Power

How Samuel Francis wrote the recipe for MAGA.

Newly discovered documents reveal Robert McNamara’s private doubts about Vietnam.

Trump’s brand of authoritarianism emerges out of New York City’s real estate industry. As mayor, Zohran Mamdani vows to curb that sector’s outsized power.

To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism we must look in unconventional places.

Fareed Zakaria blames America’s crisis on “polarization,” but the real issue is asymmetric radicalization: the Right’s anti-democratic turn.

Two different accounts from former Democratic Party insiders about the “giant U-turn” from postwar prosperity to the polarization and inequality of today.

What looks like Trump-era economic nationalism has deep roots. German nationalists of the 1800s and fascist leaders of the 1930s imagined power through autarky.

James R. Schlesinger was only head of the CIA for six months, but he nevertheless ranks as the least popular director in the agency’s history.

Mamdani’s NYC mayoral rise revives debates over Democratic fusionism, echoing 1890s Populist struggles with establishment power.

What's up at the NatC Conference.

As a new book on their travels together shows, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's friendship went beyond politics.

The risk of nuclear war has only grown, yet the public and government officials are increasingly cavalier. Some experts are trying to change that.

A Republican administration that wages war against immigrants and colleges should be understood as the culmination of William F. Buckley conservative movement.

Gouverneur Morris wrote the preamble to the Constitution. Later in life, he rejected the foundational document as a failure.

The twentieth century saw America discard representative government when it comes to war.

Louis Ludlow’s war referendum amendment was the high-water mark of American antiwar populism.

A detailed, exhausting, and ultimately too-gentle treatment of the midcentury writer and editor, Frank Meyer.

Both presidents have records as avid deregulators of environmental rules for industry, but Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on science go in a different direction.

Proposed as a compromise to ensure the ratification of the new US Constitution, the Bill of Rights has become a critical protector of civil liberties.

Frank Meyer’s journey took him from communist agitator to conservative kingmaker.

There’s a lot more to Founding Father John Dickinson than not signing the Declaration of Independence.

If he wins the New York City mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani will not be in totally uncharted territory.

If we want democracy to survive, we need a vision that’s going to be more compelling than the one the authoritarians are offering.

Nixon’s 1973 firing of a Watergate prosecutor raised questions about executive power, accountability and the limits of the law.

He has produced a crisis much like the one the colonists faced two and a half centuries ago. Now it’s our responsibility to uphold the Founders’ legacy.

Charles Sumner's example reminds us that "with enough courage and drive, can alter the trajectory of American racial history."

The often-overlooked institutions of the federal government truly do matter and so do the individuals who lead those institutions and give them direction.

The history of gerrymandering suggests that the current redistricting race for short-term partisan gain indicates a period of political instability on the way.

How an astrologer's direction steered presidential travel, public appearances, and meetings.

Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.