The odds for a Biden victory do not look good. Possibly the Democrats will win the Senate. Probably they gain strength in the House. Our long national nightmare just got longer. Obviously, we cannot surrender to Trumpism. We have to endure, so that, eventually, when the emotions that brought Trump to power exhaust themselves, the…
Search Results for: Liberalism
Freedom OF Speech or Freedom FROM Speech? Emily Bazelon is confused
And confusing. Over at the New York Times, Emily Bazelon has a humongous take on freedom of speech in the era of “Big Tech”, though working my way through umpteen thousand words of vaguely authoritarian liberal hand-wringing over what we should do about people who say things Ms. Bazelon doesn’t want to hear (and doesn’t…
Political Notes from All Over: Paul Krugman is cool, Ross Douthat is mad, Kamala Harris is “necessary” (probably), and Black Lives Matter is living down to Billy Barr’s expectations
Tough to be a man! Or a woman! Or even just a little kid. But stuff happens, as Donnie Rumsfeld liked to say, and this is some of the stuff that’s happening. First up is the good news: Paul Krugman is cool! I’ve frequently though not necessarily bitched about the way the Krugman too often,…
Are we having fun yet? Why living at the end of history has become the living end
When I went to first grade, I learned to print my name and hide under my desk in case of a nuclear blast. When I went to the movies, I saw news reels of U.S. above-ground atomic weapons tests in Nevada. (Nobody worried about fallout then.) In 1968, my parents could stand on their front…
Bernie Sanders is not a social democrat. He is a revolutionary socialist.
Bernie II is starting to look a lot like Trump I, as the startled center starts to realize that there’s no there there any more. The bad news is, Bernie Sanders isn’t a Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama style conventional liberal reformer; he’s a true believer socialist who wants to smash capitalism and live in a righteous…
Does the libertarian movement need a kick in the pants? Or is it just Nick Gillespie?
Sorry, Nick, but if you give Literature R Us an opening for a cheap shot, we’re going to take it. Nick incautiously let his guard down last month with a post in Reason, “The Libertarian Movement Needs a Kick in the Pants”, in itself a riposte, as it were, to Tyler Cowen’s thought-, if not…
Old Man War Machine, he jes’ keep rollin’ along
(Editor’s Note: I wrote this piece to describe the military intellectual complex’s endless search for a new Cold War. But Donald Trump seems to be looking for a hot one.) The Washington Post’s recent release of the “Afghanistan Papers”, which reported at least a significant portion of the near-infinite number of lies told to justify…
Democrats gone wild! Why the Democrats be acting so crazy.
Well, you’d be acting crazy too if you had just gotten out of jail after 25 long, hard years in the slam. And that’s where the Democrats are coming from. All real Democrats, that is, which doesn’t include squishy neo-lib, “pragmatic”, compromising wimps like me—dudes who believe in free markets (most of the time) and…
Robert Kagan writes an interesting essay, with some stretchers, and not a few omissions
In one way, Robert Kagan’s recent “long-form” (7,000 words) essay in the Washington Post, “The strongmen strike back”, is an honest, intelligent examination of the rise of illiberalism in the modern world, a phenomenon as incontestable as it is dispiriting. In another way, Bob’s latest and longest is a bit of a con job, and…
Brian D. Feinstein and Eric Schickle explain it all for you
Want a seriously detailed examination of the great role reversal in American politics, as the Democrats shifted from the party of segregation to the party of equal rights, losing the South but gaining its soul? Then check out “Platforms and Partners: The Civil Rights Realignment Reconsidered” by Brian D. Feinstein and Eric Schickle in Studies…