On January 4, 1975, US President Gerald Ford signed into law a section of the Social Security Act that established a national child support collection system.

My field of political philosophy contains an inherent contradiction since a philosophical disposition often eschews too close an engagement with the powers and principalities of this world.

From their early Puritan days Americans have painted their politics with Biblical imagery.

We think of economics as “the dismal science” in part because it tries to bracket the question of values, opting for mere description and impersonal laws.

Has the practice of “civility” been left behind? Though it has never been practiced as well as it should, it nonetheless has supported a system of social manners, without which it is difficult to live together.

We find ourselves once again in the midst of a depressing spectacle: election season. In my role as a political scientist I had to pay attention to electoral politics, even though I thought the art of governing was far more interesting.

Most of my students say that the main reason for the sorry state of our democracy is that people are “not well-informed.”

Political life must operate at some intuitive level on a coherence between views of the self and modes of governance.

The Declaration of Independence listed among its complaints against the king that he had involved us in Europe’s wars, insisting that their problems should not be our concern.

I live not far from Prince George’s County, Maryland, which, due to rising rents and housing prices, enacted in April 2023 a temporary rent-stabilization law.

Our tendency to treat our contemporary problems as if they are unique can blind us to the fact that our country has always been divided.

In last week’s essay, we looked at how ideas of “the sacred,” violence, and suffering congeal into our modern notions of victimhood, and our tendency to grant moral status to “victims.”

The US Supreme Court will hear arguments on April 25, 2024 in the case of Trump v. US, a case which will determine whether the former president is immune from prosecution on charges related to trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The last two Heritage essays made brief references to one of America’s most interesting and mercurial thinkers, Orestes Brownson.

We have argued in this space that the state of democracy in America is both worse and better than people think.

One of the more satisfying parts of this job has been engaging in partnerships with other organizations and presidential centers and foundations dedicated to serving the public weal and strengthening democratic norms and practices.

We in the United States in 2024 are in the midst of what political scientists and others call “polarization,” by which the poles of right and left grow stronger while the “center does not hold,” as the Irish poet once wrote.

Last week we discussed Rousseau’s idea that “the act that constitutes the republic isn’t part of its constitution,” done by a “lawgiver” “able to see all men’s passions without having any of them.”

Last week I gave a brief introduction to the thinking of Eric Voegelin, but more importantly to the problem of Gnosticism.

Tolkien’s collected correspondence was first published in 1981; a new edition was released in late 2023, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition, which adds more letters to the previous correspondence collection.