Tag
Politics
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Purse and Sword
Congress holds the two powers that are most of what a government is: the purse and the sword, the power to tax and spend and the power to make war. It has handed both away, to the executive and to a tax with no ceiling. The second draft …
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The States' House
The Senate was never meant to be a second House. It was the chamber of the states, the states’ structural check on the federal government, until a 1913 amendment cut that wire and turned both chambers over to the same electorate. The …
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The People's House
The House was built to be the chamber closest to the people, and it has drifted furthest from them: frozen at 435, districts swollen to three-quarters of a million, apportioned by residents rather than citizens, filled by careerists. The …
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Why Rewrite It
Proposing to rewrite the Constitution sounds like sacrilege. But we have already rewritten it, by drift and convenience rather than by amendment, into something far less bound than the original. The only question left is whether we write an …
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The Next Twenty Years
The Long Crisis, Part 7. The series ends where it began, at the fork between two exits. Europe’s choice is mostly made. America’s is not. The real danger is mistaking a strongman’s imposed order for renewal, when the only …
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America's Immigration Dilemma
The Long Crisis, Part 6. America’s edge over Europe is real, but it has an immigration problem of its own, and it runs two ways at once. The melting pot can fail because people never join it, or because they join only their own. Both …
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Europe's Structural Trap
The Long Crisis, Part 5. Europe is promising itself an autonomous future as an independent pole in a multipolar world. The arithmetic says otherwise. It cannot fund its social model, rearm, absorb immigration, and keep the industrial base …
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The Operating System
The Long Crisis, Part 4. The split between America and Europe isn’t really about GDP or defense budgets. It runs on a deeper layer: a shared answer to what a person is and what we owe each other. Lose that answer and a society …
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The Transatlantic Divorce
The Long Crisis, Part 3. The Western alliance didn’t die in the war with Iran. It died years ago, and the war was simply the moment everyone had to stop pretending otherwise. What replaces it is two Western blocs that no longer trust …
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Reading the Climax
The Long Crisis, Part 2. The war with Iran feels like the decisive moment. That instinct is what the theory warns against, and what Iran actually did was not break the old order but X-ray how much of it was already gone.
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Where We Are in the Cycle
The Long Crisis, Part 1. We’re somewhere inside a Crisis era, and the question that matters isn’t whether America stays powerful. It’s whether that power ends up resting on earned legitimacy or another hollow Gilded Age.