In the longer perspective of history, “multiculturalism” does not denote one moment in a local debate about American identity; it signifies the normal condition of humankind.
I look at the practice of democracy not so much as a fixed set of procedural requirements, but as a process that needs to have certain kinds of symbolic markers and consummations that define where people are in relation to each other.
When people’s personal friendship networks become more religiously diverse, that seems to make them more accepting of other faiths, but it also turns out that if you add friends within a congregation, more church friends, you actually become more civically engaged.
The relationship of money to the romantic ideal of meaningful work is profound and problematic.
We have become a nation and a people that simply cannot abide risks.
Much like the old wars of religion that shaped Europe, the new wars are fought on the ground of the image.
The role of frank speech in democratic culture is something worth considering, especially in light of the renewed ferment over political correctness.
Between Jefferson’s profession of faith in the virtues of republican simplicity and the style of his own life the contradiction could hardly be greater.
The question now is whether contemporary American democracy can even be fixed.
Today the threat against liberalism is one of atrophy rather than violent death.
Far from being the hope of cosmopolitan liberal democracy, Europe is experiencing a reemergence of the national identities and antagonisms that European values and the union they were meant to bring about were supposed to prevent.
The post-Auschwitz consensus that made overt anti-Semitism strictly forbidden is rapidly fading.
If there is one, overarching, redeemable quality to our moment, it is that ours is a time in which there can only be alternatives.
Can neoliberalism’s conceptual structure be traced directly to medieval Western Christianity?
The highly abstract and immaterial phantom economy is inextricable from the “real economy.”
While structures of power may change quickly, the building of a new social order is a longer and more precarious process.
Untruth—information that could be described as unverified, misleading, or an out-and-out lie—has been spreading with new ease and abandon, and often to undemocratic effect.
Liberalism today finds itself in the strange position of being the political philosophy that everyone lives by and no one wants to defend.
Is modern-day philanthropy a disease in the democratic body politic?
The personal diet has become not only a cult; it has become a political statement.
We are living through a vertigo in political culture.
A neglected hard-boiled novelist wrote on the greatest conspiracy of all.
Both Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey endorse the same belief: that there are only winners and losers.
As a child, I thought that to be American was to believe in individuality, to support pluralism and equality, and to celebrate common holidays and eat common foods.
Could the great size of companies like Apple and Walmart actually be a good thing?
Writing a book about Thomas Jefferson means entering a very crowded field.
King’s arguments for freedom and justice were not only constitutional but also profoundly ethical.
Cosmopolitan liberalism has reshaped international institutions and practices.
Democracy and science can be mutually reinforcing only if there is a recognition of the limited authority of each.
Once attacked for rejecting American exceptionalism, liberals now are in almost sole possession of it.
It is the irreducibly human dimensions of the radical life that are to be most cherished, and most feared.
A historian charts the evolution of her own center-right liberalism.
Cancel ’s murkiness has made it a very useful word for pushing already contentious or delicate matters into the realm of total confusion.
We might be murderers, and we might not, but isn’t it safer to assume we are and be proven wrong? Maybe not.
What do we mean by culture? Don’t ask me, I’m a political scientist.
“White Christian nationalism” remains a grievance-driven mode of whiteness.
In studying Keynes, we watch radical ideas emerge filtered through a conservative sensibility.
As a history of art and thought in the Cold War era, The Free World is enthralling but unsatisfying, inevitably so.
In any case, trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration.
Over the last half century, there has been a transition from regular to irregular forms of cultural and political combat.
What is clear is that the great divisions in our country rest on our different systems of cultural capital.
The less politics effects change, the more politics will affect mood.
Consider embracing utopia at once as indeterminate speculation about a qualitatively better future and as a hypothesis, by assuming it to be possible.
If not minimized as an aberration, mob violence is often justified as the legitimate expression of popular will.
For Marc J. Dunkelman, the verdict is clear: “The township, in essence, is dying.”
Bernie Sanders at Liberty University is more than a momentary truce in the culture war.
Do Trump’s supporters represent a new Know-Nothing movement?
As we remember the Challenger disaster, let’s not forget the engineers who tried to convince NASA not to send up the Space Shuttle on a cold morning thirty years ago.
In identifying “the system” as the issue of this election, Trump has managed to find a singular concept by which to encompass issues from wage stagnation to political corruption.
Many began watching last night’s debate wondering: Which Trump would it be? But there’s only one.
Just as Obama became a symbol of progressive diversity, Trump has become a symbol of longing for a pre-Obama America.
A zero sum reality, in which every win is someone else’s loss, exists in a constant state of crisis.
Liberalism today finds itself in the strange position of being the political philosophy that everyone lives by and no one wants to defend.
In France, wearing a COVID-19 mask will mean a real revolution in norms governing behavior in its public space.
The point of reopening is not to free voluntary workers but to place more into the category of “mandatory worker.”
Who will emerge as the new elite from this particular moment’s cast of winners and losers?
Herzen won’t stop striving for social transformation with every ounce of energy he has, but also won’t pick up Chernyshevsky’s axe.
Donald Trump’s manner was a declaration of indifference toward the values that make democracy possible.
The events of January 6 went off script.
Americans have been making arguments about the nature of their unity from the beginning.
A trick that only the most gifted demagogues can bring off.
It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.
As the titans of big tech see it, the reticence to upgrade is nothing less than resistance to progress. But a willingness to upgrade does not benefit customers in the long run.
Corporations are not defanging a threatening ideology but welcoming it back home from a field trip.
Once upon a time there was a publication that was doing all it could to tell a straight story and to listen to all sides.
Western liberal democracy is something worth aspiring to––an optimal destiny, not an imminent fate.