Viewpoints
Detail from Poltergeist poster (MGM/UA)
Media Morass
Trump Is Deranging Cable News—and Keeping It Alive

Trump derangement syndrome has made the media less edifying but also more profitable.

The Euro at 20
Europe’s Self-Inflicted Disaster

The euro’s prospects for the future are dismal. But right now, abandoning the currency is a political dead-end.

The Effects of Bad Government, Ambrogio Lorenzetti
Global Disorder
The Sources of the West’s Decline

The growing problems in the Transatlantic community long precede the Trump Administration, Brexit, and the rise of populist movements.

COST Discipline
The Solution to Capitalist Inequality: Radical Markets

The problems the radical Left seeks to address are real. But their solutions are not nearly radical enough.

Democracy Watch
The Long Freedom Slump

The good news is that democracy is not declining, at least in the aggregate. The bad news is that developing countries have taken a turn for the worse.

Bert Williams, via Wikimedia Commons.
Print & Pixels
More Ballast, Please

Rounding out the politically correct narrative about blackface.

The Character Question
Blackface, Call Out Culture, and the Evolution of Norms

Blackface in the 1980s might reflect the cavalier, ill-considered racism that was pretty much in the water at the time; today it would undoubtedly reflect a belligerent assertion of white supremacy. The same behavior does not always correspond to the same motives or presuppositions.

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/735314
Kleptocracy in America
Why the Robert Mueller Fandom Misses the Point

Liberal hero worship misses that it is not just bad people, but a bad system that is breeding collusion between American elites and the world’s kleptocrats.

Against Chicken Little
Is It Really RIP for the LIO?

Lamenting the “collapse” or “end” of the Liberal International Order has grown into a cottage industry of pundits and professors. But is the LIO really dying?

(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
We the People
Even the Easy Parts Are Hard

A normal, sane legislature could fix Social Security forever and end government shutdowns in a single day. But our two-party monopoly Congress is neither normal nor sane.

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