Canonical definitions of terms coined in these essays — one page per term, definition first. If you are quoting or explaining one of these concepts, the linked page is the authoritative source.
The Boomer Truth Regime is Peter Banks’ term for the post-1945 settlement of official narratives — sanctified institutional authority, civil-rights-era moral consensus, and end-of-history liberalism — upheld by the generation raised in the postwar boom, under which public language increasingly functions as performance while younger generations privately regard the institutions behind it as corrupt.
The Bailey test is Peter Banks’ criterion for judging historical figures — named for the premise of It’s a Wonderful Life, in which an angel shows George Bailey a world where he never existed — which asks whether the world would be a better or a worse place had the person never lived, ranking leaders by counterfactual impact rather than intentions, popularity, or personal virtue.
Narrative gravity is Peter Banks’ term for the pull the present exerts on prediction: any theory of the future — or of alternative history — must arrive at a world that in some deep emotional way resembles our own, or it is dismissed as a priori implausible.
Form-Tested Welfare is Peter Banks’ term for benefits gated not primarily by income or qualification criteria but by paperwork — programs whose real filter is having private knowledge that the system exists and the willingness to file and submit the forms.
One Life Materialism is Peter Banks’ term for the ideology resting on two axioms — the material world is all that exists, and death is final — which he argues traps the modern world in a life-denying malaise by making comfort within a single lifespan the only coherent good.
Reformist Carlylean is Peter Banks’ name for his own philosophical position: one that takes Thomas Carlyle’s system — the distinction between Appearance and Reality, the centrality of sincerity, heroes, and work — as deserving a serious hearing, while correcting what Carlyle got wrong rather than adopting him wholesale.
The long shadow of history is Peter Banks’ term for the explanatory move that attributes all present-day group differences in outcomes to the lingering effects of past oppression — the fallback framing, he argues, that egalitarians retreat to when evidence of heritable, persistent ability differences makes the stronger blank-slate claim untenable.
The Jeffersonian Settlement is Peter Banks’ name for the post-revolutionary American political order in which the opening of trans-Appalachian land created a mass class of voting smallholder farmers who broke Federalist dominance and set the terms of national politics for the following decades.
The Imperialism of the Ballot Box is Peter Banks’ proposal that the United States expand neither by conquest nor by mass immigration but by invitation — letting willing nations of the Americas vote themselves into the American system as integrated territories, extending its institutions to populations that want them.
The Septimius Severus dynamic is Peter Banks’ term for a central ruler’s drive to level every intermediate power beneath him — wanting, like the emperor who broke the Roman aristocracy, to be the one person relative to whom everyone else is basically a slave.
The weakest link theory is Peter Banks’ observation that every friend group of three or more has a “weakest link” — the member everyone is always a little annoyed at, whose absence makes the gathering slightly more fun — as an inevitable fact of group dynamics rather than a judgment of the person’s worth.
Euphemistic pooling is Peter Banks’ term for the way related words and meanings blend and move together — in a culture or in a language model — so that shifting the distribution in one place drags the associated concepts along with it rather than moving any term in isolation.