Politics
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Quote of the Day: Michael Lind
The media is building Ryan up as a serious thinker. Build him up even more, I say. Give him a Nobel Prize, like Obama's. Make him the face of the Republican Party. Progressives should want Ryan and Paul and the Cato Institute to define the next American right. That will ensure its minority status for
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Refusing to Be Bullied
I've been interested lately in how the outlines of the battle between the right and the moderate left at this time is a reflection of the battle as it took shape in the 19th century. The main outlines of the conflict are archetypal and as old as the Republic itself. The wonder is not that
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Portrait of a Tea Partier
This is not what it first appears, so read to the end. It's a vivid illustration–and an important reminder–about why what most of us think is secondary to what we actually do. From Jonathan Raban's NYRB report of his participation in the February Nashville Teaparty Convention: I was joined at a table by an intense,
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The Down Side of High Mindedness
Digby reposted a piece she put up in 2004 about the difference between conservatives and liberals and it reinforces my recent trope that we are still fighting battles from the 19th Century. She quotes the blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything who in turn quote an1820 essay by William Hazlitt: Conservatives and liberals play the game
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Glenn Beck: Man of the Seventies
. . . the 1870s, that is. From Robert H. Wiebe's The Search for Order 1877-1920: America in the late nineteenth century was a society without a core. It lacked those national centers of authority and information which might have given order to such swift changes. American institutions were still oriented toward a community life
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Upside of HCR Failure (Updated)
Marcia Angell on Moyers made the case why it shouldn't pass. She thinks overall it's going to make things worse despite its positives. And if it's going to get worse, better it should do so without government-run healthcare to blame. Maybe she's right. I'd like to hear her in a debate with Ezra Klein. But
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More on Jacksonians and Whigs
If Jefferson and Jackson saw political life as a dark struggle of "haves" and "have-nots", Lincoln and the Whigs saw the Democrats–Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Douglasite alike–as an irrational and power-hungry elite, as the real "haves" trying to play the "have-nots" off against the bourgeois "have-somes" in order to lock American politics into a static system
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Quote of the Day: Ezra Klein
The White House obviously can't pick all its fights at once, but as of yet, it hasn't picked any fights on Labor's behalf, or even shown a bare interest in doing so in the future. Some probably take that as Obama being usefully dismissive of a special interest, but in the long-run, letting Labor continue
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Quote of the Day: Henry Adams
Between the slave power and states' rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states' rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas "by joint resolution" [rather than
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Of Health Summits and Tools
I'm not writing much about the healthcare issue, because I haven't much to say I haven't already, and I'm trying to be more positive, or at least to write about things that point a way forward. It's harder to do, and hence the fewer posts. It's looking, once again, like something is going to get