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Bryan Garsten's essay suggests that liberal polities should be understood as offering "refuge" from overweening public power. While there are sound arguments to support this approach, it downplays the affirmative exercise of public power in the liberal state and leads to policy proposals—such as a more generous stance toward refugees—that may not make sense when taking into account both the right of political communities to put the needs of their members first and the considerations that have led to rising doubts throughout Western democracies about accepting large numbers of refugees at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberal democracy is under pressure and on the defensive. Well before the covid-19 outbreak, antiliberal politicians and intellectuals had issued a complex bill of particulars against liberalism. Populists charged that liberalism had become a cloak for antidemocratic elitism that took power away from rank-and-file citizens while undermining their economic interests. Nationalists alleged that liberalism bred international institutions and laws that invaded nations' sovereignty and hobbled the pursuit of legitimate national interests. Cultural traditionalists claimed that liberal individualism eroded moral and religious communities and that liberal freedom erased the distinction between liberty and license. Yet these populist, nationalist, and cultural-traditionalist critiques are based on misunderstandings of liberalism. Like every other form of government, liberal democracy has inherent structural weaknesses that the difficulties of the moment exacerbate but do not create. Wise leadership can mitigate these weaknesses, but it cannot eliminate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report from the American Political Science Association (APSA) Presidential Task Force on new partnerships.

Across the West, economic dislocation and demographic change have triggered a demand for strong leaders. This surge of populism is more than an emotional backlash; it encourages a political structure that threatens liberal democracy. While populism accepts principles of popular sovereignty and majoritarianism, it is skeptical about constitutionalism and liberal protections for individuals. Moreover, populists’ definition of “the people” as homogeneous cannot serve as the basis for a modern democracy, which stands or falls with the protection of pluralism. Although this resurgent tribalism may draw strength from the incompleteness of life in liberal society, the liberal-democratic system uniquely harbors the power of self-correction, the essential basis for needed reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our constitutional system is more sensitive to public sentiment than Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels suggest in Democracy for Realists. Even if our system is not micro-responsive—maintaining fidelity to public opinion, or to campaign promises, in every detail of public policy—it is macro-responsive: politicians grasp core public expectations and do their best to meet them. While Achen and Bartels show that group loyalties decisively shape perceptions and expectations, people often revise these perceptions and expectations based on experience. Because we are more than the creatures of groups and parties, democracy works better—and is better—than the authors suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the convergence of democratic politics since the Second World War.

In The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters' Choices Determine the Quality of Life, Benjamin Radcliff considers a wide variety of data from North America and Europe and argues that, on balance, welfare state policies make people happier. In short, there is a positive correlation and a causal relationship between happiness and welfare state provisions. This is an important conclusion for anyone interested in public policy and debates about the size of government. In their reviews, Larry M. Bartels and William A. Galston take issue with Radcliff's thesis. They challenge the relationships that Radcliff suggests exist between specific policies and happiness. Bartels challenges the way Radcliff uses his statistics to support his thesis about the relationship between happiness and specific policies as well as our ability to make generalisations from the data. Galson's objections to Radcliff's analysis and argument is more conceptual, and, among other things, he challenges the connection Radcliff seeks to establish between happiness and the satisfaction of human needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political theory is not a purely theoretical enterprise; it is intended to be practical and action-guiding. To perform this role, the requirements of political theory must be possible, and the standard of possibility it employs must be appropriate to the political domain. Because human beings vary in their capacity for morality and justice, a reasonably just society, as Rawls understands it, must not be expected. Despite his concerns to the contrary, the possibility of a just polity is not needed to ward off resignation and cynicism. There is a principled path between a politics of complacency that thwarts feasible progress and a politics of utopian aspiration that ends by inflicting harm in the name of doing good. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite skepticism about the common good, the idea has both theoretical content and practical utility. It rests on important features of human life, such as inherently social goods, social linkages, and joint occupation of various commons. It reflects the outcome for bargaining for mutual advantage, subject to a fairness test. And it is particularized through a community's adherence to certain goods as objects of joint endeavor. In the context of the United States, these goods are set forth in the Preamble to the Constitution-in general language, subject to political contestation, for a people who have agreed to live together in a united political community. While the Preamble states the ends of the union, the body of the Constitution establishes the institutional means for achieving them. So these institutions are part of the common good as well. These are the enduring commonalities-the elements of a shared good- that ceaseless democratic conflict often obscures but that reemerge in times of crisis and civic ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author discusses the challenges of dual sovereignty including claims of politics and claims of faith in the traditional Judaism and liberal democracy in context to the article of law professor Sanford Levinson. Topics discusses include difference between limits to political authority and religious authority, core principle of liberal government, and views of Justice Antonin Scalia and U.S. President John F. Kennedy on politics or faith.

Although I welcome the opportunity to discuss Alex Zakaras's fine essay, I fear that my response will disappoint him (and perhaps others as well). I find his arguments cogent and plausible, if not altogether persuasive, but many of them are directed against claims that I do not think I made. Two examples will suffice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on pluralist constitutionalism. It aims to examine ways in which a broadly pluralist outlook can help illuminate old constitutional theory and practice issues. It explores the diversity of constitution by citing its defining characteristics including its basis on a principle of authorizing legitimacy, its establishment of governing institutions including their responsibilities and powers and its orientation toward ensembles of public purposes. It offers some clarifications to some of the technical issues raised by value pluralism.

In recent decades, a ‘realist’ alternative to ideal theories of politics has slowly taken shape. Bringing together philosophers, political theorists, and political scientists, this countermovement seeks to reframe inquiry into politics and political norms. Among the hallmarks of this endeavor are a moral psychology that includes the passions and emotions; a robust conception of political possibility and rejection of utopian thinking; the belief that political conflict — of values as well as interests — is both fundamental and ineradicable; a focus on institutions as the arenas within which conflict is mediated and contained; and a conception of politics as a sphere of activity that is distinct, autonomous, and subject to norms that cannot be derived from individual morality. For political realists, a ‘well-ordered society’ is rarely attainable; a modus vivendi without agreement on first principles is often the only practical possibility. Not only will ‘full compliance’ never be achieved, but also it is an assumption that yields misleading accounts of political norms. While realists offer a number of compelling criticisms of ideal theory, there are some lacunae in their stance. It is not yet clear whether realism constitutes a coherent affirmative alternative to idealism. Nor have realists clarified the extent of conflict that is consistent with political order as such. And because both sides accept ‘ought implies can’ as a constraint on the validity of political norms, much of the debate between realists and idealists revolves around deep empirical disagreements that are yet to be clarified. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a report from the Brookings-Duke Immigration Policy Roundtable, which includes think tank analysts, political and policy entrepreneurs, and community leaders. The report contains a range of views in regard to immigration policymaking. Diverse aspects of immigration policy were discussed over the course of 10 months, which first convened in November 2008. The authors agreed that the U.S. should reduce illegal immigration by connecting workplace verification and legalization.

The essays in this special issue present and develop several important themes in the examination of ethical presidential leadership. These include the distinction(s) between public and private virtues; the ways in which America's history and democratic ethos shape the “constitutional character” required of its chief executive; the complications in the assessment of presidential leadership posed by the multidimensional character of the presidential office and by the variety of challenges that the president confronts; and the different and often divergent sources of democratic legitimacy, including responsiveness to the electorate, guidance by one's own judgment of its interests, and fidelity to one's core convictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Isaiah Berlin considered himself principally as a political theorist in the liberal tradition, his was an unorthodox liberalism in both method and substance, rooted in the confluence of three traditions-British, Russian, and Jewish. Unlike many liberals, he wrestled with the tension between universalism and particularism, and also between individualism and communalities. He rejected all monistic approaches to morality (including liberal monism) but repudiated as well the moral relativism of much modern thought, espousing instead value pluralism. While we cannot arrive at a universally valid conception of the summum bonum, we can specify the summun malum-the great evils of the human condition. Berlin saw political theory as a branch of moral philosophy but drew political morality from political life rather than imposing it on politics. The range of goods and principles that human beings rightly prize cannot be combined into harmonious wholes in either our individual or collective existence. Some goods exclude others, and we must choose among them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the philosophical debate over patriotism in determining whether human and civic virtue are congruent. It argues that the tension between civic and human virtue based on the concept of political life and self-preservation is an intellectual mistake. Briefly discussed are the two basic facts about human beings which shape the issue of civic virtue and how these facts relate to universalism. It illustrates the concrete differences between a good citizen and a responsible citizen based on their structural social, economic and political concerns toward oppression and inequality.