Essays
Judgment / August 3, 2026
You hear the phrase "coalition government" and it sounds reasonable, even sophisticated. After a bruising election, the parties that fell short of a...
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Pick any Washington bureaucracy-the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, the EPA-and you will find the same cast of characters. Thousands of...
When most people hear the word autocracy, the mental picture snaps into place quickly. A solitary strongman, uniformed and grim, crushes dissent with...
There is a quiet absurdity baked into the way we run presidential elections, and it surfaces once every four years without most of us even noticing...
Every so often a new batch of political reformers rediscovers an idea that sounds so sensible you wonder why we haven't tried it already. Get ordinary...
The most important word the President of the United States can utter is not a stirring call to duty or a soaring appeal to our better angels. It is a quiet...
Every four years we sit through the same ritual, and every four years we're told it's just the way things work. A handful of states get all the attention...
The presidential nomination process has become a carnival of impulse, not a contest of judgment. Millions of voters, isolated in voting booths, pull levers...
Every year the rankings come out, and every year a quiet panic sets in among people who ought to know better. Some think tank or magazine has released its...
Most Americans will tell you we live in a democracy. A few will correct that to "constitutional republic," and they'll rightly note the difference: in a...