Culture Wars

• Circular Firing Squad

  From Tim Miller: To the delight of Republican senators, Schumer plans to make Democratic senators vote on abortion legislation that is both unpopular—it would legalize abortions through all nine months of pregnancy, a position most Americans disapprove of—and hopeless, since it does not have the votes to pass. Here’s a tip: If you are going

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• The Woe of Roe 1

  The inherent weaknesses of Roe’s approach have long been recognized even by the strongest defenders of abortion rights. In 1992, for example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg criticized Roe as a “breathtaking” precedent during a speech at New York University. Her lecture addressed “measured third-branch decision making,” and she spoke words that have proved remarkably prescient. “Doctrinal

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• The Praying Coach of Bremerton

  Teachers are state employees, but they are not the state’s robots. When they clearly speak on their own, the First Amendment should apply. Whether they kneel in prayer or protest, it’s not just acceptable for students and parents to see teachers as people and citizens; it’s imperative. The best way to teach pluralism is to

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• The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

  In fact, if you ask me what really went wrong after 1991, it’s … that there was no recognition among the Soviet elites that they had lost the Cold War and that they had deserved to lose it. Instead, people like Putin and others nursed resentments about betrayal and humiliation—as if the Soviet Union had

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• The Grand Inquisitor and the Alt Right

  ..Essayist Gregory Hood claims that “Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood. It is the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.” A major work of alt-right history concludes: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”  Matthew

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• Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability

  Because the politics of inevitability assures you that whatever the good things are, they’re being brought about automatically by some invisible hand, right? The market is like Mom. You know, it’s going to take care of you with that invisible hand. And you don’t have to think about what the values might be, what you

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• Jamelle Bouie on Civil War

  …if you’re worried about a second Civil War, the question to ask isn’t whether people hate each other — they always have and we tend to grossly exaggerate the extent of this country’s political and cultural unity over time — but whether that hate results from the irreconcilable social and economic interests of opposing groups

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• Progressive Fever Dreams

  Every reconstructive president must confront vestiges of the old regime. The slavocracy evaded Lincoln’s grasp by seceding; the Supreme Court repeatedly thwarted F.D.R. Yet they persisted. How? What each of these presidents had at their back was an independent social movement. Behind Lincoln marched the largest democratic mass movement for abolition in modern history. Alongside

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• Genealogy Part 6: Vervaeke’s “Awakening” Series v. My “Genealogy” Series

  Plato lived at a time when the inner crisis of the traditional Greek polis and the religion intimately bound up with it had become evident, and there seems to be no reason to deny that this had a profound effect on his decision to abandon the public arena to cultivate the wisdom necessary to build

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• Douthat on Democracy

  To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters. But when it comes to the work

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