Hamilton College. His most recent book is Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism (Basic Books, 2024).

Cohn served as chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, when the Wisconsin senator was riding roughshod over the ...

In 1971, a few weeks after The New York Times wrapped its explosive series on the Pentagon Papers, the conservative magazine National Review ran a scoop of its own: another set of secret papers, this ...

Amid the recent flurry of radical executive orders, one in particular has flown under the radar: President Trump has seized ...

The civil wars in Syria and Iraq have transformed the jihadist threat to the United States. For the first time, a jihadist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), has been able to combine ...

In the fall of 2018, University of California, Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez said, to an audience of economists, policymakers, and the press, “If the data don’t fit the theory, change the theory.” ...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s first sex discrimination case came to her, improbably enough, from a man. The man who handed her the case was her husband, Martin Ginsburg; the gentleman she represented was a ...

What’s in a name? Franklin Delano Roosevelt called himself a Christian, a Democrat, and a liberal. He did not call himself a democratic socialist, or any other kind of socialist. He was, in fact, no ...

In the spring of 2022, Americans checking out at grocery stores and gas pumps across the nation faced a stark reality: Their dollars were rapidly losing value. As inflation surged above 8 percent—a ...

The Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest building at 102 stories, was completed in 1931. Building that majestic structure, later called one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the ...

Like so many others, I knocked on a lot of doors this fall—each day my worry growing that the Democrats might come up short. In a trailer park in southern Pennsylvania, two white women seethed about ...

The Editors of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas are Michael Tomasky (Editor), Jack Meserve (Managing Editor), and Delphine d'Amora (Associate Editor).