Welcome to the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard, the rational alternative to conservatism and regressivism.

July 4, 2026 will mark 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In that quarter millennium, America has—to the extent that it has upheld its founding principles—become a country that enables people to use their minds, to invent technologies, and to create everything from airplanes and skyscrapers to satellites and smartphones to Disney Land and Hollywood.

In “America the Rational,” Craig Biddle zeroes in on the fundamental value that enabled all these wonders, namely, political freedom—and, more fundamentally, on the value that makes freedom defensible and sustainable: reason. If we are to preserve, defend, and improve America, Biddle argues, we must enlist reason as our basic tool for the job.

America would have been possible if not for the founders who enshrined the values of freedom, self-determination, and limited government in the Declaration of Independence. In his review of Timothy Sandefur’s Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence, Tom Malone shows how Sandefur sets the record straight about what the Declaration truly means and why it is as invaluable today as it was in 1776.

This is followed by an excerpt from Sandefur’s chapter “Understanding the Declaration of Independence.” (Sandefur will speak on this topic at LevelUp 2026, taking place among the gleaming skyscrapers of Chicago, July 8–11.)

America’s productive output goes beyond technology—the Land of the Free is also a powerhouse of artistic creativity. So, what better way to celebrate Freedom 250 than with “Ten Poems on America the Beautiful”?

This year, an American spacecraft carried four astronauts around the Moon for the first time since 1972. Although this is a feat that only American space programs have achieved, many others are well on their way to replicating it. In “Artemis II Takes the Small Step, But Who Will Make the Giant Leap?,” I show that for America to retain its lead in the space industry, those in charge must learn the lessons of the Space Shuttle program’s failure and recognize that private industry, not NASA, should design and build the spacecraft that will take America back to the Moon and beyond.

Missions to the Moon still impress us, but we take for granted many aspects of modern life at which people of a couple centuries ago would have marveled. One of these is the virtually instantaneous global communication we now enjoy. This is thanks in part to a nineteenth-century American hero, Samuel Morse. In his profile of Morse’s life and achievements, Aditya Patil gives the inventor, best known for the code that bears his name, due recognition for his perseverance and genius in pioneering long-distance electronic communication.

Ronald Reagan once called freedom “a fragile thing . . . never more than one generation from extinction,” and recent American (and global) history has demonstrated how right he was. Many writers and filmmakers have told valuable stories about the importance of defending and preserving freedom, but such stories can also be told through music. One example is The Protomen’s musically and narratively impressive three-part story of resistance, which I highlight in “‘Hold Back the Night’: The Protomen’s Musical Warning to Stand Up for Freedom.”

Arguably one of the richest periods of American musical output was the 1960s and 1970s, when innovative artists combined influences from the blues to country to classical to create a plethora of new musical styles. One leading innovator in that period was Lowell George, whose sadly short life and prolific musical catalog Rebecca Day explores in “No ‘Little Feat’—Lowell George’s Musical Innovation.”

Another American musician who made his start in this period was Michael Jackson—the “King of Pop.” Jackson has been the subject of a hail of accusations that Tim White robustly refuted in his 2020 TOS article “Justice for Michael Jackson.” Now, White reviews the new biopic Michael, commending its portrayal of Jackson’s life and defending it from another barrage of criticism pertaining to the allegations that, White argues, have no basis in reality.

Revolutionary ideas influenced writers across the pond as well, including Jane Austen, who was born in December 1775. Diving into this influence, Angelica Werth reviews Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly, noting how Kelly recognizes many of the valuable themes expressed in Austen’s novels but often overlooked by many of her fans and biographers.

Next up, in “Mother Courage: “Epic Theater” vs the Human Soul,” Anna Shnaidman challenges the praise heaped on Bertolt Brecht’s unconventional play. She describes how it presents a character essentially lacking moral agency, thereby depriving it of a key ingredient of any good story: moral choice.

Then, in “Dracula: A Love Tale: A Sincere but Fatally Flawed Love Story,” Tim White reviews the latest film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic tale, commending many of its artistic elements while critically examining its portrayal of love.

From a flawed portrayal of romantic love to a well-executed portrayal of the love of friends, I look back on a classic of 1970s spy fiction in “Purpose and Friendship in The Persuaders!”

Next, Daria Topchii celebrates a recent exemplar of joyful independence and achievement in “A Self-Authored Victory: How Stepping Away Made Alysa Liu an Olympic Champion.”

Lastly, Margherita Bovo reviews “I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux,” showing how Prideaux corrects many common misunderstandings about Nietzsche’s life and ideas, enabling readers to navigate the philosopher’s work without falling prey to those who miscommunicated his philosophy during and after his lifetime.

That’s it for this issue—I hope you enjoy the articles and reviews. If so, be sure to recommend and share them with friends on social media, in conversation, and especially on Substack. If you have a Substack publication of your own, please recommend The Objective Standard on your home page (see “recommendations” on your dashboard). And if you’ve not yet subscribed to the journal for people of reason, head over to TheObjectiveStandard.com and become a subscriber or upgrade your subscription today.

Thank you for your business and support,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor
The Objective Standard

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

Despite the flaw, those are my favorite lines from Katharine Lee Bates’s “America the Beautiful.”

America is beautiful. But why? What makes it beautiful? And what could make it even more beautiful?

What makes America beautiful is its founding principle: individual rights—the idea that each individual has a moral prerogative to take the actions necessary to support and further his life (the right to life); to act in accordance with his own judgment, free from coercion (liberty); to keep and use the product of his effort (property); and to pursue the values and goals of his choice (the pursuit of happiness).

What could make America more beautiful is for Americans to better understand and protect rights.

Are rights real? Is there evidence to support them? If so, what is the evidence? And are rights inalienable—such that neither individuals, groups, nor governments can revoke them or take them away? If so, how do we know it? What evidence supports this?

Some Americans, including the nation’s founders and religious conservatives, believe that people have rights because a “Creator” or “God” endowed us with them. For instance, the Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Although this conception of rights served to establish America, it has not served—and cannot serve—to sustain America. This is because there is no evidence for the existence of a Creator, much less evidence to support the notion that rights somehow emanate from His will.

Since the founding of America, positivists, utilitarians, materialists, postmodernists, and other critics of rights have taken advantage of this lack of evidence. They have mocked the idea of inalienable rights—rights that exist prior to governments, rights that, as the Declaration notes, governments are instituted to secure. The idea of “rights anterior to the establishment of government,” wrote philosopher Jeremy Bentham, is “rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.” Why? Because, Bentham insisted, rights “are the fruits of the law, and of the law alone.”1 The idea of inalienable rights, wrote philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, is “one with witches and unicorns.” Why? Because no one has provided evidence for such rights; thus “every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed.”2 Yuval Noah Harari says that “rights are just like heaven and like God.” Why? Because, like heaven and God, there is no evidence for their existence. “Take a human, cut him open, look inside,” quips Harari. “You find blood, and you find the heart and lungs and kidneys, but you don’t find any rights.”3

The idea that inalienable rights are nonsense on the grounds that no evidence supports them is widespread among today’s philosophers and intellectuals, and it is undermining the very foundation of America. If there is no evidence for the existence of rights that precede governments, then what we call “rights” are not really rights but rather laws or permissions granted by governments. On this conception of “rights,” governments create laws, and the laws dictate the “rights” and “non-rights” of the people who live under those governments. In short, the government’s laws simply are the citizens’ rights.

If rights are merely permissions created by a government via law, then no legal action can violate rights. Whatever the law permits is a right; whatever it forbids is not.

Taken seriously, this means that in National Socialist Germany, the so-called Aryans had a right to throw Jews into concentration camps and gas chambers because Nazi law permitted it. In the antebellum South, white people had a right to enslave black people because their states’ laws permitted it. And in Islamic theocracies, the mullahs and “morality police” have a right to hang gay people from cranes or throw them off rooftops—and the right to punish women for exposing their ankles or for having been raped—because their governments’ laws permit it.

Thankfully, America is nowhere near such horrors today. But what is to stop us from moving in that direction? What is to stop America the beautiful from becoming America the terrible?

Consider the following, and ask yourself whether Americans and the American legal system are treating rights as moral principles that limit governments—or as “fruits of the law” such that governments may do whatever their laws permit.

• When, under civil asset forfeiture laws, governments seize a person’s cash, car, or other property without convicting him of a crime (as federal, state, and local governments do), does this violate his rights—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• When the Food and Drug Administration forbids patients from contracting voluntarily with their doctors to receive medications or treatments that could save their lives (as the FDA does), does this violate the rights of patients and doctors—or uphold rights by enforcing the law?

• When a city or state forbids people from starting a small business—say, selling food or braiding hair—unless they first obtain an expensive government-approved license or permit (as many cities and states do), does this violate the rights of peaceful people to earn a living—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• When governors order businesses to close for weeks on end, thus destroying or damaging the livelihoods of the business owners and their employees (as many governors did during COVID-19), does this violate individuals’ rights—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• If a government passes a law requiring people to use others’ preferred pronouns (as some states and localities have attempted to do, and many people want them to do), does this violate people’s right to freedom of speech—or protect rights by enforcing the law?

• If a state levies a special tax on residents above a certain net worth (as supporters of California’s 2026 Billionaire Tax Act propose), does this violate their property rights—or protect rights in compliance with the law?

• If Americans elect politicians who nationalize industry, abolish private property, and subordinate individuals to the collective or “common good” (as various intellectuals, college professors, and politicians advocate), would this violate anyone’s rights—or would it protect everyone’s rights because it’s the law?

• Alternatively, if Americans elect politicians who make biblical law the law of the land, punishing blasphemy, homosexuality, and religious dissent (as religious people who take biblical law seriously advocate), would this violate anyone’s rights—or would everyone’s rights be upheld because religious dogma had become political law?

If the only “rights” human beings have are those established by a government’s laws, then governments are not and cannot be limited by rights. If so, the American system of government, which is based on inalienable rights, is based on nothing at all. It is a sham. Consequently, there is nothing to stop the land of liberty from becoming just another tract of tyranny.

The bad news is that the idea of rights as “fruits of law” is precisely what today’s journalists, legal scholars, and college professors are teaching the rising generations—and have been for decades. To wit:

Harvard-educated E. J. Dionne Jr.—a longtime Washington Post editor and columnist, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor at Georgetown University—insists in both a Washington Post op-ed and a commencement speech to graduates of the University of Pittsburgh: “Absent a government committed to the protection of rights, there are no rights.”4

Law professors Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein—respectively professors at New York University School of Law and Harvard Law School, both of whom previously taught at the University of Chicago—write that “Under American law, rights are powers granted by the political community.” Indeed, Holmes and Sunstein clarify, this means “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action”—such that even “the right against being tortured by police officers and prison guards” exists only insofar as a government’s laws and legal machinery protect people against such practices.5

Raymond Geuss—an American political philosopher who has taught at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago—writes that a right is a “construct of a particular legal system,” meaning that its “real locus” is not in human nature but in “positive legal codes.” To claim otherwise, he says, is to “delude yourself” and to engage in “puffery or white magic.”6

This is what American college students and Americans in general are being taught about rights: They are merely the laws that governments pass and enforce. To defend inalienable rights—and thus the very foundation of America—against this fundamental and expanding assault, we need an evidence-based, demonstrably true conception of rights.

The good news is that rights are real. They exist. But, like many things that exist—such as justice, honesty, sarcasm, and logic—rights are not perceivable: We cannot see, touch, taste, or hear them. Rights are highly abstract principles that arise from and depend on various other ideas and conceptual integrations that ultimately are grounded in facts we can perceive.

To understand the source and nature of rights, and why they are inalienable, we must identify the facts and ideas that give rise to them and connect them to perceptual reality. The American philosopher Ayn Rand did just that.

Rand conceived of rights as identifications or recognitions of certain facts—namely, the social conditions required for human beings to live together peacefully.7 And when you see rights this way, far from being nonsense, they make perfect sense.

Rand observed that if and to the extent that people, groups, or governments use physical force or coercion against an individual, the individual cannot act fully as his life requires. The principle of individual rights is the recognition of this fact. And the specific rights—such as the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—are recognitions of this same fact regarding specific spheres of concern. For each right, there is a principle, which is the recognition of a particular fact—and a corresponding moral prerogative to act accordingly, which is what it means to have the right in question.

The right to life, on this view, is the broadest and most fundamental right. The principle here is the recognition of the fact that for a person to live, he must be free to take all the actions necessary to support and further his life while refraining from violating the same rights of others (more on this below). To the extent that other people, groups, or governments forcibly stop him from acting as his life requires, he cannot act fully as his life requires. For instance, to live, a person must produce goods (or services) and either use them or trade them with others. (The only alternative is to survive parasitically on others who produce life-serving goods.) If a “slave master” or socialist government or theocratic regime forces him into a cotton field, a concentration camp, or a noose, he cannot live fully as his life requires. He cannot live a fully human life. This is not “nonsense” or “white magic” or like “witches and unicorns”; nor does it depend on or have anything to do with an alleged Creator somehow endowing people with rights. Rather, it is a recognition of a fact about the world and human life. It is a truth grasped by means of reason. And for someone to possess the right to life is for him to have a moral prerogative to act in accordance with the corresponding principle: as his life requires.

Likewise, the right to liberty is the recognition of the fact that for a person to live, he must be free to act on the judgment of his mind, which is his basic means of living. To the extent that other people, groups, or governments forcibly stop him from doing so, he cannot act in accordance with his judgment. If he judges that he should start a business braiding hair, and if a government physically stops him from acting accordingly because he doesn’t have a government-authorized license to braid hair, then, to that extent, he cannot act on his judgment; he cannot act on his basic means of living; thus he cannot live fully as a human being. Here again, to possess the right is to have a moral prerogative to act in accordance with the corresponding principle: A human life is a life guided by the judgment of one’s own mind. And here, too, this is not “nonsense” or “white magic” or in any way dependent on a Creator. Rather, it is a recognition of a fact. It is a product of reason.

Similarly, the right to property is the recognition of the fact that for a person to live, he must be free to keep and use the goods he produces. To the extent that other people coercively stop him from doing so, he cannot keep or use his property; thus, he cannot live a fully human life. For instance, if he farms for a living, and if the government takes 30 percent of his earnings, then he cannot use that 30 percent to sustain or further his life. And that 30 percent represents real time, effort, and resources that he spent earning the money. To forcibly take this money is to forcibly take that portion of his life—by retroactively converting his work into involuntary servitude. This is neither “nonsense” nor “puffery.” It is a recognition of a fact—a product of reason. And individuals possess the right to property in light of this fact.

Finally, the right to the pursuit of happiness is the recognition of the fact that for a person to pursue the goals and values of his choice, he must be free to do so. To the extent that other people force him to act against his chosen aims, he cannot act in accordance with his chosen aims; thus, he cannot live fully as a human being. If a girl chooses to remove her headscarf and dance, but the “morality police” arrest or kill her for doing so, she cannot pursue the goals and values of her choice; she cannot live a fully human life. Likewise, if someone chooses to take psilocybin to overcome a psychological problem, and the “medication police” arrest him for doing so, he cannot pursue the goals or values of his choice; he cannot live a fully human life. In light of the corresponding observation-based principle, human beings have the right to the pursuit of happiness: the moral prerogative to pursue the goals and values of their choice.

Each of these rights—to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness—applies to human beings as such, on the grounds that they are humans, that they are individuals, and that acting in accordance with the judgment of their own minds is essential to living human lives.

Such fact-based rights exist in that we can observe the facts that give rise to and support the respective principles. And such fact-based rights are inalienable in that they preexist governments and cannot be revoked: One cannot revoke a basic fact of reality or human nature.

Of course, other people and governments can violate an individual’s rights—and frequently do—by initiating or threatening physical force against him, thereby stopping him from acting in accordance with his own judgment. But other people cannot revoke or remove an individual’s rights. The only person who can remove an individual’s rights is that individual himself. And the only way he can do so is by violating the rights of others—that is, by initiating or threatening physical force against them and thus throttling or thwarting their ability to act in accordance with their judgment. If and to the extent that a person initiates physical force against others, whether directly (e.g., assault or rape) or indirectly (e.g., fraud or extortion), he—of his own accord—forfeits his moral prerogatives, his rights, in proportion to his violation of the rights of others. A rational, rights-protecting legal system adjudicates rights violations and punishes rights violators accordingly.8

Rand’s theory of rights is based on her broader moral theory, rational egoism, wherein the factual requirements of human life constitute the standard of moral value—the standard by which we can measure the rightness or wrongness of chosen human actions. This standard, too, is supported by perceptual observations and conceptual integrations of reality and human nature.9

There is a great deal more to the observations and integrations that undergird, support, and give rise to inalienable rights. But the foregoing indicates how such rights are derived from and grounded in perceptual reality—facts we can see.

Seen in this light, rights are neither endowments from God nor grants from governments. Nor are they “nonsense upon stilts” or like “witches and unicorns.” Rather, rights are recognitions of facts about human beings and human nature—namely, that for human beings to live fully as human beings, they must be free to act in accordance with the faculty that makes them human: their reasoning minds.

This evidence-based conception of rights resolves the deficiency in the God-based conception expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Rights are real, but not because God gave them to us. They are real because they are identifications of the factual requirements of human life in a social context. With this understanding, Americans can move past the otherworldly, passivity-laden prayer “America! God mend thine every flaw”—and embrace the earthly, agency-driven mission: America! We the people will mend thine every flaw.

Yes, we can mend America’s every flaw. We can do so by grasping and upholding the rational, observation-based principle of inalienable rights. And when we do, we can call it America the rational. That will be beautiful.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

America

by George Gordon Byron

THE NAME of Commonwealth is past and gone,
Over three fractions of the groaning globe:—
Venice is crushed, and Holland deigns to own
A sceptre, and endures a purple robe:
If the free Switzer yet bestrides alone
His chainless mountains, ‘t is but for a time;
For tyranny of late has cunning grown,
And, in its own good season, tramples down
The sparkles of our ashes. One great clime,
Whose vigorous offspring by dividing ocean
Are kept apart, and nursed in the devotion
Of Freedom, which their fathers fought for, and
Bequeathed,—a heritage of heart and hand,
And proud distinction from each other land,
Whose sons must bow them at a monarch’s motion,
As if his senseless sceptre were a wand
Full of the magic of exploded science,—
Still one great clime, in full and free defiance,
Yet rears her crest, unconquered and sublime,
Above the far Atlantic! She has taught
Her Esau-brethren that the haughty flag,
The floating fence of Albion’s feebler crag,
May strike to those whose red right hands have bought
Rights cheaply earned with blood. Still, still, forever
Better, though each man’s life-blood were a river
That it should flow and overflow, than creep
Through thousand lazy channels in our veins,
Dammed, like the dull canal, with locks and chains,
And moving, as a sick man in his sleep,
Three paces, and then faltering: better be
Where the extinguished Spartans still are free,
In their proud charnel of Thermopylae—
Than stagnate in our marsh; or o’er the deep
Fly, and one current to the ocean add,
One spirit to the souls our fathers had,
One freeman more, America, to thee!

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), known as Lord Byron, was an English poet.

Liberty Tree

By Thomas Paine

In a chariot of light from the regions of day,
The Goddess of Liberty came;
Ten thousand celestials directed the way
And hither conducted the dame.
A fair budding branch from the gardens above,
Where millions with millions agree,
She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love,
And the plant she named Liberty Tree.

The celestial exotic struck deep in the ground,
Like a native it flourished and bore;
The fame of its fruit drew the nations around,
To seek out this peaceable shore.
Unmindful of names or distinction they came,
For freemen like brothers agree;
With one spirit endued, they one friendship pursued,
And their temple was Liberty Tree.

Beneath this fair tree, like the patriarchs of old,
Their bread in contentment they ate,
Unvexed with the troubles of silver and gold,
The cares of the grand and the great.
With timber and tar they Old England supplied,
And supported her power on the sea;
Her battles they fought, without getting a groat,
For the honor of Liberty Tree.

But hear, O ye swains, ‘tis a tale most profane,
How all the tyrannical powers,
Kings, Commons, and Lords, are uniting amain
To cut down this guardian of ours;
From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms
Through the land let the sound of it flee,
Let the far and the near, all unite with a cheer,
In defence of our Liberty Tree.

Thomas Paine (1736–1809) was an English-born American Founding Father, inventor, political philosopher, and statesman best known for writing the pamphlet “Common Sense.”

The New Colossus

By Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) was an American author, poet, translator, and Jewish activist.

America

By Walt Whitman

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,|
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

Walter Whitman Jr (1819–1892) was an American poet, essayist, journalist, and novelist.

America for Me

By Henry Van Dyke

‘Tis fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down
Among the famous palaces and cities of renown,
To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of the kings,—
But now I think I’ve had enough of antiquated things.

So it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be,
In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living there is no place like home.

I like the German fir-woods, in green battalions drilled;
I like the gardens of Versailles with flashing fountains filled;
But, oh, to take your hand, my dear, and ramble for a day
In the friendly western woodland where Nature has her way!

I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack:
The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.
But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free,—
We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.

Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me!
I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea,
To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars,
Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars.

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) was an American author, educator, and clergyman, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands.

Betsy’s Battle Flag

By Minna Irving

From dusk till dawn the livelong night
She kept the tallow dips alight,
And fast her nimble fingers flew
To sew the stars upon the blue.
With weary eyes and aching head
She stitched the stripes of white and red,
And when the day came up the stair
Complete across a carven chair
Hung Betsy’s battle flag.

Like shadows in the evening gray
The Continentals filed away,
With broken boots and ragged coats,
But hoarse defiance in their throats;
They bore the marks of want and cold,
And some were lame and some were old,
And some with wounds untended bled,
But floating bravely overhead
Was Betsy’s battle flag.

When fell the battle’s leaden rain,
The soldier hushed his moans of pain
And raised his dying head to see
King George’s troopers turn and flee.
Their charging column reeled and broke,
And vanished in the rolling smoke,
Before the glory of the stars,
The snowy stripes, and scarlet bars
Of Betsy’s battle flag.

The simple stone of Betsy Ross
Is covered now with mold and moss,
But still her deathless banner flies,
And keeps the color of the skies.
A nation thrills, a nation bleeds,
A nation follows where it leads,
And every man is proud to yield
His life upon a crimson field
For Betsy’s battle flag!

Minna Irving (1864–1940) was an American writer and poet.

Liberty Bell at the World’s Fair

By Charles Eugene Banks

Grand old bell, thy earlier mission but to voice on Sabbath morning —
As an angel’s fingers pressed thee,
As an angel’s wings caressed thee,
Softly chiming from the steeple,
“Rest ye, rest ye, O my people!”
In mellifluous tones and tender with an undertone of warning, —
Changed thy speech, as all men know.
On that morning long ago.
When thy stern majestic ring
Bade defiance to a king.

In the streets are gathered thousands waiting for the message grand
That shall loose their bonds and make them freemen in a freeman’s land, —
That shall by a single motion
Send defiance o’er the ocean,
Signal ships are outward pointed,
Signal ships that homeward run,
That a prince by priest anointed
Is but man when all is done.

Brave men breathless stand below thee, pale of cheek but stern of brow,
Praying for th’ proclamation—moments are as hours now.
See! the hand uplifted wavers,
Falls — the bellman straining there,
Sends the song on rhythmic quavers
Out upon the dancing air,
“They have signed it, O my people!”
Cries the bell from out the steeple,
“Independence! Independence! Liberty is newly crowned!”
Chorus all the waiting thousands till the old bell’s voice is drowned.

But that glorious proclamation.
Swiftly everywhere it ran
And demanded of each nation
Equal rights for every man.
How the spirit of Columbia into every heart has grown
Best is told by yon White City — symbolizing all that’s good.
East and West are come together — there is neither pole nor zone,
There is neither slave nor monarch; but where late the willow stood.
Stands the wonder of the ages. Stroke the old bell’s rusty side,
Right has triumphed and before her cowers Tyranny and Pride.

Charles Eugene Banks (1852–1932) was an American journalist, author, poet, historian, and orator.

Free America

ascribed to Dr. Joseph Warren, 1774

That seat of Science, Athens,
And earth’s proud mistress, Rome;
Where now are all their glories?
We scarce can find a tomb.
Then guard your rights, Americans,
Nor stoop to lawless sway;
Oppose, oppose, oppose, oppose,
For North America.

We led fair Freedom hither,
And lo, the desert smiled!
A paradise of pleasure
Was opened in the wild!
Your harvest, bold Americans,
No power shall snatch away!
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

Torn from a world of tyrants,
Beneath this western sky,
We formed a new dominion,
A land of liberty:
The world shall own we’re masters here;
Then hasten on the day:
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

Proud Albion bowed to Cæsar,
And numerous lords before;
To Picts, to Danes, to Normans,
And many masters more:
But we can boast, Americans,
We’ve never fallen a prey;
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

God bless this maiden climate,
And through its vast domain
May hosts of heroes cluster,
Who scorn to wear a chain:
And blast the venal sycophant
That dares our rights betray;
Huzza, huzza, huzza, huzza,
For free America.

Lift up your hands, ye heroes,
And swear with proud disdain,
The wretch that would ensnare you,
Shall lay his snares in vain:
Should Europe empty all her force,
We’ll meet her in array,
And fight and shout, and shout and fight
For North America.

Some future day shall crown us,
The masters of the main,
Our fleets shall speak in thunder
To England, France, and Spain;
And the nations over the ocean spread
Shall tremble and obey
The sons, the sons, the sons, the sons
Of brave America.

Dr. Joseph Warren (1741–1775) was an American physician and one of the most important members of the Boston Patriot movement.

On Independence

By Jonathan Mitchell Sewall

Come all you brave soldiers, both valiant and free,
It’s for Independence we all now agree;
Let us gird on our swords and prepare to defend
Our liberty, property, ourselves and our friends.

In a cause that’s so righteous, come let us agree,
And from hostile invaders set America free,
The cause is so glorious we need not to fear
But from merciless tyrants we’ll set ourselves clear.

Heaven’s blessing attending us, no tyrant shall say
That Americans e’er to such monsters gave way,
But fighting we’ll die in America’s cause
Before we’ll submit to tyrannical laws.

George the Third, of Great Britain, no more shall he reign,
With unlimited sway o’er these free States again;
Lord North, nor old Bute, nor none of their clan,
Shall ever be honor’d by an American.

May Heaven’s blessing descend on our United States,
And grant that the union may never abate;
May love, peace, and harmony ever be found,
For to go hand in hand America round.

Upon our grand Congress may Heaven bestow
Both wisdom and skill our good to pursue;
On Heaven alone dependent we’ll be.
But from all earthly tyrants we mean to be free.

Unto our brave Generals may Heaven give skill
Our armies to guide, and the sword for to wield,
May their hands taught to war, and their fingers to fight,
Be able to put British armies to flight.

And now, brave Americans, since it is so,
That we are independent, we’ll have them to know
That united we are, and united we’ll be,
And from all British tyrants we’ll try to keep free.

May Heaven smile on us in all our endeavors,
Safe guard our seaports, our towns, and our rivers,
Keep us from invaders by land and by sea,
And from all who’d deprive us of our liberty.

Jonathan Mitchell Sewall (1748–1808) was an American lawyer and poet.

America the Beautiful

By Katharine Lee Bates

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood|
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929) was an American author and poet. She wrote three versions of “America. A Poem for July 4” in 1893, 1904, and 1911. It was set to music composed by Samual A. Ward and retitled “America the Beautiful.” The 1911 version is printed above.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Editor’s note: This is part one of a three-part adaptation of a chapter from Timothy Sandefur’s book Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence, reproduced with permission of the Cato Institute.

When Thomas Jefferson showed his draft Declaration of Independence to the other members of the “committee of five,” on June 22, 1776, his colleagues were probably impressed. The 33 year old Virginian was the youngest member of the committee—in fact, the second-youngest member of the Continental Congress—and he had arrived with two documents in hand: a reply he had written to a disingenuous “peace” proposal that Prime Minister Lord North had sent over to the colonies, and a pamphlet entitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which Jefferson had written two years earlier, summarizing the American colonists’ complaints against Parliament. They were impressively enough. But Jefferson’s latest production was a brilliant exercise in concise argument and controlled passion. After a dozen years of protests and remonstrances against London’s treatment of the colonies, the Americans had finally had enough. This time, they would not be petitioning King George for help, let alone pleading for respect from Parliament—whose authority over the colonies the Americans entirely denied. Instead, this new Declaration would be a political testament to the world by a nation that had attained its political maturity.

“When in the course of human events,” Jefferson began, “it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained, and to assume among the powers of the earth. . . .”

The Premises

Jefferson’s opening lines struck the committee’s chairman, John Adams, as close, but not quite right. For one thing, referring to Americans as “subordinate” seemed unduly meek. As for the word “independent,” while noble enough, it was less striking than the more forthright “separate.” Thus Adams, along with the other committee members—Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston—made several small changes to Jefferson’s vocabulary and the specific complaints listed in the document before they submitted the completed draft to the entire Congress for further editing on June 28. Since then, many scholars have examined each word of the Declaration trying to decipher just who changed what—with notably little success. However the committee of five made its decisions, the version they turned over to Congress began:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

In the centuries since independence, many intellectuals have quarreled with Jefferson’s invocation of the “laws of nature and of nature’s God.” Some have even argued that classical liberal natural law theory was not really an animating factor in the revolution, and that Jefferson added these phrases only to make the uprising palatable to foreign nations, particularly France. The conservative historian Russell Kirk, for example, claimed that “the Francophile Jefferson” included this passage as a ploy to persuade Parisian philosophes to ally with the Americans.1 According to Kirk, natural law played no real role in the revolution; the Patriots were actually seeking to preserve the colonies’ traditional autonomy, not to vindicate the radical doctrines of equality and freedom. These assertions echoed the views of South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, who in an 1850 speech defending slavery tried to brush off the Declaration’s language about equal rights by claiming it was “inserted in our Declaration of Independence without any necessity.” The revolution really centered on the “breach of our chartered privileges,” Calhoun said. Classical liberalism had “[no] weight in constructing the governments which were substituted in the place of the colonial.”2

These claims were nonsense. In 1776, France was governed by an absolute monarch who considered himself the representative of God on Earth, and ruled over his people with a degree of absolutism that exceeded the pretensions of George III by an order of magnitude. Nothing would be less likely to attract Louis XVI’s admiration than to announce that every person has inherent rights that no just government may contradict, or that kings are servants rather than masters of the people. Nor was the Continental Congress particularly careful to ensure that King Louis even saw the Declaration. Although Congressmen certainly hoped for foreign support, they were so negligent in sending an official copy to France that it only arrived in November, well after newspapers had already reported it—hardly an oversight they would have made if their foremost concern had been impressing the French.3 In any event, the colonists had been asserting the natural law principles of equality and liberty since at least the “Boston Pamphlet” of 1772, published by Samuel Adams and his Massachusetts colleagues. Kirk’s idea that the Declaration included such language only to obtain “sympathy in France’s climate of opinion” was absurd.4

As for Calhoun’s assertion that those principles played no role in the new state governments, the first line of Virginia’s Bill of Rights is enough to disprove that. Virginians pronounced in that document—adopted a month before the Declaration of Independence—that “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights.” Parliament’s refusal to honor the colonies’ charters, and its insistence on legislating for Americans directly, did initiate the crisis with Britain in 1764. But by the summer of 1776, London had made clear that those charters were not worth the parchment they were inscribed upon. That forced Americans to take the drastic step of abandoning their “chartered privileges” and asserting their human rights, instead.

In any case, as Thomas Paine later observed, the distinction between natural rights and the rights of English tradition is to some degree illusory. “The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity,” he wrote. American Patriots may have appealed to precedents of their seventeenth-century ancestors, but those ancestors had appealed to precedents from the fifteenth or fourteenth centuries, and so on back in time. “If we travel still farther into antiquity,” Paine argued, “we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker. What was he then? Man.”5 In other words, the cherished rights of English legal tradition must rest upon the nature of man, rather than mere collective agreement—and those objective and universal rights must always underlie all political institutions if those institutions are to be legitimate. Now that Britain had declared Americans ineligible for the protections of British law, Americans had little choice: they could only lay claim to universal principles and rights.

While there was nothing new about Americans asserting their natural rights in 1776, there was a novel phrase in the Declaration’s opening paragraph: its reference to “one people.” This was what is now called “the American people,” a phrase seldom used before the imperial crisis. Before the 1760s, colonists rarely even called themselves “American,” and would hardly have considered themselves the same “one people” as the residents of other colonies. Now, however, the Declaration announced that they had forged a national identity.

That bothered Thomas Hutchinson. The disgruntled former royal governor of Massachusetts, now living in London after being relieved of his governorship two years earlier, published a pamphlet published in November 1776 responding to the Declaration point-for-point. He started by attacking the idea “that the colonies are one distinct people.” That was an “absurd notion,” he wrote.6 Americans were and always had been Britons. That was an ironic claim from a man who once said it was “impossible the rights of English subjects should be the same, in every respect, in all parts of the dominions.”7 But in any event, he was wrong. Americans truly had become a distinct people by 1776. Over the century and a half since colonization started, they had developed unique characteristics and mores, as well as distinct systems of government and even religion. To use the language of a later age, they had “grown apart.”

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;

Jefferson originally wrote “sacred and undeniable,” but changed this to the more succinct “self-evident,” possibly at Franklin’s suggestion. Ever since, scholars have disputed whether equality and liberty actually are self-evident truths. Much of this quarrel results from confusion over the term “self-evident.” The phrase refers, in the words of philosopher Thomas Reid, to “propositions . . . which appear evident to every man of sound understanding who apprehends the meaning of them distinctly and attends to them without prejudice.”8 The fact that throwing a lit match into water will extinguish it is self-evident, for instance, because anyone with enough experience to know what these words mean will need no demonstration to prove it. But rules can be self-evident, too. The principle “innocent until proven guilty,” for example, or “two wrongs don’t make a right,” are also self-evident. Self-evidence is therefore not the same as what philosophers call “analytic truths”—a phrase that refers to conclusions logically implicit in the premises of a syllogism—but neither is it the same as the experimental demonstrations of the physical sciences. The fact that gravity is proportional to mass is not a self-evident truth. The fact that rocks fall to the ground when dropped is.

The Golden Rule is self-evident, because it requires no investigation to justify it beyond an ordinary acquaintance with human nature. Because we know that every person is an essentially self-directed, self-responsible, self-interested being seeking to survive and thrive, we expect others to resent being harmed and appreciate being helped, just as we would. Consequently, the basic principle of interpersonal morality—to treat others as one wishes to be treated—is self-evident to anyone sufficiently acquainted with human beings to form a mature judgment. The principle that “all men are created equal” is equally self-evident; indeed, it is implicit in the Golden Rule. No ordinary adult is marked out as so far superior that he is entitled to run the life of another in the same way that a parent is (self-evidently) responsible for his child’s welfare. And because each person is responsible both to himself and others, each is equally entitled to freedom.

By “created equal,” the Declaration obviously does not mean that people are equal in terms of talents, skills, or character, or that they should be made equal through the redistribution of wealth or by compelling some to labor for others. It just means that nobody is entitled to dictate how others may live. Put another way, “equality” is fundamentally connected to “inalienable rights.”9 The natural equality that characterizes human nature is the possession of the same basic freedom. People are born into unequal circumstances—some rich and others poor. They may use their rights in ways that make them unequal—some may work hard and prosper, while others invest their resources foolishly and suffer. None of this is relevant, however, to the Declaration’s contention that they are equally entitled, indeed required by nature, to manage their own lives.

Jefferson modeled the equality clause on the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by the celebrated elder statesman George Mason, which observed in its first section that “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights.” Striving for concision, Jefferson realized that Mason’s phrasing (“equally free and independent”) could be collapsed into “created equal,” and that “by nature” and “inherent” are technically redundant. He also moved the term “inalienable,” which occurs elsewhere in the Virginia Declaration, into this opening sentence.

“Inalienability” was crucial to refute Thomas Hobbes’ argument that when people establish government, they surrender to it all of their rights. Hobbes concluded from this premise that rebellion against government is never justifiable, even if rulers abuse their power. Although few in America or Britain openly embraced Hobbes’s philosophy in the 1770s, some did contend that rebellion against government was never acceptable. Many Quakers and Anglicans in particular argued that Christianity required passive obedience in all circumstances. Others claimed that as a legal matter, the colonists had surrendered their claims to self-government when they accepted royal charters in the seventeenth century and acquiesced in Parliament’s legislation in the years after that. By asserting inalienability, Jefferson replied that the colonists could not be bound by any previous agreement that intruded too deeply into the liberty to which everyone is entitled.

That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

Jefferson’s decision to modify John Locke’s traditional trio of rights—life, liberty, and property (or “estate”)—has led to confusion over the years. Some have asserted that substituting “pursuit of happiness” for “property” signaled that property is less important than other rights. But Jefferson and his colleagues viewed the right to buy, sell, own, and use property as indispensable to personal freedom. The real reason Jefferson used “pursuit of happiness” is more subtle.

In writing the Virginia Declaration, George Mason had identified the basic rights as “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety,” a phrase that was more comprehensive, but also wordier. Steeped in the ideas of such philosophers as Aristotle, Epicurus, and Cicero, who held that “happiness” or “flourishing” is the purpose of existence, Mason, like Jefferson and Adams, thought the ultimate good of human activity is the well-lived individual life. The reason to acquire and possess property is that it helps one flourish. Thus, in simplifying Mason’s philosophical assertions, Jefferson was saying that people have specific rights because they have the more general right to pursue happiness.

One aspect of this right that scholars too often neglect is its foundational connection to economic freedom. Most Americans in 1776 owned few or no tangible assets; especially immigrants, who often reached American cities penniless, as Franklin had in Philadelphia more than fifty years before. Immigration to America surged in the mid-eighteenth century, with perhaps 400,000 Europeans arriving between 1740 and 1770, many owning nothing but their labor.10 Locke considered labor a kind of property, and the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith agreed in Wealth of Nations, published just four months before the Declaration. “The property which every man has in his own labor, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable,” Smith wrote. “The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands.” To deprive someone of the right to use his labor to earn a living “in what manner he thinks proper” is therefore “a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman, and of those who might be disposed to employ him.”11 Jefferson had been among the most outspoken critics of British trade restrictions, arguing in his Summary View that mercantilism unjustly deprived workingmen of their right to earn a living. In short, the phrase “pursuit of happiness” refers to freedom of opportunity. It encompasses the principle that people have the right to use their liberty to obtain property and thereby enjoy happiness in peace.

Another subtle but important innovation in the Declaration’s phrasing is its use of the word “liberty” in the singular, rather than the plural form. In ancient legal documents such as Magna Carta, kings gave the people lists of specific “liberties”—using the plural because the monarch was granting only a finite number of rights. Reversing this idea, the Declaration asserts that people naturally enjoy “liberty”—a word that literally means an infinite number of freedoms—and that government’s powers, not individual rights, are finite and limited.12 Jefferson himself later defined “liberty” as “unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others,” with the caveat, “I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’; because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.”13 Whereas ancient legal documents presumed that the king owned all rights and could parcel them out as he chose, the Declaration views the individual as presumptively free, with the people giving the government its powers piecemeal. As James Madison put it, in an essay contrasting Magna Carta with the Declaration: “In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example . . . of charters of power granted by liberty.”14

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

The notion that government is an essentially contractual relationship, in which the authorities derive their powers from the consent of the governed, was commonplace in eighteenth-century British thought. Even Loyalists thought the king and Parliament derived their powers from the consent of the governed. They simply argued that Americans were represented in Parliament, in an abstract sense, or that by emigrating to America, their forebears had surrendered the right to vote.15 The Declaration sets that debate aside. It invokes consent as the justification for the right of revolution. Since government officials are servants, not masters, the people have the right to alter or abolish unsatisfactory governments, and to create whatever alternative they think will better serve their needs.

There’s an important limit, however. Only “just powers” derive from the consent of the governed; the people have no right to give their government unjust powers. Just as they cannot rightly commit robbery or murder, so they cannot deputize the government to do so. That explains why the Declaration’s closing lines assert that the new states may only do “acts and things which independent states may of right do.” The principle that government’s powers are cabined by the universal principles of justice runs throughout the Declaration’s text, which refers to justice more than to any other value except liberty.16

Consent therefore plays a dual role, both justifying and limiting government power. As Jefferson later said, the people “are inherently independent of all but moral law.”17 The people cannot consent to tyrannical or despotic governments, even if they were so deluded as to try. Nor can they excuse evil government actions by “consenting” to them. Implicitly recognizing the risk of the “tyranny of the majority,” the Declaration sees democracy as an instrumental good—not as an end, but as a means to achieving a higher political value: the preservation of individual freedom. As Jefferson later said, while “the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable,” and must recognize that “the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect.”18

The Declaration’s implicit prioritization of rights over democracy has proven to be one of its most controversial features, as critics claim that its individualist vision elevates “selfishness” over “community” or “the common good.” But the Declaration recognizes that the preservation of each individual’s freedom is the common good, at least as far as the political realm is concerned. It is the only political ambition that, when achieved, imposes no injustice upon some people for the gratification of others. Nothing about this fact is inconsistent with acknowledging the importance of community, the value of helping the less fortunate, or the need to work together to address social ills such as poverty or pollution. In fact, working to remedy such problems can often be more rewarding in terms of personal “happiness” than the acquisitive and productive activities of the marketplace. But the Declaration recognizes that most of these issues are better addressed through “civil society”—the realm of private charitable and social organizations, which operate on the basis of personal choice and voluntary cooperation—than in the political realm, which is governed by compulsion.

The Declaration’s recognition that preserving individual freedom is the highest political good—the only truly common political good—does not, as communitarians sometimes charge, make it a manifesto for so-called atomistic individualism.19 Rather, it recognizes that social problems are often too complicated to be solved by government, and that efforts to impose political solutions on social problems usually backfire, worsening the original problem and violating the rights of the innocent. Thus the best way to address them is usually through private institutions—charities, churches, trade organizations, and the like—for the same reason that the best kinds of interpersonal relationships are those we freely choose. In short, the Declaration prioritizes the individual’s right to pursue his or her own happiness, while recognizing that this pursuit is often most fruitful in the company of others. That explains why it ends with one of the strongest forms of community bond imaginable: a mutual pledge of life, fortune, and sacred honor.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Jefferson said that he consulted no books or pamphlets when writing the Declaration, but that when his colleague Richard Henry Lee—who had officially offered the motion to declare independence—saw Jefferson’s draft, he “charged it as copied from Locke.”20 If so, Lee had a keen eye. In 1689, Locke phrased his rationale for revolution in quite similar terms. It was “evident in itself,” he wrote in the Second Treatise that “all mankind” are created “equal and independent,” and that although they “are more disposed to suffer, than [to] right themselves by resistance,” the people have the right, “whenever the legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy [their] property,” or “endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over [their] lives, liberties, and estates,” to “resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, such as they shall think fit, provide for their own safety and security.”21 In the Treatise’s closing chapters, Locke responded to those who feared this principle would lead to frequent rebellions. Revolutions, he explained, are not justified by “every little mismanagement in public affairs,” or even “great mistakes” by rulers. Instead, the people have a right to rebel only when “a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way,” prove that the authorities are seeking “to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power.”22

Jefferson had employed markedly similar wording in his Summary View—written only five years after his intense, self-directed crash-course on political theory—and now he used it in the Declaration.23 Of course, these parallels are no surprise; by the summer of 1776, Locke’s wording had been quoted and paraphrased so often in declarations, petitions, and newspaper debates, that most Patriot leaders could recite it by heart.

Although Locke’s arguments for revolution were well known on both sides of the Atlantic, they remained controversial in the 1770s. Legal scholar William Blackstone thought they could justify rebelling against a king, but not against Parliament, which “has absolute, sovereign, and uncontrollable authority.” Acknowledging that “Mr. Locke, and other theoretical writers” had reasoned to the contrary, Blackstone concluded that their views, “however just . . . in theory,” could never be accepted in practice. On the contrary, “as [long as] the English constitution lasts . . . the power of Parliament is absolute and without control.”24

Jefferson took the opposite view. No government that claims “absolute” power can ever be legitimate, because the people can no more surrender their rights to a legislature than they can to a king. Their rights are “inalienable,” meaning that the people en masse always retain the power to change their government and even overthrow it if it becomes abusive enough. In fact, the Declaration calls this not just a right, but a “duty”—a duty the people owe to themselves and their children (whose rights they have no authority to abandon). This duty was so essential that Franklin even incorporated it into a proposed national motto. In the weeks following independence, when Congress considered adopting a new set of symbols for use in official documents, Franklin designed a national seal depicting Moses parting the Red Sea, surrounded by the words “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”25 His proposal was rejected, but Jefferson liked the slogan so much he had it painted on his dishes. He gave one of the bowls to Adams as a present.26

Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

This passage marks the first mention of the king—against whom the entire Declaration was addressed. The document never refers to Parliament by name, calling it only “a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution”—which was consistent with the Patriots’ contention that Westminster never had legislative authority over the colonies in the first place. In their view, Americans were bound to the British political system only by sharing the same monarch, which was why they had consistently professed loyalty to George III, even if they sometimes did so through clenched teeth. They thought the king’s job was to stand above the political system, adjudicating disputes among subjects. Yet George had now declared himself unwilling to do that, thus breaking the reciprocal bond of allegiance and protection. Because that was the sole thread connecting America with Britain, severing it rendered the colonies independent.

Fifty years later, Adams claimed that had he disliked Jefferson’s reference to George as a “tyrant.” He remembered thinking the charge “too personal,” adding that he “never believed George to be a tyrant in disposition and in nature.”27 But by the time he wrote this, Adams’s memory was influenced by memories of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which had drawn his sympathies toward England. During the independence summer, he offered no objection to the word “tyrant.”28

In fact, it was appropriate. Tyrants rule by fear and intimidation rather than consent, and by 1776, George had made clear that he intended to subdue the Americans by violence and terror. What’s more, he approved Parliament’s claim to total authority over the colonies—a degree of absolutism that included the power to override fundamental constitutional guarantees. His support for Parliamentary absolutism was not inevitable; he could have chosen otherwise. Yet he insisted on backing up Westminster’s assertions of power with overwhelming force, proving much more belligerent than even most of his subordinates. As historian Andrew O’Shaughnessy observes, George was “the main driving force of the British war for America,” regularly urging violence even when his advisors recommended against it.29

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015
176 pp. $9.90 (paperback).

Mother Courage and Her Children is widely regarded as a brilliant, clinical dissection of wartime economies and as the pinnacle of epic theater.1 Yet its precise theme masks a profound dramatic failure. By taking away the titular character’s power to choose and using her merely to prove a point, playwright Bertolt Brecht denies her the moral realization that gives tragedy its meaning. What might have been a profound human drama instead becomes a political demonstration—one that replaces the struggle of a person capable of moral choices with the static passivity of an ideological illustration.

Critics praise the play’s intellectual ambition, structural innovation, and use of the “alienation effect,” a technique intended to discourage audiences from becoming emotionally absorbed in the drama and to instead encourage them to analyze the effects of the material conditions at work on stage.2

Mother Courage and Her Children takes place during the Thirty Years’ War and follows Anna Fierling (known as Mother Courage) as she travels across Europe with a wagon selling food, alcohol, and supplies to soldiers. War enables her livelihood; over the course of the play, however, the conflict that sustains her business gradually destroys her family.

At first glance, the structure of the play appears ideally suited to tragedy: A parent attempts to survive within a brutal social environment only to discover that the system she depends on exacts a terrible personal price. In classical tragedy, such suffering leads to recognition; the protagonist comes to understand the moral meaning of her own actions. Aristotle called this moment anagnorisis: a realization that transforms misfortune into insight and gives the tragedy its emotional and philosophic resolution.3 Brecht, however, deliberately denies us this moment. As he argued: “it is not the business of the playwright to arm Mother Courage with insight. . . she is a merchant, and her business is her ruin.”4

His thesis is that war is an economic system that rewards and destroys its participants simultaneously. To underscore the inescapable nature of this system, Brecht ensures that Mother Courage never learns.5 By denying her a moment of realization, he attempts to demonstrate that, once one is profit-bound to the machinery of war, there is no exit. She never confronts the lethal connection between her livelihood and her losses—she simply continues to pull the wagon and so remains a prisoner of her own choices.

This lack of development is a direct result of Brecht’s theory of epic theater. He does not want us to feel empathy for Mother Courage—he wants us to judge her. This distancing effect is established in the very first scene, when the cold logic of the wartime economy is laid bare. A recruiter challenges Mother Courage, singing “Like the war to nourish you? / Have to feed it something too” (13).

With this line, Brecht begins to reveal Mother Courage’s role not as a developing human soul but as a figure driven by the mercenary logic of the battlefield. She acts as a small entrepreneur seeking to profit from the slaughter, attempting the impossible task of remaining morally detached from the very violence that sustains her livelihood.

Nothing illustrates Brecht’s subordination of drama to ideology more chillingly than the death of her grown son Swiss Cheese in scene three.6 When Mother Courage learns that a bribe of two hundred florins can save him, her immediate reaction is not a mother’s desperation but a merchant’s calculation. She pivots quickly to haggling: “Two hundred’s too much for me . . . tell them I’ll pay hundred and twenty florins, else it’s all off” (40–42).

This moment is the structural heart of Brecht’s demonstration. Even with her son’s life on the line, Mother Courage fails to earn her nickname. She attempts to justify her hesitation by claiming that she must “keep a bit back” to ensure that she isn’t shoved into a ditch by the next “Tom, Dick and Harry.” She is so focused on her startup capital for a new life—calculating that, with eighty florins, she could “fill a pack with goods and start again”—that she explicitly allows the murder of her own son. The cost of this economic hesitation is exactly: “Eleven bullets they gave him, that’s all” (40–44).

The scene concludes with a moment that strips the protagonist of her last vestige of humanity. She denies her own son, driven by the belief that her survival and business depend on it. As a sergeant shows her the body and asks “Know him?”, she simply shakes her head. In Brecht’s view, this is the ultimate evidence that the wartime system destroys the human soul. But from a dramatic standpoint, it feels like the conclusion of a mathematical proof. Brecht ensures that the “haggling,” as an army chaplain later describes her cold negotiation, leads to death so that the audience will learn the lesson. By doing so, he succeeds in making a political point, but he fails to allow Mother Courage the moral recognition that would help the audience understand the intellectual point by making them feel the tragedy of her story—which is the entire point of fiction.

Brecht’s ideological point is clear: Mother Courage has become so corrupted that even the life of her child is subject to a financial cost-benefit analysis. But from a dramatic perspective, this scene reveals Brecht’s fundamental misunderstanding of the basic purpose of fiction. The way in which Brecht has his protagonist prioritize her wagon over her son’s life doesn’t explore the depths of human grief or the complexity of a mother’s soul—it is economic soapboxing. He denies her the visceral, desperate response we expect from a parent, ensuring instead that she remains a hollow vessel for his critique of war as the ultimate “capitalist” enterprise.

The reason lies in his theory of epic theater.7 Unlike genuine drama, which gives the audience reasons to identify emotionally with the characters, Brecht seeks in his plays to maintain distance between audience and performance. Songs interrupt scenes rather than adding to or connecting them, as they would in a musical or with a classical chorus. Additionally, narratively fragmented episodes replace continuous narrative development, and characters often function less as psychologically complex individuals than as archetypes of social roles.

These techniques are intended to provoke analysis rather than empathy and are predicated on the false dichotomy that the two are necessarily opposed. Brecht operates on the belief that, for the audience to observe the mechanisms of war and society objectively, such mechanisms must be stripped of emotional weight. However, this rigid separation ignores the possibility that empathizing with Mother Courage could actually deepen the viewer’s understanding of her context. Instead, Brecht asks his audience to judge the system, assuming that one cannot—or should not—both feel and think simultaneously.

Within this framework, Mother Courage becomes a figure illustrating a broader social dynamic: the small entrepreneur who attempts to profit from war while convincing herself that she can remain morally detached from its consequences. Brecht’s point is clear: War does not merely destroy lives directly—it also encourages individuals to participate in systems that ultimately destroy them. Yet the method Brecht employs to deliver his message comes at a cost.

As the play progresses, Mother Courage suffers a series of devastating losses. However, these are not mere accidents of war—they are tragedies in which Courage is deeply complicit. Each child’s death is a direct consequence of her prioritizing the “business of war” over the child’s safety. Her son Eilif is recruited while Mother Courage is distracted by a potential sale, a choice that exposes a moral vacuum created by his mother’s priorities. While her daughter Kattrin chooses to trade her life for the safety of a city, Courage is elsewhere, attempting to profit from the city’s impending destruction. Courage’s complicity lies not in pulling the trigger but in her absence; by prioritizing the “logic of the wagon” over her presence as a mother, she invites the tragedy she claims to be working to prevent.

These moments could provide opportunities for psychological transformation if she were to reconsider the ruthless assumptions that govern her life.8 Instead, the play systematically prevents such development.

At the conclusion of the drama, after losing all of her children, Mother Courage does not undergo a change of character. She does not abandon the behaviors that destroyed her family. She does not reach a moment of moral clarity. Instead, she straps herself to the wagon and continues following the army.

From Brecht’s perspective, this ending is essential. If Mother Courage were to learn from her experience, the audience might leave the theater with a sense of emotional resolution. Brecht wishes to deny that resolution—not as an end in itself but as a means to focus the audience’s attention on the system that traps her.9

The problem with this approach is that it transforms Mother Courage from a dramatic protagonist into a didactic device. Her suffering illustrates Brecht’s thesis, but it does not produce a fully realized human journey. Instead of witnessing a person grappling with moral consequences, the audience observes a deterministic demonstration of Brecht’s economic views. Any work that seeks to demonstrate a truth about the human experience while denying its characters humanity necessarily undermines itself.

Great drama emerges from the tension between individuals (or within the same individual) over differing ideas. Great characters embody philosophic or sociological principles, but they also challenge them through their actions and choices. When a playwright removes that tension from the story instead of letting the characters resolve it, the drama loses its human center.

To be fair, Mother Courage contains moments of undeniable theatrical power. The recurring image of Mother Courage pulling her wagon across a devastated landscape is one of the most haunting symbols in modern theater. The wagon represents survival, commerce, stubbornness, and tragic blindness all at once. The play also captures an uncomfortable truth about human behavior in times of conflict: Individuals frequently adapt to destructive systems rather than resist them. They rationalize participation in those systems even when the consequences become increasingly catastrophic. Brecht portrays this dynamic with remarkable precision.

The true tragedy of Mother Courage and Her Children is not that the protagonist loses everything but that she learns nothing. In the final moments of scene twelve, after burying her last child, Mother Courage performs an act that is both physically and symbolically devastating: She harnesses herself to the cart (86–88). This stage direction is the culmination of Brecht’s ideological trap. Throughout the play, her children were the ones who pulled the wagon; they were the motors of her business. With them dead, she does not abandon the trade that killed them. Instead, she replaces them, declaring “Hope I can pull cart all right by meself . . . Got to get back in business again.” By the time the offstage chorus begins the final song, the play’s thesis has been fully realized. The lyrics remind us that “The war is dragging on a bit / Another hundred years or longer,” and that although “the dead remain,” life—or rather, the machine of war—simply “staggers to its feet again.” Courage’s decision to shout “Take me along!” to the passing regiment is not a sign of resilience—it is a sign of total moral capitulation (88). She has devolved from a hopeful opportunist into a perpetuator of the very wartime economy she once sought to exploit.

Nearly a century after its creation, Brecht’s critically acclaimed play continues to provoke admiration for its intellectual rigor. He succeeded brilliantly in showing us how people can hollow out their own souls. However, by removing the tension central to fiction, Brecht sacrificed the human center of his drama.

In a genuine tragedy, the protagonist’s suffering leads to a transformative insight that gives the loss meaning. In Mother Courage, there is no such insight—only the endless, circular motion of the wagon. Brecht wanted the audience to learn the lesson that his character could not. But in his attempt, he turned what could have been a profound human journey into a cold political demonstration. The audience leaves the theater with a clear thesis, but the character remains trapped in a loop of blindness. In the end, Brecht’s ideological commitment is so absolute that it denies Mother Courage the one thing she needed to become truly tragic: the agency to understand her own story.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

When John Adams was asked in the summer of 1826 to compose a toast for the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he offered merely two words: “Independence forever.” When asked if he wanted to elaborate, the ninety-year-old ex-president replied, “Not a word” (1).

As we approach the 250th anniversary of American independence, Timothy Sandefur’s Proclaiming Liberty arrives at a moment when the Declaration is under assault from all directions. It’s dismissed by many conservatives as dangerously abstract, repudiated by “progressives” as a hypocritical cover for oppression, and treated by many legal scholars as mere rhetoric with no binding legal force. Opposing all these positions, Sandefur mounts a carefully documented, intellectually serious, and genuinely stirring defense: He argues that the Declaration meant exactly what it said, that its authors knew what they were doing, and that the principles it proclaims are as valid today as they were in 1776. “What makes the Declaration more than ‘merely revolutionary,’” writes Sandefur, “is the electric spark animating its circuits: the idea that all men are created equal, with inalienable rights, which government must respect, and which people may justly vindicate by rebelling against tyranny” (11).

Sandefur is a prolific scholar whose previous books have covered Frederick Douglass, property rights, and the history of classical liberalism. He is comfortable with legal and philosophic complexities, but he also has demonstrated an ability to write compelling narratives about history rather than dry treatises (most notably in Freedom’s Furies, the story of how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand pioneered the modern liberty movement). In Proclaiming Liberty, he combines both skills. The book is a dual biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, a history of the American Revolution, and a legal argument all woven together with two central questions: How did these men come to believe so strongly in the principles of liberty, and why does it still matter?

The Origins of the Declaration

The first half of the book traces the intellectual growth of Adams and Jefferson from childhood through the eve of American independence. Sandefur demonstrates that the philosophic framework underlying the Declaration was not invented by its authors on the fly during a crisis; rather, it was the considered conclusion of decades of study, legal and moral argument, and direct colonial experience.

For Adams, the thread runs from Cicero and the Stoics through John Locke and Cato’s Letters to the Boston minister Jonathan Mayhew. Mayhew argued that government officials derive their authority from the people, not from divine right or mere custom, and that a ruler who governs tyrannically should be resisted. Mayhew had a profound impression on the fourteen-year-old Adams, who years later sent a copy of Mayhew’s 1749 sermon to Jefferson in retirement, remembering how it had been “a tolerable catechism for the education of a boy . . . who was destined in the future course of his life to dabble in so many revolutions” (21).

Jefferson’s intellectual formation happened largely in Virginia rather than Massachusetts. His mentors, William Small and George Wythe, introduced him to the works of Newton, Locke, and Bacon. He was also a devotee of Greek and Roman philosophers, including Epicurus, Lucretius, and the Stoics. He studied law in Wythe’s office, attended the Virginia House of Burgesses, and at twenty-one, was electrified by the spectacle of Patrick Henry denouncing the Stamp Act. Jefferson later said of Henry, “He appeared to me to speak as Homer wrote” (105). Henry’s main argument was essentially the same as Mayhew’s: The British Parliament’s claim of the right to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever” was not a legitimate extension of authority but a usurpation because it rendered the colonists entirely subservient to a legislature in which they had no voice (105).

Sandefur weaves many fascinating anecdotes about both Adams and Jefferson throughout the book, such as the first time Jefferson publicly spoke the words “all men are born free” during his legal defense of a black slave, six years before the Declaration of Independence.

Sandefur traces the decade from the Stamp Act crisis to the Declaration with particular care, and this is one of the book’s most valuable contributions. Most popular accounts of the Revolution oversimplify the situation by reducing it to a story of taxation and rebellion, as if Americans went to war over a stamp duty. Sandefur shows that much more was at stake. He explains that Parliament’s claim was not merely that it could impose taxes—it was that there were no principled limits on its authority at all. British judge William Blackstone even wrote that Parliament could do “everything that is not naturally impossible” (5). It was this doctrine of unlimited parliamentary supremacy—not the details of any single act—that led the colonists to conclude that no diplomatic solution was possible.

Throughout the book, Sandefur effectively demonstrates that this was an argument from principle, not a post-hoc rationalization for a decision already made on other grounds (11). He writes, “For a decade, lawyers like Adams and Jefferson devoted tremendous amounts of time to scholarship, debate, and sometimes delicate negotiations, searching for that solution. But none could be found” (6). The evidence the colonists accumulated to support their grievances was substantial. Sandefur documents the escalation in concrete detail: colonial assemblies shuttered, petitions refused and left unread, soldiers quartered in private homes, jury trials denied and replaced by admiralty courts, American sailors conscripted into the Royal Navy, and even a royal proclamation declaring the colonists the legal equivalents of foreign enemies (6).

By 1776, the question was not whether Americans had legitimate grievances—it was whether those grievances justified the radical step of declaring independence. The Declaration was the argument that they did. Sandefur says that in 1776 Americans “gave up legal and constitutional debates, ceased to assert the ‘traditional rights of Englishmen,’ and put forward their rights as human beings instead” (11).

What the Declaration Actually Says

The book’s second half turns from history to a careful analysis of rights, first principles, and what the Declaration actually says.

The chapter titled “The Rights of British America” covers the Continental Congress of 1774 and its effort to articulate exactly what Americans were entitled to and why. Sandefur shows that this Congress marked the moment the colonial argument shifted from complaints to principled refusals: The Congress did not merely list grievances but declared that Americans possessed rights “by the immutable laws of nature”—rights to life, liberty, and property; to trial by jury; to representative government—rights they had “never ceded to any sovereign power whatever” (251). Following that logic, Parliament’s claim of authority to legislate “in all cases whatsoever” made a diplomatic settlement impossible because accepting such a claim would mean accepting the idea that rights were not immutable “laws of nature” but privileges to be granted or withdrawn at the whim of Parliament or a king (5).

In the face of this realization, the founders responded by asserting the moral principle that precedes, necessitates, and legitimizes government: individual rights. Sandefur argues that when the king refused even to read colonial petitions and endorsed Parliament’s absolutism outright, Americans could no longer defend themselves only with law and history; more fundamental principles were needed. What remained was the deeper question of what makes any government legitimate in the first place. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the “sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records”—they are inherent within human nature itself (304). That shift from the rights of Englishmen to the rights of all people is what Sandefur identifies as the intellectual pivot that made the Declaration of Independence not merely possible but necessary.

The Continental Congress’s endorsement of the Suffolk Resolves in September 1774 was, in Sandefur’s telling, a crucial moment—and Adams called it “one of the happiest days of my life.” Drafted by Adams’s friend Joseph Warren after the Massachusetts Government Act banned town meetings, the Resolves declared that no obedience was owed to Parliament’s illegitimate legislation, called on royal officials to resign, urged colonists to arm themselves, and recommended holding any official who tried to seize colonial munitions in “safe custody.” When the Continental Congress officially endorsed this language, British Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Dartmouth proclaimed that it amounted to a declaration of war. He was not wrong. The Congress had moved from petitioning for relief to sanctioning organized resistance, crossing a threshold that could not be uncrossed. Two years before Jefferson put pen to paper, Warren had already stated the essential point: Parliament’s authority was not recognized.

Sandefur then turns to the Declaration and walks through it clause by clause—not as a dry technical analysis but as an effort to uncover what its authors understood themselves to be saying, which turns out to be more rigorous than either its admirers or critics typically acknowledge.

“All men are created equal” is perhaps the most misread phrase in political history. Sandefur addresses both the “progressive” reading (that it promises equality of outcomes) and the conservative reading (that it was a statement about human nature in theory, not a rule for how government must treat people in practice). Sandefur explains why both are wrong:

By “created equal,” the Declaration obviously does not mean that people are equal in terms of talents, skills, or character, or that they should be made equal through the redistribution of wealth or by compelling some to labor for others. It just means that nobody is entitled to dictate how others may live. (330)

Sandefur also points out that unlike the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Jefferson made no exception when it came to slavery, saying “his wording asserts unequivocally that the equality of rights is inherent in human beings, whose rights may never be justly taken away” (331).

The substitution of “pursuit of happiness” for the third part of John Locke’s traditional triad of life, liberty, and property receives particular attention, and Sandefur’s analysis is illuminating. He explains that Jefferson was not ignoring property rights—he was making a philosophical point: The reason that people have a right to property is that they have a more fundamental right to pursue happiness—to live a flourishing life as each individual defines it and by his own effort. Property is the result of one’s effort and labor; to take it without consent is to take a portion of someone’s life. Jefferson and the founders understood economic freedom and the pursuit of happiness as inseparable. “In short,” Sandefur writes, “the phrase ‘pursuit of happiness’ refers to freedom of opportunity. It encompasses the principle that people have the right to use their liberty to obtain property and thereby enjoy happiness in peace” (333).

Equally important is Sandefur’s treatment of the Declaration’s theory of government. Jefferson wrote in the Declaration that governments derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.”1^[1] The word “just” is doing crucial work here. This means that the people cannot organize a government to do what the majority wishes; they can only organize a government that is just. A government designed to oppress any minority (or majority) by popular vote is not a legitimate government, merely a more democratically organized gang. Limiting majority rule by making individual rights foremost is one of the Declaration’s most philosophically important features; without it, the principle of consent collapses into the “tyranny of the majority.” Critics say that this ignores the “common good.” Sandefur addresses this succinctly: “the Declaration recognizes that the preservation of each individual’s freedom is the common good, at least as far as the political realm is concerned” (334–35).

Perhaps the most original section of the book is Sandefur’s argument that the Declaration is not merely a historical document but actual law. He points out that it appears on page 1 of Volume One of the United States Code, is implicitly referenced in the Constitution, and has been regularly applied by courts from the nineteenth century to the present. The claim that the Declaration is not law—advanced by scholars including Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Amy Coney Barrett—rests, Sandefur argues, on an indefensibly narrow concept of what constitutes law. Sandefur points out that laws, to be legally binding, need not command specific behavior or prescribe specific penalties; many laws, such as the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, set out principles that guide interpretation without prescribing conduct. The Declaration does the same, establishing the ethical and legal framework for the Constitution. State courts have cited it in cases involving jury rights, occupational licensing, property, and more. Sandefur offers a slew of historical and recent precedents to make his case, including the Amistad trial, writing, “John Quincy Adams cited the Declaration in his famous argument before the Supreme Court in the Amistad case to support his contention that enslaved Africans had the right to kill their enslavers in self-defense” (397).

Whatever one concludes about the specific applications, Sandefur shows that the legal argument that the Declaration is irrelevant to constitutional interpretation is untenable.

1776 Versus 1619

The book closes with an afterword originally published as an essay rebutting the New York Times’s 1619 Project, and it is a model of how to take on a biased, historically distorted argument while keeping his own response measured and fair. Sandefur does not deny America’s history of slavery and racial injustice. He argues that the 1619 Project is a metaphor that fails on its own terms; the claim that America was founded on slavery and that racism is “embedded in the DNA” of the country is historically incoherent, requiring the evasion or suppression of enormous portions of the actual record.

His most devastating point is the simplest. If the Declaration’s authors did not believe the principles they wrote—if “all men are created equal” was somehow a cover for protecting slavery—then why did slavery’s most committed defenders spend decades attacking the Declaration? John C. Calhoun was explicit, announcing that the proposition that all men are created equal contained “not a word of truth”—that people “are not born free,” and that the equality clause had been “inserted” in the Declaration “without any necessity” (380). Chief Justice Taney worked hard in the Dred Scott case to explain why he thought the principles did not apply to black Americans. These men understood exactly what the Declaration said and went to great lengths to argue against it. The 1619 Project’s claim that the founding was a pro-slavery project is refuted by the behavior of slavery’s explicit champions, who recognized that the Declaration was their mortal enemy.

Sandefur also notes what the 1619 Project tries to erase: that the world’s first antislavery society was founded in Philadelphia in 1775, that the opponents of slavery consistently appealed to the Declaration’s principles, and that the Fourteenth Amendment was understood by its framers as a refounding—a fulfillment—of the Declaration’s promise rather than a repudiation of it. Sandefur notes that Martin Luther King Jr. called the Declaration “America’s promissory note.” The standard against which American failures are measured is the Declaration’s standard. To replace it with a false narrative is not to broaden American history but to grotesquely distort it and to deprive Americans of the very principles they need to identify and correct injustice.

Why It Matters Now

When it comes to the Declaration, there is a recurring pattern among American historians, intellectuals, and politicians: It is invoked when convenient and minimized when inconvenient by people across the political spectrum. Conservatives who dislike its universalism call it dangerously abstract or insufficiently rooted in tradition. “Progressives” who dislike its individualism call it a fraud. Legal positivists of both camps call it irrelevant.2 What Sandefur demonstrates, patiently and with formidable evidence, is that all these positions require misreading the document, its authors, or both.

The Declaration is not abstract in the pejorative usage of the term. It is grounded in a specific theory of human nature and political organization that Adams and Jefferson did not conjure out of thin air but rather inherited, tested, refined, and ultimately staked their lives on. That theory—that individuals have rights preceding government, that government’s authority is conditional on its protection of those rights, and that no majority can legitimately authorize the violation of those rights—is not a sentiment or an aspiration. It is the moral foundation on which the United States was built and the argument to which Americans have historically turned when confronting injustice.

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, the arguments in this book are not academic. The foundational nature of individual rights—the fact that they exist prior to government and constrain what the government may do and are not merely grants that presidents, legislatures, and courts extend and revoke at will—is as contested today as it was in the 1760s. Sandefur’s book does not pretend the question is easy. What it does show—with considerable scholarship and genuine passion—is that the men who first faced that question thought hard about it, argued through it, and reached a firm conclusion that has yet to be improved upon.

Adams wanted nothing added to “Independence Forever.” Sandefur, to his immense credit, does add something: a rigorous and compelling account of where those words came from and why they continue to matter.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

She had everything she needed to become an Olympic champion. But first, she needed to quit.

In 2026, Alysa Liu became the first American woman to earn an individual figure skating gold medal at the Olympics in twenty-four years. Though her performance alone communicates a lot about her beautiful attitude toward this professional pursuit, the life-serving principles behind it reveal the important moral point embedded in that victory.

To grasp the attitude Alysa embodied at the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics, one must understand where she had been before. She was sixteen years old when she placed sixth at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and had already won three consecutive U.S. national championships. She had the technical arsenal to compete at the highest level for another decade—yet she walked away. “I was done a year before I quit. I knew I wanted to be done way before I actually announced my retirement,” she admitted later.1

She enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, as a psychology student. She spent time with friends. She traveled a lot. She did all the things that normal teenagers do but that competitive figure skaters are routinely denied because of their tight schedules. Looking back, she described her pre-retirement rhythm: “Going to the rink, going home, competing. There were many, many times when I didn’t enjoy it.”2 Figure skating had become a set of blind obligations that she had never consciously chosen. “I was lacking experience in other things in the world. All I knew was skating, and I just wanted to live my life, I guess,” Alysa said.3 She was craving experiences beyond the borders of the ice rink.

However, by the end of her freshman year, her attitude toward figure skating had shifted. “Taking a step away from the sport allowed me to understand myself, because I’d never had the time before, the space to figure out who I was,” she said. “Taking a step away allowed me to see the full picture.”4 That full picture included the realization that skating could be different—that she could be different—if she returned on her own terms. “There was a time where I wasn’t confident in myself or I didn’t know I could step out of the lane,” she reflected. “That was up until I was sixteen years old when I stepped away from the sport. That was my first out-of-the-lane decision and my authenticity just domino [effected].”5 So, she decided to return—not because she felt pressure to be back on ice, had unfinished business, or something to prove to someone, and not as an obligation or an identity she had been assigned at age five. She returned because having lived without figure skating, she discovered that she wanted it. This time it was a choice of a mature, self-directed soul.

Massimo Scali, one of her two coaches, saw profound changes in her return. “I saw freedom and control,” he said. “I saw a woman who knew what she wanted and was ready to step back into the arena with even more passion and joy than before.” Alysa and her coaches started to deal with each other as independent equals, each offering something valuable—she was not sacrificing, nor were they controlling her. Scali explained: “We share a very similar way of believing in skating and in life in general. We have the same values, the same sensitivity, and a deep respect for each other.”6 The terms of her return reflected this fully. She chose the outfits and music for her performances by herself, ate what she wanted, and rested whenever she needed to. “We know her well and understand that complete freedom is essential for her to achieve results. Not a single step is taken without her consent. She is a full partner in our team; we are equals and respect each other’s opinions,” Scali elaborated.7 A coaching relationship built on those terms is rare—and it’s precisely that rarity that made the subsequent results so impressive.

An important characteristic she brought this time was what she wanted to be known for—her creativity. “I’m really big into fashion; I have my own sense of style for sure,” she said. “I have input in my figure skating dresses . . . and I wanna share that creative process, as well.”8 She integrated her sense of self with her athletic pursuit—figure skating became a pathway for her creative expression. The program packaging, the costumes, the choreography—all of it became a part of a unified creative vision that she authored. “There needs to be more individuality,” she said. “People deserve the space to express themselves and I’m glad that people are looking to me as inspiration to do that.”9

After winning gold, she spoke about the Olympics with genuine excitement. She compared her two Olympic experiences as follows: “I am grateful for both Olympic experiences, but I feel like I am more gracious now because I have stuff that I want to share, and I want to be here. And I think that’s the difference from last time.”10 This perspective connects to a broader truth about human achievement: Productive work, at its best, is not merely a means to external reward. It is an expression of one’s identity. Alysa started to skate with creativity, with individuality, and thus with joy.

With her performance at the Olympics, Alysa demonstrated that the dichotomy between enjoying yourself and working hard is false. What she experienced in Milan was genuine joy. When asked afterward how she felt on that ice, she replied, “Calm, happy and confident.”11 This attitude comes from a mindset that sees excellence and joy as naturally belonging together. “When you enjoy doing something, you can excel at it,” her second coach DiGuglielmo said. “She can really show that you can do what you love, do it really well, and win the Olympics.”12

Her victory showcases that joy is not an obstacle to achievement. It is not something to be suppressed in the service of accomplishments. It is the foundation upon which they are properly built. The result of this attitude was an athlete who could say before the biggest competition of her life: “I don’t need a medal. I just need to be here and show people what I can do.”13 After winning gold, she elaborated: “I don’t need this,” she said of the medal. “What I needed was the stage, and I got that, so I was all good no matter what happened.”14 A person who needs a medal is pursuing achievement as validation—so if it does not arrive, that person leaves with nothing or with disappointment. A person who sees the stage as a place for self-expression—as an opportunity to do what she loves and to share it with others—is pursuing performance. The former orientation focuses solely on the outcome, whereas the latter focuses on the joy that comes from the process. “I’m OK if I do a fail program. I’m totally OK if I do a great program. No matter what the outcome is, it’s still my story,” Alysa said.15 She was there to do what she had mastered, to do it well, and to enjoy doing it. Everything else—the medals, the records, the historical significance—was secondary.

Some might mistake this approach as an argument against struggle. It is not. Struggle is an essential part of a meaningful life because every meaningful thing you build requires it. Learning a skill is a struggle. Building a relationship is a struggle. Starting something from nothing is a struggle. What makes these struggles meaningful is a direction chosen deliberately; they are in service of a specific goal. But it can become destructive when a struggle becomes a permanent state that has lost its direction; when it’s no longer in service of anything; when it’s disconnected from a person’s goals and values and has become its own destination. When one stops asking “What is this difficulty moving me toward?” and “Is this goal really what I want now?,” the struggle stops being productive and results in dissatisfaction with life rather than in a reward. Alysa articulated this herself: “I love struggling, actually,” she said. “It makes me feel alive.”16 These are not the words of someone who avoids difficulty but of an athlete who understands that struggle, when it serves a chosen purpose, is evidence that she is engaged in something important to her. She did not return to skating believing she could avoid difficulty. She returned knowing that the difficulties were worth bearing because they were in service of her chosen values. They had a purpose she had authored herself. That is the only kind of struggle that produces not merely achievement but fulfillment.

When asked directly about Olympic pressure, Alysa’s response was precise: “You would have to explain what Olympic pressure is. Who is giving—who is the pressure?”17 She understood that the Olympic pressure many athletes feel is no more than an individual interpretation—a meaning assigned to circumstances by a mind that has decided that those circumstances are threatening. The circumstances themselves are not threatening. What transforms them into pressure is the athlete’s decision to treat them that way. Alysa decided not to choose that path, grasping that although external circumstances are not under her control, the orientation of her mind toward them is. This attitude allowed her to fully enjoy what would otherwise have been such a stressful moment. “What is there to lose? Every second you’re there, you’re gaining something,” she said. There’s nothing to be lost. . . . I can’t think of anything that I would find stressful or anything that would—could bring me down.”18 She looked fearless from the outside, but that fearlessness didn’t appear from nowhere—it came from the clarity she obtained by reflecting on what she genuinely valued and what she expected to take from the Olympics.

Having this attitude, Alysa is aware of the example she sets for others—particularly younger athletes who may feel trapped by expectations or unable to assert their own needs. “It’s doing stuff that people tell you you shouldn’t do,” she said. “I’ve been doing a lot of that.”19 Her decision to step away from skating and return on her own terms exemplified how athletes can take control of their own destinies in pressure-packed environments. “I really am the one deciding for myself what to do,” Alysa said. “It’s all revolved around what I want to do, which I personally like. I get to decide what I want to wear to the rink, and which rinks I want to go to—all that. It’s liberating.”20

In competitive sport, athletes are often shaped from childhood by coaches, parents, and national federations—and gradually by the weight of expectations they have internalized as their own. She reclaimed authorship of her own life. “It feels like I’m really just doing what I want to do and I’m more confident in myself.”21

Self-confidence for Alysa wasn’t instilled by external validation or winning the medal. It emerged from the experience of making her own choices and discovering that she could trust herself. Her advice is direct and uncompromising: “Don’t compare yourself to anybody. Stay on your own path, your own journey, and focus on yourself.”22 She grasped that the proper foundation for consistent achievement is a joyful attitude toward the pursuit—and that preserving that attitude requires an independently defined purpose of it. Freedom embodied by genuine authorship of one’s life is a precondition of excellence in any serious pursuit. Alysa did not succeed by relinquishing control of her career. She succeeded because she took full control of it—and the self-made decision to leave, counterintuitively, made her return possible.

Alysa showed that when you pursue what you have chosen by your independent judgment, excellence and joy follow naturally. The day after her victory, she reflected on the experience: “I mean, it was just bliss. I was so happy to be there. I felt like I was floating, and I felt the crowd carried me. I did everything I wanted to do.”23 Not everything she had to do—everything she wanted to do. When asked about the new costume she wore for her free skate, she joked with the lightness that characterized her entire Olympic experience: “If I fell on every jump, I would still be wearing this dress.”24 The dress, the performance, the momentum—all of that had value independent of the outcome for her.

She smiled when she stepped onto the ice. She smiled through her jumps. Then she skated to the rinkside camera and let out a celebratory expletive. That was not performative joy for the cameras or the observers. That was genuine joy that she experienced because she chose her goal, achieved it, and loved it. And she would do it again, medal or no medal—because that is who she is.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Although Jane Austen is one of the most celebrated writers of all time, few of her readers fully appreciate the philosophic depth of her novels. One who does is Helena Kelly, author of Jane Austen, The Secret Radical. Angelica Werth, in her new review of this book, sheds light on some of the powerful moral ideas to be found in Austen’s work.

Whereas some great artists are merely under-appreciated, others have their reputations unjustly sullied. A prime example of this is Michael Jackson, who is back in the headlines thanks to the new biopic Michael. In his review of the movie, Tim White refutes the critical claims that the film dishonestly evades the issue of the sexual abuse claims levied against Jackson, demonstrating how those criticisms miss the essential purpose of a biographical movie.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

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Written by John Logan
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
Starring Jaafar Jackson, Nia Long, Colman Domingo
Distributed by Lionsgate Films (United States)
Running time: 127 minutes
Rated PG-13 for language and brief violence

In February 2020, I published an in-depth critical analysis of the child abuse allegations against Michael Jackson that took nearly one thousand hours to research and write. I concluded decisively that Jackson was innocent and that his acquittal was entirely just; every single accusation of child abuse made against him was either proven to be impossible, completely unsubstantiated, or in a few rare cases, “supported” only by the most threadbare wisps of circumstantial evidence (and even that is debatable). When Michael, a musical biopic about the King of Pop, was announced, I was eager to gauge both its factual accuracy and its artistic merit.

The film opens in 1966, when Jackson was eight years old. By then, the Jackson 5 already had been practicing and performing small gigs for at least three years. Jackson’s abusive father Joe (Colman Domingo) drills the five boys relentlessly and beats them—Jackson in particular—for trivial mistakes. Within the first few minutes, we are treated to an unexpectedly skilled re-creation of young Jackson’s (Juliano Krue Valdi) singing voice. Valdi, who was just nine years old during filming, is an incredible singer with nearly perfect pitch, and his performance foreshadows a level of craftsmanship rarely seen today—one that the film’s musical numbers maintain throughout its duration.

For a biopic about a man who was unquestionably one of the most skilled singers and dancers of all time, singing and dancing that are merely “good” would not do. Jackson’s real-life nephew, Jaafar, portrays the adult version of his uncle with uncanny accuracy; his dance moves, his singing voice, his speaking voice, and even his subtly nervous facial expressions are so dead-on that, at times, one forgets that it’s not Jackson on screen.

Although Jackson’s unique style and flawless precision on stage can never be replicated exactly, Jaafar comes as close as anyone could. In most dancing scenes, Jaafar—not a stunt double or professional dancer—mirrors Jackson’s extremely difficult repertoire with undeniable artistry of his own. His vocal performances, though, are not entirely his. In most of the a cappella numbers, Jaafar really is singing, and his voice is not edited beyond normal audio mixing. In most of the other musical scenes, Jaafar’s vocals are digitally blended with Jackson’s for a number of reasons, one being the sheer infeasibility of asking him to do justice to his uncle’s singing while dancing at the same level, which would be vastly harder than most people realize.1 Jaafar deserves thunderous applause for achieving the nigh-impossible task of filling Jackson’s shoes, and overall, his performance is excellent, especially for a first-time actor. Domingo also deserves special praise for his chillingly faithful portrayal of Jackson’s sinister and psychologically broken father.

Clearly, one of the filmmakers’ overarching intentions is to humanize Jackson by providing context for some of his more questionable decisions. Importantly, the film does not seek to justify or rationalize any of Jackson’s choices—only to explain them. At this, it largely succeeds, if inelegantly at times. For instance, in one scene, a thirteen-year-old Jackson protests when his mother initially denies his request for a pet llama: “[These animals] aren’t my pets, mom. They’re my friends. No one else gets me, but they do.”2 Rather than trusting the audience to infer that Jackson’s proclivity for animals over people stemmed in part from the fact that nearly every person in his life wanted to ride his coattails, the writers chose to have Valdi exposit this in a somewhat ham-fisted way. In another, better scene, Jackson examines his own body without saying a word, and his subtle facial expressions reveal his growing discomfort with what he sees. We then cut to a shot of him in a medical exam room, and when the doctor enters carrying a marker, we understand without exposition: This is a plastic surgery consult.

The plastic surgery scenes are among several that show Jackson as he really was in psychological terms: a benevolent and good man whose questionable decisions were heavily influenced by severe, unresolved childhood trauma. Jackson’s obsession with plastic surgery was not motivated by vanity, as many believe; rather, it was tied to much deeper self-esteem problems that were not his fault.

In this area, as in many others, Jackson was a complex and conflicted man. In certain respects, his self-esteem was apparently healthy; in one scene in the film, he acknowledges his own musical genius in an endearingly matter-of-fact way but refuses to release an eponymous album because it would be “too egocentric.” In other respects, his self-esteem is clearly damaged in ways that are shown to be rooted in his relationship with his father. Joe demands flawless excellence of his children and flies off the handle over the most trivial mistakes or acts of disobedience, and as a result, the boys—Jackson in particular—internalize a deep-seated intolerance for imperfection. When Jackson first begins to show symptoms of vitiligo in his late teens, he sees it not as a harmless cosmetic quirk but as something wrong with him. His nose, like most people’s noses, is ever so slightly asymmetrical, and here, too, he sees not normal human variance but an inexcusable defect. In his mind, stars with perfect pitch and perfect dance moves must also look perfect—and unlike the vast majority of entertainers, Jackson actually was a grandmaster of his craft. Whereas many celebrities seek plastic surgery in an attempt to compensate for their deficiencies of skill or character, Jackson sought integration of his appearance and his earned mastery. This is a telling and extremely important aspect of his psychology that helps rational, attentive viewers properly contextualize some of his other odd choices.

Like a great many movies released in the past decade, Michael is adored by audiences and largely panned by critics. As of this writing, the movie holds a 97 percent “fresh” audience rating compared to a 37 percent “rotten” critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where many critics are complaining that no period of Jackson’s life is explored exhaustively and that this makes the film “shallow.” Another common and related complaint is that the film is inaccurate or misleading because it changes certain minor details, such as showing the Jackson 5 performing “Never Can Say Goodbye” in 1968 (the song was written in 1970). This was most likely an intentional choice on the filmmakers’ part, not an oversight, and in the context of biopics, such choices are legitimate and well-reasoned more often than not. Perhaps a licensing issue limited the choice of songs that could be used in this way, or perhaps it was an easier song for the actors to learn and perform on a tight filming schedule. Whatever the reason, it’s simply false to say that altering minor details is misleading. (If altering a given detail would lead a reasonable person to a substantively different conclusion, then the alteration is, by definition, not minor.)

Even more critics are taking issue with what they call, in varying terms, Michael’s “overly sanitized” presentation of Jackson’s life, claiming that ending the film before the abuse allegations constitutes dishonesty. One “verified” critic (whatever that means) writes “Michael’s disingenuously airbrushed style is directly related to the material [the Jackson estate] can’t and likely never will put on-screen; they’ve found their voice and have the resources to amplify it in Dolby Atmos.”3 Another writes “Failing the honesty test, Michael fails the ‘portrait of the artist’ test as well.”4 Given the nature and purpose of the film, complaints about it being shallow are invalid, as are those about its supposed dishonesty; let’s take each kind of complaint in turn.

A biopic, like all forms and genres of film, is a specific thing with a specific scope and purpose. A biopic is a dramatized portrayal of the most important parts of its subject’s life—or only a portion of his life—and its purpose is to present a detailed but necessarily incomplete sketch of that person that is broadly accurate and faithful to his character. A biopic is not a perfectly accurate retelling of the real story in its entirety—and it isn’t supposed to be. An entirely factual film about a real person is a different kind of film: a documentary (and even a documentary is not obligated by its nature to exhaustively cover every major aspect of its subject’s life; in fact, most don’t).

One reason to choose to make a biopic over another kind of film is to gain a modest degree of creative liberty, which is honest and valid so long as no major and contextually relevant facts are misrepresented or omitted from the span of time that the filmmakers choose to cover.5 Another reason is to make it possible to condense decades of the subject’s life into a two-hour runtime; sometimes, filmmakers simply can’t portray the exact chronology or form of certain events as they occurred in real life because doing so would require devoting an unjustifiable amount of screen time to minor details. Those who criticize Michael for not being a documentary are simply holding it to the wrong standard; those who criticize it for not covering every major aspect of his life are holding it to an impossible standard.

The elephant in the room is, of course, the child abuse allegations, which are not mentioned in the film. Like many (if not most) of the people who believe that Jackson was guilty of child abuse, those who criticize the film on this point are dropping critical context. Michael deliberately ends in 1988 (the year in which the alleged abuse began), but the filmmakers did not make this choice as a way of avoiding controversy. In fact, their original plan was to engage the controversy directly, and they acted on that plan until external factors required them to change it. A previous version of the script opened in 1993 with Jackson being investigated by police in relation to the Jordan Chandler case, and the filmmakers shot “a tremendous amount” of footage related to that part of Jackson’s life.6 However, after principal photography was completed, a clause was discovered in Jackson’s real-life legal settlement with the Chandler family that forbids any mention or depiction of Jordan in any movie produced by the Jackson estate. The filmmakers then had to rewrite the script almost entirely and shoot hundreds of hours of new footage; all in all, the rewrites and reshoots cost $15–$20 million, according to sources who worked on the film.7

Even if the original script had not dealt with any of the abuse allegations, that still would not constitute a dishonest decision because the final film ends before any of the alleged abuse took place. Honesty doesn’t require filmmakers to deal with the abuse allegations in every film about Jackson as a blanket policy regardless of context, just as it doesn’t require any other artist or biographer to cover every controversy in every work about any other subject. Honesty is the refusal to fake reality—the refusal to pretend that facts aren’t facts or that falsehoods are facts. It also includes the refusal to pretend that contextually relevant facts are irrelevant or vice versa. “Contextual relevance” is the key criterion here; virtually all facts are relevant in certain contexts and not others.

Michael’s decision to omit the abuse allegations would be dishonest only if the filmmakers had claimed or implied that the film covers Jackson’s entire life or otherwise is meant to be a comprehensive overview of every significant event therein. They did neither; they presented the film as a biopic limited to one half of Jackson’s life and as a tribute to his legacy, and it clearly is both of those things.

Michael does, however, strongly imply a sequel: A title card before the ending credits reads “His story continues.” Lionsgate executive Adam Fogelson told The Hollywood Reporter in 2025: “While we’re not yet ready to confirm plans for a second film, I can tell you that the creative team is hard at work making sure that we’re in a position to deliver more Michael soon after we release the first film.”8 Assuming that such a sequel biopic does come to fruition, and assuming that it covers the second half of Jackson’s life (it almost inevitably would have to), then, in that context, that film must honestly address the abuse allegations. To omit or downplay the allegations in such a context would be dishonest because they massively impacted Jackson and hundreds of other people throughout that part of his life, and it’s not possible to form an objective opinion about Jackson without an account of the allegations that is both factual and fair.

Knowing as much about Jackson as I do, I can say without reservation that Michael fulfills its goal of honoring his legacy without distortion. It would be incomplete without a sequel—but the absence of a sequel would not retroactively render it dishonest. Dramatically, it’s one of the best films of 2026 to date, and technically, it’s one of the best films of the decade, especially for those who know enough about singing and dancing to fully understand just how good Jackson was (and Jaafar is). Like Jackson himself, Michael has both adoring fans and apoplectic critics—and like Jackson, the film is something that everyone should experience at least once.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

London: Icon Books, 2017
337 pp., $12.04

If you think of Jane Austen novels as light, fluffy romances—think again. Through her happy endings, she imparted essential moral themes, such as the fact that happiness requires knowing when to trust your own judgment (Persuasion) and acting on principle (Mansfield Park).

Such lessons are useful on their own, but many Janeites like to point out that Austen was also a social commentator, mocking and subtly criticizing certain norms and institutions of her day. However, few Austen fans have gone as far into understanding and explaining the substance and mechanisms of that criticism as Helena Kelly, author of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. Kelly begins by observing two relevant facts about Austen’s life: 1) We don’t know much about it, because few letters or other documentary evidence remain, and the family reports are unreliable (the most famous was written by her nephew four decades after her death); and 2) for most of Austen’s life, Britain was at war.

Most Janeites point out these facts as a matter of mere curiosity or perhaps to highlight a few details of how soldiers and navy men play a role in certain Austen novels. But Kelly homes in on a particular effect of this context: Due to the wars, the British government increased censorship. She explains:

Treason was redefined. It was no longer limited to actively conspiring to overthrow and to kill; it included thinking, writing, printing, reading. Prosecutions were directed not just against avowedly political figures, such as Paine, the radical politician Horne Tooke, or the theologian Gilbert Wakefield, but against their publishers. . . . There can hardly have been a thinking person in Britain who didn’t understand what was intended—to terrify writers and publishers into policing themselves. (22–23)

For this reason, Kelly argues, readers ought to look very closely at the text and at the historical context it was written in, because criticism would have had to be subtle to be allowed at that time. For example, Austen doesn’t criticize the Church of England outright—but nearly all the clergymen she depicts in her works are lazy, gluttonous, pompous, or straight-up ridiculous. The self-important Mr. Collins, for instance, provides excellent comic relief in Pride and Prejudice—but no serious Christian would want him as his pastor. Kelly argues that this context alone justifies a closer look at the text and also quotes Austen’s letter to her sister in which she declared, “I do not write for such dull Elves As have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves” (124).1^[1] Austen wanted her readers to be thoughtful and focused enough to take in the layers of meaning she offered, and Kelly aims to show what such focus, combined with some contextual knowledge, can yield.

The Secret Radical’s key strength is its clearly presented, well-researched analysis of the political elements of Austen’s works, based on Kelly’s thorough understanding of the debates and economic policies of the day, relevant British history, textual evidence from the novels, contemporary reviews, and the few remaining letters from Austen herself. Kelly examines each of Austen’s six full-length novels—Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion—in this way, aiming to work through them in the order Austen wrote them to provide a rough sketch of Austen’s intellectual development as well as to keep the history chronological. (Kelly acknowledges difficulty in dating with certainty when Austen wrote certain novels and explains her reasons for taking them in the order that she does.) In the best cases, the interpretation she offers enables readers to appreciate the work under discussion on a deeper level.

For example, Kelly argues that Pride and Prejudice should not be seen as only an interpersonal drama with lessons for individual behavior but also as a pattern for how people of different classes at the time should behave toward each other in order to reform society without violent revolution. “Elizabeth and Darcy,” she writes, “were written to be not just characters, but symbols as well” (167). Mr. Darcy, the wealthy nobleman, shows himself to be ready to learn, even from those of lower status than himself, and to correct his manners when necessary. He also symbolically removes the military presence and its associated potential for conflict at the end by arranging a position far away for Mr. Wickham, a militiaman.

Likewise, Elizabeth, a gentleman’s daughter, is willing to speak her mind and learns to judge people only on firm evidence of their character. Mr. Bingley is a straightforwardly sympathetic character who earned his money through trade, a point modern readers may not question or even notice. In the early nineteenth century, the nouveau riche were by no means accepted in many social circles. By showing him not only in a positive light but as being sought after by the Bennet girls and befriended by Darcy, Austen was encouraging the acceptance of such self-made men. Kelly’s interpretation not only integrates with the novel’s central theme (that one shouldn’t allow emotions to distort one’s rational, evidence-based judgment)—it adds a layer of complexity to it. One’s emotions, and especially one’s initial reaction to a situation, are often shaped by the attitudes one has been taught—one’s prejudices (according to some accounts, Austen considered naming the novel First Impressions). Austen encouraged her readers to consider carefully whether that immediate reaction is justified, taking into account not only one’s vanity but one’s social context.

Kelly deals significantly with the political context in which Austen lived and wrote. Politics necessarily affects individuals’ lives and thus often is present in fiction to some degree. But it is one thing to identify these aspects of the background, another to trace how they affect various characters’ motivations, and a much different task to interpret their degree of relevance to the theme of the work. In this last endeavor, Kelly occasionally errs by overemphasizing the relevance of politics to Austen’s themes. For example, she claims that Emma is about poverty created by a rapidly expanding population and worsened (at least in the short term) by enclosure, the controversial practice of landowners getting permission from Parliament to build fences and hedges to stop poor people from gathering firewood, roots, and so on from the land they or their families had been granted by the government. Kelly cites many lines and scenes that refer to enclosure and its effects, such as gypsies being camped in an unexpected place leading to an unsuspecting young woman being accosted by them and twisting her ankle in her attempt to get away. However, Kelly fails to establish that enclosure is anything more than a background force in the novel. Emma is primarily about a young woman learning to better weigh the evidence she has around people’s emotions and not to interfere in others’ affairs of the heart—that each person must choose what is best for herself. This is an important theme that stands alone. Knowledge of enclosure is not necessary to grasp this theme, though such knowledge helps to set up certain aspects of the plot.

Similarly, Kelly’s discussion of Sense and Sensibility focuses on the unfairness of primogeniture, the legally enshrined practice in which, in the vast majority of cases, the oldest son inherited everything when a man died, and any other children and his widow were dependent on that son. Once again, this is extremely relevant to the setup, as it explains how the Dashwood ladies find themselves in the situation they are in—once Mr. Dashwood dies, they depend on the charity of a distant relative to find a decent place to live and must learn to live frugally. They also cannot depend on large dowries to help with their marriage prospects. But the bulk of the action is about the eldest two sisters learning to harmonize their reason and their emotions, one having tended toward self-indulgent emotionalism and the other toward stoic rationalism. Primogeniture, though certainly a target of Austen’s criticism, is not the theme of the novel.

Despite this occasional overemphasis on politics, the context Kelly provides is remarkably useful in enabling readers of Austen to avoid being a “dull Elf” and thus to better enjoy her timeless works. The book is written in clear, accessible language but is scholarly in the way it synthesizes a vast quantity of information from a wide variety of sources. In addition, although it assumes familiarity with all of Austen’s novels, a thoughtful reader with that knowledge will benefit from the demonstration of how to apply historical and political context combined with careful reading to better understand the satire and social commentary in other novels. Readers can certainly enjoy Austen’s works without Kelly’s additional context that enables wider integrations, but it is very helpful.

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical opened my eyes to the interesting, often subtle ways in which this influential author challenged the premises of the world around her. For those who want to get more out of literature, it’s well worth the time.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

New outstanding music and new outstanding fiction seem equally hard to find in today’s culture, so I was astonished to find a little-known band from Nashville that excels at making both. As I detail in my new article, the Protomen have created a three-part work of dystopian fiction in the form of innovative and intricate synthwave rock music.

We owe thanks for the fact we can discover such niche things in the age of the internet to the pioneers of electronic communication. One often under-recognized innovator in this field is Samuel Morse, whose heroic life Aditya Patil has profiled in detail. Despite being better known for Morse Code, Morse labored through all manner of hardship to create America’s first long-distance electromagnetic telegraph, the forerunner to the electronic communications network that has brought the world together over the subsequent two centuries.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

What’s New?

This Week’s Anniversaries

“I believe the work The Objective Standard is doing is imperative to the future of our nation.” —Miguel

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By the time Samuel Morse received the news of his wife’s illness, she was already dead and buried. For most people in 1825, it was an accepted fact of life that sending messages took days, if not weeks; but for Morse, the long delays in communication became a problem that he would devote years to solving. Morse designed and built a system that could send messages across hundreds of miles in seconds. Although he is remembered for the code that bears his name, his real achievement was the integration of the scattered discoveries that others had made about electricity into a practical machine—the telegraph.

Morse was born in 1791 in Charlestown, Massachusetts—then a center of politics and commerce—in a period of rapid scientific and technological transformation. With the Industrial Revolution underway, steam was moving goods on land and sea, industrial processes were displacing manual labor, and capital was pouring into industry and invention. Yet the transmission of messages remained largely unchanged; information still moved at the speed of the people or vehicles carrying it, as it had for thousands of years.1

Though electricity was a subject of growing scientific fascination, scientists were still struggling to understand its fundamental principles. It had been in its “parlor trick era” since the early 1700s, and people viewed it as a volatile and almost supernatural force. Elite salons and scientific exhibitions used electrostatic generators, Leyden jars, and sparks to amaze audiences.2 The public was obsessed with the idea that electricity was the “spark of life,” an idea that took hold after Luigi Galvani’s discovery that electricity could cause muscle contractions in dissected frogs.3 One thought of Dr. Frankenstein, not switches and wires, at the mention of electricity.

At the same time, scientists were making important discoveries. In 1820, Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted discovered that an electric current produces a magnetic field. André-Marie Ampère built on this almost immediately, establishing the mathematical relationship between electricity and magnetism. A decade later, Michael Faraday demonstrated that a changing magnetic field could produce an electric current. Across the Atlantic, American scientist Joseph Henry was making similar discoveries independently. Together, these findings established the science of electromagnetism. Yet for all this accumulated knowledge, no one had developed a practical, scalable system of communication from it.

Even the most ambitious practical thinkers remained focused on electricity as a source of physical power for lifting heavy loads and driving machinery and industry. A proliferation of projects, many undertaken without proper scientific understanding, was attempting to harness electricity to power machinery—a task to which it was fundamentally unsuited.4 But it could be used for producing a practically instantaneous, controlled effect at a distance—signaling. Morse built his electrical telegraph to do exactly that.

Morse’s achievement is all the more remarkable given that he was not a scientist by training. Rather, Morse spent much of his early life struggling to establish himself as a painter. He had studied at Yale and trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, but he found only limited success, and he spent years traveling and taking portrait commissions wherever he could find work. Morse sailed for Europe in 1829, visiting the museums of Paris and Rome to study European masterpieces. It was on the voyage home, in 1832, that everything changed.

Aboard the ship, Morse’s fellow passenger Dr. Charles Thomas Jackson described to a small group some of the recent experiments with electricity that he had witnessed in Paris. Jackson explained that electricity could be transmitted through a wire of any length with instantaneous speed—a spark appeared at the far end of a circuit at the exact moment that the connection was made.5 He also demonstrated the properties of the electromagnet: A core of soft iron becomes magnetic only while a current passes through its surrounding coil and loses that magnetism the instant the current is cut. This means that physical force can be triggered and released at a distance, practically instantaneously, through a simple wire.

Morse saw the implication immediately: “If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity.”6 With that thought, the electromagnet was no longer a mere experimental curiosity.

The idea of using electricity to communicate was not new—it had been proposed in various forms since the time of Benjamin Franklin. But whereas others had used electromagnetism to produce visible, physical effects (such as deflecting needles to point at a display), Morse saw a means of carrying information directly: By controlling when the current was on and when it was off, the message could be encoded in the timing and the sequence of that single, repeatable signal. He spent the remainder of the month-long voyage filling his notebooks with designs for a recording telegraph. Morse was “most constant” in pursuing the subject throughout the voyage.7 By the time the ship docked in New York, he had already developed a nearly complete plan for his recording apparatus.

Back in New York, Morse set about building a working model of his telegraph. The device would record electric signals as marks on paper. Instead of requiring an operator to observe the signals as they occurred, it would create a permanent record that could be read afterward. His painting career had all but collapsed, and he was living in poverty, working and sleeping in his studio at New York University (NYU) where he served as a professor of painting and took on private pupils to earn his keep.

His first prototype was built from scrap materials in his studio. A clockwork mechanism pulled a strip of paper under a pencil, and electrical pulses from a battery activated an electromagnet that moved a rocker arm, which in turn moved the pencil, tracing a wavy line on the paper that could be decoded as a message. Crude as it was, the device worked. It showed that the principle of his invention was sound: Electricity could produce a precise, readable effect at a distance.

But Morse was unable to improve upon his model to overcome the problem of transmitting messages over a useful distance. His apparatus could send signals only up to about forty feet. The electrical resistance of the wire caused the current to weaken so much that it could not trigger the recording stylus over a longer distance. Previous attempts at electrical communication had failed repeatedly for the same reason, and Morse struggled with this problem for two years.

The solution already existed in the scientific literature. Henry had shown that a weak incoming signal could be used to trigger a fresh, fully powered outgoing signal through a device he called the electromagnetic relay.8 Leonard Gale, a chemistry professor at NYU familiar with Henry’s work, brought this to Morse’s attention. The relays took their name from the post stations of coach travel, where tired horses were replaced by fresh ones. In Morse’s telegraph, the weak current arriving at the end of its range simply operated a tiny electromagnet, which closed a fresh circuit powered by another battery. The incoming signal was thus repeated over another length of wire. By placing relays at intervals, a message could travel any distance.

This breakthrough did more than merely solve Morse’s problem; it established the fundamental principle of signal amplification in modern electrical engineering. The relay was the conceptual ancestor of the transistor and every electronic switching device that followed.

By 1837, Morse had been living on next to nothing for years—splitting his university salary into daily allowances, cooking his own meals in his studio, and using what little money remained to acquire parts for a working model. That year, Alfred Vail, the son of a prosperous ironworks owner in Morristown, New Jersey, proposed a partnership. He would build a working model at his own expense, using his father’s ironworks, in exchange for a share of the patents. The arrangement gave Morse the capital and precision engineering he had lacked.

Working through the winter of 1837 at the Speedwell Ironworks, Vail refined the crude prototype into a durable instrument and developed the dot-and-dash code that would carry Morse’s name. On January 6, 1838, after years of effort, Morse could finally demonstrate a fully functional version of his invention to the world. As a definitive test, Morse and Vail organized a demonstration. Two miles of wire were coiled around the room of the Speedwell factory building. Vail’s father dictated a message, and his son transmitted it. At the other end, Morse decoded the words: “A patient waiter is no loser.”9

The years following the demonstration were again a period of poverty and failure for Morse. He sought private capital to commercialize his invention, approaching financiers in New York to fund a working telegraph line. But the financial panic of 1837 had drained investment markets, and he was met with indifference and rejection. He needed to build the telegraph over a distance long enough to demonstrate its usefulness, and he lacked the capital to do so himself.

In 1837, Congress directed the Treasury Department to investigate the establishment of a national telegraph system, and proposals were requested. Morse was the only respondent to propose an electromagnetic telegraph; the rest proposed “optical telegraphs”—systems that transmitted signals visually between stations in line-of-sight using mechanical indicators such as arms and shutters.10 Morse argued that his invention could operate at any time of day or night, in any weather, and could record messages even when unattended.

Morse demonstrated the telegraph to Congress and President Van Buren, proposing that the government fund an experimental line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore to test the practicability of transmitting messages between distant points. The line would serve as a test for an electromagnetic telegraph’s use for rapid official communication, but it failed to gain support in Congress. He sailed for Europe to secure patents but found himself shut out in London and unable to enforce the one he obtained in France. He returned to America having gained nothing and was forced to take up portrait commissions to survive.

For the next four years Morse pursued support from Congress, submitting formal petitions for the experimental line. It was a period of wasted genius—he was waiting for political approval to build a demonstration of a concept that he had already proven. In December 1842, Morse obtained permission to demonstrate the telegraph to the legislators directly, realizing that years of petitioning on paper had failed. He strung wires between two committee rooms in the Capitol and demonstrated the telegraph once more. This time, Congress listened.

The Morse bill, which had been shelved since 1838, was brought back before Congress. The bill faced considerable opposition in the House, with one representative ridiculing Morse’s proposition that if Congress was funding Morse, it ought equally to appropriate money for experiments in mesmerism—a pseudoscientific practice of hypnosis popular at that time.11 Supporters, however, argued that Congress had the authority to fund such a system under its constitutional power to establish post offices and roads.12 Seventy congressmen abstained rather than vote public money toward something they did not understand. The bill then waited behind more than 140 others in the Senate, with one day left in the session. Morse had not expected it to survive. After a dramatic midnight vote, the news reached him the next morning: The Senate had passed the bill. President Tyler signed it into law on March 3, 1843.13 Morse had $30,000.

With the funding secured, Morse set to work on the first long-distance telegraph line in the United States—thirty-eight miles of wire connecting Washington to Baltimore. On May 1, 1844, before the line was even complete, news of the Whig Party’s nomination of Henry Clay was telegraphed from Baltimore to Washington, arriving ahead of the train carrying the same information. On May 24, with the line complete, Morse sat in the Capitol and transmitted the first official message to Vail at the Baltimore railroad depot: “What hath God wrought.”14 The Baltimore Sun declared that “time and space had been completely annihilated.”15 Morse later offered to sell the telegraph to the government for $100,000. The government declined, concluding that the revenue from the line would not justify its expense.16 Morse turned to private investors, licensing the technology to commercial enterprises that expanded it rapidly. The system was a huge commercial success, and the companies that built it were later consolidated into Western Union. Within a decade, the Morse telegraph system had been adopted as the international standard, and lines were crossing continents.

Morse spent twelve years turning a sketch into a working line while battling poverty, failed patents, and a Congress that could not tell electromagnetism from mesmerism. He was not a scientist. He was an inventor who saw that electricity could carry intelligence. The telegraph was built on brilliant scientific integrations and the discipline to see a single idea through when virtually every practical circumstance was against it. Morse spent much of his later years defending his patents in court, fighting off rivals who sought to claim what he had built. By his death in 1872, his estate was valued at half a million dollars. He had lived to see telegraph lines cross continents and oceans, carrying the language of dots and dashes, all from an idea that he had devised aboard a ship forty years earlier.

Morse’s work stands as an outstanding triumph of engineering—a field whose value lies not only in uncovering nature’s laws but in bending them to human ends. His achievement shows that bringing an idea into existence demands not merely knowledge but its application and not merely ability but immense perseverance.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

As an avid music fan, I’m constantly searching for good music. But I only find exceptional bands—the kind that blow my mind and join my all-time favorites—once or twice a decade.

Recently, one band—The Protomen—excelled beyond anything I’ve heard in the past fifteen years or so. To try to describe this band in terms of genres is somewhat futile. Their sound fuses elements of country, hard rock, electronica, progressive rock, blues, and several other genres. They took influence from Queen—a band they started their career by covering—by focusing on expressing their own artistic ideas rather than trying to fit into a particular genre. “Queen was independent in that they didn’t care about genre, they just wrote good songs,” said a band member in one interview. “In the end, no matter what genre or how you play the song, it’s still gonna sound like you.”1

The more useful way to describe what The Protomen make would be something like “story rock” or “rock opera.” Their three main albums are as much works of fiction as works of music; The Protomen (Act I), Act II: The Father of Death, and Act III: This City Made Us together form a grand dystopian story that can only be fully appreciated on repeat listenings while reading the lyrics. The band included passages of prose among the lyrics (found in the CD liner notes or online)—these are designed to be read during the instrumental and soundscape sections of the albums, moving the story along between the lyrical sections.

Each album has a distinct style and tells a separate chapter of the overall story, so it’s worth looking at each in turn to get a sense of the richness, musically and philosophically, that The Protomen offer.

The Protomen (Act I) (2005)

The first album throws us into a dystopian world loosely based on that depicted in the Mega Man video games. But whereas the games follow the titular superhero as he battles the robot army of the evil Dr. Wily in an effort to restore peace to an embattled world, The Protomen establishes a much darker setting—a city in which the population has given up on freedom. The opening narration sets the scene over an accelerating beat:

No one was left who could remember how it had happened
How the world had fallen under darkness
At least no one who would do anything
No one who would oppose the robots
No one who would challenge their power
Or so Dr. Wily believed . . .

That sets off the opening track, “Hope Rides Alone,” in which we meet Wily’s former associate Dr. Light, “an eccentric and brilliant man . . . a loner, a thinker, a man of ideas—ideas forbidden in Wily’s society.” Light creates the part-man, part-machine Protoman, a hero “hell-bent on destroying every evil standing between man and freedom” to save the city from Wily’s robotic tyranny.

Toward the end of the song, the core theme of the album starts to come through. Light wants to save the city, but the people don’t want saving—they are too apathetic and dejected to fight for freedom. They stand by and watch Protoman get pummeled by Wily’s robots, and the song ends with a crowd chanting “We are the dead”—a direct reference to George Orwell’s 1984—as they look upon the beaten hero who could have saved them.

In the third track, “Unrest in the House of Light,” we follow a grief-stricken Light as he sings about his previous “son”—Protoman’s forerunner, Mega Man—who suffered much the same fate. Light tries to dissuade Protoman, who wants to continue the fight:

For if you leave now, you will be fighting
For a people that refuse to comprehend
They have chosen their own end

Unlike the opening two tracks, which have a lo-fi, almost industrial sound symbolizing the mechanistic inhumanity of Wily’s regime, the third track is a gently swinging country song with the sombreness befitting Light’s dismay at the people’s continued lack of appetite for freedom and his remorse at his part in creating this society (detailed in Act II). Throughout the rest of the album, the style continues to change, although generally returning to an alt-rock sound reminiscent of early Muse. Also adding to the variety are the different singing and speaking voices that the band members use to capture the characters of Wily, Light, Protoman, and Mega Man, who often exchange dialogue during the songs.

Thematically, the album continues to explore the questions of whether a hero should fight for people who don’t want saving and whether a few voices for freedom can overcome a mass who willfully live at the feet of a dictator. Those people rouse, not at the appearance of a hero, but at the regime’s broadcast chant of “We have control, We keep you safe, We are your hope.” All three albums are, in their own ways, tragedies, and the tragedy of the first album is that Light is trying to use technology—Protoman—to solve a philosophic problem: the apathy of the city’s population.

Act II: The Father of Death (2009)

With Act I depicting a society clearly unready for change, one might expect its sequel to progress the story to a later stage, but instead Act II is a prequel, showing how Wily’s society came to be in the first place. After a short instrumental, it opens with “The Good Doctor,” a far cleaner track than any on the first album that signals this album’s higher fidelity production. The song is a slow, melancholy ballad backed up by a somber string section that follows a conversation between Light and Wily, both inventors looking to change a society in which many (including Light’s father) work to their deaths in toxic mines. They design robots capable of replacing men in the mines and extracting far more of the resources the city needs, but whereas Light is content with this, Wily wants to turn the robots into tools for controlling people and achieving his vision of an orderly, centrally planned society.

The first chorus is sung by Light, but the second features Wily responding to him—an example of a technique The Protomen often use called “overlapping polyphony” in which two voices deliver the same section at the same time, offset enough that each can be understood but with some overlap as though the two voices are competing to dominate the song:

They’ve waited so long for this day
(They’ve waited so long for this day)
Someone to take the death away
(There is no price they wouldn’t pay)
No son would ever have to say
(For someone else to lead them)
My father worked into his grave

As the song concludes, the two characters get to the root of their philosophic disagreement—their differing views of human nature:

I only want to help . . .
(You are a fool!)
You underestimate the character of man
(They are weaker than you think!)
You think that they’ll surrender
If you bind their working hands
But they are strong!
(Just wait and see . . .)
We will build cities in a day
(Men would cower at the sight!)
We will build towers to the heavens
(Man was not built for such a height!)
We will be heroes!
(We will BUILD heroes!)

The two singers “playing” the two characters imbue them with different qualities, helping accentuate their differences. Raul Panther III (all Protomen members use stage names) gives Light a deep, reflective, Johnny Cash-esque voice whereas Turbo Lover gives Wily a shrill, barely controlled style in which his madness regularly breaks through. This album also introduces Gambler Kirkdouglas, who not only adds a female voice (voicing Light’s girlfriend and Wily’s heartthrob Emily) but brings a more operatic style to the mix, her vocals soaring above the male voices at times while bringing a raspy, hard-rock energy to other parts. Her character’s inclusion personalizes the human cost of Wily’s regime and of Light’s efforts to oppose it, which place her in the line of fire. Later in the album, the two men’s conflict becomes as much about her as about the city itself.

With this album, the band’s Nashville roots come through strongly. In place of the first album’s industrial sound, this one features more acoustic guitar, piano, and slide guitar, giving it a much more Southern sound that also drifts into Ennio Morricone-esque Western territory at times. As the story progresses, more styles come into play, often capturing the spirit of the character each song is focusing on. “The Hounds” (focusing on the increasingly maddened Wily) features circus-like trumpets blasting over a danceable, pulsing rhythm, after which “The State Vs. Thomas Light” returns to a thoughtful, orchestral sound. Later, as the conflict between Light and Wily intensifies, the songs get faster and adopt more of a 1980s-inspired synthwave style, exemplified best in the songs “Break Out” and “Light Up the Night.” This sound points the way to the band’s third album, for which fans—aside from a tantalizing preview in the form of the 2022 stand-alone single “The Fight”—would have to wait seventeen years.

Act III: This City Made Us (2026)

Act III is the culmination of The Protomen’s story—not just of the literal story that the three albums tell but also of the band’s musical growth. Here, they perfectly realize their fusion of upbeat hard rock and expansive, synthwave electronica. Taking place some years after the events of Act I, it introduces a new, unnamed character: a budding revolutionary (also voiced by Gambler) who, much like Light before her, is determined to bring about a change for which the passive masses aren’t prepared to fight.

The story kicks off with “Hold Back the Night,” a galloping revolutionary anthem driven as much by Gambler’s energetic, soaring vocals as by the driving guitars, synths, and percussion. After each verse describing her struggle to survive in Wily’s world, she opens each chorus by bellowing “But I know a hero will come!” This refers to the aging Light, whose distant figure she has seen observing the increasing disorder as some of the young people start to oppose Wily’s control. Eventually, after she finds Light during a slowed-down instrumental interlude, he bursts into the song with a counterpoint to her optimistic choruses, driven by his deep regret over his part in creating Wily’s world:

But all of your heroes are gone
And the blood that they spilled is on my hands
A darkness will block out the sun
Not a thing can be done with so few men
That a hero couldn’t do!

She responds to his guilt with an appeal to his sense of responsibility:

When the voice from the shadows calls you
When the wind whips past your ears
Will you stand when the weight is upon you
Or will you go to your knees in fear?

There’s a chance, though I know it’s a long shot
And the city’s out of time
All for naught if your heart stops beating
’cause you’re the only one that keeps it alive
God, keep it alive!

Then, in the final chorus, the two voices debate in another instance of overlapping polyphony, driving the song to a powerful release of energy in its conclusion.

Following the example of “Hold Back the Night,” most of the album is brighter and more upbeat than its predecessors. Whereas the previous albums focused heavily on the consequences of widespread apathy about freedom, this album focuses more on the fact that hope endures as long as some are willing to fight.

With fifteen tracks, This City Made Us is a rock opera in its own right, taking us on a whole journey of a grassroots revolution and a state’s efforts to suppress it. This is The Protomen at their most Orwellian (a descriptor the band readily embraces), with the full apparatus of Wily’s regime directed at not merely suppressing the dissidents but also turning the masses against them with false-flag attacks and incessant, inescapable propaganda.

The dramatic story that The Protomen tell across their three-album series is a tale of individuals with a vision of freedom fighting against collective apathy. In a recent interview, the band members expressed their sadness that real events have paralleled the story they set out to tell in 2005, demonstrating the difficulty of motivating people to stand up for important values in a society driven by groupthink and emotionalism:

Our storyline that we’ve been writing all these years is happening all around us now. . . . As a human being in the year 2026, I didn’t know that I could get more jaded with society than in 2005.

Our first record is very much about the failure of mankind as a whole to rise to heroism or to rise to the place that they needed to be—the lowest level of making an effort. So we started out from that place and I think as we’ve gone through the acts, we try to keep hope alive. Even if it perhaps gets more and more difficult to do it, it’s still there. You have to search for the hope. That’s really what it comes down to.2

The Protomen’s rock opera series is a musical voyage exploring responsibility for one’s choices, the human cost of tyranny, and the nature of heroism. It ultimately conveys the theme that whatever physical strength a hero may possess, freedom depends on a substantial number of people understanding its importance. On the surface, it’s a riveting story told through colorful, complex, emotionally charged music. On a deeper level, it’s a warning to stand up for freedom and human life before it’s too late.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

Few philosophers are as widely quoted as Friedrich Nietzsche—yet few truly understand his ideas. To do so requires disentangling his own contradictions and 150 years of his ideas being misconstrued by those entrusted to convey them. But, with the assistance of a capable, objective guide, it’s possible to get real value from his many powerful insights and novel ideas without falling pray to his misintegrations. One such guide is Sue Prideaux’s I Am Dynamite, and Margherita Bovo’s new review of this book demonstrates how it dispels many of the misconceptions that abound regarding Nietzsche’s philosophy, leaving the way clear to appreciate his many significant steps in the right direction.

Also this week, Craig Biddle discusses the nature and existence of free will with Gregg Caruso, and we celebrate the birthdays of swing music legend Duke Ellington and prolific author of Western novels Elmer Kelton.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

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“I believe the work The Objective Standard is doing is imperative to the future of our nation.” —Miguel

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London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 2018
452 pp., $19.14

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has become one of the most widely studied thinkers in the history of philosophy.1 On one hand, he offered valuable tools to conduct one’s life independently and without fear of mystical superstitions while on the other, he denied free will and often conflated religious ethics with morality. A lot has been said about him—some fair praise, often focusing on his individualism and rejection of Christian morality, and some reasonable criticism, such as that about his rejection of “absolute reason.”2 However, many critics falsely paint him as a thinker who sought to justify violence as the primary way to defend one’s ideas, as a precursor of Nazism, or as an extreme relativist.

Without a capable guide, unpacking his ideas to understand and get value from his work without falling prey either to the same errors he did or to the many popular mischaracterizations of his ideas is challenging. Sue Prideaux offers that guide in her book I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (2018). In a welcome change from the common tendency to misconstrue him, she precisely reconstructs Nietzsche’s philosophy as he developed it throughout his life. The work is biographical, chronologically recounting the main events Nietzsche lived through and how they affected his intellectual development.

It begins with a description of Nietzsche’s childhood and the oppressive Protestant environment in which he grew up. His mother and sister were devoted Christians, and they intended Nietzsche to become a Protestant pastor like his father, who had died during Nietzsche’s infancy due to a cerebral condition that was not understood at the time. Prideaux then describes the education Nietzsche received at the famous Pforta School, at that time a respected institution for humanities yet “an ecclesiastical fortress” permeated with mysticism (25). The book’s description of his childhood and youth clarifies the root of Nietzsche’s later hostility toward religion and his intellectual background—including the fact that he was never formally trained in philosophy (he enrolled to study theology first and later switched to philology).

This background enables Prideaux to properly contextualize Nietzsche’s first work—and arguably one of his least understood. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche introduced two categories that, according to him, explain the Greek sense of life that this genre embodies: Apollonian and Dionysian.3 These would later become key parts of his philosophy, so Prideaux expounds this framework. She explains that the Apollonian worldview is made of images, geometry, and steadiness and is embodied in the god Apollo. On the other hand, the Dionysian artistic impulse is a stronger force in the human mind, embodied by the god Dionysus, which makes an individual’s certainty crumble and leads him to realize that life is often dark and chaotic. In Nietzsche’s view, the cooperation of these seemingly opposed forces helped the Greeks embrace life without idealizing it or fearing it. Many scholars focus on these two concepts, but they do not always explain them accurately or recognize the importance of The Birth of Tragedy in Nietzsche’s development of this idea; they claim that to embrace the Dionysian side of life meant to pursue an “intoxication” of whims, lust, and drunkenness—even though he remarked that most Greeks were wise enough not to embrace such hedonistic behavior.4 Prideaux is aware of this balance and is precise in describing “Apollonian and Dionysian” as two spheres “responsible for the development of art and culture” in Nietzsche’s view (111). She also points out that with this work Nietzsche became a philosopher, even if many academics were horrified by the lack of footnotes, his decision not to include a meticulous analysis of ancient texts, and his supposedly imprecise vocabulary.

Prideaux also mentions a collection that scholars often do not engage with enough: the Untimely Meditations (1873–1876). In one of these volumes, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874), Nietzsche described the main ways that people approached history and identified the main points of weakness in each approach. Prideaux is clearly aware that Nietzsche was trying to elaborate a new method to approach history, philosophy, and reality in general at this point, whereas most scholars admit this only in relation to Nietzsche’s later works, such as The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), or Beyond Good and Evil (1886). By considering Nietzsche’s earlier works, the book shows a philosopher who grappled with reality and with the mystical premises widely accepted in his own time to gain enough tools to later show that what Christians and most people consider “good”—including selflessness, obedience, and humility—is bad for individuals and derives from hypocrisy and envy rather than from a proper view on life.5 This reconstruction refutes the popular misconception that Nietzsche rejected morality merely for the sake of dismissing it.

In describing his later works, Prideaux connects them to his close friendships with the author and psychoanalyst Lou Salomé (1861–1937) and the philosopher Paul Rée (1849–1901). The three thinkers aimed to live according to their own ideas about morality and philosophy rather than accepting the dominant Christian ethics (255). Nietzsche devoted himself to that cause in an unconventional way, often writing aphorisms rather than linear treatises, because he associated the latter with academia, which—as Prideaux shows—was an environment in which Nietzsche felt uncomfortable. This way, he was able to reach a broader audience, but it also made it easier to misinterpret his meaning. Prideaux systematically analyzes Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which acknowledges that only this world exists and that, despite life being hard, we have no excuse for dismissing and evading it. She is interested in this work because Nietzsche presents here his concept of the “Übermensch” (generally translated as “Superman” or “Beyond-Man”), whose aim is to live beyond the average man’s religious framework. The prophetic character of Zarathustra proclaims the aim of the Übermensch as giving meaning to life on this planet, admonishes the readers to ignore those who promise otherworldly fulfillment, and reminds them to “remain true to the earth.”6 Many critics claim Nietzsche’s philosophy aggrandizes violence against weaker people, particularly focusing on his description of the Übermensch, but Prideaux provides evidence to reject this claim.7 While recounting Nietzsche’s youth, she mentions his unease toward Prussia’s brutality during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and his disillusionment in seeing the newly united Germany being ruled by nationalists who supported and further spread antisemitic ideas (103). Prideaux also highlights what Nietzsche later wrote in one of his notebooks: “[I]f we could dissuade from wars, so much better” (369).

Prideaux is aware that some of Nietzsche’s statements have been controversial and that many interpret them as racist, especially when he criticizes the “morality of resentment” that, according to him, started with early Jewish religion. She focuses on his claims in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) to clarify their real meaning. She points out that in this work Nietzsche claims that those who embraced this moral code condemned other individuals rather than working on themselves and labeled as evil what they were not able to achieve, such as self-interest, strength, or independent thought.8 This is how he believed the morality of altruism was invented: For such individuals, life in this world became irrelevant because they couldn’t succeed at it. So, exceptional individuals ought to feel guilty because of their success and sacrifice themselves for mediocre people, and their virtue was portrayed as vice. This kind of morality must be rejected, Nietzsche held, so he traced its development through time to attack its foundations. However, he did not believe that every Jew was responsible for altruism only by being a Jew. Any individual who embraced this wrong view was guilty, regardless of his race. Further evidence of this is Nietzsche’s decision to end his friendship with the well-known composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883): Prideaux highlights that he could not tolerate Wagner’s antisemitic and nationalist ideas any longer and that, in response, Wagner spread rumors about Nietzsche being a dissolute who built a whole philosophic system to justify his sins (233). She also recounts that when his sister, Elisabeth (1846–1935), and her husband, Bernard Förster (1843–1889), left Europe and founded an Aryan colony in Paraguay, Nietzsche was horrified.

Prideaux also describes the moments when Nietzsche’s disagreements with his family reached a peak, and his friendship with Salomé and Rée was ruined by a rivalry with Rée (as they had both developed feelings for Salomé). Nietzsche became deeply lonely while his physical health continued to deteriorate. The context provided is useful to better understand why his thoughts became even more focused on suffering even if he did not accept pessimism. According to him, an individual who embraces life rather than relying on mysticism despite all the challenges reality presents is able to live fully and love his existence. The concept of “will to power” is related to this, but Nietzsche never had the chance to develop it. He was beginning to work on an outline for his new book, The Will to Power, when his mental health was seriously compromised. Prideaux tries to reconstruct what happened on the morning of January 3, 1889, when Nietzsche had a serious mental breakdown after seeing a horse being beaten by its owner. For the following eleven years, his sister insisted on being the only one to look after him. Prideaux examines Nietzsche’s father’s undiagnosed condition, which Nietzsche might have inherited and would explain his later decline. This is useful to readers who might have heard rumors about Nietzsche contracting syphilis in his early twenties, which some claim both as the cause of his decline and as evidence of a hedonistic lifestyle. Prideaux’s examination of the evidence indicates that this is not the likely explanation, dispelling the idea that Nietzsche was a hedonist rather than a sophisticated thinker.9

The following chapters focus on the damage Elisabeth caused to her brother and his intellectual heritage. She never approved of his anti-religious ideas or his friendship with Salomé. While he was losing his ability to move and speak due to a progressive cerebral paralysis, Elisabeth edited Nietzsche’s notes, omitting or editing some passages that were openly against her and focused on spreading decontextualized statements from his unpublished aphorisms that could look close to her own antisemitic ideas. She manipulated his drafts to convey that Nietzsche regarded the will to power as the will of superior people to gain power and use force against weaker individuals.

Friedrich Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900. Later, the Nazis fully supported Elisabeth’s portrayal of Nietzsche’s ideas and considered him an Aryan hero. They presented him as a leader whose ideas would bring about a nation of Übermensch who could embody the will to power, which many interpreted as the desire to obtain power over others by force. None of this is true. Prideaux knows it and firmly condemns what Elisabeth did. She also remarks, “[T]o be a source of political theories had never been Nietzsche’s aim” because “he was only ever interested in man as an individual, rather than a herd animal—be the herd political or religious” (375).

The book’s main strength is the way it combines biographical data and philosophic explanations. The wording is precise yet nonacademic, so a broad audience can benefit from it. Prideaux knows that it is almost impossible to separate Nietzsche’s ideas from his life, especially his rejection of mysticism and violence and his thoughts on suffering. She also concentrates on the misinterpretations of Nietzsche’s ideas and explains why they are wrong. Her focus on the distortion that Elisabeth and the Nazis made of the Nietzschean philosophy demonstrates that scholars’ misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s ideas in the last century come from his sister and not from his words.

Prideaux does not fully cover one major point of Nietzsche’s philosophy: the fact that he rejected the idea of universal morality. She partly explains the reasons for this, such as the fact that he rejected religious absolute views on good and evil, but she does not identify the fact that his conflation of religious absolutism with morality as such created a self-contradiction in his work, much of which consists of moral proclamations.

Although Prideaux’s book does not exhaustively deal with Nietzsche’s view on morality and is not a fully evaluative work, it provides a valuable guide to his philosophy and successfully shows that Nietzsche’s ideas are a useful tool for rejecting dogmas and understanding the roots of Judeo-Christian morality. She describes the way he advocated for a form of individualism that leads to work on oneself rather than blaming others and the reasons that led him to reject any form of conformism (or “herd instinct”). Nietzsche is an interesting yet still often misunderstood thinker, and Prideaux’s analysis of him is a good starting point to discover his ideas without demonizing or idealizing them.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

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Great artists—be they writers, musicians, painters, poets—are true heroes who enhance our lives by bringing us joy and helping us deal with life’s questions and challenges. In this week’s new article, Rebecca Day profiles one such artist: Little Feat founding member and former frontman Lowell George. Her article has left me eager to dive into George’s impressive creative output from his sadly short life.

This week we also celebrate two literary anniversaries —Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale on April 17, 1985, and Charlotte Brönte was born on April 21, 1816." Both penned works that, in very different ways, concretized the importance of independence. Alongside them, we also celebrate baseball legend Jackie Robinson and hero of the American Revolution Joseph Warren.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

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“I believe the work The Objective Standard is doing is imperative to the future of our nation.” —Miguel

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The musical landscape of the 1970s was filled with artistic rule breakers, and singer-songwriter Lowell George was certainly one of them. His dynamic approach, a sort of controlled chaos, produced melodies and musical works that are still being performed and covered today. His devotion to creative freedom shaped his entire body of work and produced one of rock ’n’ roll’s most innovative, original bands. George’s career path was harder than most because of his uncompromising mindset. His wife, Elizabeth, alluded to the fact that for him the road less traveled was inevitable. “There was nothing regular about the guy,” she said while reflecting on his lasting legacy.^[1]

His group was called Little Feat, but George’s fusion of genres from folk to funk was anything but. He created momentous songs by pulling inspiration out of everyday experiences, including such classics as the band’s breakout single, “Willin.’” Trips to New Orleans were catalysts for George’s stylistic innovation, reaching a peak with the landmark album Feats Don’t Fail Me Now. Even lesser-known tracks from his repertoire show an artist determined to scale a musical summit of his own making. His enigmatic artistry spanned genres, and his label struggled to put his music in a mainstream stylistic box, making it harder to sell records. But dedicated listeners who showed up in droves to his shows with Little Feat helped him become one of rock’s unsung heroes. And his discography, showcasing melodic ingenuity, emotional depth, and artistic passion, made him one of rock’s most skilled explorers.

From Setback to Launch Point

In 1969, legend goes that George was fired by one of music’s most mysterious yet influential figures, Frank Zappa. George’s termination from Zappa’s group, The Mothers of Invention, was for good reason. Zappa thought the budding performer was too good to be in a supporting role in a band; he advised George to found one himself. And in the dawn of a 1970s Los Angeles music scene caught between the haze of the folk revival of the 1960s and the forthcoming progressive rock movement, George did exactly that. He teamed up with keyboardist Bill Payne, drummer Richie Hayward, and bassist Roy Estrada to form Little Feat.

In George’s own band, he encouraged and supported his bandmates’ creative experimentation with their instruments and musicianship as long as it stayed true to his overall genre-bending vision for soulful melodies and grooving rhythms. An excerpt from the Rock and Roll Doctor biography highlights Zappa’s influence:

George saw in Zappa’s management of the Mothers a model of how a band could be run. It was a model that worked, that was productive, and that allowed for individual creativity—but within the clear boundaries set by the bandleader. This idea of how things might be was to stay with him throughout his career.^[2]

By 1971, Little Feat released its debut self-titled album. It featured “Willin,’” an acoustic-based, easy-listening ballad about the adventures of a trucker and his perseverance and personal triumphs through the twists and turns of his journey. George came up with the idea for the song before forming his band. In his college days he often drummed up inspiration outside the classroom. “Willin’” was inspired by his time spent working as a gas station attendant, and it would become one of his signature songs.^[3]

George loved studying philosophy, and in interviews he sometimes quoted classical philosophers such as Socrates. For him, everything was interesting, and his insatiable curiosity made him a fount for songwriting and creative playing.

“Lowell quickly developed his own ‘sound’ which featured clean compressed notes played with precision and filled with sustain,” Gelinas writes:

Along with Lowell’s unique slide guitar, he was also developing a distinctive vocal style which employed the technique of melissima by which the singer melodically embellishes certain syllables within a [phrase]. This style of singing, much like Lowell’s slide guitar, would become a critical element of Little Feat’s musical identity.^[4]

After the group’s Sailin’ Shoes album in 1972, George especially wanted to expand the band’s artistic dimensions. Bandmate Bill Payne shared in an interview the talks he and George had when they first started playing together that reflected this creative desire:

We talked about the kind of band we wanted it to be. Should we have a horn section? What should the bass player play? Are we going to relegate ourselves to one style of music? We decided there shouldn’t be any limits to what we would do. If we wanted to play a waltz, great. If we wanted to play a straight-ahead song, fine.^[5]

By 1973, Little Feat’s third album, Dixie Chicken, featuring the popular title track and deep-cut-turned-cult-classic “Roll Um Easy,” marked the arrival of the sound that George had been experimenting with for years—a fresh integrated style he formed out of countless others. The album features an expanded sound (the band was now a six-piece) and boasted Cajun stylings, blues influences, and folk nuances, all with a classic rock ’n’ roll feel.

For a while, Little Feat averaged one album per year, made possible by George’s unrelenting work ethic. In a 1994 interview with Mojo, British musician Robert Palmer chatted about going on tour with Little Feat and how impressed he was with George’s commitment to his musical vision. “Lowell George was extremely bright, with a surreal sort of wit, and he was basically a workaholic. Day and night, all he did was make music.”^[6]

In 1974, Little Feat reached a peak with its critically acclaimed record, Feats Don’t Fail Me Now. The band hailed from California, but their sound was unmistakably southern-inspired. George took naturally to the stylings of New Orleans musicians when he and the band visited the bustling city. Present throughout each song were a horn section, syncopated rhythms common in Louisiana, and lyrical stories with equal parts glamor and grit.

Fearless Creative Approach

“We were very eclectic. We took a lot of chances,” George explained during an interview with Little Feat about his time.^[7] His penchant for creative risk-taking fostered the band’s innovative, wide-ranging sound. Journalist Elizabeth Nelson described his fearless approach to creativity: “Like a method actor, he had an eerie way of fully transforming himself into whatever a project required. Chamber music, blue-eyed soul, and avant-blues all came to him without inhibition.”^[8] Gelinas noted that the American musical landscape of the 1970s often featured “musical primitives with more enthusiasm than dexterity.”^[9]

But George possessed both, and for him, dexterity was more than a skill: it was a mindset, and he applied it to technology as much as his artistry. During the evolution of rock ’n’ roll in the 1970s, musicians embraced technological creativity while forging new sounds. Nowadays, digital audio interfaces make it easy to experiment with harmonies, instruments, and overdubbing—the process of recording different tracks over one another to create a layered final song. But when George was in the studio, he didn’t have any shortcuts. So, he helped pioneer a technique that became a defining recording tactic before digital recording software became available in the late 1980s—one he had begun toying around with during his days playing with Zappa. To layer tracks over one another, George physically altered the tapes he recorded onto by cutting sections with a razor blade and rearranging them with special adhesive. In a 1975 interview in zigzag magazine, George relayed his experimental approach with tape when he stated, “I use tape like someone would use manuscript paper.”^[10] Although this was time-consuming and costly, it was essential to his creative process. Tape splicing helped him come up with new ideas for songs and show bandmates how he wanted specific sections to be played. The editing technique helped add to Little Feat’s genre-blending, no-holds-barred style because it gave him ultimate control over the feel of the band’s sound, rather than experimenting for its own sake.

George was a skilled musician and audio engineer, but his artistic perspective was as influential to his studio sessions as his technical prowess. Little Feat’s sound gave listeners welcome surprises. One could never quite predict when George would cue a bass solo or a drum breakdown, and his lyrics and song narratives were anything but formulaic. He understood that this liveliness needed to be contrasted with steadiness. And that steadiness could be found in the silence he left between notes.

“Space is a place” was his studio motto.^[11] As rock music got busier, sometimes producing noise for noise’s sake, George’s compositions were guided by breathing room as much as the notes themselves, making for a dynamic listening experience no matter the album. Because of this motto, his slide guitar solos sang rather than screamed; they didn’t demand attention: they beckoned listeners, pulling them in.

His ingenuity didn’t stop at the studio. When performing, he often played slide guitar with a spark plug socket wrench rather than a traditional bottleneck slide, allowing him to sustain notes longer. His slide setup also gave his playing a distinct texture that evoked some of his heaviest blues influences.

The Inspiration of Howlin’ Wolf

No other musician influenced the California songwriter more than black Chicago blues vocalist Chester Burnett. Better known as Howlin’ Wolf, he remains one of America’s legendary bluesmen, releasing such enduring classics as “Smokestack Lightning.” During his heyday in the 1950s, yodeling was still popular among genres such as country, blues, and folk, but Howlin’ Wolf couldn’t yodel. Instead, when he sang in falsetto, he created a vocal slide up to a note, then held it, adding plenty of vibrato to give his vocal runs a melodic howl in place of yodeling (artists such as Adele use this technique often nowadays, but Howlin’ Wolf helped pioneer it). George followed in his footsteps in creatively overcoming musical limitations. Due to a hand injury sustained while working on model planes, it was hard for George to fully fret all six guitar strings with his left hand. So, he mastered slide guitar instead.

George was so taken with Howlin’ Wolf that he created a litmus test in his honor, which he used to decide with whom he wanted to work. If someone mentioned a player who wanted to collaborate with him, George would ask, “Is he versed in the ways of Chester Burnett?”^[12] If the player didn’t know that Chester Burnett was Howlin’ Wolf’s real name, George wasn’t interested.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it was common for musicians who happened to be white to be influenced by the blues, a historically black genre. George covered Howlin’ Wolf live with such songs as “How Many More Years.” Some critics worried that these white artists were committing what some would now call “cultural appropriation,” the supposed co-opting of a “marginalized” culture by a “dominant” one. But in a 1967 interview, Howlin’ Wolf highlighted how foundational blues musicians could profit from their music becoming mainstream. When asked about the prevalence of musicians, including young, white musicians, recording blues music from the past, he responded by pointing out that music has the power to connect different musicians through the shared love of a melody. He explained, “It doesn’t matter no different who sang your song. They sang because of the way they feel.”^[13] Adopting an entrepreneurial mindset, he also remarked, “Well I’ll tell you, there’s nothing wrong with that. I want all of them to make my records, because I gets money out of it, see,” he said, referencing the royalty payments he would receive when someone covered his songs.^[14]

For George, Howlin’ Wolf’s catalog and the blues genre as a whole didn’t represent an opportunity for appropriation, but appreciation and innovation. In the blues he found artistic alignment and inspiration.

“What Is Success?”

Among their loyal following, the visionary rock group was known as a must-see live band for their energetic performances. While writing for Let It Rock magazine, journalist Mick Houghton highlighted the band’s tight-knit sound, a foundation that anchored performances through lengthy solos and various reimagined versions of their originals. “As musicians Little Feat are as compatible an outfit as you could hope to find,” he writes.^[15] But George also felt right at home in a recording studio.

“Lowell George’s distinctive style of slide guitar and vocalizing,” writes Gelinas, “helped create a style of music that was a unique blend of second-line funk, gospel, Chicago blues, jazz and country balladry that still stands today as one of the most unique developments in American popular music during the 1970s.”^[16]

For George, music was all about exploration. But for his band’s label, Warner Bros. Records, music needed to be about replication. It was hard for a label to promote a band it struggled to define stylistically. George would not renounce his artistic vision for anyone or anything. He understood the importance of being a profitable act. But for the visionary musician, profit had to be married to passion no matter the project. “What is success?” he asked during an interview. “It certainly isn’t money,” he answered. He then clarified, “Money helps. But doing something that you really like doing as a profession is really success to me.”^[17] After album release days, George would visit various stores in person, only to find their new record wasn’t stocked.^[18] Instead of changing his band’s sound to a more mainstream rock to boost sales and please the label, he and his bandmates toured extensively to make up the difference. The pressures of being a band manager, frontman, producer, and songwriter wore on George over the group’s ten years together from 1969 to 1979. As Little Feat disbanded due to personal differences and professional fatigue, George set out on a solo career. In March 1979, he released his debut solo album, Thanks I’ll Eat It Here. But poor health and substance abuse caught up with the dedicated musician. In June 1979, George passed away from a heart attack at the age of thirty-four. Although he battled and sometimes succumbed to vices, his artistic virtue eclipsed them.

Little Feat’s heroic legacy is not that of record label darling or radio-friendly band but of a group revered by record label darlings and radio-friendly bands. Little Feat was a band’s band, and George was a musician’s musician. Led Zeppelin founder and lead guitarist Jimmy Page once called Little Feat his “favorite American group.”^[19] His bandmate, singer and frontman Robert Plant, once got a slap on the wrist for playing Little Feat records too loud in a hotel. Both modern blues icon Eric Clapton and one of rock’s most famous bands, Van Halen, covered George’s originals live and on records. Folk-rocker Jackson Browne was so taken with George’s magnetism that he called him “the Orson Welles of rock.”^[20]

At Little Feat’s helm was an imperfect but ingenious captain who navigated and explored the islands of musical genres and built from his discoveries a new melodic world—a world today’s musicians continue to mine for their own artistic gold.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

^[1] Mark Brend, Rock and Roll Doctor, Backbeat Books, 2002, 6, https://archive.org/details/rockrolldoctorlo0000bren/mode/2up.

^[2] J P Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection,” Furious magazine, August 2008, https://www.furious.com/perfect/lowellgeorge.html.

^[3] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[4] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[5] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[6] Paul Sexton, “Pursuing Atmosphere in Music: Robert Palmer in 20 Quotes,” udiscovermusic, 2006, https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/robert-palmer-in-20-quotes.

^[7] Earl Guthrie, “Lowell George Interview WXRT Chicago, June 15, 1979,”

.

^[8] Elizabeth Nelson, “Lowell George in Eight and a Half Songs, Oxford American, December 2021, https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-115-winter-2021/lowell-george-in-eight-and-a-half-songs.

^[9] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[10] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[11] “Lowell George: Feats First,” directed by Jon Storey, 2015, https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B078TNR4J9/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r.

^[12] Albert Corey, “Lowell George—Feats First,” Life since the Baby Boom, July 2023,

Life Since the Baby Boom

Lowell George - Feats First

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3 years ago · 2 likes · Albert Cory

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^[13] Chris Stratchwitz, “Howlin’ Wolf Interview,” The Chris Stratchwitz Collection, Arhoolie Foundation, April 1967, https://arhoolie.org/howlin-wolf-interview-2/.

^[14] Stratchwitz, “Howlin’ Wolf Interview.”

^[15] Michael Houghton, “Little Feat Albums,” Let It Rock, March 1975, Rock’s Backpages, https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/little-feat-albums.

^[16] Gelinas, “Lowell George, Perfect Imperfection.”

^[17] Guthrie, “Lowell George Interview WXRT Chicago.”

^[18] Jon Storey, “Lowell George: Feats First,” Pride Studios, 2015, Amazon.

^[19] Jackson Maxwell, “Eric Clapton and Van Halen Covered His Songs, and He Led Jimmy Page’s Favorite American Band: Watch Overlooked Guitar Genius Lowell George Demonstrate His Slide Technique on German TV,” Guitar World magazine, July 2023, https://www.guitarworld.com/features/lowell-george-slide-guitar-german-tv-1977.

^[20] Maxwell, “Watch Overlooked Guitar Genius Lowell George.”

Human civilization is capable of reaching far greater heights than anything seen until now, and this week’s Artemis II flight around the Moon is a tantalizing glimpse of the future we could have. But the fact that it has taken fifty-four years for humans to return to the Moon is a stark reminder that we could have been much closer to that future by now.

In my new article on the flight of Artemis II, I explore the story of America’s space program from the Apollo to the present day, identifying why it’s failed to achieve its long-held goals of a permanent human presence on the Moon and the manned exploration of Mars and beyond. In answering that question, it becomes clear that the Artemis Program shares many of the same flaws that undermine its predecessors, and that if we want to see a spacefaring future for humankind, a different approach is needed.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas F. Walker
Managing Editor

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Human beings are finally visiting the Moon for the first time since 1972, flying past the far side further than any human has gone before. NASA intends the Artemis II mission as the first step toward a permanent human lunar presence. In the fifty-four years since Apollo 17, humans have only left the relative safety of “low Earth orbit” (up to about four hundred miles) once, during SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission in 2024.^[1] That flight reached a maximum orbital height of 870 miles—a record for humans in Earth orbit but a tiny fraction of the 250,000 miles to the Moon that Artemis II’s Orion spacecraft has now traversed.

The fact that we have returned at last to our nearest cosmic neighbor is cause for celebration. A permanent human presence on the Moon could unlock tremendous benefits. The Moon has naturally occurring helium-3, an incredibly energy-dense isotope not found on Earth that could revolutionize power generation. It also has abundant precious metals.^[2] A human settlement on the Moon could serve as a scientific outpost, a waypoint for flights to Mars and beyond, a site for prosperous mining operations, an opportunity to build innovative new societies in a demanding frontier environment, and even as a lucrative tourist destination. All these things would also act as economic and technological turbochargers for innovation and industry back on Earth.

But the flight of Artemis II also shines a spotlight on a critical question: Why has this taken so long? And now that we’re going back, this time will we stay? Answering these questions reveals serious problems with the Artemis program and how successful this attempt at lunar colonization is likely to be.

How We Got Here

To answer these questions, we need to understand the motivations behind the way the American space program has been managed until now, beginning with the Apollo program. Although the Apollo Moon landings were hailed as a step forward in the human exploration of space and they did contribute valuably to many fields of science, neither scientific exploration nor the establishment of a viable colony in space was their principal purpose. Rather, the core purpose of the program was twofold:

1. Prevent the Soviet Union from establishing dominance in space and on the Moon, which it likely would have used for military purposes.

2. Demonstrate the superiority of American industry and technological capability over that of the Soviet Union (and thereby of capitalism over communism).^[3]

When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969 after a decade of the Soviets leading in the space race, many in the West assumed that America had, at least then, gained the lead in a race that was far from over. They didn’t know (and wouldn’t until the 1990s) that the USSR’s hopes for a lunar mission were literally crashing and burning. The Soviet lunar program was beset by two leading men aggressively competing for the favor of the Politburo, sometimes even sabotaging each other’s work, and a regime that threatened and silenced “disloyal” individuals who pointed out flaws in the rocket’s design and the program’s management.^[4] Accordingly, it failed catastrophically. Four of the colossal rockets exploded, one of them taking much of the launch complex and ninety-one lives with it, before the Soviets gave up their ambitions of a manned lunar program.^[5]

By the early 1970s, it was clear that the Soviets weren’t going to the Moon. They had refocused their space program on Earth-orbiting stations. At that point, a harsh reality set in: The Apollo program was not designed to facilitate development of an economically viable, long-term human presence on the Moon. It was designed to win the space race, and it had. So, Congress canceled the program. With the Russians focused on space stations, NASA tried instead to regear the hardware intended for future Apollo missions to develop an American space station. It had mixed success. But as relations between the United States and the USSR became less tense (the two countries even staged a joint manned space mission in 1975), the military justification for manned spaceflight seemed largely to have evaporated.

So, another harsh reality set in: For manned spaceflight to continue, it needed to have a sound economic justification. NASA saw the need to transform its manned space program into a commercial enterprise that could pay at least some of its own costs. But thanks to the program’s military origins, combined with the widespread belief at the time that government-planned programs were the road to prosperity, the prevailing mentality was still that manned spaceflight should be delivered by NASA. So, it developed a plan for a new type of spacecraft: the Space Shuttle. Unlike the single-use Apollo capsules, the Shuttle would be partially reusable, theoretically making it cheaper to fly. It would be limited to low Earth orbit, but it would have a larger crew and cargo capacity, enabling NASA to launch large payloads and repair satellites in orbit on a commercial basis. NASA envisioned a hundred Shuttle launches a year building a thriving orbital economy.^[6]

But it was not to be. The Shuttle program ran years behind schedule, and the vehicles proved extremely complex to manufacture and maintain. In a failed attempt to cut costs, NASA and its partners made changes to the design that negated the Shuttle’s efficiency benefits, resulting in an overweight craft that was more expensive to launch than a traditional rocket.^[7] Contractors, knowing that they were dealing with a government-funded program in which their profits were capped at a percentage of costs, made their processes inefficient to inflate their costs and maximize their profits.^[8] NASA officials attempted to bury reports that some of the Shuttle hardware was unsafe.^[9] The cracks were showing in the early 1980s with several near-miss accidents, but NASA pressed on, keen to demonstrate that the Shuttle could achieve its promises. After twenty-five flights, the illusion shattered. The Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated mid-launch live on national TV, destroyed by a fault that had been known about and covered up across countless flights. Seven astronauts died, including a schoolteacher who had been set to become the first civilian in space.

After Challenger, the Shuttle program never recovered. Terrified of another disaster, NASA implemented safety procedures that effectively limited the Shuttle to eight flights a year and dramatically increased launch costs. Nonetheless, another fatal crash occurred in 2003.^[10] On its final missions, the Shuttle had to sit rotating in space in front of the International Space Station (ISS) so that the crew could inspect its underside and confirm that it was safe to return to Earth.

After the Shuttle program ended, NASA became reliant on Russian spacecraft to service the ISS. But by this time the context had changed radically. Legal changes during the push to commercialize spaceflight in the 1980s had opened the door for private companies to develop their own launch systems, and by the end of the 2000s, several had done so. Further, China had developed and launched its own manned spacecraft, and China and several private companies were working on missions to the Moon and beyond. Keen to remove NASA’s reliance on Russian spacecraft, Congress ordered NASA to develop a two-pronged approach:

1. Develop a new launch system capable of reaching the Moon but build it using components from the Shuttle program to preserve existing jobs associated with Shuttle hardware.^[11] This became the Shuttle-derived Launch System (SLS) with the new Orion spacecraft riding atop.

2. Fund private companies to accelerate development of their launch systems and secure NASA’s use of them once they are serviceable.

Artemis II, launched fifteen years after the last Shuttle flight, is the first mission to use the SLS. That system, which relies on the same solid rocket boosters that caused the Challenger disaster, reportedly costs upward of $2 billion per launch.^[12] Meanwhile, NASA’s regular flights to the ISS are provided by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, a system that costs $140 million per launch and boasts a flawless safety record.^[13] SpaceX is now flying test missions of Starship, a radically new type of spacecraft that will, if successful, be able to reach the Moon and Mars while being far cheaper to launch than even the Falcon/Dragon system is.

This is the context of Artemis II. NASA is racing China and its own private-sector partners back to the Moon using an inordinately expensive rocket based on a failed 1970s program that only exists to protect special interests.

Will NASA’s Lunar Ambitions Succeed?

One significant advantage the Artemis program has is long-term establishment of an economically viable Moon settlement, one of its core objectives. Accordingly, early Artemis missions aim to do valuable work. Artemis II includes experiments that will study the effect of radiation on human bodies and on modern technology such as computer chips, especially during the passage through Earth’s outer magnetic field where solar radiation is concentrated. It will survey possible sites for future bases, including in the south polar region (never visited during Apollo) where water is known to exist. Following cancellation of NASA’s planned Lunar Gateway space station, the Artemis program now also includes use of that station’s already built components to construct the first permanent lunar base.

But how far any of this will get is in serious doubt. NASA’s funding has always depended on Congress; the amount and the way it must be spent swing wildly depending on its political makeup. One reason for the near-decade delay of the Artemis program is that funding and specifications for it and its precursor, the Constellation program, were changed repeatedly under the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.^[14]

Then there’s the program’s enormous cost, brought about by its reliance on Shuttle-era hardware and NASA’s approach to developing new vehicles. SpaceX has adopted a “test and retest” approach, building vehicles it expects to fail and modifying them after each test flight until all the issues are ironed out. On the other hand, NASA, stung by its experience with the Shuttle, engages in a painstaking process of pre-flight simulations and testing with the goal of achieving a faultless first flight. This results in a long wait with many delays, during which costs spiral and NASA has zero return on investment. Whereas NASA took nearly twenty years to deliver one SLS launch, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets began earning money from customers barely five years after the company honed its design with four test flights of the Falcon 1.

SpaceX is motivated to develop a system it can use to make money from customers as well as advance its exploratory objectives, whereas NASA is creating a bespoke system that is only intended for launching Artemis missions and will never make back its development costs. SpaceX is motivated to create a highly reliable, low-cost product as quickly as possible, whereas NASA is motivated to prove to Congress that it’s delivering jobs in particular locations (whether or not those jobs are efficient), advancing the incumbent administration’s goals, and upholding American prestige in space. If it does those things, it gets funding, regardless of whether its programs make economic sense, provide a commercial service, or advance the exploration and colonization of space.

It’s important, given China’s lunar ambitions, that the spacecraft that take American businesses—and may one day need to take American military strength—to the Moon are efficient, reliable, and sustainable, not merely signs of prestige. Sadly, Artemis is hardly a poster boy for American innovation. Alongside the SLS with its Shuttle-era components, the Orion service module is based on the European Space Agency’s Automated Transfer Vehicle because the original NASA version was canceled to reduce costs. The main Orion command capsule takes direct inspiration from 1960s Apollo capsules and is, in many respects, less advanced than SpaceX’s Dragon.^[15]

With the way NASA’s deadlines slip, its goal of landing Artemis IV on the Moon by 2028 seems questionable. Because NASA canceled Orion’s lunar lander component, that mission depends not only on NASA’s test flights of SLS and Orion in Artemis II and III succeeding but also on either SpaceX or Blue Origin having a lander ready in lunar orbit for Orion to dock with. Meanwhile, China plans to land its first astronauts in 2030 with an integrated system of hardware it is already building and testing.^[16]

China’s lunar objectives are a legitimate reason for the U.S. government to invest in lunar transportation. A situation in which communist China dominates space doesn’t bear thinking about—the Moon’s resources would only be open to other countries through dealing with China, and China could develop the military capability to control the use of space for communications, Earth observation, and much more. But for Congress to fund development of the SLS and the Artemis program in parallel with Starship and other private lunar programs diverts resources into a system that will never be economical for long-term colonization. NASA and the Space Force would be far better off fully piggybacking on SpaceX and Blue Origin’s existing programs. That would rapidly open up the Moon to commercial development, save vast amounts of taxpayer money, and still provide the benefit that justifies any government involvement: the protection of commercial space activities from Chinese, Russian, and other threats by establishing the space equivalent of America’s domination—and the subsequent liberation—of the oceans.^[17]

Of course, NASA and Congress have far more objectives than just that. Through Artemis, they intend to oversee the progress of lunar science, colonization, and the Moon’s use as a gateway for further solar system exploration. In so doing, they will divert investment away from private attempts to achieve these goals. It may seem that science is better served by a government mission with scientific objectives than by a SpaceX mission designed to establish a tourist outpost, but the latter will create an economic incentive to build cheaper and better infrastructure for lunar operations. Before long, that will make doing science on the Moon far cheaper and more viable than launching a dedicated scientific mission there is today.

Ultimately, the job of government is to protect rights. NASA, as a government-funded body closely tied to the U.S. military, ought to focus on doing exactly that—developing its ability to ensure that America can protect commercial spaceflight and settlements from outside threats. In so doing, it will support those businesses in creating a truly viable lunar settlement. While China is learning from both the faults of America’s government space program and the innovations of its private ones, America has the opportunity to stay in the lead by focusing wholly on the latter. China has no private space industry remotely comparable to that of the United States. It will only win the race to the Moon if America continues to stumble along trying to make a zombie version of the Space Shuttle work instead of massively better alternatives.

Artemis II is certainly cause for celebration on many levels. Like Apollo, it is inspiring a new generation of people to take an interest in outer space. It will deliver a wide range of benefits, scientifically and technologically, that will help the future colonization of space. But it is also an embarrassing example of the consequences of government mismanagement of spaceflight going back decades.

Had NASA stepped back and truly opened the door to commercial spaceflight instead of developing the Space Shuttle in the 1970s, we’d probably have lunar settlements by now. Today, the private sector has developed spacecraft unlike anything NASA has ever had. If we want to see a flourishing future in space, we need to get behind private companies such as SpaceX and their incentives to commercialize space, not lumbering government programs that waste money constantly trying to adapt to the whims of politicians.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of The Objective Standard.

^[1] Kate Arkless-Gray, “Polaris Dawn—A New Dawn in Space,” Royal Aeronautical Society, 20 September 2024, https://www.aerosociety.com/news/polaris-dawn-a-new-dawn-in-space.

^[2] “Helium-3 Mining on the Lunar Surface,” European Space Agency, https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Future/Space_for_Earth/Energy/Helium-3_mining_on_the_lunar_surface (accessed April 6, 2026);

John C.Johnson, et. al., “Understanding the Economic Worth of Precious Lunar Metals,” Universities Space Research Association, 2022, https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lunarsurface18/pdf/6001.pdf.

^[3] James Donovan, “Why Did the USA Have to Beat the Soviets to the Moon?,” History Hit, July 17, 2019, https://www.historyhit.com/why-did-the-usa-have-to-beat-the-soviets-to-the-moon.

^[4] Sven Etienne Peterson, “The Genius Who Launched the First Space Program,” Palladium, October 25, 2024, https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/10/25/the-genius-who-launched-the-first-space-program.

^[5] “Russian Space Disaster Revealed,” Flight Global, 29 March 1995, https://www.flightglobal.com/space/1995/03/russian-space-disaster-revealed.

^[6] T. A. Heppenheimer, “The Space Shuttle Decision: Chapter 6: Economics and the Shuttle,” National Space Society, 1999, https://nss.org/the-space-shuttle-decision-chapter-6.

^[7] Heppenheimer, “The Space Shuttle Decision.”

^[8] Thomas F. Walker, “How Going to Space Can Enhance Human Flourishing, with Dr. Robert Zubrin,” The Objective Standard, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 2022),

^[9] Timothy Sandefur, “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham (Review),” The Objective Standard, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Fall 2024).

^[10] “Columbia Disaster,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Columbia-disaster (accessed April 6, 2026).

^[11] John Strickland, “The SLS: Too Expensive for Exploration?,” The Space Review, November 28, 2011, https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1979/1.

^[12] Eric Berger, “NASA Does not Deny the ‘Over $2 Billion’ Cost of a Single SLS Launch,” Ars Technica, November 8, 2019, http://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/nasa-does-not-deny-the-over-2-billion-cost-of-a-single-sls-launch.

^[13] Cassidy Ward, “How Much Does It Cost to Launch a Falcon 9 (and Other Rockets)?,” SyFy, May 10, 2024, https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-falcon-9-and-other-rockets.

^[14] Jonathan Amos, “Obama Cancels Moon Return Project,” BBC News, February 1, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8489097.stm;
The timeline is complicated by President Obama’s 2010 cancellation of the Constellation Program, components of which then became components of Artemis. Artemis II, previously known as “Exploration Mission 2,” was originally meant to fly in the late 2010s.

^[15] R. D. Boozer, “The Future and the Past: Comparing Dragon and Orion,” The Space Review, May 4, 2015, https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2743/1.

^[16] Eduardo Baptista, “China’s Crewed Lunar Programme Eyes Astronaut Landing by 2030,” Reuters, April 2, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/science/chinas-crewed-lunar-programme-eyes-astronaut-landing-by-2030-2026-04-02.

^[17] Robert C. Rubel, “Navies and Economic Prosperity—the New Logic of Sea Power,” King’s College London, October 2012, https://www.kcl.ac.uk/dsd/assets/corbettpaper11.pdf.

In the philosophically muddled political culture we live in today, the prominent opposition to Marxism-inspired efforts to malign and undo the achievements of Western culture comes in the form of conservatism. In that context, it is increasingly common for conservatives to claim that Christianity was a key part of why the West became enlightened and industrialized, unlike other parts of the world. But is there truth to this claim? In his rigorous article, Frederick Seiler explores the role of religion in the scientific revolution to see how it may have helped or hindered the West’s embrace of science and reason.

I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,

Thomas Walker-Werth
Managing Editor

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