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Thousands of visitors from around the world have visited the town - about 100km (60 miles) south-west of Berlin - in recent months as it forms the focus of the anniversary celebrations.

Amid ceremonies marking Luther's legacy 500 years on, there have also been protests about an anti-Semitic sculpture (Judensau) which remains on the facade of another church in Wittenberg.

During Aranda’s administration, an ambitious project was adopted for colonizing a depopulated area in the South of Spain, the Sierra Morena, with colonists from abroad, mostly from Germany

Charles certainly tried to reduce the authority and privilege of the Church, but he was pious and his intervention was moderate.

It was not merely what the Inquisition did, but what it deterred men from doing

it is an absolute principle always to do what has been done the day before and to do it in absolutely the same way

Charles issued a decree declaring officially that the trades of tanner, blacksmith, tailor and shoemaker did not degrade the person exercising them, or his family. To carry the point further, he worked from time to time with his hands in his own factories, and he was proud of having made the boots and main items of a soldier’s equipment

It is difficult to exaggerate the darkness of the intellectual climate in which Charles and the men of the enlightenment had to work

It is impossible to understand Charles’ reign or the achievement of the men of the enlightenment in Spain without keeping constantly in mind how widespread and entrenched were the forces of conservatism, intolerance and privilege, and how few were the men who believed that the only hope for the country lay in the introduction of new ideas—in the acceptance of reason rather than tradition as the lode-star of human activity

has never produced a speculative scientist of great renown

Few people here discover any love for the sciences. Books are little read

Much was done to reform the universities

There was a revulsion against war and a condemnation of militarism. ‘This peninsula,’ wrote Cadalso, ‘has not enjoyed anything that can be called peace for nearly 2,000 years. It is a marvel that there is any grass in the fields or water in the fountains

In 1771 he created a new order that opened the doors of the nobility to the bourgeoisie

Along with the embourgeoisement of the Spanish central government went a fresh broom in local affairs that swept away many of the old hereditary offices, opened them up to anyone who was qualified regardless of birth, and even introduced elections for certain posts

He also encountered the deep-seated conservatism of the people who feared the slightest change

He established royal factories for clocks and porcelain; infant industries were protected, and some of the restrictive practices of the enormously powerful guilds were curtailed

The first national bank of Spain was founded, and economic societies were established in many parts of the country to spread technical knowledge

Trade with the colonies was encouraged; new highways were built

Charles was also a considerable patron of the arts and sciences. He founded an astronomical observatory and an immense hospital.

Napoleon remarked to his brother, Joseph, when he gave him the crown of Spain

But Charles’s struggle for internal reform was partly stultified by his failure to spare the country the cost of further war. In 1775 an expedition was undertaken against Algiers which failed ignominiously

The 1733 family Compact between the Kings of France and Spain contained an article committing His Most Christian Majesty to do everything, if necessary using force, to compel the British to restore Gibraltar to Spain

It bound Madrid to Paris and prevented Spain from making common cause with Britain

the main source of five Anglo-Spanish wars in seventy-five years and was the prime objective for which Spain joined France in the War of American Independence

Spain’s participation in the war led at first to a joint French-Spanish plan to invade England, but this soon had to be abandoned and, after the failure of secret peace talks, Spanish activity came to be concentrated more and more upon the capture of the Rock

as if all the ingenuity of Europe was combined against the Rock

From all over France and Spain spectators flocked to see the 7,000 British defenders under General George Elliot defeated by the 40,000 men under the command of the renowned Spanish general

The battle was over, and with it Spain’s chance of recovering the Rock by force

But George III was in favour of giving it up since he was convinced that ‘this proud fortress’, to use his own words, would be ‘the source at least of a constant lurking enmity between England and Spain’

He so arranged things that the British offer never reached the court of Madrid

The French Minister did not want to make the sacrifice of territory necessary to accomplish the exchange; nor did he wish to weaken the ties that bound the Bourbon powers by removing the greatest single obstacle to a reconciliation between Spain and England

In the light of history, it looks as if a golden opportunity was missed for resolving the problem. Spain recovered Minorca and acquired the whole of Florida. But the source of enmity continued to lurk

The war had brought serious consequences for Spain’s internal economy. But it had also not been without its effect on the problems of the Spanish-American colonies which now had a Republic on their doorstep

the movement for separation. The development of trade led to more prosperity among many of the creoles and, hence, to in-dependent-mindedness

the propagation of the ideas of the enlightenment

He insisted on every detail of every new idea being thrashed out in one or other of the various councils of state

like his great-grandfather, Louis XIV, that punctuality is the courtesy of kings

He was not out for himself, but for the welfare and happiness of his subjects

There could be no attenuation of his absolute authority. It was government for the people, certainly, but without the people

If the hopes were not entirely fulfilled and if Spain before long slipped backwards again into the darkness from which Charles had tried to lift her, the causes were hardly his responsibility.

The French Revolution spread such fears amongst the reforming rulers of Spain that they panicked and suspended all progress

Charles simply did not reign long enough to establish for all time the climate of change he had introduced

the Two Sicilies were happier under Charles than they had been for many a long century

he reversed his predecessor’s policy of neutrality and involved Spain in two expensive wars against Britain, for which she was ill-prepared; and he committed the country’s pride and strength to a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to recover Gibraltar

Born in Madrid in 1716, the son of Spain’s first Bourbon King, Philip V, and of his second wife, Isabella Farnese, he enjoyed in some respects a happy and normal childhood

to bend the foreign policy of Spain solely for the purpose of providing kingdoms for her offspring

I would like to deserve to be called Charles the Wise

Philip V inherited the melancholy, the longing for seclusion that at times overcame all reason

the King had become so deranged that he had to abdicate in favour of Louis

In October 1731 he set off for Italy to take over the Duchies of Parma and Piacenza, and to garrison Tuscany, an inheritance arranged for him by Isabella

the Austrians had to withdraw and Naples was ensured a separate existence under the Bourbons. Charles returned to his regime of hunting, building and reform.

Taking advantage of Austria’s preoccupations elsewhere in the war of the Polish Succession, Isabella decided to attack in Italy. The aim was to recover for Spain the provinces of the Two Sicilies which had been Spanish for two centuries until 1713 when they had been handed over to Austria under the Treaty of Utrecht. Spain declared war on Austria in December 1733, and Charles was made titular commander-in-chief of the 30,000 Spanish troops that landed at Leghorn

Austria withdrew without a fight and in 1734 Charles became King of the Two Sicilies, a territory now independent for the first time. But as part of the general settlement he had to give up his rights in the Duchies; and a commitment was made, which for him cast a shadow before, that the crowns of Spain and of the Two Sicilies would never be united

As in Spain later, Charles challenged and reduced the powers and privileges of the aristocracy and clergy. He reformed the archaic legal and economic systems. His aim was ‘to sweep away feudalism’,

Naples before him had been without industry or trade

Naples rose and flourished, a European capital of the arts

he astounded the aristocracy of Madrid by the purity of his life

His mother was once again meddling in Italian affairs, trying this time to exploit Vienna’s preoccupation with the war of the Austrian Succession to recover the central Italian duchies for Philip, her second surviving son. Charles was forced to send troops north to support his brother’s Spaniards who had landed under the Duke of Montemar

he nourished a grievance against Britain

he helped to defeat the Austrian troops at Velletri. He showed courage and leadership in the battle, having survived an attempt at capture

identify government not only with order and tradition, but with reform, and thereby helped to avert revolution.

This routine was shattered in 1759 by the death of his childless half-brother Ferdinand VI who had been King of Spain since 1746; a King who, true to family tradition, had gone mad

For months the kingdom of Spain languished under this rule

From the moment of his arrival in Madrid in December 1759, Charles showed that he was not prepared to follow in Ferdinand’s easy-going footsteps. Government was a serious business, and would be conducted by himself in the interests of the people

Italian influence came in with him like a tidal wave, sweeping over muph of Spanish life

But it was in administrative reform that the sharpest note of change was stock. The economy of the country was sagging, yet Charles badly needed more money—among other things to pay off his father’s debts, and to strengthen the almost non-existent defences of Spain and the Indies. A flow of decrees poured forth regulating commerce and providing for the collection of revenue.

cleaning as was done was carried out by private enterprise, by troops of sweepers

Charles set about a radical clean-up

Since reaching Madrid, Charles had been under pressure from both sides to join in the war between Britain and Prussia on the one hand, and France and Austria on the other, which had broken out in 1756

Ferdinand VI had managed to stay neutral and Maria Amalia had been a strong influence for peace, but after her death, Charles changed his policy

life-long grudge against the British for having taken Gibraltar from his father—a feeling compounded by Commodore Martin’s insult

if he joined the French alliance, might help him to recover Minorca and Gibraltar. So in August 1761 he agreed to the Family Compact with Louis XV which brought him into war against Britain

Spain was heavily defeated by the British fleet which captured Havana and Manila

British power had greatly increased, partly at the expense of Spain

The country was exhausted, and there was much resentment against the French. Charles personally would have liked to have shaken himself out of the family straight-jacket

But Louis XV dismissed Choiseul and wrote to Charles in his own hand: ‘My minister would have war, but I will not

Charles had no alternative but to capitulate to the British

the Madrid mutiny of 1766

The favour he had shown early on towards the bourgeoisie, his concern for the poor, and the reforming zeal of his Ministers had all helped to generate distrust amongst the nobility and clergy

the discontent did not stop with the rich

There was widespread public unrest caused by the effects of the war, prolonged drought and high prices. Far from assuaging this, Charles had aggravated it, particularly in Madrid

public indignation

Squillace was the main target of public wrath

Within a week the King capitulated and agreed to everything

the Jesuits the scapegoat for the mutiny. In 1767 they were expelled from Spain with ruthless efficiency

Analysis of district-level voting patterns suggests that Republicans enjoy an inbuilt 2.1 percentage-point advantage in contests for the House majority. Joe Biden won the national vote by 4.6 points in 2020. He won the median House seat, Illinois’s Fourteenth Congressional District, by 2.5 points.

Not since the mid-1990s have Republican senators represented a majority of American voters. The 50 Democratic senators elected in 2020 represent nearly 42 million more Americans than the 50 Republicans.

Shifting power from an overmighty presidency to a Congress that overindulges reactionary minorities will do democracy no good. The post-Watergate reformers recognized that logic, and joined their limits on the presidency to an attempted modernization of Congress.

the reformers of the 1970s understood the architecture of American democracy. Power flowed from Congress to the presidency precisely because the presidency was the most accountable branch of the federal government. If the flow was to be reversed, Congress needed to be democratized. This same problem presents itself with even greater force in the 2020s.

The 60-vote Senate has become an accepted fact of American politics, along with presidents who lose the popular vote, and state legislatures where 45 percent of the vote is converted into 55 percent of the seats, or more.

The Senate is defended by a sequence of rationalizations: It’s good that a Wyoming vote counts 68 times more than a California vote. It’s good that garnering 59 out of 100 votes does not suffice to enact laws. It’s good that any one legislator is able to disrupt the proceedings. These rationalizations have proved contagious. If minority rule is good sometimes, why not more of the time?

As the Senate has deviated further and further from majoritarian norms, the House and the state legislatures have followed. Among the great merits of Jentleson’s Kill Switch is that it reminds us how recent this trend is.

In the era of the 67-vote filibuster, the tools of minority rule were used to defend racial segregation, a cause that even its supporters did not like to defend openly.

In an important new book, Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson offers a harrowing portrait of how anti-majoritarian dysfunction has paralyzed the U.S. Senate.

The Framers’ constitutional design balanced majority rights as they were understood at the time—the rights of a majority of those persons possessed of full citizenship who voted in state and House elections—against a federal Senate to protect the rights of smaller states and a judiciary insulated from passing political passions

it’s one thing to respect regional and cultural minorities; it’s another to let those minorities impose hostile preferences upon an unwilling majority, year in, year out, with every exit from federal minority rule blocked by even more obdurate systems of minority rule at the state level.

Jentleson offers a program for reform that begins with the outright elimination of the filibuster. But without constitutional change more radical than anything contemplated today, the Senate will always remain counter-majoritarian—and Senate reform can accordingly take the country only so far toward the reanimation of the majority-rule principle.

the House, often falsely complimented as the “people’s House,” is the part of the government most in need of democratic change. Change to the House depends on change to the anti-majoritarian state legislatures that redraw congressional districts—and that change depends on renewal of the voting-rights laws the federal courts have so weakened over the past decade and a half.

In the meantime, the federal and state executive branches are the tools most available to the disempowered majority.

America got the imperial presidency in the first place in great part because of the defects of Congress. From free trade to civil rights, the post-1945 presidency would act to do things in the broad public interest over the truculent obstruction of Congresses dominated by narrow and backward-looking minority interests.

But presidents, even the greatest of them, are not magicians. Since 2010, the U.S. political system has been ever more extremely biased toward its narrow and backward-looking ideological minorities. Weaken the executive branches, federal and state, and you privilege those ideological minorities.

don’t overcorrect, and don’t overdo it. Under present rules and conditions, the executive power, state and federal, is the least antidemocratic power in the American political design.

The only hope for bringing majority rule to the rest of American politics is voting-rights enforcement by the federal Department of Justice—and maybe some forward-thinking governors—against the probable resistance of the U.S. Senate, the Republican-dominated federal courts, and the minority-rule state legislatures.

The presidency and the governorships have not always advanced the cause of majority rule in the past. They will not always do so in the future. But at this moment, that’s precisely what they’re poised to do. The enemies of the majority-rule principle understand that fact. The friends of majority rule should absorb it too.

Putnam concludes that during the Progressive Era (1890-c. 1910) “the institutional, social, and cultural seeds” of what he labels the “Great Convergence” were sown. Out of those seeds emerged more than six decades (up until the late 1960s) of “imperfect but steady upward progress toward greater economic equality, more cooperation in the public square, a stronger social fabric, and a growing culture of solidarity,”

“then suddenly and unexpectedly . . . the Great Convergence was reversed in a dramatic U-turn, to be followed by a half century of Great Divergence.”

the USA “entered the Sixties in an increasingly ‘we’ mode—with communes, shared values, and accelerating efforts toward racial and economic equality—and we left the Sixties in an increasingly ‘I’ mode—focused on ‘rights,’ culture wars, and what would be almost instantly dubbed the ‘Me Decade’ of the 1970s.”

Each Upswing chapter from 2 through 5 is devoted to a separate field--economics, politics, society, or culture. And each deals with the trends from the 1890s, when the Progressive Age began, up to the present era.

the “we” of the Great Convergence was often meant for white males more than for all Americans.

Although Putnam discusses many historical explanations for the transformation beginning in the late 1960s, like the backlash against the gains of African Americans and women, he is wise enough to realize that major historical occurrences, like the transformation considered here, almost always have innumerable causes.

It was then, in reaction to a “Gilded Age” similar to our own, that the turn toward a more cooperative, less self-centered society began

describes the Progressivism of the that time as a diverse movement “to limit the socially destructive effects of morally unhindered capitalism, to extract from those [capitalist] markets the tasks they had demonstrably bungled

“Communitarian sentiment,” he declares, “was at the heart of the Progressive mood. Teddy Roosevelt, Jane Addams, and other progressives were explicit in rejecting ‘individualism,’

The 1920s, with its three consecutive Republican presidents, slowed down the growth of communitarianism.

with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II, it renewed itself until it began in the late 1960s to reverse itself

some of the accomplishments of the Progressive Era: “the secret ballot; the direct primary system; the popular election of senators; . . . women’s suffrage; new forms of municipal administration; the federal income tax; the Federal Reserve System; protective labor laws; the minimum wage; antitrust statutes; protected public lands and resources; food and drug regulation; sanitation infrastructure; public utilities;

a vast proliferation of civic and voluntary societies; new advocacy organizations such as labor unions, the ACLU, and the NAACP; the widespread provision of free public high schools; and even the spread of public parks, libraries, and playgrounds all owe their origins to the efforts of a diverse array of Progressive reformers.”

“Progressivism . . . was not confined to the Progressive Party but affected in a striking way all the major and minor parties and the whole tone of political life. . . . It was a rather widespread and remarkably good-natured effort of the greater part of society to achieve some not very clearly specified self-reformation.”

To make his point that Progressivism was primarily a “bottom up” movement involving countless citizen reformers, he provides brief biographical sketches on some of them such as Frances Perkins (b. 1880), Paul Harris (b. 1868), Ida B. Wells (b. 1862), and Tom Johnson (b. 1854).

Generalizing about the Progressive movement, Putnam writes it “was, first and foremost, a moral awakening.”

Aided in part by the religious thinking of the Social Gospel thinkers, “Americans from all walks of life began to repudiate the self-centered, hyper-individualist creed of the Gilded Age.”

The movement was also pragmatic, not ideological, for “true innovation requires openness to experimentation that is not premised upon ideological beliefs.

Putnam believes that Progressives came to realize that “to succeed they would have to compromise—to find a way to put private property, personal liberty, and economic growth on more equal footing with communitarian ideals

These lessons regarding moral urgency, pragmatism, and compromise are ones that Putnam thinks modern reformers need to apply.

he does not yet “see a truly nonpartisan movement” bringing “issue-specific efforts together in a compelling citizen-driven call for large-scale reform.” Nor does he see “a broader vision for the future of America.”

we should, Putnam insists, learn from what they did wrong. Most significantly, they failed to make the “we” they stressed inclusive enough, paying insufficient attention to gender and racial discrimination.

“The question we face today is not whether we can or should turn back the tide of history, but whether we can resurrect the earlier communitarian virtues in a way that does not reverse the progress we’ve made in terms of individual liberties. Both values are American, and we require a balance and integration of both.”

Hirschman was suggesting that doubt could be a source not of paralysis and death but of creativity and self-renewal. One of his last books, published when he was about eighty, is called A Propensity to Self-Subversion. In the title essay, Hirschman celebrates skepticism about his own theories and ideas, and he captures not only the insight but also the pleasure, even the joy, that can come from learning that one had it wrong.

Hirschman’s work changes how you see the world. It illuminates yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His categories become your categories.

Hirschman sought, in his early twenties and long before becoming a writer, to “prove Hamlet wrong.” In Shakespeare’s account, Hamlet is immobilized and defeated by doubt. Hirschman was a great believer in doubt—he never doubted it—and he certainly doubted his own convictions. At a conference designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his first book, who else would take the opportunity to show that one of his own central arguments was wrong

Who else would publish an essay in The American Economic Review exploring the “overproduction of opinionated opinion,” questioning the value of having strong opinions, and emphasizing the importance of doubting one’s opinions and even one’s tastes? Hirschman thought that strong opinions, as such, “might be dangerous to the health of our democracy,” because they are an obstacle to mutual understanding and constructive problem-solving.

The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) is a study of the reactionary’s tool kit, identifying the standard objections to any and all proposals for reform. The objections are “perversity” (the reform will make the problem even worse), “futility” (the reform will do nothing to solve the problem), and “jeopardy” (the reform will endanger some hard-won social gain). Hirschman shows that these objections are stupefying, mechanical, hyperbolic, and often wrong

He insisted that human history provides “stories, intricate and often nonrepeatable,” which “look more like tricks history has up its sleeve than like social-scientific regularities, not to speak of laws.” He was interested in “the many might-have-beens of history,” including “felicitous and surprising escapes from disaster.

Hirschman was delighted by paradoxes, unintended consequences (especially good ones), the telling detail, inventories of actual practices (rather than big theories), surprises, and improvisation. In his view, “history is nothing if not farfetched.”

He invented the term “possibilism,” meant to draw attention to “the discovery of paths, however narrow, leading to an outcome that appears to be foreclosed on the basis of probabilistic reasoning alone.” In his lifetime, one of many such outcomes was the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, which almost no one anticipated.

Shifting Involvements—a small masterpiece that illuminates the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and protest movements of diverse kinds. Hirschman emphasized that human beings are often choosing between private and public life, and thus between the different forms of happiness that are associated with each of them. He described “pendular motions of collective behavior,” in which people swing from happiness to disappointment in one kind of activity, and then to the other. For example, the disappointments and frustrations of the student rebellions of the late 1960s encouraged a return to private life in the 1970s and 1980s. Rejecting the highly influential idea that the problem of collective action has a kind of invariable, ahistorical “logic,” Hirschman drew attention to the immense importance of history and timing as, in Adelman’s words, “people leave the streets and plazas disenchanted with politics to seek happiness in the shopping malls”—and vice versa.

The Rhetoric of Reaction, written in his mid-seventies, was an outgrowth of the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s, and it speaks directly to our current debates. Hirschman was struck by the routine, stylized, even mechanical character of much conservative thinking—and its close connection, in its rhetoric, to arguments that have been made for hundreds of years. Indeed, conservative rhetoric is the book’s target, perhaps above all in the person of Edmund Burke,

But if The Passions and the Interests was his favorite, and Exit, Voice, and Loyalty his most important, there can be no question about his most characteristic: The Rhetoric of Reaction. The sustained attack on intransigence, the bias in favor of hope, the delight in paradox, the insistence on the creative power of doubt—all these prove a lot of people wrong, not just Hamlet.

experience with Romneycare in Massachusetts — hey, this is a great age for irony — shows that such a system is indeed workable, and it can provide Americans with a huge improvement in medical and financial security.

where the New Deal had a revolutionary impact, empowering workers and creating a middle-class society that lasted for 40 years, the Big Deal has been limited to equalizing policies at the margin.

That said, health reform will provide substantial aid to the bottom half of the income distribution, paid for largely through new taxes targeted on the top 1 percent, and the “fiscal cliff” deal further raises taxes on the affluent. Over all, 1-percenters will see their after-tax income fall around 6 percent; for the top tenth of a percent, the hit rises to around 9 percent

his races to the top in schools and cars are both based on one brutal fact: “The high-wage, medium-skilled job is over,” as Stefanie Sanford, a senior education expert at the Gates Foundation, puts it. The only high-wage jobs, whether in manufacturing or services, will be high-skilled ones, requiring more and better education, and Obama’s two races to the top aim to produce both more high-skill jobs and more high-skilled workers.

Though never perfect, No Child Left Behind was still a game-changer for education reform because it gave us the data to see not only how individual schools were doing but how the most at-risk students were doing within those schools. Without that, educational reform based on accountability of teachers and principals could never start.

46 states submitted reform blueprints — and only the 12 best won grants from $70 million to $700 million, depending on the size of their student populations — even states that did not win have been implementing their proposals anyway.

because 45 states and the District of Columbia adopted similar higher academic standards (known as the “common core”) for reading and math, “for the first time in our history a kid in Massachusetts and a kid in Mississippi are now being measured by the same yardstick,” said Duncan

Obama’s doubling of vehicle mileage by 2025, led by his Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation, it’s already driving more innovation in Detroit, as each car company figures out how it will improve mileage by 5 percent every year.

Yes, the costs for cars with higher miles per gallon will rise a touch, but the savings will be manyfold that amount. The Environmental Protection Agency projects families will save $1.8 trillion in fuel costs and reduce oil consumption by 2.1 million barrels per day by 2025, which is equivalent to one-half of the oil that we currently import from OPEC countries every day

Similar waves of protests in the past successfully halted a government plan to cut the French pension system in an effort to curb its spending deficit.

In addition to fuel shortages, which that have created huge lines at gas stations, the unions have also called for nationwide strikes in the public transportation sector, including air traffic controllers and at many of the 19 nuclear plants that provide electricity for much of the country.

With approval ratings below 20 percent, Hollande is the least popular president in modern French history.

The tumult raises the possibility that Hollande may not be chosen to run for re-election in 2017, which would be the first time in more than 50 years that a first-term incumbent was not tapped to pursue a second term.

Protests could grow until then, when France will have already begun hosting the Euro 2016 soccer tournament.

Many are concerned that the disruptions to fuel supplies — and possibly even electricity — could affect the tournament, a major sporting event with millions of viewers that will place France, yet again, in the international spotlight.

Under David Cameron, the Tories came to rediscover what Labour seems to have forgotten, namely that elections are fought and won on the centre ground. It is possible to nudge the dial a little, but victory can only be achieved by straddling the centre while appeasing your core.

this is a lesson that is deep rooted within the party. One of Cameron’s greatest strengths was his longevity; as leader for over a decade, he was able to make significant progress in reshaping the parliamentary party in his own image

One of the outcomes of the referendum has been to prompt a new realignment within the party. The old Thatcherite v one-nation split, which admittedly has long been on the wane, has now firmly recrystallised around the new labels of Remainer and Leaver. So the present leadership contest is essentially a battle between one-nation Conservatives with only Liam Fox, the stand-alone candidate from the old school.

It will be one-nation Tories who will be in charge of making Brexit a reality.

Brexit can only be part of the solution. An agenda of social reform, which addresses some of the frustrations and divisions that the vote unmasked, is politically necessar

the referendum debate has provided the rationale and opportunity (given Labour’s dire state) for Cameron Conservatism to be fully realised.

First, it requires a more robust one-nation vision. One that moves away from offering cosy reassurances to metropolitan liberals that the Conservatives are no longer the “nasty party” (which was essentially what legalising gay marriage did) to one that addresses the concerns of those in Britain’s deindustralised heartlands

, a one-nation Conservative agenda cannot be seen to enact a divide, as much of Thatcher’s social reform did, between the deserving and undeserving poor or, worse, heed the Ukip agenda, creating a division between immigrants and the indigenous population.

When Conservatives such as Gove talk about social reform, they tend to centre on the individual, policies that help people realise their potential through opportunity. But surely, if the referendum has revealed anything, political capital needs to be realised at a community rather than individual level.

Second, the fate of whoever wins the leadership will depend almost entirely on how he or she negotiates Brexit and specifically, what is crucially the central plank of the deal – the balancing of freedom of movement with the freedom to trade. This will not be easy

If people start feeling that Brexit has not worked for them and do not soon see increases in wages, improved access to social services and a restriction on immigration then the political backlash will begin in earnest

If the public gets any whiff of a whitewash or if the government is seen to have sold Britain short in any way, the narrative of the “Great Betrayal” will be scripted long before the election.

Third, the fortunes of one-nation Conservatism will depend largely on the fortunes of the Labour party.

if under new leadership, Labour was somehow able to resuscitate itself and make a direct charge for the centre ground, a credible revival is still possible.

Cameron inadvertently has achieved his chief goal: to stop the Tories banging on about Europe.

His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.

Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.

Of the postwar presidents, only Johnson exceeds Obama’s domestic record, and Johnson’s successes must be measured against a crushing defeat in Vietnam. Obama, by contrast, has enjoyed a string of foreign-policy successes

liberal melancholy hangs not so much on substantive objections but on something more inchoate and emotional: a general feeling that Obama is not Ronald Reagan.

In terms of lasting change, Obama probably has matched Reagan—or, at least, he will if he can win reelection and consolidate health-care reform and financial regulation and tilt the Supreme Court further left than he already has.

what is it that American conservatives want to conserve?

Today’s Republicanism is, in contrast, absolutist, ideological, fundamentalist and angry. It has ceased to be a voice among others in a genuine conversation about our country and become a rigid, absolutist ideology fueled by the worst aspects of the right – from racism to Randian indifference to the many others who made – and make – our lives possible. A lot of the time, it is quite simply philistine.

Here’s what McClay gleans from Oakeshott’s writing that could help the cause of conservative reform: First, the idea of conversation as the model for civilized life. Second, the need to create and preserve appropriate scale in our communities, for the sake of fostering just such conversation. Third, the profound human need for release from the burden of purposefulness, which is perhaps another way of expressing the enduring need for transcendence, an avenue that Rationalism tends to foreclose to us. And fourth, the irreplaceable mission of liberal learning.

To translate: civility in public discourse, maximal federalism and subsidiarity, a sense of transcendence to overcome the delusions of materialism and individualism, and a relentless defense of universities as the core places where our society learns to breathe and grow in the light of knowledge and understanding.

Is this an agenda? Not in any sense of the word. And that is the point. There is no fixed set of policies that an Oakeshottian conservative will embrace. It will all depend on the time and the place and the problem. He will question change and reform as a constant necessity

But he will also try and judge when reform is necessary to preserve the coherence of a society.

The issue, in the end, is one of prudential judgment about all these questions, a skill and virtue that can never be reduced to an ideology or “ism”.

Understanding the limits of one’s own understanding makes a political conversation natural.

It’s a way of thinking. And until we revive that manner of thinking, American conservatism will remain defined by its ugliest and dumbest protagonists.

Ravitch thinks the solution is to get rid of the tests. But that way just leads to lethargy and perpetual mediocrity. The real answer is to keep the tests and the accountability but make sure every school has a clear sense of mission, an outstanding principal and an invigorating moral culture that hits you when you walk in the door.

tests are not the end. They are a lever to begin the process of change. They are one way of measuring change. But they are only one piece of the larger mission. The mission may involve E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curricula, or character education, or performance arts specialties. But the mission transcends the test. These schools know what kind of graduate they want to produce. The schools that are most accountability-centric are also the most alive.

Starting in 2001, China decided to engage in a nationwide reform of its curriculum, including significant changes in the textbooks used by students in grades 10, 11 and 12. In that year, China’s Ministry of Education stated that education should “form in students a correct worldview, a correct view on life, and a correct value system.”

The crucial finding from the study is that the new curriculum greatly affected students' thinking. They became more likely to count the Chinese political system as democratic. They displayed a higher level of trust in public officials. They were more skeptical of free markets, and more likely to reject the view that a market economy is preferable to any other economic system. They were more likely to want to extend political influence to groups outside of the Chinese Communist Party.

On two questions, however, the curricular reforms failed. Students didn't become more favorably disposed toward environmental protection. They were not more likely to give the environment priority over economic growth, and they were not more willing to give up some of their income to protect the environment. Nor was there a significant change in the attitudes of Han Chinese students (the majority) toward minorities.

With respect to minorities, the students’ beliefs appear to be deeply engrained, and essentially impervious to curricular influences.

As Cantoni and his co-authors summarize their various findings, “the state can effectively indoctrinate students.” To be sure, families and friends matter, as do economic incentives, but if an authoritarian government is determined to move students in major ways, it may well be able to do so.

Is this conclusion limited to authoritarian nations?

A year after the DOJ announced the findings of its investigation into the Ferguson Police Department, Lynch said the people of Ferguson should not have to wait any longer for "their city to adopt an agreement that would protect their rights and keep them safe." She said the violations by the police and courts in Ferguson "were not only egregious — they were routine."

She also said she was disappointed that Ferguson had not approved the deal, as the goal of the negotiation was to avoid litigation.

"A few weeks ago, the Department of Justice and Ferguson's own negotiators came to an agreement that was both fair and cost-effective — and that would provide all the residents of Ferguson the constitutional and effective policing and court practices guaranteed to all Americans. As agreed, it was presented to the Ferguson City Council for approval or rejection. And last night, the city council rejected the consent decree approved by their own negotiators. Their decision leaves us no further choice."

The lawsuit alleges a "pattern or practice of law enforcement conduct that violates the First, Fourth and 14th Amendments of the Constitution and federal civil rights laws," Lynch said. "We intend to aggressively prosecute this case and I have no doubt that we will prevail."

From a conservative point of view, Mr. Obama did everything wrong, afflicting the comfortable (slightly) and comforting the afflicted (a lot), and nothing bad happened. We can, it turns out, make our society better after all.

What did Mr. Obama do that was supposed to kill jobs? Quite a lot, actually. He signed the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform, which critics claimed would crush employment by starving businesses of capital.

He raised taxes on high incomes, especially at the very top, where average tax rates rose by about six and a half percentage points after 2012, a step that critics claimed would destroy incentives.

And he enacted a health reform that went into full effect in 2014, amid claims that it would have catastrophic effects on employment.

Yet none of the dire predicted consequences of these policies have materialized.

what do we learn from this impressive failure to fail? That the conservative economic orthodoxy dominating the Republican Party is very, very wrong.