politics

The erosion of democracy follows a predictable rhythm—one that echoes through literature and reverberates in our current moment. Today’s headlines blur into yesterday’s warnings, and the distance between fiction and reality shrinks with each news cycle. Free-ish Today: The Illusion of Intact Liberty We live in the “free-ish” moment—where rights exist on paper while practice tells a different story. Constitutional protections remain formally intact, yet their application becomes increasingly selective. Court decisions that once seemed foundational are suddenly “wrongly decided....

America isn’t retreating on the world stage by accident. It’s echoing a deeper crisis: an internal implosion of cultural confidence that has left the country squabbling over who it is and what it stands for. Even after the traumas of World War I, the U.S. regained an outward focus by World War II. Today, that pivot outward is hampered by partisan fatigue, social-media tribalism, and eroding unity. Ronald Reagan once described America as a “shining city on a hill,” built not by ethnicity or lineage but by shared ideals....