Nietzsche's Critique of Liberalism

Liberal institutions straightway cease from being liberal, the moment they are soundly established: once this is attained no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions! One knows, of course, what they bring about: they undermine the Will to Power, they are the levelling of mountain

Taking Inclusion Seriously: Kevin Elliott's Democracy for Busy People

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” This question, asked by English writer Samuel Johnson in 1775, still touches a nerve today. Americans on the one hand carry the pride of one of the oldest sets of representative institutions in the

How New York City Botched the Migrant Crisis

It is not easy to leave your home and move elsewhere. It’s harder when you are moving to another country, leaving behind your old home and neighborhood, and harder still when you are fleeing persecution and violence because of who you are.  These difficulties are only compounded when the

Public Reason and Unreasonable Pluralism

In the context of castigating authors’ servile dedications to superiors, and dedicating his own (1757) Four Dissertations to his cousin the playwright John Home, David Hume offers ‘liberty of thought’ as an example of ‘true liberty.’ When I first read it, I thought he meant to discuss what we now

Deradicalizing the Center

In 2016, the Washington Post ran a remarkable piece of journalism. Derek Black, a pedigreed, up-and-coming white nationalist leader had experienced an ideological transformation while a student at the New College of Florida.  After he was outed by another student as a white nationalist, the school reviewed Black’s academic

Chris Rufo and Critical Theory: Looking for Revolutionaries in the Wrong Places

In his bestselling new book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How The Radical Left Conquered Everything, Christopher F. Rufo describes a pivotal moment in the history of critical theory: the 1969 break between two of its leading thinkers: Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. The men were early members, and for decades,

DeSantis's Nazi Problem and the Republican Staffer Class

The latest person touted as national conservatism’s trendy intellectual is more than a little sympathetic to fascism—quelle surprise. Former DeSantis staffer Nate Hochman has joined Pedro Gonzalez as another DeSantis orbiter unable to stay off the third rail of modern conservative politics: being an (open) fascist. Gonzalez, an

The Details of a Rawlsian Society: Daniel Chandler’s Free and Equal

…We may reject the contention that the ordering of institutions is always defective because the distribution of natural talents and the contingencies of social circumstance are unjust, and this injustice must inevitably carry over to human arrangements. Occasionally this reflection is offered as an excuse for ignoring injustice, as if

The Democratic Animal: Thomas Paine's Legacy

In 1774, Thomas Paine arrived in America having left a string of odd jobs, a twice-failed career as an Excise officer, and the remnants of two marriages back in England. The pamphlets he penned in America served as the spark (Common Sense) and the fuel (the Crisis series) for a

The Harmony of Interests

Many liberal theorists have an implied distaste for politics. One prominent type of this liberal anti-politics presupposes a harmony of interests. This is visible, for example, in the following passage in Rawls: “Assume further that expectations are close-knit: that is, it is impossible to raise or lower the expectation of

So What Is Gender Anyway?

Sex and Gender. These are the terms at the heart of the latest right-wing moral panic, used to explain why trans people are who they say they are—or why they aren’t.  In common parlance, ‘sex’ usually refers to the physical attributes of an individual’s body, while ‘gender’

Biden’s Foreign Policy Is Not Just ‘Better than Trump’, It’s the Best in the Field

The entrance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the Democratic Primary and announcement that Cornel West will be seeking the nomination for the Green Party in 2024 have both sought to turn what is usually the automatic re-nomination of a presidential incumbent into a heated contest between rival factions like