James Hollyer and B. Peter Rosendorff (NYU) and James Raymond Vreeland (Georgetown): Democracy and Transparency. Mark Fenster (Florida): Seeing the State: Transparency as Metaphor. Ilya Somin (GMU): Deliberative Democracy and Political Ignorance. Their own facts: How basic misunderstandings about government benefit the right. The stupidity of crowds: The trouble isn’t too many bad politicians, it’s too many voters. The first chapter from Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People by Lynn Stout. Mark Lilla on the nation we have, not the nation we wish for. Almost the worst thing anybody can call you today is an "elitist" — elites, it seems, are downright un-American. "We the people": Walter Benn Michaels on the tea parties, the GOP and the elites. A short history of the activists that started the groups that helped create the movement that became the Tea Party. Tea Party Hypocrites: Which states talk cuts, love federal spending. Is the tea party movement like a pyramid scheme? A review of The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History by Jill Lepore (and more and more and more and more and more). Conservatives are resurgent; is their conservatism authentic? Late for the tea party: Conservative pundits rush to catch up. Superficial observers for two decades have treated Rush Limbaugh as a cutup, a frat boy, a brawler with a barroom gift for getting people to listen — the facts are otherwise and have never been hidden. Why does the right hate George Soros? Just two years into his term, some 46 books demonizing the president have been published. Contrary to Gingrich and D’Souza, there is nothing foreign or exotic about the struggle to be free — anticolonialism is something Americans and Africans have in common.
