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TheAtlantic.com | April 26, 2020 THE Republican Party has been taken over by an unscrupulous populist demagogue. His loyalty is to himself, not to his party or any ideology. He glories in violating political norms. He trashes liberals and government bureaucrats but has no use for limiting the government’s powers—at least, not his own powers. He…
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By Jonathan Rauch and Ray La Raja The Atlantic | December 2019 AMERICANS who tuned in to the first Democratic presidential debates this summer beheld a spectacle that would have struck earlier generations as ludicrous. A self-help guru and a tech executive, both of them unqualified and implausible as national candidates, shared the platform with governors,…
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National Affairs | Fall 2019 IN MAY of 2016, a motorist named Cassy McWade had an accident on the interstate in western North Carolina and called her mechanic for a tow. The mechanic couldn’t come, so he sent a friend from another company. In due course, Ken Shupe, of Shupee Max Towing, reached her, but as he…
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…But Losing Taught Libertarians How to Win Reason | December 2018 IT IS 2012 in Washington state, where voters are facing an initiative to legalize recreational marijuana. The airwaves reverberate with ads on both sides. At a glance, it’s not always obvious which side is which. One pro-legalization ad features an authoritative man who introduces himself as…
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Reason.com | November 26, 2018 SOCIOPATHS have haunted fiction since fiction began, and no wonder. Sociopathy is civilization’s greatest challenge. Richard III and Iago; Raskolnikov, Kurtz, Willie Stark, and Humbert Humbert; J.R. Ewing, Frank Underwood, and even HAL 9000. How do we understand the narcissist, the demagogue, the liar, the manipulator, the person without scruples or conscience?…
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National Affairs | Fall 2018 LONG before Donald Trump began his political career, he explained his attitude toward truth with characteristic brazenness. In a 2004 television interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, he marveled at the Republicans’ successful attacks on the wartime heroism of Senator John Kerry, the Democrats’ presidential candidate. “[I]t’s almost coming out that…
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…and Now There’s Momentum for Some Radical Fixes Washington Post Magazine | April 15, 2018 I THINK what we’re seeing,” Marc Freedman told me when I interviewed him one summer day, “right in front of our nose, is the emergence of a new period of life.” Freedman is in his late 50s and lives and works…
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The Atlantic | January-February 2018 FRANK Kameny, the last century’s greatest gay-rights activist, filed the first-ever Supreme Court petition challenging discrimination against homosexuals. He led some of the first gay-rights demonstrations. He was the first openly gay congressional candidate. He spearheaded the challenge to the psychiatric establishment’s categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness. He fought tirelessly…
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Washington Post | February 18, 2018 The single most important intellectual trend of our time is the popular rediscovery of human tribalism. We thought we had it licked. For roughly 200,000 years, humans ran around in small, clannish groups, hunting and mating together while variously raiding or befriending other groups. But in the past couple…
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New York Review of Books | November 9, 2017 Review of The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, by Mark Lilla I OWE my marriage to identity politics. In 1960, I was born into a world where openly homosexual Americans were legally banned from federal employment, informally banned from much private employment, terrorized on the streets,…