Last week I wrote about the decline of friendship in America and mused on why that spelled trouble for civic life.

The tyrant’s dream is to separate people and then isolate them, making them easier to control.

I expect most people agree that by making too much of a thing we can easily make too little of it—and also that as far as platitudes go that’s a fairly solid one.

This is the third installment of columns exploring the history and operation of the Electoral College.

Nine times in our nation’s history a US vice president has ascended to the office of president.

We celebrate Constitution Day, September 17^th, amidst concerns about its future.

Our Constitution promises to “secure the blessings of liberty” to “ourselves and our posterity.”

Aristotle argued that the only just polity had to be a “mixed regime,” and that meant one that blended popular and aristocratic elements.

This is the second installment in a series based on questions asked about the Electoral College.

I’ll start with a claim that is both non-controversial and controversial: to be a conservative (of the sort I am) is to be skeptical of abstractions.

We may not live in “unprecedented” times — you’d need to have a narrow historical horizon to think so — but that hasn’t stopped us from profligate use of the modifier.

The current crisis of social isolation and political polarization found in the United States and to a lesser extent in other liberal democracies has led recently to an upsurge of interest in friendship as a political category.

The idea of reflecting on a political order has an interesting history and generally occurs under two circumstances…

I recently had the chance to talk with a group of high school students who asked me questions about the Electoral College.

One of the ironies of our current political conversations is that many people have opinions about politics, but don’t necessarily have a clear understanding of what politics is.

One of the central conceits of this website is that good action comes from sound thinking, and sound thinking requires attention to how words are used.

For about a decade beginning in 1965, NBC late night weekend programming consisted of Best of Carson reruns.

The men and women of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives love their job so much they are afraid to do it; because if they do it, they may lose it.

Of late 18th century American novels only Uncle Tom's Cabin outsold and out paced in significance Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, the story of Julian West, who falls asleep in 1887 amidst the chaos of late capitalism and awakes to the socialist utopia of the year 2000.

Back in my school days when I was a philosophy major I would usually get the question “what could you possibly do with that degree?”