The Fire Next Time: The US Coups of 2021 and 2025

The following propositions seem to me to be probably true: Had Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley been Vice President, Donald Trump would now be the President of the United States. Swing state legislators would have cooperated to that end. Most elected Republicans, whether or not they participated in the coup, would not have objected and very few would have resisted. Most of the Republicans rank and file would have celebrated.

Socialism Is Democracy Extended.

There has been a centuries-long trend of growth in the share of the population having a serious say in the way things run. Significant exceptions are easy to find and there have been terrible reversals, but still it is a big picture trend. I will call the agents behind reallocation of power from smaller to larger social groups “the left,” conceding that this is an oversimplification as well as anachronism, the “left/right” terminology arising only with the French Estates General.

Mandates, Democratic Theory, and President Trump

It is common for a national leader who wins election by a large margin to claim a mandate from the voters and a right and duty to make sweeping policy changes. It is also not uncommon for a candidate who barely squeaks by in an election to be cautious, proposing a less bold program, and seeking common ground with other parties. The current US president exhibits the opposite conduct.

Lottery Democracy

Adding a little randomness to democracy is sometimes to the good. Why, when, and how far?

Of Voter Identification, Fraudulent Votes, and Closed-Out Voters

I hope you will all agree that increasing the stringency of voter identification requirements at the polls may prevent some unlawful votes, but will also result in some perfectly lawful votes not being cast, as voters, from various causes, do not get the right identification in their hands by election day.

What it seems, naively, should determine the policy for identification stringency is minimizing the sum of unlawful votes plus lawful votes that would otherwise have been cast but were not as result of the stringency. Naive or not, this is the voter identification policy test for which I will argue.

Was the US Constitution Unconstitutional?

In the United States we have a nearly universal reverence for our Constitution, the Constitution of 1789 together with its amendments. Largely inspired by the aura of that great document, citizens of the United States tend also to be strong constitutionalists, lower case, believing that every nation should be governed by a written constitution guaranteeing rights, representation, legality, and stability.

It is something of an irony, then, that the Constitution appears, at least on the face of things, to have been unconstitutional.

The Moral Underpinnings of Democracy and its Degree-Affected Variant

Motivated by some ideas that percolated around in the New Left, this essay argues that the core justification of democracy is not that it maximizes utility (which it often does pretty well) or even that it recognizes equality of citizenship (which is essential to any just political order), but instead that it is the best projection into the sphere of social decision making of the values of individual autonomy and liberty. It follows that democracy keyed to the stake that each voter has in the outcome will sometimes realize democratic values more fully than does one citizen one vote.