The End of Hypocrisy with Martha Finnemore

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane. The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, appearing on Meet the Press shortly thereafter, called WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, “a high-tech terrorist.”

More recently, following the disclosures about U.S. spying programs

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Other Writing:

Essay

Saving Democratic Institutions from Corrupting Markets

Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles’ essay – and the book that lies behind it – are part of a broader liberaltarian challenge. Liberaltarianism, as I understand it, looks to use classical liberalism as a set of foundations for a very different understanding of market and state than libertarianism. Rather than starting from the market order ...
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Essay

The New Libertarian Elitists – with Hugo Mercier and Melissa Schwartzberg

What’s behind the dangerous new notion that democracy should be left to the well-educated. It’s been a rough ten years for democracy. It isn’t just that Donald Trump was elected against the wishes of the majority of American voters, and that he then tried to overturn an election that he lost. Nor is it even ...
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