Conclusion: The Words That Made Us and Still Must.  In December of 1776, the Revolution was not moving toward triumph. It was close to collapse. Washington’s army was exhausted. Enlistments were running out. Men who had already given much were being asked to give more. Then Thomas Paine’s words were read aloud… …  “These are the times that try men’s...

Lately, I’ve been reading more history, mostly to educate myself. But the other night, I opened Lord Acton’s Lectures on the French Revolution and didn’t get far before I sat up in bed. I was reading about France two centuries ago, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the comparisons to Washington today. To be honest, most of what I remember...

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...

Last August, I wrote that I was “stepping back from the chaos” of Donald Trump. I meant to write about his presidency only when his actions were significant. That was the naïve part. This is not Republican versus Democrat. This is democracy versus authoritarianism: 2025–2026 — Turned pressure on universities into national policy.After targeting individual universities with investigations and funding...

I never imagined I would be writing a commentary about the cancellation of a television program, certainly not one explained away under the dubious claim of “lost revenue.” It is a thin rationale that asks us to accept far more than it actually explains. Colbert has occupied the 11:30 slot on CBS longer than Johnny Carson held court on The...

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...

Britain’s King Charles III spoke to a chamber that, for a moment, set aside party labels—Democrat and Republican—and listened not as factions, but as participants in a relationship that has endured for more than two centuries. What stood out in Charles’s address was not grandeur, but restraint. Not proclamation, but purpose. And beneath it all, a quiet ethical framework worth...

New information has now confirmed what many feared from the start: Alex Pretti was disarmed before he was shot—multiple times—by federal agents in Minneapolis. Whatever uncertainties once clouded this tragedy, that fact changes the moral terrain entirely. This is no longer a case about split-second judgment under imminent threat. It is a case about what happens after the threat is...

Not long ago, I stopped watching the national news. I told myself I was stepping away from the noise and the churn for some peace of mind. But reading a daily paper doesn’t guarantee a complete sense of calm; it simply delivers the chaos in longer form: page after page of anger, violence, grievance, retribution, and my-way-or-the-highway governance. It is...

“There’s a difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.” United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said that. But it was not part of any written Supreme Court opinion or legal case. While it’s been widely quoted as Stewart’s judicial philosophy, there is no record of it in any official Supreme Court...