This essay appears in our Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. In August 1936, after a failed coup against the Second Spanish Republic, Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces seized the city of ...

The failure of formal checks and balances to significantly stymie Trump is painfully clear. It is also not unprecedented. As Lisa Miller illustrates, checks and balances have been routinely weaponized ...

Miller warns that liberal hopes in such checks and balances are misplaced. Far from a safeguard of democracy, she argues, ...

As we struggle to answer his policies with progressive alternatives, the history of popular economic nationalism and its often-racist politics offers a powerful warning. The answer, though, isn’t a ...

This essay is featured in our Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. Over the last year and a half, American universities have rapidly destroyed the right to protest on campus. At the request of ...

This essay is part of an Election Chronicle series in our Winter 2025 issue, Trump’s Return. The year 2014 was a heady moment in the economic policy world. That spring, French economist Thomas Piketty ...

With the recent rapid development of AI tools, many are hailing the promise of digital technologies to enhance civic engagement and improve governance and democracy. Political theorist Hélène ...

My grandmother was a good Catholic who didn’t go to college and had eight children. Her oldest child went to college and had one child, me. Your own family probably fits this pattern. In a decline ...

At the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the syllabus for an Africana Studies summer course entitled The Politics of Race includes prompts for students in need of term paper guidance. The ...

“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Alabama governor George Wallace’s most famous sentence fired through the frigid air on the coldest day anyone in the state could remember.

When James Baldwin visited San Francisco in 1963 to film a documentary about U.S. racism, he encountered neighborhoods in turmoil: the city was seizing properties through eminent domain, razing them, ...