Welcome to Arguments

Welcome to Arguments, Democracy’s new blog.

In our inaugural issue five years ago, we asked, “What could be more anachronistic—in the media culture and political climate of 2006—than the founding of a quarterly journal of ideas?” One could well ask the same question of starting a blog at this late date, more than a decade after the first blogs started appearing.

But Democracy has never cared much for what’s fashionable. Ideas are our métier, and we’ve been pushing some of the best over the last five years. In that time, Democracy has emerged as the premier forum for progressive ideas in our discourse, a clearinghouse for the best that our side has to offer.

Don’t let the blog mislead you: Our belief in the long essay remains as strong as ever. And our commitment to refashioning progressivism for the twenty-first century remains intact. With the blog, we hope to extend Democracy’s reach, if only modestly, into the blogosphere. Our web traffic has grown by leaps and bounds in the last year—our last issue was our biggest online yet—and we hope to use the blog to build on that growth and find new avenues to present our ideas to the world.

This will not be a news blog, nor will we be updating with the frequency of a Daily Kos. Our posts will be thoughtful, substantive dispatches from the Democracy community; they will be extensions of arguments that have played out in our pages, or opening salvos in new ones that we hope to start. In the coming weeks, we’ll have posts from Democracy editors and staffers, as well as authors who have appeared in our pages, like Shadi Hamid, Isabel Sawhill, Bradford Delong, Thomas Edsall, and Susan Christopherson.

So please check back frequently and chime in. We’re excited to launch this new phase of Democracy’s development, and we hope you will be, too.

—The Editors