The presidency’s very virtues as an office—relative unity and vertical integration—make it impossible to render abuse-proof. It is vested with a truly awesome thing:”the executive power” of the entire federal government. There are simply too many ways to abuse that power…
Wasn’t free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism? Wasn’t liberal academe a way for ideas, good and bad, to be subjected to enlightened reason? Generations of professors and students imagined the university to be a temple for productive challenge…
How did liberals become so hopelessly illiberal? In “The Closing of the Liberal Mind,” Kim R. Holmes suggests that “the loss of historical memory as to what liberalism was is actually a key to understanding what it is today.” Mr.…
Treating people equally has given way to making all of us ambassadors for our race. This is a classic theme in critical race theory, that people of color carry a burden of representation that white people do not. But foisting…
Throughout the book, Leeman maintains that the consensus between Protestant and Enlightenment thought has produced a confusion that is now eroding the very religious liberty the American founders sought to protect. As the culture wars escalate, so does the possibility…
When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after…
We will be hearing much more from this school of thought over the next months. Its voices will encourage us to feel doubt and disgust at democracy, and they will subtly flatter our elite, or would-be elite, ideas of historical…
For Edmund Randolph, the evils from which the new country was suffering had originated in the “turbulence and follies of democracy.” Regularly, Elbridge Gerry spoke of democracy as “the worst of all political evils,” and Roger Sherman hoped that “the…
The testimony of the experts has actually already been given. They identified this problem as a matter of theory, and correctly suggested that it could be solved in practice, if never securely. That remainder or gap is the same one that appears in the “discursive” problem that Dan describes, and that we are currently observing as a conflict bordering on crisis within and of the presidential nomination process primarily in the Republican Party, but increasingly enveloping the Democratic Party and perceptions of its legitimacy and therefore of the entire two-party political system as we know it.
Comment Elsewhere: To @BurtLikko under “How to Fix a Broken Elephant: Prologue”
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