Public Biography
Raúl Alejandro Guzmán is an opinion columnist for The New York Time5, where he writes “The Long Game,” a column that examines current events through the lens of historical precedent, civilizational cycles, and what he has called “the extremely long now.” He has written the column since 2022.
Mr. Guzmán holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation examined administrative collapse in late-period Spanish colonial governance. He previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin and spent four years as a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he developed a following for essays that connected contemporary American politics to the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the fall of the Song dynasty, and, on one occasion, the administrative practices of the Inca road system.
He was born in El Paso, Texas, to a family that has lived on both sides of the border for four generations, a biographical detail he has noted “gives you a certain perspective on the permanence of political boundaries.” His parents operated a small chain of auto parts stores in the El Paso–Juárez metro area.
Mr. Guzmán is the author of The Comfortable Decline: Why Civilizations Don’t Fall, They Sit Down (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), which was a National Book Award finalist and is assigned in at least fourteen university courses, a fact he considers “either vindication or a sign that the curriculum itself is in decline, which would also be consistent with my thesis.”
He lives in Chicago with his wife, a constitutional law professor, and their three children.
Selected Columns
- “This Has Happened Before, and It Went Badly Then Too” (January 2026)
- “The Roman Senate Also Thought It Was Fine” (October 2025)
- “America’s Roundabout Problem Is Actually a Sovereignty Problem, and I Can Prove It” (March 2026)