Remembering the Weight of Life and Death in a Profane Age: As Told By The Author YouTube video by Liberal Currents

Listen to @gawattia.bsky.social talking about his article on the universal treatment of death as sacred, and Trump’s profaning of it youtube.com/shorts/5whiM...

Remembering the Weight of Life and Death in a Profane Age Donald Trump is unrelenting in his boastful indulgence in the ugliest facets of the human personality. There is another way.

“Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jests can be made.” E.A.Poe

My new piece for @liberalcurrents.com is a short meditation of the role of the sacred in politics. www.liberalcurrents.com/remembering-...

Too Great For Any One Man Since the founding generation, there has been a consistent and rational fear that the office of president was too powerful to be constrained by democratic institutions.

The paranoid style has rightly been sanctioned, but to the detriment of other more healthful forms of public neurotism. @liberalcurrents.com
I argue that perhaps what the country needs is for liberal politics to grow more paranoid in style, not less.
www.liberalcurrents.com/too-great-fo...

The War That Still Haunts the United States YouTube video by Liberal Currents

Listen to @gawattia.bsky.social talk about what history can teach us about the war in Iran youtube.com/shorts/fWImX...

The War That Still Haunts the United States Remembering another war America was unable to extricate themselves from.

“There are certain physical facts—bodies of water, deposits of gas—that technology was never going to transcend, except in the ultra-long term.’’ says Janan Ganesh. Missing from his list is history. My new piece for @liberalcurrents.com looks back at 1982.

www.liberalcurrents.com/the-war-that...

Call You This Liberty? "Once a mask is involved, people understand it as a sign of weakness. That the government has something to hide."

New @liberalcurrents.com: “The American psyche understandably recoils at the sight of armed men in masks…masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan…introducing a layer of secrecy at a time of low government trust.”
www.liberalcurrents.com/call-you-thi...

The Liberal Conscience Must Be Fostered With Accurate History A knowledge of the injustices of the past and the reasons for their occurrence is vital to the development of a liberal conscience.

Millions of people in the American South were subjected to what the French call ‘‘une vie sanglante’’(a bloody life). As I explain in this @liberalcurrents.com article, the world should never forget that. Memory of past cruelties builds a liberal conscience www.liberalcurrents.com/the-liberal-...

Readings this week...

"Liberalism ... is able to find unity in diversity by balancing the need for enduring order on one hand and restless dynamism on the other."

A reformed US political system, with robust immigration from Africa, can counter the demographic bomb of low fertility that is dragging down China and Europe.

As I point out in my @liberalcurrents.com piece, liberalism seeks to answer a pressing Q: how do you maintain stable societies and ensure different ways of life and ideas can coalesce into something healthful and vigorous when tribal hatred comes easy to human beings?

good piece from guillaume about some relatively basic demographic facts that are more or less baked into the cake at this point. as the saying goes, "all the new workers of 2046 have already been born." guess where that's happening?

…but as The Economist notes, “African migration is an unstoppable force that will long outlast today’s populists and help define the 21st century. Ignore it at your peril—and at your loss." As early as 2020 Rotberg and others were pointing to Africa’s sheer demographic power.

As @lkatfield.bsky.social notes in her new book on the MAGA movement, "The New Right doesn't care." Its adherents, she explains, are opposed to pluralism in principle. They "do not believe in the egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy that has gained real traction in the United States"

America's Future Is African The security and prosperity of nations does not depend on complete uniformity of thought, manners, or coloration.

“Liberals do not believe that the security and prosperity of nations must depend on complete uniformity of thought, manners, and coloration.” Indeed, “fierce disputation and colorful variety are often a sign of good health, not terminal decline.”
www.liberalcurrents.com/future-is-af...

Speech That Plays It Safe Does Not Remain Free for Long Fierce disputation and colorful variety are often a sign of a society in good health, not terminal decline.

And today, @gawattia.bsky.social argues against Megyn Kelly's pernicious idea that free speech is something exercised quietly and peacefully from the safety of your home, when instead "tense, heated, and socially disruptive speech" is necessary for the health of the body politic

Speech That Plays It Safe Does Not Remain Free for Long Fierce disputation and colorful variety are often a sign of a society in good health, not terminal decline.

On Sept. 1, 2025 an internal memo by the Portland police described the anti-ICE protests there as showing “little to no energy.” As I argue in this @liberalcurrents.com article, liberal philosophers like W.Humboldt prized the ‘high energy’ of vigorous criticism.

www.liberalcurrents.com/s/

What Happens When Books Aren’t News In a sense, the decline of book reviews, like the decline of newspapers themselves, is a story about disaggregation.

“When such critics and editors disappear, every part of the literary ecosystem suffers.” Indeed, reviewing books is a humane enterprise: it helps us understand ourselves and others better.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Yes. He’s a Princeton PhD and it shows: very erudite and learned. His mastery of both theory and the details of Washington politics are an asset and gives an unmatched sharpness to his criticism. The biggest surprise was T.Kronman. He offers the most interesting and innovative conservative vision

A small selection from the past week and a half of reading, with special emphasis on conservatism and its political embodiment in the U.S.

Some people think books don’t matter, but without them we are cut off from the past, misunderstand the present, and are unprepared to face the future.

Readings this week…

People make fun of this site being all 37 year olds, but apparently my fellow 37 year olds are on the front lines getting shot

“The transatlantic crisis is the effect of a much bigger change: the coming of a multi-polar age. In Europe, a staggering three-quarters of Germans and French now view China unfavourably. Meanwhile, 73% of French people and 71% of Germans believe that the US is no longer an ally.”

Danger of Mark Carney’s ‘middle power’ manifesto Europe can’t defend itself or police its own neighbourhood without the US. That’s a truth no Davos speech will change

Working on an article analysis of the Carney speech. This column is by miles the most sober write-up so far and much closer to my views: www.thetimes.com/article/bc7b...