When recalling Harry S. Truman’s legacy in World War II, we tend to think more about the end of the war than the beginning. But in 1940, Truman began receiving letters about a new Army fort being constructed in Pulaski County, in the Ozark hills of Missouri, the state he represented in the U.S. Senate. Something just “wasn’t right,” the letters insisted, and so he set out on a road trip to have a look for himself.1 What he found there sickened him. In Truman’s own words, he saw “There were buildings being built . . . and they were cost­ing three to four times what they should have .…

As in the 1950s, today’s surface optimism for technological miracles thinly disguises oceans of social and psychological alienation. That our own era is filled with silent suffering and dysfunction has been well-documented in a series of studies and publications beginning over a decade ago. Already in 2011, MIT researcher Sherry Turkle published the book-length lament…

News of an American aircraft carrier approaching Vietnam recalls a history of conflict. Yet as the USS Ronald Reagan pulled into port at Danang on June 25, 2023, she came as a sign of friendship. The visit, only the third by a U.S. aircraft carrier since the end of the Viet­nam War, testified to strengthening ties between the two countries. For reasons of both realpolitik and material reality…

The war in Ukraine has forced Germany to think seriously about its position in the world and its national interests, leaving behind the evasive pragmatism of the Merkel era. The Russian invasion of Ukraine compelled Germany on short notice to cut its trade relations with Russia and provide military support to Ukraine, following American and…

On the eve of independence in 1947, India was seen as the country of the future. Seventy-five years later, it still is. Undoubtedly, the country has made remarkable progress on multiple socioeconomic and human development indicators, and despite the odds has remained a functioning democracy. Yet when compared with its former developing-world peers, the People’s…

“We thought we knew the story of the twentieth century,” Charles Maier notes in an announcement for his new book The Project State and Its Rivals. Both haunting and tantalizing, the sentence’s past tense speaks to a profoundly contemporary mood. As the twenty-first century progresses, confident visions about the previous century conceived from the vantage point of the 1990s—the “age of extremes” resolved by a set of liberal settlements—no longer…

There is no grander age of unelected heroes in American government and society at large than the early twentieth century. And in all the epic decades of the early twentieth century, there is no time more focused, more electric, more clear in its implications for the possibility of public action, than the gloomy crisis years of the 1930s and ’40s—years dominated on the American home front by that motley gallery of talented, sympathetic misfits from everywhere and nowhere called the “New Dealers”…

“Dictators are easy to read. Democratic leaders are more difficult to decipher. However, they can be just as unbalanced as dicta­tors and can play a truly destructive role in our history.” So Patrick Weil writes in the final paragraph of his thought-provoking treatment of Woodrow Wilson as the “madman in the White House.” His case is built on the seemingly irrational obstinacy—“no compromise or conces­sion of any kind,” Wilson vowed—that resulted in the U.S. Senate’s rejection…

Tyranny, Inc. is a book about the nature of labor relations, the conduct of corporations, and political possibilities in postindustrial America. Sohrab Ahmari, a journalist and editor whose magazine credits span the ideological spectrum from Dissent to the American Conservative, here combines anecdote and analysis with the awful ring of truth. It would be exhilarating if the portrait were not so grim. Ahmari’s first theme is coercion…

“Live not by lies.” —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn A “virtuous lie” is a false, misleading, or highly contestable claim that is promulgated without qualification as flatly true in order to serve a purportedly emancipatory end, despite the fact that evidence of its falsehood, deceptiveness, or contestability is readily available. We live by these lies. They underlie a great many communications in the media, in academic journals, in government, and at elite educational institutions like my college. For example, a recent announcement for a talk read: “In this lecture, [the guest] asks, what can we do about unkindness? How can [we] grap­ple with this messy, borderless concept, which has influenced so much of…

We are witnessing an ongoing transformation of our political regime, in which sovereignty (that is, the authority to decide) has gradually been relocated from its constitutionally prescribed setting, which granted a presumptive deference to the majority, to a set of mutually supporting technical and moral clerisies. These staff a state-like entity that expands its dominion…

Since the mid-2010s, “wokeness,” an evolving but recognizable set of progressive-coded formal norms and patterns of speech and affect, has swept through American institutions with an intensity, sweep, and speed far outpacing that of an earlier generation’s “political correctness.” This cultural shift has had significant effects on the day-to-day operations, on both the public-facing and…