Is America built on a foundation of broken promises? Many constitutional fundamentalists in the legal academy today believe this is without question the case. Joining this conviction is the fear that the promises broken to date will pale in comparison to those broken in the future; that to deviate from
I can’t change Texas’s law, but you can. You can and everyone else who may or may not like it can go out there and be lobbying forces in changing laws that you don’t like. Justice Sonia Sotomayor There is a great deal to dislike about the
There are many factors in a free society which conspire to make the public sphere an unseemly terrain. Citizen sovereignty increases the stakes of public persuasion by distributing voting power so broadly that personal persuasion alone cannot suffice to keep elected officials in office. Consumer sovereignty leaves political media constrained
It has been five years since Liberal Currents launched with seven essays at the ready. Many more have been published since; as of this writing we expect to hit our 300th essay within six or seven months. After spending our first three years as an all-volunteer effort, we launched a
The creation, proliferation, and persistence of liberal democracy in the last century is a triumph which we should neither underestimate nor take for granted. For liberals, the protection of liberties, the strengthening of democratic accountability, the quest for lawfulness, the fostering of new capabilities and proliferation of old ones, as
The American federal system and the various Supreme Courts that have defended its boundaries impose firm limitations on what system-wide reforms are possible. To many it seems impossible to make any meaningful improvement to American governance without amending the Constitution, something that requires a massive supermajority. But American federalism need
All social relations create vulnerabilities and dependencies that are subject to abuse. This is a fundamental fact about the social nature of humanity, a baseline from which all specific arrangements need to be judged. Most of our public debates,however, take the posture of implying that the mere occurrence of
Most Americans take pride in our Constitutional order, and the basic grade school version of it—with checks and balances, the three branches, and so forth—that they are familiar with. But they do not really know our system, because you cannot understand a system without some grasp of how
“What happened to Brock??” I will never forget the moment I saw these words. On Monday morning more than two years ago now, I was walking towards my son’s daycare to drop him off that morning, and I had checked my phone and seen that there was an unread
[The following came out of an email conversation between Martin Gurri and Adam Gurri that took place January 16–18 of this year. The topic of the conversation was Adam Gurri’s essay What Is Liberal Democracy?] Hey Adam, I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed your
There was a period during the Trump presidency when it was defensible to believe he was too incompetent and too narrowly self-interested to be any more dangerous than a typical president, even if few would argue he was a typical president. The events of 2020 shattered that optimism, as Trump
“My textile exploration began in wonder,” Virginia Postrel writes at the end of her magnificent new book, The Fabric of Civilization. “As I heard from scholars, scientists, and businesspeople (. . .) I was repeatedly struck by what a fundamental technology textiles represent, what world-shaking consequences they’ve had, and how remarkable much