Persuasion | August 6, 2025 IN November, James Lindsay—an independent scholar, author, and sometime prankster—decided to test his observation that the American right’s illiberalism and irrationalism have, bizarrely, converged with the woke left’s illiberalism and irrationalism. He grabbed verbiage from the Communist Manifesto, changed left-wing valences to right-wing, and submitted the result to an online conservative journal. He…
The Atlantic | December 2024 JULY 1977: A 105-degree afternoon in Phoenix. I’m 17 and making deliveries in an underpowered Chevette with “4-55” air-conditioning (four open windows at 55 miles per hour), so I welcome the long runs to Sun City, when I can let desert air and American Top 40 blast through the…
Persuasion | August 6, 2024 IF it is true, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, that only a first-rate intelligence can function while holding two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, then only a genius can assess the future of liberalism—such is the paradox that confronts liberals right now. On the one hand,…
The Atlantic | July 1, 2024 LIKE A LIGHTNING STRIKE illuminating a dim landscape, the twin invasions of Israel and Ukraine have brought a sudden recognition: What appeared to be, until now, disparate and disorganized challenges to the United States and its allies is actually something broader, more integrated, more aggressive, and more dangerous. Over the past…
The Atlantic | January 26, 2024 IN THE SUMMER of 1984, after he finished his first U.S. Foreign Service assignment, in Yugoslavia, Jan Krc flew to Washington, D.C., for what he thought would be a couple of weeks’ training en route to his next post, in South Africa. He thought nothing of it when…
National Affairs | Winter 2023 LIBERALISM — the great social innovation of rule by rules rather than rulers — has found itself under attack in recent years. This might have come as a shock to Americans back in 1989. At the time, Mikhail Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was winding down. And Francis Fukuyama…
The Atlantic | December 1, 2023 TO ME, she was always Mrs. O’Connor, the mom next door. Yet she was always—even then, in the mid-1960s in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona—the person who would be Justice O’Connor. Long before her breakthrough appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court made her one of America’s most renowned…
National Affairs | Winter 2021 ON June 17, 2017, President Donald Trump directed the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to fire special counsel Robert Mueller. Instead, McGahn packed up his belongings and prepared his letter of resignation, telling the White House chief of staff that the president had told him to “do crazy shit.” Initially, Trump…
The New Republic | April 30, 2001 IN JUNIOR high school, I was small and got picked on. I thought one of the bigger boys might grab my wallet and run, so I punched an eyelet in the leather and attached the wallet to a loop on my belt by means of a chain. Nerdy,…
The Daily | January 6, 2012 A NUCLEAR-armed Iran? Intolerable. That seems to be the only thing President Obama and his leading Republican opponents agree on, even as the Islamic Republic threatens to close the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta calls Iranian nuclearization “a red line” and hints at military action. Republican…