At the height of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which, despite a ceasefire, continues to claim lives, US college campuses were the sites of some of the most intense organizing in opposition to Israeli policies and US support for them. The lion's share of US media coverage went
For its 100-year anniversary, Walt Disney company released an ambitious animated film entitled Wish. Chock full of references and allusions to earlier films, seemingly fitting the anniversary it celebrates, it takes risks in attempting to capstone a century of filmmaking, and in the opinion of most critics, these risks
Well beyond the cliched phrases about 'content of character', King drew on the finest of the liberal tradition and added to it, providing a roadmap for the future in his final work Few if any figures enjoy such a widespread veneration among Americans - at least, those who don’
Constant wrangling over continuing resolutions creates more, not fewer, opportunities for ill advised changes With the American government emerging from its longest shut down in history, and with the current budget lasting only a few months, more light than ever has been shown on the American system of budgeting and
This is a bit of a shift from the typical format of this newsletter, but I’ve gotten numerous questions asking for a quick and accessible survey of Georgism, and this seems like the best platform to create it. I’m sure others have done the same, and better, but
There are so many things wrong with the president unilaterally ordering the obliteration of small boats in international waters that it's difficult to know where to start. The executive grabbing even more power over life and death? The absolute disregard for the citizens of other countries and diplomatic
One of the great ‘true but misleading’ statements of 20th century American politics is that ‘more Democrats than Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act”; one of the greater oversimplifications in response is the claim that the parties ‘flipped’ somewhere between the 1940s and 1970s. The electoral record is indeed
Liberalism as an idea has long run up against established interests. Its great strength is that it has been able either to thwart or win them over with the promise of economic dynamism - that the power of freed markets would generate such wealth as to overcome any inconvenience caused by
The Quasi-Judicial Immigration system presents a threat to all Americans’ rights In a nation of laws, the names of things and their precise definitions take on increasing importance and require increasing scrutiny. Theorists have long noted how words like ‘treason’ or ‘terrorism’ had a tendency to expand in definition
Today, nobody would doubt the contribution of the Irish to American history, culture, or economics. But as Douglass was writing, the Irish would have appeared every bit the ‘culturally incompatible’ immigrants Vance is warning Germany about.
Perhaps ironically, given the devotion of this newsletter to Liberalism, I find myself thinking a great deal about tradition and what - at its best - it can offer, in times of crisis perhaps more than ever. And as I write, the most salient tradition is that of Ash Wednesday, observed by
In the wake of an atrocity - or a series of them, as with those that followed the recent Hamas raid into Israel - it is easy to be swept up in a righteous fervor for ‘justice’ that turns out to be nothing more than vengeance. The famous “9/12” attitude that