Wealth Distribution
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Miscellaneous Thoughts on Impeachment, Culture, and the Surveillance State
It's important that the U.S. have a post-Trump reckoning about how much damage has been done, not just by him but by his enablers. Will the impeachment play some role in that? I doubt it, since the whole point of it is simply to focus on what is already known about what Trump did before
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Christian Nationalism
If you're not aware of this bizarre exercise in religious delusion, this article in the NY Times does a good job of laying it out, and of identifying who benefits. It's pretty much what I've been writing about over the last month–how billionaires use culture war issues and credulous Christians to insure the entrenchment of
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Quote of the Day: Eliot Cohen
Other thoughtful Republicans (or former Republicans) are mulling over their own complicity in a party that was compromising its values for power. But equally, or more so, there has not been a full reckoning on the left. Particularly given the impending release of what is sure to be a gracefully written and elegiac memoir by
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Trump Doesn’t Worry Me; Republican Leadership Does
If Republican leadership won't stand up to this buffoon playing at il duce, why should we expect them to stand up to a truly dangerous, ruthless one? This is another problem of commonplaces and how they work with ideas that everybody grew up thinking. The commonplace about the Republican Party is that it's pro-business, pro-military,
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Quote of the Day: Ross Douthat
Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are naked on his Twitter feed, but Bloomberg’s imperial instincts, his indifference to limits on his power, are a conspicuous feature of his career. Trump jokes about running for a third term; Bloomberg actually managed it, bulldozing through the necessary legal changes. Trump tries to bully the F.B.I. and undermine civil liberties;
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Drift toward Authoritarianism
I am sympathetic to those who think that liberal democracy is failing, was, in fact, always doomed to failure. After all it gave us Trump, who presently is at an all time high approval rating with Gallup at 46%. The U.S. had a flawed but good run for a good quarter millennium. But it's time
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Steve Bannon: Minister of Propaganda, not Policy (Updated)
In a post last November I wrote a piece entitled "What Kind of America Does Steve Bannon Want?" I wrote about how his view of America seems to be very much at odds with the view held by the Republican establishment, i.e., the world dominated by the Koch Brothers, American Heritage, their creatures in the