Politics
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Embracing Your Inner Authoritarian (Updated)
From a Sullivan reader: I think a lot of President Bush’s attempts to super-empower the presidency have to do with his perception of crisis stemming from 9/11. I’m not endorsing Bush’s policies — I agree with a lot of your positions about the inherent antidemocratic dangers of his "Decider" presidency. But as a thought exercise,
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Quote of the Day: John H.
Do the hacks just think that it’s not worth taking political risks to end the Iraq War? Or do they secretly support it? After all, they feed from the same trough as Republicans. The political risk that Democrats refuse to address is their Culture of Weakness. Every time they cave to Bush to appear strong
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Boomer Culpability (Updated)
MZ in response to my "Soft Tryranny" post asked what I thought about boomer culpability in getting us where we are. I’ll share a few thoughts here, but what do other boomers think? Non-boomers–what’s your take on the responsibility of your elders in getting us all into this fix? I’d say first of all, the
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Learning from Weimar
Democracy is a fragile flower, as we learn again and again. Among the many failed democracies of the past century, few held more promise than Germany’s Weimar Republic, and none collapsed into greater horror. Its story can be told in two ways: as a drama of decadent excess and tragic flaws, or as an elegy
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Soft Tyranny
When any system of politics devours the surrounding culture, we have totalitarianism, the attempt to bring the whole of life under authoritarian control. We are bitterly familiar with totalitarian politics in the form of brutal regimes which achieve their integration by bludgeon and bayonet. But in the case of the technocracy, totalitarianism is perfected because
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Quote of the Day: Arthur Silber
Let us try to describe the general nature of our national conversation, and of our political debates. To even raise this subject, is to run into nearly insurmountable difficulties at the outset. It is not simply that our national discourse rests on a foundation of evasions, complicated by equivocations, twisted by avoidance, and rendered into
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David Brooks and Integrity
Brooks did a column yesterday on Deborah Pryce (R) Ohio. The whole premise that someone who admires Dennis Hastert is a paradigm of someone who has maintained her humanity and integrity is hard to take seriously. Maybe in Brooks’s world. I don’t know anything about Deborah Pryce, but from Brooks’s description of her she appears
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The Al Gore Phenomenon (Updated)
I admire Gore in many ways – especially his knowledge of science and his concern with civil liberties. But he’s also insufferable. And can you imagine how more pompous he’s going to be now? Andrew Sullivan Is it Gore the man who is insufferable, or is it rather Gore the creature fabricated by the Maureen
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America’s Moral Obligation to the Iraqis
In the current issue of Commonweal. Andrew Bacevich responds to the conventional wisdom "we’re obligated to stay" position as espoused by Matthew Shadle: The United States owes Iraq nothing. Its obligations to the Iraqi people are considerable. Specifically, the U.S. debt is to those who have suffered physical harm and been made destitute, who have
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Malkin as a Proto Brown Shirt? (Updated)
Michelle Malkin pioneered this new sphere of affairs last year by kicking off a campaign to attack a group of college antiwar protesters with their home addresses and phone numbers. It was, of course, unusually reminiscent of what went down in Rwanda during ethnic strife there, where radio announcers would give out the home addresses