“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
I am writing this on November 7, 2020, three years, ten months, and two weeks after the day Liberal Currents first launched. A little less than two hours ago, the major news networks called the presidential election for Joe Biden, a result the nation has waited to hear for a
Interest group influence on American public policy and the political progress is so widely accepted it approaches the level of a truism. Political scientists since the 1970s have had their eye on the growth of this category at the expense of the power of formal political party organizations. But interest
The long expected death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg so soon before the election has all but guaranteed a 6-3 conservative supermajority on the nation’s highest court. The bitter, divisive, unforgiving politics of Supreme Court appointments has kicked into high gear once again. Just four years ago, a Republican Senate
At the close of the 20th century, Alexander Keyssar found himself writing what would become the preeminent book on the history of enfranchisement in America. This had not been his original plan. He had spent years, in fact, working on a very different plan—“a highly quantitative study of working-class
Over the last few weeks, issues ostensibly about freedom of speech once again made headlines. Unfortunately, these debates seem plagued by conceptual brittleness. Classically, “freedom of speech” refers to freedom from state-enforced censorship, and despite what the current state of the “free speech” debate might lead one to think, the
The murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer has once again brought the issue of systemic racism, police violence, and criminal justice reform to the forefront of the American national conversation, in print and in the streets. As part of that conversation, Liberal Currents solicited
A divided America has come together in the face of a crisis; to a man they have all agreed that “if the world were organised according to my political views, this tragedy would never have happened.” For a certain class of American, this includes their views on how the media
Few remember that the Arab Spring began with the public self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, in desperate defiance of a government that had ground him under its boot. In his home country, he is remembered fondly as the original spark that led to replacing a tyrant with
If Trump wins on November 3rd this year, we will be told that the doomed effort to remove him from office bears much of the blame. If he loses, the impeachment will get at least some of the credit. But it’s quite possible that the impeachment will have no
The roadside police encounter gone wrong was a familiar genre in American media before audiences more recently began to develop a larger appetite for police misconduct stories. Is this merely a special case of a now general, nihilistic tendency in which “government failure now sets the agenda”? That is undeniably
There have only been five presidential elections in the history of the United States in which the winner of the electoral college did not win the popular vote. Two of the five, the only ones which did not occur in the 19th century, were the most recent Republican presidents; one,