The range of opinions about what to do with (or to) Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the "little brother" in the Boston Marathon bombing, says a lot about the exceptionally perverse character of American culture right now, our addled confusion about violence. Sitting at a table with people who know each other very...

Dear Mr. Kushner,

This historian tips his cap to you. In The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures you captured with remarkable empathy the language, cultural references, and worldview of the Old (as in Communist) American Left, still persisting after the Cold War....

Like a fog slowly clearing, we can perceive the slow-motion realignment of American politics towards a mass party of the center. This emerging formation, the Clinton-Obama remaking of the Democratic Party, will almost certainly dominate politics and policy at the federal level and in most major states for the long-term....

It is striking how off-base liberals are about Mitt Romney's bullying a boy with long, dyed hair back in 1964, leading a gang to shear him like a lamb. From The New Yorker to MoveOn.Org, it's a given that this was gay-bashing, if only because the victim, John Lauber, lived...

Recently, Michelle Alexander's brilliant legal history, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, has exposed the insidious politics of today's drug laws, which have been used to lock up millions of African American and Latino boys and men, always in a "race-neutral" fashion but with extremely...

In 1729, Jonathan Swift penned his notorious "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to the Public," to mock English complaints about the "burden" of the Irish people on the British...

A recent blog by The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg ("What If Israel Ceases to Be a Democracy?") led to my pondering a basic question: what is a democracy? Can we define it by a single, simple standard that will rebut the self-justifying assertions by rulers who pay cynical homage...

We need to get clear: birthright citizenship was a core principle at the founding of the Republic in 1776. Yet now, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina wants to hold Senate hearings on the bedrock constitutional precept that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to...

[I've re-run my numbers, to make them all from the same year, and corrected an egregious error re Lancaster County, PA]

For more than two hundred years, the rest of the world has listened to Americans boast about our "freedom," our "liberty," and, most of all, how we are the...

Rand Paul is a gift to historians. As a candidate he embodies some of the longest-lasting, most picturesque -- and most reactionary and dangerous -- elements of the American political tradition: contempt for government; veneration of personal property over all else; freedom defined as the absence of restraint, meaning the...

The Republican Party is trumpeting its unprecedented number of African-American congressional candidates -- 32 in all. But serious political analysts know that it's going to take a lot more than long-shot candidates in Democratic districts, or the occasional election of a black representative from a white district like J. C....

Almost every day I get a message from Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele denouncing President Obama's "radical socialist" policies. Fox News relentlessly sounds this chorus, and some Americans agree, rallying with posters featuring hammer-and-sickle drawings and pictures of Stalin next to our elected leader.

For the rest of the...