The Founders meant for the republic to be agile in philosophy — always changing to meet the new demands of the next generations. They meant for us to be self-governing, and empowered to create policy for problem-solving in new eras they themselves could not even conceive of. Thomas Jefferson wrote forewarningly of the Dead Hand […]
The cognitive dissonance of the so-called Republican “agenda” is on acute display, wherein mortal threat to a literally enumerated power of the Constitution given to Congress to establish a federal US postal service seems not to bother the Constitutional originalists one bit. Not to mention said power’s role in facilitating free and fair elections. Curioser […]
Buckle up, we’re in for a wild ride. Many of the serious scholars of political history and authoritarian regimes are sounding the alarm bells that, although it is a very very good thing that we got the Trump crime family out of the Oval Office, it is still a very very bad thing for America […]
The term Christian nationalists brings together a number of radical religious sects seeking to overthrow the democratic republic of the United States and installing a strict theocracy, from dominionists to orthodox Catholics to Evangelicals and many more. They tend to believe in Strict Father Morality, and desire to establish some sort of Christian fascist state […]
Dark money refers to political spending by organizations that are not required to disclose their donors or how much money they spend. This allows wealthy individuals and special interest groups to secretly fund political campaigns and influence elections without transparency or accountability. The term “dark money” gained prominence after the 2010 Supreme Court decision in […]
Gerrymandering is a political tactic used to manipulate the boundaries of electoral districts to favor one political party over another. It’s essentially the opposite of what the Founders meant by representative democracy — voters are supposed to choose their representatives, and not the other way around. The practice is named after Elbridge Gerry, a governor […]
One of two major parties in our American first-past-the-post voting system of dual-party reality, the Republican Party, has evolved (or devolved…) into a full-throated authoritarian movement seeking to overthrow our democracy, The Constitution, and the rule of law in order to establish a fascist regime in the United States. It’s been a not-so-secret fever dream […]
We have embraced all of these here in America — maybe not all at the same time, and not all at the same volume, or as consistently. Nevertheless, it’s a good practice to have a set of guiding principles even bitter rivals can agree on. This set of ideals is one of the most universal, […]
The demagogue is the creature the Founders of America most feared: the authoritarian-style leader who would stir the passions of the mob and use them to overthrow the more moderate democratic norms and checks and balances of the republic in order to stay in power. Yet the United States has had a flirtation with demagogues […]
Freedom from Dogma The world had been ruled by dogma for thousands of years until The Enlightenment burst onto the scene — and it holds sway still, in many parts and pockets of the world. Freedom from dogma was one of the greatest gifts of the intense period of scientific and empirical discovery of the […]
The radical right is a fervent anti-government strain of Libertarian ultraconservative, emerging out of the anti-New Deal ideology of the 1930s. From McCarthyism to the John Birch Society, from fiscal conservatives to Christian nationalists, the radical right contains some of the most extreme ideologies in the right wing. Conservative ideology has gotten more and more […]
The Republican National Committee, in perhaps the most stunningly stupid self-own in the history of modern politics certainly in my lifetime, finally said the quietest part out loud: that in their official pronouncement, the events at the Capitol on January 6 constituted “legitimate political discourse.” Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were censured by the […]
Below is a list of the covert gang of folks trying to take down the US government — the anti-government oligarchs who think they run the place. By 2016 the Koch network of private political groups had a paid staff of 1600 people in 35 states — a payroll larger than that of the Republican […]
Originalism is received wisdom by another name. It is a way of pseudo-argument privileging one narrow type of political view (conservatism) over all others — a view that we must try to divine the “original” intentions of the Founders in our creation and interpretation of the law. A view that, by the way, the Founders […]
Majority Leader Schumer is right to come around to the idea that the filibuster must be changed in order to pass voting rights and save our democratic republic from the forces of authoritarianism. The filibuster is an archaic rule that was at first only there by accident, then whittled into a sharp blade of minority […]