Part 2: Common Sense Are we still capable of that kind of clarity when it matters most? There was a moment in the birth of the country when uncertainty did not simply fade; it was confronted. Not with noise or outrage, but with moral clarity. A moment when a divided people were forced to face a harder question: not what...

The current American political order is starting to feel like a collision between the films Seven Days in May and All the King’s Men. One warns us about powerful institutions turning against constitutional democracy. The other shows how a populist leader can take grievance, resentment, and loyalty and turn them into a system of rule. I recently watched both films...

I began watching 60 Minutes when it premiered on September 24, 1968, when Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace introduced a new kind of television journalism: “a magazine for television,” flexible enough to go wherever the stories — and the facts — led. What followed was more than a CBS program. For me, it became a Sunday night institution. Under Don...

What kind of leadership… what kind of citizenship, will it take to restore and live the values we claim to believe? It begins with service. Leadership without service is merely power. Public office was never meant to be a stage for self-glorification. It was meant to be a trust.  A president’s first question shouldn’t be, “How do I win?” but,...

There’s a scene in the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day when Phil Connors—trapped in the same day over and over again—turns to two guys in a bar and asks, “What if there were no tomorrow?” One turns to him and says, “That would mean there would be no consequences. We could do whatever we wanted!” It gets a good laugh...

As distilled from an email update from Michael Waldman, President and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Soon, it will rule on the president’s birthright citizenship executive order, one that, as Waldman writes, “could upend what it means to be an American.” That is not...

In the winter of 1863, as the Civil War dragged into its third year, prices in the North rose sharply. Coffee, flour, and coal steadily became more expensive. Newspapers carried the numbers. Housewives felt them at the market. Even then, Americans did not see the same hardship in the same way. And that divide, between what is experienced and what...

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that if forced to choose between “a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government,” he would prefer the latter. The statement was not an attack on government; it was a recognition that transparency is the lifeblood of liberty. In a democracy, the press asks questions. The government answers them. And the public, armed with facts,...

SPECIAL REPORT  I recently received an email message from a nationwide grassroots political network. The message reads as follows: “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is spending millions on warehouses they plan to repurpose as ICE detention ‘mega-centers’ to hold as many as 10,000 human beings per warehouse. “Draft layouts show ‘pods’ in which individuals are to be held, each...

There are moments when a single arrest tells us more about the state of the country than a thousand speeches. The recent detention of Don Lemon while covering a protest inside a church is one of those moments—not because of who he is, but because of what it signals. “I was walking up to the room, and I pressed the...