Fear and voluntary servitude are powerful political motivators. “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” This was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice to Oliver Wendell Holmes who, as • Read More »
Tags: Emerson, Estienne de la Boétie, fear, monarchy, Peter Baker, reprisal, trump, voluntary servitude
We’ve had a really close call. I’m glad I put blogging and much else aside for a while, when I became deeply immersed in the Biden/Harris get out the vote • Read More »
Tags: coup, Fascist, hitler, inept authoritatianism, mussolini, Napoleon, Nazi, nearest run thing, Trump Administration, Waterloo, Wellington
Trump’s Italian Doppelgänger survived COVID-19. An encouraging example for the President, perhaps. Though more visibly fit, recidivist former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi is actually ten years older than Trump. Still, he • Read More »
Tags: Berlusconi, COVID-19, populism, trump
Pullout from NATO in a second Trump term? The September 3 New York Times piece by @michaelcrowley was enough to trigger palpitations in any old security policy wonk. No big surprise, in truth. The President • Read More »
Tags: 2020 election, NATO, North Atlantic Treaty, presidential power, Senate, treaty withdrawal
“First do no harm.” Not an actual quotation from the Hippocratic Oath, but sound advice for physicians and politicians. Crafters of the newly approved platform of the Democratic Party took it to • Read More »
Waiting for the Barbarians is certainly an imperfect movie. The performances by Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp, for example, are one-dimensional, and the latter regrettably seems reduced to doing caricatures • Read More »
Tags: #thetartarsteppe, #waitingforthebarbarians, Alexandria, cavafy, coetzee
Avoiding demographic meltdown requires immigration, now more than ever. There is bad news for the U.S. birthrate. Peter Coy writes for Bloomberg that, due to the pandemic, 2021 births here could • Read More »
Ambassador behaving badly. Not exactly a new story, but the CBS News item about the current U.S. ambassador to Iceland was particularly juicy. Although serving in one of the safest countries in • Read More »
Tags: career diplomats, Iceland, Jeffrey Ross Gunter, political appointees, U.S. ambassador, vetting
Historical analogies can help us think about the present and the future. Our current situation is in part similar to the aftermath of World War II in Europe. No war with tens of • Read More »
Tags: Catholic Church, Christian Democrats, Clare Boothe Luce, Communists, globalization, Holy See, Socialists, Steve White, US-Italy