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* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
* Show Me How It Travels (6-2-26)
* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
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* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for the Los Angeles Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
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* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
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* Social Cliques in New York, 2026 (5-25-26)
* Social Cliques in San Francisco, 2026 (5-25-26)
* The Rival Courts of Washington (5-25-26)
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Category Archives: Democracy
Amy Gutmann: A Life in Democratic Theory
Amy Gutmann (b. November 19, 1949) ranks among the principal democratic theorists of her generation, and her working life joins three callings that seldom meet in one career: political philosophy, university leadership, and diplomacy. She built a sustained body of … Continue reading
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Making Democratic Theory Democratic (2023)
Grant John J. Mearsheimer his anthropology, and most of this book survives. Authors Stephen Turner and George Mazur have already done much of the demolition Mearsheimer wants done. They deflate. Democracy is a majoritarian procedure for making law and choosing … Continue reading
Posted in Democracy, Stephen Turner
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Pinsof on Democracy
David Pinsof writes June 22, 2026: Throughout our evolutionary history, our ancestors faced a variety of threats to their survival and reproduction—feuds, raids, tyrants, power struggles—that no individual could overcome on their own. As a result, early humans evolved to … Continue reading
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Stein Ringen and the Question of Good Government
Stein Ringen (b. July 5, 1945) is a Norwegian sociologist and political scientist whose work on democracy, governance, welfare states, and political legitimacy has placed him among Europe’s leading contemporary social scientists. He spent more than two decades at the … Continue reading
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The Autopsy Surgeon: How the Expert Class Profits from Democracy’s Decline
The mournful-American-democracy genre is a competition over the meaning of a failing political order, conducted under time pressure, before an audience that rewards emotionally calibrated moral clarity, through institutional channels that select for transmissible wisdom. Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of cultural … Continue reading
Stephen Turner’s Unfinished Work: Gaps, Needed Boldness, and a Freer Intellectual Trajectory
Stephen Turner’s reconstruction of democratic theory begins as an act of intellectual hygiene. Strip away the myths. Discard the will of the people, justice, and the rule of law as normative ideals. What remains is procedure. Law is a hierarchy … Continue reading
Posted in Carl Schmitt, Democracy, DSM, Martin Gurri, Max Weber, Opiods, Stephen Turner
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Pluralism as the Technology of Elite Rule
Elites cannot rule a united people. They can only rule a fragmented one. This is not a cynical observation about elite intentions. It is a structural description of how minority rule sustains itself in a formally democratic system. A genuinely … Continue reading
“Threats to Democracy”: Elite Rhetoric as Fragmentation Defense
When the American expert class warns that democracy is under threat, it is worth asking precisely which democracy it is defending. The answer, examined carefully, is not the democracy of popular sovereignty, the idea that the people govern themselves through … Continue reading
The Skittle Boy Problem: Weber, Bureaucracy, and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy
Max Weber never intended his analysis of the 1905 Russian crisis to serve as a forecast. He thought he was describing a limiting case, a political situation so extreme that it clarified the general mechanics of bureaucratic power in ways … Continue reading
Elites love to proclaim what is and is not ‘healthy democracy’
Political scientists tell us (e.g, Natan Sachs 40 minutes in) that to have one personality such as Donald Trump or Bibi Netanyahu define a country’s politics is “not healthy.” Why is it not healthy? Because it is not in the … Continue reading
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