Engines of oligarchy: with Hugh Pope
One of my favourite podcasts with journalist, scholar and gentleman Hugh Pope. Hugh has just brought to publication a book written by his father in...
Understanding the present by listening to the past: Walter Lippmann’s “The Public Philosophy”
One way to get beneath the surface of what's going on is to read people who were writing about issues, as they emerged rather than...
Fighting political polarisation
From this week's Substack of mine. Thomas B. Edsall has an important writeup of research into reducing political polarisation. But to me it seems to...
Polarisation and the Case for Citizens’ Juries
Cross posted from Quillette from 16 Feb 2019, but now behind a paywall. When a conversation is not a conversation: party political discourse in the...
The David Solomon Lecture: Government 2.0 a couple of years on . . .
https://youtu.be/ftssK9b8WFI Finding a formatting mess when I looked this up on Troppo, I've reposted it here for the record. I'm a bit embarrassed by my...
Elections are all about competition right? (They weren’t way back when)
As part of my recent fascination with competitive and ‘de-competitive’ merit selection, I’ve been looking at the origins of both parliamentary and presidential elections. Intriguingly...
An Alt-left?
https://youtu.be/gYKPWkvTRIg I What is it with James Burnham? I associate him — via Curtis Yarvin — with the alt-right. And Burnham is the founding text...