Author: Thom Hartmann

“Conservative” columnists in America are bemoaning how coarse, violent, and Third-World-ish the United States has become in the past 40 years. David Brooks, for example, comes right out and says “America is falling apart at the seams.” In that, he is largely quoting data from Matt Iglesias’ substack newsletter Slow Boring, where he wrote: “You’re seeing more killing, which is a subset of the increase in shooting, which in turn is a subset of the large increase in gun-carrying. But traffic deaths are also up. Unruly passenger incidents on airplanes have surged. Schools report more discipline and student safety...

Our vote is the most important part of the American commons. The commons are those realms that we all own and jointly administer through our government. They include our air and water; our roads and skyways; the frequency spectrum we use for communication, radio, and television; our public school system; our military, police, and fire departments; the agencies we use to ensure the safety and quality of our food and medications; the systems and laws that keep people playing the game of business within legal boundaries; our jails and prisons; our oceans and public lands; and our social safety...

The Founders of this nation, and the Framers who wrote our Constitution, created as Ben Franklin famously said a constitutional republic: a government “deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed” through citizens’ right to vote. They referred to this as “republicanism” because it was based on the Greek and Roman republics (then thousands of years in the past but still remembered and idealized), and when put into law they called it “a Republican Form of Government.” Today that form of government in crisis in America, as that core right to vote that defines republicanism is under...

When fascism reared its ugly head in Europe and Japan in the 1920s, it signaled a coming war. As a newer and slicker form of that despotism rises here in America, it may well bring the same type of crisis. We stand on the threshold of momentous change in this nation. While it’s rarely discussed in this frame, the next two elections will almost certainly determine what form of government we’ll have for at least a generation. Will America become more free and democratic, or will we devolve into a 21st century form of Trumpy fascism? The Democratic Party...