America Needs ‘Self-Evident’ Truths
The Trump administration has backed down in Minnesota. Last week, Tom Homan, the border czar, announced that the surge of federal agents into the state—3,000 officers—was ending. He framed this mostly as a mission accomplished: They had come to round up illegal immigrants, and the job was done. But even Homan had to grudgingly acknowledge that something unexpected had happened amid the confrontations between ICE agents and local people trying to defend their neighbors. Despite the attempt to dismiss and denigrate this opposition—including the two observers killed by agents—as “domestic terrorists,” Americans had registered a more universally human story, one that short-circuited the familiar, and exhausting, predetermined narratives that set one tribe’s interests against another’s. “I don’t want to see any more bloodshed,” Homan said. Whether you were an officer or a neighbor, a citizen or an undocumented immigrant, he added, “I don’t want to see anybody harmed.”
The administration seems to know that it can’t spin its way out of what happened—and what people felt about it. The New York Times recently asked a handful of Trump voters how they perceived the immigration crackdown after the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and heard answers such as “This is inhumane.” One woman said it made her want to “protest and be with my fellow humanity.” Polling is not the way to measure such emotions, but after taking in stories of a terrorized city and witnessing these deaths, nearly two-thirds of Americans now oppose ICE’s behavior. All of this leads me to a sentiment that I know might elicit laughter and a reminder that this is, after all, still 2026: Maybe we do have a sense of the morally obvious.
Another way to say that something is morally obvious—maybe a more American way—is to call it a “self-evident truth.” In his new book, Radical Universalism, the New School professor Omri Boehm sees this load-bearing expression from the Declaration of Independence not as a relic from 250 years ago but as a living phrase that points to a persistent, imperative American mode. To imagine that anything could be considered self-evident in our post-truth age, in the age of Trump—when even a celebratory Super Bowl halftime show becomes fodder for fights over American identity (and Megyn Kelly screaming “Football is ours!”)—is almost impossible. Sadly, even the Declaration’s proposition that “all men are created equal” seems to be up for debate.
And yet, there are these flashes, moments, when we’re reminded about human dignity and justice in a way that is not circumscribed by what racial or even national group one belongs to. There are truths that supersede any man-made law—truths that just are. Boehm doesn’t quite put it this way, but I would describe these as precepts that live in the gut. Self-evident truths motivated abolitionists who couldn’t abide the hypocrisy of a freedom-obsessed country that tolerated slavery; they were articulated at Gettysburg by Lincoln as he waged war to wipe out this hypocrisy; and they were still insisted upon by Martin Luther King Jr. 100 years later. They might also be what allowed those Americans watching the events in Minneapolis to override their political identities and think of “humanity.”
Boehm calls the belief in these self-evident truths “radical universalism.” This is not some kitschy version of harmony—a Coca-Cola ad with young people of different ethnicities on a generic hilltop holding hands and belting out that they’d like to teach the world to sing. He calls his version radical for a reason. Boehm’s idea is hard to realize—almost impossibly hard, I would say. But that’s why reading this cogent, succinct book felt like such a cold plunge, painful but reinvigorating.
[Read: Minneapolis had its Birmingham moment]
First, Boehm dispenses with the identitarians—both the ideologues on the right, who fight “in terms of traditional values,” and those on the left, who fight “in the name of gender and race.” The MAGA versus critical race theory death match is an easy foil, two sides of the same group-centric approach that is ill-suited for a pluralistic society, let alone all of humanity. But if this was his only target, a reader weary of the culture war might just easily nod along. Boehm goes further, and takes aim at the 400-year-old tradition of Western liberalism, or what he calls “false universalism.”
Because he is trying to invoke a politics built on essential, everlasting truths, Boehm considers the marketplace of ideas almost as much of a cul de sac as the tribal alleys of identitarians. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment, he argues, is that moral obviousness was replaced by a culture of “consensus, interest, and opinion.” We reason our way to a point of view, and argue and haggle with others toward some moral compromise. In practice, we usually end up balancing delicately on the knife’s edge of the thinnest majoritarianism. This might sound like a reasonable place to end up, and even the best we can hope for—except when it works to mask injustice.
Liberalism is contingent on who holds power, and how large a circle they draw when it comes to who matters and who deserves rights and freedoms. We the People, Boehm points out, was a limiting phrase, meant to indicate that these rules were derived by and applied only to whoever happened to be included in that we. Unlike the Declaration, which took its authority from the universal human desire not to be subjugated, the Constitution implies its own kind of identitarianism, with amendments becoming a mechanism for widening or narrowing the circle (Black people and women, of course, stood outside of it for a very long time, along with many immigrant groups).
The mother of all transcendent truths is the one about the dignity of every human being. Boehm anchors his thinking in the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s ideas about morality. Everything in this world, Kant said, either has a price or has dignity. Humans, because they are capable of moral choice, are imbued with dignity. They can never have a price. They are an end in themselves, never a means. (This is why slavery was such a degradation to Kant). This realization creates the basis for his famous categorial imperative: Essentially, act only according to principles you would apply to everyone. Boehm channels Kant when he writes, “It is because human beings are open to the question of what they ought to do that they themselves are subjects of absolute dignity.” For the radical universalist, this truth about who we are trumps all else, all borders and constitutions and written laws.
So what would a politics based on “absolute dignity” actually look like? One of Boehm’s examples is King’s decision in the mid-1960s to protest the Vietnam War. At the time, the war was popular and the civil-rights movement was making progress with Lyndon B. Johnson; denouncing his administration’s foreign policy was seen by no less than the NAACP as a “serious tactical mistake.” The Washington Post editorialized in 1967 that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country and his people.” But King did not understand himself as working for the interests of any single group. He felt he was being consistent with his duty to justice. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people, they ask?” King said in a sermon, responding to the criticism. “And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling.”
[Read: There is a word for what is happening in Minneapolis]
This is why radical universalism is hard: It often demands that you go against your own immediate interests. It can also mean breaking earthly law. “Following absolute duty is not the origin of obedience but of disobedience,” Boehm writes. A refusal to accept an immoral status quo led to civil war in this country. And although the outcome of that war was a more moral order, I can also see how following the demands of such universalism can land you in places that are highly impractical, even dangerous, with many more unintended consequences and blooming injustices.
When it comes to immigration, for example, Boehm’s ideas taken to their conclusion would seem to suggest a policy of open borders—how else can the dignity of all people be considered on the same plane? But then what about the dignity of people who lose their jobs, state support, or other scarce resources as a result? Boehm, who was born in Israel, also applied his thinking to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in a recent book, Haifa Republic; he concludes that the answer is a one-state solution, a “binational utopia” in which “all are equal.” But history has shown again and again that these antagonists are bad at living peacefully in the same polity, to put it mildly. If any conflict offered proof that separation might be the only course for reaching something like self-determination, the Israeli-Palestinian one would be it.
You might need the eyesight of a prophet to really think in these radical universalist terms, to see humanity as a whole, Boehm writes, which is why people such as Lincoln and King come to inhabit an exalted, almost supernatural, place in our collective memory. But is this instinct really so rare? I’m not sure.
I imagine Boehm would disagree with any dilution of his absolutism, but it might be more helpful to bring these ideas a little closer to earth, to remember those flashes of self-evident truth, and to imagine that we all carry this universalist impulse—an antibody that can be activated when something upsets our gut. That’s why I go back to the people of Minneapolis. They were willing to risk their lives to protect strangers. They took these actions not to secure their own rights or freedom but out of a sense of duty to others.
[Read: How originalism killed the Constitution]
What self-evident truths might yank us out of our silos in this way? The wrongness of Good’s and Pretti’s deaths certainly had this effect, but I think we can still recognize these truths in more pedestrian areas of life. People should not be treated as objects. The innocence of childhood should be inviolable. Personal experience matters but should not overrule our sense of shared humanity. These are truths that can manifest themselves in small ways rather than in revolutionary change; they can help us build a sane health-care system, or keep phones out of schools, or formulate an immigration policy that doesn’t treat refugees like garbage.
If these ideas feel basic, uncontroversial, that’s because they are. What I take from Boehm’s radical universalism—and what I think is applicable to the world of real people and not only to the world of prophets—is a reminder that the morally obvious exists, that it is part of our American vernacular, something that could even bring our irritable country together, and not just after senseless death.