This post is focused on an excerpt from a recent essay by Walter Russell Mead, which appeared in online magazine Tablet. Here's a link to the original. To me, it captures something important about the presidential election -- the way in which the contest turned out to be a referendum on the character of America's … Continue reading Walter Russell Mead: American Leadership Has a Versailles Problem
This post is a reflection on a book by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. In it she provides one of the most compelling and persuasive explanation for the turn toward right-wing populism in American politics and the peculiar appeal of Donald Trump. As she puts … Continue reading Hochschild — Strangers in Their Own Land
This post is a piece by Thomas Edsall published in the New York Times last week. It explores in detail the recent literature about the role that declining social status has played in the rise of right-wing populism in the US and elsewhere. Here's a link to the original. The argument is one that resonates … Continue reading Thomas Edsall: The Resentment that Never Sleeps
This post is an essay by political scientist Francis Fukuyama about the challenges facing liberal democracy today from populisms of the left and right. The original appeared in the on-line journal, American Purpose, which he helped found. A large number of essays have emerged in recent years worrying about the future of liberal democracy, but … Continue reading Francis Fukuyama: Liberalism and Its Discontents
This post is a piece by Graeme Wood from the December Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. It's a profile of Peter Turchin, a population ecologist who decided to turn his skills in mathematical modeling toward big history -- looking for patterns across long expanses of time that help explain the rise and fall … Continue reading Graeme Wood — The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
This post is a reprint of a piece I published in Quartz in 2017. Here's a link to the original. It's an effort to explore the distinctively populist character of American higher education. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that US colleges and universities have managed to generate is … Continue reading Nobel prizes are great, but college football is why American universities dominate the globe
This post is a commentary on Colin Woodard's book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. Woodard argues that the United States is not a single national culture but a collection of national cultures, each with its own geographic base. The core insight for this analytical approach comes from … Continue reading Colin Woodard: Maps that Show the Historical Roots of Current US Political Faultlines
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 