Departments

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liberalism

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    6/8/2021

    Social Fissures have Made Building a Broad Liberal Coalition Hard for 50 Years

    by Steven M. Gillon

    Hostility toward the welfare state, frequently driven by the idea that government programs unfairly benefit minorities at the expense of whites, has prevented the Democratic party from consolidating a political majority for decades. Worshipping fallen heroes like Robert Kennedy obscures the political work needed to build and keep a coalition.

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/1/2021

    Joe Biden, the Reverse Ronald Reagan

    Is the Biden administration's response to the crises affecting America more than a collection of programs and initiatives? Is the Democratic party moving to firmly repudiate Ronald Reagan's quip that "government is the problem"? 

  • SOURCE: The Baffler
    4/1/2021

    Runaway American Dreams

    by Dennis M. Hogan

    What does it say about American liberalism that it's cultural tribune, Bruce Springsteen, is doing a corporate-sponsored podcast with the former President of the United States? 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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. 

  • 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").

  • 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.

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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.