The progressive challenges to the founding principles was largely intellectual and ideological; few challenged them on moral grounds. The current revolution of the woke vigilantes now challenges the entire morality of the founding; this is the danger of the 1619 Project and its reflection in the Black Lives Matter organization. By changing the focus of the founding from one of clarifying and protecting rights to one of advancing and protecting slavery they seek to remove any moral authority of the founding and the Declaration of Independence. It is no wonder that the statue toppling Olympics did not stop with the Confederates; Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were sure to follow.
Read MoreThe Corona virus may succeed in realigning the balance of trade better than any of Trump’s tariffs or negotiations. The Chinese market is still so large that it cannot be ignored, but it also can no longer be depended on to be a consistent and secure source of supply of critical components for American manufactured goods.
Read More“Properly understood, the “1619 Project” isn’t about black history. It’s about today’s racial disparities. It’s about applying current ideologies to past events, in the continuing attempt to blame the past actions of whites for the current problems of blacks.”
Read More“The right of property is of course always and everywhere a necessary but not insufficient condition for the flourishing of genuine liberty, which is a different thing from genuine democracy. Democracy despises property when it does not envy it and envies it when it does not despise it, and hence Senator Bernie Sanders et al. extol democracy in their war on property, which is a war on liberty, its sometime synonym. “
Read More“..this is not Donald Trump’s America or Elizabeth Warren’s America but ours and Walt Whitman’s and John Coltrane’s and Herman Melville’s and Toni Morrison’s, and that if we really love this country, then that can only be because we love the people in it, the ones who are with us still and the ones who have been, who are “not enemies but friends.”
Read MorePoliticians tend to promise benefits without paying for them, hiding the true cost in a maze of mandates, cross subsidies, proxies, and regulations.
Read More“Though democracy is probably the best form of limited government, it becomes an absurdity if it turns into unlimited government. Those who profess that democracy is all-competent and support all that the majority wants at any given moment are working for its fall. “
Read MoreThe federal government can put Social Security and Medicare on the credit card for as long as demand for U.S. Treasuries is high. States and municipalities don’t have that luxury. There is an upper bound to what even the most progressive mayors and governors can grant the lobbies that mobilize voters for their campaigns. But it’s a glass ceiling. Public sector unions are eager to break it.
Read MorePolitics can pollute science, religion and – in this case- history. We are all the sum of our decisions- good and bad. Progress comes from the recognition of both; recognition and correction of our sins, but also the recognition of how we overcame them and the value of our institutions that prevented other evils and promoted the stunning progress we have achieved in spite of our sins. The 1619 Project only wants to recognize our sins and ignore our redemption, virtues, and progress.
Read More“we are on a trajectory to increased sluggishness economically, which will mean increased ferocity politically as we use political power to allocate wealth and opportunity, which we used to assign to markets.”
Read MoreHanson’s Jacobin moniker is more accurate than ‘progressive’. It is a far more radical, illiberal, and often violent way to move the political needle. It is different than populism; it shares impatience and passion but lacks a root to the old order. Among populists you sense a love for the country, even if it is an older version of it; with the Jacobins you sense a disgust for the country. One could argue that the Jacobin wing on of the Democratic Party is just a violent radical populist movement, but its lack of civil restraints make it far more dangerous.
Read More“As a group they are virtually ignored, and yet they are the center of everything. They include those of the left who are no longer comfortable in a new progressive party. And rightists not comfortable with Mr. Trump, or with the decisions and approaches of the Bush era. It includes those experiencing ongoing EID—extreme ideological discomfort.”
Read MoreThus 1619 Project from the NYT is the opposite of history; it is anti-history. Instead of studying the past to learn about the present, it projects current passions on the past. Confirming events are generalized to be the sole motivation, non confirming events are ignored or minimized as inconsequential.
Read More“Therefore ameliorative government becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage. When government embraces redistribution, it summons into existence factions eager to get in on the action.”
Read MoreThis tension between the limited government of the constitution and the reach of the current administrative state is in my opinion the heart of the reason for our congressional disfunction, and our national division. Democracy is frustrated by regulations from an administrative state beyond accountability to the voters.
Read MoreI tend to ignore sources that intentionally mislead using carefully selected facts, or writers who cannot describe an idea or thought without personal invectives and demonization.
Read More“Most voters, admirably or not, do not always believe that their president must be morally perfect to do good, but only that, in practical terms, he must at least appear better than the alternative. “
Read MoreWe lost understanding as we moved from information to confirmation, and we have lost civility as we moved from confirmation to outrage.
Read More“When you hand power over to planners, technocrats, or commissars to substitute their judgement for the rule of law, you are behaving like an outlaw, because you are literally outside the law.”
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