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Principles Of Government

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    • GOALS OF PROGRESSIVISM AND THE MODERN LEFT
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  • Principles of Government
    • INTRODUCTION
    • CITIZENSHIP
    • BELIEF SYSTEM
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America Needs the Filibuster AA

By Ben Sasse July 19, 2026 - The filibuster prevents the dramatic pendulum swings that are the natural result of simple-majority lawmaking. Every election and every vote becomes an existential crisis in a system that no longer plods through checks and balances but instead rushes to European-style referenda.... It’s a partisan’s dream: Court packing, new states, federal takeover of state elections...Sweeping changes to nearly every aspect of national and local life....The reality is that once the dam breaks, the stakes will climb endlessly higher. Read More

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Big Government Inevitably Invites Corruption AA

By Marian L. Tupy July 20, 2026 - But what makes such conduct possible in the first place? Democrats rightly blame the man....But there is another culprit. The power of the federal government, which commands the fate of every major enterprise in America. A tariff waiver can mean billions for one company and bankruptcy for its rival. An antitrust filing can erase a decade of shareholder value in an afternoon. A procurement decision can build a company, and a regulatory finding can bury one. When the government holds that much influence, officials need not even demand tribute. Tribute arrives on...

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India’s Affirmative-Action Lesson for America

By Sadanand Dhume July 15, 2026 - Quotas hold the country back, even as China’s meritocracy fuels its economic advancement....“The biggest challenge for 21st-century India is how to go forward with democracy and merit,” Mr. Das said. He pointed out that India could learn from China’s “remarkable success” in recent decades at dramatically reducing poverty and becoming “a middle-class nation.” Mr. Das argued that China’s embrace of the principle of merit—in both education and leadership selection—played a large role in the country’s transformation. Read More

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Trump Can Restore Standards to Federal Hiring

Charles Murray June 19, 2026 - Bring back an updated version of the Federal Service Entrance Examination and apply the Rule of Three for all new hires. (the “Rule of Three”...limited the hiring official to a choice among the three highest-scoring candidates—the only truly effective way to limit the role of personal preferences in hiring decisions). It won’t transform the civil service immediately, but it would dramatically improve the competence of new hires and the fairness of their selection. Read More

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Justice Thomas: Progressives vs. the Declaration AA

By Justice Clarence Thomas- Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement—...—to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration. Progressives strove to undo the Declaration’s commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident....But we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bounds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx and their followers. Fascism—which, after all, was a national socialism—triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions. The socialism of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China proceeded to kill more tens of millions of their own people. This is...

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What the Founders Didn’t Trust

By Barton Swaim - July 1, 2026 - The doctrine of original sin—and its implication that humans tend toward rank self-interest and degeneracy—animated every part of the constitutional structure the Founders erected. ... Even the skeptics and deists among them, of whom there were few, happily adopted Christianity’s moral outlook. ...But Hamilton, Jay and Madison aimed chiefly to convince the public that the proposed Constitution, by balancing powers against each other, mitigated man’s propensity for mischief, violence and corruption. Read More

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Rediscovering Order in an Age of Populism AA – lengthy article

By Mike Pence & Ed Feulner - Summer 2025 - An existential identity crisis now grips the American right. A political movement once united by a commitment to limited government, moral order, and a robust defense of American ideals now appears fractured, its purpose clouded by populist grievances and ideological drift. The urgency of this moment demands a return to first principles, along with a reexamination of what conservatism means and what it seeks to achieve in an age marked by cultural upheaval and political polarization. Read More

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How Public Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage AA

By Fred Siegel - But there was another "rights" movement, largely overlooked, that has also had a profound effect on American life. The looming public-pension crisis that threatens to bankrupt city, county and state governments had its origins in those same years when public employees, already protected by civil-service rules, gained the right to bargain collectively. Read More

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The Democrats’ Refounding of America AA

By Christopher Caldwell - ...In this view, the civil rights movement wasn’t just a reform but a refounding....The real political legacy of the 1960s comes from the Civil Rights Act of 1964....…The new law cut constitutional corners, constraining freedom of association, ... drawing the federal government into the running of local elections. It opened the door to new kinds of lawsuits: The U.S. attorney general, for instance, could now file discrimination suits against local school districts. It imposed a degree of federal management on all institutions that received federal money. And it created a vast investigative infrastructure through the Equal...

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Jimmy Carter, Champion of Deregulation AA

By Phil Gramm - Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 on Oct. 1, doesn’t get enough credit for the quarter-century economic boom from 1983 to 2008 and the underlying resilience of the economy since. Without Mr. Carter’s deregulation of airlines, trucking, railroads, energy and communications, America might not have had the ability to diversify its economy and lead the world in high-tech development when our postwar domination of manufacturing ended in the late 1970s. The Carter deregulation helped fuel the Reagan economic renaissance and continues to make possible the powerful innovations that remake our world. Read More

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The Partisan Bureaucracy AA

By Kimberly A, Strassel - May 11, 2021- Would the IRS violate your privacy to further Democratic policy objectives?....The lesson is that Republicans must realize that Democrats are no longer their only political foe. They face an equally potent and dangerous federal bureaucracy—committed to destroying GOP officials and propelling a liberal agenda. Read More

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Mitch McConnell: Liberal Bureaucrats Threaten Democracy

By Mitch McConnell - The Constitution vests each branch of the federal government with an exclusive power, responsive to the people in elections. In each branch, liberals seek to remove that power from democratic accountability and vest it in unelected bureaucrats.  Read More

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DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America

By Tunku Varadarajan and Ilya Shipiro - … The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution.… If you read critical legal studies, of which critical race theory is a subset, you’ll read about the need to ‘fundamentally dismantle existing structures,’ to ‘change the way social hierarchies operate.’ . . . The goal is to fundamentally change the way that American society operates”…. Read More

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The Deep State Is All Too Real

By David Bernhardt - Grade-school civics teaches that Washington is designed to operate under a system of checks and balances, constrained by the Constitution and empowered by the consent of the governed. In practice, however, power has become concentrated in the executive branch and largely wielded by unaccountable career bureaucrats. The notion of a “deep state” isn’t a conspiratorial talking point but a manifest political reality....The separation of powers is an animating principle of our nation’s founding documents. Read More

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America Needs a New Civil Rights Act

By Philip Hamburger - Today’s problem is the suppression of dissent. ...Most worrisome is federal and state encouragement for private entities to discriminate against Americans with dissenting views. ...The funding justification for regulation increasingly reaches not only subsidized programs but entire institutions. And almost every major institution receives federal funding. So the potential for privatized government discrimination is nearly unlimited. In education, conditions on funding interfere with academic speech and the freedom of private institutions....The first step in a constitutionally more modest approach would be to recognize that government power shouldn’t be exercised in ways that discriminate. On this basis,...

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‘Not Accountable’ Review: Unelected Legislators

By John Ketcham - In short, the union thwarted the mayor’s authority over the city’s schools and commandeered the state’s legislative power. In this case and many others, a public-sector union served its own interests at the expense of the public’s. In “Not Accountable,” Philip Howard shows in vivid detail how such practices have made government at all levels unmanageable, inefficient and opposed to the common good. He argues that, in fact, public unions—that is, unions whose members work for the government—are forbidden by the Constitution. Read More

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Characteristics of Government

  • INTRODUCTION
  • SOCIALISM
  • COMPETITION
  • DEMOCRACY AND VOTING
  • SOCIAL POLICIES EFFECTS ON DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT
  • GOALS OF PROGRESSIVISM AND THE MODERN LEFT
  • EVOLVING IDEOLOGIES
  • DEMOCRACIES AND NATIONAL DEFENSE

Principles of Good Government

  • INTRODUCTION
  • CITIZENSHIP
  • BELIEF SYSTEM
  • GOVERNMENT STRUCTURE AND POLITICAL SYSTEM
  • FISCAL POLICIES
  • SOCIAL POLICIES
  • FREE MARKETS AND REGULATION
  • SOUND MONEY
  • THE RULE OF LAW
  • DEFENSE AND FOREIGN POLICY
  • Conservation and Environment

Resources

  • Featured Articles
  • ARTICLES
  • BOOK REVIEWS
  • Books
  • MAJOR THINK TANKS
  • CIVIC EDUCATION WEB RESOURCES
  • Important Conservative Organizations
  • Conservative American Colleges and Universities
  • Print Resources

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