Based on popular demand, the American Schism series will renew in 2025 with a look at science-based public policy caught in the crossfires of today’s culture wars.
Readers often send me comments on how this series effectively sheds light on our contemporary political divisions through careful examination and analysis of our own American history, since so many of our present issues are derivative of conflicts long brewing in our past. As I wrote last year on these pages, history can act as a salve for our present-day wounds if we apply it.
As the new year begins, one of the most salient features of our contemporary schism is the one at the intersection of science and policy. With Robert Kennedy Jr. incoming as head of Health and Human Services (pending Senate confirmation), speculation abounds regarding his plans: will he proceed with the halting of vaccine mandates and removing drinking water fluoride, despite rock-solid evidence of those same policies’ salutary results? Or, by contrast, will Kennedy take on the food lobby by advocating stricter regulations on food additives that pose potential health risks, certainly worthy of consideration?
As Kennedy begins his campaign tour among US Senators, despite his previous comments, both Fox News and CNN report that the status quo looks safe, at least as far as the polio vaccine is concerned. Nonetheless, many questions remain, given Donald Trump’s previously demonstrated antipathy toward scientific expertise. So, considering science and public policy, what lessons can we learn from our history?
One hundred years ago, John Scopes was accused of violating a Tennessee state law that prohibited teaching the theory of evolution in schools. The 1925 Scopes trial pitted the great defense attorney of the time, Clarence Darrow, against the three-time presidential candidate Williams Jennings Bryan, labeled “the Great Commoner.” A present-day version of this trial seems entirely plausible and even likely in the next few years when, predictably, a doctor provides an abortion in a state that has outlawed such.
In 1925, nearly 160 reporters covered the trial, thereby providing ample records of the events. During the Scopes trial, all copies of the biology textbook in question were sold out. In an unnerving parallel, the NYT recently cited a Guttmacher Institute study indicating that “in nearly every state that has banned abortion, the number of women receiving abortions increased between 2020 and the end of 2023.”
During the Scopes trial, despite the high level of drama and conflict, the mood on the ground was reportedly jubilant and even circus-like. Vendors sold food and drinks and, for penny change, street performers photographed willing citizens with Chimpanzees. According to Keeping the Faith, a new book by award-winning historian Brenda Wineapple, everyone seemed to join in the fun: university students petitioned the legislature to “amend the law of gravity and do something about the excessive speed of light.” One of the journalists covering the proceedings, George Schuyler, interviewed a gorilla at the Bronx Zoo who expressed outrage at the appalling idea of being related to people. The primate was quoted: Nobody had ever seen us carry on, lynching each other, filling up jails, or overworking our little ones …Did you ever hear of monkeys allowing one of their race to appropriate all the trees in the jungle and then force others to pay him rent?
The similarities between 1925 and 2025 are truly remarkable, revealing the continuity in our culture wars vis-à-vis conflicts between science and religion. Just as in 1925, the city-dwelling “cultured crowd” and the rest of the country took opposite sides. During the Scopes trial, there was considerable evidence of contempt on both sides as scientists searching for truth clashed with white fundamentalists threatened by an assault on their religion. Like today, there were also aspects of the split related to race and the acute perception among Christian men of the 1920s that they were losing ground to the millions of Catholic and Jewish immigrants who had flooded the country decades prior. Further, the recent enfranchisement of women added to men’s concerns.
The underlying tension throughout the proceedings (radio broadcast to the entire nation) positioned “educated” city residents as resolute opposition to the local townspeople. In the present-day parallel, we see today’s fiercest cultural warriors emerging from nonurban parts of America that missed out on the tech boom enriching coastal cities.
But here is one crucial contrasting element: while the America of 1925 certainly had its share of violence, the political divisions around the epoch’s culture wars evinced scant animosity. Before the trial, local Tennessee businessmen put up Scopes's bail money as they didn’t want to see their kids’ teacher jailed. Not only were Darrow and Bryan friendly, but once Scopes had lost the case, Bryan volunteered to pay the associated fines.
The environment could not be more different today, where candidates at every level of government make a continual practice of weaponizing culture war disputes. The stoking of divisiveness, rage, and acrimony to win elections has become standard play in this century. In Scopes day, both sides of the debate respected each other, sharing many meals together and managing to co-exist without hatred. Perhaps that lesson can form the basis of a collective New Year’s resolution in 2025.
If only.
Seth David Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation ” and serves on the Advisory Councils at Business for America, RepresentUs, and The Grand Bargain Project. This is the first entry in a 10-part series on the American Schism in 2025.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.