Today, when it comes to repeated acts meant to erase reality’s record and memory, it wouldn’t be Eastern Europe or Russia that came to mind but the United States. With the release of the Mueller report, the word “redaction” is once again in the news, though for those of us...
When everybody lies, anything can indeed be true. And when everybody — or even a significant chunk of everybody — believes this, the effect can be profoundly anti-democratic. Such belief doesn’t just rile people up and make them wonder what in the world is true. It also generates a yearning...
The “rule of law” distinguishes democracies from dictatorships. It’s based on three fundamental principles. Trump is violating every one of them.
Donald Trump is not only undermining democracy here at home, but he’s also emboldening dangerous authoritarian movements around the world. Trump’s presidency has become America’s most dangerous export.
The political process no longer advances the interests of the average citizen. It has turned the consent of the governed into a cruel joke. This facade of democratic process eviscerates one of the primary social bonds in a democratic state and abolishes the vital shared belief that citizens have the...
Tthe essence of America – the attribute we must hold most secure because it defines who we are and what we strive for – is a system of government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln put it. If Putin or a Kremlin-connected Ukrainian strongman or...
Presidential lies are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to an American political, media, intellectual and educational culture that has long been drenched in a vast sea of fable, deception, ideological selection and flat-out propagandistic falsification. The biggest and most relevant lies of our time are major...
When two corrupt parties control the political system, debating which is the more corrupt simply diverts attention away from addressing the source of the corruption. In this case, the source is extreme inequality combined with a system of law that allows for a virtually unlimited concentration of corporate power.
It’s not simply her personal story or energy. It’s that she and hundreds of other Americans with no special money or connections got together and decided that the progressive worldview remains alive, that maybe we were right after all.
We used to have a class of low-information voters. But they have now been cultivated and transformed into wrong-information voters. This was done on purpose.