One of the strangest things about contemporary politics is that many people who support authoritarian politicians seem at least as unhappy about the state of their country as the people who oppose those politicians, and sometimes they appear even more unhappy than their opponents. What gives?

NEW BOOK ALERT! I’m very excited to be able to finally show you my newest edited volume, Fascist Legacies: Far Right Ideologies Then and Now. More info on the book and a very special offer here: arikohen.substack.com/p/new-book-a...

I think, from now on, any time something doesn’t go well for me I’m going to blame SICK DERANGED VANDALS for whatever happened.

If things have seemed quieter around here, it’s because I’ve been on a family vacation to visit relatives in Virginia. Apart from the usual travel-related shenanigans and general excitement of children thrown off their usual schedules, we were fortunate to do some American history sightseeing.

This is awesome! You too can help Sara’s campaign in all sorts of ways. Check out saraforoppd.com to volunteer or donate!

There’s an unusual phenomenon that’s taken hold of us as a species over the past two decades, namely spending an inordinate amount of time trying, across time and space, to convince total strangers that your opinion is correct.

Despite my seemingly constant harping on the problems of social media and the (mis)information environment in which we live, it’s crucial for citizens to have a handle on what’s happening outside their front door.

This week, I wrote about how we can build empathy in our daily lives by reframing the way we react to someone who offends us. Rather than focusing on my own feelings of being insulted, I've been encouraged to try to imagine what the other person must be feeling to have acted this way.

If you spend any time on social media, you’ll very quickly run into the claims that both sides are terrible and all politicians are the same. The comment is delivered with a sense of confidence and finality: cynical detachment is the only rational response to contemporary American politics.

It’s been an exciting and challenging primary season here in Nebraska and now the successful candidates are putting their efforts into a long summer and fall of campaigning ahead of November’s important general election.

It would be easy to cultivate more readers, to increase traffic, to get more comments and restacks. I know the game because I played it for years when I published my (usually angry) thoughts on a blog that averaged many thousands of daily views and when I was (overly) active on Twitter.

There’s a certain clarity that comes from having an enemy. We can pretty easily see its appeal, but we also need to be able to articulate a form of political engagement that can compete with it.

If the following formulation sounds familiar, it’s probably because you were active on Facebook or Twitter in 2015-2017:

"Fascist Legacies," the new book from me and Gerald Steinacher will be published this summer and it's available for pre-order now from the University of Nebraska Press (tinyurl.com/2x9z32pk). We're very proud of this fourth volume in our ongoing book series, Contemporary Holocaust Studies.

Liberal political thought doesn’t demand alienation from our neighbors, but it does recognize that there will be moments when our values require us to hold positions that are deeply unpopular. In today's post, I spend some time thinking about why it matters much more to be right than to be popular:

About a year and a half ago—maybe a bit longer than that now that I think about it—I deleted all of the social media apps from my phone. Read about why I did it and why I think it matters for liberalism as a political philosophy here: arikohen.substack.com/p/turning-of...

I got an email this afternoon from a Jewish organization that referred to “intolerable antisemitic violence” and that phrase has been stuck in my head ever since. It certainly feels intolerable to American Jews. But nothing will change until it’s intolerable to a lot more people.

I’m a weirdo. I love institutions and rules. Regulations and regular order really are my cup of tea. I spent a fair amount of time learning parliamentary procedure in high school. When someone “calls the question” during a meeting, I know what we’re supposed to do and what we’re not supposed to do.

Any society that spends this much time debating the genetic makeup of Jewish people is not a healthy society.

Exciting news in our house: Sara Kohen is running for a seat on the Omaha Public Power District board of directors. It’s an important role in our community and I hope a lot of people will jump in to help her win this race! Lots of info is here: saraforoppd.com

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the pervasive sense that the slow decline of liberalism has sped up considerably but at the same time that it’s not clear what we can do about it.

If we feel that we cannot safely attend a protest or film a law enforcement officer or legally carry a gun—whether or not we will ever do these things or have any desire to ever do them—then we cannot be said to have these rights in any meaningful way.

It’s 2026! But when it comes to writing about liberalism we haven’t changed very much by breaking out that new “12 Hilarious Basset Hounds for 2026” calendar we got for Hanukkah last month.

Right before the beginning of this semester, I made a series of changes to the syllabus of one of my classes after attending a seminar on teaching civil discourse.

I find that I repeat myself a fair amount, and not just because I’m getting older and more forgetful. One thing that I never get tired of saying is that a community is only as good as you make it.

If there’s one thing I find myself saying to my students in every class I teach, it’s this: we need to spend more time together.

With another successful “No Kings” protest in the books, there are some who are—rightly, I would say—feeling buoyed by the effort. The crowd sizes were impressive, the signs were both deeply funny and deeply serious (sometimes at the same time), and the people in adorable costumes...

As I often tell my students, time is always running out; there’s always going to be less of it than you hope for and, as a result, it’s probably the truest expression of our priorities. open.substack.com/pub/arikohen...

Charlie Kirk’s murder hit me harder than I ever could have anticipated, not because I liked or agreed with him but because I disliked and disagreed with him so vehemently. I felt as though I had a personal relationship with Kirk over the past decade, one that consisted of him making my life worse.

In about 30 minutes, we’ll be hosting a great event and, if you’re not in Lincoln, you can tune in online using the following link:

The surest sign that a liberal democratic society is falling apart is when it becomes commonplace to use and to celebrate violence against people because of their politics. This is an extremely bad and dangerous time.

On Tuesday, in my first class of the semester, the students had a lively debate about the limits of toleration … though perhaps not in the way you might imagine. They weren’t interested in figuring out when they could “cancel” someone.

I'm incredibly honored to announce that I've been named the inaugural Kripke Chair of Judaic Studies at @unlincoln.bsky.social. Rabbi Myer and Dorothy Kripke were pillars not only of Nebraska's Jewish community but the wider Jewish world as well, making this appointment especially meaningful to me:

I was incredibly privileged to spend several days last week in Chapel Hill at a joint Duke/UNC seminar on teaching civil discourse. I joined professors from universities around the country to talk about why and how to teach controversial topics at a moment of deep polarization.

In this week's post, we’re not going to solve the Israel/Palestine problem. Instead, I write about the central point of Matti Friedman’s recent article, namely that facts are an uncertain thing, especially when bad actors can benefit from the spread of misinformation.

When a moment of moral emergency comes—when vulnerable people are in danger or when liberal democracy itself is threatened—we look to those leaders to make the hard choice rather than the politically convenient one.

This is how you behave when the leader of your party definitely isn't implicated in an absolutely horrific child trafficking and sexual exploitation cult, right? Right?

If liberalism was a dish at a restaurant, it would be buttered noodles. If liberalism was a musical genre, it would be pop hits of the 2010s. It feels like the political philosophy of people who want to stay home on a Saturday night and take a nice warm bath. Read more here:

I love arguing, always have. This penchant for argument is part of my heritage as a member of both a liberal democratic society and the Jewish people. In both traditions, debate and disagreement is absolutely central.

I’m always surprised when I hear adults who have subscribed to the infantile idea that prayer is basically just making a wish, that God is some sort of lamp-bound genie or rarely-glimpsed shooting star. It’s such a sad and impoverished vision of the Divine.

The thing is, when a person’s off-the-cuff remarks are salted with bigoted language, it’s because he’s used to thinking and saying them. In case anyone wasn’t clear on why this man keeps saying bigoted stuff, across a whole decade of ad libbing during political speeches.

This is the guy we’re supposed to believe is devoted to fighting the antisemitism, right?

Happy 4th of July! This week, I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about political violence and what it means for liberalism. Before you start grilling burgers and lighting sparklers, check it out: arikohen.substack.com/p/political-...

News flash, if the president is successfully coercing news coverage of him in major national outlets, it’s not a free country with a free press.

There’s something about political liberalism, with its vocabulary of toleration, pluralism, deliberation, and process, that feels, to many people today, like weakness.

There is a temptation, I think, to view last weekend’s “No Kings” demonstration as a protest about the political landscape in one country (the United States), of one policy (the treatment of migrants), or of one person (the current occupant of the White House).

It’s fun because Tucker spent something like three full years peddling the classic antisemitic Great Replacement conspiracy theory on his Fox show but Cruz can’t call him on that because then he’d lose all his extremist supporters who totally bought into that when Tucker was selling it every night.

Not caring what Tulsi Gabbard said is, in fact, the most defensible stance, especially regarding what she says about the Middle East or Europe. Except that's why she should be a kook doing hits for Russian State media, rather than Director of National Intelligence for the United States.

Last week, I wrote about antisemitism and what its resurgence means not only for the Jewish people but also for liberalism. At the same time, I wrote a companion piece about the danger of using illiberal tactics to combat antisemitism. That's here: arikohen.substack.com/p/the-enemy-...

It’s impossible to write something that doesn’t discuss the back-to-back attacks on American Jews in DC and in Colorado. I had a couple of days over Shavuot to do some quiet thinking about what terrorist attacks on Jews can tell us about the health of American liberal democracy.