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,
What are the proper limits of liberal tolerance? Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, appears to have found himself pinned against this seemingly impossible question. Shortly after giving a speech at Georgetown University about freedom of expression, the Facebook CEO has found himself hounded with questions about his choice to include
“In the first three decades of the twentieth century,” Thomas Leonard tells us in Illiberal Reformers, “eugenic ideas were politically influential, culturally fashionable, and scientifically mainstream. The elite sprinkled their conversations with eugenic concerns to signal their au courant high-mindedness.” “Eugenic thinking in forms both mundane and grand increasingly stained
A liberal is a person who can’t take his own side in a quarrel. Robert Frost Richard Rorty stands as the most controversial figure in 20th century English-language philosophy. As William Curtis documents in Defending Rorty, Rorty’s untroubled attitude and deflationary arguments were a lightning rod among analytic
Two years ago, a group of friends and I were discussing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to “intensify” the crackdown on black-market cigarettes after having enacted a tax hike on them. Since NYPD officers ostensibly looking for black-market cigarettes had killed Eric Garner a mere three
The title of Chris Arnade’s book seems at times paradoxical, as one is reading through the catalogue of indignities endured by the people he sat with, talked to, and photographed. But that, of course, is the point: even in the most rusted-through of the Rust Belt, even in the
This past Saturday, Quillette editor Andy Ngo was assaulted by counter-protesters to a right-wing demonstration. This reignited the well-rehearsed debate over the use of violence against right-wing speech by Antifa and related left-wing groups, a debate which this piece will largely avoid. What I will be discussing instead relates to
When you’re a kid, authority isn’t the stuff of political theory, it’s a feature of the landscape. A natural characteristic. Parents and teachers and some other adults have it. They also seem to know everything there is to know, as if adulthood means getting let in on
Against a liberalism of pre-political foundations and historical destiny, Jacob Levy has been working hard to recover a vision of liberalism that appreciates the complex patchwork of social life, is historically contingent, and accepts the existence of irresolvable tensions. Though he has been influenced by Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of