“I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it,” Beatrice Evelyn Hall wrote in her 1906 biography of Voltaire. Her words conveying Voltaire’s attitude have become one of the most quoted, and most valorized, summations of liberal principles. Unfortunately, the statement
In 2019, the liberal European parliamentary group Renew Europe won its best election result since 2004. Reflecting on that result, the president of Renew Europe, Dacian Ciolos, wrote, “Europeans have given us a strong mandate to change Europe for the better…[Renew Europe] will stand up for the people who
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
Trump made headlines in announcing that the US will be suspending financial support to the World Health Organization (WHO) until completing an investigation into its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. While this action has been rightly decried as an attempt to deflect blame for his own response, which was too
“Anyone who believes that if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem is part of the problem.” Aaron Haspel Guns and fetuses. Out of all the issues that have plagued American democracy in the past few centuries, none seem to reach the tenor and
If ever rival countries were to be united by a truly common enemy, infectious disease should be that threat. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the global economy and has killed tens of thousands of people worldwide; containing and treating it is truly a global priority. However,
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
American exceptionalism extends beyond its absolute wealth, into its absolutely atrocious homeless problem. While the USA does not have the greatest proportion of homeless people in the world, the isolation of these individuals is truly striking. The remarkable vulnerability of this population is evidence of the immorality of a society
Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 came as a shock to most political analysts, and spurred numerous analyses looking to explain the outcome. One insightful explanation comes from Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized. Klein sees the election as a culmination of our social psychology mixing with a
In The Narrow Corridor, with impressive historical breadth, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (hereafter A&R) develop and apply a conceptual framework to explain the emergence, sustenance, and, all too often, disappearance, of liberty. It is a serious, important and wide-ranging scholarly effort. Narrative histories provide the empirical grist
Asked to place the headline “Prisons Illegally Sterilizing Female Inmates”, most Americans would assume it came from the Jim Crow South or the height of eugenics in the 1930s. Few, if they hadn’t been tracking the particular story, would guess that the women in question—148 of them—were
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
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