The Supreme Court will rule for nationwide marriage equality by a 6-3 vote. That's my prediction. This is premature, more than a week before the Justices hear arguments, but here are my reasons -- good, bad, and ugly. If it does happen, this will be why.

Good Reasons

These are...

With both gay marriage and a challenge to affirmative action on its agenda, the Supreme Court will weigh in on two of the most charged issues. Progressives are full of nervous excitement about the marriage cases and just plain nervous about affirmative action.

Consider this unsettling possibility. Suppose the Court...

Is having fewer children the mark of decadence? The New York Times' cultural conservative, Ross Douthat, has been arguing that in recent columns. For him, a decline in childbearing means that people are abandoning the future for the fleeting pleasures of the present.

Douthat suggests...

Recall the numbers: 59 percent of white voters supported Romney. More dramatically, 88 percent of his votes came from whites. One simple but plausible analysis suggested that Obama won a majority of white votes only in New England, New York, and Hawaii. His national share of the white vote fell...

Everyone knows that what won on Tuesday was not just a candidate or a party, but a version of America's future. But there's a lot we don't know about that future, even though we are living in it, even though we are it.

A lot of what we know is...

It's time to fight like hell for the party of the center-right, represented by Barack Obama, against the party of the far right. There is no alternative.

It's a time for progressives to be disappointed and resolute. This is so different from the mood of 2008 that it's worth pausing...

Despite what David Brooks thinks, it is not true that Barack Obama has forced Mitt Romney into a debate about the morality of capitalism. Too bad. But with Bain, LIBOR, and offshoring all in the campaign mix, it's just possible that that the debate might happen. If we manage to...

Law happens on a field of pain and death. For all their dry distinctions and sonorous tone, judges' opinions set people free and send them to die, grant them security or leave them deprived.

This was acutely true when the Supreme Court ruled on the Affordable Care Act, the...

The food movement is young and growing. Like any growing movement, it needs more ideas -- small, medium, and large. These are (1) more concrete reforms, (2) sharper ways of framing its keys issues, and (3) a picture of how its values fit into the big problems and themes...

The Occupy encampment nearest me (Chapel Hill, NC) voluntarily disbanded a few weeks ago, and for months people have been saying "Occupy Everywhere" to describe the (non)program after the Manhattan eviction. What could that look like?

The answer has to come from a sense of what it means to...

A democracy must be able to engage its own economy -- even a democracy as money-bloated and doubt-ridden as ours has become. To do that, we need a way of talking about the (im)morality of capitalism that lets us get hold of the issue and grapple with it.

My...

Nicholas Kristof steps up in yesterday's New York Times to answer a Swarthmore student's question that "startled" him: is it immoral to become a banker?

Kristof's answer: No, because banking is a core part of the capitalism that makes us rich. But, he goes on to say,...

The two most visible environmental issues today, climate change and agriculture, are about as different as they could be. Taken together, though, they give some reminders. Environmental consciousness is very young. Its challenge to some of the ways we live is deep. And it can be a great source of...

Ron Paul's anti-war stance makes me angry, but not at Ron Paul. What's frustrating is that, after four years under a Democratic president who campaigned against "dumb" foreign intervention, there is exactly one presidential candidate who speaks to anti-war voters. This, of course, is Paul, whose objection to getting entangled...

HuffPo readers hear a lot about the Supreme Court's money-is-speech doctrine and its protection of corporate spending. Why do these decisions happen? Much more than any other branch of government, the federal courts are powered by ideas, and it's essential to grasp those ideas if you want to understand harmful...

When I argued last week that treating "socialism" as a slur shuts us off from some important and humane ideas, the posting drew a long string of comments (nearly 1k at last count). Naturally, lots of people want to know what it would mean to take socialism seriously,...

Is socialism's value as a meaningless scare-word played out yet? If so, maybe we can give it a second chance as a real idea. By treating the word as an all-purpose insult, we've lost touch with essential strands of American political thinking.

These ideas were vital to Abraham Lincoln,...

Yesterday, Barack Obama sounded a little like Theodore Roosevelt: scourge of wealthy special interests, champion of a middle class society, defender of government's necessary role in the economy. So it was a fine stroke to deliver the president's most populist speech yet in Osawatomie, Kansas, where Roosevelt went...