished. He is the audience’s self-image made good: the working-class kid who rose without leaving, who kept the faith of the home. Limbaugh’s listeners looked up at a talent on loan from God. Hannity’s viewers look across at one of their own who got the big chair, and they trust him the way the tribe trusts a member, on the credential of sameness.

His durability delivers the frame’s final lesson. Consider the fates of the stars who built individual brands. Bill O’Reilly, the biggest name in cable, fired. Megyn Kelly (b. 1970), who bet on herself as an individual talent and left for NBC, crashed within a year. Carlson, whose personal brand grew larger than the network, cut in a day. Alan Colmes (1950-2017) is remembered as the liberal foil. Hannity, the least brilliant of all of them by the liberal measure, has held his chair across three decades, every purge, every scandal, every regime change at Fox News, because he never once elevated himself above the group. The individualists rose higher and fell. The loyalist endured. Mearsheimer says embedding in the group has always been the human survival strategy, and reason a lesser instrument. Hannity’s whole career is that sentence with a time slot.

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The Anthropology of Fox News

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Mearsheimer’s anthropology exposes Fox News at the level of its slogans. Fair and Balanced. We report, you decide. Both assume the liberal man: a rational individual who weighs evidence and forms his own conclusions, with the network as neutral servant of his reason. Mearsheimer says that man barely exists. Reason is the weakest of the three sources of preference, behind innate sentiment and socialization, and the deciding was done decades before the viewer ever found the channel. The slogans flatter the liberal self while the product feeds the tribal one, and the gap between slogan and product is the business model.
Look at what the programming does rather than what it claims. It names the group: real Americans, the heartland, the folks. It names the enemies: coastal elites, the mainstream media, Hollywood, the universities, the bureaucrats, the border crossers. It patrols the boundary nightly and reports on threats to the group’s standing and survival. Mearsheimer holds that survival is the prime human motive and that survival has always been social, secured through the group. Fox grasped that the deepest available appeal is not policy but group survival, and its strongest content has always run on extinction anxiety: your country is being taken, your culture erased, your kind replaced. Carlson took that logic to its limit with replacement talk, which is group-survival anthropology broadcast straight, stripped of liberal politeness. The ratings rewarded him because he was speaking to the fear Mearsheimer puts at the bottom of the human stack.
The socialization argument cuts deeper. Mearsheimer says our moral codes are infused in childhood, before the critical faculties mature, by family and surrounding society. Fox’s core audience received its infusion in mid-century America: church, flag, two-parent home, the schoolroom pledge. Then the surrounding society changed its values while the audience’s infusion stayed fixed, as infusions do. Fox does not convert anyone. It curates a world where the old infusion remains valid, honored, and right, and it frames the new dispensation as an alien imposition rather than the same process that formed the viewers themselves. The grievance underneath the channel is that the socializing machinery, the schools, the networks, the studios, the platforms, now infuses different values into the grandchildren.
Which explains the content mix better than any media theory. Run down Fox’s recurring panics: critical race theory in schools, gender ideology in classrooms, campus indoctrination, Disney, drag story hour, library books. Every one is a fight over the socialization of children. Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts that the fiercest political conflicts will erupt over the value-infusion machinery, because whoever holds it writes the moral code of the next generation, and adults cannot be argued out of codes installed before argument was possible. Fox is a nightly war report from the socialization front. Its audience cannot win back the universities or the studios, so it watches the battle the way exiles follow news of the old country.
On nationalism the channel sits exactly where Mearsheimer’s ranking puts the human heart. Liberal universalism says rights belong to everyone and borders are administrative. Fox’s content says the nation is the unit that counts: sovereignty, the border, America First, suspicion of the UN and the globalists, contempt for foreign policy run as missionary work. Its cable rivals spoke the universal language, facts first, citizens of the world, and lost the ratings war for a quarter century to a channel that spoke particularism, because particularism matches the anthropology. The audience’s drift on foreign wars completes the picture. The same viewers who cheered Iraq in 2003 turned against liberal hegemony as its costs came home, and Carlson spent his last Fox years making the realist case against the Ukraine project, NATO expansion as provocation, to the largest audience in cable news. Mearsheimer’s arguments about the war circulated through that audience while the liberal networks treated them as heresy. The professor’s foreign policy found its mass constituency on the channel his anthropology explains.
One contradiction runs through the network, and it is Reagan’s contradiction inherited. Fox preaches economic individualism, bootstraps and markets, while practicing tribal politics, and the two never conflict on air because the individualism functions as a tribal marker rather than a philosophy. Celebrating the self-made man is how this tribe sings about itself. The content is liberal vocabulary, the function is group emblem, and nobody in the audience experiences any tension, because nobody is processing it as philosophy.
The Arizona call reads differently through this frame than through Collins. The decision desk acted on the network’s official anthropology: viewers are rational individuals, we report, they decide. The audience responded with its real anthropology: the group’s chief was under attack and the channel had joined the attackers. Loyalty beat accuracy within weeks, measured in ratings, and the network capitulated to the tribe at a cost of $787 million. The liberal theory of its own audience was the most expensive mistake Fox ever made about human nature, and it never made it again.

Interaction Ritual Chains

Fox News took the Randall Collins ritual that talk radio built for the commute and rebuilt it for the hearth. Same theory, different hour, different chamber, and a few inventions radio could not make.

Begin with the founder, because the design was deliberate. Roger Ailes (1940-2017) came out of daytime television and Nixon’s image shop, and he understood that he was not building a news channel. He was building a place viewers lived. The instruction he gave his producers was emotional: make the audience feel defended, make them feel at home. Collins would translate: maximize shared mood, and the information will take care of itself.

Television restores something radio lacked: the face. Collins puts the face near the center of ritual life, since entrainment runs through expression as much as voice. Fox News built its prime time on faces held in close-up for minutes at a time. Bill O’Reilly‘s (b. 1949) glower, Sean Hannity (b. 1961) disgust, and above all Tucker Carlson‘s (b. 1969) furrowed bafflement, a face that performed the audience’s own incomprehension back at it and invited synchrony. The monologue is the same entrainment engine the radio men used, with the face as a second channel of rhythm. The viewer’s expression follows the host’s. That is bodily co-presence at one remove, and it is stronger than the dashboard voice.

The second invention is on-screen assembly. A radio host is alone with the audience. Fox stages the group itself. Fox & Friends puts three people on a couch at dawn, bantering like family at a kitchen table, and the viewer at his own kitchen table joins the circle as the silent fourth. The Five stages a simulated friend group at the happy-hour slot, with laughter, teasing, and one designated liberal to absorb the group’s corrections. Collins says solidarity requires members to witness each other’s mood. Fox solved the problem of the invisible audience by hiring a visible one and seating it on a couch. The viewer entrains with people he can see entraining with each other.

Then the schedule, which turns a channel into a chain. A story enters in the morning shows at low charge, passes through the afternoon, and arrives at prime time fully loaded, each host recharging the symbol and handing it on. The chyrons compress the day’s outrage into liturgical phrases the regulars can read in a glance and outsiders find half coded. By the time Carlson opened at eight, the audience had been entrained for twelve hours, and the monologue landed on prepared ground. Collins describes ritual chains running through individual lives. Fox runs one through its own broadcast day, inside the building, then out through the country each evening.

The audience side is the hearth. Fox skews old, and its core viewers run it six, eight, ten hours a day, in the living room, the kitchen, the nursing home lounge, the airport bar. For the isolated elderly viewer, the widower alone at four in the afternoon, the channel is the household’s other presence, a continuous supply of focused attention, familiar faces, and shared indignation. Collins says people starved of interaction rituals will take emotional energy from whatever source offers it. Fox is the ambient ritual, always on, and the loneliness of its audience is the foundation of its ratings. The set glows in the corner like the fire it replaced.

The sacred objects are visual now. The flag in the graphics, the gold and blue of the set, the dress code that functions as vestments, the logo in the corner of the screen marking consecrated ground. The calendar fills with seasonal rites, and the War on Christmas is the purest case: an annual festival of righteous anger, returning each December like a feast day, in which the group rehearses its persecution and its solidarity on schedule. Collins notes that ritual life organizes itself into calendars. Fox built one. Election night sits at the top of it, the high holy day, the longest assembly, the night the whole tribe watches together.

Which is why the Arizona call of November 3, 2020 was a catastrophe of a kind the frame predicts. The decision desk, acting on the liberal premise that a news channel reports outcomes, called the state for Biden in the middle of the high rite. The audience experienced it as profanation at the altar, the priests desecrating the sacred object on the holiest night. Within weeks, viewers defected to Newsmax in the hundreds of thousands, not because Newsmax had better information, but because it offered the unbroken ritual. The Dominion discovery later showed the aftermath from inside: hosts and executives texting their private disbelief in the fraud claims while broadcasting accommodation of them, terrified of the audience. Collins explains what the texts show. The congregation disciplines the priests. A ritual that has run long enough belongs to its members, and the celebrants keep the rite or lose the church. Fox chose the rite, and the choice cost it $787 million, which the network paid as the price of solidarity.

Donald Trump (b. 1946) fits the frame as the rival sacred object. For years Fox charged him nightly, and a symbol charged by that much ritual attention accumulates more energy than the apparatus that charged it. By 2020 the audience’s loyalty ran to the symbol over the church, and when the two split, the members followed the symbol. Networks can build sacred objects. They cannot repossess them.

The hosts, last, are Collins’s energy stars at maximum wattage. An hour of prime time with three million entrained viewers is the richest EE position American media offers, and the men who hold it behave like men who cannot give it up: the contract wars, the post-firing podcasts and streaming ventures, O’Reilly and Carlson reconstructing smaller altars rather than accept silence. Ailes himself kept the monitor wall running at home. Whoever stands at the focus takes the largest charge, and withdrawal is the one outcome none of them chose freely.

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The Anthropology of Talk Radio

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains talk radio better than any media theory does, because the format only makes sense once you drop the liberal picture of the listener.
Take the liberal picture first. Talk radio presents itself as the public sphere in miniature. Open lines, every citizen a voice, opinions tested in debate, the individual exercising reason. That is the founding myth of the format, and almost nothing about the practice matches it. Callers are screened. The host dominates every exchange. Nobody changes his mind, ever, and the audience does not tune in to have its mind changed. It tunes in for three hours a day, five days a week, for decades, which is not the behavior of a rational actor sampling arguments. It is the behavior of a member attending his group.
Mearsheimer says reason is the weakest of the three sources of our preferences, behind innate sentiment and socialization, and that socialization works through long, repeated, protected exposure. Talk radio is adult socialization on exactly that model. The daily three-hour block does for grown men what childhood does in Mearsheimer’s account: it infuses values through repetition inside a trusted relationship, while the critical faculties rest. The host does not persuade. He maintains. He tells the tribe each morning who we are, who they are, and what happened overnight in the war between us.
The deepest fit concerns who listens. Talk radio’s core audience has always been the socially stranded: the truck driver alone in his cab, the shift worker, the widow in her kitchen, the small businessman who answers to no one and talks to no one. Mearsheimer holds that humans need group membership to survive and will seek it wherever it can be found. Talk radio sells belonging to atomized people. The voice in the dashboard is a companion, the regular callers are familiar faces, the enemies are shared. Liberal society produces the atomization, and talk radio sells the cure. The format is a compensation racket built on the social nature liberalism ignores.
Several hosts ran their shows on something close to Mearsheimer’s anthropology.
Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021). His audience named the proof. Dittoheads. The term concedes everything: agreement precedes argument, loyalty precedes reason, the caller phones in to affirm membership rather than to deliberate. Limbaugh understood this and said so in his own way. He described his job as validating what his audience already knew and giving them confidence to say it. That is morale work for a tribe under pressure, and he fused it with nationalism, the flag, the EIB Network as a country within the country. Restaurants set aside Rush Rooms so members could listen together. No one ever set aside a room for a podcast of arguments.
Alan Jones built the same structure in Sydney with a harder edge of command. His phrase was pick and stick: choose your people and never waver, a loyalty ethic with no liberal content at all. Jones ran his audience as a chief runs a tribe, distributing favors, organizing letter campaigns, punishing politicians who crossed him, and the politicians feared him because they knew the audience moved as a bloc. A bloc is a group acting on attachment. Liberal theory has no name for what Jones commanded. Mearsheimer does.
John Laws (1935-2025). When the cash-for-comment scandal broke in 1999, Laws defended himself by saying he was an entertainer, not a journalist, and owed nobody the disinterest that journalism’s liberal norms require. The regulators and the broadsheets were scandalized. His audience mostly was not, and it stayed. The liberal institutions assumed the bond between host and listener ran on disclosure, accuracy, and the norms of the rational public sphere. It ran on the voice, thirty years of familiarity, and paternal authority. The scandal measured the gap between liberal norms and tribal psychology, and the tribe’s verdict differed from the institutions’ verdict because the two run on different anthropologies.
Paul Harvey (1918-2009). Hello, Americans. The greeting itself addressed a national family, and his whole career was value re-infusion: small towns, work, church, the decent middle of the country told daily that its inherited code was right. Harvey never argued. He confirmed.
The counterexample seals it. Air America launched in 2004 as the liberal answer to right-wing talk and died within six years. Market structure explains part of the failure, but Mearsheimer’s frame explains the rest. Progressive politics in that era spoke the universalist language of rights and humanity, and universalism cannot bind a tribe, because a tribe needs a boundary and universalism dissolves boundaries by design. Right-wing talk spoke nationalism, the strongest group ideology Mearsheimer knows. One side offered arguments to individuals. The other offered membership to social beings. The format rewarded the side whose anthropology was true.

Buffered vs Porous Selves

Charles Taylor (b. 1931) draws the line between two ways of having a self. The porous self of the enchanted world is open: spirits, voices, blessings, and curses cross its boundary, and meaning lives in things outside the mind, which can enter and take hold. The buffered self of modernity is sealed: meanings live inside, the world outside is neutral, and the self engages it at a distance, by choice. Taylor says we moderns are buffered. Talk radio is the evidence that the buffering is thinner than the theory.
Start with the medium. Radio has no screen and no page, nothing to hold at arm’s length. The voice arrives inside the skull, in the earbud, in the sealed cab of the truck, in the kitchen at dawn. Print addresses a reader who sits apart from the text and works on it. Radio enters. The listener does not decode the host; he hosts him. Every other medium asks for attention. Radio asks for admission, and the listener grants it, hours a day, for decades. That act of letting a voice in past the boundary is porosity, performed daily in the most disenchanted suburbs on earth.
Watch what duration does. After enough years, the host’s voice colonizes the listener’s inner speech. Listeners quote the host’s phrases as their own, hear his cadence when they read the news, anticipate what he will say about an event before he says it. The buffered self maintains a wall between my thoughts and the thoughts of others. Long listening dissolves the wall. The host’s mind and the listener’s mind interpenetrate, and the listener cannot say anymore where one stops. Possession is too strong a word by a degree, but only by a degree, and the older language would not have hesitated.
Now the content. Taylor says disenchantment drained the world of personal agency: things happen through impersonal systems, markets, statistics, viruses, rates. The buffered self lives in that flat causal weather and finds it cold. Talk radio re-enchants the cosmos in secular dress. On talk radio, nothing happens through impersonal process. Everything happens because someone did it. They wrecked the economy. They opened the border. They are coming for your way of life. The host narrates a world of agents, intentions, malice, and protection, which is the structure of the enchanted cosmos with demons swapped for elites. The listener under threat from personal forces is a porous self again, vulnerable to powers outside him, and the format keeps him in that state because the state is the product.
The host stands in the old role of the one who manages the boundary. Priests and cunning men once mediated between the porous self and the forces that pressed on it, naming the threat, prescribing the response, offering protection. The talk host does the same office. He names the danger each morning, tells the listener what it means and what to feel, marks the births and deaths of the audience, reads out the names of the sick. Alan Jones ran his program as a parish. John Laws, the Golden Tonsils, was called the voice of God for fifty years, and the joke was only half a joke; the voice carried an authority that no argument in it could account for. The authority was in the presence, which is where enchanted authority always lived.
The caller’s experience confirms it. Long-time listener, first-time caller, and the voice shakes. Why does it shake? On the buffered account, a citizen is phoning a media program to contribute an opinion, and there is nothing to tremble at. The trembling makes sense only if the caller is approaching a presence, entering a charged space where a power can bless him with airtime and agreement or banish him with the cut of a line. People do not tremble before content. They tremble before powers.
Liveness completes the structure. A podcast is buffered media: chosen, paused, skipped, consumed on the self’s own terms, the listener sovereign. Live radio is a flow the listener submits to in real time. It happens to him. He cannot stop the voice, only leave it, and he does not leave it. Submission to a continuous presence beyond your control is the porous posture, and the dial position never changes.
The purest case is night radio. Art Bell (1945-2018) broadcast Coast to Coast AM from a trailer in the Nevada desert to millions of people alone in the dark, and the content was the old enchanted world without disguise: ghosts, possession, visitations, voices from elsewhere. The biggest overnight audience in American radio belonged to a program that treated the porous cosmos as fact. The buffered self was supposed to have outgrown all that. At 2 a.m., alone, with a voice coming out of the dark, the listener discovered he had not.
Taylor gives the reason the whole format works. Buffering bought the modern self invulnerability and paid for it with flatness, the malaise of a world where nothing outside you can touch you and nothing outside you means anything. Talk radio sells the cure for flatness. It offers a daily cosmos where things mean, enemies threaten, a familiar power speaks to you by name, and you are open to all of it. The listener drives to work enchanted. He would never put it that way. He just says he likes the company.

Interaction Ritual Chains

Randall Collins (b. 1941) says rituals need four ingredients: bodies assembled in one place, a barrier against outsiders, a shared focus of attention, and a common mood. Run those through each other and you get the outputs: group solidarity, emotional energy in the individual, sacred symbols, and righteous anger against whoever profanes them. People then chain from ritual to ritual, seeking the energy charge, and a life is the chain. Collins doubts that media can do this at full strength, because the bodies are missing. Talk radio is the great test of that doubt, because it engineered around the missing ingredient and built the strongest ritual chain in broadcasting.
Start with shared focus, the ingredient radio does best. At 9 a.m. the host begins, and hundreds of thousands of people attend to one voice at one moment. Liveness does the work here. A podcast is consumed alone, on the listener’s schedule, and no one knows who else is listening or when. Live radio synchronizes attention across a city or a country, and the host labors to make the audience visible to itself: the folks, you out there, the calls read out, the texts read out, the town named with each caller. Frank from Penrith. Every named caller proves to every silent listener that the assembly exists and he is in it. The bodies are absent. The mutual awareness is not.
Then mood. Collins says rituals run on rhythmic entrainment: voices and gestures falling into a shared beat until the feeling becomes collective. The monologue is an entrainment engine. The host opens with the day’s outrage, builds it through repetition and escalation, and the audience’s pulse follows. Limbaugh’s pacing was a precision instrument. Jones escalated like a man climbing stairs. And the audience invented its own entrainment device: ditto. The word compressed the affirmation so the rhythm never broke. A caller who restated the argument in his own words would have slowed the beat. Ditto kept time. The dittohead was a man announcing that he was synchronized.
The barrier against outsiders is the insider code. Feminazis, the drive-by media, Struggle Street, the running jokes, the villain lexicon, the nicknames that take years to learn. Tune in cold and the show is half unintelligible, which is the point. Mastery of the code marks membership, and the daily broadcast extends the code faster than outsiders can learn it.
Now the outputs. The first sacred object is the host. Collins says the focus of a successful ritual becomes charged, a symbol of the group to itself, and the charge needs periodic renewal. Three hours a day is the renewal schedule. Around the host, lesser sacred objects accumulate: the golden microphone, which Laws possessed in literal gold, the EIB Network, the catchphrases that members exchange like tokens. And sacrilege produces what Collins predicts. When sponsors boycotted Limbaugh or regulators came for Jones, the audience experienced it as profanation and responded with righteous fury, flooding stations and advertisers. Punishing the profaner is itself a solidarity ritual, and a host under attack often emerged with a tighter tribe than before.
Emotional energy explains the listening itself. Collins says individuals leave good rituals charged with confidence and enthusiasm, and they organize their lives to get back to the source. The talk listener drives away from the show pumped, certain, ready to argue at the lunch table, and the charge drains by evening, and tomorrow at nine the source resumes. The schedule is an EE subscription, timed to the commute, with the car as the ritual chamber. The listener then recirculates the charged symbols, quoting the host at work, and each quotation is a micro-ritual that links him to other members and back to the chain.
The call-in segment is the ritual at maximum intensity. The first-time caller’s trembling voice, which Taylor’s frame read one way, reads in Collins as the physiology of high-stakes ritual entry: the member steps from the congregation to the altar. A successful call synchronizes with the host’s rhythm, receives his blessing, and delivers an energy payoff the caller will remember for years. A dissenting caller serves another function. The host crushes him, the group’s anger fires in unison, solidarity spikes, and the line goes dead. The format needs occasional heretics the way the ritual needs occasional sacrifices, and screeners admit a few for exactly that use.
Collins also explains the hosts. Emotional energy stratifies: whoever stands at the focus of a successful ritual harvests the largest charge, and becomes an energy star who needs the ritual more than anyone. This is why the great hosts never stop. Laws broadcast past eighty, retired, and returned, because retirement was withdrawal from the richest EE source he knew. Jones fought to stay at the microphone long after the money meant nothing. Three hours of focused attention from a million people, daily, for decades, produces men who are radiant on air and reportedly diminished off it. The chain holds the host hardest of all.
Two confirmations from the edges. First, the secondary rituals: Rush Rooms, listener cruises, station family days. The audience kept converting the mediated ritual back into bodily assembly, recharging at full Collins strength what the airwaves could only sustain at partial strength. The members themselves sensed what the medium lacked and supplied it. Second, the failures: balanced panel formats, point-counterpoint shows, the respectable forums that program directors love and listeners abandon. Balance prevents a shared mood by design, and without shared mood there is no entrainment, no solidarity, no charge, no chain. The audience was never seeking information. It was seeking the ritual, and it can tell within minutes which stations hold one.

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The Anthropology of Margaret Thatcher

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) gives Mearsheimer an even sharper test case than Reagan, because she said the anti-Mearsheimer thesis out loud. “There is no such thing as society,” she told Woman’s Own in 1987. “There are individual men and women and there are families.” That is liberal atomism stated as flatly as anyone has ever stated it. If Mearsheimer is right, her own career should refute her sentence. It does.
Begin with what made her. The grocer’s shop in Grantham, the Methodist discipline of her father Alfred Roberts (1892-1970), the thrift, the sermons, the civic duty of a provincial alderman’s home. Thatcher did not reason her way to her convictions any more than Reagan did. She received a value infusion in childhood and spent fifty years applying it. The woman who preached that individuals make themselves was herself the most thoroughly socialized politician of her generation, a walking product of one shop on one street in one Lincolnshire town.
Then look at what won her elections. Free-market doctrine never had mass appeal in Britain. The Falklands did. In April 1982 her government was the most unpopular on record, and the war transformed her into the embodiment of the nation. Crowds did not cheer monetarism. They cheered Britain humiliating an enemy and recovering its standing after Suez and the IMF crisis of 1976. Her project sold itself as national restoration: putting the Great back in Great Britain. The individualist economics rode on tribal feeling, which is Mearsheimer’s ranking of nationalism over liberalism in one package.
Her foreign policy splits the same way Reagan’s does. The rhetoric was liberal and Atlanticist, freedom against communism. The practice was balance-of-power realism. She spotted Gorbachev before Washington did and announced in December 1984 that she could do business with him. She opposed German reunification in 1989 and 1990 on naked power grounds, fearing a state that might dominate the continent, and she said so to anyone who listened. No liberal principle supports blocking forty million Germans from self-determination. Realism does.
Europe is the cleanest evidence. The European project is liberalism applied to nations: pool sovereignty, dissolve borders, let rules and markets replace tribal loyalties. Thatcher signed the Single European Act in 1986 for market reasons, then recoiled when she saw where the logic went. The Bruges speech of September 20, 1988 drew the line at the nation-state. When her liberalism and her nationalism collided, nationalism won, exactly as Mearsheimer predicts it must.
The domestic record carries a darker Mearsheimerian lesson. Her economics treated people as the atomistic actors of liberal theory, and where the theory met dense social groups it broke them. The miners’ strike of 1984-85 destroyed not just an industry but the villages built around it, and Mearsheimer’s frame predicts what followed: people stripped of one group attachment seek another. Scotland, hit by deindustrialization and then the poll tax, transferred its loyalty from Britain to Scottish nationalism, and the Tories were nearly extinct there within a decade. The long fuse of resentment her project lit in the deindustrialized north helped detonate Brexit, itself a tribal revolt against liberal integration. Her individualism produced nationalist reactions on every side, because the social nature she denied kept reasserting against her.
Her end completes the argument. The electorate never removed Thatcher. Her tribe did. In November 1990 the Conservative Party, the most ruthless group organism in British politics, judged her a liability over Europe and the poll tax and cut her down through its own internal rituals. The woman who said there were only individuals and families was destroyed by a collective she could not command, and she spent her remaining years wounded by exile from it. She needed the group more than the group needed her.
So Mearsheimer’s frame reads Thatcher as a nationalist who mistook herself for an individualist. The mistake cost her little while the two ran together, in the Falklands and the Cold War. It cost her everything when they diverged, over Europe and within her party. And it cost Britain a measure of social cohesion that her theory said did not exist and her policies proved did.

Buffered vs Porous Selves

Thatcher is the buffered self elected to office. Taylor traces the buffered self to the Reformation’s long discipline: the war on magic and sacrament, the relocation of meaning from the world into the conscience, the sealed individual answerable to God and his own will. Methodism carried that discipline into the English provinces, and the grocer’s house in Grantham ran on it. Conscience, thrift, work, self-command, no mystery and no excuse. Thatcher did not merely hold the buffered anthropology. She was its finished product, three centuries of Reform compressed into one woman above a corner shop.
Her creed projected that self onto the whole country. There is no such thing as society means: there are no porous selves. There are sealed units of will and responsibility, each generating its own purposes from within, connected by contract and family and nothing else. Her economics assumed that man. Strip away subsidy and shelter, and the buffered individual stands forth, chooses, strives, and prospers. The Sermon on the Mound in May 1988 gave the theology version: salvation is individual choice, the Good Samaritan needed money before he could do good. The Church of England answered with Faith in the City, a porous Christianity of communities and bonds, and she regarded the bishops as fools. The two anthropologies could not hear each other.
In person she seemed sealed to a degree that astonished people. No doubt, no need for approval, four hours of sleep, no visible malaise. The lady’s not for turning is the buffered self’s motto: my meanings are inside, generated from within, and the weather of other minds does not cross my boundary. Ministers came to her with the mood of the party, the mood of the country, and the mood did not enter. She lacked the porous receptors. She could not feel a room, and toward the end she could not feel the nation turning on the poll tax, because feeling a nation requires a permeability she had trained out of herself or never had.
Yet her power over others was porous power. Cabinet ministers, grown men who had governed empires of paper, described being in her presence in the language of possession and fear. The handbagging, the blue gaze, François Mitterrand’s (1916-1996) line about the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe. Charisma is a presence crossing into other selves and acting there, an enchanted phenomenon with no place in her own theory of persons. She wielded on others a force she did not believe existed.
And her politics, when it mattered most, re-enchanted the world. The Falklands turned the nation back into a charged and sacred thing, a presence that claimed lives and demanded rejoicing, and the country answered as porous selves answer a summons. Her rhetoric peopled the cosmos with agents of menace: the enemy within, the Argentine junta, Brussels reimposing the frontiers of the state. Enemy within is demonology, the old enchanted grammar of possession and threat. She preached a disenchanted economy and ran an enchanted politics, and the second carried the first to three election victories.
The deepest collision came in the coalfields. Her theory saw inefficient industries staffed by individuals who could retrain and move, because buffered selves can move; their meanings travel with them, inside. The villages she broke were the last enchanted communities in industrial Britain: the pit, the chapel, the band, the gala, the union banner carried like a relic. The men were porous to those things. The pit was not their employer. It was in them, constitutive, the way the parish was in a medieval villager. When the pits closed, men grieved as for deaths, and then died early themselves in numbers, and her anthropology had no category for the wound. You cannot register the destruction of meanings you believe do not exist outside the head. Arthur Scargill (b. 1938) led an enchanted tribe against a woman who could not see one.
Her end ran the lesson in reverse, twice. First, the fall: the party’s mood gathered for months, porous men like Geoffrey Howe (1926-2015) absorbing the danger and signaling it, and she, sealed, perceived nothing until the votes were counted. The buffered self’s invulnerability had become deafness. Second, the aftermath: the woman whose theory said the self is complete in itself was hollowed out by exile from power, wandering, by every account, in grief for a presence that had left her. Denis, the red boxes, the purpose, the force that had filled her, gone. She turned out to be porous after all, open to one great power her whole life, and when it withdrew it took most of her with it.
So Taylor’s frame reads Thatcher as a woman who governed porous people with a buffered creed, broke their enchanted worlds in the name of a self they did not have, and was broken in turn by forces her philosophy could not admit through the boundary. The creed was wrong about Britain. Its last refutation was her.

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The Anthropology of Ronald Reagan

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

Mearsheimer’s frame turns Reagan inside out. Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) talked like the purest liberal individualist in American politics, and on Mearsheimer’s account that talk was the surface of something else: nationalism wearing liberal clothes.
Start with the rhetoric. The city on a hill, the evil empire, the Westminster speech of June 8, 1982 consigning Marxism-Leninism to the ash heap of history. That language is universalist. Rights belong to everyone, freedom is the natural condition of man, and the Soviet system offends against human nature. Pure political liberalism by Mearsheimer’s definition.
Now look at the practice. Reagan governed in a bipolar world, and Mearsheimer argues that bipolarity disciplines states into realism whether they like it or not. Liberal hegemony only became possible after 1989, when the United States faced no peer. Reagan never had that luxury. So his foreign policy looks like containment with a megaphone. He armed proxies in Afghanistan and Nicaragua rather than sending armies to build democracies. He embraced Jeane Kirkpatrick’s (1926-2006) distinction between authoritarian friends and totalitarian enemies, which is realist alliance logic dressed as moral philosophy. He pulled out of Lebanon in 1984 after the barracks bombing rather than escalate for credibility’s sake. He negotiated with Gorbachev (1931-2022) the moment the balance of power made negotiation profitable. A liberal crusader does not sign the INF Treaty with the head of the evil empire. A realist does.
Reagan preached individualism, but nobody experienced Reaganism as atomism. People experienced it as belonging. Morning in America, the flag, the restored pride after Vietnam and the Carter years. Reagan offered Americans membership in a group with a story, and that is why they loved him. The cowboy individualist is an American tribal myth, a marker of group identity. When Reagan celebrated the lone entrepreneur, his audience heard a hymn to us, the Americans, against them. His individualism functioned as a shibboleth of the tribe.
Reagan’s own biography illustrates Mearsheimer’s claim about socialization beating reason. He did not reason his way to his creed. He absorbed it: the Disciples of Christ piety of his mother in Dixon, Illinois, the small-town Midwest of the 1920s, the Hollywood anticommunism of the Screen Actors Guild fights, the General Electric years touring plants and giving the same speech hundreds of times. By the time Reagan held power his values were decades-old infusions, and he held them with the fixity of a man who never doubted what his group taught him. Reason came later, as decoration.
Reagan succeeded because he fused the two ideologies in the order Mearsheimer says they must be ranked. Nationalism first, liberalism second, with liberalism serving as the vocabulary of the nation rather than a program for the planet. The universalist talk gave Americans a flattering self-image. The realist practice kept the costs down. His successors inverted the order after the Cold War, took the universalist talk as a literal program, and produced the failures Mearsheimer’s book catalogs.

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The Anthropology of the Democratic Party

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

The Democratic Party comes off worse, because it is the institutional home of the creed Mearsheimer calls a delusion. The GOP contains a faction his theory vindicates. The Democrats are built on the thing he says is false.
Start with the core. Rights universalism is the party’s official religion. Every human being everywhere holds the same inalienable rights, and politics exists to vindicate them. This is the language of the party’s lawyers, its NGOs, its foundations, its foreign policy hands, and its activist base. If Mearsheimer is right, this creed misdescribes the species. People do not experience themselves as bearers of universal rights. They experience themselves as members of particular groups, and the largest group that commands real sacrifice is the nation. A party whose moral vocabulary runs past the nation to humanity asks voters for an allegiance almost no one feels. “Citizen of the world” is, on his premises, a phrase that describes nobody.
Here is the paradox, though. The Democrats preach universalism and practice tribalism. The party’s electoral machine is a coalition of identity groups, each organized around the group attachments Mearsheimer says drive human beings. So the party half-confirms his theory in its daily operations while denying it in its philosophy. The trouble is the level at which the tribalism operates. The Democratic coalition mobilizes tribes below the nation: racial groups, gender categories, sexual identities. The Republican coalition increasingly mobilizes the nation as the tribe. If Mearsheimer is right that nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet, the party that organizes sub-national tribes against a party that claims the national tribe has chosen the weaker position. Ceding the flag is ceding the strongest force in politics.
The coalition structure produces its own pathologies under his premises. A party of many tribes without a tribe above them must pay each member group constantly, in policy, in language, in vetoes over the platform. Each group polices its boundary, because that is what tribes do. Hence the purity spirals, the acronym politics, the inability to tell any constituent group no. A single-tribe party disciplines itself around the leader. A many-tribe party negotiates itself into paralysis.
The professional-class wing fares no better. The educated stratum that now dominates the party believes in reason as the route to political truth: explain the policy, check the facts, correct the misinformation, and voters will update. This is the anthropology Mearsheimer ranks last. If socialization and innate sentiment beat reason as sources of belief, then explainer journalism, fact-checking operations, and the whole technocratic style convert almost no one. The misinformation framing rests on the assumption that wrong beliefs come from bad information, when on his account they come from group attachment, and no correction touches them. Thomas Frank (b. 1965) asked what was the matter with Kansas, why voters there ignored their material interests. Mearsheimer’s answer is that nothing was the matter. Voters vote their tribe. The Democrats keep offering material benefits to working-class voters, the rational-actor appeal, and keep watching those voters, White and increasingly Hispanic and Black, drift toward the party that offers belonging instead. Benefits do not buy loyalty. Membership does.
Immigration is where the creed costs most. The universalist logic runs straight to the activist positions: no human is illegal, asylum is a human right, enforcement is violence. The national tribe’s boundary instinct runs the other way, and on Mearsheimer’s account that instinct sits deeper than any argument. The party’s immigration politics since 2013 reads as a long experiment in testing his theory, with the results he predicts.
Foreign policy implicates the Democrats as much as the neocons. Liberal hegemony was a bipartisan project, and its Democratic version, humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, the rules-based international order, flows from the same universalism. Libya was a Democratic war. If Mearsheimer is right, the Clinton-Obama-Biden tradition of foreign policy fails for the same reason the Bush tradition failed: you cannot install a creed in a society whose members were socialized into something else. The antiwar left, long the party’s embarrassing uncle, holds the position his theory endorses, which mirrors the GOP’s situation, where the restrainers were the embarrassing uncles until recently.
Now the other side of the ledger, because his premises also reveal the Democrats’ great hidden asset. If socialization beats reason, the side that controls the institutions of childhood and young adulthood wins the long game regardless of elections. Progressives hold the schools, the universities, the entertainment industry, the HR departments. They perform the value infusion on each cohort before its critical faculties mature. Young Americans lean left not because the arguments persuaded them but because the institutions formed them, which is exactly how Mearsheimer says moral codes get made. On his premises this is worth more than any presidency. It also explains why the Republican assault on those institutions, school choice, homeschooling, the university funding fights, is rational rather than paranoid. Both sides now act as if Mearsheimer is right about where beliefs come from.
One more implication, about religion. The Democrats became the secular party as their constituencies stopped going to church, and on Mearsheimer’s account that removed a deep source of solidarity and moral formation. What filled the space looks like a substitute creed: sacred values, blasphemy norms, conversion narratives, excommunications. This confirms his anthropology, humans will have a tribe and a sacred order whether or not they call it religion. But the substitute is the creed of a class, formed in universities and fluent only there. It cannot scale to a nation, and it alienates the voters whose formation happened elsewhere.
The path his theory suggests is the one the party keeps finding and losing. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) fused liberal policy to national solidarity and won five consecutive presidential cycles for his party. Barack Obama (b. 1961) ran in 2008 on one America, no red states and blue states, the national tribe, and won bigger than any Democrat since. The party wins when it claims the nation and loses when it speaks past it, upward to humanity or downward to the demographic coalition. If Mearsheimer is right, the Democrats’ problem is not their policies, which often poll well. It is that they built a church on the doctrine that congregations do not exist.
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) draws the line in A Secular Age between two ways of having a self. The porous self of the enchanted world stands open to forces outside it. Spirits, curses, blessings, relics, and words can get in and do things to you. Meaning lives in the world, not just in minds. The buffered self of modernity closes that boundary. Meaning retreats inside the head, the world becomes a neutral system of objects, and the self gains invulnerability at the price of what Taylor calls the malaise of immanence, the flatness of a disenchanted world. Run the Democratic Party through this distinction and the party splits open along a line nobody in it can name.
The party’s commanding heights belong to the most buffered population ever assembled. The professional class that staffs the campaigns, the foundations, the agencies, and the newsrooms lives the buffered life in full: secular, credentialed, therapeutic, managerial. Its political style follows from its self-structure. Policy is social engineering. Problems are technical. The world is a system to administer, and the administrator stands outside what he administers, disengaged, running the numbers. Trust the science. Read the explainer. The wonk is the buffered self doing politics, and the party’s chronic production of candidates who read as managers rather than leaders comes from a class that trained itself out of the registers in which leadership is felt rather than evaluated.
But the party’s base was never buffered. The Black church is a porous institution. Grace moves through bodies there, the Spirit descends, the dead are present, and a sermon is an event in the world rather than a transfer of information. Hispanic Catholicism keeps its saints, its candles, its processions. Immigrant communities carry enchanted worlds with them. For most of the twentieth century the Democratic coalition ran on this porousness. The civil rights movement was a porous event. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) spoke of souls, redemption, and the beloved community, and the language did work because his hearers had selves that language of that kind could enter. The party’s moral music came from its porous wing. As the leadership class secularized, the party kept the songbook and lost the voice. Obama could still cross the line, singing Amazing Grace in Charleston, preaching eulogy as a participant rather than an observer. Hillary Clinton (b. 1947) could not, and the difference between those two politicians is in large part the difference between a man who could enter the porous register and a woman locked in the buffered one.
Now the strange part. Taylor predicts the buffered self will not rest easy. The closed boundary produces flatness, and the flatness produces a hunger for re-enchantment. Look at the party’s activist wing through this lens and you find the porous self reborn inside the secular world. Words wound there. A slur is not information about the speaker but a force that enters and damages the hearer, which is porous anthropology to the letter, meaning located in the word as a power rather than in the mind as an interpretation. Safe spaces are anti-contagion architecture. Trauma discourse describes a self that external events colonize and inhabit. Whiteness functions as a possessing force that operates through people without their intent, and implicit bias names a spirit you carry unknowing, while “doing the work” is the exorcism. Systemic racism, in its strongest formulations, has the structure of an enchanted force: invisible, omnipresent, acting at a distance, working through hosts. None of this is meant as mockery. It confirms Taylor. Strip a population of God, saints, and sacraments, and the porous structure does not vanish. It returns wearing secular clothes, with sacred victims in place of saints, privilege confessions in place of the confessional, and cancellation in place of excommunication.
So the party holds a contradiction it cannot see. Its official epistemology is buffered: facts, data, expertise, the disenchanted universe of the explainer. Its activist practice is porous: contamination, purity, possession, words as forces. The same young staffer who mocks religious voters for believing words can be blasphemous will file an HR complaint describing speech as violence, and no one in the building notices the two anthropologies at war in one person. Taylor calls this cross-pressure, the buffered self haunted by what it buffered out, and the Democratic Party may be the most cross-pressured institution in American life.
The electoral costs run in two directions. Toward the religious, the buffered leadership cannot hear porous claims as anything but irrational preference. A religious-liberty claim sounds like a policy demand rather than what it is, a report from people for whom the sacred is real and violable. The party’s tone-deafness toward the devout, including the devout inside its own coalition, is a translation failure between self-structures. Toward the unchurched young, the party becomes the accidental supplier of enchantment. Politics turns into the only available source of the sacred, which produces activists who need politics to deliver meaning, belonging, and salvation, loads on the system it was never built to carry. A buffered politics of administration cannot feed them, so they radicalize toward the porous politics of purity and contamination, and the party’s internal wars follow.
Mass politics itself is a porous experience. The rally, the flag, the martyr, the anthem, solidarity felt in a crowd, these work on selves to the degree the boundary opens. A party run by buffered selves distrusts all of it as manipulation, kitsch, or danger, and so it cedes the enchanted register of national life to its opponents while wondering why its superior policy papers do not move anyone. The Democrats’ nostalgia for the civil rights era is nostalgia for the last moment the party spoke as a porous institution and the country felt it. The songbook is still on the shelf. The question Taylor leaves is whether a leadership class formed by disenchantment can ever sing from it again, or whether it can only cite it.

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The Anthropology of the Republican Party

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

If John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is right about human nature, the Republican Party’s internal fights stop looking like arguments over policy and start looking like a contest between a faction built on a false anthropology and a faction built on a true one.
Start with fusionism. The Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, traditional values, and anticommunism rested on the individualist picture Mearsheimer rejects. Its economic wing treated the voter as a rational actor who responds to incentives, calculates his tax burden, and wants government out of the way so he can flourish alone. Paul Ryan (b. 1970) was the purest expression of this. He offered entitlement reform, dynamic scoring, and opportunity-society rhetoric to an electorate that, on Mearsheimer’s account, never wanted any of it, because people do not experience themselves as atomistic actors maximizing utility. They experience themselves as members of groups under threat or in decline. The base’s indifference to the donor-class agenda, visible since at least 2012 and undeniable after 2016, follows from his premises. Libertarianism within the GOP becomes a doctrine for the small minority of men whose temperament lets them feel like lone wolves, funded by a donor class whose interests it serves, and structurally incapable of winning mass loyalty.
The faction Mearsheimer’s anthropology vindicates is national conservatism. Donald Trump (b. 1946) grasped by instinct what Yoram Hazony (b. 1964), Patrick Deneen (b. 1964), and JD Vance (b. 1984) argue in books: the nation is the largest tribe that works. Mearsheimer says in The Great Delusion that when nationalism and liberalism collide, nationalism almost always wins. If so, the populist turn is a correction toward reality, and the party’s older establishment was the delusion. Immigration becomes the central issue under this reading because it concerns the boundary of the group, and boundary questions arouse the deepest sentiments humans have. The establishment treated immigration as an economic question with a clear answer. The base treated it as a question about who we are. Mearsheimer’s premises say the base had the better grasp of what politics is.
His argument cuts hardest on foreign policy, which is the book’s subject. If rights universalism is a philosophical error, then the democracy-promotion wing, the Bush-Cheney-Bolton lineage, was committed to a project that might never have worked: remaking tribal societies in the image of a creed their members never internalized. Afghanistan and Iraq become predictable failures rather than execution problems. The restraint wing of the party, which barely existed in 2003 and now contests for dominance, holds the position his theory endorses. Sovereignty replaces human rights as the organizing vocabulary. The fight between Vance and the remaining Reaganite internationalists over Ukraine is, on these premises, a fight the restrainers should win and probably will.
The religious right gets an unexpected vindication too, though on secular grounds. If socialization beats reason as the source of moral preferences, then whoever controls the institutions of childhood controls the moral future. The school-board fights, the curriculum wars, the battles over what a seven-year-old hears about sex and country and God stop looking like culture-war theater and start looking like the most consequential politics there is. Mearsheimer’s account implies that conservatives who spent decades fighting over marginal tax rates while progressives captured education made a catastrophic allocation of effort. The value infusion happens before the reasoning faculties mature. The side that performs the infusion wins, a generation later, regardless of who wins the arguments.
For practices, the implications are uncomfortable for anyone who likes deliberative politics. If reason is the weakest of the three sources of preference, persuasion through argument converts almost no one. Mobilization beats persuasion. Loyalty signals beat white papers. The rally, the flag, the enemy, the grievance, these work because they engage the tribal endowment. Trump’s style is, on this reading, a more accurate political technology than the think-tank style it displaced. The party’s drift toward loyalty tests and primary purges follows the same logic: tribes police defection because defection threatens survival, and a party that behaves like a tribe will punish heretics more harshly than incompetents.
Governance is where it gets dangerous, and where Mearsheimer himself might caution the GOP against over-reading him. He is no postliberal at home. His argument for liberalism is that people will never agree on first principles, that such disagreements turn lethal, and that liberal tolerance is a survival arrangement, a modus vivendi rather than a truth. A Republican Party that takes his anthropology as license for full tribal rule misreads him. The same premises that explain why nationalism beats liberalism abroad explain why a continental, multiethnic nation needs liberal institutions at home to keep its internal tribes from each other’s throats. The constructive project his theory implies is a thick civic nationalism: build a shared American identity strong enough to function as the tribe, so the smaller tribes within it do not tear the place apart. The destructive temptation his theory also explains is majority-group identity politics, which treats one tribe within the nation as the nation. The first might hold a diverse country together. The second guarantees the conflict it claims to prevent.
So the picture: the donor wing holds the money and a refuted anthropology. The populist wing holds the voters and the correct one, but flirts with conclusions Mearsheimer rejects. The party’s unresolved condition, populists winning the symbolic fights while donors win the legislative ones, persists because the coalition contains both the truth about human nature and the interests that profit from denying it. If Mearsheimer is right, that arrangement is unstable, and the populists hold the high ground, because they are working with the grain of the species.

Buffered & Porous Selves

The Democrats are a buffered leadership sitting on a porous base it can no longer hear. The Republicans are a porous base that captured the party and drove the buffered leadership out.
Start with where the enchanted world survived in America. It survived on the right. Evangelical and charismatic Christianity never accepted the buffer. In the Pentecostal and charismatic churches that supply the party’s most committed voters, demons are real and active, prayer changes outcomes, prophecy continues, healing flows through hands, and spiritual warfare is a daily fact. The devil is an agent with plans. This is the porous self in full, not a remnant of it, and it constitutes the largest enchanted population in the developed world. The Republican coalition is built on top of it.
For decades the party paired this porous base with a buffered command structure. Fusionism, seen through Taylor, was an alliance of self-structures as much as ideologies: buffered money and porous believers. The Chamber of Commerce wing, the libertarian economists, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Mitt Romney (b. 1947) and the Ryan budget wonks, these were buffered men running a disenchanted politics of incentives and growth charts, while the enchanted base supplied votes and moral energy. The arrangement held as long as the buffered wing delivered respect along with judicial appointments. It stopped holding when the base noticed the respect was absent. What followed was the porous capture of the party.
Trump is the porous phenomenon par excellence, and Taylor explains him better than most political science does. Begin with his formation. His family church was Norman Vincent Peale’s (1898-1993), and positive thinking is a porous doctrine: words are forces that shape reality, speech acts on the world rather than describing it. Trump talks the way a man talks when he believes saying it makes it so. The fact-checkers spent a decade treating his statements as failed propositions, buffered selves grading an enchanted speaker, and they never touched him because his audience does not receive his words as propositions either. They receive them as acts, blessings and curses, loyalty and war. The rallies are enchanted events, closer to revival than to speech, where presence does the work and the crowd comes to feel a force rather than evaluate an argument. The MAGA hat functions as a talisman. The prophecy movement declared him a Cyrus, an anointed pagan instrument of God, and Paula White (b. 1966) stood in the White House calling on angels from Africa and South America. None of this embarrasses the base, because none of it is foreign to the porous self.
Conspiracy belongs in the same analysis. QAnon is a porous cosmology: hidden powers behind appearances, a cosmic war of good and evil, coming judgment, secret knowledge for the initiated. The Deep State is demonology for the administrative age. Where the buffered self sees institutions, procedures, and incompetence, the porous self sees powers and principalities, and the porous reading generates loyalty and martyrdom in a way no institutional analysis can. The COVID wars ran along the same line. To the buffered self, the vaccine is a technical object entering a body that is a system. To the porous self, the needle is the state crossing the boundary into the flesh, contamination by an alien power, and the resistance was felt at the level of self-structure before any argument arrived.
The buffered conservatives know they lost. George Will (b. 1941), the disenchanted Tory atheist, left the party. The Burke-and-Buckley style, argument, citation, the well-made essay, gave way to prophecy and rally. The remaining buffered men in the coalition, the tax-cut donors and the Federalist Society lawyers, now operate the way the Democratic porous wing operates in its party, as a tolerated minority that supplies something the dominant self-structure needs, in this case money and judicial craft, while the energy comes from elsewhere.
Taylor’s malaise of immanence shows up on the right in its own form, and here the party has an advantage it barely understands. The young men adrift in the disenchanted world, the audience that found Jordan Peterson (b. 1962) and kept going, hunger for exactly what the buffered order cannot supply: weight, meaning, a cosmos with stakes. The right offers re-enchantment without apology. Trad Catholicism, Orthodox conversion, the online vitalists and neo-pagans, the gym-and-God circuit, all of it sells thickness of being to selves starving on immanence. The left supplies re-enchantment too, but disguised, embarrassed, smuggled in as politics. The right sells it under its own name, and in a market of starving selves the open seller wins.
Now the costs, which are severe. Governance is buffered work. Regulations get drafted, budgets scored, agencies run, by disengaged reason operating on systems. A party whose energy is porous and whose governing requires buffered skills produces what we have watched it produce: administrations at war with their own technical staff, prophecy where planning should be, loyalty tests applied to jobs that need competence. The porous self also makes a magnificent market for grifters. An audience that receives words as forces and leaders as anointed will buy the supplements, the gold coins, the miracle cures, and the legal defense funds, and the right’s media economy has become in part a machine for harvesting enchanted trust. And porous politics has no internal brake. The buffered self can be argued out of a position. The possessed cannot, and a party that runs on enchantment cannot easily call its own demons off.
Step back and the two parties form a single picture. The selves are sorting. The buffered are consolidating in one party, the porous in the other, and each party keeps a shrinking minority of the opposite type, Black churchgoers among the Democrats, country-club rationalists among the Republicans. American polarization, read through Taylor, is not two ideologies fighting over policy. It is two self-structures that no longer share a world, one living among objects and the other among powers, each finding the other not wrong but unintelligible. The Republicans hold the deeper reservoir of what mass politics runs on. The Democrats hold the machinery of the disenchanted state. Neither can do what the other does, and the country requires both.

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Michelle Goldberg & the Believer Beat

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

Michelle Goldberg (b. 1975) is an American journalist, author, and political commentator whose work examines the intersection of religion, gender, ideology, and political power. Since 2017 she has written an opinion column for The New York Times, where she ranks among the prominent progressive voices in American journalism. Across a career spanning magazines, newspapers, books, podcasts, and television, Goldberg has chronicled the rise of Christian nationalism, the conflicts over reproductive rights, the evolution of contemporary feminism, and the ideological struggles reshaping both the American right and the American left.

Goldberg was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in a Jewish family steeped in journalism. Her father, Gerald Goldberg, served as managing editor of The Buffalo News. Her mother taught mathematics at a community college. She resisted following her father into the trade at first, but journalism surrounded her from childhood, and the resistance did not hold. Her political consciousness formed early. At thirteen she accompanied a pregnant thirteen-year-old friend to an abortion clinic, an experience she later described as formative. In high school she defended abortion clinics during a period of intense anti-abortion protest. These experiences fixed a lifelong concern with reproductive rights and women’s autonomy at the center of her work.

A precocious student, Goldberg attended SUNY Purchase at sixteen before transferring to the University at Buffalo. She earned a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she developed the reporting habits that defined her later career.

She entered journalism during the early years of digital media. After working for alternative newspapers in California, she joined Salon in 2002. There she reported on the growing political influence of conservative Christianity, the religious right, and the battles over reproductive freedom. She combined traditional reporting with cultural and political analysis, and she developed a style that sought to explain how ideas become movements and how movements reshape institutions. The subject matter and the method both proved durable.

Her breakthrough came with Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006). Built on extensive reporting among evangelical activists, pastors, political organizers, and conservative intellectuals, the book argued that Christian nationalism had become a major force in American politics. It appeared years before the movement entered mainstream political discourse, and it established Goldberg as an early and influential chronicler of the phenomenon. The book was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award in 2007 and remains a foundational journalistic account of the modern religious right.

Goldberg followed with The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (2009), a global investigation of reproductive rights and women’s status. The book rested on reporting trips to India, Egypt, Kenya, and Nicaragua. Goldberg examined how policies such as the American global gag rule affected clinics and women’s health services abroad, and how struggles over contraception and abortion reflected larger battles over political authority. In Nicaragua she documented the consequences of a total abortion ban and the efforts of feminist activists to challenge the alliance between political leaders and religious institutions. The book widened her focus from American politics to international questions of gender, religion, and development. Its argument: control over reproduction remains a central instrument through which societies exercise power.

During the following decade Goldberg became a leading progressive magazine writer. She served as a senior contributing writer for The Nation and wrote for Slate, The Daily Beast, and The American Prospect. Her reporting and commentary turned with growing frequency to populism, nationalism, feminism, immigration, and the changing character of liberal democracy.

In 2015 she published The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West, a biography of Indra Devi (1899-2002). The book traced how yoga moved from India into mainstream Western culture and explored larger questions about spirituality, globalization, and the culture of self-improvement. It departed from her political books in subject, yet it extended her abiding interest in how belief systems migrate across societies and change over time.

Themes from The Goddess Pose resurfaced in her journalism years later. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Goldberg became a notable commentator on the relationship between wellness culture, alternative spirituality, anti-vaccine activism, and right-wing conspiracy movements. She argued that communities organized around health, self-discovery, and personal empowerment had become vulnerable to misinformation and political radicalization, a phenomenon often called “conspirituality.”

Goldberg joined the Times opinion section in 2017. Her first column, “Tyranny of the Minority,” appeared on September 25 of that year. The move marked a transition from the world of progressive magazines to the most influential newspaper opinion platform in the United States. From 2018 through 2021 she co-hosted the Times podcast The Argument, where she debated colleagues from across the ideological spectrum, including frequent exchanges with fellow columnist Ross Douthat (b. 1979). The podcast became an important forum for argument about American politics, culture, and public policy during the Trump years.

Her tenure at the Times has coincided with an era of political turbulence. She has written at length about the presidency of Donald Trump (b. 1946), democratic backsliding, abortion rights, immigration, political violence, free speech controversies, and the internal conflicts of liberalism. Her columns return again and again to how ideological movements create identities and loyalties that outrun conventional policy debate.

A major theme of her later work traces the evolution of Christian nationalism after Kingdom Coming. During the Trump era she argued that much of the religious right had entered a transactional alliance with Trump, trading traditional moral standards for judicial appointments and political influence. As the decade progressed she examined the fusion of Christian nationalism with populist grievance politics, conspiracy theories, and online movements such as QAnon. Her reporting documented the transformation of a movement once centered on churches and religious organizations into something decentralized and networked through digital channels.

Although firmly identified with progressive politics, Goldberg has criticized the left. During the #MeToo era she raised concerns about the erosion of due process in some high-profile cases and warned against collapsing the distinctions between different kinds of misconduct. She has written against call-out culture, ideological conformity, and the internal policing of progressive institutions. Excessive purity tests, she has argued, weaken political organizations and distract them from larger strategic goals. This willingness to challenge factions within her own coalition makes her a more complicated figure than admirers or critics sometimes allow.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) returned Goldberg to the issue that first drew her into political life. Her post-Dobbs columns documented the practical consequences of abortion bans: legal confusion, medical uncertainty, and widening disparities between states. She framed the decision as more than a legal victory for conservatives. In her account it transformed the status of women as citizens and as patients.

Goldberg has received professional honors throughout her career. She belonged to the Times opinion operation during the period when the newspaper received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting on sexual harassment and abuse. She received the Hillman Prize for opinion and analysis in 2020, recognition of her commentary during a period of intense political conflict.

Her influence extends past print. She appears often on cable news, mostly on networks and programs aligned with liberal audiences, and she participates in public debates about politics, religion, feminism, and democracy. The combination of reporting, historical perspective, and ideological analysis has made her among the most recognizable opinion journalists of her generation.

Goldberg lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Matthew Ipcar, and their two children. Her career mirrors the transformation of American journalism over the past quarter century. She emerged from the insurgent world of early online magazines, built her reputation through long-form reporting and books, and arrived at the institutional center of American media at The New York Times.

Whether the subject is Christian nationalism, reproductive rights, yoga culture, populist politics, feminism, wellness movements, or the future of liberal democracy, Goldberg’s central concern remains how belief systems organize human behavior. Her reporting seeks to explain how beliefs become social movements, political coalitions, and durable institutions with the capacity to reshape public life.

I was interviewed by Goldberg in 1999 and 2000 for two articles. She was charm personified. She was magnetic. She was empathic. She was feminine. She was disarming. She sounded like the sexiest woman alive. She made me want to be my best self. She had this quality that made me want to open up to her. I wanted to talk to her for hours. So did all of my friends (in the Los Angeles sense) who spoke to her. Joan Didion (1934-2021) wrote that her smallness and inarticulateness led people to forget her presence and say things against their own interest. Janet Malcolm (1934-2021) built The Journalist and the Murderer on the claim that every reporter plays a confidence game, presenting as sympathetic, harmless, on your side, until the piece runs. A young woman who giggles and plays harmless while interviewing men holds a strong hand at that game. The subject relaxes, performs, condescends, and talks. The reporter who later writes that the religious right threatens the foundations of the Republic did not sound like that on the phone, though she was honest that her politics were left, but she did it in a way that felt non-threatening. I spoke to her as if she was my best friend in the world. There was nothing underhanded or unethical in her method. I knew she followed good journalistic protocol. She just had a way that relaxed all of us who spoke to her. When Goldberg called, we had all day for her because we enjoyed talking to her. And when we read our quotes in her pieces, we recognized that they were accurate and fair and we enjoyed her lively writing. We had no complaints about our Michelle Goldberg experience.

When she became famous a few years later, it was for polemics, and it was hard to recognize the woman I knew.

Of course, I never “knew” Goldberg. I only encountered her in one role. Upon reflection, some parts of what I heard decades ago translated into her later success — intelligence, empathy, courage, honesty, spontaneity, education, and commitment to her craft.

The Great Delusion

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:

My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.

If Mearsheimer is right, the implications run through every layer of Goldberg’s career, and most of them cut against her.
Start with her subject. Kingdom Coming treats Christian nationalism as an aberration, a fevered radicalism threatening the secular Republic. On Mearsheimer’s account, the Christian nationalists behave as humans behave. They form intense group attachments, derive their moral code from socialization and innate sentiment, sacrifice for fellow members, and seek to order political life around their tribe’s sacred commitments. The dominionist is the default human. The anomaly requiring explanation is the secular liberal universalist who believes a Nicaraguan peasant, a Cairo housewife, and a Brooklyn columnist share an identical set of inherent rights that trump every local solidarity. Goldberg spent twenty years explaining the wrong puzzle. The megachurch needs no explanation. The Times opinion section does.
Second, her own formation. Mearsheimer’s passage on socialization describes Goldberg with uncomfortable accuracy. She absorbed her moral code in a secular Jewish home where the father edited the local paper. She defended abortion clinics in high school, before her critical faculties matured, exactly the sequence Mearsheimer describes: value infusion first, reasoning second. Berkeley journalism school, the progressive magazines, Cobble Hill. By her own account the clinic visit at thirteen was formative. Mearsheimer might say it was constitutive. The career that followed reads less like a reasoner examining belief and more like a tribe member elaborating the commitments her group installed before she could examine anything. Her conviction that she chose her positions through reason while her subjects inherited theirs through church and family becomes the central unexamined assumption of the work.
Third, The Means of Reproduction. This is the book Mearsheimer’s argument hits hardest, because it is liberal universalism in its purest form: the claim that reproductive rights belong to every woman on the planet, and that American policy, NGO money, and feminist organizing should secure them in India, Egypt, Kenya, and Nicaragua. Mearsheimer’s whole point about ambitious liberal foreign policy applies. The rights crusade runs into nationalism and local religion and loses, because group attachment beats abstract rights nearly every time the two collide. Goldberg’s own reporting documents the resistance, the alliances between political leaders and clergy, the failure of universalist pressure to dislodge local arrangements. She reports the evidence for Mearsheimer’s thesis and draws the opposite conclusion. Where she sees a struggle still to be won, he sees a structural limit.
Fourth, her one great insight survives and turns on her. Goldberg’s career-long theme, that belief systems organize human behavior and become coalitions and institutions, is Mearsheimer’s anthropology applied to other people. She grasps the social nature of man whenever she looks right. The asymmetry is the tell. The evangelicals have a tribe; she has positions. They are socialized; she reasons. Mearsheimer flattens the distinction. Both run on the same fuel.
Fifth, her heterodoxy fits the theory better than her universalism does. When she warns the left against purity tests because they weaken political organizations and distract from strategic goals, she argues as a coalition member concerned with group survival, which is what Mearsheimer expects of a profoundly social being. Her #MeToo cautions, her impatience with call-out culture, these are tribal maintenance, and there is no shame in that on his account. The shame, if any, lies in describing the work as independent reason.
Last, the Dobbs writing. She frames abortion as the status of women as citizens and patients, a rights question with a correct answer. Mearsheimer’s frame recasts it as two moral communities with incommensurable codes, each installed by socialization and sentiment, fighting over whose code the state enforces. Rights talk then becomes one tribe’s idiom rather than a neutral standard, and the post-Dobbs map of America, state by state, community by community, looks less like backsliding from a universal norm and more like the social nature of man reasserting itself against a fifty-year legal abstraction.

Alliance Theory

Applied to Goldberg, Alliance Theory does something more aggressive than Mearsheimer did. Mearsheimer relocated her inside a tribe. Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton redescribe her job.
Start with her organizing premise. Across every book and column, Goldberg’s stated project is understanding how beliefs become movements, coalitions, and institutions. Alliance Theory reverses the arrow. Coalitions come first. Beliefs are downstream artifacts, patchwork narratives generated to mobilize support for allies already chosen. On this account Goldberg has spent twenty-five years studying the exhaust and calling it the engine. The megachurch crowds she watched in Ohio in 2004 did not assemble because of a theology of marriage; the theology of marriage got foregrounded because the alliance needed mobilizing, and gay marriage mobilized.
Kingdom Coming sits at the center of this. The book treats Christian nationalism as a belief system with a vision of reality, and treats the believers’ subsequent conduct as a falling away from it. The paper handles her exact material in passing: the combination of libertarianism with Christian fundamentalism never emerged from philosophical analysis, and the only reason those philosophies travel together in America is the strategic alliance between pro-life evangelicals and wealthy Republicans struck in the 1970s. Goldberg reported the incoherence of that fusion as a paradox needing explanation. Alliance Theory says there was never anything to explain. The beliefs are not a worldview with internal tensions; they are a coalition’s collected talking points, and coalitions owe no one consistency.
Her Trump-era finding follows the same pattern. She wrote that the religious right entered a transactional alliance with Trump, trading moral standards for judicial appointments, and she framed this as a scandal and a corruption. Alliance Theory predicts it as the baseline. Loyal partisans flout their apparent moral principles when it serves their allies; the most morally vocal are often the least morally constrained, because the moral vocabulary was always a mobilizing tactic rather than a constraint. Evangelical support for a thrice-married casino owner is not the fall of a belief system. It is evidence about what the belief system was for. Goldberg got the reporting right and the genre wrong: she wrote a tragedy where the theory says she witnessed normal operations.
Then the theory turns on her own production. A Times opinion columnist is, in Pinsof’s non-pejorative technical sense, a professional generator of alliance propaganda: narratives that establish the in-coalition as moral and the rival coalition as menacing, that recruit third parties, that embolden allies. Her prize citations say this without embarrassment. The Hillman Foundation praised her as a voice for people who wake up unable to believe what is happening, whose columns make readers feel they are not alone in their horror. That is mobilization, named as such by the people paying tribute to it. The language of Kingdom Coming, the fevered radicalism and bellicose fundamentalism, performs the perpetrator framing the paper catalogs: the rival coalition as aggressor, one’s own as the threatened party. Her post-Dobbs columns perform the victim framing: documenting the suffering of the coalition’s members to mobilize sympathy and recruit the undecided. None of this requires insincerity. The theory’s whole point is that the propagandist believes the propaganda; that is what makes it work.
Her heterodoxy, which I called complexity in the bio, gets reread too. Notice the form her criticisms of the left take. Purity tests weaken political organizations and distract from strategic goals. That is not a moral argument against her coalition; it is tactical advice to it. She objects to call-out culture the way a staff officer objects to a doomed offensive. Alliance Theory predicts exactly this kind of internal criticism from a high-value coalition member: it polices tactics, never allegiance, and it doubles as a credibility display that makes her advocacy more persuasive to third parties. The columnist who sometimes scolds her own side is a better recruiter than the one who never does.
The theory also supplies a test you could run on her archive. Pinsof says double standards are discovered by taking a moral principle deployed for one group and applying it to the rival group. Goldberg invoked due process during #MeToo when certain cases troubled her. The test: chart her due-process concern against the coalition membership of the accused, across Franken, Kavanaugh, Cuomo, and the rest. If the concern tracks allegiance rather than evidence, Alliance Theory scores. I have not run that chart and will not assert its result. But the theory tells you where to dig, and her twenty years of columns are an unusually complete dataset.
The conspirituality work fits last. She described wellness communities sliding toward QAnon as belief migration, ideas infecting new hosts. Alliance Theory describes it as re-sorting: groups switching sides in a consolidating two-super-alliance structure, with the beliefs arriving after the switch to justify it. The yoga teacher did not read herself into the rival coalition. She changed sides, then acquired the narratives, which is the order the theory expects and the opposite of the order Goldberg’s frame assumes.
The summary implication is harsher than Mearsheimer’s. Under Mearsheimer she was a tribe member who mistook herself for a reasoner. Under Alliance Theory she is a skilled coalition propagandist whose deepest professional belief, that belief drives politics, is itself a piece of coalition equipment: it lets her describe her own side as people with convictions and the other side as people with a dangerous ideology, when the theory says both sides are alliances all the way down, and the conviction talk is how alliances fight.

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The Paper Trail: David Zahniser and the Government of Los Angeles

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Luke Ford

David Zahniser (b. 1965) is an American journalist whose career has centered on the government of Los Angeles. As a City Hall correspondent for the Los Angeles Times since 2007, he has become an authority on municipal power in Southern California: campaign finance, ethics enforcement, land use, lobbying, labor influence, housing policy, and public corruption. While most political reporters of his generation moved toward national subjects, Zahniser built his career on mastery of a single institution. His reporting has shaped public understanding of how Los Angeles governs itself and how private interests work to bend that process.

Zahniser graduated from Pomona College in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in history. Before journalism, he worked as a staff writer for a labor union. The job gave him an early education in organized labor, a force that remains central to Los Angeles politics. His later reporting shows a rare familiarity with the relationships among unions, elected officials, developers, business groups, and community activists that drive local policymaking.

He came up through the local newspaper world of Southern California, a training ground that exposed him to the practical workings of government at street level. His stops included the Claremont Courier, the Pasadena Star-News, the Daily Breeze, the Santa Monica Daily Press, L.A. Weekly, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Covering city councils, redevelopment agencies, planning commissions, neighborhood disputes, and local elections gave him a granular understanding of the institutions that became his life’s subject.

His years at L.A. Weekly shaped his investigative method. The alternative weekly still ranked among the city’s influential journalistic institutions, and Zahniser produced reported examinations of redevelopment projects, city politics, and the administration of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (b. 1953). The work deepened his interest in the intersection of government power, economic development, and political influence.

In 2007, Zahniser joined the Los Angeles Times and became a principal City Hall correspondent. His beat extends past electoral politics. He works through the technical material of municipal governance: environmental impact reports, ethics filings, campaign finance disclosures, planning documents, court records, grand jury indictments, and public records requests. His stories tend to examine the systems through which power operates rather than the personalities who hold office for a term or two.

Where many political journalists trade on insider access, Zahniser practices a document-driven method. His stories grow out of long analysis of public records, financial disclosures, and bureaucratic paperwork. Colleagues describe his ability to find significant patterns inside dense technical documents. The method suits land-use fights, development battles, ethics controversies, and corruption investigations, where the paper trail tells the story that sources will not.

A defining achievement came with the Times investigation “Big Money, Unlikely Donors.” Working with Emily Alpert Reyes, Joe Fox, and Len De Groot, Zahniser helped uncover suspicious campaign contributions tied to major development projects. The investigation showed how political money moved through networks of donors whose financial participation made little sense given their economic circumstances. The project exposed weaknesses in campaign finance oversight and showed how far developers and political operatives could reach into local government. In 2017, the team won the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting, a major honor in business and investigative journalism.

Through the late 2010s and early 2020s, Zahniser led coverage of the federal corruption investigations that engulfed City Hall. His reporting documented allegations against developers, lobbyists, elected officials, and city staff, and explained how land-use approvals became vehicles for bribery and influence-peddling. The investigations produced criminal prosecutions and convictions, reshaped public perception of City Hall, and fed calls for structural reform.

Another major chapter opened in 2022 with the release of secret recordings of conversations among senior Los Angeles political figures. Public attention fixed on the racist remarks captured on tape. Zahniser’s reporting pressed on the larger significance of the conversation. He explained the technical process of City Council redistricting and showed how elected officials shape district boundaries to preserve power, secure economic assets, and apportion representation among communities. The scandal produced a political crisis with few modern parallels in the city. The fallout brought the resignation of Council President Nury Martinez (b. 1973) and pressure on council members Kevin de León (b. 1966) and Gil Cedillo (b. 1954). Zahniser belonged to the Times team, with Dakota Smith, Julia Wick, Benjamin Oreskes, and others, whose coverage won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting.

Development and urban growth sit at the center of his work. Los Angeles is a city where zoning decisions, transit projects, housing proposals, and redevelopment plans carry enormous economic consequences. Zahniser has shown again and again how an obscure planning decision can reshape a neighborhood, redraw political alliances, and generate large private fortunes. His reporting connects technical planning procedure to the broader questions of affordability, inequality, homelessness, and growth that define the city’s politics.

His institutional memory distinguishes his journalism. His stories place current controversies in historical context, tracing present disputes to decisions made years or decades earlier. By connecting today’s conflicts to earlier policies and arrangements, he helps readers see that the city’s recurring problems grow from long-term structural choices rather than isolated events.

Beyond reporting, Zahniser served as president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists during his time at the Times, supporting local journalism and professional standards.

He continues to cover City Hall as of 2026, a year of consequence for his beat. His recent reporting has examined Mayor Karen Bass (b. 1953) and her reelection campaign, her budget proposals, the performance of her signature homelessness program, and the challenge mounted against her by Councilmember Nithya Raman (b. 1981), a contest with the June 2, 2026 primary at its center. The work shows the same pattern as the rest of his career: sustained attention to one institution, grounded in documents, with the money and the land at the center of the story.

Zahniser belongs to a shrinking tradition of metropolitan beat reporters who spend decades on a single institution. While colleagues moved between beats or sought national prominence, he stayed with Los Angeles City Hall and accumulated procedural and historical expertise that few reporters can match. His career demonstrates the continuing value of local accountability journalism and of sustained attention to the hidden workings of government. Through investigations into campaign finance, corruption, ethics enforcement, and development politics, he stands as a major chronicler of political power in modern Los Angeles.

The Back Region: David Zahniser Through Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman (1922-1982) divided social life into regions. The front region is where the performance happens, where a team of performers sustains a definition of the situation before an audience. The back region is where the team retires, drops the performance, rehearses the next one, and says what it thinks. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman argued that neither region holds the true self. Both are staged. The backstage has its own conventions, its own etiquette, its own required behavior. Chief among those conventions is what he called the treatment of the absent: performers backstage mock the audience they flatter out front. The waiter ridicules the diners in the kitchen. The doctor jokes about the patient in the corridor. The derogation is not a slip. It is how teams bind themselves.

Los Angeles City Hall runs on this division. The council meeting is the front region. The public comment period, the ceremonial presentations, the unanimous votes, the language of community and equity, all of it sustains a performance of open deliberation. The audience is asked to believe that decisions happen in the chamber. They do not. They happen in the back region, in offices and restaurants and union halls, among performers who trust one another to keep the regions sealed. The vote on the floor ratifies a settlement reached out of sight. Everyone inside the building knows this. The performance requires that the audience not see it demonstrated.

In October 2022, the regions collapsed. A recording surfaced of a 2021 conversation among Council President Nury Martinez, council members Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, and labor leader Ron Herrera, taped in the offices of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. The four were a team in Goffman’s strict sense: performers cooperating to stage a single routine, in this case the routine of redistricting as a neutral, community-minded process. On the tape they talk the way teams talk backstage. They are crude about colleagues. They are racist about a colleague’s child, about Oaxacans, about Blacks and renters and anyone outside the coalition. And they are technical. They sort the city’s assets, the airport, USC, the Expo line, the shopping districts, and discuss which member’s district should hold them and which members can be weakened by losing them.

The public reaction treated the tape as an unmasking. The real Martinez had been exposed; the front-stage Martinez had been a fraud. Goffman would resist that reading. The backstage talk was not more real than the floor speeches. It was a different performance for a different audience, the audience of the team. The contempt on the tape follows the script Goffman wrote in 1956: teams consolidate themselves by degrading the absent audience, and the uglier the degradation, the tighter the bond it builds. What the tape revealed was not the secret character of four individuals. It revealed that the staging of Los Angeles government requires a back region, and it showed what the work done there sounds like.

This is where David Zahniser earned his Pulitzer. Most coverage stayed with the slurs, which is to say it stayed with the unmasking story, the front-stage scandal of bad people caught. Zahniser did something else. He explained what the four were doing. His reporting walked readers through redistricting, the once-a-decade redrawing of council boundaries, and showed why the conversation happened at all: district lines decide which member controls which economic assets, which donor bases, which voting blocs. He translated the backstage talk. The slurs were the team’s bonding ritual. The asset map was the team’s business. Zahniser’s coverage kept the business in view when the city wanted to talk only about the ritual.

He could do this because his entire method is a back-region operation. Consider what a document is, in Goffman’s terms. An environmental impact report, an ethics filing, a campaign finance disclosure, a grand jury indictment: these are texts an institution produces for a restricted audience, regulators, courts, its own files. They are written with a different audience consciousness than the press release. They sit closer to the back region than anything an official will say into a microphone. The institution speaking to itself, or to a bureaucratic audience it considers captive, lets things show that the front-stage performance conceals. Zahniser’s career is built on reading at that seam. The “Big Money, Unlikely Donors” investigation found, in disclosure filings, donors whose contributions made no sense given their incomes. The front-stage story said citizens supporting candidates. The filings, read closely, showed a back-region arrangement: money routed through names. The documents did not mean to confess. Documents never do. But they are produced with the audience’s gaze pointed elsewhere, and that lowers the staging discipline.

Goffman catalogued the discrepant roles, the people who move between regions without belonging to the team. The spotter checks up on performers from inside the audience. The shopper enters the establishment as a customer and reports to a rival. The beat reporter is a discrepant role Goffman did not name but would recognize. After thirty years in one building, Zahniser holds backstage knowledge without team membership. He knows the rehearsals, the props, the staging history. He sits in the chamber as what Goffman called a non-person, present and discounted, like the waiter at the dinner party, until the moment his story runs and the discounting ends. The team cannot expel him and cannot recruit him. The access journalist resolves this tension by joining the team in practice, trading staging secrets for backstage invitations, and his reporting becomes part of the performance. Zahniser refused the trade. The documents made the refusal affordable. A reporter who can read the filings does not need the invitation.

His institutional memory works the same seam. Goffman noted that a performance is vulnerable to anyone who saw the earlier shows, because the team revises its routine and counts on the audience forgetting. The council member who champions a project in 2026 voted to kill its predecessor in 2014, and the front-stage performance depends on no one recalling the older staging. Zahniser recalls it. Three decades of watching one theater turns every new performance into a text read against its drafts.

The tape changed the theater. After 2022, every performer in City Hall assumes the back region is wired. Goffman wrote that teams require a place where the performance can drop; staging is exhausting, and the backstage is where performers recover and prepare. Strip that away and the performer adopts front-stage discipline everywhere, which does not end backstage dealing. It pushes the dealing into thinner channels, the walk without phones, the conversation that leaves no record. The paradox for journalism is sharp. The leak that produced the city’s greatest backstage exposure has made the next one harder. What remains, when the talk goes dark, is paper. Institutions cannot run on unrecorded conversation. The approvals must be filed, the money must be disclosed, the maps must be published. The back region leaves residue, and the residue is the public record.

That is the wager of Zahniser’s career, made decades before the tape vindicated it. The tape was a windfall, one night of the back region broadcast whole. The documents are the daily discipline, the back region recovered in fragments, filing by filing. Goffman taught that the front-stage performance is not a lie laid over a truth; it is one staging among others, and the work of understanding an institution is the work of moving between its regions. Zahniser does that work for one building in one city. The council votes in public. He reads what it wrote when it thought no one was watching.

What Dies With Him: David Zahniser Through Stephen P. Turner on Tacit Knowledge

Stephen P. Turner (b. 1951) spent a career dismantling a comfortable idea: that tacit knowledge is a shared substance, a collective possession that groups hold and pass down. In The Social Theory of Practices and Understanding the Tacit, he argued that nothing of the kind exists. There is no group mind, no practice-stuff transmitted from one generation to the next. Tacit knowledge is individual. Each person builds his own through his own history of exposure, trial, error, and feedback. Two craftsmen in the same shop hold similar skills because similar conditions trained them, the way two trees on the same hillside lean the same way. Nothing passed between them. When we say a skill was handed down, Turner says, we describe an arrangement of conditions under which a learner built the skill again, for himself, from scratch. And when the conditions disappear, the skill stops getting rebuilt. It dies with the last man who holds it.

David Zahniser holds a skill of this kind. Call it the ability to read Los Angeles City Hall. He can look at a campaign finance disclosure and see that something is wrong with it before he can say what. He knows which ethics filing is anomalous, which environmental impact report buries its finding, which donor name does not belong on the list. The “Big Money, Unlikely Donors” investigation began in that kind of recognition: contributions from people whose circumstances made the giving implausible. A janitor does not give the maximum to a council race. A retiree on a fixed income does not fund a land-use fight. The filings were public. Anyone could read them. Almost no one could see them.

Turner explains why. The recognition is not a method that could be written down and handed to a younger reporter. It is the residue of a particular path: a job writing for a labor union in the late 1980s, then the Claremont Courier, the Pasadena Star-News, the Daily Breeze, the Santa Monica Daily Press, the L.A. Weekly, the San Diego Union-Tribune, then nineteen years at the Times reading thousands of filings against the stories they did or did not yield. Every story that panned out tuned the recognition. Every tip that collapsed tuned it too. The training set was decades of paper checked against decades of outcomes. A manual could list red flags, and the list would be nearly useless, because the flags are not the knowledge. The knowledge is the weighting, the feel for which flag counts in which context, and the weighting lives below articulation. Zahniser could not fully explain his own judgment if he tried. On Turner’s account, no expert can.

This is the standard story of craft expertise, and if the frame stopped there it would yield a tribute. It cuts deeper, because the corruption Zahniser covers runs on the same kind of knowledge.

Consider what a fixer in Los Angeles development knows. He knows which council office is open for business and which is not. He knows how an ask gets phrased so that it is understood and deniable at once. He knows what a contribution means, what a fundraiser hosted at the right moment means, what a consultant’s retainer buys, what the exchange rate is between a PLA commitment and a zoning variance. None of this is written anywhere. It cannot be written anywhere, because in this craft articulation is evidence. The federal prosecutions that swept City Hall in the late 2010s show the structure of the problem. Prosecutors could not build cases from documents alone, because the documents record everything except the understanding. They needed wiretaps, cooperators, men describing in their own words what the money meant. The quid pro quo lives in tacit understanding between parties who have learned, through their own histories of deals offered and honored, what signals what. The fixer’s knowledge was built the way Zahniser’s was built: years inside one system, with feedback.

So the document reporter and the corrupt fixer are rivals in the same craft. Both are experts in the unwritten layer of City Hall. Both know that the official record is a surface and that the action sits beneath it. The fixer’s work is to keep the action below the paper line. Zahniser’s work is to find the places where it broke the surface, the donor who should not be on the list, the approval that moved too fast, the variance that contradicts the file. Each man’s skill defines the other’s problem. The fixer who understands what a reporter can see learns to leave less. The reporter who understands what a fixer must do learns where the residue collects. Neither can fully explain his own craft, and each spends his working life modeling the other’s.

Turner’s frame also explains what Zahniser’s stories can and cannot give the reader. A story articulates a finding: this donor is connected to this developer, this approval followed this money. What it cannot transfer is the judgment that produced the finding. The reader receives outputs of a pattern recognition he cannot audit. He cannot rerun Zahniser’s thirty years and check the weighting. He can only watch the findings hold up over time, story after story, and extend trust on the record. Turner argued that this is the general condition of expertise in public life: the expert cannot show his work in any complete sense, because the work is partly sub-articulate, and so the public’s relation to expertise is always a relation of trust built on track record rather than inspection. Zahniser’s track record is long enough that the trust functions. A new reporter’s would not, even with identical talent, because the talent is not the knowledge.

Now the succession question. On Turner’s account, tacit knowledge survives only where the conditions for rebuilding it survive. The conditions in this case are plain: a stable beat, held for decades, at an institution willing to pay a senior salary for one building, with enough publication and feedback density that a learner’s recognition gets tuned. Those conditions existed at the metropolitan papers of the late twentieth century. They produced Zahniser. They no longer exist. The Times has shrunk through round after round of cuts. Young reporters cycle through beats in two or three years, which is enough time to learn the org chart and not enough to learn the building. No one now entering journalism will read filings against outcomes for thirty years, because no employer will fund the apprenticeship. The conditions are gone, so the skill will not be rebuilt. When Zahniser retires, the knowledge does not transfer to a successor or to an archive. It stops.

The other side of the rivalry faces no such problem. The fixer’s apprenticeship is funded by the development economy, which is not shrinking. Lobbying firms are stable institutions with senior partners and junior associates and decades of client continuity. The conditions for rebuilding that craft persist in every cycle, because the money that pays for it persists. So the two rival bodies of tacit knowledge, the reading of City Hall and the working of City Hall, are on different reproduction schedules. One side’s apprenticeship system collapsed with the newspaper business. The other side’s never depended on it.

Turner offers no comfort here. His whole argument is that knowledge of this kind cannot be preserved by writing it down, digitizing it, or storing it in an institution. The Times can keep Zahniser’s archive forever. The archive holds his findings. It does not hold him. A future reader of the archive will know what Zahniser saw and will not acquire the seeing. The city will still produce filings, and the filings will still carry their anomalies, and for a while there was a man who could look at the page and feel which number was wrong. The page will outlast the feeling.

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