This weekend, America embarks on its modern political tradition; the government shutdown. That semi-annual event spurred on by the inability, or lack of desire, to make sure that the necessary and constitutional duty of the American Congress, that being the appropriation of funds to all federal activities, is fulfilled in time before the previous appropriations run out.

Over the weekend, I saw Oppenheimer in the theater. Christoffer Nolan’s 3-hour biopic on the life of the father of the atomic bomb has been igniting discussions on nuclear weapons, deterrence, the intersection of science and the state, and critiques about the devastating effects of those weapons on affected communities and the ways in which it was okay or not okay for the film to not highlight them.

John F. Kennedy famously trounced his Republican rival and fellow future president, Richard Nixon in the very first televised debate for candidates to America’s highest office. JFK appeared young, full of energy and with a smile that many would come to instinctively know as the Kennedy grin.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid to man the ship of the democratic party for the 2024 presidential election has brought some dizzying conversation. He’s been called the anti-vaccine candidate, having built his recent brand around his fierce opposition to the covid-19 vaccines. Yet his campaign manager, former congressman Dennis Kucinich, calls that a smear and that really Kennedy is about vaccine safety.

The election of Donald Trump, Brexit, the war in Ukraine, the crisis of human movement out of the Middle East and Africa. These events, in singularity and in concert have contributed to a growing sense of unease in the liberal democratic order. A raft of data shows that people living in, and benefiting from, democracies are feeling increasingly weary or distrustful of those systems. The number and quality of democracies globally has been in decline, year-over-year, since 2006.