How Samuel Huntington Predicted Our Political Moment
Samuel Huntington, the professor of government at Harvard University (and member of The American Interest editorial board from its founding until his death in 2008) was a titan of 20th-century social...
View ArticleThe Make-Believe Supreme Court and the Coming Constitutional Crisis
“Government requires make-believe,” the Yale historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote in Inventing the People, his provocative 1988 history of Anglo-American political institutions. “Make believe that the king...
View ArticleThe Irony of Philadelphia
Despite an intensifying earthquake of historic left-wing agitation during the Obama years—Occupy Wall Street, the campus Jacobins, Black Lives Matter, #FightFor15, the Sanders revolution—the Democratic...
View ArticlePutin Is a Distraction
“If Trump wins (or comes close),” Vox’s Timothy Lee wrote on Twitter earlier this week, “liberals are going to need a better answer than writing half the electorate off as racist.”As the possibility...
View ArticleCan the Supreme Court Survive the Next Presidency?
No matter which presidential candidate wins in November, he or she is likely to push the Supreme Court into uncharted ideological territory, according to a FiveThirtyEight model. Oliver Roeder, a...
View ArticleA Dubious Defense of the Blue Model
Wealthy coastal states tend to vote for Democrats. Therefore, Democratic economic policies are superior.If this reasoning sounds fallacious, that’s because it is. And yet it is the main argument of a...
View ArticleWhat Happened in Kansas?
The conventional account of Kansas’ Republican primary elections earlier this week is that moderation is, at long last, making a comeback in the GOP. The New York Times editorial board: Moderate...
View ArticleThe Return of History?
Are the norms underpinning the liberal democratic governments of North America and Western Europe as fragile as the communist ideology of Russia and Eastern Europe in the decades preceding its sudden...
View ArticleThe Extinction of Palo Alto?
A member of the Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commission has penned a powerful open letter of resignation condemning the wealthy community’s ongoing refusal to address skyrocketing housing...
View ArticleAcademics and “Intellectuals”
Over at the New York Times, Thomas Edsall assesses the state of the Republican Party as it struggles to re-orient itself after sustaining repeated blows from the Trump wrecking ball. One of the most...
View ArticleA Norm-Shattering Campaign in California
The torches-and-pitchforks campaign to recall Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky, who was widely criticized for ordering a lenient sentence for a Stanford swimmer convicted of sexual...
View ArticleWhat the Chicago Letter Won’t Fix
The University of Chicago’s letter to incoming freshmen declaring its support for freedom of expression is winning praise from embattled defenders of liberal education and predictable howls of outrage...
View ArticleThe Campus Left and the Alt-Right Are Natural Allies
As the Obama era comes to a close, two political movements that were once confined to the margins of public discourse are elbowing their way further and further into the mainstream.The first, a type of...
View ArticleAnother Casualty of Campus Orthodoxy
It’s been a persistent theme on this blog that college faculties, with their relentless focus on racial and gender diversity, have neglected another kind of diversity that is also important:...
View ArticleColleges Respond to Racial Tensions By Making Them Worse
It’s orientation week on American college campuses, and that means that students across the country are being subjected to a battery of elaborate diversity-training seminars providing detailed...
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Trust in Media Is Collapsing
For the past two weeks, as the general election polls tightened, the mainstream media has taken an extraordinary browbeating—from Democrats, liberal pundits, and the president himself—for allegedly not...
View ArticleOnline Education at the End of History
Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok discusses an unusual Department of Justice mandate directed at the University of California, Berkeley. A summary: Berkeley posts many faculty lectures and...
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The One Political Institution Surviving the Trust Implosion
One of the most important trends in American public opinion over the last generation is the avalanche of distrust burying major political and cultural institutions. From the media to the courts to...
View ArticleOn Stop-And-Frisk, Hypocrisy on Left and Right
The outrage surrounding Donald Trump’s clumsy endorsement of stop-and-frisk is sure to be overtaken in a matter of days if not hours by the next item in the succession of Trump-related controversies...
View ArticleGolden State Rolls Out Private Sector Retirement Plan
In an ambitious and controversial effort to address growing problem of retirement insecurity in the private sector, the State of California will automatically withdraw a share of workers’ paychecks and...
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