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It may be difficult to believe today, but Congress was once a force to be reckoned with. The pinnacle of this, of course, was Reconstruction, during which Congress regularly overrode the president’s veto and even impeached one for the first time. Most significantly, the Reconstruction Congress regularly put the
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Recent decades have been kind to liberal and Marxist attempts at dialogue. But old animosities are like Henry Kissinger; they die slowly. Of course there are still considerable disagreements between liberals and Marxists on a wide variety of issues. This is especially true of classical liberals and libertarians, who still
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The discourse about the structure of the world political order has come to turn increasingly around the question of ‘poles’ of geopolitical power—centers of influence and control, usually assumed to be particularly influential nation states, around which others orbit. Most recently, France’s president Emmanuel Macron declared, after discussions
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Editor’s Note: Eden Knight (2000–2023) was a Saudi Arabian trans woman studying computer science in the United States. After her visa expired, she began the process of seeking asylum. During this time, she was contacted by Michael Pocalyko and Ellen Cole, who promised to help her with her
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But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.
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Ever since Donald Trump first came down that golden escalator, everyone from laymen to various pundits and historians have debated if it is appropriate to speak of him and his Republican Party as fascist. It has generally been the position of the professionally-contrarian pundit class that to use the f-word
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This essay is based on the invited comments delivered on March 10, 2023, celebrating the Lee Kong Chian Chair Professorship of Chandran Kukathas at Singapore Management University. I congratulate Singapore and the faculty and students of Singapore Management University for luring the pre-eminent liberal theorist of our age, Chandran Kukathas,
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Our media is obsessed with wealth inequality. From Succession to The White Lotus, with Parasite and Triangle of Sadness taking big-screen accolades, the comings and goings of the ultra-rich are of mass interest. This, of course, coincides with a surge in wealth inequality. The share of the pie going to
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In January of this year, media personality Matt Walsh tweeted “Singapore is able to have nice things in part because they execute drug dealers by hanging and arrest even petty vandals and thieves and beat them with a cane until they bleed. We don’t have nice things because we
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It is often remarked that the Americans and Europeans use the term ‘Liberal’ in quite different contexts—in the US, to signify a greater welfare state, while in Europe it is a signifier of free markets, with the two usages coinciding only on social issues. The distinct history of the
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Antisemitism is a great blight upon massive swaths of the world. It takes many forms, of course, and does not always resemble the violence and pogroms of so many centuries, The Dreyfus Affair in France, or the Nazi regime and the Holocaust all across Europe. It can be aggressive or
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In recent years the modern world has come under fire. In 2022, one study found that 58% of Americans said they were dissatisfied with how democracy is working in the United States. Similarly, in 2021 another found that only 49% of 18- to 34-year-olds held a positive view of capitalism,