As in every holiday season for centuries, people around the world are praying for peace on earth. Understanding what it is and how it must be obtained is the best response and answer to those entreat...

The morning after Election Day, as Democrats woke up to a country that had moved rightward in 90% of the nation's counties, many found themselves wondering: who are these people? ...

After the 2022 midterm elections, we were thankful that the light of our American democracy still shines. After the election of November 5th, we still are. Here's why......

In his Inaugural Address, Donald Trump promised to end "American carnage," but of course he created it instead, because what's needed to end carnage is courage--and only one candidate has that...

Experienced drivers know the center lane's the place to be on a highway, especially if you're a good driver. Because it maximizes flexibility, it's often both safer and faster--less road rage, too. P...

We have come to what poet Robert Frost would call a fork in the road in our country. Relative to the world, we've always taken the one less traveled by, and it has made all the difference...

The urban-rural divide that dominates our politics today is not new, but in recent decades it has been approaching fracture.  Fortunately, there are ways & means to mend it and make our nation strong...

The Paris Olympic Games showcased an inspiring revival of the can-do American spirit and commitment to excellence. Our workers have been, and continue to be, Olympian in every profession in every way...

There needs to be an American elegy written for poor, lower-income, and middle class workers. JD Vance has shown, repeatedly, in his words and actions, that he will not be the one to write it...

He hosted a show called The Apprentice that had nothing to do with the genuine article because he's never been one himself--always and only a sorcerer. That's why he was a historic failure as preside...

Today's American economy is literally the wonder of the world, but there's one sign we may be out over our skis--if every unemployed American in the labor force found full-time work, there would still...

Republicans have all the answers (at least they think so); Democrats prefer to ask questions. But if they don't start acting now, asking later, wondering Dems could find themselves wandering in the w...

One of the worst things a conservative can be called these days is a RINO, Republican In Name Only. But in 2024, there's a Republican Party in name only too...

The least dangerous branch has already tarnished itself, perhaps irrevocably. Now new research proves political orientation impacts virtually all decisions in the federal judiciary in a very specific ...

How about neither? This would be Donald Trump's answer to the classic game show question, because he knows that where there's no truth, there's only power. We, the people, need get our fellow citizens...

Research on diversity's value is clear, in education, in business, in nature. DEI is far from a perfect reflection of what we know, but that doesn't justify the GOP's determination to kill it...

The federal government has rarely been popular, but we'd miss it if it were gone, and currently it faces threats from multiple directions that could bring it to the brink of extinction if we don't ral...

In many presidential elections, the primaries of Super Tuesday are a turning point. This year, with voters divided between intoxication, ambivalence, and apathy, it looks more like there's no turning...

Bidenomics, vibecession, vabpression, all need to be replaced by another kind of economics. The first political party to understand this will never have to puzzle over disconnects between their macro...

We can't rely on the media, the courts, or either party to do it. We, the people, are going to have to save our democracy this year, and we'll have to do more than vote to do it....

It will surely hurt his feelings to hear it, but Trump's 90+ felony charges pale in comparison to the real Trial of the Century. The defendant is democracy, the jury is we, the people, and the verdic...

Our first president said it first, and the last real Republican president said it best: "Every immigrant makes our nation more, not less, American." And today what divides us on immigration--stunting ...

There's much intoning these days about the urban-rural divide. The irony, as we've known since the heyday of Swift's, is our poles face more challenges in common than what separates them...

Are America's cities dying? We posed that question in 2015, and as in so many other ways, the subsequent pandemic revealed more than it created. The good news? Urban policymakers have an opportunity t...

Since our last infrastructure post, billions have rightfully been spent on our physical plant, but the state of our human infrastructure has only deteriorated. Fortunately there's a solution it takes ...

Are strikes good or bad? That depends on whether you're pitching or at bat, but America's workers will never know if they're home or away unless they take the field...

It's the thing with feathers, the rope we grip in stormy seas or on steep climbs, known around the world as the quality that for many best defines the nature of America and Americans and, fortunately,...

Many are starting to think they can see the darkness at the end of the world; proving them wrong will require changing the focus from the end of the human race to the race we must collectively win...

As we approach another anniversary of our nation's birth, it's become increasingly difficult to recall what we're celebrating and, indeed, to visualize our "indivisible" republic itself...

Not Necessarily the News was a satirical HBO comedy series that ran from 1983 to 1990. As seems so often the case these days, what was thought to be a comedy has turned out to be, in title at least, ...

When Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, his successor declared "our long national nightmare" over, but while Watergate fed a cancer of cynicism weakening our will to act, few were as directly affected by...

For decades, small business policy has been reactionary, endeavoring only to patch up cracks in the Main Street facade, rather than treat start-ups and mom and pops like the powerful futuristic growth...

The answer to the Bermuda Triangle question of macroeconomics: how mom-and-pops and start-ups created nearly two-thirds of new jobs in our country over the last quarter-century+, yet still employ less...

Ron DeSantis believes he stands in the doorway of Florida schools and other institutions, forbidding indoctrination to pass. We think he projecteth too much...

They say sunlight is the best disinfectant; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has been demonstrating, to a concerning degree, that artificial light can and often does have the opposite effect...

Back when civics was central to education, "vote early and often" was a good government slogan. Now we need civics early and often to restore good government once more...

"American democracy will work and reform will prove possible only if obligations join rights at center stage." So writes Richard Haass. We agree, and discuss what they should be...

Republicans know from the four years they were in power that there's no need for debt ceiling to put the US or us through the roof--solutions abound, with or without them...

ChatGPT may disagree, but artificial human intelligence continues to be a greater threat to our way of life than AI, while the real thing remains the best antidote to the potential toxicity of both...

We remember three good citizens (and then three more) who left us in body in 2022, but not in spirit, as well as the works and inspiration they left behind for us to build on...

January 6th has become a day that will live in infamy, but thanks to the man who uttered those words about the first such occasion, there's another, better reason to remember and act on it...

Merriam-Webster chose "gaslighting" as theirs, but to us, this was the year when our country finally started cooking with gas again, and "democracy" had to be the word for that...

All across America, Trump-backed candidates did something last month he's never been able to do himself--give a concession speech. And the other concessions generated in his name are getting stale...

As the first third week in November approaches in relative peace and hope, we express our thanks to the many Americans of many kinds who, in many ways, made it so...

The campaigns of individual candidates often have theme songs; this year's midterms seem to have a theme *album* and *film,* Talking Heads 1984 live opus, "Stop Making Sense"...

Public education has long been one of the pillars upon which democracy has been built. Today, it's under siege, and like elementary math, the solutions are both simple and hard...

Our flag and Constitution are both tapestries in support of our more perfect union. Our founding documentis increasingly multi- hued, but is our flag--and our democracy--unfurling or unraveling?...

It's a highly infectious disease of the economy in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. There's no vaccine, no known cure, but there could be new treatments derived from an old remedy...

Journalists describe the current state of their industry as "struggling" and in "chaos," but they're a lot more positive about their work than the public, and therein lie the beginnings of hope...

On July 8th, investigative journalist Amanda Ripley broke a story in the Washington Post that was apparently news to many of her peers, but not to wide swaths of the American public across the politic...

There's fetid talk of 1861 in the air, but to truly make America great again, we'll have to reach further back than that, all the way to 1776, this time to fight a war for interdependence...

The Lords giveth and the Lords taketh away--that seems to be the motto of today's Supreme Court. We suspect even Alexander Hamilton is rolling over in his grave...

Our current political sprawl (threatening to become a brawl) has spawned not just divisions, but subdivisions as well. Fortunately, the pieces could be easier to put back together than a summer holid...

As time passes, Amazon.com has become increasingly like its force-of-nature namesake river, for both better and worse, as the company, its employees, its contractors, and its customers all seek to rid...

With the 'Internet's town square' under new management, titans of politics and business are wrestling anew with the challenge of supporting free speech in the Disinformation Age...

There's been a lot of talk recently about Jimmy Carter, the 1970's, and "stagflation." The truth is that our economy is in a state of "conflation," to which traditional metrics no longer apply....

For years, the word "infrastructure" has had the adjective "crumbling" welded to it. No more, thanks, in part, to the bipartisan infrastructure bill, but also because there aren't enough workers qual...

2021 was the year of a special type of start-up entrepreneur, the edupreneur, who's not just for K-college education anymore, but dedicated to empowering customers in any field, discipline, industry, ...

For one night, at least, Joe Biden's State of the Union address suggested no need to rename it, but had it been delivered days earlier, leaders of one party seemed to hail from another country...

We live in a time when islands sink under the waves. Solving our mental health crisis is going to require the kind of community-centric approach, not rugged individualism, that built our nation...

There's another pandemic in America that's going largely untreated, spawned via the unholy union of Trumpism and COVID-19, and mutating into variants of identity, individuality, and isolation...

Harry Reid, John Madden, and Betty White had more in common than the recency of their departure from our all-too-mortal coil and the ineffable power of the legacies they left behind...

We've only been the United States of America in times of crisis, and today we face the greatest challenges in our nation's history. And to live out the true meaning of our name, we will have to decid...

Ours is a promised land, meaning a land of promises not yet kept and promises broken, yet still a nation young enough to hear and heed voices from its past to guide it to our promised destination. ...

Critical race theory may be the GOP word of the year, but ours is just critical race and there's nothing theoretical about it. Let us explain...

Martin Luther King famously observed that "only in the darkness can you see the stars." They've shown brightly over this year's political landscape, including some we've been following for years...

That was the title of Studs Turkel's final work. It's time to take inspiration from and join him, along with many other great Americans, who have risen, risen above the dying of the light....

Faced with a job market pockmarked with vacuums and sandpits, American workers are stepping back and away in what's being called the Great Resignation, but there's no reason to be resigned to it; inde...

It's projected that we'll be dealing with the mental health effects of COVID for decades. For members of Trump's cancer cult, as well as those who have to share this country with them, it could be lon...

In 1974, White House lawyer John Dean reported to then-president Richard Nixon there was a cancer on the presidency. That cancer has since metastasized and spread throughout our democracy ...

The body politic in any free society is subject to many ills, and as in our lives, the most dangerous is not COVID, it's cancer, and like cancer, sooner or later, every democracy has to confront it...

We are a nation built by and on the backs of immigrants, but have always had problems grappling with immigration. In the hypercompetitive global economy, that's a luxury we can no longer afford....

There couldn't be a better symbol for income inequality than the billionaire space race in full swing. Fortunately for the rest of us, there's a lot being done to bring it back down to earth...

Good things come in threes. As we ensure our latest holiday, Juneteenth, is being properly observed, we should race to embrace the all-too natural third leg of the trifecta that began on 7/4/1776......

Some in our country want to start a Devolutionary War to erase not only much of the progress we've made, but further, all record and acknowledgment of our struggles to get where we are today ...

Another day, another mass shooting, and yet guns continue to proliferate, even as, not coincidentally, the peaceful resolution of disputes is increasingly restricted...

What progressives never expected him to be, he's been; what he most told us he wanted to be remains elusive...

Doing good by doing well and doing well by doing good are one in the same in the post-pandemic economy, especially when the concept of what constitutes a social venture is appropriately expanded...

The forbidding political shoals created by the last four years have also generated the biggest civics wave since the 1930s, and a one-time opportunity to ride it to safe haven...

The party formerly known as the GOP has failed to take the last pivot from the road to perdition and become the Party Of Trump. What they're smoking is open to debate...

They share three letter acronyms, but only one belongs in the company of FDR, JFK, and LBJ, indeed leads them where our founding values are concerned...

Three dates that will live in infamy. To make 12-7-9-11-1-6 a winning ticker for the nation, we must make 1/20/21 the most important date of all...

The winter holidays have always been the inflection point where past and future meet. We reflect and reminisce; we wish and dream. This season is a time to remember so we can dream again...

We apply our decades of experience involved in political campaigns to separate the truth from the tweets; as usual, it wasn't only candidates who won and lost...

We've known for some time that we need a vaccine, but not just any old vaccine--in fact, we need four to really cure what ails us......

Just as a Thanksgiving meal has its staples, so too have our elections in recent cycles, many of them sources of civic indigestion. But there were many who rose to the occasion, giving us new reasons...

2020 has been a year of loss after loss, until Election Day, not only because of its most important result, but even more so the conduct of the election, where the burning lights of every polling plac...

What Republicans did in the dead of night on October 26, Democrats can undo in the light of day, and end the judicial wars once and for all...

Their alarming level of support for authoritarianism doesn't make them mindless nor mindful, but it does make them mind less what's been done to the country because their minds are full...

He/his supporters consider him a profile in courage, but it's carnage, the American carnage he said he would eliminate he's instead made real. How to contain a wildfire where democracy is the tinder...

Faced with a daunting future, both parties are looking behind them for support.  Where they diverge is 1965, the last time a president took on an agenda of the scope required now...

The founders understood the importance of the P.O. in connecting the nation--it's included in the Constitution--and its state today is our nation's in microcosm. Yet the distance to be closed could be...

The Trump Administration is right--it's time to "Find Something New." But it's not our country's 30 million unemployed who need to do the looking...

It's time for a major focus on the large swaths of the economy hurt most in the pandemic--microbusinesses (75% of all companies) and nonemployee firms (80% of all small businesses)...

George Floyd's death has compelled reckonings from small-town America to NASCAR, MLB, and the NFL, with dozens of shameless monuments to the Confederacy at ground zero. Here's how we can convert our ...

We all need a holiday, but not from each other. The events of the last year--both positive and negative--call for a new celebration on the calendar...

We must never forget or stop trying to close the racial divide that rends the nation, but there's another divide, arguably even greater, that needs far more attention than it's been getting...

A knee on the neck of a man, the light fading from his eyes, a micro-microcosm of 400+ years of history suddenly blown up and out to the ends of the earth. A systemic problem demands a systemic respo...

Paradox is the seed capital for crisis: the opposite of social distancing, in spirit, is going to be necessary to get COVID-19 behind us......

To deal with challenges as fundamental as our nation is now facing, we don't need a plan--we need four of them...

Regression in software and statistics is used to find mistakes; in politics, it's being used to make them...

COVID-19 kills by quietly destroying your lungs; by the time you start feeling pain and find yourself gasping for breath, it's too late. Let that not be the same for our country...

There's ample war-time precedent for what it takes to be a war-time president, and Donald Trump is falling short in every conceivable way...

They're just tools in the toolbox, and neither the box nor the handymen and women needed to create the society we want are economic systems at all......

As we head into the elections, we're increasingly hearing a tale of two economies. Has it been a boom or bust for workers? It depends, and neither......

In the week since our last post, the Trump Administration has continued to cross previously uncrossed lines, as if determined to permanently change the definition of the term "norm." We have other pe...

The decade 2010–2019 for the United States, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, was one that “ended not with a bang but with a whimper.” 2020–2029 must be the decade of recovery because time is running ...

In a time where we seem all too willing to make excuses for words and behavior that used to be considered beyond the pale, there are still actions that are purely inexcusable. China would know....

"Climate emergency," "existential," "they," were all put forward as "words of the year" for 2019, but they're all really just part of a bigger noun, verb, adjective, and adverb...

Both 'sides' in today's political debates accuse the other of being unpatriotic, but on the American side we all belong to, true patriotism, both old and new, is emerging...

A number of new initiatives are trying to bring red and blue Americans together. They're too little, too late, but there's no need to despair...

Our civic engagement champions share their hard-won vision for what civics education should look like and include in the 21st century...

Civic engagement champions come from all walks of life, but for those whose effects are most powerful, all roads lead to middle school...

The four middle school teachers who recently became our first Civic Engagement Champions all helped elevate student voices in their communities, each in their own way--they share their stories here...

As on many other issues, Donald Trump is showing--and convincing--a majority of Americans that the right position on trade is opposite to the one he holds...

As it did for the founders, as it has so many times in our history, though we have representatives, the fate of the nation now lies with we, the people...

What the Roundtable CEOs need to do to walk their talk, and some of the companies that already are...

Fifty years after the tumultuous summer of '69, it's time for a new, more nuanced rallying cry to bring America back together again...

For Earth Day, 1970, cartoonist Walt Kelly designed a poster with an iconic message: We have met the enemy and he is us. When it comes to democracy, it's true as well...

Real nationalism isn't a threat to democracy in America; it could well be its savior--and ours...

What the Founders intended as the last bulwark in defense of democracy is increasingly undermining it instead, and needs serious reform...

Our nation is a song, one that has been sung, and is yet to be written, a song of harmony and discord, open and concealed...

Finding common ground on the most contentious of moral issues may require first redefining its terms...

The greatest untapped resource to deal with all of America's problems, including the divisions between us, is Americans...

The subject that originated public education has the highest stakes of all, and states like Massachusetts and Illinois are illuminating the path back to the future, aided and abetted by a plethora of ...

Connecting the dots that need to be connected, and why connecting them will be more of an arc than a line...

Tucked into the tax bill were extensive breaks for companies who build in "opportunity zones." We explore whether their promise is as gaseous as their contraction, and what would put them on more soli...

It may not be the race we wanted, but it's the race we have. Who will win, how, and what does winning mean?...

With Parliament's recent votes, the classic emergency call has taken on multiple new meanings for Britain, Europe, and the world...

Oxford, Cambridge, and Webster have all revealed their 'words of the year' for 2018; we review their choices, and add a few choice ones of our own...

Wishing you a Happier 2019, America, with an emphasis on happier. Here's why it's important, and how we can get there, every one by one...

Make America Great Again? George Herbert Walker Bush showed the way, and the path he laid down is still well-lit enough to follow...

Donald Trump's rambling, self-serving Thanksgiving calls to our troops from the comfort of his Florida mansion continue a long history of aversion and disrespect that speak even louder than his words...

Donald Trump is looking in all the wrong places for enemies of the people. Some free advice on where he should look, and why...

Sometimes he says he's a nationalist, sometimes a globalist, but what is Donald Trump, really? We think he deserves his own category, and here's how we would define it...

The Small Business Administration provides billions in relief after hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters... well?...

Their confidence has never been higher, their success has never been more vital; it's time to give small businesses the boost they need to insure U.S. economic leadership for years to come...

Maine Senator Susan Collins seemed to have one particular classic country song playing in her head when she cast her Kavanaugh vote; it really should have been another...

Our Civil War claimed the lives of 620,000 Americans. The uncivil war in full effect this week has the potential to be much, much worse...

In our first blog post for The Moderate Voice, a leading centrist publisher, we put on our activist hats to handicap the upcoming elections, in hopes they won't handicap the nation...

Republicans seem baffled that the only wave the roaring economy appears to be producing for them is a red tide. Here's what they need to learn...

How the War On Poverty became a war on the poor–and what can be done about it, using the best in both liberal and conservative thinking...

There's a paradox at the heart of 'bigger is better' that's been snowballing into fruition since we were last truly united seventy-plus years past...

Recent events, and our responses to them, reveal Trump Derangement Syndrome's true nature...

An iconic American country demonstrates the important of focus in these extraordinarily disorienting times...

Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, and Charles Krauthammer led very different lives, but had some very American things in common we can all learn from and be inspired by...

The arc of history is no longer to be confused with the angle of repose, but one change agent and his message remain as vibrant and relevant as they were fifty years ago...

The future of democracy depends on it: what's working, what's stopping it, what's next...

Leading thinkers left & right agree: beneath all the fire and fury there is a transformation taking place. We, the people, will decide whether for better or worse...

None of the standard classifications fit the type of government we have now, so we've had to create our own, defining the basis of its deconstruction in the process...

Muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair spoke with a singular voice. The Sinclair Broadcasting Group does too. In a tale of two journalisms, similarities end there...

Super-majorities of Americans have supported significant gun law reforms through tragedy after tragedy without result. Seven reasons why this time it will be different...

Donald Trump's new infrastructure “plan” seeks to build bridges, roads, and more out of smoke and mirrors. We break it down before it does...

In the Washington Monthly, we explain why Parkland Florida's students have been such effective advocates–and why it shouldn't have been a surprise...

How and why the best cure for what ails American democracy is prevention–before it's too late...

As President Trump gets ready to deliver his first State of the Union address, we have some thoughts, one in particular, on a topic that's likely to be a focus...

In the game of life and death in which we find ourselves (all too expectedly), it's not the size of the button that matters...