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What Americans Should Know about the Constitution

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Having just finished reading a new biography of H.L. Mencken, I was intrigued when I discovered that the Washington Post had an online section about politics called “Monkey Cage.” It was Mencken who said, “Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.” “Monkey Cage’”s mission “is to connect political scientists and the political conversation by creating a compelling forum, developing publicly focused scholars, and building an informed audience. Here, political scientists draw on their own expertise and the discipline’s research to illuminate the news, inform civic discussion, and make some sense of the circus that is politics.” But it was the headline of the first post I read in the comments section that intrigued me even more. “Too many Americans know too little about the Constitution,” read the headline. That is certainly not fake news, I thought. I saw that ignorance firsthand back when I taught American Government to high-school seniors. Most of them had absolutely ...

Slavery and Segregation Were Federal Programs

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Americans are afflicted with a “collective amnesia” that surrounds the subject of segregation, complacently assured that it was, if anything, a “minor factor” in the striking wealth gap that today divides white from black Americans. In his book The Color of Law, the Economic Policy Institute’s Richard Rothstein argues that not only have Americans forgotten the true legacy of segregation, they have also forgotten its principal cause. Rothstein contends that the polite, embarrassedly euphemistic story we find in the mainstream’s politics of respectability has ignored or underplayed important facts. “Most segregation,” he states in the book’s introduction, “does fall into the category of open and explicit government-sponsored segregation.” To undergird his claims, Rothstein adduces an impressive body of evidence, surveying a range of government policies and court decisions that he says show the government’s official “imposition of racial segregation,” both forceful and purposeful. His thesis, then, runs quite contrary to the comfortable notion that segregation in the United States is ...

Felix Morley, Champion of the American Republic

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The American socialist Ed Sard is reported to have originated the concept of a “permanent arms economy” as a way to explain why America experienced a post–World War II boom, while World War I had been followed by recession. Sard concluded that the United States retained many of the characteristics of a war economy, including what today is called “the military-industrial complex.” Capitalism was shored up by continued military spending, he argued. Rooted in Marxism, Sard coupled keen political insight with badly flawed economics. The concept was far better enunciated by the libertarian journalist and scholar Felix Morley (1894–1982). A war economy crippled capitalism in myriad ways, Morley argued, including the public’s increased dependency on government and increased skepticism toward free-market solutions; the system war truly promoted was socialism. As an advocate of limited government, Morley believed the centralization of power during war and preparation for war was the core dynamic by which America had moved from a republic to an ...

Ludwig von Mises and the Real Meaning of Liberalism

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Liberalism has become one of the most widely misused and abused words in the American political lexicon. It represents, some say, politically “progressive thought,” based on the goal of “social justice” through greater “distributive justice” for all. Others declare it represents moral relativism, political paternalism, governmental license, and just another word for “socialism.” Lost in all of this is ...