In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of commentary.
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In late February, the Trump administration announced that it would abandon the use of Anthropic’s artificial intelligence tools and ordered all federal agencies to do the same. A few days later, the Department of War went further and officially designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk”. If this decision is upheld, it will prevent defense contractors—including cloud providers crucial to Anthropic’s business, such as Amazon Web Services—from using Anthropic for anything touching defense work. The dispute arises from the AI company’s insistence that its products not be used for fully autonomous…
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It is no secret that lawmakers are more interested than ever in artificial intelligence (AI), with over 1,500 AI-related bills introduced in state legislatures in the past year. Much of this new legislation is motivated by, or aims to address, issues surrounding “AI Safety,” that is, the potential risks posed to human welfare by AI development. Voiced by a diverse community of safety advocates, such concerns range from the risk of economic dislocation due to AI automation to the potential for human extinction at the hands of super-intelligent AI systems. While the specific…
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Henry Tonks’s thought-provoking essay sets out to correct the record and point toward a way forward for Democrats and liberals. He rejects the “liberal betrayal narrative” whereby growth-oriented members of the Democratic Party – the so-called Atari Democrats or New Democrats – perversely inaugurated a new age by embracing neoliberalism. Not so, argues Tonks. Rather than Reaganite Judases, these liberal Democrats were authentic heirs of the New Deal, updating it for the new millennium. Having rescued these men, Tonks suggests contemporary Democrats might win on a platform based on their…
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Do national Democratic leaders intend to outsource the job of winning this year’s pivotal midterm elections to none other than Donald Trump? It certainly seems like it. The much-fêted “realignment” heralded in November 2024 has fallen apart amid the cruel mania of Trump 2.0. MAGA’s alleged popularity, especially among young men and Latino voters, proved evanescent. Given the thermostatic nature of modern electoral politics, it is plausible that being “Not Trump” will suffice for Democrats to retake the House of Representatives and gain ground in the Senate this November. National…
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Anyone who studies the founding era long enough will eventually run into the kind of essay that looks to the revolutionary past for answers to the problems of the present. These efforts usually reflect a genuine desire to recover something like a common inheritance: some shared meaning capable of holding divided people together. Casey Spinks’s “Finding the Founding” is an ambitious entry in this tradition. At its core, it is an earnest attempt to rediscover unity by returning to the Declaration of Independence. Spinks’s central move is what he calls “re-membering”—putting the American people back together again. (I am reminded of…
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America makes the world think of wealth and power, but it also makes the world think of childish behavior. A certain juvenile tendency cuts across political categories. On the left, for example, when Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election, some of his supporters apparently believed they would no longer have to pay rent. It’s as if they expected Santa Claus to come racing in on his sled during a snowstorm and give them all that they had wanted for Christmas. On the right, after America bombed the Iranian nuclear…
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In our era of extreme political dysfunction, we have rightly come to expect very little from Congress. Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) stood out for defying this expectation, at least in part: Its higher education provisions are sweeping and provide a framework for substantive reform that better serves taxpayers and students. Following the end of the Second World War, higher education became a ticket to the middle class for anyone willing to put up the money and put in the time. If you asked almost any American during the…
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Forrest McDonald, noted historian of the U.S. Constitution and much more, died 10 years ago, on January 19, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He was a professor of history at Brown University from 1958 to 1967, including when I was an undergraduate student there (1962-66). For me, the timing was fortuitous. He came up by the old route; he wrote a book that forced smart people to argue with it. In 1958, a year before he joined the Brown faculty, he published We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution. It took aim…
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In the 250th year of independence, it is altogether fitting that Americans should return to the Declaration of Independence and meditate on its teachings. For the more passively familiar we are with the words, the more sterile they risk becoming in our hearts and minds. In this light, it is a pleasure to comment on Dr. Spinks’ thoughtful essay, whose close reading of the Declaration will surely be reinvigorating to citizens and scholars alike. Returning to the text of the Declaration need not entail the idea that America is merely a propositional republic, as if Americans in the founding era were not a fusion of folkways, tied together by…
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Robert Duvall, who died this week at the age of 95, was one of the small number of famous actors from the New Hollywood of the 1960s who endured long enough to become, as we used to say, iconic. More than that, Duvall was not just one of the actors defining manliness in his heyday, but a very adventurous man himself, in ways more typical of his time than ours. There’s much to admire in his work and no better way to remember him than at his peak. Duvall had…