This Friday, Niall Ferguson tells students that academic freedom and constitutional governance will endure as long as citizens keep up their efforts to maintain them; Scott Atlas analyzes the social and mental health challenges facing Gen Z as well as possible remedies; and David Berkey reflects on editing 100 issues of Strategika, Hoover’s premier publication dedicated to revitalizing military history in academia.
Politics, Institutions, and Public Opinion
At his Substack, Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson has published the transcript of a speech he gave at the University of Austin—a private college he cofounded—on Constitution and Citizenship Day, September 17. In the speech, Ferguson scans our political landscape, noting the impact of illiberal ideological capture of certain academic disciplines and the consequences of a decline in the teaching of Western civilization. The distinguished historian also examines claims of rising fascism in the United States and finds them concerningly disconnected from the facts of twentieth-century fascism in Italy and Germany. “The prelude to dictatorship is often civil war or anarchy. Americans may be polarized, but they are not at war with one another,” argues Ferguson. While acknowledging threats to the constitutional order “at home and abroad,” Ferguson concludes that academic freedom and self-government can be maintained, with deliberate effort. Read more or watch the speech here.
In a column at RealClearPolitics, Senior Fellow Scott W. Atlas examines the social and technological factors that have negatively impacted “Gen Z,” or those born between 1997 and 2012. Atlas cites high daily average screen time of around nine hours and inflammatory ideological influences from politicians and academics as major drivers of this generation’s poor mental health, high degree of loneliness, and propensity to condone violent responses to speech they consider threatening. Examining how negative mental health and behavioral trends among this group could be reversed, Atlas says “legal, top-down interventions” are less likely to work than individual efforts. Atlas calls on older generations to seek out opportunities to mentor rising leaders within Gen Z committed to the principles of a free society. “Efforts like these demand courage—from us and from them,” writes Atlas. Read more here.
Revitalizing History
After twelve years of commissioning leading minds to write about the history of humans at war in Strategika, Hoover Research Fellow David Berkey says the work they generate can sometimes, inadvertently, illustrate the future. Berkey works with members of Hoover’s Military History in Contemporary Conflict Working Group and guest contributors to Strategika to curate entries, select art, and, together with Hoover Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson, decide on the overall topic of each issue. And often, he says, the ideas that become opinion pieces in the journal spark wider thought among military thinkers going forward. “Strategika often looks ahead to issues that might not be in the forefront of the news but are very critical topics,” Berkey said in an interview. “We’re not trying to follow the news cycle at Strategika.” Yet the Strategika team is always “trying to think ahead,” Berkey said. “It’s uncanny how sometimes we will release an issue and then six months later it will become a topic that will figure in news stories.” Read more here.
Revitalizing American Institutions
Why are some people heavily invested in their local communities while others prioritize participation in national politics? In a new paper, Hoover fellows Hans Lueders and Elizabeth Elder link this variation to people’s local attachments, or the emotional and affective bonds that tie them to a particular locality. Their new measure of place attachments, developed and tested using original survey data from the United States and Germany, finds that many voters have strong bonds to the place where they live, that these attachments vary little with partisanship, voter demographics, and objective measures of place quality, and that they are equally strong in urban and rural areas. This work is part of a broader project supported by Hoover’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions that seeks to understand geographic divides in the United States and challenges the conventional focus on urban-rural divides and the identities formed around them. Read more here.
Two new short videos from the Hoover Institution’s Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy address policy challenges facing core American social benefits programs Medicaid and Social Security. Starting in 2027, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will require able-bodied Medicaid enrollees ages 19 to 55 to complete 20 hours of weekly community engagement, such as paid work, job training, or volunteering. Although there are broad exemptions for children, pregnant women, and people with disabilities, the Congressional Budget Office estimates these requirements will lead to 4.8 million fewer able-bodied adults enrolling in Medicaid by 2034, significantly altering the program’s scope. In the second video, Senior Fellow John F. Cogan considers whether America can afford its current Social Security promises. Cogan argues that Congress could secure the program’s longer-term viability by limiting the growth of future benefits to the rate of inflation, without cutting current payments to retirees. Watch the video on Medicaid here. Watch the video on Social Security here.
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