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Category: Congress

Corporatism for the Twenty-First Century

Ask voters about American politics, and they typically respond that it is ever more polarized, fragmented, divisive, and hyper­partisan. A recent report indicated that 78 percent of voters are un­happy with increasing partisan divisions. Beyond the issue of polar­ization, there is also a problem of performance. Satisfaction with American political institutions is decreasing. The dominant…

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Will Shifting Party Coalitions Change Policy Priorities?

America’s two major political parties appear to be in the process of swapping their historic coalition constituents. With that shift, many of our assumptions about what it means to be a Democrat or a Republican are coming apart at the seams. The most significant development seen in recent polling data is the exodus of college-educated…

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Corporate Power Beyond Lobbying

The biases that private interests can introduce into politics have always been a key concern for democratic theory. Lobbying in particular has come into the focus of social science research since the beginning of the twentieth century. After a century of study, there is a general consensus that the freedom of political participation creates an…

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America’s STEM Crisis Threatens Our National Security

On October 4, 1957, a steel sphere the size of a beach ball and bristling with four radio antennae circled the Earth in eight minutes. Dubbed “Satellite-1,” or “PS-1” (Prosteyshiy Sputnik-1) by its Soviet fabricators, it was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviets had launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit, where it…

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It’s Economic Strategy, Stupid

America’s international economic policy is in crisis. For decades, policymakers believed that liberalizing international trade would be a rising tide that lifted all boats. While some might lose out from competition with foreign trade in the short run, the economy would grow in ways that would allow those people to adapt and adjust, ultimately finding…

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An Anatomy of Radicalism

What is radicalism really about? When does it make sense? Do we need it now? These seem to be impossibly abstract questions. At first glance, everything turns on the substantive commitments of those who purport to be radical. Do they believe in theocratic rule? In authoritarianism? In decentralization? In economic growth? In liberalism? In the collapse of liberalism? In property rights? In free markets? In self-government? In liberty? In freedom from discrimination on the basis of race and sex? In executing or imprisoning…

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Who’s Afraid of an Article V Convention?

There it is, on a platform in Independence Hall in Philadelphia—George Washington’s chair, the very one he planted his bottom on while presiding over the Constitutional Convention that gave birth to our republic in 1787. The wooden chair, with its carving of a gilded sun, is a relic, the only piece of furniture from the…

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Earmarks: Better Government through Honest Graft

George Washington Plunkitt, the notorious leader of New York’s nineteenth-century Tammany Hall machine, famously insisted on a distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. When acting from honest graft, a politician is simultaneously pursuing both personal interest (including the interest in being reelected) and the public good. Our constitutional system, as Madison, Hamilton, and Jay…

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The Singapore Solution

We are at a critical time—a unique juncture at which we can rethink our health care policy in a fundamental way. To do so, reform-minded conservatives should abandon or at least heavily qualify their resistance to state involvement in health care. The American government has been significantly involved in the provision and regulation of health…

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