There is no greater myth regarding American exceptionalism than the view that only the United States has always seen the promotion of “liberal democracy” as part of its national identity.  In actual fact, the United States pledges itself to “liberal democracy” the world over only when its military designs are compromised or stymied.  The model was President Woodrow Wilson’s “war to end all wars” during World War I.  When Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in 1917, he famously stated that the “world must be made safe for democracy.” More

The end-of-the-week meltdown of Oracle, coupled with Sam Altman’s admission that his Open AI team has no idea what it’s doing, has many hoping that the AI bubble is about to burst. It’s too early to know whether we have yet seen the Bear Stearns moment of the AI bubble, but we should be on guard against another bad moment of the housing bubble: the bank bailouts. To remind folks, when most of the major banks’ greed put them at the edge of bankruptcy as the housing bubble collapsed, the government rushed to the rescue with trillions of dollars of cash, loans, and guarantees. They justified this massive intervention with the Big Lie: if we didn’t save the banks, we would be hit by the Second Great Depression. More

The New York Times obituary headline for Ward Churchill states what was most noteworthy about the controversial academic. It makes explicit reference to his statements on 9/11 that led to a university investigation for “academic misconduct” and later to his firing from a tenured faculty position at the University of Colorado Boulder. That text pairs with the black-and-white photograph of Churchill, resting his head in his palm, black hair parted down the middle, and eyes gazing directly into the lens while a desk lamp casts a halo over his head. Taken together, the headline and the photo frame a central question: was this man a sinner or a saint? Was he a martyr for academic freedom, or what we might call in today’s hyper-online parlance an “edgelord,” intentionally shocking the public by comparing the people who died in the Twin Towers during the 9/11 attacks to Nazi war criminals, calling them “little Eichmanns”? Either way, “the paper of record” only grants thousand-word retrospectives to those whose fame or infamy rises to a certain level of importance to justify the ink spilled. More

When Serb nationalist leaders were inflicting ethnic cleansing on Bosniaks in 1995, NATO was relatively swift about using military force to stop it; and it offered the same assistance to Kosovar Albanians in 1999. Today, Israel is three years into its genocide in Gaza, which now increasingly extends into the West Bank. Western governments would be horrified to even contemplate military force to end this much more catastrophic, and extensively-documented, genocide. The West’s still mostly liberal democratic governments are, with rare exceptions, not trying to do much of anything, by any means, to stop it. The most prominent and powerful Western governments are more committed to inflicting draconian punishments on those who are trying—and trying nonviolently. More