Katie Miller, the conservative podcaster, former DOGE aide, and wife to Stephen Miller, thinks the Constitution and the philosophical tradition upon which it is based are “woke” nonsense. Or possibly she doesn’t understand what they are. It’s hard to say which explanation is worse.
For several days, analysts have debated which of these discouraging explanations pertains. The relevant text is a pair of angry posts on X (most of her posts are angry) this week. The first came at 8:20 Monday morning. She highlighted, with evident alarm, a post from the day before by Caitlin Kalinowski, a hardware engineer best known for her work on virtual reality. Miller’s alarmed message read, “OPEN AI EXEC,” followed by three down arrows, a social-media way of saying, Look at the crazy thing this person just wrote!
[Read: The wrath of Stephen Miller]
Kalinowski’s nutty message consisted, in its entirety, of the following:
1st Amendment—freedom of speech, assembly, and protest
2nd Amendment—right to bear arms
4th Amendment—protection against unreasonable searches and seizures
5th Amendment—due process of law
14th Amendment—equal protection under the law
Quoting directly from the Constitution sans commentary used to be considered a rather cold take. Miller, however, treated it as an act of subversive radicalism.
Sixteen minutes later, Miller’s alarm seemed to have increased. She followed up the previous post by citing an even more offensive social-media message, from Chris Olah, another Silicon Valley executive. Olah set off Miller by including the following line, which she quoted incredulously: “My deep loyalty is to the principles of classical liberal democracy.” Miller commented, “If this is what they say publicly, this is how their AI model is programmed. Woke and deeply leftist ideology is what they want you to rely upon.”
Classical liberalism is not the same thing as woke, leftist ideology—it is essentially the antithesis. Liberalism, in the modern American context, refers to one strand of classical liberalism that favors activist government and social equality (the governing theory of the Democratic Party from the New Deal era onward). Classical liberalism is an Enlightenment philosophy, developed by thinkers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, built upon individual rights and limited government.
Classical liberalism is the philosophical inspiration for the American Revolution, the Constitution, and the broad civic norms that have shaped American life since the founding. Figures as diverse as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan all saw themselves as heirs to classical liberalism.
Woke leftism is a pejorative description for a vein of radical skepticism of classical liberalism. These leftists accuse America’s system of government of being designed to preserve unequal power structures under the guise of philosophical neutrality.
There is also a rising strain of illiberalism on the right, sometimes called post-liberalism. The post-liberal right believes that the far left has captured American institutions, posing a mortal threat to the republic, which has forced the right to employ harsh exercises of state power to save the country from imminent ruin.
Stephen Miller is absolutely an adherent of the post-liberal right. The question is whether his wife was intending to endorse post-liberalism, or whether she mistook “classical liberal” to mean “liberals, but old”—like Walter Mondale or something.
Her posts offer support for both interpretations. The she-made-a-mistake hypothesis emphasizes her amateurish conflation. If Katie Miller wanted to accuse Olah of belonging to the woke left, she’d have claimed he was hiding behind classical liberalism, rather than citing his identification with the Enlightenment as a confession of left-wing radicalism. This reading would suggest Miller lacks any grasp of the theory that her husband, as a devoted national conservative, is dedicated to tearing down. Say what you want about the tenets of national conservatism, dude, at least it’s an ethos.
The intentionality hypothesis assumes she is consciously endorsing the theory embraced by her husband. “Yes, we’re very aware that you and your husband hate America’s system of liberal democracy that’s built on free elections, the rule of law, equal rights, and the freedom of speech, assembly, press, and religion,” Jon Favreau, of Pod Save America, replied to her post. Miller’s outraged posts about the Constitution support this interpretation. Since Miller has obviously heard of the Constitution, when she expresses alarm at amendments guaranteeing free speech, equal protection, and the like, she is knowingly taking direct aim at the pillars of liberal democracy.
[Idrees Kahloon: The return of MAGA’s favorite forbidden book]
There’s a third possibility, blending the first two. Miller grasps that social-media messages affirming the value of classical liberalism, and the value of the Constitution it inspired, are a rebuke of Trump.
Many Trumpists, including Trump himself, have a gut-level attachment to post-liberalism without any grounding in its doctrines. The philosophy isn’t terribly sophisticated anyway, and mostly amounts to the syllogism that the left is evil and powerful, so it must be defeated by any means necessary.
Miller demands fealty, or at least silence, as federal law-enforcement officers kill Americans who pose no apparent threat to them. Whether or not she understands post-liberalism at a theoretical level, by browbeating powerful business leaders who have a stake in government policy with the implicit threat of government retribution, she grasps how it works in practice.
The post Katie Miller Makes a Classic Error appeared first on The Atlantic.
