liberalism 
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SOURCE: The Week
3/21/2022
The Thrill of Teaching Mill
by Samuel Goldman
Mill was prescient in focusing attention not only on the restriction of speech by the state, but on the cultural and social obstacles to dissenting opinion.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/14/2022
Francis Fukuyama Revisits the "End of History" and Liberalism's Prospects After War
"People really like being in liberal societies after they’ve gone through either horrible nationalist conflict (as in the two world wars of the 20th century) or they’ve had to live under authoritarian dictatorship (as people in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union did under communism)."
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SOURCE: The Nation
11/27/2021
Selective Conscience: New Book Dissects Rawls's Theory of Fairness
by Olúfémi O. Táíwò
Katrina Forrester's book shows the influence of John Rawls on the study of ethics, but also reveals the limits of abstract theory for understanding historical injustice.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
11/15/2021
The Bad Guys are Winning: The 21st Century Reversal of Liberalism
by Anne Applebaum
"Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists."
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SOURCE: The Nation
11/15/2021
Stuck in the Middle: George Packer and Liberal Faith
by Nikhil Pal Singh
George Packer's commitment to liberalism prevents him from evaluating why it seems imperiled today.
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SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
9/20/2021
Why a Liberal Education is Worth Defending
by Steve Mintz
Roosevelt Montas’s forthcoming "Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation" makes a powerful case for engagment with the Great Books as a way to subvert hierarchies and promote equity.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
8/20/2021
Liberal Democracy is Worth a Fight
by Anne Applebaum
"In the real world, the battle to defend liberal democracy is sometimes a real battle, a military battle, not merely an ideological battle."
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SOURCE: Public Books
8/20/2021
Review Essay: Freedom for Whom?
by Michael Mirer
Two recent books, by Tyler Stovall and Annelien De Dijn, interrogate the history of the idea of freedom and the question of whether western liberal democracy can be freed from its historical roots in exclusion and domination of others.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
8/2/2021
The Liberals Who Weakened Trust in Government
by Kim Phillips-Fein
Historian Kim Phillips-Fein writes that Paul Sabin's new book "Public Citizens" adds to understanding of the rise of conservatism and the power of attacks on "big government" by focusing on the role of liberal public interest groups in exposing the capture of the liberal regulatory state by big business interests.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
6/8/2021
Social Fissures have Made Building a Broad Liberal Coalition Hard for 50 Years
by Steven M. Gillon
Hostility toward the welfare state, frequently driven by the idea that government programs unfairly benefit minorities at the expense of whites, has prevented the Democratic party from consolidating a political majority for decades. Worshipping fallen heroes like Robert Kennedy obscures the political work needed to build and keep a coalition.
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SOURCE: New York Times
5/1/2021
Joe Biden, the Reverse Ronald Reagan
Is the Biden administration's response to the crises affecting America more than a collection of programs and initiatives? Is the Democratic party moving to firmly repudiate Ronald Reagan's quip that "government is the problem"?
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SOURCE: The Baffler
4/1/2021
Runaway American Dreams
by Dennis M. Hogan
What does it say about American liberalism that it's cultural tribune, Bruce Springsteen, is doing a corporate-sponsored podcast with the former President of the United States?
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SOURCE: Washington Post
2/21/2021
Emmanuel Macron’s Socially Constructed Bogeymen
by Daniel W. Drezner
What, exactly, "Islamo-leftism" is, and what relationship it could possibly have to American academic theories, are two big questions left unanswered by the French President's attacks on academic ideas.
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SOURCE: The New Republic
2/22/2021
Pankaj Mishra’s Reckoning With Liberalism’s Bloody Past
Indian critic Pankaj Mishra argues in a new book of essays that recent liberal concern about right-wing politicians declaring support for "western civilization" ignores the way that liberal colonialists have embraced ideas of cultural supremacy.
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2/14/2021
History, Evidence and the Ethics of Belief
by Guy Lancaster
Untrammelled freedom of belief has been enshrined as an American civic virtue. The nation, democracy, and possibly the planet are imperiled without a collective commitment to respect belief only to the extent available evidence supports it.
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2/21/2021
Neal Gabler's "Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour"
by James Thornton Harris
Neal Gabler's first volume of a biography of Ted Kennedy praises the long-serving senator as the driving force of a hugely consequential period of liberal legislative success. Those looking for gossip or consideration of his personal failures may be disappointed.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
1/28/2021
From Revolution to Reformism
by Adam Przeworski
A new book of political theory excerpted here locates the decline of the Left in its adoption of reformist rhetoric that accommodated capitalism's preferences for fiscal stability and austerity.
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SOURCE: New York Times
1/29/2021
What Should Drive Biden’s Foreign Policy?
Columnist and Humphrey biographer James Traub says the former Senator and VP's interventionist liberalism in foreign policy is a model for Joe Biden's administration to reestablish American preeminence in world affairs.
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SOURCE: The Nation
1/11/2021
Ex-Friends: Anne Applebaum and the Crisis of Centrist Politics
Critic David Klion considers the unexamined relationship between the late 20th Century rise of market-oriented liberalism and the 21st century rise of authoritarian nationalism (or, "why so many of her once-close friends have turned out to be fascists").
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1/12/2021
Public Speech and Democracy
by Sandra Peart
American leaders have failed to support public speech that sustains disagreement without violence. That culture of speech must be rebuilt for democracy to survive.
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