Localism
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Douthat on Democracy
To be clear, the present Democratic Party is absolutely in favor of letting as many people vote as possible. There are no doubts about the mass franchise among liberals, no fears of voter fraud and fewer anxieties than on the right about the pernicious influence of low-information voters. But when it comes to the work
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Whither Scotland?
People have compared the U.K.-Scotland relationship, in the event of a split, to the United States and Canada, which of course is inexact and even absurd in all kinds of ways. But I will say this: whenever I’ve visited Ottawa and dipped a toe into the Canadian political experience, I’ve always come away impressed with
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Concentration of Power
Presents a greater danger to the public good than concentrations of wealth, but where there is concentration of wealth, concentration of power follows. Libertarians get upset with the idea of power concentrated in governments–and that can be a very serious problem–but the real problem in America has always been the way power concentrates in the
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Ukraine and the West
The Beltway hawks want to defeat Putin, depicted as a new Hitler by Hillary Clinton, to punish the Russian leader who put a stop to the oligarch looting spree of the 1990s that had sent Russia into a death spiral. Their dream: humiliating Putin, setting off “freedom” demonstrations in Moscow, perhaps a civil war to
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Douthat on the Leftist Pope
But the church’s social teaching is no less an official teaching for allowing room for disagreement on its policy implications. And for Catholics who pride themselves on fidelity to Rome, the burden is on them — on us — to explain why a worldview that inspires left-leaning papal rhetoric also allows for right-of-center conclusions. That
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Technocratic v. Humanistic Education 2
I wrote on this theme here, but this kid really gets it: See also Patrick Denneen's eloquent speech at Notre Dame against the Common Core. Key grafs: I began by suggesting that it was in the very absence of any national standard for education, and the strong tradition of local control of education, that we
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Seattle’s Two Most Interesting Elections
Washington State has 100% mail-in ballots, so it takes a while to find out who wins in close elections. Sue Peters and Kshama Sawant were in such close elections, and both won. Neither ran as Democrats in a Democrats-dominated town–they ran to the left of the Dem establishment and won despite all the money that
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Local vs. Central
Interesting discussion on Corey Robin's blog about the problems related to both, especially in the comments. There is always the problem of the particulars of any time and any place. That's why my bias toward the local is quite clear that often those tyrannized by local mafias need to have some way of appealing for
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Little Fish Fighting Big Ones
There is something admirable about the local autonomy enjoyed, for instance, by the patchwork of city states that composed the northern Italian Peninsula during the Renaissance. Not so desirable was their continuous, pointless fighting among themselves, and in the end their weakness in defending their autonomy against the centralized powers France, Spain, and Austria who moved in