While the excesses of American policing are magnified by racism, they are also independent of it—and almost all Americans share some responsibility for our excessively punitive culture.

There isn’t a liberal or conservative way to fight a pandemic. Why do we act as if it’s otherwise?

Like all political identities, our current divisions are “imagined”—sentimental and tied to expressive symbolism. But that does not make them “imaginary,” or any less consequential.

In the culture of pervasive outrage, everything is an outrage, so nothing is.

Trump’s blatant bigotry makes it easy to cast racists as loud, obnoxious villains who need to be named and shamed. But the most pernicious forms of racism today are systemic, not individual.

Today’s emergent socialism is less an attack on liberalism than a wake-up call to mainstream politicians sleeping through the tech revolution.

Officials in San Francisco have set their sights on destroying a set of 1930s-era murals tackling the legacy of slavery and the Native American genocide. Why? The themes are too upsetting.

These days, it’s all too easy to conclude that a decision one happens to disagree with must be motivated by invidious prejudice. And it’s easier still when the list of traits someone could “discriminate” against keeps growing and now includes things like “culture” and “ideology.”

Blackface in the 1980s might reflect the cavalier, ill-considered racism that was pretty much in the water at the time; today it would undoubtedly reflect a belligerent assertion of white supremacy. The same behavior does not always correspond to the same motives or presuppositions.

The tug of war between social expectations and individual desire that drives the Baby It’s Cold Outside controversy is rapidly becoming as anachronistic as the social rituals of France’s ancien regime.