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In those days I had seen little further than the old school of political economists into the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social arrangements. Private property, as now understood, and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, the dernier mot of legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating
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The UN has long been held up as a model of international idealism—supporters see it as a possibility to create a better world, while even detractors tend to characterize it as if anything too idealistic to achieve its goal of global peace. Indeed, looking at UN documents like the
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There are many factors in a free society which conspire to make the public sphere an unseemly terrain. Citizen sovereignty increases the stakes of public persuasion by distributing voting power so broadly that personal persuasion alone cannot suffice to keep elected officials in office. Consumer sovereignty leaves political media constrained
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In 2005, shortly after he started blogging, Glenn Greenwald wrote an infamous and incendiary anti-immigrant post defending reactionary bigot Tom Tancredo. “Current illegal immigration—whereby unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate, and who consequently have no need, motivation or ability
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We should abolish the National Environmental Policy Act. Nobody is saying this—but a lot of people are walking right up to saying it. This is understandable, given that “we should abolish the National Environmental Policy Act” sounds like something a Captain Planet villain would say. But it is the
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In 2005, Tony Blair’s Labour Party won reelection in the United Kingdom. The result severely cut the overwhelming parliamentary majority that his “New Labour” brand had won in 1997 and 2001, but his party still retained a governing majority of 65 seats. That was larger than many majorities that
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Debates about race and the legacy of racism have long dominated American politics. This spans the political spectrum, from the recent feverish efforts of conservatives to detect critical race theory everywhere to the left-liberal characterization of Trumpism as a fundamentally racist and xenophobic movement. This would no doubt come as
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What is currently occurring in Ukraine is beyond barbaric and is in no way sustainable by the Russian government on any level. Period. While the invasion of Ukraine was not sustainable before the massive, multilateral sanctioning campaign that has since occurred, it is even less so today as the Russian
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American theorist John Mearsheimer has been making the rounds claiming that the West bears the majority of the responsibility (this month in The Economist) or fault (in 2014 in Foreign Affairs) for the war in Ukraine. It is perhaps odd for a proponent of a Realist international relations theory—which
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At the end of February, thousands of high school students gathered in streets and squares in 40 cities around Italy. They held signs that read “It could have been me” or “You shouldn’t die of school”. The protests were sparked by the death of a fellow student during a
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“Realism and Restraint” as a school of thought is a new player on the US foreign policy stage—though it has older intellectual precursors. In part a response to the perceived interventionist excesses of the aughts, this new school brings a voice of caution to what is traditionally a hawkish
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It has been five years since Liberal Currents launched with seven essays at the ready. Many more have been published since; as of this writing we expect to hit our 300th essay within six or seven months. After spending our first three years as an all-volunteer effort, we launched a