In recent times, Christianity has been used by the British far right as a symbol of national identity. However, the historical developments and demographic changes in British Christianity make this invocation more complicated than it first appears. Proponents of far-right rhetoric, most notably Tommy Robinson in his 2025 Christmas Carol Service, often use Christian language to present Britain as culturally unified and rooted in a particular moral tradition. This rhetoric is then used to justify political positions, especially vis-à-vis “wokeism,” immigration, or other religions.

However, within these spaces, Christianity functions as a national symbol under circumstances and realities that complicate its coherence. These include the historical role Christianity has played in shaping Britain’s liberal secular institutions and culture of tolerance, as well as the fact that white Britons attending church and practicing Christianity are declining, with active Christian communities increasingly concentrated among immigrant and minority groups: Christian Britain is less white than some imagine. In light of these considerations, we must ask: can Christianity still function as a coherent and legitimate national identity marker for the far right?

The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute is delighted to present this essay in collaboration with The Wilberforce Society at the University of Cambridge.

Christianity and the Formation of Modern British Political Culture

“Woke ideology” is one of the principal irritants of the contemporary far right. This term generally means a discourse emphasizing systemic injustices, particularly concerning race and gender, and, less frequently, class inequality. The right often deems this stance oversensitive, performative, or coercive, arguing that it enables a repressive “cancel culture,” prioritizes identity politics over merit, threatens traditional societal structures, and enforces ideological conformity, thereby eroding freedom of speech. By invoking a rhetoric of Christianity in response, the far-right attempts to construct a moral buffer against the perceived excesses of secularism. For example, when Ceirion Dewar, a bishop in the small, conservative Confessing Anglican Church, opened a Tommy Robinson rally in prayer, he stated that Great Britain was “founded on Christian principles and from the Christian faith” and that this foundation was being “eroded.”1

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Rather than treating modern tolerant society as antithetical to Christianity, one can point to historical links between tolerance and the development of British Christianity. There is significant scholarly discussion over how modern liberalism developed out of Christian values.2 Graeme Smith argues that ideas of individual human worth and dignity, shared public reason, historical progress, and humanity’s ability to investigate its world can all be traced to Christian theological sources.3 Even among Robinson’s supporters, Christianity is framed as the source of an emancipatory civilization rather than strictly devotional or theological. Gareth Talbot, for example, stated:

It’s not that I’ve found God. I’ve never felt you need to go to church to be a Christian, but it’s always been the Christian religion that’s kept our values and freedoms, and that’s why I need to support it now.4

However, others argue that liberalism and a tolerant society are products of early modern secular humanism and the Enlightenment, rather than Christianity itself. Needless to add, political and philosophical ideas do not emerge from the void, and the sources may be multifold. While Enlightenment figures propagated what we now call liberal ideas in nonreligious terms, such as the rights of man, reason, and equality before the law, there were also Christian peers advancing similar arguments. Christian culture and ideas have undeniably played a significant role in British and European history. The Religious Society of Friends, founded in seventeenth-century England by George Fox, emphasized the “Inner Light” and promoted peace, equality, and social justice. It was generally Protestant dissenters, often marginalized themselves, who were key propagators of tolerance and social justice. For instance, William Wilberforce was a devout evangelical Anglican who fused faith and politics in his forty-year campaign to abolish the slave trade.

Meanwhile, at every stage in history, liberal Christianity also had its conservative counterpart. The far right today appears to lean into that conservative strand. Robinson’s appeal to England as a “Christian nation” is ambiguously Anglican due to his affiliations,5 suggesting that his Christianity is civilizational and traditional, rooted in the history of the Church of England, rather than deeply theological or biblical. Historically, therefore, his invocation of Christianity as a source for his politics is not unfounded. Especially in an Anglican context, Christianity has always contained both progressive and conservative strands.

Christianity vs. Civilizational Identity in Contemporary Far-Right Discourse

It is crucial to differentiate between Christianity as a devotion or a belief structure and Christianity as an identity marker. Many far-right figures claim to be Christian because they were born and raised in Britain, a “Christian country,” yet they do not practice in any meaningful sense. Robinson himself converted in prison and claims to practice, yet this isn’t integral because his rhetoric suggests something more civilizational than devotional. When Dame Sarah Mullally was named the next Archbishop of Canterbury in 2025, Robinson retweeted a past statement of hers supporting Black Lives Matter, adding: “Their churches will stay empty; a Christian revival will grow on the streets. Masculine Christianity [sic] is coming not this weak drivel.”6

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Here, he is infusing Christianity with gendered traditionalism to serve as a vehicle for narratives of strength, masculinity, and cultural defense. Similarly in his September Unite the Kingdom rally, some attendants were dressed as crusader soldiers. Gareth Talbot similarly admitted he does not necessarily believe in God but has started attending church because he fears Christianity could be “replaced.”7 This concession undermines the notion that far-right politics’ attachment to Christianity is biblically rooted, or indeed that it even has to be in order to be acceptable. Rather, Christianity functions as cultural heritage and national memory, an integral part of British history and therefore culture. It operates independently of church attendance or doctrinal adherence.

Crucially, appeals to Christianity in this rhetoric often function as a boundary marker against Islam. While the far right mobilizes Christian language against “woke ideology,” its primary usage of “Christian Britain” emerges in debates about immigration and perceived Islamic cultural difference. Some argue that Robinson’s rhetoric about this being a Christian country is code for a “white” and specifically “not Muslim” country.8 However, this boundary-marking becomes unstable when confronted with demographic realities.

Demographic Transformation of British Christianity

The demographic transformation of Christianity in Britain is central to assessing the validity of the far right’s invocation. According to the 2021 Census, for the first time less than half of the population of England and Wales, 46.2 percent, or 27.5 million people, described themselves as Christian. This was a 13.1 percentage point drop from 59.3 percent, or 33.3 million people, in 2011. Furthermore, while the Muslim population increased from 1.5 million to 3.8 million between 2001 and 2021, and Hindus from 0.5 million to 1 million, the number of people with no religion rose far more dramatically, from 7.2 million to 20.7 million.9 This suggests that secularization, rather than Islam, is the most significant shift. Therefore, the invocation of a Christian Britain against a perceived outside threat does not hold as much weight as one may initially think. Church attendance is even lower, with only around 5 percent of Britons attending church on a typical Sunday.10 Thus, the 46.2 percent identifying as Christian includes many nominal rather than practicing believers.

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At the same time, there has been a dramatic shift in ethnic makeup. In 2001, 82 percent of white British respondents identified as Christian. By 2021, this had fallen to 49 percent. Among young people aged 16 to 24, religious practice among persons of color is two to three times higher than among white youths.

Migration has also significantly shaped the Christian population. Between 2001 and 2011, 1.2 million Christians migrated to the United Kingdom. Between 2011 and 2021, that number rose to 1.9 million. Christians were the largest group among the foreign-born population at 50 percent, comparable to Great Britain overall at 54 percent at the time. The proportion of foreign-born people with no religion, 18 percent, was half that of Great Britain overall at 36 percent.11

These data indicate that immigration has not diluted Christianity in Britain but rather, in many respects, has sustained it. More Britons are atheists than immigrants, and so advocacy for a “Christian Britain” cannot coherently function as a buffer against immigration as it is migrants themselves that significantly contribute to Christian vitality. Christianity in Britain is increasingly ethnically diverse and globally connected, and although the diverse Christians may not all be of the Anglican profession, they are increasingly the carriers of Christian values or ideology in whatever form. In fact, many of the Christian immigrants from the Global South may themselves carry conservative cultural values. In any case, the “Christian nation” invoked by the far right, implicitly white and ethnically British, diverges sharply from sociological reality: if one wishes for a more Christian Britain, one arguably ought to support current immigration trends, not oppose them.

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Conclusion

Historically, invoking Christianity against liberal cultural values has fair grounding, given Christianity’s complex relationship with liberalism: there are definitely conservative streams within historical Christianity. Using Christianity as a civilizational counterpoint to Islam also has historical precedent, whether through crusader narratives or broader European self-understandings. However, the invocation of Christianity is not useful in pursuit of an anti-immigrant or ethnically exclusivist program. Christianity in Britain is on average more common amongst a given migrant community than an increasingly secular white or British-born population, and the demographics within the faith continue to shift in this direction.12 This is why many Christian leaders have expressed discomfort with the far-right positions. In September, a group of Church of England bishops joined leaders from other denominations to condemn what they described as the “co-opting of the cross” at Robinson’s rally as a means of causing division and excluding others.13

The morality of co-opting is not the primary concern here. Observationally, the tension lies in this: an increasingly ethnically diverse and immigrant-sustained faith is being instrumentalized by a movement that positions itself, at best, as anti-immigrant and, at worst, as racially exclusionary. Given that young people (especially those of color) are often more politically disengaged,14 and given that young Christians of color are statistically more religiously active than their white counterparts, this dynamic may produce unexpected political realignments. As a result of the projected link between Christianity and right-wing politics—or at least with aspects of cultural conservatism—some Christians of color might be drawn toward conservative voting habits or at least lead them to align with more “traditional” political stances, for example, around gender politics. However, this is a speculation at this point and requires more evidence.

Anita Ukaenwe is a penultimate-year History undergraduate at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. She is interested in using historical research to better understand contemporary social and policy issues.

The belief in a savior, ultimate salvation, and the final battle between good and evil has deep roots in Iranian cultural imagination, even before Islam. This is particularly evident in late Zoroastrian eschatological traditions surrounding the figure of the Saoshyant and the final renovation of the world (Frashokereti).1 The “horizon of the end” in Iranian political theology cannot be solely reduced to Shi’a theology or its later political formulations. Over the centuries, in conjunction with Shi’a messianism, this developed a distinct form of religious and historical imagination that can be understood as a type of “Iranian Shi’ism.” This outcome is not merely an achievement of the modern state or ideology but a result of the historical sedimentation of two traditions in the collective consciousness of the people. Consequently, apocalyptic concepts in Iran typically intensify during times of crisis, instability, and disorder, becoming a language for interpreting the situation and the possibility of rupture. The reflection of this convergence can be found not only in official texts but also in popular narratives—for example, in the Rostam-nāmeh, an anonymous epic poem where Rostam, the legendary hero of the Iranian epic tradition, eventually converts to Shi’ism upon encountering Ali, the first Imam of the Shi’a.2 Its significance lies not in historical authenticity but in its cultural implications: the link between Iran’s mythical hero and the central figure of Shi’ism, and the fusion of Iranian epic imagination with the messianic eschatological horizon.

It is precisely this deep-seated cultural and symbolic grammar that structures contemporary Iranian politics, presenting a scene of “unequal symmetry” between state power and popular resistance. Power has co-opted this eschatological grammar, transforming it into a “katechonic” logic of deterrence and delay to preserve the existing order and postpone the end. Conversely, resistance draws on this same horizon—often secularized as demands for justice, dignity, and truth—to urge a decisive “rupture” and “acceleration” toward that very end. Though vastly unequal in means—pitting state violence against popular vulnerability—both sides are bound by a shared, end-oriented semantic framework within their historical imagination. This distinguishes Iranian politics from mere power calculations, turning it into a stage for realizing or postponing a final moment.

This linguistic horizon extends beyond religious or revolutionary discourses, permeating modern Iranian politics. For instance, during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911)—a period when messianic groups like the Shaykhis, Babis, and Azalis actively blended political reform with apocalyptic zeal—the naming of certain newspapers, such as Sur-e Esrâfil (The Trumpet of Israfil), Sobh-e Sadegh (The True Dawn), and Habl al-Matin (The Firm Rope), attests to a similar presence of religious-eschatological language in the public sphere. In 1974, Mohammad Reza Shah’s establishment of the “Rastakhiz Party” (Resurgence Party) articulated a political project laden with resurrectionist overtones, indicating that the Pahlavi state’s political imagination retained a revivalist language. This experience was, of course, not unprecedented. Such examples demonstrate that the language of the end, resurrection, and impending collapse becomes part of the common articulation of political action in Iran during periods of political crisis, whether in the guise of the state or resistance.

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When this fertile intellectual terrain encountered modernity, it confronted the fundamental concept of “revolution.” From the moment of its arrival, the concept appeared structured by a temporal tension. From the Latin revolvere—to roll back or return—the term evoked restoration of an original principle. Yet within modern political language, it simultaneously signified rupture, transformation, and the opening of a new historical horizon. The concept thus carried a Janus‑faced orientation: toward return and restoration, and toward rupture and the creation of the new. When it entered the Iranian context, this tension did not disappear; the concept arrived already bearing this dual temporal structure. Rather, it intertwined with deep layers of ethics, theology, and ritual.3 In the Iranian experience, “revolution” was not merely a political upheaval but became an event that promised a new future while simultaneously demanding a return to an authentic, primordial, or suppressed truth. Consequently, it was able to link the modern concept of progress with an apocalyptic, messianic, and eschatological imagination, securing a distinguished position in Iranian politics in relation to the horizon of the end.

A significant example of this intersection is evident in Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh’s engagement with the concept of revolution. Akhundzadeh, an early socio-historical critic of Iran in the modern era and likely one of the first to introduce the modern connotation of this concept into the Iranian intellectual sphere, uses the word “révolution.” However, his significance lies not merely in transmitting a word. Within the framework of what he understood as a form of “Islamic Protestantism,” Akhundzadeh found a historical model for such a rupture in the medieval Isma‘ili declaration of Qiyama (Resurrection) at Alamut, which he interpreted as a symbolic abolition of religious law in favor of absolute freedom and the beginning of a new historical order. The importance of this narrative for the present discussion lies not in its historical authenticity but in Akhundzadeh’s use of it: he employs a model where freedom passes through the declaration of the Qiyamah and the eschatological moment to formulate his reformist ideals. Modern rupture in Iran is born not from the philosophy of progress but from an apocalyptic moment, where freedom, the abrogation of Sharia, and the establishment of a new order are linked to the declaration of the end of an era. Thus, the concept of “révolution” was shaped from its inception at the crossroads of the modern future and the symbolic apocalypse, a connection whose resonance reached its peak political dynamism in the twentieth century, in the views of figures like Ali Shariati and the activists of the 1979 Revolution.

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For Shariati, an intellectual influential among many revolutionaries, revolution is not reducible to a mere transfer of political power; rather, it is a form of historical, ethical, and existential awakening. Concepts such as “return to the self,” “resurrection,” “Alavi Shi’ism,” “martyrdom,” and “waiting” (Entezar) are interconnected in his works, transforming politics into an arena for the revival of a suppressed truth. While criticizing passive and fatalistic waiting, Shariati does not abandon Mahdist waiting; instead, he transforms it into a negating, historical, and revolutionary force:

belief in waiting, belief in the period of occultation, and belief in the inevitability of salvation in the end times, is not a sedative but rather the greatest negating force…the most powerful weapon for the destruction of corruption, the greatest blow for crushing oppression, and the greatest energy for moving toward the future.4

Within this framework, waiting is not a sign of stagnation but a source of historical energy and will directed toward the future. Occultation (Ghaybat) also does not mean the suspension of politics, but a state in which the believing and revolutionary subject becomes active. From this perspective, Shariati’s conception of revolution, while possessing that same Janus-faced aspect, also entails an eschatological imagination. History becomes the field of confrontation between truth and falsehood, uprising acquires a sacred meaning, and martyrdom is linked to the possibility of collective revival and the opening of a new horizon for history.

Following the 1979 Revolution, the eschatological horizon did not disappear but continued in a different logic within the governmental formulation. In Ruhollah Khomeini’s thought, politics finds meaning in the era of occultation: society cannot remain in suspension until the advent, so a vicegerent order must be established to preserve Sharia and prevent chaos. Hence, Wilayat al-Faqih is understood as a mechanism for managing the interval between occultation and advent. Here, too, the trace of the Janus-face is visible: while Khomeini understood the revolution within the horizon of a religious and promised future, he simultaneously spoke of reviving and returning to Islamic civilization; as if opening the future were only possible through rediscovering an authentic past.

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This logic is reinforced by the famous principle that “preserving the system is the most necessary of obligations,” now central to the political discourse of the Islamic Republic. Khomeini gave this principle one of its most radical formulations when he stated that “preserving the Islamic Republic is more obligatory than the life of the Twelfth Imam.”5 In this sense, the Islamic Republic may be said to possess a katechonic temporality: power understands itself not as the actualizer of the end times, but as the guardian of the order that precedes them. In Christian political theology, the katechon names the force that restrains the end and preserves historical order before the apocalypse. This comparison neither equates Shi’ism with Christianity nor simply transfers a Christian concept into Shi’a jurisprudence; rather, it clarifies a temporal logic in which “preparing the ground for the advent” becomes tied to “preserving the system,” and Mahdist waiting shifts from rupture to continuity and delay. Within this official interpretation, the system is represented as protected from ultimate harm, even endowed with a kind of divine guarantee, as reflected in Ayatollah Araki’s claim that “Imam Mahdi pays attention to this country.”6 Power thereby casts itself under the protection of the promised savior, rendering survival and delay natural and legitimate.

This logic can be linked to the broader discussion of political theology in Iran: as Shahin Nasiri emphasizes the political theology of Iranian despotism,7 resistance against despotism also does not stand entirely outside this horizon. If power formulates itself in a sacred, salvific, historical, and sometimes apocalyptic language, many forms of resistance operate within the same semantic reservoir. Therefore, political conflict in Iran is not merely a confrontation between religion and secularism or two secular forces, but rather a clash of two theological imaginations that both define politics in relation to salvation, the end, and the possibility of a new foundation. However, emphasis must be placed on the concept of “unequal symmetry”: the shared horizon of language between power and resistance does not mean their equality, because the state possesses the instruments of repression, prisons, law, media, and the official organization of power, while resistance usually operates from a vulnerable, scattered, and costly position. Nevertheless, both can draw from common concepts such as the end, salvation, martyrdom, purification, standing to the end, and the moment of judgment at the level of language, imagination, and temporal relation.

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If the political theology of power in Iran is linked to preserving order, delaying the end, and managing the era of occultation, the political theology of resistance often operates differently: by constructing a subject who prepares themselves for danger, suffering, rupture, and steadfastness. However, this logic should not be sought solely at the level of abstract concepts; the language of the streets, media, and contemporary protest actions also shows that the apocalyptic mindset has permeated the public political culture. Expressions such as “We will stand to the end” on the walls of Khamenei’s supporters, “the last battle” in the slogans of Pahlavi supporters, and “the last chance” in the discourse of some diasporic Iranian media, all indicate that political crisis is often understood not as a problem for governance, compromise, and gradual organization, but within the horizon of rupture, judgment, and final confrontation. In such a horizon, politics slides from the logic of mechanism to the logic of revelation: a moment when truth must be revealed, evil must be eradicated, and a new order born.

It is at this point that the political theology of resistance intertwines with discussions of subjectivity, suffering, askesis, violence, and political mysticism. The political actor within this semantic framework is not merely a claimant or organizer but a subject who prepares themselves for danger, repression, violence, and sometimes direct confrontation. Askesis—understood as practice, discipline, and self-cultivation through discipline and endurance of suffering—in the context of resistance becomes a form of self-care amidst transgression. The streets, prisons, mourning, repression, and violence can be arenas for such practice; places where political suffering finds meaning in a language close to political mysticism. In this logic, encountering violence is not merely a destructive experience but is sometimes understood as a form of catharsis: passing through pain and danger as moral purification, overcoming fear, and the rebirth of the protesting subject. Therefore, violence, whether as state violence or as the imagination of confrontation and reciprocal response, can acquire a meaning beyond political tactic within the apocalyptic horizon, becoming a sign of passage, purification, and entry into a new phase.

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This form of political mysticism in Iran is shaped by a cultural background that encompasses a wide range of apocalyptic concepts, particularly the tradition of martyrdom. Hence, even in the discourse of secular forces, this language can be reproduced: suffering, blood, the names of the deceased, and collective mourning become signs of truth, authenticity, and the beginning of a new order. In the course of contemporary protests, this logic has intensified: while the Green Movement still spoke, to some extent, in the language of law, votes, reform, and a return to official mechanisms, in subsequent uprisings—and particularly in the violent situation experienced during the late December 2025–early January 2026 protests—the horizon of rupture, confrontation, and the end of the existing order became more pronounced. This shift indicates that protest politics is gradually moving from demanding the reform of mechanisms to imagining the final moment and a decisive rupture.

However, this “mysticism of resistance,” despite generating immense moral force and astonishing courage, carries a profound structural risk. The capture of the political arena by apocalyptic theology empties politics of its fundamental meaning—namely, the step-by-step management of the public sphere and the understanding of protracted temporality. When every act of protest is understood as the “last battle” and a final confrontation, the slow, terrestrial time of politics is devoured in favor of the accelerated, theological time. In this messianic horizon, the necessity of arduous work for organization, institutional building, networking, and creating stable coalitions is marginalized; for subjects who see themselves on the verge of a moment of rupture find no reason to invest in the long-term politics and representative mechanisms. Consequently, despite passionate uprisings and sacrifices, the lack of institutions and organization in Iranian resistance is not merely a tactical flaw or sociological weakness but is linked to the dominance of this very rupture-oriented theology, which ceaselessly sacrifices the long-term “strategy” before the promised moment of “salvation,” preventing the effervescent energy of revolts from transforming into stable institutional capacity.

Mahdi Panjalipour is an independent researcher focusing on political theology, political economy, and contemporary social movements in Iran. His research explores the intersection of messianic imaginaries, political mysticism, theories of resistance, and counterrevolution in the Middle East.

The sudden spectacular rise of a right-wing populist party in Australia might seem entirely unsurprising given that something similar seems to be happening in many Western countries. Australia’s One Nation (technically Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, often referred to by the acronym PHON) can thus be easily understood as a local correlate to Reform UK or the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

Living in Australia, and specifically in the rural hinterland where PHON’s rise has been most pronounced, I have however been puzzled by this as perhaps by no other political phenomenon I have encountered in my life. The most puzzling—indeed uncanny—aspect of this is the way I see absolutely nothing anywhere either online or in real life that reflects this phenomenon. I have heard or seen no one signal any support for this party. It has come up in conversation only with the very politically interested in the context of discussions of the polling, and even then this does not seem to be much discussed.

Moreover, not only are there no outward signs of this psephological phenomenon but nothing seems to have changed either that might have caused it. Yes, we are beset by several crises that have been occurring in much the same way in many other countries with the same results, but none of these have particularly coincided with the rise of One Nation. One Nation has existed for almost thirty years, far longer than the aforementioned populist right-wing formations in other countries. We have endemic cost-of-living crises and the highest rates of immigration anywhere in the world, but these are respectively a slow-burning issue and a long-standing one: this is very different from the UK, where record high immigration suddenly occurred in a discrete event a few years ago, increasingly and accurately referred to as the “Boriswave,” which might directly be linked to anti-immigrant sentiment. One might say that Australia is, as so often, rather late to the party, but this doesn’t explain why it has decided to arrive at this point. One might point to the appearance of prominent new backers of ON, to billionaire mining magnate Gina Reinhart and former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, but in both cases we can see this as much of an effect of the party’s trajectory as a cause: certainly it began well before they climbed on board.

I have reached the conclusion that the cause is quite simple, amounting to the recent playing out of what has been referred to as the Great Realignment. In Australia as elsewhere in the West, social liberalism increasingly aligns with higher income and educational attainment and thus traditional center-left and center-right parties that draw their key personnel and support from the university-educated have found themselves increasingly detached from a working class with quite different values. This has tended to make conventional center-right political formations, such as the mainstream U.S. GOP, the Conservatives in Britain, or Christian Democrats in Germany, which depended on an unspoken alignment of the wealthy with the lower orders around social conservatism, increasingly unviable as a political proposition, and hence is one of the main causes of the growth of Reform and the AfD, as well as, of course, MAGA in the United States.

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In Australia specifically, the rise of One Nation is therefore a symptom of the collapse of a quite peculiar conventional center-right formation, called the Coalition or LNP (Liberal-National Party—although technically this appellation refers only to its Queensland branch). The Coalition is a permanent coalition of two political parties: the National Party, which represented rural interests, and the Liberal Party, which can best be thought of as itself a broad church of urban and suburban opponents of the Labor Party, including some social liberals (so-called “wets”) but typically dominated by economically and socially conservative views. The Coalition has thus operated for decades on the basis of economic neoliberalism (with a partial protectionist carve-out for agriculture to please the Nationals) and social conservatism that appealed to sections of the wealthy, working class, and rural voters.

The Coalition model collapsed in essence because relatively wealthy electorates have become overwhelmingly socially progressive. Wealthy parts of Sydney and Melbourne were the absolute core of the historic Liberal Party, but many dramatically flipped in 2022 to so-called “teal” challengers (so called after their campaign color-coding), women candidates who were economically conservative but in particular rejected Coalition hesitancy on climate action. This altered the electoral dynamics so as to make Coalition government in many states and at a federal level suddenly seem impossible.

In light of this, the Liberal Party chose a new leader (ex officio also then the leader of the Coalition), Sussan Ley. In effect, Ley, a moderate, attempted to tail the teals and move the Coalition back towards the center. It was this that proximally caused One Nation’s rise. One Nation itself did nothing in particular to catalyze it; rather, the Coalition began unsuccessfully chasing its own lost core and in so doing thoroughly alienated its outer suburban and rural voters.

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One Nation’s new rise terminated in a plateau when the Liberals ditched Ley and replaced her with outer-suburban right winger Angus Taylor, who immediately began moving the party back toward the right. While this stemmed the hemorrhaging of support to One Nation, it has done little to win any voters back, and offers no particular prospect of winning back the lost urbanite core, where indeed the teals are beginning to coalesce into a formal political party.

It might be added that the Nationals had their own considerable woes stretching back a decade, emanating principally from rural perceptions they were too compromised and insufficiently representing “the bush.” Consequently, they had already been partially displaced by an alternative rural party, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, before they declined in turn, clearing the ground for One Nation apparently to become the new countryside default.

The Labor Party’s response to the rise of One Nation has been muted. While promising to cut immigration numbers and alleviate cost-of-living pressures, there is little evidence of the government delivering either thing, and the electorate certainly doesn’t seem convinced. By far their most voluble response so far has been the May 2026 budget, in which Labor quite deliberately broke a campaign promise and restricted so-called “negative gearing” on investment property. A long-standing third rail of Australian politics, negative gearing allows owners to deduct costs of maintenance from their taxable income, which has long been seen as a subsidy to older, wealthier real estate investors, and hence a force for house price growth in the context of ever-cratering housing affordability. Far from seeing off One Nation, this is clearly oriented toward the youth vote and thus seems if anything directed to head off the threat to Labor from the left, specifically the Australian Greens who, like the Green Party in England, have made significant gains from Labor among left-wing and Muslim voters due to widespread outrage over Israeli actions in Gaza. This makes tactical sense for the Australian Labor Party, for which the rise of One Nation might be seen as nonthreatening due to its effect of dividing the right to Labor’s advantage. Nonetheless, the budget was generally panned, and, while it did swiftly reverse creeping Green gains against Labor, its main effect seems to have been to restart One Nation’s previously stalled rise at the expense of both Liberals and Labor, leading to a novel situation in which One Nation has now become the front-running party in some polls.

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The below graph shows One Nation’s meteoric rise in orange, beginning steadily from the last Australian federal election in 2025—Ley became Liberal leader effectively immediately at the election as her relatively right-wing predecessor lost his seat. The apparently exponential growth in PHON support terminates abruptly exactly when Angus Taylor becomes Liberal leader in February 2026, and it instead begins to slowly decline until Labor present their May budget, when it begins to grow again rapidly—May also saw the by-election triggered by the resignation of Sussan Ley upon her leadership ouster, which was won by One Nation. Notably, when PHON polling waxes, both Coalition and Labor wane, whereas the Liberal-National rebound under Taylor corresponded to both Labor and PHON decline.

One Nation is itself a very strange beast. It has always been centered on—though has not always been led by or even included—the figure of Pauline Hanson, an unprepossessing regional shopkeeper turned politician who was dumped by the Liberal Party as a candidate on the eve of the 1996 general election over her views but won anyway. She formed a new party, which within two years took 23 percent of the vote in the state election in her native Queensland. However, it failed to replicate this success at the national poll later the same year: Hanson herself lost her seat, and the party descended into infighting, culminating in it losing so many members that it not only could not maintain its registration but was also found to have registered itself illegally, for which Hanson and a key ally were briefly imprisoned. The party then spent more than two decades vacillating in the electoral wilderness: it has continued to exist, sometimes under slightly different names, sometimes without its eponymous founder, and occasionally one or two members have been elected, often then to leave the party or lose their seats in due course.

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Reputationally, the party has long been perceived by many, particularly on the left, in the way parties of the far right typically are: as fascists, beyond the pale of polite consideration. Again typically, this is rather hyperbolic. One Nation’s distinction had always been opposition to immigration, but a culturalist one: the name referred to the ideal of a singular Australian nation that welcomed immigrants who assimilated to Australian norms and conversely demanded that Australians Aborigines also assimilate to this singular culture. In the context of Australia’s extraordinarily high per capita migration intake, this meant a position on immigration that would retain substantial if much reduced levels. Of course, critics, particularly on the left, have seen all this as a barely veiled racism. In our hyperpoliticized times, there is no shortage of critics on the online right who, contrariwise, see One Nation as weak beer and not racist enough. Importantly, though, there is no significant political force to the right of them. Until recently, the largest political force in Australia to the right of Hanson was the explicitly Nazi National Socialist Network (NSN), which has since disbanded and been banned.

PHON support is anti-immigrant, anti-elite, relatively conservative, a complaint about cost-of-living pressure, etc. But I do not believe the rise in One Nation’s support betokens any particularly shift in public views on these questions, so much as a conclusion that neither the Coalition nor Labor will address them, after years or decades of signaling that they would and then not delivering. In this regard, the shift is very similar to that seen in the UK contemporarily.

One Nation is growing then effectively as a repository for sentiments that have no other vehicle. The party has little to commend it. It is organizationally fragile such that it is hard to believe it would cohere in the event it won any significant representation. It is ideologically inconsistent such that it does not represent any clear proposition. Scarcely a week passes without a prominent figure in the party contradicting previously announced policy positions. Its platform is a hodgepodge and, for example, involves no foreign policy position. One Nation is not so much isolationist as simply uninterested in the outside world, engaging with it largely through trying to outflank the major parties to the right in opposing China and supporting Israel. Generally PHON has deliberately aligned itself with Trump’s America, but just last week a senior member of the party shocked almost everyone by describing the United States as “the world’s greatest terrorist organisation.”

Of course, similar things might be said about other right-wing populist parties abroad, but in their cases this is more a matter of them being new and unproven organizations. One Nation might be unique in the longevity of its track record of dysfunction and cognitive vacuousness. In such a situation, one might reasonably expect some new, more coherent force to emerge. The Liberal Party actually does have, in its not insubstantial hard right, the resources to become a more competent vehicle of this type.

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It is worth mentioning in this regard that Australia’s electoral system is dramatically different from those of most other countries in at least two relevant respects. One is that voting is compulsory, meaning that there is no significant reservoir of nonvoters that might be mobilized by a movement that speaks to an unrepresented constituency. Mandatory preferential voting in Australia means that, in the crucial federal lower house at least, all voters must direct their votes in preferential order such that every single valid ballot will ultimately be cast for one of the two front-running parties. This means that all left- and right-wing votes tend to fall behind the leading left and right candidates, which would mean the determining question of which party will dominate will depend on whether One Nation or Coalition can lead in first preferences. That said, many Coalition preferences may in fact flow instead to Labor as moderate voters of the right prefer the center-left to the hard right, constituting an effective cordon sanitaire against One Nation. This implies that One Nation besting the Coalition in first preferences across the country might redound to the electoral benefit of the currently governing Labor Party in the House of Representatives. The prognosis for Australian politics from here remains necessarily unclear. The remaining question, much as with Reform UK, is whether PHON can attract enough Labor voters for it to break through, not just by displacing the Tories but also by leveraging alienation of relatively socially conservative suburban Laborites.

The silence I hear at backyard barbecues around One Nation’s rise may thus be attributed to the quietness of the politics it displaces: no one was loudly declaring their intention to vote for the Coalition previously either. Voting in Australia’s compulsory, preferential system, away from the heated invectives of university campuses and inner-city protests, lends itself to a quiet, resigned lesser-evilism. Our Saturday elections revolve for many more around getting a “democracy sausage” at the polling place than around the numbers they put on the ballot. Of course, this banality of process does not rule out that dramatic results might yet emanate from it.

Mark G. E. Kelly is Executive Director of the Telos–Paul Piccone Institute. He is Associate Professor and Program Lead in Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is the author of six books, most recently Normal Now: Individualism as Conformity (Polity, 2022).

Article 5(1) of the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) declares: “Everyone shall have the right to freely express and disseminate his opinions. There shall be no censorship.” As a foundational constitutional guarantee, the provision appears unambiguous.

That commitment to free speech has been hollowed out through a set of overlapping criminal statutes, government-backed enforcement networks, and targeted prosecutions—particularly since 2015. As a result, the space for political speech has narrowed, with concrete and measurable consequences: thousands of criminal prosecutions per year, police raids on private homes over social media posts, and a documented chilling effect on public discourse. Polling by the Allensbach Institute, Germany’s foremost survey organization, indicates that a majority of German citizens feel unable to express their political views freely.

The phenomenon has attracted comments from international observers, including the Economist and a segment on the CBS program 60 Minutes. This program drew wider Anglophone attention to the issue and featured prosecutors who described, with obvious schadenfreude, how painful it is for people when their mobile phones are taken away.

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Omer Bartov, distinguished historian and now public intellectual, does not like what Israel has become. In his view, Israel has become its own Greek tragedy. Originating as a response to the Holocaust, Israel committed, and continues to commit, its own genocide against the Palestinian people. Zionism, “a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression and persecution” (3), has morphed into an ideology defined by the “oppression and persecution” of the Palestinians. Even worse, Israel responded to the Hamas invasion of 10/7 with a genocidal war against Gaza’s inhabitants that was “conducted with the wide support, laced with denial and indifference, of most its own Jewish citizens” (3). How Israel became such a monster is the question Bartov explores in this short, maddening book.

Before I get to the many problems, errors, and omissions in Bartov’s argument, let me give credit where credit is due: unlike other examples of what Matti Friedman terms “Gazology”—a new literary genre that blames everything on Israel and grants the Palestinians total immunity—Bartov does not let Hamas or the Palestinians off the hook. The Hamas attack on 10/7 “is a war crime and a crime against humanity” (20–21), “akin,” Bartov says later in the book, “to the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001” (120). Bartov even admits (in a qualified way) that maybe “the Arab and Palestinian rejection of the partition was a mistake” (137).

But these moments are few and far between. For the most part, everything is Israel’s fault, and Zionism is ultimately the reason why, Bartov repeats over and over and over again, Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

Such an incendiary claim requires evidence, and here is where Bartov’s argument falls apart.

His evidence for Israel’s genocide is, to put mildly, shaky at best. Bartov asserts at the book’s start that “68,000 Palestinians were killed, about 80 percent of whom were civilians, the majority of them children” (5). Bartov does not specify his source, but the numbers likely come from Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is of course Hamas. But Hamas is hardly a reliable source. Bartov surely knows that Hamas doesn’t distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and they have been caught inflating the number of deaths. In addition, Hamas counts anyone up to the age of 18 as a “child,” which includes combatants. But instead of qualifying his numbers and acknowledging that Hamas manipulates statistics for propaganda, Bartov accepts what Hamas says at face value and repeatedly states that Israel kills children.

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Nor does Bartov take into account the type of combat Israel faced in Gaza—urban combat—and how that might have impacted civilian casualties. Hamas is not a conventional army with uniforms, nor did they fight Israel on a field well outside population centers. Instead, Hamas fighters hid among civilians, used protected facilities, hospitals in particular, for military purposes, and booby-trapped buildings.

That’s above ground. Below ground, there was even more. Bartov mentions the vast tunnel system Hamas constructed in Gaza only twice (36, 122), and even though Bartov is deeply concerned about civilian casualties, he ignores how Hamas refused to let civilians into the tunnels for protection. Mousa Abu Marzouk, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, admitted that “the tunnels are meant to protect us [Hamas fighters] from airplanes”; it’s someone else’s responsibility to take care of civilians. Which is not to say that innocent civilians didn’t die, but surely Hamas bears a significant amount of responsibility for those deaths by using the civilian population as human shields and refusing them shelter. Yet Bartov gives them a pass.

There was a mordant joke circulating after 10/7 that if Israel really wanted to commit genocide, the war would have been over on 10/8. Instead, the IDF took many steps—all ignored by Bartov—to protect, as far as possible, the civilian population. To quote noted military historian and expert on urban warfare John Spencer:

The IDF has telegraphed almost every move ahead of time so civilians can relocate, nearly always ceding the element of surprise. . . . Israel gave warning, in some cases for weeks, for civilians to evacuate the major urban areas of northern Gaza before it launched its ground campaign in the fall. The IDF reported dropping over 7 million flyers, but it also deployed technologies never used anywhere in the world, as I witnessed firsthand on a recent trip to Gaza and southern Israel. Israel has made over 70,000 direct phone calls, sent over 13 million text messages and left over 15 million pre-recorded voicemails to notify civilians that they should leave combat areas, where they should go, and what route they should take. They deployed drones with speakers and dropped giant speakers by parachute that began broadcasting for civilians to leave combat areas once they hit the ground. They announced and conducted daily pauses of all operations to allow any civilians left in combat areas to evacuate.

A responsible analysis of the Gaza war would take these warnings and precautions into account. But not this one.

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Bartov inadvertently reveals how his bias against Israel shapes his reporting when he writes about his interactions with Israeli and American college students. In 2024, after his New York Times op-ed warning about genocide, Bartov gave a talk at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He was confronted by a group protesting his lecture and calling for it to be canceled. But instead of being silenced, Bartov (to his credit) invited the students in for a conversation. The students, Bartov noted, “had recently returned from reserve service, during which they had been deployed in the Gaza Strip” (38). They tried to rebut Bartov’s accusation that Israel was committing genocide. Instead, they blamed the destruction on Hamas “using civilians as human shields”; even more, “They showed me photos on their phones to prove that they had behaved admirably toward children, denied that there was any hunger in Gaza, insisted that the systemic destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, public buildings, residence, and infrastructure was necessary and justifiable” (39).

Even though these students had “lived experience” with Gaza, and provided photographic evidence, Bartov is having none of it. Instead, Bartov dismisses them as deluded because they had “internalized a particular view that had become commonplace in Israel” (39), namely, that Hamas are “human animals” (39). Given that more Jews were killed on 10/7 than at any time after the Holocaust, and given the barbarity of Hamas’s behavior, including rape, which Hamas live-streamed, hatred of the enemy should not be surprising. Instead, Bartov refuses to give any credence to people who are in a much better position than most to judge the IDF’s behavior. Instead, Bartov says, condescendingly, that he feels sorry for them because they “were unaware of how they had been manipulated” (43).

It’s deeply ironic that Bartov condemns Israel for its lack of empathy concerning Gaza because he seems to have zero empathy for Israel. He condemns the Israeli media, for example, for refusing to cover the joyous reception Palestinian prisoners got when they returned (126) while privileging the reception Israeli hostages received. But Bartov seems to excuse Hamas returning the body of a “young Palestinian woman” instead of the corpses of the Bibas children by calling it “an apparent mix-up” (126). Rather than condemning this macabre trick, Bartov focuses his outrage on the Israeli media for saying that murdering these two children demonstrated how Hamas’s cruelty “knows no bounds” (127). He doesn’t seem to care that they were murdered, not killed by an Israeli strike. Instead, Bartov is more concerned with blaming Israeli authorities for “[inflaming] public opinion” (125). It’s more than clear that Bartov has a lot more sympathy for Hamas—which, we should always remember, started this war—than for Israel.

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A little later, Bartov talks about the protests at American universities, and he takes a very different approach. He grants that “in the early days following the Hamas attack, there were voices among protestors that justified or even glorified the massacre of Israeli civilians . . . or simply denied the atrocities” (60). But Bartov immediately tries to downplay them, claiming “these were minority voices among the protestors,” and a little further, “it must be stressed that the vast majority of the protestors in the United States have not condoned the crimes of Hamas” (60).

Yet Bartov does not provide any evidence to back up these assertions. How does he know that “the vast majority” didn’t condone Hamas? How does he know these were “minority voices”?

When Cornell history professor Russell Rickford exclaimed that not only was he “exhilarated” by 10/7 but that if you weren’t, you were “not human,” the crowd of students around him cheered. At an encampment protest at the University of California, Los Angeles, students wrote in chalk: “Oh Qassam [referencing the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing], oh beloved, we want to burn Tel Aviv.” You can find many more examples. So there is good reason to doubt that support for Hamas was a “minority” position. But the skepticism Bartov extends toward the Israeli students disappears when dealing with American anti-Israel protests.

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Let me finish by unpacking a sentence that sums up everything wrong with this book: Israel’s establishment in 1948 “was followed by an invasion of Palestine by several Arab armies and the expansion of the intercommunal clashes into a full-scale war” (139).

First, “several armies”: “several” typically refers to two or three items, not many, and implies that the exact number is not very important. In fact, FIVE armies invaded: Egypt, Transjordan (now Jordan), Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. Six if you want to include the soldiers that Saudi Arabia sent to fight with Egypt. Bartov’s use of “several” deliberately minimizes the forces arrayed against the new state, as if the threat they posed were not very great.

Next “intercommunal clashes” is a remarkably mild way of describing the bloody, anti-Jewish, and anti-Arab violence roiling pre-independence Israel.

Finally, the five armies did not invade “Palestine.” On November 29, 1947, the United Nations passed a resolution partitioning the British protectorate, Palestine, into an Arab and Jewish state. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion reads the Declaration of Independence, and 11 minutes later, President Harry Truman recognized the new state. One day later (May 15), the five armies invade, not Palestine, but Israel, for the express purpose of destroying the nascent Jewish state.

Why would Omer Bartov—a distinguished historian—make such a mistake? The answer is that Bartov thinks that Israel’s founding is a grievous, historical error, and he’s nostalgic for the Arab League’s plan for a “‘unitary state’ that would have an Arab majority and allow minority rights for the Jews” (138). Think about that. Bartov is okay with Jews as second-class citizens.

There are many more errors and omissions. Bartov repeatedly says that Gaza is “occupied,” but Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005 (rockets were launched from Gaza a month later). Granted, Israel tries to control Gaza’s borders to try to prevent weapons smuggling (apparently, unsuccessfully), but so does Egypt, which Bartov neglects to mention, and Egypt built the mother of all walls to keep the Gazans out.

Bartov asserts that “the rise in anti-Jewish violence around the world . . . [is] associated first and foremost with extreme right, racist, and white supremacist elements” (102), which surely will come as a surprise to the victims of the Bondi Massacre and the Boulder attack. In fact, Bartov completely neglects radical Islam, even though there is a very long history of anti-Jewish sentiment in Islam and Hamas is an explicitly Islamist organization.

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Bartov’s use of sources is also unreliable. He claims, for example, that a June 2025 op-ed in the Washington Post by Norman Goda and Jeffrey Herf presents “not only Hamas but all Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression as Holocaust-like genocidal actions” (114). But a quick look at the article shows that’s not true. Instead, Goda and Herf argue that the genocide accusation against Israel is unfounded, and they show how anyone challenging the accusation will be subject to all manner of abuse, including being called a “Zionist rat.”

What makes this book so frustrating is that in detailing only some (there are a lot more, but space does not allow) of Bartov’s errors, it may seem that I fully endorse Benjamin Netanyahu and all his works. But that’s not true. Pointing out that it’s a mistake to call Gaza “occupied” does not mean that the West Bank is not occupied, just as stating that the IDF’s tactics in Gaza don’t amount to genocide does not excuse the settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. There is a great deal that Netanyahu has to answer for, not the least being bringing the most extreme, and racist, elements into the government. But instead of a rational, evidence-based discussion about where and how Israeli policy has erred, Bartov’s screed only supports those who want to deny Israel’s right to exist and ally themselves with Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel: What Went Wrong? is not antisemitic, but it gives intellectual cover for those who are antisemitic, and that’s unforgivable.

Peter C. Herman is emeritus professor of English literature at San Diego State University. He has published books on Shakespeare, Milton, and the literature of terrorism, and essays in Quillette, Newsweek, Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Inside Higher Ed, and Times of San Diego. His latest book is Early Modern Others: Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature (Routledge).

Modern journalism confronts a contradiction it cannot fully acknowledge. The institutional demand for continuous moral clarity now exceeds the temporal and epistemic conditions under which truth can responsibly emerge. Contemporary media organizations are no longer expected to investigate events while contextualizing uncertainty and complexity. They are now required to position themselves visibly, publicly, and under conditions of permanent exposure, vis-à-vis unfolding reality in real time.

This transformation changes not only the speed of journalism but its institutional character. News institutions now draw legitimacy from demonstrating synchronization with rapidly consolidating public perception, rather than from interrupting collective normative consolidation through evidentiary restraint. Journalism itself operates inside accelerating ethical judgment rather than standing at meaningful distance from it.

The controversy surrounding Nicholas Kristof’s recent New York Times column on alleged sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli personnel exposed this transformation with unusual clarity. Critics accused the article of relying on activist NGOs, anonymous testimony, and fragile evidentiary conditions. Defenders responded that Palestinian testimony is routinely dismissed, that abuse in Israeli detention facilities has been documented, and that demands for exceptional verification often emerge selectively when Palestinian suffering is involved.

The significance of the controversy extends far beyond the factual status of any individual allegation. Journalism under wartime conditions necessarily unfolds amid uncertainty, emotional intensity, incomplete verification, and competing testimonial worlds. What became visible in the Kristof controversy was not the possibility of error alone, but a broader transformation in the temporal organization of epistemic legitimacy itself.

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Epistemic Latency

Classical liberal journalism depended upon what might be called epistemic latency. The institutional capacity to remain within uncertainty long enough for verification, contradiction, corroboration, contextualization, and interpretive judgment to occur before normative consolidation crystallized into public certainty. Latency was not a weakness of journalism but one of its central ethical conditions. Responsible reporting required delay precisely because public seriousness depended upon evidentiary seriousness. Journalism derived legitimacy from disciplined restraint under conditions where closure was emotionally and politically desirable, rather than from immediate normative positioning.

This temporal structure is now weakening. The current information environment increasingly rewards immediacy over epistemic duration. Ethical positioning circulates faster than evidentiary consolidation. Public actors now operate under conditions of continuous visibility in which hesitation itself risks appearing ethically compromised. Under such circumstances, the temporal interval separating event, interpretation, verification, and judgment steadily contracts. The distinction between investigation and authorization becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

This transformation should not be reduced to ideological bias alone. Bias implies deviation from an otherwise stable epistemic framework. What became visible through this episode was not the possibility of error alone, but a broader transformation in the temporal organization of epistemic legitimacy itself. Media organizations now derive authority not only from their ability to verify information, but from their capacity to consolidate public meaning under conditions of volatility and acceleration. Modern journalism no longer functions solely as a system that describes reality. It now participates in organizing which realities become collectively actionable in the first place.

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Some narratives become publicly coherent before they become epistemically stable. Under present conditions, social recognition depends upon rapid ethical recognizability. Narratives aligned with established structures of suffering, domination, victimhood, and exposure begin acquiring plausibility prior to evidentiary maturation. Testimony itself acquires anticipatory normative authority whenever it echoes recognizable interpretive grammars.

The Kristof controversy exposed this mechanism with unusual clarity because the allegations themselves occupied a uniquely charged symbolic position. Sexual violence functions within liberal discourse not just as criminality but as civilizational transgression. Once allegations of sexual assault become attached to imprisonment, military domination, humiliation, ethnic conflict, and dehumanization, they acquire force far exceeding ordinary evidentiary thresholds. Such allegations rapidly cease functioning as empirical propositions subject to verification. They become ethically saturated objects around which institutional authority itself becomes entangled.

The dynamics visible here did not emerge uniquely within the context of Israel–Palestine. Similar pressures became visible during the MeToo moment, when institutions increasingly confronted moral environments in which skepticism toward accusation itself risked appearing ethically compromised. In many settings, the obligation to demonstrate responsiveness to suffering began competing directly with procedural norms historically associated with evidentiary restraint. The issue is not that such accusations were false or that older procedures were neutral. It is that anticipatory moral recognition increasingly preceded adversarial verification, compressing the interval within which judgment could remain open.

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Most revealing is that many institutions now most susceptible to these pressures were historically understood as gatekeepers tasked with slowing judgment through evidentiary restraint. News organizations no longer operate primarily as relatively insulated intermediaries standing between event and public interpretation. They now operate inside continuously circulating environments of escalation in which institutional credibility becomes dependent upon visible responsiveness. Editorial decisions no longer unfold under conditions where interpretation can mature gradually before normative consolidation crystallizes collectively. They unfold inside ecosystems where judgment is already circulating, intensifying, and imposing reputational pressure before verification processes have concluded.

Digital media intensified this transformation, but importantly, it did not create it. Nor can the transformation be reduced simply to partisan bias or the decline of journalistic professionalism, since many of the institutions most susceptible to these dynamics were historically understood precisely as guardians of evidentiary restraint and procedural authority. The decentralization of evidentiary visibility shattered the monopoly that older journalistic systems once possessed over the production of public reality. Images, testimony, activist framings, counterevidence, and interpretive communities now circulate simultaneously outside traditional editorial mediation. This fragmentation can expose realities older systems ignored or suppressed. Yet it also intensifies pressure upon public actors to synchronize rapidly with emerging consensus under conditions where verification, interpretation, emotional consolidation, and public judgment unfold simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Media systems participate in recursive legitimacy structures in which their own authority depends upon demonstrating synchronization with rapidly consolidating interpretive coherence. Classical journalism partially derived authority from temporal asymmetry with the crowd. Journalism now derives legitimacy from temporal synchronization with normative acceleration itself. This synchronization is not just behavioral. It has become structural necessity. Under conditions of permanent circulation, visible desynchronization from rapidly consolidating narratives threatens institutional credibility itself. Public actors therefore experience latency not only as slowness, but as vulnerability.

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Moral Acceleration

One could observe this mechanism concretely throughout the post–October 7 media environment. Allegations, images, fragments of testimony, short video clips, activist framings, and emotionally saturated narratives circulated through digital networks at extraordinary speed. Normative consolidation often began before verification processes had meaningfully matured. Under such conditions, editorial caution no longer appeared simply professional. It now risked appearing ethically suspect. Institutions confronted not only the possibility of factual error, but the reputational danger of moral lateness.

These processes did not remain confined to questions of testimonial credibility alone. Allegations concerning starvation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide frequently achieved rapid normative consolidation long before the evidentiary and legal conditions necessary for responsible adjudication had matured. This does not mean that such claims are necessarily false, but rather that contemporary informational environments now accelerate maximal moral convergence under conditions where narrative closure arrives faster than epistemic consolidation. Once such categories harden collectively, they begin organizing the conditions under which subsequent evidence is interpreted in the first place. Contradictory information may still emerge, but it no longer enters an open interpretive environment. It arrives within discursive structures already synchronized around conclusions that had already sedimented socially, where its disruptive capacity becomes significantly diminished.

In such environments, truth no longer emerges primarily through the slow accumulation of corroboration alone. Narratives acquire the status of truth because they satisfy preexisting moral expectations, restore explanatory coherence, and synchronize successfully with emotional and organizational environments already prepared to recognize them as such. The issue is not simply deception or propaganda. It is that contemporary informational systems now blur the distinction between evidentiary consolidation and socially desired intelligibility.

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Viewed through this lens, the asymmetrical distribution of latency and acceleration becomes profoundly revealing. Extensive evidence concerning sexual violence committed against Israelis on October 7 often encountered institutional hesitation, fragmentation, or delayed recognition despite survivor testimony, forensic evidence, independent investigations, and substantial documentation, including delayed acknowledgment by organizations such as UN Women and skepticism within elite media discourse. As many institutions struggled to translate such evidence into stable ethical recognition, allegations concerning Israeli abuses against Palestinians achieved rapid public plausibility under far more unstable evidentiary conditions.

The issue is not that allegations concerning Palestinian detainees required the same skepticism directed toward early reports of sexual violence on October 7. Nor is the argument that epistemic hesitation itself constitutes injustice. The asymmetry is diagnostically revealing precisely because latency and acceleration were distributed differently according to already established structures of moral recognizability. In one case, extensive evidentiary accumulation struggled for durable public recognition despite substantial documentation. In the other, moral certainty cohered rapidly before comparable epistemic maturation had occurred. The issue is therefore not inconsistency alone, but the differential organization of epistemic activation itself.

The differential distribution of latency and acceleration across these cases was not accidental. It tracked the moral architecture of contemporary progressive discourse, which now organizes legitimacy through symbolic frameworks centered on anti-colonialism, structural domination, racial asymmetry, carceral violence, and the exposure of hidden abuse. Palestinian suffering now enters Western institutional consciousness through already sedimented moral vocabularies that make such allegations rapidly plausible. This does not invalidate Palestinian testimony. It means the allegations entered a discursive environment already primed for anticipatory moral recognition.

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By contrast, Israeli and Jewish victimhood now encounters symbolic instability precisely because Jews no longer occupy a secure position within inherited liberal moral grammars. Jews appear simultaneously vulnerable and sovereign, traumatized and militarized, historically persecuted yet visibly powerful. Within this symbolic structure, Jewish suffering becomes difficult to metabolize because it no longer maps cleanly onto contemporary moral legitimacy.

Historically, evidentiary restraint functioned as a condition of public seriousness. The ethical obligation to expose suffering intensified rather than weakened the obligation to verify claims. Today, under conditions of acceleration, restraint risks appearing as moral insufficiency. Institutions no longer experience delay primarily as responsibility, but as exposure. The result is not the disappearance of judgment but its temporal compression. Institutions now consolidate normative authority before the epistemic conditions necessary for responsible judgment have fully emerged.

What emerges within this transformation is more than institutional bias alone. It is a reconfiguration of the relationship between procedure, judgment, and legitimacy themselves. Weber anticipated aspects of this transformation in his account of rationalization and procedural legitimacy, through which modern institutions increasingly secure authority through formally recognizable procedures rather than through historically situated judgment. Yet procedural legitimacy cannot resolve the problem of judgment itself. Arendt understood judgment not as the mechanical application of moral rules, but as the difficult activity of remaining within spaces of competing perspectives, incomplete evidence, and unresolved ambiguity without surrendering either thought or responsibility. Judgment required temporality, distance, and resistance to collective consolidation. What disappears under conditions of acceleration is precisely this interval between event and closure. Institutions continue speaking in ethical vocabularies while losing the temporal conditions necessary for reflective judgment.

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None of this means epistemic latency was historically neutral or universally just. Delay often protected entrenched power. Journalistic hesitation contributed historically to the marginalization of lynching testimony and the dismissal of early reports concerning totalitarian violence. Latency could function both as epistemic discipline and as institutional inertia. The point is not that older journalism represented a lost golden age of objectivity. The point is that liberal institutions historically depended upon temporal intervals within which judgment could remain accountable to evidentiary maturation even when those intervals were imperfectly distributed.

The collapse of latency therefore produces a genuine dialectical problem. Acceleration can expose hidden suffering more rapidly than older information systems permitted. Yet it can also dissolve the temporal conditions necessary for epistemic responsibility itself. The issue is not speed alone. The issue is what happens when public coherence begins outrunning institutional capacities for reflective judgment.

Antisemitism without Antisemites

The consequences are especially serious in relation to Jews because antisemitism historically functioned not only through hatred, exclusion, or dehumanization, but through explanatory condensation. Jews repeatedly became sites onto which broader civilizational anxieties, moral contradictions, political dislocations, and crises of legitimacy were projected and narratively fixed before they were politically understood.

This is what distinguishes antisemitism structurally from many other forms of prejudice. Antisemitism historically transforms Jews into overdetermined explanatory objects. They appear not as a minority among others, but as figures through which diffuse social contradictions can become narratively coherent under conditions of uncertainty and instability. Other groups may experience condensation episodically, but Jews have experienced it structurally across centuries and civilizations.

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Antisemitism therefore possesses a distinctive relationship to acceleration. Jewish meaning often coheres publicly before political reality coheres epistemically. Jews become “fast narratives.” Complexity condenses around them with unusual speed. They become narratively available as explanatory resolution mechanisms during moments of institutional disorientation and civilizational anxiety.

This is why antisemitism historically adapts so effectively to environments in which explanatory coherence outruns institutional restraint. Accelerated media systems reward explanatory condensation. They reward narratives capable of rapidly transforming complexity into politically actionable certainty. Antisemitism historically proves unusually adaptive to precisely this operation.

Historically, this process transformed Jews into explanatory infrastructure for diffuse crises. Jews became associated simultaneously with capitalism and anti-capitalism, cosmopolitanism and tribalism, weakness and hyper-power, rootlessness and hidden coordination, revolutionary disorder and financial control. Antisemitism repeatedly abstracted Jews beyond ordinary sociological concreteness and transformed them into portable explanatory mechanisms through which societies narrated disorientation back to themselves.

The issue, however, is not simply the production of negative narratives concerning Jews. It is the preemptive fixation of Jewish meaning before Jewish agency, testimony, ambiguity, or self-description can meaningfully interrupt the explanatory coherence already forming around them.

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Liberal institutions remain profoundly uncomfortable with explicit antisemitism and often highly vigilant against it in overt form. Yet antisemitism under contemporary liberal conditions operates not primarily through explicit hostility, but through instability in the institutional conditions under which Jewish vulnerability, agency, legitimacy, and violence become recognizable at all.

Antisemitism no longer necessarily requires antisemites. It can emerge infrastructurally through asymmetries in the thresholds governing plausibility, recognizability, and epistemic legitimacy. This does not mean every asymmetrical institutional outcome constitutes antisemitism. The claim is narrower and more structural. Institutional environments can reproduce historically recognizable asymmetries in the public legibility of Jewish experience without requiring explicit antisemitic intention among the actors operating within them.

The Collapse of Judgment

The danger under present conditions is therefore not simply prejudice in its familiar forms. It is the emergence of institutional environments unable to distinguish between explanatory coherence and epistemic consolidation itself. Once complexity begins collapsing directly into actionable certainty, institutions no longer risk factual error alone. They become susceptible to mythic forms of condensation that transform uncertainty into total explanation before judgment has had time to mature.

This is what makes the current moment so difficult to perceive from within. Institutions continue understanding themselves as ethically responsive even as the temporal conditions necessary for responsible judgment erode. Liberal journalism historically justified its authority not by eliminating uncertainty, but by preserving institutional spaces within which uncertainty could remain socially legitimate long enough for judgment to mature. Once institutions lose that capacity, they risk more than factual error. They risk losing the ability to perceive the distinction between reality and socially authorized meaning itself. And once epistemic latency collapses, institutions may lose the ability to recognize that they have lost it.

The author thanks Russell Berman for his thoughtful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.

Eliyahu V. Sapir is a political scientist at Maastricht University. His recent work focuses on antisemitism in higher education, documenting the experiences of Jewish and Israeli students and faculty and analyzing institutional responses to antisemitic harm. He co-authored the 2024 report Unsafe Spaces: The Rise of Anti-Semitism in the Dutch Academic World and the 2025 book Het 7 oktober-effect, and regularly contributes to public debate on these issues through op-eds in Dutch media.

People feared for him—for his safety, even for his life—every time he returned to Algeria. And on November 16, 2024, the author Boualem Sansal disappeared upon arriving at Algiers airport. The worst was feared: the secret police of the dictatorship, the Islamists—the two once again allied, as in the past, in some dark combination? A complete blackout followed. As Rachel, the brilliant “math whiz” in his novel The German Mujahid (Le Village de l’Allemand), puts it, Boualem Sansal “entered, in a quantum manner, into a non-Euclidean space.” He became a character from his own narratives, which weave together all the threads of History between “Nazislamism” and Algerian “Stalinationalism.”

Finally, the authorities announced that Boualem Sansal had been arrested and charged with undermining state security. He was said to be in prison, then in a prison hospital; his lawyers were unable to meet with him, and concerns mounted over his health, known to be fragile. Absurdity, cynicism, arrogance, cruelty—the traits of a violent and enraged regime attacking so gentle a man: a writer, a poet, a lover of the French language and of numbers. Boualem Sansal is indeed inexhaustible when speaking about prime numbers, irrational numbers, remarkable numbers, complex numbers, real numbers. He speaks of them with tenderness and complicity; he caresses them, plays with them, and the white papercloth fills with arabesques of figures and cabalistic formulas.

And from numbers he moves to geometry and the tracing of family trees. His own genealogical tree links the two shores of the Mediterranean—from Spain to Kabylia, from Morocco to France, and even to Jerusalem, which he sometimes visits in memory of his brother Daoud-David and the “dusty old rabbi” of his novel Darwin Street. Like Mounia (another version of himself in the novel), Boualem then opens “a breach in space-time.” That, too, is something the Algerian regime cannot forgive him for: his sympathy toward Morocco, the brother-enemy, and perhaps even worse, his friendship toward Israel.

The Islamists are likewise revolted by his frequenting with Jews, whom Islam tolerates only as dhimmis (this pariah status of Jews under the caliphate and the Ottoman Empire). But they are not the only ones who want Boualem Sansal destroyed. An entire section of the Left—or those claiming to be such—the kind that prefers Sartre to Camus, attacks Boualem Sansal by accusing him of having “turned to the far right,” precisely because he stands with the luminous Algeria of Camus. This Left has chosen authoritarianism of every kind: that of the Global South, of dictators large and small, boastful or discreet, kleptocrats, bloodthirsty psychopaths, and self-proclaimed avengers driven by grievance and revenge—all of them threatening our freedom to think, to speak, to love, to live.

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Throughout Boualem Sansal’s captivity, left-wing intellectuals and politicians, commentators and polemicists, essentially maintained that he had brought his fate upon himself. By criticizing the Algerian regime so openly and delivering supposedly “Islamophobic” diatribes, they argued, he had only himself to blame. And after his release, criticism—even insults—erupted once again. Caught unwillingly in a politico-editorial imbroglio, he was reproached for changing publishers and for “selling himself” to a right-wing businessman who has become the Left’s great Satan: Vincent Bolloré, who recently acquired the publishing house Grasset, the publisher that Boualem Sansal had joined a few months earlier and to which he remained loyal after the change in ownership.

This so-called “revolutionary” Left has always exercised significant influence in France. Its hold over the broader Left and over intellectual and political circles has fluctuated through the decades but has more or less endured. Today, the “radical” political Left—characterized by an aggressive Islamo-woke ideology—dominates the cultural sphere, achieving, in Gramscian terms, a form of hegemony, while its electoral performances have reached heights comparable to the communist apex of the 1950s and 1960s. Viewing violence as revolutionary in itself, this Left has replaced the figure of the proletarian with that of the “Palestinian” as the emblematic “wretched of the earth” to be defended by any means necessary, according to the Bolshevik principle that “the end justifies the means.”

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The “Palestinian” is not a real individual—an Arab from Mandatory Palestine—but a mythical being who subsumes the Muslim supposedly victimized by “Islamophobia,” the Arab supposedly victimized by “systemic racism,” the immigrant, the colonized, the “dominated,” in short, supposedly victimized by the Westerner, by “the white man,” and above all by that alleged “super-white” figure, the Jew, once portrayed as an auxiliary of the French colonists in Algeria and now supposedly the Israeli “colonizer.” The absurd theory of “white privilege” has indeed produced a specifically antisemitic offshoot: echoing the hashtag #WhitePrivilege, the hashtag #JewishPrivilege appeared on Twitter in July 2020. The “foreigners” and “mixed bloods” vilified by the racist antisemitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have now become the most hated “whites” in the racialized vision of a world once again radically divided by race.

Propalestinism, promoter of “Palestinian suffering,” instrumentalizes compassionate support for Palestinians—that is, for the Arabs of Palestine and their descendants, transformed into hereditary refugees cared for by the UNRWA since 1949 because the Arab states decided to preserve them as a permanent sore point. The strategic objective of propalestinism is the disappearance of the State of Israel, because the entirety of Mandatory British Palestine (that region of the defeated Ottoman Empire which the League of Nations entrusted to Great Britain for administration) is considered destined to remain Muslim and to belong exclusively to the Arabs. To achieve this aim, the tactic of propalestinism is to delegitimize the Jewish state, especially through the obsessive victimization of Palestinian populations and the demonization—literally and figuratively—of the Jew/Israeli.

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Yet Boualem Sansal stands against this phantasmatic worldview promoted by woke ideology and by this propalestinism, which has today become the doctrinal core of the neo-Bolshevik Left. As an Algerian, he does not conform to the archetype of the oppressed. If he suffers oppression, it comes not from France, from its culture, language, or Enlightenment philosophy—all of which he has fully embraced—but rather, on the one hand, from the Islamist offensive that, during Algeria’s “Black Decade,” carried out a true genocide against his country’s intelligentsia and, on the other hand, from the Algerian authoritarian regime.

Thus, he became a target, particularly in France for parties such as La France Insoumise and the New Anticapitalist Party, but also for ecologists of all kinds, who have made the struggle against so-called Islamophobia one of their main causes and who, at every opportunity, defend the wearing of the veil and various Islamist communitarian demands. The Communist Party is no exception, as shown by its connections with the PFLP, a Palestinian terrorist group, and its sustained relations with Iranian intellectuals close to the regime of the mullahs. Even the Socialist Party, drifting steadily downward in its decline, follows the same path. Having defended the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 and now rejoicing in the resilience of Iran’s military-religious regime after “Israeli-American” attacks, this fundamentally anti-Western and anti-democratic Left supports the Algerian regime and attacks the personalities it persecutes. Thus, Boualem Sansal—a free man even at the bottom of his prison cell—has become the ideal target for Islamo-woke leftist propaganda.

Renée Fregosi is a philosopher and political scientist, and president of the Centre Européen pour la Coopération Internationale et les Échanges Culturels (CECIEC). Her latest book is Le Sud global à la dérive: Entre décolonialisme et antisémitisme (The Global South Adrift: Between Decolonialism and Antisemitism; Paris: Intervalles Publishing, 2025).

German author Konrad Weiss (1880–1940) left a body of work including poetry, some prose fiction, art criticism, travel essays, and—this is our concern now—his 1933 essay on the “Christian Epimetheus.” This figure of thought makes several appearances in the writings of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt and Weiss both participated in German Catholic thinking of the era, although they take that legacy in alternative directions along the religious spectrum between activism and mysticism: Schmitt’s decisionism versus Weiss’s negative theology. Understanding Weiss can shed light on Schmitt.

The Christian Epimetheus treats several distinct topics. First, it presents a political diary from the Hindenburg election of 1932 to Hitler’s accession to power in 1933. This record of contemporary history includes reflections on political personalities as well as constitutional technicalities, e.g., whether Hindenburg’s presidency could have been extended by the Reichstag alone rather than going to a general election—which Hindenburg won but which gave Hitler a significant boost in public presence.

Second, the essay includes implicit reflections on party politics, in particular regarding the Catholic Center Party, which had been a core part of the Weimar coalition supporting the Republic but which found itself at loose ends in the context of the crises after 1930. Weiss also provides a critical analysis and parallel rejections of two competing tendencies: Nazi racial thinking and liberal humanism. Normally seen as opposites, Weiss rejects them symmetrically from a distinctive Catholic conservative position: both proceed from positive assumptions of nature; in contrast, Weiss invokes a German history of overcoming nature in the early medieval transition from paganism to Christianity.

Third, Weiss develops a negative theology centered on Mary and culminating in the Pietà, which he also projects onto a theory of visual art. The aesthetic points to a program for abstraction with theological foundations: the image (Inbild) involves a spiritual core that necessarily remains elusive. Works of art do not depict; they withhold. Paintings are representational as icons rather than as realistic mimesis. While Weiss often invokes medieval architecture as a reference point, he was in fact a proponent of modern art in Munich of the early twentieth century and was close to the painter Karl Caspar, whom the Nazis would declare as “degenerate.”

To begin to make Weiss legible to contemporary theoretical concerns, it is worth recognizing how The Christian Epimetheus has a set of divergent ambitions—in addition to its significance as a companion text to Schmitt.

Weiss’s essay offers at times a powerful critique of modernity—Weimar culture and its excess—as a regime of unbounded production, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin on “mechanical reproduction” or Jean Baudrillard’s later attack on “productivism.” Weiss might be misunderstood as standing near a Lukácsian critique of reification, though without Georg Lukács’s Marxist framework, certainly without his progressivist philosophy of history, and of course phrased in a very different idiom. For Lukács, modernity dissolves the relation between form and substance, with a resulting loss of unity. The aspiration to repair that fragmentation reveals an underlying classicism in his Marxism. In contrast, for Weiss unity is always and necessarily illusory, insofar as it conceals the unsurpassable gap between creator and created. This argument is particularly strong in Weiss’s attacks on liberalism and humanitarianism: Menschlichkeit or humane-ness turns out to be unconcerned with genuine Menschheit or humanity.

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Second, the essay unfolds a theological account of absence and measure. The insistence on human creatureliness and creation in general does not flow into a pantheistic endorsement of the whole cosmos as a divine accomplishment. On the contrary, the claim of createdness indicates the distance between the creator and the creature. Art and politics should, he suggests, proceed from an internalization of this gap rather than attempting to feign completeness.

At the center of Weiss’s thought lies a theological anthropology structured by absence. The Inbild—the inner image or figural ground—is not present as a stable center; it is withdrawn, operative precisely through its iconic non-presence. Meaning therefore “takes place outside the center,” and the individual is constituted by a detachment from this absent ground. Behind this account, one can recognize Weiss’s ultimate dogmatic assumption of a flawed state of fallenness, or original sin, although he does not use that terminology.

The figure of Epimetheus names the retrospective stance; his Christianity adds a component of regret or mourning. Against the Promethean drive to project, create, and dominate, Epimetheus embodies after-knowledge, receptivity to the point of passivity and measure. Rather than initiating action, he responds to what is given—and what is given is marked by lack. The “Epimethean justice” that Weiss invokes is not distributive justice in a conventional sense, but a sense of appropriate order coupled with a refusal to exceed what can be rightly borne by the absent center.

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A third aspect brings into focus the explicitly political vocabulary that emerges in the text: justice, measure, division, and opposition. Here Weiss can be read as offering a political theology, though his position is not reducible to Schmitt’s. Schmitt proposes a decisionism that is necessarily activist; Weiss articulates a witnessing of catastrophe that leads him toward a set of passive mystical stances: reclusa, or withdrawal from the world; immaculata, or awareness without intervention; and pieta, the figure of mournful comfort. Compared to Schmitt, he is apolitical, outside the state, yet perhaps close to Ernst Jünger’s figure of the anarch as described in his novel Eumeswil.

Weiss’s invocation of justice marks a shift from epistemology to political form. Justice, however, is not grounded in unity; it arises from distance and division. His formula—“distances are justices”—turns into the insistence that forms involve structured separations. Justice is not a matter of normative equality. At stake instead are propriety of order, hierarchical structure, and empathy, most pronounced when he addresses the question of “the poor man.”

His term Gegenschaft is crucial. It designates a condition of being set against, a structural field in which differentiation becomes constitutive. Political reality is not a harmonious whole—neither democratic egalitarianism nor Nazi Volksgemeinschaft—but an arrangement of separating pillars. In fact, Weiss returns repeatedly to architectural images from cathedrals, where pillars structure the interior space: a spatialized order of divisions. Justice, in this context, is the regulation of these divisions through measure. Weiss may even be pointing toward a corporativist politics (one might think of “pillarized” societies of Verzuiling as in the Netherlands).

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What distinguishes Weiss from more familiar political theological frameworks is that his argument is not grounded in sovereignty or decision, but in absence and proportion. This removes the possibility of a fully self-grounding political order. Instead, political life becomes a site in which the absence of the center must be negotiated through measure, without ever being overcome. It would be fair to say that he does not offer a political theory, let alone a party program, but instead a reflection on the limitations of the political altogether, perhaps a negative political theology. It is worth recalling here Schmitt’s judgment on the essay: “One may dismiss his Marian image of history as mere historical mysticism. However, its dark truth is thereby not disconfirmed, and neither is its significance as a historical counterforce against the leveling of history to the status of universal humanity, to the museum of the past, and an exchangeable costume to conceal the bluntness of activist attempts to give meaning to the meaningless.”1

After Catastrophe

Epimetheus looks backward, and the end of the essay places him in a storm. That image anticipates the storm of progress that traps Benjamin’s “angel of history” in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” of 1940. The same image of “storm” figures at the conclusion of Martin Heidegger’s 1933 speech on “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” although the reference there was arguably to the “Storm Troopers” attending the lecture. Weiss does not specify which storm or the catastrophe that is at stake for Epimetheus, but one can speculate: the carnage of World War I, the end of the German Empire, or the catastrophe of modernity in general—the Reformation, perhaps, since Weiss references the tensions between Catholics and Protestants in Germany. Alternatively the catastrophe can be read in religious terms: the Crucifixion, the banishment from Eden, or even creation as such that places us at irreducible distance from the creator.

This post-catastrophic historic sensibility explains the usefulness as well as the limits of Weiss’s account today. As much as he is a critic of the Nazis, he concedes that Germany faced a profound crisis involving a substantively national culture (hence a national, but not an ethno-national argument). A conservative anti-Nazi, he attempts to rescue an understanding of German nationhood as a precondition to achieving some social stabilization. Reading Weiss today therefore leaves us with the question as to the standing of any national history, e.g., American national history, as a key to contemporary phenomena. Does (deep) national history still matter at all in the age of globalization, mass migration, and “world citizenship”? What place should national memory play in curricula—if any at all? Similarly, one can ask about the pertinence of Weiss’s parallel dismantlings of liberalism and racialism—the racial epistemologies of the ethno-nationalists on the right and the identity-politicians on the left.

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Yet Weiss’s late Weimar catastrophism also appears incongruous in the United States of 2026 (at most we have a mood expecting catastrophe rather than a sense of already living in its aftermath). Are there nonetheless ways to read Weiss as having significance for our contemporary situation? Most obviously is the challenge to ask about the importance of religion in our cultural self-understanding. Weiss was looking for a theological response to the Weimar crisis, a solution that the Catholic Center Party had failed to supply. His essay therefore prompts us to ask the question about the status of religion today. In fact it appears that a sort of religious revival may be underway, evidenced in increasing church attendance.

While Weiss’s ambience of mournful quietism nonetheless seems distant, there is an argument to be made building on the earlier reference to Jünger’s anarch. The Weissian three-part prescription—reclusa, immaculata, pieta—could be transposed onto a variant of anarchic libertarianism: the urgency of developing effective postures outside the state and conventional politics, but driven by integrity, commitment, and solace, rather than by obedience or citizenship. In any case, Weiss does not leave us fully stateless: the essay includes surprisingly sympathetic portraits of Brüning (explicitly as Catholic chancellor and wise leader) and of Hindenburg, so politics in the conventional sense is not fully excluded; it is just not at the center of his account. Weiss’s emphasis on the existential gap that defines human existence—his central point—does however preclude any world-remaking gnosticism, whether of the revolutionaries on the right or on the left.

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A translation of the full essay is in preparation; an English version of the conclusion follows. Weiss’s language is challenging. To facilitate understanding, it is worth remembering that the discussion of creation is primarily about the gap between creator and created (in contrast to the American creationist discourse). Similarly references to image or likeness involve non-identity. Secondly the language of “angulation” and “disposition” involves a theory of history as textured, not an empty continuum (another point of intersection with Benjamin). History should not be understood as chronology but rather as an alternative to nature and, more importantly, as incarnation. Finally, the concluding reference to 1 John 5:6–8 appears to offer a forceful affirmation at odds with the quietism of Weiss’s triad of reclusa, immaculata, and pieta, indeed a sudden shift from Mary to Jesus. We are left with an interpretive puzzle about the relationship of this conclusion to the Marian theology at the core of the essay.

The Conclusion of Konrad Weiss, The Christian Epimetheus

If, therefore, the middle is, like justice, extinguished in the image, then the world of the earth becomes richest. But how does this great and beautiful abandonment come about? For—this is God’s mystery with His creation—the richness within the image produces abandonment. We are given to understand that creation knows nothing of the honor that is communicated in God’s own sight and not in conception; and what we conceive we must carry over, through the Virgin, into fervent honor and into createdness [Geschöpflichkeit]—yet it robs us through excess. And what we receive, purified in a historical sense, brings us all the more from the earth: it leads us into the dispositive essence of the earth.

Seemingly—that is, if one reflects on the methodical concept of the Christian order of history (and that a true metaphysics is possible only through a gap in which the earth becomes image and the assistance of meaning becomes foundation, in contrast to the mere form of analogy)—and if one sees that the degree of the Christian form lies in overcoming the merely analogical—then it appears that the Christian measure, as a prior exclusion, negates the inclusive classical worldview, which is bound to its own self-clarification.

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Is the Christian form, then, one that does not bind its content to its essence through clarification, but rather, the more it separates content from non-content, the more it receives it as life and thereby departs from it? Does it then appear to be merely a technique? (Indeed, even the old Christian architectural form contains a technique within itself, as an integrated fervor.)

And yet, through the comparative exchange of substance between inside and outside, there arise angulation, intermediate position, and disposition: formed both negatively and positively through comparative selection, they signify exchanged forces—through angulation and proportion, determination and contribution—with the defense of immaculate justice, with the strength of deed and of nature attributed to it, and with transgression in the true meaning, as an inner-sense. The order itself gathers wealth and bears its own consequence—until meaning itself is understood in honor. But here begins what creation itself does not know as honor: the order cannot itself rule as concept within its own receptivity; it is broken off, like a creature, from witnessing. We must be deprived and held in counterbalance with the Virgin; and she herself cannot enter into order as into an honor. She—who, without meaning in herself, holds all things within meaning and gives meaning to history—looks expectantly upon creation and stands, as it were, abandoned [ausgeliefert] within witnessing. What is decided in meaning arises more deeply, as desire, within witness; this is the path of time, and the meaning of salvation cannot be enacted apart from creation. It is through the meaning of history that we have honor.

But we, Epimetheus, are swept along in witnessing as in a storm. This is the threefold witnessing on earth: and corresponding to the Trinity in heaven, it is—as John says—the three who bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood (and these three are one). In these testimonies, history storms [stürmt die Geschichte], and we are caught up within this great dispositive reversal.

Russell A. Berman is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and former editor of Telos. He is now President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

The elections in Britain on May 7th mark a tectonic shift in UK politics with implications for both Europe and the Anglosphere. After a century of two-party rule, the country’s political landscape is profoundly fragmented, mirroring the deep economic, cultural, and social divides. The country is more atomized and fractured today than even in the run-up to the Brexit referendum ten years ago. Keir Starmer will likely face a challenge as prime minister, and his successor would be the seventh since 2016. Yet successive government have failed to rebuild state capacity for renewed prosperity at home or defending national and shared Western interests against the threats from hostile foreign powers such as China or Russia.

In the English local elections, the governing center-left Labour Party and to a lesser extent the center-right Conservative Party suffered heavy losses to the radical-right populist Reform UK party and the far-left populist Green Party. Meanwhile, in the Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections, the nationalists emerged triumphant, with Reform in second place and the Greens progressing while Labour lost dramatically and the Conservatives shed support too.

Thus, in one sense the populist backlash against progressivist technocracy continues apace. Labour, which won a landslide victory in the UK national elections less than two years ago, are losing everywhere to everyone. In their former heartlands in the North-East, North-West, and the Midlands, they are being replaced by Reform. In London and university towns, their vote is squeezed by the Greens. And in some of the so-called home counties—the wealthy middle-class regions around the capital—Labour is ceding ground to the centrist Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, though the latter are losing to Reform in working-class areas across southern England.

Geography and social class largely coincide. Labour’s electoral coalition used to stretch from Hampstead (north London), home to Fabian-style intellectuals, to Hull (northern England), home to the industrial working class. This coalition has fractured, with parts of the progressive professional managerial class abandoning Labour in favor of the Green Party and the nationalists in Scotland and Wales, while the socially conservative ex-industrial working class have switched their support to Reform. The Conservatives are now the party of the older, more affluent voters, a small yet stable rump.

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In another sense, Britain is witnessing a decomposition of mainstream parties and a realignment. The two-party system that has underpinned UK politics for two centuries—first Liberals and Conservatives, then Labour and Conservatives—has given way to a contest of five UK-wide parties (Labour, Conservative, LibDem, Reform, and Green) and three nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Scottish Nationalist Party, Plaid Cymru, and Sinn Féin). We might be seeing the demise of Labour and the Conservatives as national parties, with their national share of the vote well below 20 percent each, while Reform UK got about 26 percent and, so far, has the advantage of building a relatively stable electoral coalition out of the working and lower middle classes across England and now Wales too.

But at this juncture, no party can govern on its own, and the prospect of coalition government for years to come adds to the sense of paralysis. Scotland, where the SNP has been in power for over twenty years and governed either as a minority party or in coalition with the Greens, has some of the worst public services and other economic outcomes, showing that a governing strategy of the lowest common denominator accelerates decline. Something similar applies to the Conservative/LibDem coalition in Westminster from 2010 to 2015, which gave the country the lasting damage wrought by austerity, depressing economic growth and involving draconian cuts to public services and defense spending. So far coalitions have existed within the national parties, not between them. Over time, the very legitimacy of British parliamentary democracy will be in question.

Ideologically, the defeat of centrist technocracy does not represent the demise of progressivism or the tempering of the populist right—as with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. Instead, the energy is with two rival forms of populism—the nationalist, sovereignist populist brand of Reform versus the globalist, “inclusive” populist brand of the Greens. While Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, led the charge for Brexit and is a staunch defender of President Trump (albeit not in favor of the Iran war), the leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, sides with those who accuse Israel of genocide and champions ultra-progressive causes ranging from trans-activism to the decolonization of the school curriculum. Progressivist politics is growing on the populist far left of the spectrum.

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Yet this clash of the two brands of populism conceals a deeper fusion of certain libertarian with specific statist views. Both Reform and the Greens accuse the old mainstream parties of liberticide and a sustained crackdown on free speech, combined with censorship and surveillance. All this is couched in the familiar terms of elite coercive control versus popular resistance. The Greens are even more libertarian than Reform in promoting the legalization of recreational drugs and euthanasia. At the same time, both parties support statist solutions to the economic crisis, advocating vast public spending on welfare and public services in the hope of boosting the living standards of people left behind by globalization and austerity.

Moreover, each of the two insurgent forces is deeply divided. Reform oscillates between statist intervention to support its working-class voters and a Thatcherite low-tax, low-spend economy to placate its suburban middle-class support. The Greens are simultaneously appealing to socially ultra-progressive secular graduates and middle-class voters and socially more conservative Muslim voters.

It is therefore highly uncertain whether their political positioning or policy platforms command greater popular support in a general election for the UK Parliament, due by July 2029 when the current parliamentary term expires. Arguably the fusion of libertarian with statist ideas will limit their appeal among voters as time—and scrutiny—goes on. A majority of British people remain much more small-“c” communitarian in terms of family, work, and a sense of national belonging. Most people are culturally and socially moderate while wanting to see a radically different economic model that allows them and their children to flourish once more.

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A broad section of the UK population are opposed to the ethno-nationalist atavism of Reform’s radical wing, who seek to deport millions of foreign-born Brits, as much as to the globalist reverse racism of Green’s militant activists, who blame the white indigenous people for all the ills of the country and the whole world.

So far, no political party or politicians seems to have grasped the sheer depth of the crisis or worked out how to confront the structural drivers. Reform UK says that the United Kingdom is broken but falls back on old ideas such as Global Britain as a buccaneering free-trade country in a world of great-power blocs and growing protectionism. It also speaks the language of the “special relationship” with the United States at a time when historically close diplomatic, military, intelligence, and economic ties are giving way to more transactional deals based on very short-term calculations rather than longer-term strategic interests.

While Reform UK has consistently criticized high levels of immigration and the associated cultural changes, it has so far failed to connect these to economic pressures. Free trade will only exacerbate the divides between globally traded service sectors and the foundational economy of non-traded goods and services. Linked to this is the reliance on importing skilled, cheap(er) labor to fill vacancies in more vocational and technical sectors such as healthcare, adult social care, construction, and adjacent activities. Crucially, Reform UK seems fully invested in the “culture wars” pitting ultra-progressive woke activists against national-populists, when a majority of voters reject identity-driven politics and do not view the underlying divisions as set in stone.

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How will its current political outlook and nascent policy platform speak to the two parts of the electoral coalition that it needs to hold together and grow, i.e., working-class voters in ex-industrial towns, suburban zones, but also rural and coastal areas (who used to vote Labour), as well as lower-middle-class voters in cities and more affluent pensioners (who are disillusioned by the Conservatives)?

Amid political fragmentation, fracturing communities, and material fault lines, what’s missing from British politics is a broad UK-wide party with a vision that balances tradition with transformation. An economic model that creates value, not financial speculation or the extraction of rents, and rewards hard work. An economic model that fosters firms with a social and not only an economic purpose, such as public-interest companies, cooperatives, and mutuals that pool risk, resources, and rewards. An economic model that reduces energy costs for both households and businesses, and that replaces dependency on energy imports with real energy security based on a combination of nuclear with renewables.

A central state that devolves power and resources to local and regional tiers of government, which know better about the needs of their citizens and are accountable to them. A central state that abandons managerial micro-management with decisive action in favor of reindustrialization, affordable and good-quality public services run by organizations governed by funders, workers, and users. A central state that clamps down on rent-seeking and profiteering, invests in innovation, and deploys technology for public benefit. A central state that enforces strong borders and takes decisive action to eliminate illegal immigration.

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Good government at all levels of the country to celebrate the United Kingdom’s shared history, strengthen communities, go after those preaching hate, and deal with the scourge of antisemitism and ethno-sectarian intolerance. All this requires less focus on process and rules and instead a much greater exercise of both ethical and political leadership based on courage and conviction.

For the past decade or so, Western politics has been characterized by the opposition between progressives and populists amid growing cultural and economic polarization. Today, politics is fragmented as old parties lose their popular base while new insurgent forces still struggle to command majority support. A majority politics can be built on solidarity and subsidiarity instead of diversity and coercion, the common good and flourishing rather than the right to have rights or the maximization of utility, freedom and duties instead of servitude and entitlement.

The sway of both social and economic liberalism, which was dominant for forty years, is being undermined by the intrusion of new political polarities that do not readily fit into a left–right spectrum. These new polarities concern variously common sense and common decency versus the binary of technocracy and populism, rootedness and tolerance versus mobility and the division of culture wars, the local and national versus the uniformly global or atavistic ethno-nationalism. Such and similar political polarities require a more paradoxical conception that fuses the defense of tried and tested tradition with the promotion of radical yet realistic transformation.

Britain’s much-vaunted stability and majority rule are unraveling in a world of great-power rivalry. The current capacity of the British state and the ruling establishment to offer remedies is as small as the scale of the task is big. Only a new virtuous elite combined with greater popular participation in power and wealth can reverse decades of decline and renew the United Kingdom before it breaks apart and ceases to play a vital role in the promotion of the wider West both geopolitically and civilizationally.

Topics: Beyond State and Market • Reflections & Dialogues

Adrian Pabst is Honorary Professor of Politics at the University of Kent, UK, and Deputy Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Since 2012 he has been an Associate Editor of Telos. His research is at the interstice of political thought, political economy, and political theology. He is the co-editor of Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (2015) and the co-author (with John Milbank) of The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (2016). Author of several other monographs, his most recent book is Penser l’ère post-libérale (2025). Since October 2025 he has been a Member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

I.

Cole Tomas Allen, the young man who walked into the Washington Hilton on Saturday night with a shotgun, a handgun, multiple knives, and a stated intention to kill the president of the United States, gave a charming interview to ABC7 in Los Angeles in 2017. He was a Caltech senior studying mechanical engineering. He had designed a prototype emergency brake to keep wheelchairs from skidding when their wheel brakes engaged. The reporter found him gracious and articulate. The brake worked.

In the almost decade between his star turns, Allen took a master’s in computer science at Cal State Dominguez Hills, tutored high school students at C2 Education in Torrance, and was named the company’s Teacher of the Month in December 2024. The parents of his students told the Los Angeles Times he was intelligent, soft-spoken, and on the nicer side. His professor at Cal State remembered him in the front row, attentive, polite, and frequently emailing about coursework. On Saturday night, having traveled by train from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, he sent his family a note ten minutes before the attack. He apologized to those whose trust he had abused. He said he did not expect forgiveness. In the writings he left behind, he called himself the “Friendly Federal Assassin.”

How does the boy who built a wheelchair brake become the assassin at the magnetometer? The reporters covering the case have proposed mental illness, online radicalization, isolation. None of these answers is wrong. None is sufficient. They describe the surface, but the deeper architecture demands our attention.

Allen is the third in eighteen months. Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson in December 2024. Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk in September 2025. Each of these young men explained himself before he acted. Each presented his act as service to the nation. Each accepted, or anticipated, his own death as the price of that “service.” The framework authorizing their reasoning is older than effective altruism, but effective altruism is its current respectable form. The corrective is older still. It is a verse of John’s Gospel that our culture has either forgotten or, having half-remembered, inverted.

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II.

Allen, apparently obsessed with saving the nation by sacrificing its president, is a modern echo of the gospels’ Caiaphas.

“It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” The high priest spoke at a council convened after the raising of Lazarus, when the religious authorities had concluded that the Jesus movement, left alone, would provoke a Roman crackdown destroying the temple and the nation with it. The calculation, on its face, is prudence. It is the kind of arithmetic any administrator runs. It produced unanimity in the council and discharged a social tension that had become unbearable. The gospel writer treats the line as both prophetic and damning in the same breath.

René Girard located here the mechanism by which human societies have always discharged collective tension. Unanimous violence against an innocent victim produces social cohesion, the appearance of justice, and a feeling of relief so profound that participants experience it as a sacred event. The mechanism works in the technical sense. Cultures across history have used it. What the gospels do, on Girard’s reading, is take the side of the victim and expose the lie. Once exposed, the mechanism cannot work the same way again. The lynch mob becomes suspect even when its victim looks guilty. The persecution texts of the ancient world give way, slowly, to texts that worry about scapegoats.

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This is one source of an intuition that Western societies, including their secular members, treat as bedrock: the individual is inviolable; human sacrifice is categorically forbidden; the lynching is suspect even when the lynched man looks like a villain. These intuitions are not universal. They are not present in every civilization. Aztec sacrifice, Carthaginian Tophet, the burning of widows on funeral pyres are recent on the scale of recorded history. The reason most contemporary Westerners recoil from them is not that human nature has improved. It is that our ancestors read, and we still half-remember, a particular text. The atheist horrified by ritual killing is borrowing intellectual furniture from a faith he does not profess, and may find that, absent care, that furniture may not be bequeathed to the next generation.

III.

Mangione wrote the script. Robinson and Allen are reading from it.

The Mangione manifesto reasoned, in the language it could find, from harms in aggregate to a license for individual action. The American health insurance regime kills people; therefore the executive of a major insurer must die. The math is the giveaway. The math assumes that lives are fungible, that suffering can be summed across persons, and that the sum can be set against a particular killing as its justification. Once the premises are granted, the conclusion follows. Read carefully, the manifesto is not the work of a deranged mind. It is the work of a logically consistent one, operating from premises Christianity was supposed to have rendered unthinkable.

Tyler Robinson is the harder case. The reasoning, on what we know of it, was structurally identical to Mangione’s, with different inputs. Charlie Kirk’s speech was causing harm; the harm had to be stopped. Speech replaces insurance claims; the conclusion follows along the same path. Kirk was, by any honest accounting, the most prominent voice persuading young men of his generation toward the conservative tradition. He was killed for that work, by another young man of the same generation reasoning from the same premises that had moved Mangione nine months earlier.

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Allen completes the figure. The “Friendly Federal Assassin” is Caiaphas in modern dress: the same prudential frame, the same self-presentation as servant of the nation, the same willingness to absorb personal destruction as the price of the service. Allen intends, on his own account, to save the country. He accepts his own death in the bargain. That is the deeper Girardian point. The scapegoater becomes scapegoat. The cycle does not stop. The president has described the manifesto as expressing hatred for Christians; whether the text bears that out in detail is a question for the trial. The structure of Allen’s reasoning, whatever his explicit theological views, is the structure that the Christian tradition was supposed to have foreclosed.

Allen is not crazy in any legal or clinical sense. He sat in the front row. He was Teacher of the Month. He was reasoning. The reasoning leads where it leads when the prohibition is gone.

IV.

Caiaphas needed Pilate. He still does.

The Pilate of John 18 and 19 is not the architect of the killing. He examines the prisoner, finds no fault in him, says so on the record, and authorizes the killing anyway. He cannot afford the political cost of intervention. He washes his hands, declares himself innocent, and returns to administration. The killing proceeds.

The pattern of the past eighteen months on the institutional left has been the pattern of Pilate. Mainstream organs that shape liberal opinion did not endorse Mangione’s act. They did, in publication after publication, treat his manifesto as a document deserving sympathetic exegesis and his person as an object of unsettling cultural fascination. They did not endorse Robinson’s killing of Kirk. They did, with rare exceptions, treat Kirk’s death as an occasion to revisit Kirk’s rhetoric rather than to denounce the architecture of reasoning that produced his killer. They will not endorse Allen. They have already begun to amplify him. Norah O’Donnell, interviewing the president the day after the attack, read Allen’s denunciation of him aloud from the manifesto, the words “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” delivered in the measured cadence of network news, the assassin’s accusation laundered through the authority of CBS into a question the president was invited to answer. This is the work Pilate’s procurators do once the killing is underway. They give the charge a hearing. They treat the killer’s grievance as a contribution to public discourse. They will, in the days to come, find ways to write that the country’s politics had become unbearable for sensitive young men.

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This is the Pilate move. It does not require approval of the killings. It requires only the choice not to intervene against the architecture that produces them. The intervention would mean naming the moral grammar of utilitarian aggregation as defective, repudiating the networks that have grown wealthy and respectable on its terms, and acknowledging that a political coalition that has lately mocked Christian moral seriousness as theocratic threat is now reaping a harvest its mockery helped to sow. The institutional left will not make the intervention. The political costs are too high. The energy of the men at the magnetometer does work, in the structure of contemporary politics, that mainstream voices would not do themselves. So, the hands are washed, the case is found wanting on its merits, and the killing proceeds.

The defense is always that these are isolated cases, lone wolves, mentally unwell young men whose acts cannot be generalized. The defense does not survive three cases reasoning from identical premises within eighteen months.

V.

The architects of the authorizing architecture are not bad people. This is the part of the argument that requires care. The casualties of a wrong idea are often the people who took it most seriously.

Peter Singer at Princeton has spent fifty years arguing, with patience and rigor, that geographic distance ought not block moral obligation and that the comparison of outcomes across persons is the proper grammar of ethical thought. The argument has produced real charity and saved real lives. It has also produced a moral grammar that lacks any categorical prohibition on the scapegoat. Singer’s frame can absorb such a prohibition only as an empirical generalization about the long-run consequences of permitting killing. It cannot ground the prohibition as inviolable in itself.

Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried at Stanford Law have done careful, humane work on responsibility and consequentialism. Their philosophical project is serious. Their son Sam took the philosophy he had inherited seriously and acted on it. Under the pressure of running an exchange in a falling market, he discovered that the architecture he had been taught could not hold a line a more ancient grammar would have held. He is a talented young man lost to a wrong formation, one of the casualties of an idea, worth another chance if the idea around him is ever named clearly enough to be repudiated.

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The same charity is owed his parents and the broader effective-altruist community. They are people of conscience working on serious problems. The question their architecture cannot answer, because no consequentialist architecture can answer it from inside, is why the inviolability of the individual ought to function as a non-negotiable constraint on the aggregation of welfare. That premise was historically supplied by a religious tradition the academy has spent a generation treating as embarrassment. Stripped of the premise, consequentialism is arithmetic, and arithmetic licenses whatever the numbers favor. This is not a failure of the philosophers; it is a structural limit of philosophy unaided by what theologians used to call revelation. A generation of our most gifted young people is being formed in the architecture. Some end at FTX. A smaller number, formed in adjacent architectures with sharper edges and weaker ties, end at a magnetometer.

VI.

Allen will be prosecuted. The federal indictment names attempted assassination, interstate transport of a firearm in furtherance of a violent crime, and discharge of a firearm during a violent crime. Conviction is overdetermined. He will spend his life in federal prison.

This is necessary. It is not sufficient.

Positive law forbids the killing. Positive law cannot supply the moral grammar that makes the prohibition feel natural. Hart’s minimum content of natural law gestures toward the insight; Fuller’s morality of law gestures toward it from the other direction. The deeper Thomistic point, recovered in Pope Leo XIV’s Vatican Tribunal address last month and treated at length in these pages, is that positive law presupposes a populace that will not reason its way around it. When the populace makes the move, the law has nothing to say that the populace will hear. Allen knew the law. The law did not deter him. Criminal law’s deterrence model assumes a baseline of socialization that recoils from killing. When the socialization fails, the law can punish the killer. It cannot reach the next one through punishment alone. The genuinely persuaded man who has already accepted his own death is the case the criminal law was never built to handle.

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Schmitt’s formulation belongs here. The sovereign decides on the exception. The state’s monopoly on legitimate force is the renunciation, by every other actor, of the right to decide which deaths serve the nation. When private citizens reclaim the right, the polity has either revolution or terror. The American settlement assumes that even those who hate one another will not kill each other. That assumption is doing more work than the Constitution acknowledges, and the work is not legal work.

The asymmetry should be named. Mangione, Robinson, and Allen are men of the left. The American right has its own histories of violence. In this particular moment, the active assassin script is a script of the left. The most plausible reading is that the secular left has gone further down the road of forgetting than the secular right has. The right’s secularism still trades on a residual Christian inheritance, often without acknowledging the source. The left’s secularism, especially in its technocratic and effective-altruist forms, has taken the deeper drink. The grammar of aggregate welfare without inviolable individual claims has done its work first where it took root first.

We are not going to legislate our way out of this. The criminal statutes will not do the work. Hardened protective details will reduce frequency but will not address the source of this violence. The assassination of public figures by gifted young men reasoning from utilitarian premises is not a legal problem. It is a catechetical one. The catechism that produced the Western refusal to sacrifice the one for the many was Christian. The substitutes on offer—humanism, effective altruism, technocratic liberalism—are not catechisms. They are denominational variations on the position Caiaphas took in the council. They will produce more Cole Allens. They cannot help producing them. The broader culture still benefits from the Christian inheritance while forgetting its source. Whether it recognizes what it is losing in time to recover it is the open question of our generation. All signs derived from the Hilton on Saturday night were discouraging.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Tim Rosenberger is a pastor and attorney and cofounder of Excelsior Action.

In 2012, Xi Jinping promoted the idea of a “new era of great power relations,” a term that had been introduced in China decades earlier, but which took on new meaning given China’s remarkable economic development. It was, early on, a sort of invitation to then U.S. president Barack Obama and a signal of Chinese newfound confidence as a leader in a global order to which it hoped to contribute not only materially but in terms of values and norms. President Obama demurred and his successor, Donald Trump, gave a clearer response in his 2017 National Security Strategy, which spoke of a new era of great power competition. Even so, for several years Xi Jinping promoted the concept of a “new era of great power relations,” and it was dissected and evaluated at length by Chinese scholars and sinologists. In the end, he adjusted to a “new era of international politics.”

In a forthcoming essay, Chen Gang and I explore why Xi Jinping was unable to persuade audiences, domestic and international, to endorse the idea of a “new era of great power relations.” In a striking contrast, U.S. president Donald Trump, with little interest in conceptual elaboration, generated a seemingly endless discussion of how he has brought about changes in the international system, and, despite severe criticism, many political leaders have proven themselves willing to engage with the shifts he has introduced, such as the global tariff-cum-bilateral negotiation scheme he launched without warning in April 2025.

This essay offers a preliminary analysis of the foreign policy of the second Trump administration. While there is so much to address, as with his earlier administration, the current administration has moved quickly and delivered constant rhetorical displays to attract attention. But this mandate features much bolder and more definitive policy moves, as well as a more confident and less leaky administration, which largely acts first and explains later. For reasons of space, I hoped to limit the discussion to the Western Hemisphere, the area identified by the National Security Strategy (NSS) of December 2025 and the National Defense Strategy (NDS) of January 2026 as the most important region for U.S. security. Yet the ongoing military activities in Iran make such a restriction impossible.

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Since returning to the presidency in January 2025, Donald Trump publicly considered making Canada the 51st state, suggested possible military tactics to control Greenland, and insisted on U.S. control of the Panama Canal. The United States has deployed its military forces to blow up boats in the Caribbean alleged to be engaged in drug-trafficking, has captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, and has exerted pressure on regional governments to prevent oil shipments to Cuba. In addition to raising tariffs on the entire world, Trump raised additional tariffs in response to actions taken by presidents (Colombian president Gustavo Petro) or supreme courts (in Brazil), endorsed presidential candidates (Honduras), and pushed an IMF support loan to help presidents regarded as fellow travelers (Argentina).

The above represents a considerable change in the scope and intensity of U.S. foreign policy activity in the Western Hemisphere. Many analysts have criticized the Trump administration for pursuing a so-called “sphere of influence” policy, which they see represented in U.S. government efforts to dominate the Western Hemisphere and expressions of interest in withdrawal from other regions (Western Europe, the Middle East, East Asia). Critics worry not only about abandoning allies—such as Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea—but also about ceding legitimacy to aggressive action by China, Russia, and others in their perceived respective “spheres of influence.”

While Trump’s policies may have such consequences, these are certainly not their goals. Critics confuse “backyard” and “sphere of influence.” A great power may be concerned about activities, including those sponsored by other great powers, in its backyard. But in order for a great power to have a sphere of influence, that sphere must be recognized by other great powers as a geopolitical fact. The Trump administration recognizes only one sphere of influence, that of the United States. It may recognize the security concerns of Russia or China (or Turkey, etc.), but it also sells weapons to neighbors and actively pursues freedom of navigation activities in regions critical to the security of other great powers. The United States is not alone in not recognizing a Chinese or Russian sphere of influence. Many countries, including China, operate in Russia’s “near abroad,” and there is considerable diversity of geopolitical alignment amongst countries bordering and proximate to China. So Trump 2.0 policies do not really seem to be what analysts identify (or fear) as a sphere of influence foreign policy.

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That said, the Trump administration expressly aims to recalibrate relations with its allies, with the latter taking more of a leading role in local/regional security concerns and the United States operating as a second level of defense. This is most visible in the U.S. plan for South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to play more of a role in security within the First Island Chain and the United States more involved in the Second Island Chain. There are risks with such a recalibration, but this is not—at least in terms of strategy—conceding or legitimating spheres of influence.

The criticism of the Trump administration pursuing a sphere of influence foreign policy is part of a broader conceptualization of policies that find parallels in the nineteenth century, especially in the form of great power competition. The Trump administration would no doubt accept this characterization, as it sees foreign policy in realist terms, with states being most prudent when they pursue national interest according to their limited capabilities. More tellingly, the National Security Strategy refers often and positively to the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary, and proposes the development of a “Trump Corollary” (which news agencies have dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine”). This hemispheric strategy has been to pressure governments to reduce exposure to Russia, China, and Iran, and conceive new collective efforts in areas of security and migration (primarily or, at least, initially). The various activities mentioned earlier are representative of largely unilateral efforts to these ends, while the Shield of the Americas (or the Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition), announced in March 2026, is a multilateral, ongoing cooperative effort.

While there are visible analogs between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. policy in Latin America and the current Trump administration strategy in the Western Hemisphere, the most directly resonant comparison is in tactics. That is, moving and then parking an armada in the Caribbean (or other seas) and demanding significant foreign policy concessions seem ripped from history textbook discussions of gunboat diplomacy. That practice, a tactic used first by European countries and then the United States and Japan, involved showing potential naval power outside a port in order to intimidate a polity considered less militarily capable into backing down on a particular case or range of policies. If the presence of the vessels was insufficient, the port might be shelled. Yet, for the most part, gunboat diplomacy was seen as a diplomatic tactic—coercive, but short of war.

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With the standardization of international law, the collapse of colonialism, the Cold War re-spatialization of politics, and the politics of decolonization, gunboat diplomacy became increasingly viewed as illegitimate and inefficient. The Trump administration’s redeployment of a vast number of naval vessels to the Caribbean to pressure South American governments and the later destruction of boats alleged to be drug trafficking fit within norms and tactics of an earlier era of intense great power competition. The pressure campaign on Cuba, with the aim of producing a change in policy and leadership, if not in regime, follows a similar script. The rendition of Maduro seems to be gunboat diplomacy 2.0. In this case, the naval presence in the Caribbean followed and juxtaposed diplomacy, which was the case in earlier gunboat diplomacy. But the success of the rendition was largely due to an intelligence operation that predated the arrival of the boats. This intelligence and diplomacy, then showing the flag with naval presence, is characteristic of the U.S. war with Iran.

If there are tactical similarities between U.S. operations in Venezuela and Iran, there are nevertheless very important strategic differences. The NSS and NDS make clear that U.S. foreign policy should be narrowly focused on national interest, which means that the United States should prioritize the Western Hemisphere and East Asia, deprioritize the Middle East and Western Europe, practice realism and not worry about types of regimes outside of the Americas and Europe, and avoid “regime change wars.” Up until the February 28 opening of hostilities with Iran, U.S. foreign policy was rather consistent. Pressure was placed on European and East Asian allies for them to ramp up military spending and to invest more in U.S. industry. The Russia-Ukraine war was seen as a European conflict where the United States would increase its role as mediator and play a less automatic role as patron. Critics worried that Trump’s effort to get a deal from China might reduce military sales to Taiwan. In the Middle East, Trump endorsed former ISIS member turned nationalist Syrian president Ahmed Al-Sharaa, who won over the United States in a November 2025 visit, perhaps due to his play on the basketball court with U.S. military officials. Trump also was in the process of reengaging Iran in what seemed to many to be a return to the type of nuclear deal from which he walked away in 2018. Indeed, the military strikes occurred while Oman-led negotiations were allegedly progressing.

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Without making a clear case for why the attack on Iran was necessary, Trump has issued a series of demands, culminating in his call for “regime change” and “unconditional surrender,” as well as his threat that “a whole civilization” might “die.” Rather than working with regimes from regions outside of the Western Hemisphere and Europe that are oriented by distinct values, Trump has called upon the Iranian people to democratize their regime. The priority the NSS and NDS give to East Asian security seems challenged as Trump mentioned sending THAAD missiles from South Korea to the Middle East to replenish missiles spent responding to Iranian counterattacks (this has yet to be verified). Moreover, Iran has proven itself more resilient than perhaps Trump imagined. The decapitation of many leaders, which followed earlier rounds of decapitation, has led to neither the emergence of a “Delcy-Rodriguez figure” (a term that we who study Latin America would never have conceived prior to this January), nor a regime collapse, nor a generalized popular rebellion. Rather, Iranian missile strikes have continued, and, most importantly, Iran has shown that in choking off the Strait of Hormuz, it can hit the United States, indirectly, at the gas pump and squeeze U.S. allies who were uninvolved in the planning and decision-making of the U.S. military action but who bear much of the costs.

So why did President Trump authorize the military operation in Iran? His concern about Iran predates his first term in office, yet it is the authorization of the strikes and the deviation from the NSS/NDS strategy that are most surprising. It is likely that the mass protests and government repression convinced him that the regime was unpopular. The rapid slide of the Iran’s rial and the very widely reported drought in Iran, as well as the country’s foundering since Israel’s responses to the October 7 Hamas attacks, suggested that the government was vulnerable. In such a scenario, a very quick, kinetic attack, combined with decapitation, could allow for rapid escalation and then de-escalation with a more pliant Iran. The success of the operation in Venezuela and the pressure campaign in Cuba made it very possible that Trump could reverse the course of the Venezuelan government and possibly bring policy, if not regime change, in Cuba, something that has dogged U.S. presidents for six decades. The opportunity to do the same in Iran, a hostile regime for close to five decades, may have been too difficult to pass up, even if the Trump administration needed to break many of its own rules and principles to do so.

It is too soon to know what the consequences of this military engagement in the Middle East will be, but important questions remain. Is the attack a one-off deviation, or is it an extension of the principles of dominating the Western Hemisphere to a broader theater—perhaps bolstered because of the perceived success of Western Hemisphere operations and relatively muted responses from others—that there is only one, global sphere of influence, and that sphere is America’s? Either question raises further questions. Recent U.S. presidents have tried to respond to a global order in which China and the United States have, relative to twenty years ago, greater and lesser military and economic capabilities, respectively. These presidents have differed in terms of how they have leveraged (and treated) allies, engaged in global trade regimes and international organizations, and deployed military force, but all have tried to respond to a shifting global order as both leader and participant within that order. Trump’s Western Hemisphere policies and strategies prior to the war with Iran offered a consistent, if controversial, approach that seemed to deliberately direct U.S. and global order during an inflection point toward a new nomos. It is harder to evaluate his overall foreign policy strategy since the decision to attack Iran, and harder still given Iran’s resistance and the global consequences. What seems clear is that considerations of great power competition have moved from discussions among security officials to headline-leading speeches of heads of state across the world.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues • China Initiative

Tony Spanakos is Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. He has been a Fulbright Scholar (2002 Brazil, 2008 Venezuela) and visiting researcher at the East Asia Institute (Singapore 2009, 2017). He is co-editor of Reforming Brazil (Lexington), Conceptualising Comparative Politics (Routledge), and “The Legacy of Hugo Chavez,” a special issue of Latin American Perspectives. His work examines questions in the areas of democratization, the use of concepts, international relations, and political theory, giving particular attention to Latin America, East Asia, and U.S. relations with these regions.

Summary

Contemporary Chinese intellectuals display a complex and sometimes contradictory attitude toward the West and toward exchanges between Chinese and Western thought. Their views are strongly shaped by state-led narratives, such as the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” the “rise of China,” and the “Chinese Dream,” which emphasize Chinese cultural uniqueness and superiority. In exchanges between Chinese and Western thought, Chinese intellectuals often present themselves as bearing a mission to promote Chinese values to the West. Rather than engaging in reciprocal dialogue, they frequently seek to “instruct” the West and to “correct” what they perceive as Western misunderstandings. However, certain events have also revealed the dilemmas and divisions within the Chinese intellectual community. Some scholars have attempted to challenge dominant narratives through critical essays, expressing a longing for freedom. Yet such voices are often quickly subjected to censorship and find it difficult to gain wide circulation within China. Overall, in the current political, economic, and cultural context, Chinese intellectuals resemble a “choir” to some extent. Genuine dialogue between Chinese and Western thought will require greater openness, deeper critical reflection, and the recovery of independent intellectual voices beyond this collective “choir.”

Thomas Zimmer is a German sinologist who has been teaching and researching at German and Chinese universities for several decades. His areas of research include Chinese literature, the history of traveling between Europe and China since 1600, and the associated processes of knowledge transfer, as well as developments in early Marxism in China.

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中国知识分子的“思想大合唱”

司马涛

当代中国知识分子在面对西方及中西思想交流时，呈现出一种复杂而矛盾的态度。这种态度既受到国家主导叙事的深刻影响，又在一定程度上反映了知识分子对自身角色、自由表达以及文化自信的思考。中国知识分子在当前环境下比较像一个“合唱团”，其思想和表达往往围绕着“中国崛起”、“中国梦”和“文化自信”等国家叙事展开，而对西方的态度则体现出警惕、批判与选择性开放的特征。

首先，中国知识分子在国家叙事的框架下，倾向于强调中国的独特性和文化优越感。近年来，随着“中华民族伟大复兴”与“文化自信”成为中国官方意识形态的重要话语，一些中国知识分子积极响应，并在公共领域中发声，强调中国历史文化的独特价值，试图与西方价值体系划清界限。比如复旦大学中国研究院院长张维为主张“中国模式”优于西方自由民主制度，认为西方的“普世价值”并不适用于中国。他在《这就是中国》等节目中强调：“我们要有制度自信、道路自信、文化自信，中国有五千年文明，是世界上最有持续性的文明。” 清华大学康晓光教授提出“文化保守主义”立场，认为中国应该拒绝西方价值体系的“软侵略”，重新确立以儒家文化为核心的国家意识形态。他主张“复兴儒教”，使之成为现代中国的精神支柱。这种态度源于对西方主导的全球话语权的质疑，以及对近代中国“受害者”角色的强调。相对于对中国历史的深入批判，中国知识分子更倾向于“讲好中国故事”、传播“正能量”。这种“文化自信”的基础主要是对传统的肯定，而非批判性反思。相比之下，西方知识分子更注重个体独立性和批判精神，这与中国知识分子的集体主义倾向形成鲜明对比。

其次，在中西思想交流中，中国知识分子往往表现出一种“使命感”，试图向西方输出中国的话语和价值观。中国知识分子更倾向于“教导”西方，纠正“误解”，而不是进行双向、平等的思想交流。一个典型人物是因对国际政治尤其在对美关系方面态度强硬著称的中国人民大学国际关系学院教授金灿荣。他经常直接批评西方媒体与政治体制，并试图‘修正’公众对国际事务的认知。在分析国际问题时，他常用“告诉大家真相”、“不要被西方舆论误导”等表述，树立一种中国知识分子‘揭露真相’的权威形象。例如，他在一次讲座中说：“西方说中国不民主，那是他们根本不了解中国。我们得帮他们弄清楚什么是真正的民主。”——这里的“帮他们弄清楚”显然带有一种教导姿态。这种单向输出反映了中国对国际话语权的追求，但也导致了交流中的不对等。例如，西方强调自主探索和科学传统，而中国知识分子容易将西方的质疑视为“傲慢”或“误解”，从而削弱了真正的思想碰撞。此外，“人类命运共同体”等新理念试图取代西方的“人权”话语，进一步凸显了中国知识分子试图重塑全球叙事的努力。

不过，某些事件也揭示了中国知识分子内部的困境与分裂。比如清华大学许章润教授等人试图通过批判性文章（如2018年发表的《我们当下的恐惧与期待》一文）挑战主流叙事，表达对自由和理性的渴望。但这些声音往往迅速遭到审查，难以在国内获得广泛传播。相比之下，体制内的知识分子更倾向于顺应国家叙事，强调“正能量”而避免敏感话题。例如，2018年微信上流传的博文《知识分子不能只想着当富豪更不能当“土豪”》呼吁知识分子承担“道德责任”，却未触及体制性问题。外部审查和自我审查的压力使得中国知识分子的多元性受限，难以形成像德国知识分子那样的“多声部”景观。

王小波的遗产为我们提供了一个独特的视角。他在1990年代的文章中批判了中国知识分子因道德优越感和等级观念而产生的局限性，强调科学与思想的自由和平等。他认为，真正的知识分子应以理性为基础，追求真理，而非被意识形态束缚。王小波的观点在今天依然具有启发性：中国知识分子需要摆脱“精神监狱”，以开放的心态与世界对话。然而，当前的审查制度和国家叙事使得这种自由表达变得困难。正如李银河2013年博文中所言，王小波的文字至今仍被视为“敏感”，反映了审查对思想启蒙的持续压制。

总之，中国当代知识分子在面对西方及中西思想交流时，既受到国家叙事的引导，又在有限的空间内寻求表达自我。要实现真正的中西思想交流，中国知识分子需要在开放性与批判性之间找到平衡，摆脱“合唱团”的束缚，重拾个体的独立声音。

作者简介：司马涛，德国汉学家，数十年来在中国和德国多所高校任教。他的研究领域涵盖中国文学、自1600年以来欧洲与中国之间的旅行史及其相关的知识迁移过程，以及中国早期马克思主义的发展。

I.

The confrontation between Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump over the American-Israeli war with Iran has generated considerable heat and rather less light. Trump called the first American pope weak and terrible for foreign policy. Leo responded that he had no fear of the Trump administration and would continue to preach the Gospel. The cycle looks like a political spat. In truth, it surfaces an ancient disagreement in Christian thought about faith and the use of force, a question the tradition has never fully resolved and that Leo has now restated at volume without reckoning with its implications.

Both figures deserve more charity than the exchange has produced. Trump’s instinct that a civilization under existential threat from a nuclear-armed adversary has the right and duty to defend itself is not theologically illiterate. It is the settled position of the Catholic Church whose leader is criticizing him, and in this exchange the president finds himself, improbably, its defender. Leo’s instinct that invoking divine blessing on the destruction of an entire people is politically reckless and spiritually dangerous is also not wrong. The positions become incompatible only when Leo reaches for language more absolute than the tradition warrants and Trump for divine endorsement more confident than any statesman should claim.

II.

Leo’s recent statements have followed an unfortunate arc. On Palm Sunday he said that Jesus “is the king of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” adding that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war but rejects them.” On social media he wrote that “God does not bless any conflict” and that no disciple of Christ “is ever on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” He supported these claims with a citation from Isaiah 1:15, in which God tells Israel he will not listen to their prayers because their hands are full of blood.

These statements deserve a more careful reading than the political exchange has given them. The claim that God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war is one I cannot find any pacifist tradition actually defending. Taken literally, it nullifies the prayers of every Christian soldier who ever prayed for God’s protection, and those of every priest who ever ministered to a dying soldier making his peace with God. To advance it as papal teaching is to claim that the prayers of every Catholic sailor at Lepanto, every Union chaplain at Gettysburg, every G.I. and Tommy kneeling before Normandy, and Billy Graham across half a century with American presidents, went unheard in heaven. It contradicts the pastoral practice of the Church in every war through which it has ministered.

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The Isaiah citation deserves closer attention than it has received. The prophetic critique in Isaiah 1 is directed not at war but at a people who combined ritual observance with social injustice, bringing sacrifices to the temple while oppressing the poor and the widow. “Your hands are full of blood” is a charge of moral hypocrisy against a religious establishment, not a categorical indictment of military force. The same tradition that produced Isaiah also produced Joshua’s campaigns and the books of Maccabees, which sit inside the Catholic canon precisely because the Church has never read scripture against itself in this way. One suspects the verse was originally set aside for a different quarrel, perhaps a homily condemning immigration enforcement, and reached for without anyone checking.

“No one can use Christ to justify war” is not an exegetical argument. It is a doctrinal claim, and it stands in direct contradiction to the settled teaching of the Catholic Church over which Leo presides.

III.

The just war tradition is not a compromise between Christian ethics and political necessity. It is the product of taking the moral stakes of violence seriously enough to specify, with legal precision, the conditions under which violence is nonetheless permitted. Augustine argued that love of neighbor could require the use of force. Aquinas systematized the framework around legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention. The Salamanca School (Vitoria, Suárez) translated it into the jus gentium that founded modern international law, and Grotius carried the same structure into the Protestant and secular world.

Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes preserved it while emphasizing proportionality. The Catechism codifies it at paragraphs 2307 through 2317, and those paragraphs reward a closer reading than Leo’s homilies have invited.

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The Catechism urges prayer for peace, and then states that “governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.” The right is not grudgingly tolerated; it “cannot be denied.” Paragraph 2309 sets out the four jus ad bellum criteria (grave and lasting damage, last resort, serious prospects of success, proportionality) and expressly reserves their evaluation to “the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good,” that is, to statesmen, not to bishops and not to the pope. That reservation is a remarkable concession in a document not otherwise famous for reticence about papal authority, and one Leo appears to have forgotten or to be purposely flouting. Paragraph 2310 teaches that soldiers who carry out their duty honorably are “servants of the security and freedom of nations” who “truly contribute to the common good.” This is not the language of an institution that believes God refuses to hear warriors’ prayers. Paragraphs 2312 through 2314 set out the jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality, largely tracking the Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law. Paragraph 2316 authorizes regulation of the arms trade but assumes, without embarrassment, a legitimate arms industry. Paragraph 2317 locates the roots of war in “injustice, excessive economic or social inequalities, envy, distrust, and pride,” a diagnosis Leo has in fact echoed. Nearly every one of the preceding paragraphs, however, contradicts something he has said in the past three weeks.

Jean Bethke Elshtain pressed the Augustinian point with force in Just War Against Terror: the love commandment does not merely permit but can require the protection of the innocent through force. Elshtain, writing as a Lutheran political theorist deeply engaged with the Catholic tradition and cited widely in international law scholarship, was no enthusiast of American power. She saw clearly that a pacifism unwilling to confront the reality of aggression does not end injustice but reassigns its victims. That argument is not easily answered by papal fiat.

Aquinas is the deeper problem. Leo quoted him with approval at the Vatican Tribunal just weeks before the Iran war escalated. The natural law framework he invoked there leads directly to conclusions about just war Leo is not drawing. A prince who fails to use the sword to protect his people from grave injustice fails in his duty. Having dragged the Angelic Doctor out of the attic for natural law, Leo may come to regret that Aquinas has a great deal more to say.

IV.

There is a pacifist strand in Christian history, and the Christians who have held it with full consistency deserve genuine respect. The Anabaptist tradition, represented today by the Mennonites and the Amish, holds categorically that Christian discipleship excludes participation in war or in any form of violence. Within Catholicism the purest twentieth-century expression was the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day, whose political commitments sat well to the left of the Church’s magisterium.

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The witness of the consistent pacifists is not easily dismissed. Their refusal of the sword stands as a rebuke to Christians who reach for coercive means too quickly. But a rebuke is not a doctrine, and a personal witness is not a magisterium. What distinguishes the Mennonites from Leo’s position is that they have accepted the cost of their conviction. They do not run states. They refuse to serve in the military and accept the legal consequences of that refusal. They do not accept the protection of armed guards.

The Catholic Church is not a Mennonite community. Catholic men serve in the military in every country where Catholics live, and the Church supplies chaplains to attend to their spiritual needs. Leo both presides over a sovereign state and is protected by the Swiss Guard, an elite commando squad with modern weaponry hidden beneath their flamboyant costumes, charged with using lethal force to defend the pope. The pope who proclaims that no disciple of Christ is ever on the side of those “who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs” has armed men standing outside his bedroom door.

A liberal Catholic reader will object that the historical argument proves too much, since post-conciliar popes have contradicted immemorial teaching on a number of matters, from religious liberty and usury to, in Francis’s case, capital punishment. Benedict XVI distinguished a hermeneutic of continuity from a hermeneutic of rupture, favoring continuity; Francis preferred rupture. But even rupture requires the formal work of doctrinal development. Francis changed the Catechism text on capital punishment, published his reasoning, and left a paper trail. Leo so far has issued only homilies and social media posts. His soon-to-be-published first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is dedicated not to questions of war and peace but to the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence. If Leo intends to repudiate the Catechism’s just war doctrine, the honest and legally coherent path is to say so and defend the change through the ordinary magisterium. Homilies, however heartfelt, are not development of doctrine.

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V.

The Protestant and Orthodox traditions offer useful triangulation. Luther’s two-kingdoms theology sidesteps the question of whether God condones violence by dividing God’s reign into two realms: the spiritual, governed through the Gospel and grace, and the temporal, governed through law and the sword. A Christian soldier acts as an agent of the temporal order, not as a disciple of the Sermon on the Mount. The kingdoms must not be collapsed. A commander who claims God’s specific blessing on his campaign makes the same category error as the categorical pacifist, from the opposite direction, by baptizing coercive power with transcendent authority it does not possess.

Eastern Orthodoxy occupies a distinct and underappreciated position. It has no formal just war doctrine, nor is it pacifist. What it has is closer to “justifiable but never truly just” war: violence may be permitted as a tragic necessity but is never celebrated. Canon 13 of St. Basil the Great counsels that soldiers who kill in war, even legitimate war, be excluded from communion for three years as a penitential discipline. The canon was never universally enforced, but the claim is clear: killing, even when permitted, incurs a spiritual cost requiring cleansing. The Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Kirill has in recent years done precisely what the tradition warns against, blessing Russian military action in Ukraine and framing it as civilizational warfare. The damage to Russian Orthodoxy illustrates what happens when “justifiable but not just” collapses into crusade theology. It should give pause to anyone who reaches too quickly for divine endorsement, including a pope who reaches in the opposite direction too quickly for divine prohibition.

VI.

Carl Schmitt observed that politics cannot be reduced to moral categories because it rests on a friend-enemy distinction that universal moral claims do not dissolve but merely relocate. A state that claims to fight not an enemy but a criminal, not a war but a crusade, has not transcended the political; it has moralized it. Leo’s version runs formally in the opposite direction and practically in the same one.

When Leo says no disciple of Christ can be on the side of those who “once wielded the sword and today drop bombs,” the language is universal, but the application has been conspicuously one-sided. The Islamic Republic of Iran has waged proxy war against the West since 1979. It arms and directs Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Its mining of the Strait of Hormuz inflicts far greater harm on the developing world’s poor, those the Church rightly cares about, than on Western militaries. It has pursued a nuclear weapons capability defying the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Leo has not addressed any of this with comparable intensity. He has reserved his categorical moral language for the American and Israeli response.

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This is the familiar pattern of the Cold War peace movements. Campaigns like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament framed themselves as bilateral calls for disarmament, but the practical effect ran one way: mass rallies in London and Bonn, silence in Moscow, and pressure for Western unilateralism that would have left the Warsaw Pact’s nuclear superiority undisturbed. Formal universalism paired with selective application is partisanship laundered through transcendent language. Schmitt saw this pattern clearly a century ago, and it is what Leo, intentionally or not, has reproduced.

VII.

The second observation is about asymmetry. Christianity is the only major world tradition in which categorical nonviolence has emerged as a serious internal option. Islam has its own well-developed jurisprudence of war and peace, with meaningful constraints on the conduct of warfare, though it draws different rules for conflicts among Muslims and with non-Muslims, and has produced no historic peace church along Mennonite or Quaker lines. The fourteen centuries of encounter between Christianity and Islam have been, in significant part, a military encounter. Catholic Europe fought off successive Islamic incursions at Tours under Charles Martel, at Lepanto, and at the gates of Vienna, and survived as Catholic because it fought. Eastern Europe, pressed in turn by Islamic and later Soviet power, did not fare as well. A Church committed to categorical pacifism in such a world would face a situation history has rarely resolved in the pacifist’s favor. Leo’s language, taken seriously, would require Catholics to accept that asymmetry as a condition of discipleship, and nothing he has said suggests he has thought through what that would mean for the Church he leads or for Western civilization.

The pacifists may still be right. The Mennonites who survived Soviet collectivization and Nazi occupation without arms are a witness with which the tradition must reckon. Their wager on divine protection is not irrational, but such protection is miraculous, and ordering a Church around the expectation of miracles is a presumption the natural law tradition has consistently warned against. If the pacifists are right, we will need miracles, and no magisterium can bind Catholics to that wager by homily.

The most honest thing Leo could say would not be that God never blesses conflict. It would be closer to this: the Church has lived in the tension between Gospel and sword since Constantine; the tradition has developed a precise legal grammar, preserved in the Catechism and in centuries of canon and international law, for acknowledging that tension; and any revision of that grammar must be done in the forms the tradition recognizes, through encyclical and council, not through homily and social media. Until then, paragraphs 2307 through 2317 remain the teaching of the Church, and the pope who departs from them in practice while leaving the text in place departs from his own magisterium.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Tim Rosenberger is a pastor and attorney and cofounder of Excelsior Action.

China, Taiwan, and the U.S.: Decisions Today That Will Shape the World of Tomorrow

May 4, 2026
University of California, Irvine
Humanities Gateway (HG) 1030

Sponsored by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and the UCI Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies

Event Description

The Chinese Communist Party has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since it took power in China in 1949, and China’s government has been rapidly developing its military capabilities to lay siege to or invade the island. At the same time, China, Taiwan, and the United States have developed economic relationships that would be threatened by any Chinese attempt to assert sovereignty over Taiwan. The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently revised its threat assessment to indicate that China would not invade Taiwan in 2027, as previously assumed, but there is still disagreement about China’s plans due to its continuing aggressive actions in the Taiwan Strait. The panelists for this event will discuss the following two questions: What is the nature of the regime in China and the threat to Taiwan? What should the United States do to face this threat?

Speakers

Russell A. Berman, President, Telos-Paul Piccone Institute; Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Former Member, Policy Planning Staff and Commission on Unalienable Rights, U.S. State Department

Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China and The Great U.S.-China Tech War

John Graham, Professor Emeritus of the UCI Merage School of Business, Founding Director of the UCI Long US-China Institute, and co-author with Michael Lam of China Now: Doing Business in the World’s Most Dynamic Marketplace.

Eric Hendriks, Director, Telos-Paul Piccone Institute China Initiative; Visiting Fellow, Danube Institute

David Pan, Professor of European Studies, UC Irvine; Editor, Telos; Former Member, Commission on Unalienable Rights, U.S. State Department

Miles Yu, Professor of Military History and Modern China, U.S. Naval Academy; Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute; Former Principal China Policy Advisor, Policy Planning Staff, U.S. State Department

This event is sponsored by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and the UC Irvine Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies.

Photo: Debjyoti Bardhan via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0

“Jewish life belongs to Germany.” Few phrases are invoked more often in discussions of German-Jewish relations. It sounds like a promise, a reassurance, sometimes almost like a declaration of faith. Yet the more often it is said, the more pressing the question becomes of what it actually means. The very frequency with which this formula is invoked points to an unresolved tension. Its constant repetition appears to compensate for a deeper, largely unspoken unease. The assumption that this unease originates with Jews themselves and merely reflects the insecurity of Jewish life in Germany, however, falls short. In reality, it reveals a deeper discomfort within German society about its own past, of which Jews are inevitably perceived as a living reminder.

In political discourse, the focus often seems to be less on real Jews than on a particular “idea of Jews.” In this sense, Jews serve above all as the yardstick by which Germany measures its own claim to be a decent and democratic country despite its “difficult history.” At times, Germany’s commitment to “protecting Jewish life” appears as little more than a matter of duty, performed diligently, yet quietly experienced as a burden. This discrepancy becomes visible not only in political rituals but also in everyday life. For years, Jewish activists have pointed out that Jews in Germany are largely perceived in three roles: as mascots of intercultural dialogue, as objects of hostility in debates surrounding Israel, or as victims of the Holocaust. As a result, German-Jewish relations are marked by a persistent unease and deep-seated reservations.

Paradoxically, this insecurity often goes hand in hand with a striking degree of confidence, for example, when politicians quick to express indignation debate the legitimacy of Israeli retaliatory strikes or public intellectuals pronounce with great certainty on whether Auschwitz should be regarded as historically unique. The root of this imbalance lies less in a lack of information than in a resistance to experiences that do not fit the preconceived picture. Representative surveys repeatedly show how strong the desire for moral exoneration in Germany is and how limited the knowledge of one’s own family history often remains. Around 18 percent of Germans claim that their ancestors helped Jews during the Nazi era, for example by hiding them.

Historical research, however, paints a very different picture. Even generous estimates suggest that the share of those who actually assisted Jews in hiding amounted to only about 0.2 percent of the population. Yet this limited historical awareness is met not with humility but with a passive-aggressive sense of expectation. Against this backdrop, it is striking how confidently and loudly German society places demands on what is often described as “schützenswertes jüdisches Leben” (“Jewish life worthy of protection”). The sheer number of requests directed at Jewish communities, organizations, and their representatives speaks volumes: “Jewish life” should not be too Zionist, it should remain suitable for moral admonition and remembrance, and it should stay compatible with interreligious dialogue.

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For many Jews in Germany, however, Israel is not a distant political issue but an essential element of collective security and identity. This is particularly true for Jews with Eastern European family backgrounds, who make up the large majority of the community. Their families were shaped by experiences of Soviet antisemitism or earlier waves of persecution in Eastern Europe. For them, anti-Israel rhetoric rarely appears as a purely abstract political disagreement. It often resonates with experiences of exclusion and older patterns of antisemitism, and therefore carries a particular historical weight that many outside these communities underestimate.

The Expectation of Moral Superiority

This arrangement works as long as the “Jew worthy of protection” fits the expected mold and there is agreement on what his legitimate needs are. It starts to unravel, however, as soon as Jews articulate their everyday fears and concerns about security, about radicalized Muslims or postcolonial agitators on university campuses. Suddenly Jews are seen as unreliable, politically instrumentalized, or as having taken a political wrong turn. In this constellation, Jews are not perceived as subjects with their own lived experiences, but as extras in a scripted moral drama. Jews may speak as long as they reaffirm what is already believed to be right. Once they deviate from that script, they lose their role.

Interestingly, voices that fit prevailing expectations often receive disproportionate attention in German public discourse. In several prominent cases, these have been left-leaning American or Israeli Jews whose hostility toward Israel resonates strongly with German audiences. While publishing in major newspapers and appearing on talk shows, they often lament the supposed suppression of dissenting voices. In practice, however, such outside commentators are readily welcomed in the German debate, as their interventions make it easier to portray more conservative and security-oriented positions within local Jewish communities as unjustified attempts to “exploit German guilt.”

This imbalance becomes most apparent where outrage is selective, as sympathy for victims of antisemitism at times depends less on the person attacked than on the identity of the perpetrator. When Jews are attacked by a white neo-Nazi, the outrage is immediate and widespread. The image fits, the lines are clear, and it is easy to take a moral stance. The moral calculus changes, however, when antisemitism surfaces within progressive ranks or among those perceived primarily as victims of racism. This is where the relativization begins: everything is placed “in context,” followed by the familiar admonitions not to generalize, not to instrumentalize, and not to “play into the hands of racists.” Concern then shifts away from the Jews who have been attacked toward the political hygiene of one’s own worldview.

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German essayist Eike Geisel once captured this expectation with biting irony. Germans, he argued, have come to view Auschwitz as a kind of “reformatory” for Jews.1 The victims themselves are expected, in retrospect, to demonstrate that something morally meaningful could still be salvaged from the senseless machinery of extermination. Not despite Auschwitz, but precisely because of it, Jews are expected to behave in a particular way. They are expected to be better people and to have internalized a “never again” that is increasingly understood today as an obligation to exercise restraint even in the face of antisemitic terror, much of it perpetrated by radicalized Muslims. Confronting such antisemitism too forcefully, however, would challenge the multicultural self-image of contemporary Germany as an open and tolerant society.

In this context, it is not difficult to imagine the “bad Jew”: the one who refuses the role assigned to him. He is not conciliatory, nor willing to reinterpret the violence directed against him and his community as the expression of deeper social forces. Instead, he insists on self-defense, on Jewish solidarity, and on the right to express anger and demand justice for the wrongs inflicted upon him. Above all, he disrupts the comforting belief that something morally redeeming emerged from the catastrophe. The “bad Jew” refuses the pedagogical expectation. And that is precisely the provocation. Once Jews can no longer serve as a moral lesson, the entire arrangement begins to falter.

The urge for exoneration and the relentless search for “Jewish guilt” are not marginal phenomena but a central mechanism for deflecting guilt in postwar Germany. The supposed crimes of others provide a convenient escape from confronting the crimes of one’s own ancestors. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that slogans such as “Free Palestine from German guilt” found particular resonance and that antisemitic mobilization began even before Israel could respond to the October 7 massacre to protect its population from further attacks that had already been announced.

The expectation of moral superiority turns into aggression when it is disappointed. Jews who refuse to chasten themselves or to join the demanded criticism of Israel will be disciplined accordingly. One interlocutor succinctly described this impossible situation: “I wish more people in this country would treat us like ordinary people, and not as symbols or projection screens for their own conflicts.”

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Will There Still Be Jews in Europe in Twenty Years?

After October 7, it became clear how deeply these reaction patterns are entrenched in German society and how fragile the supposed German-Jewish normalcy truly is. Many Jews had expected that the brutality of the massacre and its openly genocidal intent would preclude any relativization; that the sheer scale of the violence would persuade even those who had long resisted all arguments. Instead, hatred of Jews exploded, with deadly consequences around the world.

Images of mutilated bodies and of those abducted to Gaza did not primarily evoke sympathy but intensified existing hostilities. Antisemitism persisted not despite the suffering but, disturbingly, because of it. In conversations, the same image was drawn again and again: sharks that smell blood and begin to circle their prey. This image captures the unsettling realization that Jews, once they show vulnerability, will not be protected. They become targets. When suffering becomes visible, it does not restrain hostility but instead fuels it.

Many also described a climate in which their grief was not recognized as such but immediately relativized or weighed against the number of victims in Gaza. Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that many Jews are considering leaving Germany altogether. The future of Jewish life in Western Europe is no longer an abstract question. In neighboring France, around 50,000 Jews have emigrated over the past decade, many of them moving to Israel, according to figures from the Jewish Agency. Germany is harder to quantify statistically, but anecdotal evidence suggests a comparable trend. Many younger Jews are considering leaving, often for Israel or the United States. The motivations may vary—security concerns, political frustration, or simply the search for a more stable future—but the underlying question remains whether Jewish life can continue to flourish in societies where hostility toward Israel and Jews is increasingly normalized.

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Several European governments have recently moved toward recognizing a Palestinian state, a step often driven less by diplomatic strategy than by domestic political calculations. For many politicians, the issue is increasingly shaped by electoral arithmetic, with a combination of antisemitic sentiment among segments of the political left and among parts of Muslim communities becoming an influential factor in public debate. Governments worry not only about votes but also about unrest in the streets. In such a climate, affirming gestures toward the “Palestinian cause” can appear politically advantageous, even when they run counter to the security of local Jewish communities. In Germany, such a policy still seems unlikely. Among older generations there remains a sense of historical responsibility or, if not that, at least a reluctance to damage Germany’s carefully cultivated postwar image. Yet demographic change and the sharp rise in antisemitic incidents may well shake this fragile equilibrium.

At the same time, Germany is increasingly shaped by political and intellectual currents that transcend national borders. Paradoxically, the country’s deep integration into transnational institutions and its embrace of an increasingly “internationalized” political culture have also created channels through which forms of antisemitism already visible in international forums such as the United Nations can gain influence. This is no longer the old, traditional hatred of Jews, but rather its postmodern and politically respectable variant. Increasingly, younger Germans who study abroad and move within international academic, corporate, and policy networks adopt these frameworks as well.

In Germany, uncertainty is growing, and an increasing number of Jewish parents are wondering whether they can still raise their children in Germany and send them to regular schools. In some of these schools, out of consideration for the sensitivities of Muslim students, the Holocaust is addressed only cautiously or avoided altogether. Many Jews are increasingly retreating into Jewish circles, not out of a desire for isolation, but out of necessity. The reemergence of separate professional associations for Jewish journalists, academics, and lawyers is itself a sign of how much public space has narrowed for Jews.

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Jews are often described as the canary in the coal mine, though many are unaware of what the metaphor actually implies. When Jews begin leaving a society because of rising antisemitism, it signals more than the dangers of “brain drain”—the loss of figures like Freud, Einstein, Zweig, or other “lost talents” often invoked in German popular culture in connection with flight and exile. Rather, it points to a central insight that is still insufficiently acknowledged: antisemitism poses a threat to freedom, democracy, and the Western way of life as a whole.

Precisely for this reason the broader society should be far more concerned, not out of well-meaning sympathy, but out of sober self-interest. For where Jews are attacked, the very order that places law above power and allows dissent will sooner or later begin to break down. If hatred of the liberal West, with Jews often cast as its agents, continues to grow without resistance, the embattled Jews of Europe will settle elsewhere. Jewish history offers many such examples. In the long run, this has usually harmed the societies that rid themselves of Jews or watched it happen in silence.

Ultimately, every Jew is evidence that somewhere in their family line someone once made a conscious decision to remain Jewish despite violence, exclusion, and persecution, despite the tempting option of assimilation. Sometimes this meant abandoning a place of residence after centuries in order to pursue a Jewish future elsewhere. The Jewish path was rarely the easier one, yet it was chosen again and again. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described Judaism not in its narrow religious sense as a system of beliefs, but as a shared story unfolding across time. This civilization has survived, while the vases and jewelry of the Romans and the mummies of ancient Egypt can now only be admired in museums.

This article is an extended version of a piece originally published in the German journal Zeitzeichen. The author gratefully acknowledges Eric Fraunholz for his assistance with translating this essay.

Topics: Israel Initiative • Reflections & Dialogues

Alexandra Farkas Bandl is pursuing her doctorate in Leipzig, with a focus on East-Central Europe, Jewish history, and the political cultures of state socialism in Hungary. She also leads a Jewish and Zionist organization for young adults.

On March 14, 2026, Pope Leo XIV addressed the judges and officials of the Vatican City State Tribunal for the inauguration of its judicial year. The occasion was routine. Popes have been giving these addresses for decades, and they follow a predictable arc. Pontiff after Pontiff expresses gratitude for the quiet work of the judiciary, a few theological reflections on the nature of justice, and an exhortation to fidelity. Leo XIV followed a proven formula, and his remarks were remarkable primarily for their adherence to convention.

“Authentic justice,” the pope told his judges, “cannot be understood solely in the technical terms of positive law. In the light of the mission that guides the action of the Church, it also appears as the exercise of an ordered form of charity, capable of safeguarding and promoting communion.” He then spent the balance of his remarks unpacking this claim with support from the works of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, grounding the administration of justice in the Thomistic virtue tradition and the Augustinian theology of rightly ordered love.

This is not new ground but draws from the most settled propositions in Catholic jurisprudence. That his remarks received attention tells us something about the current state of the institution he leads. For thirteen years, under the pontificate of Francis, the Angelic Doctor served a largely decorative function in papal discourse. He was invoked occasionally, but almost never deployed structurally. Francis’s preferred register was pastoral, situational, and oriented toward discernment and accompaniment rather than toward the stable and objective character of justice upon which Aquinas insists. Leo XIV’s address is not a revolution, but a recovery. And the fact that this recovery of first principles feels revolutionary invites reflection, not only for the Church but for any institution that claims to operate from pre-liberal philosophical foundations while having quietly abandoned them in practice.

The philosophical architecture of Leo’s remarks deserves attention, because it is doing more work than the occasion required. Leo XIV does not merely assert that justice transcends positive law; he provides the Thomistic scaffolding for the claim. He quotes Aquinas’s definition of justice from the Summa Theologiae: “constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum unicuique tribuendi,” the constant and perpetual will to render to each person what is due. He notes Aquinas’s insistence that “iustitia ad bonum commune ordinatur,” that justice is ordered to the common good. And he invokes the theological formula “caritas perfecta, perfecta iustitia est”: in the fullness of charity, justice finds its most authentic fulfillment.

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The structure of the argument is precise. Justice is not a set of rules but a virtue, a stable disposition of the will oriented toward truth and the good of others. Because it is a virtue, it cannot be reduced to the technical application of norms, but requires the exercise of practical wisdom by a person whose character has been formed for the task. And because justice finds its perfection in charity, the legal order is not self-grounding. It depends on a prior moral order, an account of what is due to persons and why, that positive law presupposes but cannot generate.

This is the classical natural law critique of legal positivism, and it has secular analogues that readers of Telos will recognize. The insufficiency of proceduralism is a theme that runs from Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberal legalism through the Frankfurt School’s analysis of instrumental reason, both central to the intellectual project that Telos has sustained for more than half a century. Schmitt argued that liberal constitutionalism imagines a self-executing legal order in which the question “who decides?” can be permanently deferred, because the rules themselves decide. The Frankfurt School argued that instrumental rationality, left to its own devices, hollows out the substantive commitments that give institutions their purpose. Leo XIV is making a cognate claim from within the Catholic tradition. Positive law, however necessary, cannot sustain a just legal order without reference to the substantive moral vision that animates it.

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It is worth noting what the pope is not saying. He is not dismissing positive law. He explicitly affirms “the observance of procedural safeguards, the impartiality of the judge, the effectiveness of the right of defence [sic] and the reasonable duration of proceedings” as conditions through which the judicial function “acquires particular authority and contributes to institutional stability.” The argument is not positivism versus natural law. It is that positivism is necessary but insufficient: the skeleton without which the body cannot stand, but not the life that animates it.

The Schmittian resonance, however, introduces the Schmittian problem. If positive law must be supplemented by the judgment of a person exercising the virtue of justice, everything depends on the formation and orientation of that person. The question “who decides?” does not disappear simply because one has identified the inadequacy of the claim that rules decide for themselves. It returns with greater force because the person who claims to transcend positive law in the name of a higher justice now wields a more potent authority than the mere technician of legal procedure ever did.

The Thomistic framework has an answer, but the answer presupposes conditions that do not obtain outside its native habitat. Aquinas wrote within a civilization that shared, at least nominally, a metaphysical anthropology: an account of what human beings are, their purpose, and what they are due. Within that shared horizon, “the constant and perpetual will to render to each what is due” has determinate content. Outside it, the formula becomes an invitation to fill in the blanks according to one’s own commitments, and to do so with the elevated confidence that comes from believing oneself to be serving justice rather than merely applying rules. The contemporary American legal landscape is littered with examples of such confidence run amok. Judges who override statutory text in the name of evolving standards of justice, prosecutors who decline to bring charges because enforcement would offend their understanding of equity, juries that reach verdicts animated by moral convictions, class animus, or political grievance untethered from facts or evidence: all of these actors could describe their conduct in the language of the tribunal remarks. Every one of them believes, or could plausibly believe, that he is exercising an ordered form of charity rather than merely applying positive law. The question is not whether they are sincere. Sincerity, absent a shared account of the order to which charity should conform, is no check at all on the exercise of power.

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Leo XIV can address the Vatican tribunal in these terms because Vatican City is, uniquely among the world’s polities, a jurisdiction in which the metaphysical premises of the Thomistic argument are formally, if not actually, shared by all participants. The supreme legislator, executive, and judge is one person who claims to be the Vicar of Christ. Canon law is the first source of norms. The judges serve at the pleasure of the pope and exercise their power in his name. Whatever difficulties attend the practical administration of justice in this peculiar micro-state, the theoretical problem of shared premises does not arise. The rest of us are not so situated.

The most rigorous theological challenge to what Leo XIV is doing comes not from within the Catholic tradition but from the Reformation. Luther’s two-kingdoms theology represents the foundational Protestant attempt to answer the question the tribunal remarks raise: what is the relationship between divine justice and the positive law of temporal institutions?

Luther’s answer is that God governs through two distinct kingdoms, each with its own proper logic. The spiritual kingdom operates through the Gospel of grace, forgiveness, and the free gift of justification. The temporal kingdom operates through law, reason, and coercive order. Both are legitimate expressions of divine governance. Neither can substitute for the other. The temporal kingdom does not need to become the spiritual kingdom in order to fulfill its function. The judge who administers temporal law faithfully, with impartiality and procedural rigor, is already doing God’s work in the earthly kingdom. He does not need to imagine himself as administering divine charity for his work to have moral weight.

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The force of this becomes clear when set against Leo XIV’s central claim. When the pope tells his judges that justice is “an ordered form of charity,” Luther would urge the sharpest caution. The moment a temporal judge begins to think of himself as administering charity rather than law, the restraints that proceduralism provides (imperfect, insufficient, but real) begin to dissolve. The judge who believes he is serving a justice that transcends positive law has given himself permission to override the law’s constraints, and he has done so with a confidence that no merely human actor is entitled to possess.

This is not a defense of positivism. Luther is neither Austin nor Kelsen. He does not believe that law is merely the command of the sovereign backed by force. He believes that temporal law participates in God’s governance of a fallen world. But he insists that the mode of that participation is proper to the temporal kingdom, which operates through reason, precedent, procedure, and the restraint of coercive power by institutional structure, not through the direct application of theological charity to legal disputes.

The contemporary relevance of Luther’s insight is stark. Every instance in which a legal actor invokes a justice higher than the positive law he is charged with administering, whether from the left or the right, is an instance of the category confusion Luther warned against. The progressive prosecutor who declines to enforce laws he considers unjust, and a conservatively ideological judge who reads his policy preferences into constitutional text are engaged in the same structural move. Both baptize temporal coercion with transcendent authority it does not possess. Luther’s two-kingdoms theology does not resolve the tension between positive law and transcendent justice. But it names, with a precision the Thomistic framework sometimes lacks, the specific danger of resolving it too quickly.

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Had we only Thomism and Luther, we could merely diagnose our present ills. Positivism is insufficient, the Thomistic alternative is unavailable outside its native habitat, and the Lutheran correction warns against cheap substitutes. The question of formation, of where rightly ordered judges and legislators actually come from, would remain unanswered.

It is here that the Wesleyan tradition offers something constructive. John Wesley shared Luther’s Protestant sobriety about the fallenness of human institutions, but he refused the quietist implication that the brokenness of the temporal order is simply to be endured. His distinctive theological contribution was the insistence that sanctification is real, progressive, and practically achievable. He does not offer perfection in the Pelagian sense, but genuine transformation of the person through disciplined engagement with what he called “the means of grace.” Prayer, Scripture, sacrament, Christian conference (by which Wesley meant structured mutual accountability among believers), and acts of mercy were not optional devotional exercises but the mechanism through which persons were formed for the exercise of rightly ordered judgment.

The genius of the Wesleyan project was institutional. That emphasis on disciplined, morally formative community also points backward to earlier Protestant traditions, including aspects of Calvinist covenant theology, which likewise understood communal structures as central to the formation of Christian judgment. The class meetings and bands that defined early Methodism were intentional communities of formation, featuring small groups in which persons submitted to mutual examination, confessed their failings, and held one another accountable to standards that the broader culture did not enforce. Wesley’s famous dictum, “think and let think,” preserved genuine pluralism on matters not essential to the faith while insisting that the persons who exercise judgment must themselves be genuinely formed, not merely instructed or credentialed. This is a critical distinction. Credentialing tells you what a person knows. Formation shapes who a person is.

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Translated out of confessional language, the Wesleyan insight is that virtue is cultivable at the human scale even when it is not achievable at the civilizational scale. One need not restore Christendom (the integralist hope) or redesign the constitutional order (the technocratic hope) in order to produce persons capable of judgment that transcends mere proceduralism. What is needed are communities of practice with thick moral commitments and real structures of accountability, communities honest enough to acknowledge that technical competence is not a substitute for character. The liberal order cannot produce the kind of people it needs through proceduralism alone. But it also cannot and should not attempt to reimpose a civilizational metaphysics. What it can do is attend seriously to the conditions under which formational communities flourish, and stop pretending that three years of law school and a bar examination produce wisdom.

Leo XIV’s address to the Vatican tribunal is a small, quiet text delivered to a tiny audience in a very small state. Its philosophical claims are not original. Its theological sources are not novel. Its practical implications, within the 121 acres to which it is formally addressed, are modest. And yet the question it raises is among the most urgent of the present political moment. The pope evidently doubts that any legal order can sustain itself on positive law alone.

The pope told his judges that their work requires “not only legal competence, but also wisdom, balance, and a constant search for truth.” That sentence is either a platitude or a radical challenge, depending on whether anyone takes seriously the question of where wisdom, balance, and a disposition toward truth actually come from. They do not come from law school. They do not come from procedural rules. They do not come from professional codes of conduct, however carefully drafted. They come from formation in communities with substantive moral commitments, communities capable of shaping not only what a person knows but who a person is. The Thomistic tradition names this problem with unmatched philosophical precision. The Lutheran tradition identifies, with equal precision, the danger of premature solutions. The Wesleyan tradition suggests that the work of formation is possible, if modest in scope and honest about its limits. Whether any of these resources can be brought to bear on the institutions that most urgently need them is a question that Leo XIV’s remarks pose but do not answer. Perhaps it is enough, for now, that a pope has posed it again. The answer will have to come from the rest of us, in communities smaller and more particular than Rome, doing the slow and unspectacular work of forming persons for the exercise of judgment in a world that feels increasingly unformed and uninterested in reformation.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Tim Rosenberger is a pastor and attorney and cofounder of Excelsior Action.

Issue 214 of Telos has just been published. This constitutes the second issue emanating from our 2025 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference in New York, “China Keywords,” co-edited by Eric Hendriks, the Director of the TPPI China Initiative.

This principally consists of articles on central Chinese political concepts and also continues the debate in the previous issue about the nature of the Chinese state. Read the editors’ introduction here.

Alexander Sollfrank is Commander of Germany’s Joint Operational Command and former Commander of NATO’s Joint Support and Enabling Command. He has previously emphasized the importance for the Bundeswehr and NATO to prepare for a Russian assault. In a recent interview in the German newspaper Die Welt, he underscored how, despite considerable losses in the Ukraine War, Russia is simultaneously rebuilding in a way that could facilitate its opening an additional front on Europe’s eastern flank and a potential targeting of Germany. The assault might well begin—indeed, perhaps it has already begun—in hybrid dimensions including disinformation, sabotage of critical infrastructure, and cyberattacks, as preparation for a full-scale conventional invasion.

Rather than treating the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran as distinct conflicts, one can deduce from Sollfrank’s warning that they are preliminary theaters within a single great power competition that can spill over into the European heartland and challenge NATO to live up to its responsibilities. There is no inevitability in this potential escalation, but neither should one overlook how the distinct wars—here Ukraine, there Gaza—may not only foreshadow an expansion into Europe, but are already merging into a single war, with increasing interaction between the several zones: Russia aiding Iran with upgraded drones and intelligence to counter the United States, while Ukraine enters into defense pacts with Gulf states as a response to Iran’s drone warfare against Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahrain, and even Qatar. In the interview that follows, Sollfrank discusses how the fighting in Europe might begin.

General Sollfrank, Russia is currently suffering massive losses—in both personnel and materiel—in its war against Ukraine. Does Russia still pose a genuine threat to Western Europe?

Alexander Sollfrank: Our analyses proceed from the premise, first, that we here in the West—in Germany, in Europe—remain clearly in Russia’s crosshairs. That we are potentially vulnerable to attack. That Russia is currently doing everything in its power to replenish its stockpiles, to strengthen its troops, and to grow its military to a size of 1.5 million soldiers. The question is: When will Russia attack? When will the situation arise in which Russia launches an attack on Europe—including Germany? Of course, a smaller, regional-scale attack is possible at any time. NATO speaks of a “Fight Tonight”—a scenario for which we must be prepared. And that, too, is firmly within our focus. At present, our planning is based on the assumption that Russia will be ready to launch a large-scale attack against us by 2029. However, we are also making preparations for the possibility that an attack—albeit on a smaller scale—could occur sooner. And that is precisely what we are preparing and gearing up for.

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The nature of warfare is no longer evolving in annual increments, but rather in terms of months and weeks. What does this imply for potential attack scenarios? Should we anticipate, above all, a massive drone war?

Sollfrank: I think that when we discuss scenarios regarding how Russia might potentially threaten us in a conflict, we can generally assume that such a move would naturally be preceded by corresponding hybrid attacks—that is, anything falling outside the scope of a conventional assault. We are already witnessing elements of this today: sabotage, disinformation, and, for instance, massive cyberattacks. Should an actual attack materialize, a conventional military strike would, of course, constitute an integral part of that offensive. Moreover, such an attack would be waged across all domains—on land, in the air, and at sea. Such a scenario would also be accompanied by nuclear threats as well as by long-range strikes deep into enemy territory, specifically targeting areas toward France and Germany, in order to hit key strategic nodes within those regions. In short, we must be prepared to face precisely the kind of warfare we are currently witnessing in the conflict involving Iran.

Do you have sleepless nights given the fact that time may be running out? We see the rearmament efforts—in Germany as well as among our NATO partners—but are we really moving fast enough?

Sollfrank: Well, as the Commander of the Joint Operations Command, I serve as the operational commander of the German Armed Forces—the Bundeswehr—and in that capacity, things can never move fast enough for me. We cannot afford for weapons and ammunition to arrive too late. We cannot afford lengthy debates before a decision is finally reached. So, from that perspective, I must admit that I am constantly restless.

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On the other hand, I remain confident: I see a great sense of unity here in Germany—and indeed across all 32 NATO nations—regarding our resolve to counter any potential attack. Take “Eastern Sentry,” for example: this is an air-based deterrence operation in which Bundeswehr Eurofighters fly daily patrols along the eastern flank, ready to repel attacks should the need arise. We have ground forces stationed in Lithuania. Other nations have forces deployed in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Romania, and so on. Along the entire eastern flank, we have forces in place—specifically to be ready to “fight tonight.”

Even without the United States?

Sollfrank: Well, the United States is, of course, absolutely central to NATO—particularly in ensuring that the alliance, as a nuclear power, maintains the necessary credibility in its deterrence posture. However, my daily interactions with American generals and soldiers leave absolutely no room for doubt that the Americans are fully committed and standing right alongside us.

Has it truly sunk in among the German public that this threat posed by Russia is not some distant, abstract issue, but rather a matter of immediate and pressing relevance?

Sollfrank: I certainly sense that this awareness—this consciousness—exists: that the days of being free from threat are over, and that there is someone here who could potentially attack us with weapons to enforce his interests. And not merely as an abstract construct, but possibly very soon—and then in a very, very concrete way.

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You are preparing for a day that everyone hopes will never come. Should that day arrive nonetheless, can NATO—can Germany—win such a war against Russia?

Sollfrank: I am firmly convinced that we can. Of course, there are still shortfalls here—deficiencies that we identify and address on a daily basis. We are working hard to resolve them. However, if I were not convinced right now that such an operation—such a war—could be successfully prosecuted, then deterrence itself would be a complete failure. And I am convinced: Our plans are sound, our forces are prepared, and we have an excellent fighting force. We will counter any act of aggression with everything we have. We work hard every single day on our preparations. If we were to waver, if we were to falter, or if we failed to use this time—for instance, to stockpile the necessary armaments, ammunition, and so forth—then things would indeed become difficult. But let me reiterate: 32 nations are currently putting their shoulders to the wheel. And things are moving in absolutely the right direction.

I would like to return to the subject of the deficits. When you look at Ukraine, you no longer see an infantry war, but rather a drone war. Russia is currently striving to produce up to 1,000 drones a day. Does NATO—does Germany—even have the capacity to hold its own in such a drone war?

Sollfrank: Yes, well, we are monitoring this very closely. Incidentally, Russia has just fired 1,000 drones at Ukraine within a 24-hour period. Nor does Russia show any signs of ceasing its attacks. Moscow is not backing down, despite suffering massive losses. And, naturally, we are not yet prepared for a conflict on this scale. That must be stated quite clearly. However, we are well on our way—on a very, very good path—to developing this capability. And we already have truly excellent capabilities to demonstrate. But once again: time is critical, and we must not let up now.

This interview originally appeared in German in Die Welt and is presented here by permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Russell A. Berman is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and former editor of Telos. He is now President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

In November 2024, the First World Conference of Classics was held in Beijing, and Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter, marking the formal endorsement of classics at the state level. The rise of classics in China—which remains highly controversial—is part of a century-long intellectual effort to reassess Chinese civilization in response to the crises of Western modernity. In ongoing debates over antiquity and modernity, China and the West, Chinese scholars have turned to canonical traditions in both civilizations to seek intellectual resources for addressing shared challenges. This civilizational self-awareness ensures that classics in China will not simply replicate Western models but will also involve sustained engagement with China’s own classical heritage.

Luo Feng is a Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, East China Normal University. Her academic focus is primarily on Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama, and the study of classical Chinese and Western poetics. She is the author of Dionysus and the World Polis: An Interpretation of Euripides’ “The Bacchae.”

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中国的古典学建设与文明自觉

罗 峰

在全球人文学科整体式微的背景下，一向被认为是西方传统学科的古典学在中国逆势兴起，堪称中外学界的一大奇迹。古典学在中国的兴起也引发了广泛关注，其中不乏争议。中国学人为何对据称是西方传统王牌学科的古典学感兴趣？它在中国的发展为何会引起如此大的关注？中国的古典学建设又将走向何方？

一、古典学的何种“传统”

2015年1月，由刘小枫教授创立的“‘经典与解释’丛书十五年350种纪念研讨会”在北京召开。“从古典重新开始”一时成为中国学界热议的话题。经国内媒体推波助澜，这门原本极为边缘的冷门学科随后在学界引发关于“何为古典学”的争议，引起广泛关注。

有目共睹的是，“经典与解释”丛书（迄今出版近800种）设计之初便中西学并重，为中国古典学术奠定了深广的基础，极大推进了中国古典学的建设，成为当代中国最具影响力的学术品牌之一。丛书下设“西方传统”“中国传统”“经典与解释辑刊”三大系列，其下又各设若干子系列（例如，“西方传统”下设“荷马注疏集”“古希腊肃剧注疏”“阿里斯托芬集”“柏拉图注疏集”“法拉比集”“莎士比亚绎读”“洛克集”“尼采集”“施特劳斯集”等四十余个子系列）。“西方传统”的译介不限于狭义上的“古典”，而是同时纳入中世纪的阿尔法拉比、阿威罗伊，现代哲人霍布斯、卢梭、洛克等，形成对西方古今大传统的深厚理解，侧重于经典的细致注疏，全面涵盖了政治哲学、古典诗学、伦理学、宗教哲学等学科，旨在引领汉语学界对西方思想大传统朝有解释深度的细读方向推进；“中国传统”立足于推动中国学人在现代学术语境中重拾自己的古典传统；“经典与解释辑刊”则以专题形式推广国内外学界的最新成果。

李长春教授总结了刘小枫教授在中国推行的古典学的四大特征：首先是涵括古今中西的包容性，通过充分敞开其中的张力，以西学激活中国经典，以古典关切现代人的生存处境。其次，中西古典学均诞生于现代性的学术语境，因此具有以古鉴今的反思性。第三是批判性，要在中西古今的张力中总体审视人类文明形态，需要借助古典学的批判意识。对什么是好、善、高贵和伟大等根本问题的共同关切，对于可能出现的新的文明样态的形塑，表明古典学也天然具有建设性。

时过境迁，古典学如今已迎来最好的发展机遇。不过，十年前那场因古典学在中国的兴起所引发的争论恰恰让我们看到，国内部分古典学者从一开始就没能认清西方古典学内部的张力。其实，早在2012年刊发的《古典学的何种“传统”》中，刘小枫教授不仅已然扼要梳理了西方古典学的起源和发展，还回溯源头精当地指出了内含于这一学科的张力。即便在西方，古典学也并非传统学科，而是伴随现代大学兴起的产物。18世纪末，亚当·斯密倡导面向商业社会的实用国民教育，人文教育衰落。通常认为，西方古典学科的成立，以弗雷德里希·A·沃尔夫（Friedrich A. Wolf）于1795年出版的《荷马绪论》为标志。但这位被誉为“古典学之父”的沃尔夫挑起“荷马问题”本身就表明，古典学从一开始就将古希腊罗马经典视为“古籍”研究对象，而非活的教养源泉。西方古典学科产生之初所内含的张力鲜明地体现在学科分支上。古典学甫一成立，便形成三位一体结构：古典语文学（文本研究）、古代史、考古学。三种学问路径的品质大相径庭，由此也导致了学科旨趣的核心分歧。有别于以实证原则研究为路径的古代史和考古学，古典语文学以关注经典文本承载的智慧。19世纪末，维拉莫维茨与尼采的著名论战所呈现出的实证史学与从现代文明危机视角解读古典的路径分歧，就凸显了西方古典学学科内部学问路向的本质差异与主导权争夺。不同于把一切文本当史料的实证路径，尼采的古典学抱负强调面向少数人进行古典教育的道德动机。这种分歧进一步延伸至现代教材：比尔德与汉德森的《古典学》代表了英美“后现代”倾向，将古典学核心等同于“旅游”（人类学化的实地考察/物质遗存研究）。这种学问路径把泡萨尼阿斯的《希腊指南》奉为圭臬，文本研究服务于田野。与之相对，克拉特夫的《古典语文学常谈》则体现了德国传统对西方文明精神传统的关切，将古典学（尤其语文学）与政治、道德及文明危机思考相联系，强调其教养功能。

由此可见，西方古典学的“传统”面相远非单一。由于古典学在西方的诞生有着鲜明的现代性，自这门学科诞生之日起，把古典作品作为客观实证研究的对象（以考古、人类学化为主导），还是视之为平衡乃至回应现代性困境的智慧和思想资源，一开始就构成了这门学科的内部紧张。后者正是尼采所代表的西方古典学人的品质和学问取向。尽管在那场争论中，维拉莫维茨占据上风，尼采所代表的关注古典智慧与现代精神关联的路径，却为我们指明了中国古典学的未来。

尼采的古典学路径表明，西方现代性的困境同样构成促发西方古典学人省思的一股力量。在这点上，中国古典学人的初心与之相仿：晚清以来中国学术乃至文明同样遭遇了西方现代性带来的困境，如何在这次中西文明的大碰撞中看清中国与西方，乃至传统与现代的关系，同样促发了中国学人百余年来的精神追索。

二、中国的古典学建设与文明自觉

晚清以来，中国以惨痛的代价迎来了现代性时刻。遭遇西方严重冲击给彼时的中国学人造成一个严重的误识，中国在军事和经济上的落后，被等同甚至归因于文化、制度乃至文明的落后，甚至出现了全盘否定中国传统的倾向。由新文化运动引发的中西古今之争，影响至今。2009年时值新文化运动九十年，《开放时代》主办了题为《古典西学在中国》的论坛（后以笔谈形式刊发）。此次论坛不仅深入探讨了中国的古典学建设及文化崛起，诸多议题（文化自信、自主知识体系的探索及文明互鉴等）甚至富于前瞻性。

甘阳教授指出，较之经济上有目共睹的成绩，中国在文化上的崛起刚起步。原因在于近代以来中国对西方的认知长期停留在“现代西方”（文艺复兴后的技术文明），并以之比照“传统中国”，导致中西比较严重不对称。长期以来，中国学人不仅全盘否定中国文明，也未看清西方古典传统（古希腊-罗马）与现代西方的断裂性。这种认知偏差使中国学术陷入“以现代西学为体”的困境，亟需通过研究西方古典文明重建文化主体性。但研究西方古典学绝非亦步亦趋追随西方，而是借此重新定位中国和西方的关系。因此，建设中国的古典学不是西方古典学的一部分，而是“中国学术界的一部分”。他还提醒，中国的古典研究虽旨在服务中国文明复兴，简单学习西方的时代也已过去，但我们绝不能将西方意识形态化，而是要严肃对待西学，对西学的了解深度将决定我们对中国的了解深度。

刘小枫教授在题为《为什么应该建设中国的古典学》的发言中系统检审了中国高等教育的结构性缺陷：由于传统“国学”被现代西方学科体系（文史哲分立）切割，中国传统学问已失去整体关照。西方古典学（古希腊罗马研究）在高校更几近空白。现代大学日益凸显的实用导向使得大学过度偏重理工、经管等实用学科，导致文教沦为技术附庸，以品性涵养为核心的古典教化传统在我国教育中的缺位，令文明血脉濒临中断，文明传承陷入危机。刘小枫教授主张以“古典学”替代“五四”以来的“国学”，打破中西对立框架，转向“古今之争”的文明对话。他旗帜鲜明地反对与西方主流大学的古典学专业接轨，认为应该整合中国古典、古希腊-罗马、犹太-基督教、印度文明研究，消弭文史哲分割，以经典文本教学为核心，建设中西合璧的古典学，设立独立一级学科“古典文明系”，以此完成晚清以来中国学界未竟的教育大业：“立足本土培养‘兼通中西之学，于古今沿革，中外得失，皆了然于胸中’（皮锡瑞语）的新时代栋梁之才。”

此次论坛也为中西比较与文明对话的路径建立了范式。与会学者对西方文明的根基进行了批判性反思。研究西方古典旨在认清其文明根底的矛盾（如两希张力），为中国提供镜鉴，目标是以“文明对话”取代“文明冲突”，在“古今中西”的叩问中认清自己的位置。

二十一世纪初以来，古典学在中国方兴未艾。李长春教授指出，以2010年中国古典学学会创立为标志，中国学人在教学和科研中长期摸索推进古典学学科建设的努力，可谓中国的“古典学运动”。这场由中国学人自发开展的古典学运动“深刻地反映了中国学人想要重新认识中国自己的文明传统的强烈冲动”（《专访甘阳：古典学与中国学术共同体》）。

三、如何建设中国的古典学

新世纪以来，古典学在中国的兴起，不仅是中国学界对古典学学科建设的独立摸索，也表明了中国学人探问中西文明根柢的学术自觉。随着2024年11月首届世界古典学大会召开，中国的古典学建设获得国家层面的支持。如今，古典学早已不是先前的冷门学科（入选“2024年中国学术十大热点”）。围绕中国古典学的学科化设计及面临的挑战，也在学界引发诸多讨论。

2024年6月，在第十一届全国古典学年会召开期间举办的“应该如何建设中国的古典学”的圆桌讨论上，贺方婴教授回顾了21世纪以来中国古典学学科建设的历程。若以《经典与解释》辑刊发布为标志，中国古典学学科的起点可以追溯至2003。首辑刊发中学文章9篇，西学文章4篇，彰显了中国古典学人在中西比较视野下做中国的古典学研究的初心。2010年起，由刘小枫教授主编的《古典学研究》历经国际期刊、国内辑刊，到如今的季刊，为中国古典学学科建设搭建了高水平的学术交流平台。柯小刚教授甚至认为，古典学在中国的发展堪称“古典学的中国时刻”。

长期以来，中国古典学在缺乏国家制度支持、自主探索的情况下“碰运气”（《与刘小枫谈古典教育》）。2010年，刘小枫教授在中国人民大学首创古典学实验班，以中西古典学为核心辟出跨学科模式的试验田。他还编修了将语言、作品与文脉传统贯穿其中的古典语文教材《凯若斯：古希腊文读本》和《雅努斯：古典拉丁语文读本》。

对于中国古典学的学科设计，刘小枫教授强调要立足中国自身的古典传统，关注西方古典学的同时还应包纳古印度和阿拉伯文明。在对西方古典学的认识上，他主张除了公认的古希腊罗马经典，还应纳入欧洲的古典传统，因为西方的古今断裂实际发生于十七十八世纪的古今之争。诚如丁耘教授所言，由于中国的古典学天然是“一门自觉检讨现代性的学科”，这必然意味着新时期的古典学建设要有“大古典学”视野。刘小枫教授还指出设立古典学本科建制的紧迫性：近百年来，中国文化面临的基本问题依然是化解西方文明的挑战，“‘破解古今中西之争’是新时期的历史使命”。中国学术的底气，必须基于深入把握西方传世经典重新认识中国传世经典。若无从本科开始培育习读中西传世经典的学科建制保障，中国学界很难“真正获得对西方文明独立自主的解释权”。（《古典学不是象牙塔里的学问》）。

不过，就在形势一片大好之际，国内就古典学的学科范围及古典学学科建设的时机是否成熟上有了一些争议。实际上，刘小枫教授早已指明中国古典学建设的核心：“古典学的主体是经典研究，文献整理、文物品鉴、考古发掘都是辅助学科。”（《古典学不是象牙塔里的学问》）。2025年3月，四川大学成立国内首个古典学系，率先开启了中国古典学学科化建制的实践和探索。

扼要回溯中国古典学的来龙去脉不难看出，中国古典学在全球文科衰退潮流中逆势兴起，并非偶然，而是百年来中国学人在遭遇西方现代性危机中重新认识自我的一次自发探索。在古今中西之争的百年思想激荡中，中国古典学人选择回到中西传世经典，寻找化解人类共同面对的现代性危机的思想资源。这种鲜明的文明自觉注定中国的古典学不会是西方古典学的翻版，而是天然包含着对中华文明源头及传世经典的精深研究。

中国的古典学建设始终要直面吴飞教授指出的三大张力（中西、古今、义理与考据）。在接下来的学科建设道路探索上也将充满困难和争议。但争议本身并非坏事，而是学术活力与自觉的体现，关键在于如何将之转化为利于学科发展的动力。

对于古典学在中国的兴起，西方古典学者总体持开放欢迎的态度。不过，近期有学者注意到，美国“后古典主义研究集团”（The Postclassicisms Collective）核心人物詹姆斯·波尔特（James Porter）认为，中国学者在西方学者早已转向批判、反思乃至抛弃“古典”之时才开始研究西方古典，反映了“当下中国西化的潮流”以及中国学者欲在古典学上“与西方学者一争高下的学术心态”。（张瀚墨，《新世纪国学与古典学关系的反思》）这种偏见与傲慢本身提醒我们：西方古典学在日益考古学化、人类学化乃至反古典的转向中背离古典精神而不断衰落，不啻为一记警钟。这同样警示我们，中西古典学者若不能超越意气之争，摈弃门户之见，回归古典的德性教养旨归，注定无法以平和的心态正确看待古典学在中国的兴起。

【本文为上海市曙光人才计划项目“欧里庇得斯悲剧翻译、笺注与研究”（编号：24SG27）及国家社科基金重大项目“地中海文明与古希腊哲学起源研究”（23&ZD239）的阶段性成果】

作者简介：罗峰，华东师范大学外国语学院教授。她的研究领域集中在希腊悲剧、莎士比亚戏剧，以及中西古典诗学，著有《酒神与世界城邦：<酒神的伴侣>义疏》。

German novelist Peter Schneider, who passed away on March 3, was one of the most prominent literary voices of the “1968 generation” of the Vietnam-era protest movement. More quickly than many of his contemporaries, he grew critical of the dogmatic tendencies that emerged within that movement, as parts of the anti-authoritarian left developed their own forms of authoritarianism. By 1970, the New Left was decomposing in divergent directions. Some adherents turned to terrorism—the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, like the Weathermen in the United States. Others reverted to variants of orthodox Marxism, the “Old Left,” and found themselves defending the Soviet Union through formal or informal ties to Communist parties. Still others—among them Schneider—confronted the shortcomings of dogmatic leftism and, over subsequent decades, articulated a politics of freedom and dignity, often worked out through literary form.

He entered the literary scene with his 1973 novel Lenz, exploring the disappointments of the protest generation. His Mauerspringer (1982; English translation: The Wall Jumper, 1983) presents the surreal fantasy of a figure moving back and forth across the Berlin Wall. Alongside his fiction, Schneider was a prolific essayist on cultural and political questions, including contributing to Telos. In lieu of offering a full retrospective of his literary career, it is instructive to return to one example, his 1999 Telos essay “Intervention in Kosovo.” That text can serve as a litmus test for Schneider’s mature political thinking. It condenses the trajectory from the anti-authoritarian critique of the 1968 generation, through the turn to subjective experience, to a defense of intervention grounded in human dignity rather than ideology. It also speaks with renewed urgency today, as questions of intervention—Kosovo then, Ukraine and Iran now—remain unresolved.

Schneider’s intellectual development can be understood as a movement through three phases: from the critique of the dogmatic left, through the emergence of “new subjectivity,” to a position that combines moral affect with a willingness to endorse force under certain conditions. In the Germany of the early 1970s, the turn to “new subjectivity” marked a rejection of authoritarian politics, accompanied by skepticism toward any rigid theorization and an affirmation of individual experience. Emotion was granted priority over abstraction; Schneider was a central figure in this development. It is therefore not surprising that, three decades later, in the Kosovo essay, he begins not with doctrine but with affect:

The war in Kosovo is heartbreaking for everyone whose feelings are not limited by their convictions. Watching the daily television images of refugees and the NATO bombings, only dogmatists could be satisfied by their arguments for or against the war. Opponents and advocates of the intervention alike should concede their mixed emotions, and there is no reason to deny similar scruples to the political leadership of the Western alliance.

This opening establishes a fundamental premise: before questions of morality, legality, or strategic aims, one must acknowledge suffering and respond to it. War is hell, and the suffering of victims demands recognition. Schneider’s insistence on the primacy of affect reflects a consistent ethical stance: suffering is never to be endorsed or dismissed, regardless of political alignment. In this regard, his position stands in sharp contrast to contemporary responses to violence that have, at times, such as after the October 7 attacks, included both open celebration of violence against civilian victims or cold denial of the reality of the atrocities.

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From his initial moment of solidarity with victims, Schneider proceeds in his Kosovo essay to the central conceptual claim: respecting sovereignty is not a blank check for violence. Against anti-interventionist arguments that point to ulterior motives—strategic, economic, or geopolitical—he focuses on the normative core of the issue:

So far, no one has come up with a minimally convincing argument for the claim that the NATO intervention concerns natural resources, strategic positions, territorial expansion, etc. On the contrary, this war is about the establishment of an elementary principle: legitimate sovereignty and the domestic concerns of a state do not include the systematic expulsion, rape, and murder of a segment of the population.

Here Schneider articulates what would later be codified in the language of a “responsibility to protect”: sovereignty is conditional upon the protection of a population. States may claim autonomy, but they do not therefore have the right to commit mass violence against their own citizens. Read today, however, this argument appears to belong to a different historical moment. What has changed is not only policy but the moral vocabulary itself. The language of human rights and protection has receded in favor of deterrence, stability, and strategic interest. In the case of Ukraine, the dominant justification concerns the defense of state sovereignty rather than the protection of populations. With regard to Iran, concerns focus on nuclear proliferation and regional destabilization, while the suffering of the Iranian population, though acknowledged, does not serve as the primary rationale for policy. Schneider’s Kosovo essay thus marks a moment when European intellectual discourse still entertained the possibility that military force could be justified in explicitly moral terms.

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A third dimension of Schneider’s argument concerns his critique of pacifism, particularly in the German context. In the decades after World War II, a strong anti-military reflex developed in West Germany, a salutary reaction against the legacy of Nazi crimes. Yet this was not a universal pacifism; it was only a historically specific and limited claim: because of its past, Germany should abstain from military involvement. Schneider exposed the paradox at the heart of this position:

In the discussion of whether Germany should participate in the Bosnia intervention, it was bizarre and, frankly, ghoulish to hear how a recognition of the history of German guilt was turned into a privilege. Thus, some were prepared to accept the possibility that young Swedes, Danes, French, and Dutch might risk their lives for human rights; yet, given the Nazi past, Germans, so it was claimed, should be spared.

Here the guilt of the past ceases to be a burden and turns instead into a justification for nonparticipation, effectively outsourcing the labor of moral responsibility to others. With modest modifications, this logic persists in contemporary Europe, not only in Germany. There is an expectation that others, the United States and sometimes Israel, do what the German chancellor called the “dirty work,” which Europe avoids. In response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, European states have provided financial and military support, yet direct participation remains unthinkable. Similarly, in the context of the conflict involving Iran, European leaders condemn destabilizing actions by Iran and Hezbollah—they do know what is wrong—while nonetheless criticizing U.S. policy and limiting themselves to, at best, defensive or indirect measures. Schneider’s critique exposes the moral asymmetry of such positions: abstention may preserve safety and the psychological advantage of ethical purity, but it does not confer innocence.

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This leads to Schneider’s most forceful claim: the rejection of intervention does not constitute a higher moral stance. On the contrary, it may entail complicity through passivity:

Well before the massacres in Bosnia, it was clear that one does not remain innocent if one refrains from offering timely opposition to dictators and tyrants, if necessary with force….The opponents of intervention cannot lay claim to some higher morality. They should face up to the fact that they passively stand by and watch the expulsion and massacre of civilians, while they almost automatically minimize or relativize their suffering…

Schneider does not reject diplomacy as such, but he warns against its misuse as a delaying tactic that allows violence to continue. This insight leads him to a reconsideration of timing in the use of force. Rather than treating military action as a “last resort,” he suggests that earlier intervention may prevent greater harm:

The only way the current bombing war in Kosovo might have been prevented would have been through war, a much earlier military intervention….It is, therefore, time to rethink the notion that military force should only be used as a “last resort.”

This argument challenges a deeply ingrained moral intuition. The idea that force must always come last may, paradoxically, increase the scale of violence by allowing dictators to rampage and conflicts to escalate unchecked. Schneider’s position thus combines moral seriousness with a realpolitical willingness to confront tragic choices: the refusal to act may itself be a form of moral failure.

Read today, Schneider’s Kosovo essay appears less as a policy prescription than as a reminder of a lost moral vocabulary. It reflects a moment when European intellectual life still grappled with the possibility that force could serve the ends of human dignity. Its distance from current debates is precisely what makes it illuminating. In an era increasingly defined by strategic calculation and geopolitical realism, Schneider’s insistence on the ethical stakes of intervention challenges us. He understood the importance that individuals take part in the civic project, even including through the projection of military force. He himself stood out as a perceptive citizen, an astute observer of the political scene, and a consistent critic of public hypocrisy, the best legacy of 1968. We were fortunate to be able to publish him in Telos.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Russell A. Berman is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and former editor of Telos. He is now President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.