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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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…
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When Abraham Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863, he offered the previously regional holiday as a feast of national gratitude in counterpoint to the ongoing horrors of the Civil War. Celebrating the vast resources and opportunities of the United States, Lincoln declared that those boons “should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.” Today’s indulgence in resentment risks drowning out what should be a season of gratitude. In testament to the divides of contemporary American politics, the Thanksgiving table has…
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Yesterday marked William F. Buckley, Jr.’s centennial. We should celebrate the anniversary because many owe him a debt of gratitude—Buckley was far the most politically influential conservative from the mid-century onward. Such anniversaries offer us a much-needed opportunity to recur to origins. We should look back to Buckley for two reasons. First, he founded National Review, one of the few important publications of the conservative movement. We should be thinking about foundations at this moment, so that we learn to see opportunities where the consensus holds there is only a cultural…
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It is a common tic for foreign policy commentators to make confident assertions about what dictators are like at the negotiating table. There are apparently “Ten Simple Rules” in such negotiations, including “dictators are dictators for a reason” and “a dictatorship’s core goal is merely to perpetuate itself.” Some advise that negotiators “show [dictators] how the deal could advance their interests” rather than engage in moral preening. Others suggest “when a dictator believes they are winning, that is precisely when they begin to lose.” It is similarly common for grand…
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The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give. — Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Mr. Donway has responded to the Senate’s recent failure to facilitate the selling-off of federal lands, by…
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The United States faces a housing shortage of 4 to 8 million homes. This is a crisis for the nation, driving home prices higher, pricing people out of homeownership, and driving many people out of homes entirely. Simultaneously, our federal government is in possession of over half of the 12 westernmost states and Alaska. The sale of a minute fraction of that land – less than 0.1 percent – would be enough to build over 3 million homes over the next 40 years, and 1.5 million in the next 10.…
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“Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile (1762) On June 29, 2025, Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee withdrew a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would have allowed the first major sale of public lands since the enactment in 1976 of the Federal Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA), which declared that all public lands would remain government-owned except in cases of “the national interest.” Despite the withdrawal, during the Senate’s frantic last-minute…
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On July 24, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” The order reversed several decades of federal policy toward the homeless, which had been geared toward creating more permanent housing and more voluntary services. Going forward, the focus is to be on mental illness and substance abuse, which afflict a large share of the homeless population. This new “Behavioral Health Treatment First” approach replaces the “Housing First” approach emphasized by the Biden administration, and puts less emphasis on voluntary services and more…