Sublime

The financial crisis of 2008, and the Great Recession that followed, had a similar effect on the home front. The guilty parties were elites—bankers, traders, regulators, and policymakers. Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman and an Ayn Rand fan, admitted that the crisis undermined his faith in the narrative of Free America. But those who di

At the heart of our divisions is almost half a century of rising inequality and declining social mobility. Americans tolerate more economic inequality than citizens of other modern democracies: if anyone can become anything, today’s unequal results are fair and might well change tomorrow. That was never completely true, but now it’s plainly false.

Our values are corny ones, reason, decency, prosperity, human dignity, contact, the finest, broadest possible America.

Although Truman had won on the basis of his “Fair Deal” program, that program’s fate would still be controlled by anti–Fair Deal southerners. And in the unlikely event that Truman’s proposals somehow emerged from committee, there was still the filibuster in the Senate. What was the legislation that had been defeated in the Senate in 1948? Legislati

Agre stressed that a healthier politics should begin and end with human practices,

This “de-purpling” of America generates multiple feedback effects that mostly tend to reinforce one another. Many one-party states are enacting policies almost expressly designed to offend residents of the other party—for example, bans on abortion or transgender treatments in red zone states or bans on guns and gas-powered appliances in blue zone s

America