America has spent decades treating freedom as the absence of restraint. But when corporations can engineer our desires, monetize our weaknesses, and shift the costs of our choices onto everyone else, the right to choose can become a remarkably thin form of liberty.
Trump says the economy is doing just fine. But rising prices, weaker hiring, and falling real wages tell a less reassuring story: America may still be growing, but many Americans are not getting richer with it.
#Analysis
What happens when the machinery of American power begins to resemble the balance sheet of the people directing it? Under transactional executive leadership, diplomacy, resource policy, and private wealth can stop operating as separate spheres—and start feeding one another.
#Opinion
Washington’s withdrawal from Iraq marks the end of one military mission, not the end of the machinery that keeps American troops in the region. Bases create new security threats, allies organize their defense around Washington’s guarantees, and the Pentagon finds fresh reasons to remain long after a deployment's original purpose has faded.
#Opinion
America’s economic order rests on more than billionaires and Wall Street titans. In ordinary businesses across the nation, a new group of entrepreneurs has amassed wealth and the political clout to protect the rules that let them do it.
#Books
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity is an unsettling political thought at the core of a comic little book: a society becomes dangerous not because of foolish people, but because it gives them the tools to act on the assumption that the world is dangerous.
#Analysis
John Fetterman’s Republican fundraising connections offer a glimpse of a political system in which candidates can keep the party label while building independent networks of donors, media allies, and voters around themselves.
#Analysis
A political dispute can be settled. A sacred struggle cannot. But the distinction is not going to be easy to overlook in an America where theology has begun to get into the language of power.
The Washington Probe