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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
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The policy needle of the state and the conscience of the public don’t budge in any direction if people don’t collaborate to educate others and affect political change. Creating new intellectual and political alliances, and enforcing the connections between old ones, are crucial steps toward spreading ideas, establishing
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The nations of the world are remarkably united in opposition to the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine launched in late February 2022. Russian aggression has (for the most part) been understood as unprovoked and unjust. But even in the world’s unified call for peace, respect for persons and national
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On February 22, 2022, Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to refer for prosecution parents of transgender minors who are receiving gender-affirming medical care. He concurred with an opinion, released a few days prior, by the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that giving minors
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A popular saying, often used when discussing the uncertainties of the past, is that “history is written by winners.” The implication is that the powerful create our narratives of the past, and the point of view of the various “losers” in history is unknowable. This truism is not, however, particularly
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It is very important that I am banned from weightlifting. Very important that I never compete in mixed martial arts, very important that I never win a swimming competition, very important that I never win a footrace. I am a trans woman, you see, and we are too strong, too
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In opposing US imperialism, progressives often emphasize US power. The logic here is straightforward; if the United States has great power to affect international events, it also has great culpability. The problem, though, is that the focus on US actions and US capacity can lead to the conclusion that the
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Discourse studies is an interdisciplinary method used to unpack how we use language to organize and express ideas in the most convincing possible way, even up to the point of misleading our audience. To illustrate how useful Discourse Studies can be for getting a deeper understanding of the messages around
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…The tradition of associational socialism can contribute to the deepening of the pluralism that is constitutive of liberal democracy. But this requires a rejection of the atomistic liberal vision of an individual that could exist with her rights and interests prior to and independently of her inscription in a community.
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Many self-proclaimed capitalists and free marketeers see recent advances in space exploration as an opportunity to hail the kinds of fruit borne from markets and competition. In this way, one sees rockets soaring away from their launchpads as heartwarming symbols of entrepreneurship—a display of technological progress and human capability
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Recently New York magazine published a long interview with Joss Whedon in which the film director and television showrunner attempted to defend himself from charges of abuse, harassment, sexism, and racism. Charisma Carpenter, an actor on Whedon’s shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel in the late 1990s and
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Liberalism at Large is an intellectual biography of The Economist with a special emphasis on how the ideology of the 175+ year old liberal newspaper has evolved—and failed to evolve—with the times. Alexander Zevin argues that this history provides a special insight into liberalism itself, as The Economist