Tuesday, February 17, 2026

Should Democracy Backers Now Love "States' Rights"?

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  "Progressives" have long been wary of "states' rights." That take is unsurprising, since "constitutional argu...
Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Willmoore Kendall, Irascible Drunken McCarthyite, YES; Brilliant Scholar, NO. Part I. Socrates, Mill, and Free Speech

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  I've spilled considerable ink to date on Carl Schmitt, having reviewed several books on the Nazi jurist/theorist and mused about his l...
Tuesday, January 20, 2026

What is "Direct Democracy"? What is "More Democracy"? What is Less?

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  The dawn of the 21st Century in the U.S. resembled the opening of the 20th in producing an explosion of interest in participatory democrac...
Wednesday, January 7, 2026

A Psychological Interlude

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  Something different today: I will dump little or no democratic theory on anybody, and hold off on my discussion of Recall until next time....
Saturday, December 20, 2025

Ah, Why Can't All Self-Proclaimed Democracy Advocates Just Get Along?

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  I mean, Prof. Charles Beitz of Princeton wants more and better democracy, and I want more and better democracy. He says our system is badl...
Thursday, November 20, 2025

Matthew Kramer's Book on H.L.A. Hart

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Once you get the Austin/Kelsen/Schmitt/Hart/Fuller/Finnis/Dworkin bug, it's pretty hard to get over it. Where do laws come from? Why sho...
Friday, November 14, 2025

A Distressing Realization for a Democratic Theorist

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It's not particularly fun to get old. But for those of us lucky enough to have a comfortable home, sweet, patient partner, awesome doggi...
Friday, October 3, 2025

Schmitt IV: An Important Book, An Additional Democratic Constraint, and My Error in Schmitt III

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My latest review over at the 3:16 AM Magazine “Hornbook of Democracy Book Reviews” is of Lars Vinx’s generous helping of translati...
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Wednesday, September 17, 2025

A Shared "Solution" to a Problem Basic to Both Epistemology and Political Theory

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  A couple of hundred years into the Common Era, a skeptical philosopher named Sextus Empiricus wrote this: Those who claim for themselves t...