There are words we know, and there are words we argue about, working our way to a shared meaning. And then there is that unique category of terms that, once they appear, stubbornly refuse to succumb ...

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, a little-known Sovietologist and deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning, published an article in a Washington journal, The National Interest, ...

Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield discussed the evolution of liberalism in American politics at a Nov. 3 Rocky talk.

My recent column made some pretty sweeping historical claims: that the reelection of Donald Trump proved that we have definitively exited the post-Cold War era; that the phase of history that began in ...

For anyone curious about the future of democracy, two developments out of Brazil and Germany pose something of a mystery. The election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil looks too similar to the wave of ...

Institutions of higher education are uniquely situated to promote human rights values and principles through teaching, research, policies, practices, programming, and campus life. While a human rights ...

Just as liberals in the last twenty years have conflated the terms "equality" and "equity", they are confused about the meaning of "democracy". Conservatives understand that America is founded on a ...

Don’t count liberalism out in 2024. I know it’s a Rodney Dangerfield political philosophy—meek and mild, self-deprecating, it gets no respect—but battle-hardened post-Trump liberals have proved tough ...

My last newsletter before Thanksgiving was devoted to an argument about the potential resilience of both liberalism and democracy, even in a world where the post-Cold War liberal order becomes a ...

I think liberals need a reality check. Most of us still believe liberalism and democracy are the same thing. The terms used to be synonymous. From the 1960s to the 2010s, you could use them ...

In the end, the argument garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court. Even Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't debase themselves by going along with such a half-baked, ...