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, ...

Nobel-winning economist Daron Acemoglu on Zohran Mamdani’s rise, the problem with cultural politics — and the case for ...

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 ...

“As we begin 2017, the most urgent threat to liberal democracy is not autocracy,” writes William Galston of The Wall Street Journal, “it is illiberal democracy.” Galston’s diagnosis is not wrong, and ...

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 ...

Liberal nationalism is an important recent development in political theory that challenges liberals to acknowledge the significance of nationality in people's lives, and its role in the justification ...

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 ...

In 2023, David P. Gushee published Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies. Gushee’s diagnosis was familiar – that conservative and fundamentalist White Christian movements in America and ...

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 ...

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 ...

Prior to Kanye West, Lawrence Dennis was America’s most famous Black fascist. Born in 1893, Dennis had European features and light skin that allowed him to pass for white, which he did for nearly his ...