Abundance

One of the most dangerous political pathologies is the tendency to defend whatever your enemies attack.

“This is what democracy looks like” is a common chant at protests, but what democracy should look like is a devilishly hard question to answer.

But the world of abundance has trade-offs, and trade-offs require choices.

The right is abandoning many of its successes to embrace a politics of scarcity.

For years, the boundaries of American politics had felt fixed, even settled. But now they are falling.

We are in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another.

Even in times without world wars and pandemics, crises abound. Turning them into national priorities is, and has always been, a political choice.

Between 1980 and 2005, the number of medical-school matriculants essentially flatlined69 as the US added 70 million people.

If crisis is the ultimate push-and-pull mechanism—both galvanizing action and rewarding success—we must remember that it is always up to us to decide what counts as a crisis.