There are words we know, and there are words we argue about, working our way to a shared meaning. And then there is that unique category of terms that, once they appear, stubbornly refuse to succumb ...

Under Trump, post-liberal intellectuals have abandoned tradition for radicalism and scholarship for vulgarity.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, a little-known Sovietologist and deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning, published an article in a Washington journal, The National Interest, ...

In 2017, Samuel Moyn, a left-wing Yale professor of law and history, co-wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined, “Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is.” In the essay, Moyn diagnosed ...

“As we begin 2017, the most urgent threat to liberal democracy is not autocracy,” writes William Galston of The Wall Street Journal, “it is illiberal democracy.” Galston’s diagnosis is not wrong, and ...

Liberalism is in crisis. Its defenders, who see liberalism as a bulwark against tyranny, fear that illiberalism now threatens to overwhelm liberal democracy. Its critics, who say liberalism is a ...

In his new book, “The Struggle for a Decent Politics,” the political philosopher Michael Walzer grapples with a definition. By James Traub When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our ...

My recent column made some pretty sweeping historical claims: that the reelection of Donald Trump proved that we have definitively exited the post-Cold War era; that the phase of history that began in ...

In the end, the argument garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court. Even Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't debase themselves by going along with such a half-baked, ...

Democracy does not exist when political parties are controlled by major donors. Democracy does not exist when it is ...

When Estonia regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and restored liberal democracy, the small Baltic country ...

Don’t count liberalism out in 2024. I know it’s a Rodney Dangerfield political philosophy—meek and mild, self-deprecating, it gets no respect—but battle-hardened post-Trump liberals have proved tough ...