Yes! But the articles pasted here will be (I hope) a little less doctrinaire, and a little more self-critical, than those sometimes found on progressive sites--while still keeping a distinctly progressive perspective. Topically, the material will be more closely tied to national (versus international) issues. I'm particularly interested in questions of economic justice and equity, and in the need to counter efforts, always ongoing, to imprint in the public laws, and impose on the public discourse, forms of ideological orthodoxy: those conceptual and discursive boundaries that foreclose close questioning, open discussion, and rigorous, critical analysis. But I'll also pass along articles that--while only loosely related in theme--still strike me as strong, insightful, and interesting to read.

In short, I see this site as an opportunity to freely foist my own particular biases, premises, and angle of view upon you, the reader. :) Please feel free, on your part, to point me to articles on the web that I should include--I plan to add new links each week--and to ways I might improve what I'm doing. Just click the "write" link above (or click here) and begin.

  Dissent is not incidental to democracy--a nuisance to be tolerated--but vital to it.

  To enable dissent, democracy must reject the current course toward a disengaged, trivialized, procedural conception of public life in which new or substantially differing perspectives--particularly those that call into question entrenched economic/philosophic/political orthodoxies--go unheard and, ultimately, unexpressed. This erasure of debate can only produce a false consensus, a passive "affirmation" that is capable merely of confirming and reproducing the status quo. Instead, we need to affirm a more vigorous democratic process, one which draws a fuller range of voices into the civic discourse and which, in so doing, makes more genuinely reciprocal the central negotiation of democratic life: how best to balance individual (private) interests and collective (public) responsibilities.

  To an equal extent, our public conversations should not hesitate to be about something essential. As Justice Robert Jackson observed,

  The freedom to differ, or dissent, is precisely the theme that unites each of the First Amendment's six protections (or five, if the Establishment Clause is read, rightly, as consonant with free exercise--as its logical and necessary precondition):

At root, what the First Amendment prohibits is any effort by government to answer for its citizens questions of identity: of who people are, and of what they (should) believe.

  One of our most pressing socioeconomic predicaments--that 10 percent of us in the U.S. possess 71 percent of the nation's wealth, and thus a disproportionate voice in public affairs--is inherently undemocratic. So, likewise, is the political/economic right's justification of this status quo, its defense of the conservation of wealth and privilege.

  A better world is possible. It's trite to say. But with the right's aggressive, long-running, and largely successful campaign to make conservative ideology appear the "natural" or presumable order of things, it still seems worth emphatically saying.

  Our understandings always are partial, in both senses of that: incomplete, and inclined to that with which we're familiar. We can see the world more clearly when our thinking, and our knowledge, consist commensurately of revisions.

  So, partly in sum:

• Democracy is the dialectic, i.e., the process of reasoned argumentation and persuasion. Emptying public life of this logical tension empties it of content.
• When we bring new voices and new perspectives into our public conversations, we can better recognize that, in the words of legal scholar Martha Minow, “the status quo [is not] natural and inevitable," but is instead "a reflection of choices made and choices that can be remade." Here especially, history matters: The past (literally) is in front of us.
• True learning, and thus true progressive change, are premised on habits of mind--in particular, on the adoption of an attitude of critical openness that admits ambiguity and the capacity to rethink old or inherited understandings.