American Right
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How Far We’ve Come since 1940
In greed and meanness, that is. This speech might be full of cliches, but it envisions a cliche world I wouldn't mind to live in. Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator
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Elitism and the American Equality Ideal
People in Red America are in pain, and it's deeper than just economic. I'd argue that a good deal of the pain comes from the disjunction between its mindset and the real world in which Red America lives. The world no longer makes sense for a mindset that was developed in the early 19th century.
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Lessig on Neoprogressives
But if this Neo-Progressive Movement is to have any chance of success, it needs to be disciplined enough not to insist that all members also be members of Moveon.org. We need, to borrow and remix the insight of Cass Sunstein, an "incompletely theorized movement." We need Republicans who stand in the tradition of Reagan and
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Tea Party at the Mall
Liberal and rationalist Steve Benen asks what do these people want? He can't figure it out, but I don't think it's that difficult. They want the United States to be what it was before the Civil War. I don't think it's primarily driven by racism; racism is a part of it because that's the way
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The Ground Zero Mosque
I wasn't going to say anything about this because it just seems like another ridiculous scuffle in our endless culture war, and it has provoked little more than knee-jerk reactions on either side of the issue. I certainly don't dispute that in America you have a right to build a place of worship wherever you
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Movie Treatment: The Second Civil War (Updated)
Treatment for a first episode in bad made-for-TV miniseries: It's 2011. As credits roll in the opening, scenes of lines at soup kitchens, tent cities, a radio newcast voiceover describes a food riot in Miami, survivalists in a firefight with mobile marauders in the Northwest, another voiceover editorializes about the failure of the Obama administration's
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The Race This Week (Updated)
The polls have been notoriously inaccurate in this primary season. There are probably better analyses why than my rumination here, but in a volatile situation where no real pattern or dynamic has been established and in which a large percentage of voters are undecided, the polls have little predictive value. Olbermann's "Keith Factor" is a
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Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary
If there is one overarching emotion that characterizes Romanticism, it's nostalgia. The Romantic hates modernity and longs for something lost, a lost age (or a lost childhood) when one did not feel so estranged, when men were men and women were women, where nobility and grace and chivalry were the rule, where the world was