For the past few years, the foundation of America’s open society, its bedrock liberalism, has been eroded by the woke left and the populist right. In his newly released book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, Thomas Chatterton Williams traces how the rise of social justice—and the explosive summer of 2020—generated the angry politics we face today.

Williams shows how the left’s race to the extremes opened the door for Donald Trump’s return to office in a far more aggressively populist guise than in his first term. The zero-sum thinking behind the president’s protectionist agenda is emblematic of this second-term approach. In a new analysis, Derek Scissors explains why the most severe impacts of Trump’s tariffs are yet to come.

Tariffs are just one example of how the president is using unilateral assertions of his power to bypass Congress’s constitutional authority. AEI congressional expert Philip Wallach highlights a new, under-the-radar tactic the administration is using to avoid spending appropriated funds: “pocket recissions.”

Over the past few years, Congress has made critical investments in the United States’ defense industrial base. Mackenzie Eaglen documents how the military is at last addressing its munitions shortages and building the capacity to sustain a long war.

In education, classical schools are providing a much-needed alternative to the ideological conformity and bureaucratic constraints of traditional public schools; however, the limited availability of qualified teachers is slowing their growth. In a new AEI report, Robert Pondiscio, Annika Hernandez, and Riley Fletcher map out what policymakers and schools can do to expand the pool of educators available to these schools.