A new study of federal court filings suggests that artificial intelligence may be transforming one of the oldest — and most expensive — services in American society: representation in court. 

The paper, now circulating for comments before publication, reports a nationwide surge in civil lawsuits filed by people acting pro se (as their own attorneys). The researchers conclude that many of these filings were researched, drafted, or otherwise heavily assisted by large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT and Claude. 

The study examined millions of federal court docket entries across multiple years and dozens of categories of litigation. Using large databases of filings, linguistic analysis, statistical comparisons with pre-ChatGPT baselines, and software to detect AI-generated language patterns, the researchers conclude that the rise of generative AI coincides with a major increase in pro se litigation in federal courts. 

That increase is substantial. Federal civil filings surged after the public release of advanced LLMs. The overwhelming majority of the increase came from pro se plaintiffs. The authors report:

In the post-[AI] period, we find that the AI detection rate rises consistently, from near zero at the end of 2022 to 18 percent by early 2026, tracking the trajectory of LLM capability gains and diffusion of LLM adoption rather than any single event. By early 2026, roughly one in five complaint filings contains text that the detector classifies as AI-generated [emphasis added]. 

The right to represent oneself in federal court dates to the founding era and was codified by the First Congress in the Judiciary Act of 1789. In practice, however, the right often existed more in theory than reality. The Sixth Amendment and subsequent rulings assured a right to an attorney for those accused of a criminal offense, but no such protection exists in civil or administrative courts. Federal litigation is intimidating, technical, document-heavy, and expensive. Filing fees may be affordable, but legal representation often is not. 

For generations, many Americans who believed they had been cheated, harassed, wrongly terminated, denied compensation, defamed, discriminated against, or otherwise mistreated under the law reached the same reluctant conclusion: it simply was not worth paying a lawyer and risking unpredictable legal costs to pursue a civil case. Artificial intelligence abruptly alters that calculation. 

Chatbots Enter the Courtroom

A plaintiff can now ask ChatGPT to explain filing requirements, organize facts, summarize precedents, draft motions, prepare responses, and generate properly formatted legal documents at little or no cost. What once required thousands of dollars and weeks of expert legal work can be meaningfully attempted at home in an evening. (For what it’s worth, ChatGPT scored a 297 out of 400 on the Uniform Bar Exam, easily exceeding the passing score in nearly all US jurisdictions. Some 10 percent of US law school graduates never pass the exam.) 

The jump in AI-assisted filings occurred across a wide range of legal categories, from real estate disputes and employment law to slander and libel claims, insurance matters, disability cases, and immigration proceedings. Of particular note, perhaps, is the rapid growth in filings related to detention and deportation, where detainees increasingly appear to be using AI tools to navigate the federal legal system without attorneys. Amid accelerating (often erratic) immigration enforcement, habeas corpus lawsuits have increased 8,400 percent. In other words, a market-generated AI technology may be broadening de facto access to constitutional protections for the groups least able to defend themselves within the legal system. From that perspective, this looks like an impressive democratization of access to justice. 

For decades, reformers have argued that lower-income Americans effectively lack equal access to civil courts because professional legal services (“legal cognition”) are too expensive. Lawyers cost money because legal work requires highly trained cognitive labor: research, drafting, procedural knowledge, formatting, and endless paperwork. Legal aid programs and pro bono services help some people, but many are turned away because the basic economics remained unchanged. 

Now, LLMs have dramatically reduced the cost of producing all that legal text and navigating legal procedure. The result may be a profound expansion of practical access to civil litigation in American history. 

The Risks of AI Litigation

US courts evolved under the assumption that legal services would remain “scarce” and therefore expensive. That scarcity acted as a filtering mechanism. Lawyers didn’t merely draft documents. They discouraged weak claims, translated emotional grievances into legally actionable arguments, imposed professional discipline, and absorbed enormous procedural burdens before cases reached judges. 

AI removes much of that friction. 

The legal profession, for now, is deeply divided over the impact of what they call “robo-litigation” on the future of American justice. Some lawyers and judges see a coming wave of frivolous filings, fabricated citations, and procedural chaos. Others, including many organizations devoted to expanding access to legal services, see something closer to a breakthrough. 

The American Bar Association recently conceded that generative AI could provide “affordable legal guidance” to people unable to hire attorneys but warned about inaccurate advice, ethical problems, and the unauthorized practice of law. Courts increasingly caution litigants that they remain fully responsible for errors generated by AI systems, including fabricated legal citations and imaginary precedents. Several lawyers already have been sanctioned after submitting briefs containing nonexistent cases hallucinated by AI tools. 

Legal aid organizations are more enthusiastic than alarmed. The ABA’s own Center for Innovation has described AI as a potentially transformative tool for improving access to justice. The Thomson Reuters Institute recently called AI a “generational opportunity” to narrow the justice gap (unmet civil legal needs of Americans) by helping underserved populations navigate legal systems that historically have been too expensive and complex for ordinary citizens. One survey discussed by the Legal Services Corporation found that legal aid organizations are adopting AI tools at roughly twice the rate of the broader legal profession. 

In short, the groups most directly confronted with unmet legal demand seem naturally eager to use AI. For legal aid attorneys and reform advocates, the advantages are obvious. A tenant facing eviction, a migrant contesting detention, a worker challenging dismissal, or a disabled claimant denied benefits suddenly can obtain procedural guidance, draft filings, organize evidence, and prepare legal arguments at little or no cost. What elite lawyers may view as a destabilizing automation can look different to people who previously had no practical access to legal representation at all. 

Will Automation Overwhelm the System?

Critics reply that lowering the cost of legal access is also lowering the cost of producing legal “noise.” Federal judges complain of growing quantities of AI-assisted filings containing procedural errors, invented authorities, and poorly grounded legal arguments. Even accurate filings, however, increase pressure on courts that already struggle with overloaded dockets and limited judicial capacity. In many ways, the system’s stability relies on most people not exercising their rights. “Justice delayed” is one of the most politically sensitive measures of a court system. 

And unlike private firms, the federal judiciary cannot rapidly gear up in response to surging demand. Adding more judges requires congressional action. Court procedures are governed by law, precedent, and elaborate procedural rules designed for consistency and due process — explicitly not for rapid adaptation. 

In this sense, the federal courts may be confronting a classic problem identified decades ago by the economist Ludwig von Mises in Bureaucracy. Market institutions can respond dynamically to technological innovation because they are guided broadly by profit, loss, and competitive adaptation. Bureaucratic institutions operating under law necessarily move more cautiously because their authority depends upon rules, procedure, and limited discretion. 

The courts now face precisely that asymmetry. The market has produced a revolutionary technology capable of dramatically lowering the cost of legal cognition. But the judicial system must respond through new legislation, revised procedures, modified administrative rules, and constitutional safeguards. Recently, for example, courts ruled that attorney-client privilege doesn’t apply to chatbots, even if the user is relying on them for legal counsel.

From Disruption to Democratization

Not so long ago, headlines about AI and law focused on whether ChatGPT could pass the bar exam and whether AI would threaten the jobs of junior associates drafting legal briefs. 

Across profession after profession, AI is reducing the cost of cognitive labor once performed only by highly trained people. Journalism, accounting, customer service, education, finance, medicine, and software development — to name a few — all are confronting versions of the same disruption. Institutions built around expensive expertise suddenly face technologies capable of reproducing portions of that expertise at near-zero marginal cost. That we knew.

But few considered the more consequential finding that millions of ordinary citizens suddenly possess tools capable of helping them navigate the legal system. The relationship between ordinary Americans and the legal system is changing fundamentally. The constitutional right to represent oneself existed long before AI. What AI may now be doing is operationalizing that right on a mass scale for the first time in American history. 

Many discussions of the ongoing decline in fertility end up treading on the grounds of “family policy” when discussing remedies (or, if one believes there are too many people on Earth, incentives) to fertility decline. Commonly debated items include subsidized childcare, income tax credits, housing reform, divorce laws, welfare policy, and the possible trade-offs of “quantity” and “quality” when investing in children. What is rarely, if ever, included is the role of monetary policy.

Fertility decisions are primarily based on lifelong considerations. Because monetary policy mostly affects the short-run, even large unexpected monetary expansions or contractions are unlikely to matter much for such long-run fertility decisions. In extreme cases, an unexpected monetary expansion can cause a real wealth reduction that affects timing. If extreme enough, the delay may push older possible parents out of their prime years for having children. In other extreme cases (think hyperinflation) we can expect some effects. But both examples are extreme cases.

Available estimates of the role of monetary policy on fertility in non-extreme cases show something, but it is a small something (although not negligible). Thus, the role of monetary policy seems properly sidelined in countries like the United States.

A recent book by Jeffrey Degner* argues that these results understate the true damage. In Inflation and the Family, Degner argues that monetary institutions (which could include state-issued monies as well as competitively issued ones under a free banking regime) end up shaping people’s time preferences. Our habits (greater indebtedness, increased inequality, and greater moral hazard) are influenced by the economic environment. “Time preferences” refers to how people value present consumption relative to future consumption or, more broadly, how willing they are to defer gratification. Related habits include the age at first marriage, the number of children, and the spacing between children, among other factors. Ultimately, he argues that political control of the money supply gives politicians incentives to overissue money, fueling an “inflation culture” which depresses fertility.

There is much to say about such an argument. Economists, in general, are reluctant to argue in terms of “preference changes.” One of the fathers of family economics, Nobel laureate Gary Becker, famously argued that we should take preferences as given and never invoke preference changes to explain social or economic change. Not because such changes never occur, but because it is a facile argument. “Preference change” can be used to explain too much, and it’s difficult to falsify. 

Being somewhat of a Becker devotee, I tend to admonish my students the same Becker did. At the same time, there is always a little voice in my head that makes me somewhat reluctant to say that preference changes should never be used. After all, dictatorial regimes invest significant resources in propaganda precisely to reshape people’s preferences so that they acquiesce. So it cannot be fundamentally wrong to argue about preference changes, but we should set the standard required to make a convincing case extremely high.

Degner’s case has parts that respect Becker’s admonition but also parts that violate it in order to take the more difficult road. In the parts where the admonition is respected, the case is fully convincing. In the parts where it is not, Degner does not quite make that case, but he does make a convincing case that the issue deserves more attention.

For example, with respect to instances of following Becker’s admonition, Degner points out that we measure inflation for the poor very poorly, which likely explains why we understate the damages of inflation. The consumer price index (CPI), when one looks at how it is constructed, tends to resemble the inflation experience of households in the top income quartile of the population. Attempts to create “group-specific” inflation measures generally find higher rates of inflation at the bottom than at the top of the distribution. Degner argues that this is due in part to how money enters the economy — loose monetary policy actually fuels inequality. Since inequality has been shown to have some connection to fertility, monetary policy may affect fertility through its contributions to inequality. This well-anchored claim indicates the “usual” assessments understate the role and importance of monetary policy.

Straying from Becker’s advice about positing shifting preferences, Degner invokes the idea of an “inflation culture.” In this framework, monetary policy does not merely influence prices; it also shapes the incentives and behavioral responses (like indebtedness, low savings rates) that arise under an inflationary monetary regime and ultimately influence household decisions, including family formation. The intriguing link merits further investigation, and in Degner’s treatment it largely serves as an invitation for future research rather than as a fully developed empirical demonstration.

Indeed, Degner highlights earlier efforts at making the “inflation culture” argument – including one by Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy — as well as potential avenues to connect economics with biology, psychology and sociology to explain preference formation. But in this, Degner only hints at future research, and in fact omits some obvious empirical arguments in his favor.  

Take, for example, the habits of people in former Soviet bloc countries, notably in East Germany. Despite now having lived under a liberal democracy with relatively stable monetary policy and open markets — and for many having grown up in that environment — East Germans still exhibit a much stronger aversion to inflation than people in West Germany. This is despite a literature showing that, before Soviet division, there were few socio-economic discontinuities at the border between what later became East and West Germany.

That last criticism notwithstanding, Inflation and the Family makes for a worthy addition to one’s library. What it does well is genuinely valuable, and even where it is less fully developed, the book provides a useful starting point for future inquiry. All in all, it is a valuable contribution.

*This review was commissioned and completed before Jeffery Degner joined the AIER staff.

As a seventeen-year-old high school student in Trier, Germany, Karl Marx wrote a religious essay to fulfill a graduation requirement. Titled “The Union of the Faithful with Christ,” it explained the human need for the divine as an “unsatisfied longing for truth and light.” A loving relationship with God not only filled that longing but also brought virtue as a benefit.

“Then every repulsive aspect is submerged,” Marx continued, “everything earthly suppressed, everything crude extinguished, and virtue is more enlightened as it becomes milder and more humane.”

Although the essay feels somewhat more analytical than heartfelt, along with Marx’s other work, it was easily good enough to graduate. He finished eighth in a class of 32, ready for college.

Parents naturally fret when children leave home. What if they fall in with a bad crowd or adopt destructive ideas? Pity Marx’s parents, Heinrich and Henriette; young Karl was an edge case of this. Within two years of his family turning out at 4 a.m. to see him off to university aboard a river steamer, Marx was living a life notably short on virtue, mildness, or humanity. In fact, a tsunami of egotism and wrath toward God had consumed him. Those who have had their own battles with self-absorption and anger can relate.

Between 1835 and 1841, Marx studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, during which time he was jailed for drunkenness and disturbing the peace, was accused of carrying weapons, and reportedly fought a duel.

His parents, who were financing this mischief, worried, with Heinrich carrying on a correspondence with Karl that degenerated into conflict. Believing his son’s heart was “enlivened and governed by a spirit that is not given to all men,” in 1837, he frankly asked Karl whether that spirit was “of a heavenly or a Faustian nature.”

“Do you think,” he wrote, “that you will ever be capable of feeling a truly human, a domestic happiness?”

Karl wrote back a long, solipsistic reply which signaled that a momentous battle inside him had been decided. He described an illness that seemed to be partly physical and partly spiritual. It had led him out of Berlin into the countryside to recuperate. For several days he was unable to think at all.

“I ran like a madman around the garden beside the dirty waters of the Spree,” Karl wrote.

Literary Ambition and Swallowing Fury

In 1838, the very next year, Heinrich died. He was 61. Karl didn’t attend the funeral. Any substantive relationship with his family ended at that point. 

What brought on Karl’s remarkable college transformation? Perhaps a Marxist would say he was overcome by rational objectivity. But as the biographer Werner Blumenberg notes, in the end Marx was less an objective scientist than (quoting Marx’s friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels) “a revolutionary politician.” His intellectual work was designed to serve political ends. Beneath the claims of objective rationality lay a tortured, artistic soul. 

Marx’s first college ambitions, in fact, had been literary. At Bonn, he was active in a poetry group. Today his verse serves as a window into the emotional storm that drove him. 

In “Invocation of One in Despair” (1836-37), Marx describes wanting to avenge himself on  a god whom he claimed had “snatched from me my all.” In “The Pale Maiden” (1837) he quotes the titular character as saying “Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, Is chosen for Hell.” And the later poem “The Fiddler” (1841) reads like a bizarro version of the Charlie Daniels’ song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” Marx describes a violin player turning against God, who had lent him his art: “Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel, With Satan I have struck my deal. He chalks the signs, beats time for me, I play the death march fast and free.” 

In 1837, when an editor rejected his poems for publication, Marx had written his father that he “swallowed it with fury.” That was when his primary ambitions pivoted to philosophy and history. Exhaustion from this intense study seems to be what led to the illness that drove him out of Berlin to run like a madman beside the river.  

It also arguably drove the work that would make Marx famous. 

The Gospel of Marx

Marxist philosophy is a reimagined New Testament, with Marx in the role of Christ. After all, Jesus had first spoken of a kingdom in which the last would be first, and vice versa. Marxism even has its own perverted eschatology, with violent socialist revolutions paving the way to a utopian state of communism that supposedly marks the end of history.

Creating this system of thought came at a cost. Marx’s drive and intellect could have secured a much more comfortable life for his family, who lived in profound poverty. Four of his children died before reaching adolescence. His wife, Jenny, who had been raised in wealth, had to beg a neighbor for money just to bury one of them. Marx himself died in 1883 at age 64, with eleven people attending his funeral — many of his growing number of disciples, one imagines, were too busy promoting his work to the world.

Jesus said you could know a tree by its fruits, and those of Marx did not fully ripen until the twentieth century. At one point, over a third of humanity lived under Marxist governments. Utopias they were not.

Fortunately, today the ratio has declined to less than one-twentieth, if you exclude China, which remains nominally socialist but with a significantly different economic model.

Instead of rewriting the Gospels, Marx’s life might have been better spent trying to live them out, cultivating something he had written about in his high school essay: “…a heart full of love for humankind, open to everything noble, everything great, not out of ambition but for the sake of Christ.”

At seventeen, Karl knew the words of a better way to live, even if he had not yet learned the tune. The dreams of youth are sometimes lost with tragic results.

As the Iran campaign grinds into its third month, with unpredictable reactions and uncontrollable consequences pushing the conflict toward open‑ended escalation — a prolonged war — the contrast with January’s swift capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro could not be starker. 

Yet the two interventions are by the same military and the same commander-in-chief. What explains the difference?

The contrast between the two campaigns points to a deeper issue. War has long been understood as having uncertain outcomes. As Carl von Clausewitz observed, any war unfolds in a “fog” where much remains unknown and therefore cannot be controlled. Yet military campaigns are still planned as rational and deliberate undertakings, utilizing strategies and tactics to manage or overcome this uncertainty and bring about the intended outcome: victory on the battlefield.

Friedrich Hayek offers a fundamental and revealing critique of the planning mindset that permeates the military and its campaigns. His work on knowledge in society as not given to a single mind, but dispersed across individuals, puts the very framework of top-down planning in question. War, as the coercive imposition of one centralized rule over another, suffers from this limitation.

Although Hayek developed this insight in the context of markets, it applies equally to war. Military campaigns seek to impose a single will, yet their success depends on navigating and overcoming the dispersed knowledge embedded in the societies they confront — and therefore the varied and unpredictable responses on the battlefield and beyond. Because the goal is to overtake and establish control over the enemy, war becomes a central planning problem.

Hayek’s insight is that much of what matters is knowledge of the “particular circumstances of time and place.” This knowledge is largely tacit, what Michael Polanyi described as knowing more than we can tell. Because it is practical and experience-based, it cannot be centralized or fully communicated.

The reason the knowledge gap is not merely a complication but a fundamental barrier lies in the nature of feedback. Hayek observed that markets correct poor planning through price signals, which generate decentralized, immediate responses that reveal planners’ errors.

War lacks an equivalent mechanism. As James Scott argued, by the time the knowledge gap becomes apparent, the intervention has already altered the society in which it is embedded. New, irreversible facts are created on the ground. In Iran, each month of campaigning generates reactions that no prior intelligence service could have anticipated, and each reaction reshapes the terrain for what comes next. The planner is initially ignorant, lacking the full knowledge necessary to make rational decisions, and it is the very act of planning that exacerbates this ignorance.

Even taking uncertainty into account does not solve it. Donald Rumsfeld’s distinction between “known and unknown unknowns” acknowledges uncertainty, but does not dispel it. However, Hayek’s point explains that the issue is not simply that some data are missing, but rather that the necessary knowledge found in the cultural, historical, and social spheres is not of the kind that can be compiled, centralized, or incorporated into a plan.

The swift resolution of the Venezuelan conflict and Iran’s prolonged involvement illustrate this well. Maduro represented a center of concentrated power — one man in a specific and well-defined position — and his removal required knowledge that intelligence could approximate. Iran, by contrast, is different: the task is broader and less well defined. Success hinges not only on military might, but also on the responses of a society deeply rooted in distinct cultural, historical, and religious dynamics. Although there is opposition to the regime, would it rise in support of a foreign intervention, remain passive and silent, or even side with the state in resisting it? Even the most sophisticated intelligence cannot reliably predict such outcomes, because the relevant knowledge is dispersed among millions of individuals.

The danger is not that war is irrational, but that it is treated as if it can be made rational and predictable. This illusion not only justifies action without sufficient knowledge but also underlies the belief that societies can be reconstructed from the top down after conflict. War is not only a matter of military might and technology, but also of human response.

Hayek’s insight thus invites skepticism toward the idea of rational war. Outcomes depend on dispersed and tacit knowledge that no planner can fully access or control. War is therefore not only uncertain, as Clausewitz argued, but constrained by deeper epistemological limits.

Planning cannot overcome this limitation. As President Eisenhower put it, “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

While watching this just-released, kid-targeted film on May Day — a day which socialists since 1886 have celebrated as “International Workers Day” — I knew already from promotional material that it would “flip the script” on George Orwell’s 1945 satirical allegorical novella. The approach was soft-pedaled by the movie’s distributor, Angel Studios (founded by Mormons in 2014), a Utah-based firm specializing in faith-based, Christian-themed content. Perhaps Angel Studios hopes parents will take the revised theme on sheer faith.

This movie recklessly inverts Orwell’s original theme even beyond the public relations billing. Like his more famous, later work — the novel 1984 (which appeared in 1948) — Animal Farm is anti-authoritarian. It vilifies not capitalists, but communists. This movie effectively reverses Orwell’s moral framework and vilifies not communists (or even collectivists) but capitalists.

When the animals arrive on the farm, they first sense fun upon seeing signage that reads “Laughterhouse,” but they soon realize the full sign reads “Slaughterhouse.” The antagonist is not the cruel and corrupt Napoleon, but a greedy billionaire and a corporation intent on shutting down the farm. It is a clever but not-too-subtle hint — carried throughout the film — that these animals, like workers, will not merely be corralled but exploited. Filmmaker Andy Serkis appears to view this as a good and peaceful message for kids.

Not only is the original (anti-communist) theme of Animal Farm clear to anyone who bothers to read it, but Orwell himself was clearer still in his 1947 preface to the Ukrainian version, that “its various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution.” Orwell also knew, of course, that the 1917 revolt in Russia was not of workers against capitalists but of Bolsheviks and disgruntled (because unpaid) soldiers against the royalist-Czarist regime. Although Bolsheviks were inspired by Marxism and Marx was anti-capitalist, it didn’t follow that the Bolshevik Revolution was an overturning of capitalism. Russia in 1917 was more feudal-agrarian than it was capitalist-industrial.

Other accounts of Animal Farm are clear about its meaning. Per Britannica, it’s a “political fable based on the events of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the betrayal of the cause by Joseph Stalin. The book concerns a group of barnyard animals who overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own, based on the founding principle “All animals are equal.” Eventually, the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution. Concluding that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,’ the pigs form a dictatorship even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters.”

In his essay for the Times of London in 2023 — “Animal Farm is Still Horribly Relevant Today” — A.N. Wilson described the novella as an “incomparable masterpiece” that still “resonates today” and “not just as a terrible indictment of left-wing idealism and Communist tyranny” — as it illustrates “exactly what Lenin, and then Stalin, did to the population of the USSR” at the beginning of the last century — but because like many people still today, the characters exhibit “a pathetic weakness to believe political mantras.” Again, it’s an obvious indictment of socialism, not capitalism.

Orwell (a lifelong Englishman, born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903) said he was apolitical in his youth, then saw poverty and became a democratic socialist. This committed him to being anti-fascist, but he was also candid enough to criticize non-democratic, oppressive forms of socialism. His mistake was to believe that mere voting could soften socialism’s blows. In the 1930s German voters elected the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) and soon got years of tyranny. Conveniently, Orwell blamed that not on the democratic or socialist part of the mix but the nationalist part. In 1998 (and a few times thereafter), Venezuelan voters elected democratic socialists and before long, also got tyranny. They still suffer it. What would Orwell say about that? Probably something close to what’s now said by the Democratic Socialists of America: Venezuela isn’t “genuine” socialism. As New York City mayor and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has said, an ideal, “genuine” socialism remains the goal, such that America must “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Orwell warned of the “excesses” of collectivism, but being socialist surely undermined his message. 

Returning to Orwell’s preface to the 1947 Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, we learn that he did, in fact, initially envision the novella as a parable about the evils of capitalism. He recalls that the “details of the story did not come to me for some time, until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength, we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.” How then did Animal Farm become instead a parable not about capitalist “exploitation” but about socialism gone awry? As mentioned, Orwell says the novella’s episodes were taken from the Russian Revolution and its disastrous aftermath. “Up to 1930, I did not look upon myself as a Socialist,” he recounts, as he had “no clearly defined political views.” He says he “became pro-Socialist more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society.”

In 1936, Orwell raced to Spain to fight in its civil war — against the fascist regime and on the side of Trotskyites, who opposed Stalin for his “impure” (brutal) form of socialism. Then Orwell heard about Stalin’s gruesome, murderous purges of top military officials in 1936-38. “To experience all this was a valuable object lesson,” he recalled (in the 1947 preface), for “it taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries. I saw innocent people being thrown into prison merely because they were suspected of unorthodoxy.” “I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the Western Socialist movement.” Notice how he refused to critique socialism per se. He insisted that its authoritarian versions should not be counted as genuine versions. Socialists have made this unsubstantiated assertion repeatedly since 1917. For some odd reason, Orwell didn’t consider such brazen, defensive, apologetic whitewashing as part of what he labeled “totalitarian propaganda to control opinion.”

It may be said that Orwell’s two main books weren’t really warnings about the dangers of socialism but rather attempts to salvage its terrible reputation, which he somehow presumed was unearned. In the 1930s, per Orwell, “it was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was. Since 1930 I had seen little evidence that the U.S.S.R. was progressing towards anything that one could truly call Socialism. On the contrary, I was struck by clear signs of its transformation into a hierarchical society, in which the rulers have no more reason to give up their power than any other ruling class.” Nevertheless, he recalled, “even if I had the power, I would not wish to interfere in Soviet domestic affairs” and “would not condemn Stalin and his associates merely for their barbaric and undemocratic methods. It is quite possible that, even with the best intentions, they could not have acted otherwise under the conditions prevailing there.”

The above passage is quite an ugly admission by Orwell. He “would not condemn barbaric and undemocratic methods” — even as a supposed democratic socialist — nor would he condemn socialism as necessitating such methods, especially given Marx’s distinctive expectation that revolution would launch with a mass expropriation of private property and a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” These were two crucial aspects of the original idea of socialism and they were actually instituted by Lenin and Stalin — socialism by revolution and bullets, not evolution and ballots. Orwell insisted that “nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.” But Orwell did excuse those acts. He told us he “would not condemn barbaric and undemocratic” acts. 

It’s fair to conclude that Orwell’s self-admitted motivation for writing his two anti-authoritarian books in 1945 and 1948 was a worry that socialism wouldn’t advance in his native Britain, where he lived from 1928 onward, as long as Stalin’s Soviet Union was seen as the role model. Again, from the 1947 preface, we find him declaring that “for the past ten years (1938-47) I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” What is the “Soviet myth”? That the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (USSR) was real socialism. 

How does Andy Serkis, the producer of the new animated film, explain his desecration of the classic satire? In a recent episode of the Reason Interview, “What Orwell Understood About Tyranny,” libertarian host Nick Gillespie praises him and lightly questions but doesn’t criticize him for bizarrely transforming the bad guys from socialists into capitalists. Serkis says it’s an innocent “adaptation” of the original story and claims he got approval from the Orwell Estate. Serkis insists that his version’s theme isn’t different from the original novella but merely “broader,” as it’s about the “corrupting nature of power.” What does he mean by “power?” As is common among socialists — Orwell included — Serkis improperly conflates opposites: economic power (the power to produce) and political power (the power to coerce). In effect, Henry Ford and Joseph Stalin are both deemed dangerous because “powerful.” If you can so easily conflate opposites, you can also easily invert story plots and characters, switch the good guys and bad guys. Serkis does both. On his account, capitalism is no less “dangerous” than socialism. Why then prefer the latter over the former? Each is supposedly constrained by democracy, by a majority vote of whoever for whatever. Anything goes. In fact, history teaches that unlimited democracy, devoid of any real protection of genuine rights (especially property rights), degrades capitalism’s inherent safety, security, and prosperity, while it also enables the rise and spread of socialism. Of course, that’s the aim of “democratic socialists.” Democracy for them is a way to get socialism, not confine it. They know the cocktail is both possible and dangerous.

For those interested in accuracy and fidelity to the original source material of Animal Farm, the only visual alternatives to the current film are the British-American animated version of 1954 and the live-action film from 1999, using the puppetry of the late, great Jim Henson.

When my eldest daughter, now 23, was five years old, she delivered her first “out of the mouths of babes” moment. When walking into our local supermarket shortly before Memorial Day, displays were predictably decked in red-white-and-blue bunting. She asked me why, and I replied, “It’s because Memorial Day is next weekend.” She then retorted, “Oh! Is that the day we celebrate the wars?!” 

Her question stopped me in my tracks. Pausing to gather my best dad-on-the spot response, I explained, “No, sweetie. We don’t celebrate wars. It’s supposed to be a sad day. We need to remember how awful war is and to think about and pray for our friends and family that have been hurt or killed in wars.” 

In an instant, my young daughter revealed the message delivered to American children: War is too far removed to lament. Rather, the full appreciation of the sacrifices associated with military conflicts is held at a great distance. Whether those sacrifices were made willingly or unwillingly, lamenting them is largely absent from this culture’s consciousness. Our children know it, and if we’re honest, so do the rest of us.

This essay isn’t intended to rail against Memorial Day sales, consumerism, barbecues, and furniture discounts that have come to define the extended weekend. Rather, it reflects on how this culture lost its ability to mourn the losses of war since the original “Decoration Day.”

The Origins of Memorial Day

The origin of the holiday revolves around the close of the Civil War, so the controversy over its origins comes as no surprise. The earliest grave decoration appeared in October 1864, when three women of Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, decorated the graves of the fallen. Whether Union soldiers’ graves were exclusively commemorated remains unclear. Another account from Charleston, South Carolina, explicitly honored northern casualties alone on May 1 of the same year. 

Two springs later, the secretary of the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia, Mary Ann Williams wrote a letter to the editor calling for officials to “set apart a certain day to be observed…and be handed down through time as a religious custom of the country, to wreathe the graves of our martyred dead with flowers.” 

Two weeks later, both Columbus, Georgia, and Columbus, Mississippi, held events one day apart, and the latter was immortalized in the Francis Miles Finch poem The Blue and the Gray. 

With sectional rivalries still at a fever pitch during the Reconstruction era, General Orders No. 11 was issued by General John A. Logan. He was reportedly inspired by his wife, Mary, after she witnessed the practice of grave decoration in Virginia. She remarked to her husband that it was “not too late for the Union men of the nation to follow the example of the people of the South in perpetuating the memory of their friends.” In response, Logan ordered military personnel to set aside May 30, 1868, as a national day of Decoration. While not yet a national holiday, it served as an informal day of remembrance for the armed services and others who sought to honor the war dead. With the shadow of the Civil War still hanging over the country, the solemnity of the occasion would not have been lost.

In the decades following, greater emphasis was placed on the day. It wasn’t until May 11, 1950, that Congress passed a joint resolution, requesting that President Truman “issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe each Memorial Day as a day of prayer for permanent peace and designating a period during each such day when the people of the United States might unite in such supplication.” Finally, the date was officially moved from May 30 to the last Monday of the month in 1971, while the nation was still in the throes of the Vietnam War.

War as an ‘Economic Good’

The call to prayer for “permanent peace” has given way to the post–World War II era of near-constant foreign conflict. The inescapable irony is that, during this age of frequent military engagement and deployment, the lived experience of war is more distant from American culture than at any point in recent memory. So much so that the costs of war are often described in terms of “pain” at the gas pump, rather than the bodies, hearts, and minds of Americans on extended deployment and in harm’s way. To be sure, supply shocks and higher living costs are real burdens felt by ordinary Americans in the midst of unnecessary conflict. But they pale in comparison to the losses borne by those in active war zones.

This distancing reflects a cultural transformation with deep and complex roots. Still, two plausible contributors are worth considering.

First, the economics of war finance since World War II has, at least temporarily, insulated the public from the costs of war. Military expenditures have been funded less through direct taxation or the mass sale of war bonds and more through deficit spending. The Federal Reserve and its commercial bank partners continue to absorb much of this debt. As a result, the costs are largely obscured from public view and are felt only later, when policymakers can deflect blame for the resulting loss of purchasing power onto familiar scapegoats.

Second, many Americans still operate under the assumption that war is “good for the economy.” They point to the federal government as a demand-driver in the GDP calculation, and to new technologies and industries that emerge from the military-industrial complex. Military contractors have cleverly spread the benefits of their subcontractors throughout the fifty states. For instance, the F-35 fighter jet has significant employment attached to it in 45 states. Moreover, the “Camo Economy” involved vast economic benefits to subcontractors, rather than to the Pentagon directly. In 2019, contractors in Afghanistan outnumbered military personnel by more than 50 percent and “an estimated 8,000 US contractors died, in addition to around 7,000 US troops.” Some honest commenters who claim that war benefits the overall economy at least acknowledge that without massive military expenditures “taxes would have been lower, inflation would have been lower, there would have been higher consumption and investment and certainly lower budget deficits.”

Through these two channels, inflation-financed warmaking and government-driven excess expenditures, the costs of war appear to be far removed, and even, dare we say it, beneficial. 

‘The Great Severance’

This cultural insulation brings me back to my daughter’s early impressions of Memorial Day. If the true costs of war are cast far from us in terms of economic pain, and even painted as economically beneficial, then it is no wonder that a child might think that in America, we celebrate war. This powerfully illustrates what Catherine Pakaluk has called, albeit in another context, “the great severance.”

Wherever we see economic policies that shield people from the social, cultural, and economic consequences of policymakers’ choices, the true human toll remains hidden from view, although only temporarily. But sometimes, even a child’s eyes can see straight through the ruse.