The American Revolution was in many ways inspired by the scientific one. But this says at least as much about science as it does about America—and as vaccine-related controversies renew calls to “listen to scientists,” it’s worth considering how the philosophy of science parallels the philosophy of the Founders, and what those parallels suggest about […]

Postliberalism and pornography are independently controversial subjects—so perhaps I should have thought twice before conjoining them in a semi-snarky, slightly ambiguous tweet, which sparked a number of strong reactions: That a liberal columnist at a liberal newspaper did more to restrict pornography than every postlib put together reflects an intrinsic limitation of postliberalism: its contempt […]

Within 48 hours of Thanksgiving, two documents were released that addressed this year’s seasonal theme: how to balance private liberty and salus populi.  The first document, released shortly after midnight Thanksgiving day, was the Supreme Court’s unsigned injunction against Andrew Cuomo’s coronavirus rules, which had imposed harsher restrictions on churches and synagogues than on some […]

Not many talking points survived November’s narratological cull. The assumption that high turnout would crush Republicans down ballot turned out to be false, with both parties seeing a groundswell of government-dividing, record-shattering support. The assurance that, this time, the pollsters knew what they were doing went from confident to quaint in the blink of an […]

A contested election—especially one in which an unelected body casts the final vote—is the worst possible outcome next week. Trump winning in a landslide would be preferable. So would a Biden blowout. Neither of those outcomes will delegitimize the rules of the game as much as the rules failing to supply a clear outcome; pray […]

In late August, one day after the Republican National Convention had officially begun, David Frum penned an essay in The Atlantic that purported to outline “[w]hat the Republican Party actually stands for, in 13 points.” Frum was responding to the GOP’s decision not to publish an official 2020 platform, which had “led some to conclude […]

In the unlikely event Trump ekes out a victory in November, it will be because the electoral college let him win without the popular vote, and the democratic imprimatur it carries. Cognizant of this reality, Trump’s opponents have intensified their attacks on the electoral college itself—preemptively invalidating a second term and justifying, in the words […]

The debate over Cuties, Netflix’s maligned and muddled take on the pornographication of pre-teens, is really a debate about markets, and whether sex should be governed by one. In the interest of furthering that debate, let me offer three theses about Cuties, each of which is independently plausible, and all of which might be true. They […]

In a previous post, I used the term “synthetic nationalism” to describe what is increasingly the default premise of many conservative nationalists—or, in their words, of many national conservatives. The premise is that restrictions on immigration, tariffs on foreign imports, a more restrained foreign policy, and other “nationalist” measures don’t just help America, but ultimately […]

Since at least Woodrow Wilson and arguably since the Mayflower, Americans have struggled to conceive of their interests as distinct from their ideals. Blurring that distinction is sometimes said to be the original sin of neoliberalism (or “globalism”; take your pick), but the truth is it’s been blurry for almost four centuries, from John Winthrop’s […]