This essay appears in our Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe to get a copy. In August 1936, after a failed coup against the Second Spanish Republic, Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces seized the city of ...

Amy King is author of I Want to Make You Safe and co-editor of the PEN Poetry Series. Andrew Ridker, Cathy Park Hong, Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Robert Pinsky, Charles Bernstein, Harmony Holiday, ...

In their new book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that American liberals have ironically succumbed to a conservative worldview, in the original sense of “conservative.” Instead of ...

I am grateful for these provocative and engaging responses. Start with the elephant in the room: Is this the right moment to critique our system of checks and balances, after a near-majority of voters ...

The failure of formal checks and balances to significantly stymie Trump is painfully clear. It is also not unprecedented. As Lisa Miller illustrates, checks and balances have been routinely weaponized ...

Lisa Miller clearly comes to condemn Trump, not to praise him. Yet her polemic captures a common justification of his administration’s violent, cruel, and authoritarian ethnonationalism. This striking ...

The Democratic Party’s decision to double down on checks and balances as the best response to the Trump administration is only the latest reflection of its paucity of political vision. Both Joe Biden ...

The hallowed story Americans like to tell about our constitutional order gets it precisely backward—on that, Lisa Miller is utterly convincing. Rather than empowering democracy, our system obstructs ...

Lisa Miller’s case against the myth of American checks and balances is spot-on. In my corner of the world—organized labor—an overestimation of the power of the courts and an underestimation of mass ...

The system is not functioning well—Lisa Miller is right about that. She insightfully dissects the limits of our traditional understanding of checks and balances, showing why a major national movement ...