The 11 nations of North America, Colin Woodward and Tufts/Brian Stauffer in Business Insider
One of the shortcomings of my trip around the country is that I never really penetrated America's conservative community of thought. Undoubtedly, a contributing factor was a nai...
A recent article in Vox got me thinking about our "democratic project," especially after reading James Fallow's piece earlier in the week. A particular quote by the author jumped out, because it resonates in the space between local engagement and national governance:
"Even as the national government induces distrust and despair," James Fallows writes in the Atlantic, "most polls show rising faith in local governance."
This resonates as a key message out of A Search for America. In interview after interview, while I generally h...
In an earlier post, I'd referenced a Journal of Democracy article about some interesting findings that suggest many citizens in democratic nations would willingly "trade" or give up aspects of a healthy democracy for greater economic security. The Economist provides so...
December and January were festivity-filled months of exhilaration, distraction, contemplation and reverie, and ultimately some good many hours writing. And the result is the final report of Search for America, which I am completely humbled and grateful to be sharing....
A slew of articles have come across my desk lately and they all point to one thing: democracy as we've known it reached its high watermark years ago. And we've endured a period of decline during which disenchantment set in and the appetite for reform has begun to swell...
I enjoyed this brief set of ideas from Victoria Coates (video), a foreign policy advisor to Ted Cruz's presidential campaign and the author of, "David's Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art." In her brief commentary on the power of art to serve as a unifyi...
There are so many reason's to love America and the promise of opportunity contained between our eastern and western shores, the 49th parallel and the Gulf of Mexico, Rio Grand and our southern border with Mexico. Traveling 14,000 miles around the country gives you an a...
One of the themes I heard on my search for the essential narratives and imagery of our democratic aspiration was, simply, fatigue. More than that, it was exhaustion. The sense that more is being taking out of us by the political system than we are getting back - more h...
This is the title of a collection of fifteen speeches composed and delivered by the American scholar David McCullough. They are wonderfully compact, s...