Power

The Great Society’s Model Cities Program wasn’t perfect. But it offered a vision of what democratic, community-based planning could look like.

Trump is reviving a controversial budget tactic, putting a Nixon-era fight over presidential power and congressional authority back in the headlines.

Just down the road from Lexington and Concord, American patriots scurried to defend their immigrant neighbors.

A brief history of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Ultimately, only a civic culture alert to and upset by abuses of power can safeguard sound republican government.

What the Constitution asks of us.

The Iran-Contra affair exposed how government officials can ignore democratic norms and practices.

After the Civil War, conservatives used terrorism, cold-blooded murder, and economic coercion to fight the new state constitution in South Carolina.

On the Second Red Scare and the lessons that it can provide for us today.

This isn’t the first effort by a president’s appointee to streamline government.

Espionage has always been with us, but its rapid growth over the past century may have undermined trust in government.

“Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”

There was no “unitary executive” until some dudes made the idea up to save Nixon.

Winning more than two elections was unthinkable. Then came FDR.

Rather than resisting authoritarianism, the courts have enabled Trump’s rise.

Edward Wilmot Blyden sorted through competing ideas about the meaning of freedom in 19th-Century Liberia.

The American Revolution’s first battle is a reminder that liberty isn't the result of inevitable progress but a prize won by those willing to fight for it.

Confused about the oft-mentioned Alien Enemies Act? This explainer, with links to free peer-reviewed scholarship, may help clear things up.

On the constitutional settlement that governed America from the end of the Volcker Shock in 1982 to the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024.

The long history of promising an “efficient” federal government. 

John Quincy Adams challenges the idea of an expanding American frontier. 

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is questioning what a socialist might accomplish as mayor of NYC. To answer it, it’s worth looking back on Fiorello La Guardia.

Effective Republican organizing and intraparty divisions among Democrats solidified GOP political dominance until the 1930s.

Before Lincoln turned the idea of “the Union” into a cause worth dying for, he tried other means of ending slavery in America.

Americans need to reconnect with their innate dislike of arbitrary rule.

Where the rediscovery of Sam Francis goes wrong.

A new Library of America edition of John Quincy Adams’s writings demonstrates the enduring appeal—and real shortcomings—of his revolutionary conservatism.

A little understood part of the New Deal.

During World War I, America lurched toward autocracy. Resistance was minimal.

Once upon a time, there was a federal government department that helped design and distribute tools for living the good life. What happened to that vision?