The use of education to secure more egalitarian economic outcomes without outright redistribution has been a cherished goal of liberals in the United States for centuries. The public education ideal, first nationally codified in the Northwest Ordinance that set aside land for public schools in the Old Northwest, has carried
To supporters of the market economy, the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly thirty years ago was supposed to mean the undisputed triumph of capitalism. But tensions today from increasing inequality, the rise of populism, and the remarkable growth of China have thrown this foregone conclusion into doubt. Did capitalism’
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,
Within the Manuscripts Department of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles resides one of the masterpieces of the medieval age of illumination: the vaunted Stammheim Missal. Dating to the late 12th century, the Missal figures importantly in the Getty’s manuscript reliquary as a testament to the workmanship,
The mythology, rather than the history, of homesteading, looms large in the American imagination. Included in this mythology is the idea of ‘valueless’ land made valuable in the process of homesteading, and the supposed egalitarian nature of land distribution; this is supposed by many Americans both to have made the
If you had asked me a few years ago what political tradition I belonged to, I would have been confused by the very question. Not only did I have little interest in politics at the time, but I had no idea that I belonged to any tradition whatsoever. I merely
Since 2016, to hear the media tell it, the world’s democracies have been faced with a deluge of ‘populism’. The word seems most commonly applied to President Donald Trump, but electoral surprises in large democracies—Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Brexit, the Five Star Movement—have been blamed on the
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
It was as I recall in the form of a scroll, gold leaf and all. And I found it one day in a drawer of old photographs hidden away. And my eyes still grow damp to see good old King George signed it with his own rubber stamp. Roger Waters,
During and after World War II the architects of the economic institutions of the liberal international order articulated a compelling rationale for the structure and rules of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). In a recent article I identified a common set of
“But is it supported by Scripture?” he asked me as we stood in the taco truck line after the church service. The “he” we’ll call Just-Asking-Questions. The “it” was the idea that the history of racial injustice in America, enabled by Protestant churches, required some sort of response in
“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