Civics

I have spent years writing about honor as if it were an antique: a virtue our ancestors practiced and we merely study. Stoic biographies, civics essays, a shelf of books about how a person builds a defensible inner life. I used to think the point of that work was personal: how do I hold myself together when nobody’s watching? Lately I’ve had to sit with a second, less comfortable question underneath it. What happens to a country when the people running it stop asking that question at all? ...

The 2026 Senate Map: A Race-by-Race Guide The setup: Republicans currently hold the Senate 53–47. Thirty-five seats are on the November 2026 ballot — 33 regular contests plus two special elections to fill vacancies. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take the majority; Republicans can afford to lose only two and still hold it outright (a loss of three produces a 50–50 tie, broken by the vice president). ...

Stoic Saturday: When the Law Becomes a Suggestion Think clearly. Live intentionally. Love deeply. The Rule of Law Isn’t a Spectator Sport Marcus Aurelius wrote that “the best revenge is not to be like your enemy.” Today, that enemy isn’t just a person—it’s the slow rot of a system that once held power in check. The rule of law isn’t a given. It’s a daily practice, like flossing or not eating the entire pizza in one sitting. And right now, it’s being treated like a suggestion rather than a rule. ...

Elon Musk and the Engineering of Chaos: A Scholarly Assessment Question: Is the man stupid, evil, both, or something else? Thesis: He is not stupid. He is not evil in the sense of personal malice. He is something more historically novel and institutionally corrosive: a techno-libertarian demolitionist who mistakes engineering intelligence for governing wisdom — a man who has spent three decades acquiring, building, and destroying institutions according to a single algorithm (identify inefficiency, slash personnel, declare victory, move on), and who has now applied that algorithm to the federal government, the public square, and the very idea of institutional continuity. He does not seek to rule. He seeks to reboot. And in the gap between the crash and the reboot, millions suffer. ...

Mike Johnson and the Problem of Bad Faith: A Scholarly Assessment Question: Is the man stupid, evil, both, or something else? Thesis: He is not stupid. He is not evil in the sense of personal malevolence. He is something more dangerous and more explicable: a true believer of above-average intelligence who has substituted a closed theological epistemology for empirical reasoning, and who has proven willing to abandon democratic norms and institutional integrity when they conflict with his eschatological politics. In short, he is a competent ideologue operating in bad faith — not because he is incapable of recognizing truth, but because he has trained himself to reject it when it threatens his worldview. ...

Peter Thiel and the Contrarian’s Revenge: A Scholarly Assessment Question: Is the man stupid, evil, both, or something else? Thesis: He is not stupid. He is not evil in the sense of personal malice. He is something more historically rooted and intellectually ambitious: a plutocratic philosopher-king who has concluded, after decades of reading Strauss, Girard, and the Gospels, that democracy is incompatible with the kind of technological civilization he wants to build — and who has spent his fortune and influence creating the intellectual, political, and surveillance infrastructure for a post-democratic future. He is not a populist demagogue. He is a techno-monarchist operating in plain sight — patient, erudite, and willing to wait a generation for his vision to mature. ...

Stephen Miller and the Architecture of Cruelty: A Scholarly Assessment Question: Is the man stupid, evil, both, or something else? Thesis: He is not stupid. He is not evil in the sense of personal sadism. He is something more precise and more historically recognizable: a technocratic ideologue of demographic anxiety — a man of above-average intelligence who has devoted his entire adult life to a single obsession (the reversal of America’s demographic change through immigration restriction) and who has proven willing to deploy any instrument of state power, including those that inflict deliberate suffering on families and children, to achieve it. He is not a monster who enjoys blood. He is an architect who draws blueprints for cruelty and then watches the construction proceed with bureaucratic satisfaction. In short, he is a racial anxiety technician operating in good faith to bad ends — which may be the most dangerous political type of all. ...

Texas Senate 2026: The Preacher’s Son vs. The Indicted Attorney General Question: How did a race in Texas — a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988 — become a genuine toss-up? Answer: Because the Republican Party, in its wisdom, nominated a man who has been impeached, indicted, and investigated more times than some organized crime figures, and because the Democratic Party, for once, found a candidate who can talk about Jesus and insulin prices in the same breath without sounding like he’s focus-grouping his soul. ...

Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835 & 1840 Executive Summary Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States in 1831, nominally to study the American prison system. What he produced from nine months of observation was the most penetrating analysis of democratic society ever written — and he wrote it at thirty. Democracy in America is two volumes of concentrated attention: the first on the mechanics of American democracy, the second on its effects on the human soul. The thesis, stated across both: democracy is the political future of the modern world, and it carries within it the seeds of its own corruption — not through tyranny from above, but through conformity and comfortable dependency from below. ...

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil Hannah Arendt, 1963 Executive Summary Hannah Arendt covered the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann — the Nazi bureaucrat who administered the logistics of the Holocaust — for The New Yorker. What she found was not the monster the prosecution needed him to be. Eichmann was, she concluded, something more disturbing: an ordinary man, neither ideologically fanatical nor sadistically cruel, who had committed mass murder primarily through the failure to think. The phrase she coined — “the banality of evil” — became one of the most contested and necessary formulations in modern political philosophy. The thesis: the greatest crimes in history may not require evil people. They may require only people who have stopped thinking. ...