American political commentators have frequently called for the U.S. president to take effective action to improve world economic growth. Such calls are a form of what Matthew Yglesias has dubbed “Green Lanternism”—the unspoken theory that the U.S. president’s ability to affect outcomes is primarily affected by his willpower. In this article, I examine the opposite—and ...

In August 8, 1897, Michele Angiolillo, an Italian anarchist, shot Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the Prime Minister of Spain. Cánovas had dominated Spanish politics for decades, even during periods when he was nominally out of office, helping shore up Spain’s tottering monarchy and its possession of Cuba and the Philippines through torture and wide-scale military ...