43 essays
Rights talk gets used loosely enough that it’s worth being exact about what a right is before applying the word to information. The distinction that matters here is Isaiah Berlin’s: negative liberty is freedom from interference — a space others […]
In 1840 a handful of abolitionists meeting in Albany nominated James G. Birney for president under the name Liberty Party. They had no ballot lines, no money and almost no votes, under seven thousand that fall. They built the party […]
“Govern a large country,” says the sixtieth verse of the Tao Te Ching, “as you would cook a small fish.” A small fish falls apart if it’s poked and turned too often. One way to read the line is as […]
Arden, Delaware, is a village of a few hundred houses under oak and tulip poplar, a few miles north of Wilmington. Nobody there owns the ground under a house. Since 1900 residents have leased their lots from trustees and paid […]
Three days after the election, the phrase in every newsroom is the Trump wipeout. Democrats hold at least 54 Senate seats and a House majority that may run past 250, and the losing side has already begun the sorting that […]
Palo Alto and Menlo Park sit on either side of San Francisquito Creek, in two counties, with two city halls about two miles apart. Each is a somewhere: a city with its own streets, its own quarrels and its own […]
On November 3, 2026, the governing party lost both chambers of Congress, by margins beyond 2006. After the Shellacking gives two readings of the loss. In the first, it was the six-year itch, and the cycle will turn by itself. […]
On November 3, 2010, the morning after his party lost sixty-three House seats, Barack Obama stood at a White House podium and called it a shellacking. He didn’t recommend that future presidents take one, he said. Sixteen years later to […]
Texas’s 15th Congressional District runs from the eastern suburbs of San Antonio down to McAllen, and the Texas Tribune has called it Republicans’ greatest success story with Texas Latino voters. Monica De La Cruz won it by fourteen points in […]
On Sunday, two days before the vote, the national numbers look like a switchover in progress. Emerson’s last October poll has Democrats ahead on the generic House ballot 52 to 42, up from 44 percent support fifteen months ago, with […]
Montana’s Senate seat wasn’t supposed to be open. On March 4, Sen. Steve Daines withdrew from his reelection race and endorsed Kurt Alme, the U.S. attorney for Montana, who then took 77 percent in the June primary. Seth Bodnar, the […]
In October, an NPR series on swing voters reported on two online focus groups of Georgians who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Donald Trump in 2024. There were twelve of them. Eleven said they were disappointed in […]
In 1946, Earl Warren ran for reelection as governor of California and won the Republican primary. He also won the Democratic primary. On the general election ballot, he was effectively unopposed by either party. A 1913 law, written under Hiram […]
On October 27 the Associated Press reported that Republicans fear Libertarian candidates could cost them the United States Senate. The party holds fifty-three seats and can lose three and keep control with Vice President JD Vance breaking ties. The AP […]
The South Rises described four states, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, held by one coalition at every layer at once, and asked whether the checks built into their governments still worked once the arithmetic stopped requiring them to. November 3 […]
Robert Taber covered the Cuban revolution for CBS and went with Castro’s columns from the Sierra Maestra to Havana. The War of the Flea, published in 1965 as American troops were arriving in Viet Nam by the division, is his […]
A New England town meeting runs off a warrant, the list of articles the selectmen post weeks ahead, and every voter in town gets a say on each one. Massachusetts voters will see something close to a statewide warrant on […]
In 1643 Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven formed the United Colonies of New England. Each colony sent two commissioners, and any decision needed six of the eight votes. The confederation handled what no single colony could, chiefly defense […]
Schisms Within ended on a question: whether a primary-season fracture costs a coalition the general election, or whether November simply reassembles what August split apart. The Great Lakes states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, vote on November 3, and […]
On the night of 27 March 1943 a group of men in borrowed police uniforms talked their way into the Amsterdam population registry on the Plantage Kerklaan, a former concert hall across from the zoo. They overpowered the guards, moved […]
Sometime in the late 1860s, at Eastwood on the edge of Sydney, Maria Ann Smith threw the cores of some French crab apples onto a heap near the creek at the bottom of her farm. Apples don't grow true from […]
In the autumn of 1818 the parish of Dedham, Massachusetts, chose a new minister. The parish was every taxpayer in town, and the taxpayers wanted Alvan Lamson, a young Harvard man of the liberal, Unitarian kind. The church was the […]
On October 16, 1834, a pair of workmen were told to get rid of two cartloads of old wooden sticks stored in the Palace of Westminster. The sticks were Exchequer tallies, notched hazel rods that had recorded payments to the […]
In California's housing arguments, two words get used as if they were interchangeable. A politician who wants more homes calls themselves pro-housing, and one who wants to permit more projects of every kind calls themselves the same thing. Opponents of […]
Three voices. SL speaks for the Social Liberty Foundation. Claude is the AI model that helped draft this piece, given its own lines. 3rd Party is a composite of the country's existing outside parties, fifty years of running […]
America's founding answer to state power was a list of things the state may not do: it may not establish a religion, may not abridge speech, may not […]
No single post on this site was written to be read as a system. Each one starts from something narrower and more provoking — a ballot measure, a zoning fight, a dead anarchist's pamphlet, a tennis tournament's prize structure — and follows the […]
Before getting to what's actually on it, the ballot itself deserves a harder look than it usually gets. California's initiative process was built in 1911 as a check on a legislature the Progressive movement considered captured by the railroads — […]
Seven states will put an environmental measure in front of voters this November, and reading through all nine at once — a $500 million Arkansas bond, a Colorado sales-tax carve-out, a right to hunt written into a state constitution, a […]
Owning Essential made a narrow claim about a California ballot measure: once a government grants expedited process and exemption from rules to a defined list of project categories, the list itself becomes the site where a value system gets imposed, […]
Ask most Californians to name the law that actually decides what gets built in their state — a subdivision, a transmission line, a warehouse, a corner grocery's expansion — and the California Environmental Quality Act is unlikely to come up. […]
The West North Central division — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri — earns the regional treatment The South Rises, Schisms Within, and The River Decides What Seven States Couldn't already gave other Census divisions, and […]
California voters decide on November 3 whether to rewrite how the state's signature environmental law actually works in practice, and the honest answer to what it would do for social liberty is not a clean yes or no. Proposition 45 […]
What Sacramento Is Deciding, Austin's Long Recess, Beacon Hill's Interval Training, and The View from Tallahassee each read a single capital's session. The South Rises and The River Decides What Seven States Couldn't broke that pattern to read a region […]
What Sacramento Is Deciding, Austin's Long Recess, Beacon Hill's Interval Training, and The View from Tallahassee each read one state capital's session for what it actually decides about social liberty, bill by bill. The South Rises broke that pattern once […]
The South Rises took the East South Central states as a single unit because all four were governed, this year, by the same coalition with enough margin that the ordinary checks on that coalition had mostly stopped checking. The Great […]
What Sacramento Is Deciding, Austin's Long Recess, and Beacon Hill's Interval Training each took a single state capital as the unit worth watching. This entry breaks that pattern on purpose. Growing a Movement as a Design Problem argued that the […]
Three regions into this beat and no two legislatures have run on the same clock. What Sacramento Is Deciding covered a state in continuous annual session against a hard floor deadline. Austin's Long Recess covered one that meets once every […]
This is the first entry in a beat this site is starting: reading a state legislature's session, bill by bill, for what it actually means for social liberty, rather than waiting for the national platform fights that get all the […]
What Sacramento Is Deciding opened this site's legislature beat with California, mid-session, bills moving through committee on a clock. Texas is the second region on that beat, and it immediately breaks the format that piece assumed: there is no Texas […]
The Right to Remember made the case that a public ledger converts what would otherwise be a standing positive right — continuous, fundable, defundable preservation work — into something closer to a structural guarantee: a record that doesn't need an […]
Palo Alto's Parks & Recreation Commission recently stood up a small ad hoc committee to strengthen biodiversity and pollinator connectivity across the park system. It's the kind of item that disappears from public attention within a week — it shouldn't. There's a real social liberty argument buried in it.
Every dollar our city government spends comes from We the People. Our property taxes, our sales taxes, our labor. And yet for most people, finding out exactly where that money goes — how we understand and actualize priorities – which […]
Social Liberty