The impeachment curse
The final forced impeachment of Donald Trump has ended in the result that should never happen in a show trial. The sacrificial victim of the authorities’ spite was acquitted. Jonathan…
Tag: democracy
On living not by lies
2020 has taught us through bitter experience that our societies are not vaccinated against totalitarianism, and certainly not the mutant strain of “soft totalitarianism” described in Rod Dreher’s Live Not…
America’s fate: civil war, fragmentation or collapse?
Today after the distressing events and death in the Capitol building of Washington DC that interrupted the process of confirming electoral college votes, I am reposting this piece from five…
Waiting for the crisis to unveil
Events threaten to overwhelm my mind. The world stands on the brink of a crisis, and I cannot tell whether the world will drown me, or whether a disordered mind…
The failure of institutions in the pandemic crisis
Yuval Levin argues that the institutions of contemporary society, primarily America in his account, have become degraded. There is a good discussion with Yuval Levin on this topic over at…
K.T. McFarland’s Revolution in Tamerlane’s Shadow
Over the last week I have read the K.T. (Kathleen Troia) McFarland’s Revolution: Trump, Washington and ‘We the People’ (2020). I was led to this book by the remarkable case…
How democracies really die
I found on my bookshelf by chance yesterday the 2018 jeremiad by two Harvard University professors (of government and the “science of government” no less!), Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt,…
An open letter to America
To the citizens, office-holders and advocates of the United States of America, Your republic is breaking. Yet your empire holds on. And the conceit of manifest destiny as the primal…
Emmanuel Todd’s Lineages of Modernity
“Never have human groups of such a size been so rich, so old, so educated, so devoid of collective beliefs.” Emmanuel Todd, Lineages of Modernity, p 21 I picked up…
The impeachment curse
The third impeachment of an American President in my living memory is now drawing to a close: Nixon in 1973-74, Clinton in 1998-99, and Trump in 2019-20. Nixon used government…
On the virtue of not knowing (WordPress anniversary repost)
Today I am posting the last (for now) of my reposts from earlier, retired blogs. This post comes from 2010 and is a reflection on Vaclav Havel’s thought, then still…
Do we repair our republics with big ideas or ordinary virtues?
My old boss and sometime mentor, Terry Moran, has given an oration in which he sets out a diagnosis and remedy for the troubles of government and democracy today. Terry…
