. A U.S. Navy Destroyer fires a Tomahawk Cruise Missile. Image Source: Flickr The much-publicized “generation gap” in U.S. politics is generally thought to apply primarily to domestic policy, and to social issues — like gay rights, religion, and immigration — in particular. But today, as American warships assemble in the Eastern Mediterranean and Congress debates whether to authorize a military strike against Syria, it’s worth considering a different dimension of the generational divide: Forei...

Christine Quinn in 2012 // Credit: David Shankbone It’s not hard to find politicians with bad records on First Amendment issues. But I’m not aware of any prominent American political figure who has been as consistently in favor of silencing political views with which he or she disagrees than Christine M. Quinn, the Speaker of New York’s City Council and a leading candidate to be its next mayor. Last summer, Quinn made headlines by writing to the President of NYU — in her official capacity as a...

Image source: The First Amendment Center. Since 1997, the First Amendment Center, a research and education foundation, has sponsored an annual survey of American public opinion on First Amendment issues. This year’s results are in. Here are some of the key takeaways, paraphrased from the report: * The First Amendment got a lot less popular this year. The percentage of Americans who say the First Amendment goes too far in protecting rights shot up to 34%, in the largest single-year increase si...

A few weeks ago, after a wave of reports documenting the sharp decline of humanities majors at U.S. colleges and universities shook the academic community, I made my own case for these embattled disciplines. I wrote that purely quantitative fields of study, like math and economics, have serious limitations when it comes to shaping public policy. They can clarify certain issues, but only on the margins. The most vexing political questions, from tax fairness to affirmative action, “are questions ...

In different ways, liberals and conservatives both pine for the 1950s. Liberals mourn the loss of the egalitarian economic arrangements that characterized the postwar decade — the strong unions, the growing middle class, the 90 percent top tax rate, the Keynesian consensus. Conservatives, meanwhile, see a lot to like in the 1950s social architecture — low divorce rates, high church attendance, strong social solidarity, traditional attitudes toward sexuality and family. It has been said that lib...

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw’s provocative recent paper, “Defending the One Percent,” has reinvigorated the debate about taxing the rich across the economics blogosphere, with Paul Krugman, The Economist and other prominent voices weighing in. Interestingly, Mankiw’s paper is not even about economics per se. It’s mostly a treatise in moral philosophy. The eminent economist even acknowledges that his field of expertise faces profound limitations when it comes to devising tax policy, writing tha...

Much of the right-wing resistance to the post-Newtown gun control push was animated, not by gun owners’ commitment to hunting or personal defense, but by the idea that an armed society is a fundamental safeguard against government tyranny. For example, in a hearing on gun control, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre told Congress that the Founding Fathers conceived of the Second Amendment because “they had lived under the tyranny of King George and they wanted to make sure that these free people in this ...

President Barack Obama holds a town hall with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Silicon Valley is an invaluable Democratic asset. In 2012, Barack Obama crushed Mitt Romney by 42 percentage points in Santa Clara County and 71 points — yes, a 71 point margin — in the county of San Francisco. More importantly, Obama drew on Silicon Valley’s deep reservoir of wealth and programming talent. As Nate Silver reported last year, the Obama campaign picked up an overwhelming share of contributions from te...

The GOP has not historically been the party of the First Amendment. In the most explosive political debates since the Second World War — from the McCarthyite purges of the 1950s to the flag burning debates of the 1990s to Bush-era speech restrictions — the establishment right has tended to elevate other priotities (conformity, order, national security) above liberty of expression. Progressive journalists and politicians have generally been the champions of freedom of speech. But all this is chan...