In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of commentary.
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Two very different houses stand on the grounds of Woodlawn Plantation, a historic landmark just across the Potomac from Washington, DC. The larger building is a stately Georgian manor built in 1799 as a wedding gift from George Washington to Eleanor Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s daughter from a previous marriage. The smaller is the Pope-Leighey House, a compact, mid-century modern home built in 1941 by Frank Lloyd Wright for a local newspaperman. Strangely enough, the imposing colonial mansion has a much greater hold on our national imagination than the graceful,…
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As I was teaching an online class recently, I sat in front of the screen watching six young people discuss the role of democracy in society. They were passionate and determined to try to find the answer. However, as I watched these young souls grapple with a profound question, I realised it was all for nought. Far from enlightening each other, confusion reigned. This was because none of the participants in discussion had a firm grasp on the material. They were beginners in a complex topic, which they were not…
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The war at the intersection—or intersectionality?—of race and gender is heating up again. Last month a Virginia Democrat protesting Republican gubernatorial candidate Winsome Sears held up a sign: “Hey Winsome. If Trans Can’t Share Your bathroom, then Blacks can’t share my water fountain.” I feel sorry for the lady who held the sign. Read superficially, it’s racist, supporting a return to the segregated South, and she has been excoriated for it. Yet that wasn’t the point. What the activist was saying was that to block a man who identifies as a…
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Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, monetary and fiscal policy in the United States has become increasingly entangled with one another. In 2012, the late Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President and CEO Charles Plosser lamented a “substantial breakdown in the institutional framework and accepted barriers between monetary and fiscal policy” in the aftermath of the Federal Reserve’s and Europe’s responses to the 2008 financial crisis. Unfortunately, his call to restore these boundaries fell on deaf ears, as the Fed further blurred the boundaries between fiscal and…
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There are times when the death of an individual reveals itself to be larger than that individual. It feels as though with that individual, something else has died. Or perhaps, there just emerges a recognition that something else had already died. As our nation reels from the gruesome murder of young conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, one of the looming senses in the background is that we have lost any kind of psychology for the pre-political—a psychology for whatever it is that makes shared life within a political community worthwhile in…
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In the aftermath of last month’s church-school shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, public figures offered thoughts and prayers. The ensuing debate—now perennial, it seems—proceeded down well-worn dialectical paths. Religious conservatives defended the public place of prayer as a response to tragedy, while religious progressives and secularists argued that prayer wasn’t enough. Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis and a practicing Reformed Jew, denounced the notion that prayer was an appropriate political response. “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now,” Frey told reporters, “these kids were…
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During my tenure as a professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, any conversation about campus expansion revolved around the complexities of California’s regulatory maze. These laws are known for being so cumbersome that the University’s former president, Andrew K. Benton, was elected, in large part, because of his ability to navigate the web of state environmental laws and development restrictions. The Board of Regents no doubt reasoned, if he could overcome the roadblocks set by agencies like the California Coastal Commission and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), surely,…
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The first two decades of the 21st Century saw three of the most catastrophic failures of expert leadership in United States history: the national security debacles of the 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent Iraq War morass, the global financial crisis of 2008, and finally, the COVID public health crisis in 2020. Numerous books and even movies have been made that review the national security failures associated with 9/11 and the financial crisis. Now five years after COVID’s arrival on American shores, two new books autopsy the U.S. response to SARS-CoV-2 and particularly…
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The people of Athens preserved the ship of Theseus long after the hero’s return from Crete: “they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place,” Plutarch reported. This sparked in the minds of philosophers the question of whether, once each plank had been replaced, the vessel was still the same one as that on which the Attic king sailed home. As President Donald Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) unveil the theories that will guide their…
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“Public-private partnership” has a modern ring, but it is as old as the concept of the public. Such complex relationships have long been at the heart of infrastructure projects, as have waste, fraud, and abuse. In recent years, California’s high-speed rail network has generated headlines thanks to an astounding series of cost overruns and delays amidst little progress. Among its many initiatives, the Inflation Reduction Act sought to feed massive sums over many years to questionable private entities claiming to pursue a “greener” environmental infrastructure. The amount of money wasted…