Tocqueville, and the Self-Correction of Democratic Republics

President Donald Trump announced Saturday that he is deploying Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to American airports to help manage worsening security lines…

The Senate is debating the SAVE America Act — a bill that requires proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Simple. Obvious. The kind of thing that used to be uncontroversial. The bill has been on the floor for three days. Democrats have been calling it a voter suppression scheme, an attack on democracy, an act of Republican extremism.

Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian War, recorded what has since become the most instructive observation in the literature of statecraft: that it is the nature of dominant powers to expand their dominion wherever they are not resisted, and that the only durable check on aggression is the demonstrated will to oppose it completely.