In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of full-length features.
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If Donald Trump had a motto, it might be: Have carrots ready but start with sticks. With Learning Resources v. Trump, in which a 6-3 Supreme Court majority struck down Trump’s largest group of tariffs, America’s judiciary has disarmed the president of one of his favorite sticks. He will no doubt find others. Yet the justices have struck an important blow for our constitutional separation of powers. They have made it clear that presidents who set themselves up as independent lawmakers generally make themselves law-breakers. This message comes across loud and…
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(This essay is the second in a series of reflections on the meaning of the Declaration of Independence in honor of its 250th anniversary. The series will run until July 4, 2026.) I. “We hold these Truths to be self-evident…” This may be the one phrase from a historical text that most Americans have memorized. That is strange, because it is so confusing. Do Americans know they have absorbed the greatest riddle of the Declaration? Or has it sunk so deeply into our collective mind because we know it is…
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We’ve all seen the headlines: Johnny can’t read anymore. Reading scores are plummeting. Forty-six percent of Americans didn’t read a single book in the past year. Young people no longer read for pleasure. The ability of most college students to comprehend even a paragraph of decent English prose is all but non-existent. We don’t even need to click the links or read the studies. We all have plenty of our own anecdotes to back them up at this point. And we all know why: It’s the screens, dummy. But what we’ve seen so far is…
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One of the major questions of modern historiography concerns the beginnings of “capitalism.” Well-known explanations include Karl Marx’s account of the victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal class and Max Weber’s tracing of the spirit of capitalism to the Protestant ethic. A key challenge faced by scholars is that capitalism is a rich concept that can refer to an economic system as well as a political ideology or even a worldview. The term can be used both as a neutral term of analysis and as a normative one for either…
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(This essay is the first in a series of reflections on the meaning of the Declaration of Independence in honor of its 250th anniversary. The series will run until July 4, 2026.) Many may find this “exposition’s” form strange; it might seem to them too strict to be edifying and too edifying to be strictly scientific. As far as the latter is concerned, I have no opinion. —Anti-Climacus, The Sickness unto Death When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on…
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The American criminal justice system provides room and board to more prisoners — 1.8 million across state and federal prisons and county jails — than any other liberal democracy in the world, even as our streets overflow with repeat offenders habituated to violent crime and mentally ill individuals left to their own sad devices. We proclaim rehabilitation while practicing warehousing. We delay executions for decades, transforming swift justice into prolonged torture. Nearly a century ago, the caustic Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken observed that the “so-called progress of civilization” had fettered…
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The future of American conservatism, or “movement” conservatism, as it is known, has become linked to the outcomes of the Trump administration. It seems impossible to speak of its future without reference to President Trump’s influence. Yet it is also becoming clearer every day that the future of conservatism will be determined by ideas and events that Trump will not control. The choice faced by American conservatives will not only be which way forward in a post-Trump political sense, but how much of the path chosen will be paved by…
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The latest wave of tech layoffs has revived an old storyline. Scott Galloway notes that U.S. employers have announced roughly 946,000 job cuts this year—numbers we have not seen since 2020. At the same time, internal memos from firms like Google report that AI has boosted engineer productivity by about ten percent. For many observers, stories like these appear to show that AI is displacing workers. But that leap from juxtaposition to explanation is a familiar temptation. It assumes that every labor market tremor occurring near a new technology must…
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For many years now, the dominant—if not exclusive—view among scholars has been that nations and nationalism are essentially modern phenomena. Despite disagreement on the specific times and places in which nationalism first began to arise, or the intellectual and material sources that gave rise to such movements, a relatively broad consensus remains that it did so in the modern era, whereas before that we had…something else. Somewhat unexpectedly, this view has recently come under somewhat amorphous challenge as part of a larger political and social turn against liberal pieties. The thinking goes…
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For generations, we’ve gazed into the eyes of chimpanzees and seen ourselves reflected back—a comforting mirror that suggested our nature was written in their behavior. But what if we’ve been looking at the wrong animal all along? In The Primate Myth, the author Jonathan Leaf dismantles one of modern science’s most cherished assumptions: that studying our closest genetic relatives reveals the essence of human nature. The stakes extend far beyond academic taxonomy. How we understand ourselves shapes everything from war and peace to family structure and democratic governance. If we’re…