Sublime

What we are trying to achieve with this book is a neural alternative that is open to important truths: the central role of the Public in American life, the overwhelming power of corporations in our public life, the predatory nature of privatization, the disastrous reality of humanly caused global warming, and the powerfully negative effect of extre

The American passion for equality is thwarted by vastly and permanently unequal conditions. If Americans are to achieve the equality that has always attracted and always eluded us, government will have to be the prime mover, though not the only one.

“achieving a better life

The proposed Constitution “forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.”67 Madison thus deployed scale across space to reverse time: history would henceforth strengthen his republic by allowing factions to compete at all levels, so th

In his first State of the Union address, Eisenhower had promised to carry out Truman’s edict and end segregation in the military and in the District, and he had kept that promise. By the end of 1953, all public facilities in the capital had been desegregated, and he could boast that in the Navy and the Air Force, segregated units were “a thing of t

The suspense of a presidential election now comes down to close votes in a mere handful of states; the rest are landslides. Similarly, the share of all states having “trifecta governments”—governor and both legislative houses controlled by the same party—has been rising. From 1967 until 2009, the number of trifecta states was never more than twenty