In a democratic polity such as ours we have strange and frequently paradoxical expectations of our leaders.

This is the fifth article in a series about the Electoral College that I think a lot of Americans want to know the answers to.

This summer, when the US and its NATO allies wanted to demonstrate their solidarity in opposing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they sent their greatest single weapon to the eastern Mediterranean– Gerald R. Ford. 

Perhaps no other thinker is so ardently claimed by both conservatives and liberals as Alexis De Tocqueville.

This is the fourth installment of a series of articles on the Electoral College and our presidential election system.

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.