Enjoying the view from Limbo
The heirs of Frankfurt. — The American left’s intellectual strategists have long believed that the way to break the country’s resistance to progressivism was to forge ahead, with their vanguard fringes displayed in bright colors, in open defiance of the popular consensus, precisely because those fringes would be perceived by the “silent majority” as too much, too extreme, too immoderate and anti-American. The...
In an interview on Book TV, Thomas Sowell explained that he was once asked whether he had ever tried to persuade America’s leading race hustlers to accept his anti-progressive views on racial politics and affirmative action, to which he answered, “I’m sure Jesse Jackson makes ten times what I make. How do you convince a man to reduce his income by ninety percent?”...
I see that Walter Williams, an influential and distinguished American proto-libertarian economist, professor, and political columnist, has died. A few thoughts, as they occur to me. To be an American black man and a classical liberal at the same time is to put a big X on one’s forehead and one’s life, in contemporary political and “cultural” terms. Williams followed this path, unwaveringly...
The other day, I listened to a recent Hoover Institution interview with Thomas Sowell, in which the interviewer, Peter Robinson, a milquetoast Republican type, asked Sowell to assess the presidency of Donald Trump. To be precise, he cited Sowell’s friend and fellow free market defender Walter Williams, who while criticizing Trump’s character nevertheless believes that he is “a good president,” offering as evidence...
Though I don’t consider myself arrogant or excessively proud, I am also averse to false modesty. The exaggerated “Who, me?” reaction, when it becomes a rhetorical formula — or a moral formula, which is even worse — is harmful to the soul, since unreflectively diminishing oneself in the face of praise, while perhaps seeming properly humble, is as often as not an indication of something much less savory, namely a desire not...
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