Politics
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Centrist Politics & Rhetorical Virtue
Rhetorical virtue requires having the practical wisdom to achieve your communications goals with a particular audience. What's virtue for one audience is not virtue for another. If you to lead a group of true believers, there's rarely rhetorical virtue in appearing moderate and reasonable, or to suggest looking for ways to compromise with your opponents.
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Centrism qua Nihilism
"Centrism in accommodation of nihilism is no virtue." (Commenter 1.1 Elvis Elvisher @ Joe Klein's Time Magazine blog To win you have to appeal to moderates and the independent center, but people in the center don't really know what they think or believe. That's why the voters there flail this way and that way so
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Why Decency Isn’t Enough
Americans have to be shrewd, too. And if they put the GOP back in the majority today, they clearly lack shrewdness. I understand the country's frustration with the feckless, corporate-owned Democrats, and I understand that the economy is bad. So has it come to just flailing at whoever's in office? Is that how mindlessly lost
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Stewart’s Attempt to Restore Sanity
I think Stewart's rally is an admirable effort, and I appreciate what he's trying to do. I think his closing speech in the video above is well-wrought piece of demonstrative oratory designed to define the Aristotelian mean–that sane midpoint between the crazy extremes that we all recognize as the place where human decency and sanity
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Obama v. Stewart
A couple of issues came into focus for me after watching the interchange between the two the other night on The Daily Show. Obama's excuse for being a disappointment to the Dem base is that he couldn't be the visionary reformer he presented himself to be during the campaign because he had to deal with
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Why the Game is Up
And why I don't write about politics anymore. Chris Hedges: The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts
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Tea Party Profile: Jennifier Stefano
Stefano has big goals for making the Republican Party more assertive. “The lower end of Bucks County [PA] is heavily Democratic,” she said. “We have to go out and start bringing the message to the people, recruiting people to run for vacant seats there. Democratic areas, working- and middle-class places, the conservative message has to
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Quote of the Day: Glenn Greenwald
This last point is the critical one for me, and most illustrative of why I find the effort to cut Social Security so appalling. For the moment, leave to the side abstract debates over the propriety of social programs, or even debates over specific proposals such as raising the retirement age or means-testing. Instead, let's
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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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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