Democracy

Whether the second Trump administration has damaged American self-government is no longer a matter of opinion. It is a matter of measurement, and the people who measure it have reported. The open questions are narrower and harder: how much of the damage is structural, how much is reversible, and what a citizen who wants to oppose it can do on an ordinary Tuesday. This essay takes up the record first, because the argument rests on it, and then the work, because a record is not a plan. ...

The midterms come Tuesday, November 3, and the single most consequential fact about them is not a candidate, a poll, or a map. It is that most eligible Americans will not vote. In 2022, the closest thing the country has seen to a high-turnout midterm in generations, 52.2 percent of the citizen voting-age population cast a ballot.1 By the stricter measure that counts only the voting-eligible population, turnout was 46 percent.2 Either way, the majority stayed home. In 2014 the number was worse: 41.9 percent by the census count, and just 36.4 percent of eligible voters by the elections-project measure, the lowest since 1942, a year when a large share of the country’s eligible voters were overseas fighting a world war.13 The largest bloc in American politics is not a party and not a movement. It is the empty seat. ...

On the afternoon of October 9, 2026, a gallon of diesel in the United States cost $6.28, down from a record $6.53 set on September 22 but still up roughly 70 percent since the United States and Israel went to war with Iran in February (ABC News Australia, 2026). President Donald Trump placed a call to President Vladimir Putin, ostensibly to discuss a suspected outbreak of plague in Russia. What he announced instead was a deal: Russia would send more than 300,000 metric tons of diesel to “the American and Global Marketplace” at once, another 500,000 tons in November, one million tons “immediately thereafter,” and then, if its refineries allowed it, three million more. Diesel prices, the president wrote on Truth Social, “will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!” (The Business Standard, 2026). ...

On July 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14319, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.” The order requires that any large language model procured by a federal agency adhere to two “Unbiased AI Principles”: truth-seeking and ideological neutrality (The White House, 2025a). Speaking at the signing, the president said: “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models, and neither do other countries” (NPR, 2025). ...

I have written about grift before. The grift is the con at scale, the confidence game run from the highest office in the land, open and defended as virtue. This essay is about the machinery that makes the grift possible: a presidency that no longer argues with reality but generates its own. PolitiFact counted 36 posts on Donald Trump’s Truth Social account since his inauguration that used AI-generated imagery. Twenty-one of them promoted or sensationalized Trump and his administration. Twelve degraded his opponents. Three reinforced his policy messaging (PolitiFact, 2025). NBC News, reviewing the same feed, found “dozens” of pieces of synthetic media, roughly half of them posted in August and September 2025 alone (NBC News, 2025). The White House’s own X account has posted at least 14 more since January. Add the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and other agency accounts, and the count grows further. ...

Profiles in Courage John F. Kennedy, 1956 Executive Summary Kennedy’s premise is that the Senate is a body designed to punish independent judgment. A senator who follows his conscience against his party, his state, or his contributors does so knowing the cost is his career, and the book is a study of eight men who paid it. It was published in January 1956 by Harper & Brothers, won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and became the single most effective piece of reputation-building in American political history. The thesis: the health of a republic depends on the willingness of individual legislators to lose their seats rather than their judgment. ...

Peter, I am writing this in the open because you have never hidden what you think, and what you think deserves an answer longer than a post. I have read you for years, not the caricature but the actual essays. The Education of a Libertarian is the clearest thing you have ever written, and I want to begin by saying the thing almost no one who disagrees with you is willing to say. ...

Three times in the last sixteen months, the country has answered a single question in the streets.1 In June 2025, millions turned out on the same day the president staged a military parade for his own birthday. In October 2025, they returned for a second day of action across more than 2,600 locations. On March 28, 2026, they came back a third time, in what organizers described to the press as the largest single-day demonstration in American history, with events in all fifty states and every congressional district.12 I have written about each of these days on this site, because the question they answer matters more than the crowds: does the United States have a king? ...

I have spent the last several years writing about trust: what it is, how it is built, and what happens when it is spent. I have written about honor as a practical discipline, about corruption as a constitutional danger, about the bond market pricing the arithmetic rather than the promises. Underneath all of it is a question I keep coming back to, and it is the question a reader put to me recently: “How can I be sure Trump is telling the truth?” ...

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. ...