National Affairs

01/30/2025

To drive the next wave of innovation, researchers must re-learn to reason about the world using simple, transparent principles, and to draw on both theory and data in their work.

Contemporary social scientists seem to think that access to vast amounts of data has rendered theoretical frameworks far less useful than they used to be. Yet scientific theory is just as important as ever. To drive the next wave of innovation, resea...

01/27/2025

Free markets today face skepticism from factions on both the left and the right. Samuel Gregg & Richard M. Reinsch II discuss how to defend them:

Long viewed with suspicion by many on the left, free markets today face skepticism from factions on both the left and the right. These challenges go far beyond the technical and the legal: They suggest we need to remind ourselves of some of the basic...

01/25/2025

Americans are clearly troubled by the state of their political leadership and the quality of candidate choices in recent elections. Hans Zeiger writes about how to form citizen leaders worthy of our republic:

The systems that prepare citizens to hold elected office in America today are wide-ranging — from formal schools to institutions of civil society to political institutions themselves. Some are more functional than others. By surveying their history a...

01/23/2025

New schools of civic thought are emerging at major state universities across the country. James R. Stoner, Jr., discusses how they can find a home in the academy:

The past few years have seen the emergence of what appears to be a new field of inquiry in the academy. This field, known as "civic thought," is rooted in the perspective of the citizen and focused on developing the knowledge required to promote heal...

01/20/2025

As Donald Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second time, Tevi Troy provides a history of the White House policy process:

The White House sits at the nexus of our national policy debates. Yet how the team that surrounds the president facilitates his policymaking role is no simple question. The White House policy process we have today has developed gradually over many de...

01/20/2025

Martin Luther King, conservative? John Wood, Jr., joined our latest podcast to discuss why King should rightly be considered a philosophical conservative alongside one of the fathers of American conservatism, Russell Kirk:

The National Affairs Podcast, Episode 57: On the philosophical conservatism of King and Russell Kirk. ...

01/19/2025

Religious freedom is a crucial right in the United States. But what exactly is a religion, for purposes of the First Amendment? Frank DeVito considers:

Religious freedom is a crucial right in the United States, enshrined by the First Amendment's insistence that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." But what exactly is a religi...

01/16/2025

How can American Catholics be both faithful Catholics and devoted citizens of the United States? Robert P. George takes a closer look at the teachings of the Church itself:

Since our nation's founding, American Catholics have confronted the question of whether one can be a faithful Catholic and a devoted citizen of the United States. The question is not theoretical: Catholic parents and Catholic schools, among others, m...

01/14/2025

Flagg Taylor on the nature of speech and its relationship to human freedom:

Free speech comes under threat today because we tend either to deny or take for granted the nature of our freedom. Critics of free speech assert our un-freedom, while its friends shy away from demonstrating what they think ought to be axiomatic. More...

01/10/2025

"If you intend to push hard for a unitary political goal that cannot be achieved without significant coercion, and you have no clear sense of how it will turn out, your political activism is not only imprudent; it is immoral." A great Friday/weekend read by David Corey:

The notion that politics must be a collective pursuit of unified, rational ends has always held powerful appeal. In some circumstances — above all, in war — there is no alternative to coercing such agreement in practice. But as a framework for everyd...

01/09/2025

As restaurants go, so goes America itself. https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-future-of-the-american-restaurant

01/07/2025

Jonathan Hartley on how both Republicans and Democrats have embraced neo-populist economics:

We live in extraordinarily divided times. Yet in our day, no less than in the 1990s, economic policy is largely driven by a set of politically potent assumptions that cross party lines. These aren't the assumptions that dominated politics a generatio...

01/04/2025

New technologies are heaping disaster on the American family. But if properly guided, technological innovation can help uplift the family and usher it into a new era of flourishing. Jon Askonas and Michael Toscano lead off our Winter issue: https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/technology-for-the-american-family

01/03/2025

Our Winter issue is now live, featuring essays on technology for the American family, the White House policy process, the future of the restaurant, educating statesmen, the original meaning of religion, the politics of unitary vision, and much more. Happy New Year and happy reading!

A quarterly journal of essays about domestic policy, political economy, society, culture, and political thought.

11/04/2024

Ahead of Election Day, Andy Taylor joined our podcast to discuss the evolution of the modern Democratic Party. What is the vision behind Democrats' "democracy agenda"? https://nationalaffairs.com/blog/detail/media/from-the-new-deal-coalition-to-the-democracy-agenda-the-evolution-of-the-democratic-party

10/10/2024

Regulatory volatility badly undermines the work of American government. Jeff Rosen looks for solutions in each branch of the federal government:

Each time a new president has entered the White House in recent decades, his administration has either repealed or reinstated many of his predecessors' regulations while implementing dozens more of his own. This volatility badly undermines the work o...

10/08/2024

Proponents of net neutrality advocate a theory of "information equality." But as Luke Hogg writes, to maximize the benefits of modern telecommunications networks, policymakers must allow information to be treated unequally:

Discussions on regulating modern communication technologies often insist that all information is equal in value. But as the history of telecommunications demonstrates, information is inherently unequal, and ignoring that is likely to result in less i...

10/07/2024

Paul McDonnold: "Something tells me that even unelected regulators half-a-world away can feel pressure from an electorate. A political push for simpler financial regulation could change not only rules enacted in the United States, but those coming from Basel as well."

Big Finance often fails spectacularly for all to see, but regulation of finance fails quietly and insidiously through unintended consequences — like the increasing surrender of national sovereignty to unelected technocrats in Europe. Today's regulato...