At the close of the 20th century, Alexander Keyssar found himself writing what would become the preeminent book on the history of enfranchisement in America. This had not been his original plan. He had spent years, in fact, working on a very different plan—“a highly quantitative study of working-class
Over the last few weeks, issues ostensibly about freedom of speech once again made headlines. Unfortunately, these debates seem plagued by conceptual brittleness. Classically, “freedom of speech” refers to freedom from state-enforced censorship, and despite what the current state of the “free speech” debate might lead one to think, the
The murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer has once again brought the issue of systemic racism, police violence, and criminal justice reform to the forefront of the American national conversation, in print and in the streets. As part of that conversation, Liberal Currents solicited
A divided America has come together in the face of a crisis; to a man they have all agreed that “if the world were organised according to my political views, this tragedy would never have happened.” For a certain class of American, this includes their views on how the media
Few remember that the Arab Spring began with the public self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, in desperate defiance of a government that had ground him under its boot. In his home country, he is remembered fondly as the original spark that led to replacing a tyrant with
If Trump wins on November 3rd this year, we will be told that the doomed effort to remove him from office bears much of the blame. If he loses, the impeachment will get at least some of the credit. But it’s quite possible that the impeachment will have no
The roadside police encounter gone wrong was a familiar genre in American media before audiences more recently began to develop a larger appetite for police misconduct stories. Is this merely a special case of a now general, nihilistic tendency in which “government failure now sets the agenda”? That is undeniably
There have only been five presidential elections in the history of the United States in which the winner of the electoral college did not win the popular vote. Two of the five, the only ones which did not occur in the 19th century, were the most recent Republican presidents; one,
What are the proper limits of liberal tolerance? Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, appears to have found himself pinned against this seemingly impossible question. Shortly after giving a speech at Georgetown University about freedom of expression, the Facebook CEO has found himself hounded with questions about his choice to include
“In the first three decades of the twentieth century,” Thomas Leonard tells us in Illiberal Reformers, “eugenic ideas were politically influential, culturally fashionable, and scientifically mainstream. The elite sprinkled their conversations with eugenic concerns to signal their au courant high-mindedness.” “Eugenic thinking in forms both mundane and grand increasingly stained
A liberal is a person who can’t take his own side in a quarrel. Robert Frost Richard Rorty stands as the most controversial figure in 20th century English-language philosophy. As William Curtis documents in Defending Rorty, Rorty’s untroubled attitude and deflationary arguments were a lightning rod among analytic
Two years ago, a group of friends and I were discussing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to “intensify” the crackdown on black-market cigarettes after having enacted a tax hike on them. Since NYPD officers ostensibly looking for black-market cigarettes had killed Eric Garner a mere three