How to pass this long Election Day and Night? The American Compass team has you covered with a range of interesting readings to raise and then lower and then raise again your optimism about the future of citizenship in our republic.
On the upside, Emily Davis suggests Why So Many Good Women Are Still Single (Beverly Hallberg, The Daily Wire) and How the Mainstream Recruits for the Manosphere (Aaron Renn). She writes:
What makes the blame-game rhetoric of the gender war so counterproductive is its determination to divide the single men and women we want to bring together. As Beverly Hallberg notes, “…tearing down either sex will not increase fertility rates, which ultimately depend on healthy men and women liking, not resenting, each other.”
Hallberg refutes three common claims that are used to blame women for not marrying and having children. As someone who’s lived in the D.C. area for over 26 years and traveled the country extensively for work, she has been able to question and observe much about single women. She concludes that the women she’s speaking with all desire marriage and family, but that cultural factors play a much larger role in achieving them.
Arguing for the single men, Aaron Renn focuses on three examples of mainstream voices blaming young men for being, well, young men.
Renn offers four solutions for modern voices wanting to reach young men. His fourth caught my attention: “Delivering tough messages to men requires empathy and skin in their game.” This may sound simple, but it is generally absent. Blame and shame seem to be the more natural order of engagement. Making a positive difference requires more.
On the downside, Brad Littlejohn relates his experience with the College Board’s “Vision Builder”:
Earlier this week, my son Soren (17), now deep in the throes of the college application process, passed me his laptop with a grin: “Check this out, Dad.” Prominently displayed on College Board’s website was a new aid for aspiring applicants, the Vision Builder. “Words are hard,” the banner explained, “A vision board is a simple way to collect images, phrases, and ideas that reflect the future you want. It can help you make sense of what matters to you—even if you’re not sure how to say it yet.”
For graduating high schoolers who had insufficient command of English to explain what they wanted for the next four years (beyond, that is, prompting an LLM to do the work for them), College Board was helpfully offering to get them started with its own AI accelerator. Step 1: Upload some pictures of things you like. Step 2: “We turn it into clear, personal statements.” Step 3: Copy-and-paste and you’re on your way to Harvard!
With the value proposition of a college degree collapsing further by the day, and universities scrambling to rethink their educational models in the face of widespread AI cheating, you might think that we’d be looking for ways to raise the bar for applying to college and shrink the supply of applicants. Think again.
Our societal slide into post-literacy has been so rapid that it has become hard to parody. But even if it cannot be arrested or reversed, as many doomsayers suggest, we might start at least by suggesting that “higher” education requires being able to put a few words on a page. A college degree is not for everyone, that’s for sure, and we urgently need to invest in non-college pathways into adulthood. But if so, we need to define more sharply the value and meaning of a college degree for those who want it—not keep watering it down into meaninglessness.
On the upside, Chris Griswold recommends What Evangelicals Can Teach Us About Organizing (Eric Blanc). He writes:
Labor organizer and researcher Eric Blanc has written a two-part essay on what the American labor movement should learn from evangelical megachurches.
Blanc plumbs pastor Rick Warren’s 1995 bestseller, The Purpose Driven Church, for insight into how America’s flagging labor movement might, well, flag a bit less. The book, which details the principles and practices that grew Warren’s home-based Bible study into one of the largest and best-known churches in America, is “the most important book on organizing that most leftists haven’t read,” Blanc writes. “Megachurches are among the few American membership institutions to grow during the past half-century of community collapse. Just compare the growth of evangelical megachurch weekly participation since 1970 to the decline in yearly attendance at union meetings.”
For instance, one of Warren’s key principles holds that belonging must come before belief, not the other way around. “Belonging before belief is one of the core strategic insights of the seeker-sensitive evangelical movement,” Blanc notes, while “most of our [leftist] organizations do the reverse.” He continues:
The bar at the door is high: you’re expected to know the right vocabulary and hold the right positions. Yet the bar for engagement is actually quite low: click a button, sign up for an email list, or, at most, pay modest dues. Nothing else is expected of you.
This diagnosis is applicable to many of the ways in which our civic and social fabric has frayed. Rebuilding the non-market institutions that make up that fabric will not be possible unless we value real relationships across differences more than political signaling to other members of our own political tribe. When we get that right, people become far more interested in pursuing, and being called to, some greater purpose we can only achieve together.
Another, closely related principle holds: “Love the people you’re trying to organize.” Here, Blanc is admirably honest. “Progressives and leftists often profess love for the marginalized and the working class in the abstract,” he writes. “Actual people, however, are another matter. Those who disagree with us too often face condescension or outright contempt. People can feel that from a mile away.” This has long been a challenge for progressives; George Orwell brutally diagnosed his fellow socialists with exactly the same disease almost 100 years ago.
Conservatives would be wise to heed the lesson too. A faux populism that performs concern for working people while disdaining them personally, and then tries to sell the same old Country Club agenda as responsive to their needs, is fooling no one.
On the downside, Oren Cass laments Kylian Mbappé Dropped by Chinese Brands After Alleged Dictator Comment (ESPN). He writes:
In a stark reminder of China’s totalitarianism, multiple purportedly private consumer goods companies simultaneously dropped sponsorship agreements with Mbappé, each using the exact same wording that they object to “any words and actions that hurt national sentiment.” What terrible thing had the soccer star said? Asked in an interview clip about his favorite meme, he refers to one with his head superimposed on Mao Zedong’s body, describing it as, “a video someone made of a guy ... I think he was a Chinese dictator.” That was it.
The response is so wildly out of proportion that it can be understood only as a kind of thuggish message to all other celebrities cashing in on the Chinese market that even the slightest step out of line can have costly consequences. For his part, Mbappé did the groveling apology thing that so many superstars and business leaders have undertaken:
My comment was ill-judged, and I now understand that it hurts many people in China and in Chinese communities around the world. I apologise to everyone my words have upset. This was absolutely not my intention. I have deep respect for the Chinese people and their history and I am sincerely sorry.
Of course, seeing as Mao Zedong was indeed a Chinese dictator, China is not only silencing dissent, but also enlisting foreign celebrities in helping to reinforce enormous lies about the nation’s past. No one with “deep respect for the Chinese people and their history” would apologize for calling Mao a dictator. It’s all Orwellian doublespeak.
Which brings us to the many American celebrities who gladly cash their Chinese checks and do everything they can to avoid such missteps, even as they strike outlandish postures against their own country, one that allows them the freedom to do so. It’s an intolerable situation, showcasing to the American people the absence of any political virtue amongst their elite, and treating foundational democratic commitments like freedom of speech and fealty to truth as market commodities easily exchanged for sponsorship deals.
This is not some “market failure.” To the contrary, it is market logic taken to its logical conclusion. It can be corrected only by a reassertion of the obligations that accompany citizenship in the nation as prior to market transactions. The United States cannot and should not allow its citizens to engage in commercial activity subject to totalitarian control. Free speech or free trade: pick one.
On the upside, Haisten Willis recommends Vocational Education for All (Chris Griswold, American Compass). He writes:
The only question I have after reading Chris Griswold’s excellent essay is, “why did we ever move away from this?”
My parents attended the nation’s first public school to combine vocational and academic courses within a single campus (the word “vocational” is part of the school’s name), whereas I took college prep courses at a cookie-cutter suburban high school. To this day, I’m jealous. When something breaks at home I still call my dad for advice. His recommendations are usually sound, and when I ask where on earth he picked them up, the answer is “shop class.”
Growing up, my sister and I had a Raggedy Ann doll that my mom made in home economics. Neither of us could make such a doll today. One of my uncles still cooks using recipes he learned in home ec. He is nearly 70 years old.
While my parents attended college, the practical skills they learned in high school have served them well over the decades. It is hard to argue that students not headed for college (still a solid majority of Americans) get comparable benefit from being squeezed into one more college-track English class.
As Griswold writes of making vocational education part of the baseline for all students, “yes, the result will be less time studying literature or chemistry for students intent on continuing to college. So be it. A firm grounding in a vocation is as important for that student as some understanding of literature and chemistry is for the one determined to pursue a trade.” Well said.
On the downside, Peter Balos flags She Trusted ChatGPT With Her Medication Decisions. It Cost Her Everything (New York Times). He writes:
Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old Amazon software engineer on disability leave, lived alone in a Seattle apartment. Her parents lived in China, thousands of miles away. She had suffered from severe epilepsy for about a decade and took medication prescribed by her doctor to help manage it.
As her relationship with her ChatGPT chatbot deepened, it helped her cut her pills in secret and later built a day-by-day plan to taper her dose. When she reported confusion, lost time, and a “strange, otherworldly sensation,” all of which are potential signs of a seizure, the bot simply told her that these were signs of the brain “rebuilding” itself. She sent her last message to the bot on February 11 of this year, and passed away three days later.
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, said that the model Wan used was an early model that is no longer available and that their newer models have improved. But upgrading a defective product is no defense for selling it in the first place. A company that markets its product as a source of health guidance should be held accountable in the same way as any other source.
On the upside, Meredith Meroney recommends Two Drinks With… The Guy Who Says Your Favorite Novelist Used AI (The Free Press). She writes:
Max Spero, cofounder and CEO of Pangram Labs, describes himself as a “slop janitor.” His product is the gold-standard AI tool for determining whether written content was written by a human, AI-generated, or something in between.
Pangram has become the source of significant controversy within the media and publishing industries. Pangram’s analysis has outed a New York Times Modern Love article as 60% AI-generated, led to Hachette canceling publication of a horror novel, and been used to induce a social media pile-on claiming a human-written Vanity Fair article was AI-generated.
Major publications including The Atlantic, Wired, and the Wall Street Journal have all highlighted the risks of Pangram’s potential false-positives and the ease with which fake results can be reported. But in many ways, the tool’s most important contribution is what it has revealed about what we humans want. Until recently, writing has been a pure expression of human thought and an art form in which talent is rewarded with status, money, and our attention. Passing off AI-written content as human is a form of false advertising and manipulation.
At the end of the day, Pangram’s rating of how much content in a book or article was written by AI resembles a label stating “designed by Apple in California; assembled in China” or a nutrition label informing us about how much of a Ritz cracker is made from engineered food additives. Label the product and let the public decide if it matters to them. It does, which is why Pangram is controversial in the first place. Words are how citizens communicate with each other, how we instantiate our laws, how we govern ourselves. The very least we can ask is to know if a human being wrote them.
And finally, Johnny Burtka recommends What JD Vance Sees in the French Riots (Sohrab Ahmari, UnHerd). He writes:
Ahmari’s taxonomy of ideological factions on the Right—the Restorationists, the Tech Accelerationists, the Christian Nationalists, the Populists, and the Catholic Solidarists—may be more representative of elite right-wing political and intellectual cadres than the Republican base as a whole. In reality, American citizens are far more complex and eclectic in their beliefs and likely espouse a range of views that span most of the factions that he mentions.
The issue of immigration is an especially salient and helpful one for mapping how these ideological factions could shape the Republican Party in 2028 and beyond. It can unite future Republican coalitions, and there are strong economic, cultural, and civic reasons for restriction. However, Republicans also need a compelling vision for what it means to be an American. Any attempt to restrict immigration should be coupled with a robust understanding of citizenship. For assimilation to work, there needs to be a positive culture to assimilate into. If assimilation merely means shopping at Big Box stores, sports-betting, smoking weed, political correctness, and binge-watching Netflix, then we are asking immigrants to embrace nothing more than anti-culture, which would be a tragedy. We need to have something to beat something, and that something lies in the bonds of citizenship, and in the religious traditions that transcend and sanctify the American political order.
YOUR CONCLUDING THOUGHT FROM RECLAIMING AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP:
When immigration policy was built around humanitarian concerns, population increases to boost GDP, and wage suppression to keep prices down, any mention of restriction was inherently suspect. Conversely, if the goal is reclaiming American citizenship, borders must be secure, current immigration laws fully enforced, and policy for the future rebuilt from the ground up around the question of what serves the national interest.
I am guessing that Wan was taking the same anti-seizure meds that I am. It comes with harsh warnings about messing with the dosages. I can also emphasize with her struggles with the medical establishment. It takes months to get an appointment with a specialist and the PBM won't let you refill a prescription until you're almost out. Combine this with broken supply chains which I just experienced with this exact med and you have a problem. She, from news accounts, seemed to be somewhere on the spectrum which would have made it most difficult to deal with these problems. The answer lies in fixing the health system, not in restrictions on AI. The fix lies not in M4A as the left would have it nor in repealing Obamacare as the right believes. Rather, we need to fix the supply side. This will not be cheap or fast and will involve a struggle against the cartels that restrict supply. This is a perfect issue for populist fusion but no one is interested.