liberalism 
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SOURCE: Washington Post
2/21/2021
Emmanuel Macron’s Socially Constructed Bogeymen
by Daniel W. Drezner
What, exactly, "Islamo-leftism" is, and what relationship it could possibly have to American academic theories, are two big questions left unanswered by the French President's attacks on academic ideas.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
2/22/2021
Pankaj Mishra’s Reckoning With Liberalism’s Bloody Past
Indian critic Pankaj Mishra argues in a new book of essays that recent liberal concern about right-wing politicians declaring support for "western civilization" ignores the way that liberal colonialists have embraced ideas of cultural supremacy.
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2/14/2021
History, Evidence and the Ethics of Belief
by Guy Lancaster
Untrammelled freedom of belief has been enshrined as an American civic virtue. The nation, democracy, and possibly the planet are imperiled without a collective commitment to respect belief only to the extent available evidence supports it.
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2/21/2021
Neal Gabler's "Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour"
by James Thornton Harris
Neal Gabler's first volume of a biography of Ted Kennedy praises the long-serving senator as the driving force of a hugely consequential period of liberal legislative success. Those looking for gossip or consideration of his personal failures may be disappointed.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
1/28/2021
From Revolution to Reformism
by Adam Przeworski
A new book of political theory excerpted here locates the decline of the Left in its adoption of reformist rhetoric that accommodated capitalism's preferences for fiscal stability and austerity.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/29/2021
What Should Drive Biden’s Foreign Policy?
Columnist and Humphrey biographer James Traub says the former Senator and VP's interventionist liberalism in foreign policy is a model for Joe Biden's administration to reestablish American preeminence in world affairs.
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SOURCE: The Nation
1/11/2021
Ex-Friends: Anne Applebaum and the Crisis of Centrist Politics
Critic David Klion considers the unexamined relationship between the late 20th Century rise of market-oriented liberalism and the 21st century rise of authoritarian nationalism (or, "why so many of her once-close friends have turned out to be fascists").
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1/12/2021
Public Speech and Democracy
by Sandra Peart
American leaders have failed to support public speech that sustains disagreement without violence. That culture of speech must be rebuilt for democracy to survive.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
12/9/2020
How Did the GOP Become the Party of Ideas?
by Lawrence B. Glickman
The Republican Party's reputation as the "Party of Ideas" in the late 1970s and 1980s was generally created by Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who derided the New Deal and Great Society as stale and outdated in a struggle to push the Democratic Party to the right.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
11/19/2020
Against Returning to Normal
by David Walsh
Liberal pleas to return to a "normal" defined by bipartisan consensus ignore the long legacy of ideological conflict and the pursuit of division as a political strategy by the conservative movement.
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SOURCE: New York Magazine
10/22/2020
Burn it All Down: A Growing Number of Liberal Laywers Want More than Court Packing
Liberals in the legal profession and legal academia have begun to grapple with the idea that the courts serve power as much as justice, and norms of collegiality are part of the problem. Are they prepared to embrace a more confrontational and openly political idea of the law?
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SOURCE: The New Republic
10/20/2020
"The Atlantic" and the Limits of Reasonableness
A new collection of writing from the venerable magazine highlights the struggles of rational argument and civil discourse in the age of Donald Trump.
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SOURCE: Jacobin
9/8/2020
Centrists Are Pining for a Golden Age that Never Was (Review)
A review of Anne Applebaum's "Twilight of Democracy" argues that the author focuses on the role of nostalgia and personality in driving authoritarianism and breaking up the center-right coalition, but ignores the fact that that the center failed to deliver an improved standard of living to the broad public.
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9/6/2020
A Coup of "Clerqs"?: Anne Applebaum's "Twilight of Democracy" Reviewed
by David O'Connor
Anne Applebaum's new book looks with concern at the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the loyal party functionaries who enable its march.
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SOURCE: The Nation
8/24/2020
The Guardians: Does "The Resistance" Actually Want More Democracy, or Less?
by Samuel Moyn
Samuel Moyn warns that a leading Never Trump legal scholar is less concerned with how Trump might harm minorities than with how Trump might harm the image of rule by elites.
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8/23/2020
James Madison’s Last Stand: Are We Witnessing the End of Liberal Democracy?
by Richard Matthews
The Trump presidency is a stern test of James Madison's design for a government that could govern without becoming tyrannical. The people and the ballot may be the last of Madison's checks and balances left.
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8/2/2020
Free Speech and Civic Virtue between "Fake News" and "Wokeness"
by Campbell F. Scribner
Left critics of the recent "Harper's Magazine" open letter on free speech and open debate make some claims that are narrowly meritorious. But they don't address the value of speech as a way of building the collective citizenship necessary for democracy. In this respect, the signers are correct.
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7/12/2020
Will White Liberals Keep Faith With This Historical Moment?
by Elwood Watson
White liberal allies to today's Black protest movements must dig in for the long haul and remember the words of Audre Lorde: "The war against dehumanization is ceaseless."
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Madison’s Sorrow Goes Beyond Pompeo's Dinners
by Kevin C. O'Leary
We are stuck with two major parties and when one party abandons the broad liberal-conservative center, the system stops working.
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SOURCE: The Nation
3/10/11
Joe Biden Personifies Democratic Party Failures Since the Cold War
by Michael Brenes
The Democratic Party needs to escape the shadow of anti-communism and embrace economic and racial justice.
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