The American states offer tremendous potential as laboratories of democracy. As Louis Brandeis pointed out long ago, states can “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of ...

The November 2020 presidential election marked a moment of real optimism for those looking for a politics beyond neoliberalism. Democrats, buffeted by four years of the Trump Administration and facing ...

Just two years ago, this would have been an extraordinarily radical essay. Its premise is that court-packing—increasing the number of seats on the Supreme Court to change its ideological makeup—is, in ...

Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins • Cambridge University Press • 2024 • 398 pages • $30 Picture a ...

What’s in a name? Franklin Delano Roosevelt called himself a Christian, a Democrat, and a liberal. He did not call himself a democratic socialist, or any other kind of socialist. He was, in fact, no ...

American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again by Yuval Levin • Basic Books • 2024 • 352 pages • $32 No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United ...

The interim National Security Strategic Guidance (NSSG) issued by the Biden Administration in early March 2021 articulated a central role for democracy and democratic values in guiding and shaping ...

Stating the obvious: Ours is a government (and thus a society) in crisis. All three branches of our federal government are led by men who do not believe in pluralism. Compromise is for the weak; ...

There was some debate after the election last year about whether it was, or was not, a “wipeout.” I argue that regardless of whether it was or wasn’t, Democrats must behave as if it was. If the party ...

The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 spurred a “racial reckoning”: a surge of interest not only in reforming policing, but also in challenging us to understand the role of race in our ...

Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart • Bloomsbury Publishing • 2025 • 352 pages • $30 In 1964, when I was seven years old, my family took a day ...

The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America by Andrew W. Kahrl • University of Chicago Press • 2024 • 456 pages • $35 “No taxation without representation” is often ...