True fans of the Constitution, like true fans of the national pastime, acknowledge the critical role of human judgment in making tough calls. We don't expect flawless interpretation. We expect good fa...
The Bechdel-Wallace test is a similarly simple device, created by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace, for evaluating whether movies and television shows perpetuate gender inequit...
By deliberately withholding power, you generate more. By choosing to redirect it, you remember that the choice is yours. Such acts remind us how much dormant civic power we actually have—and how infre...
We haven’t truly enabled all the people of this society to participate in self-government to the fullest extent of their potential. We haven’t come close, not in an age when our elected officials and...
If you want to change the story that justifies current structures of power and privilege, you must have such a combination of bold goals and specific steps.
Many smart folks seem to think that if you just get your metaphors and messages right, you'll win. That if you start describing what you favor as a 'moral value' - 'affordable health care is a moral v...
In American politics, power is presumptively illegitimate. It’s important to remember this. Our founding is premised on the notion that power is inherently hostile to freedom. The pamphlets of the Rev...
Power justifies itself, in countless small ways. But one of the big ways it does so is by creating an ideological narrative about how things got to be this way—and what must now change. These narrativ...
In our country, there is so much that’s wrong with the way we deliver care to the aging, the very young, and the infirm. But you can’t beat something with nothing. It is not enough to decry what’s bro...
The story of El Centro’s creation and flourishing reminds us that civic power may not require a plan—but it does require a purpose.
They share a vision of a society where more people are able to claim and create more power—for themselves, by themselves—against the encroachments of others. And they now share an experience that teac...
Which is why, from the Inca Empire to the Soviet Union, extractive societies have been prone to collapse. Power naturally flows to the top. We’ve established that. But where power flows to the top and...
In civically flourishing societies, the people remember that the system is healthiest and most robust when power emerges from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down. In such societies, the...