Paul Crider

Oct 2, 2024 | liberalcurrents.com | Adam Gurri |Samantha Hancox-Li |Janet Bufton |Paul Crider

We have forgotten feudalism. We think of lords and gentry in the same way we think of knights and castles. Feudalism is little more than a fantastical setting for our imagination. Sometimes there are dragons. It isn’t an organizing analogy we use in our lives or in our politics. If we want nostalgia, we reach for the imagined America of the 1950s, or perhaps the settling of the wild west.

Aug 13, 2024 | liberalcurrents.com | Jacob Grier |Paul Crider |Samantha Hancox-Li |Sophia Hottel

History is not just an objective record of what has been. It is a reminder of what can be. Useful history offers inspiration but not hagiography, cautionary tales but not empty moralism. The Founding Fathers’ success in establishing new, stable political institutions is tempered by how relatively quickly the society served by those institutions devolved into a civil war.

Aug 9, 2024 | liberalcurrents.com | Paul Crider |Samantha Hancox-Li |Sophia Hottel |Jacob Grier

Gun to your head, if you had to vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, whom would you choose? This should be an easy question for libertarians, but for many it isn’t. “The gun would go off,” quipped Libertarian Party presidential candidate Chase Oliver in a recent interview with Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie.

Feb 8, 2024 | jacobin.com | Paul Crider

“Every child,” Marx quipped in a letter to his friend the social democratic activist and theorist Ludwig Kugelmann, “knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish.” That work is central to the functioning of any society is undeniable, but whether this provides a justification for its positive valuation is deeply contested by both the Left and the Right.