Liberalism has been schizophrenic about democracy for about a century.

Reform at the top is obviously helpful (it is better to have a Yeltsin than a Brezhnev in charge), but alone is likely to be inadequate.

Higher tax rates on high earners, even if they produce less revenue, are an attempt to centralize power in government and to limit the autonomy and countervailing power of individuals in the voluntary sector. Which is why the liberal bloggers cheer them on.

American-Israeli author Gershom Gorenberg​ argues, Israel is a country best defined by its contradictions. So is his newest book, The Unmaking of Israel.

A new systemic idea about the social order would have to emerge to really disprove Fukuyama.

In a newly published op-ed, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar Paul Wolfowitz, Mark Palmer, and Patrick Glenn emphasize that foreign assistance alone is a poor solution to reducing poverty and ineffective at improving governance in transitional democracies. Instead, the United Nations should establish Millennium Governance Goals.

The new president will need to decide whether democracy in the process is more important than democracy as the final result. How should the United States react if, as the new regimes rewrite their constitutions, they turn from democracy toward theocracy? (INCLUDES VIDEO)

Pushing government decisions down to the lowest democratic level possible — while protecting basic civil rights — guarantees that more people will have a say in how they live their lives.