Posts by Claire Schnatterbeck

[ad_1] Pundits talk a lot—a whole lot—about “preserving democracy” in the face of President Donald Trump’s rising authoritarianism. This is not the right call. Not because I disagree that American democracy is under assault and we need to take action, but because there’s a world of difference between struggling to restore a defective political order and engaging in a spirited,…Read More

[ad_1] The United States collects much less revenue as a share of our economy than most other wealthy nations. Meanwhile, a handful of extremely wealthy Americans are consolidating their grip on an increasing share of the nation’s wealth, partly because the income generated by businesses these Americans own is not adequately taxed. This is at the root of the staggering…Read More

[ad_1] In 1776, the authors of the Declaration of Independence proclaimed a new republic founded upon revolutionary ideas about individual liberty and political equality. Two hundred and fifty years later, however, many Americans—particularly young Americans—seem disillusioned with the world’s longest-running experiment in representative democracy. Polling shows a sharp generational divide on questions of patriotism and democracy. A 2025 poll found only…Read More

[ad_1] In 1962, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn published a short book that changed how educated people think about intellectual progress. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that knowledge does not advance through the steady accumulation of better facts. It advances through ruptures—moments when a prevailing framework, or paradigm, collapses under the weight of anomalies it cannot explain, and…Read More