Politics

Archives: The Best of Brian Doherty

The June 2026 issue's archives are dedicated to longtime Reason editor Brian Doherty, who died in March.

Reason Staff | From the June 2026 issue

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(Photo: Kestrin Pantera)

In March, longtime Senior Editor Brian Doherty died in a hiking accident. He was 57. To celebrate his life, this month's archives are excerpts from his 30 years of work at Reason.

3 years ago
March 2023

"In the post–Donald Trump GOP, support for the Iraq War has largely become anathema. Yet the U.S. has still not fully internalized that war's lessons. The Iraq debacle should have taught the U.S. it can never again scare itself into war based on guesses about how sinister some enemy is or will be. It should have taught Americans the damage that can be done by treating a foreign bogeyman as inherently intolerable—whether it's Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin or the mullahs of Iran, a nation whose feared pursuit of nuclear weapons has vexed Washington for many years."
"The Iraq War at 20"

6 years ago
December 2020

"If you actually care about a functioning civilization, it is never enough to have the state controlled by the 'right side.'…In a more libertarian world, police would not be continually engaged in overly aggressive assaults on citizens, whether those citizens were suspected of crimes or not. We suffer that now because police, as representatives of the state, are not subject to the same discipline that the rest of us are, and because they're charged with enforcing, potentially through violence, all sorts of petty or flagrantly unjust dictates, from traffic laws to drug laws. In a more libertarian world, we also would not see angry, threatening mobs insisting that random fellow citizens join them in public expressions of political piety or setting fire to buildings and breaking windows. However honorable the cause may be, such actions tear at the roots of our prosperity: the ability to possess wealth and space and to use them to offer goods and services for a price, helping others while peacefully bettering ourselves."
"Bourgeois Libertarianism Could Save America"

8 years ago
January 2018

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