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
The Liberal Currents Podcast LC Podcast #3: Adam Gurri on Institutional Provincialism Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 31:50 Subscribe Share Apple Podcasts Stitcher Google Podcasts Spotify RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window
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
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