Enjoying the view from Limbo
Kamala Harris, a black female, and therefore already twice as qualified to be the Democratic presidential candidate as her nearest rivals, who are merely black or female, has a brilliant plan to improve American education: Reward the most ineffective teachers in the advanced world with a massive pay raise, using money stolen from dead rich people and their rightful (and chosen) heirs, thereby...
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the most exotically-named American political hoax since Barack Hussein Obama, is out there talking again — never a wise choice for her — this time about healthcare. Invoking the “death panel” imagery made famous by Sarah Palin, Ocasio-Cortez tries to turn the concept around on critics of her socialist fantasies: Actually, we have for-profit “death panels” now: they are companies +...
Spectator sports often teach us a lot about the people, or rather peoples, who make them popular. There is nothing new about this, of course. Seneca taught us as much about the state of Roman society in his time as about his own Stoic sensibilities, when he wrote, in his Moral Letter “On Crowds”: But nothing is so damaging to good character as...
Alfie Evans is being killed by the British government. Specifically, the plan is to hurry the gravely ill child to death by forced starvation. How forced? Pope Francis has a Vatican jet on standby to take the boy to Rome and feed him, a plan both of Alfie’s parents prefer — but a British judge has declared that Rome has “no jurisdiction” over...
As I have written on numerous occasions, socialism (aka “democratic socialism”) is, at its core, beyond all the rhetoric about equality, caring for the weak, people before profits, and so on, a political ideology — not a theory or hypothesis, but an ideology in the Marxist sense — based on one simple notion: the individual human being is property of the State. Allow...
What is Progressivism? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 7, 2018 · Last modified February 10, 2018
The essential mechanism of democratic socialism, which Tocqueville explained perfectly with his warning about the threat of soft despotism, is the nanny state’s inviting web of progressive “help,” which gradually lulls well-meaning but compromised citizens into the immobility of moral paralysis, until they are ready to be devoured by a government with an endless appetite for human blood. Take the case of the...
Well, my calendar says it’s 2018, but anyone taking a quick glance at today’s world scene and its sorry cast of characters could be forgiven for imagining it was 1918. After all, we humans pride ourselves on learning from our mistakes, and surely no era would be more inclined to indulge in this pride than one that calls itself “progressive.” And yet… One...
A point of clarification or emphasis: I’ve noticed that in commenting on my American Thinker article concerning Bernie Sanders’ moral judgment on Donald Trump, a lot of readers are bringing up Bernie’s old essay which mentions women fantasizing about being raped. Others, meanwhile, draw attention to his wife’s financial embroilments. Way beside the point, I would say, and extremely small potatoes compared to...
Bernie Sanders is calling on President Trump to “think about resigning,” citing past allegations of sexual misconduct against him, along with his infamous Access Hollywood vulgarity. Anyone familiar with my writing knows I am not a Trump defender, but for the media to trumpet Sanders, of all people, as a moral judge — of Donald Trump or anyone else — indicates the measure...
When George Washington’s memory has been deemed “unacceptable” to Americans, will America still exist? In the fundamental transformation of any nation, there will be a moment that stands as the symbolic termination of that nation as anything recognizable, and the beginning of a completely new nation unrelated to the old except in name. For example, you will know England is over when Shakespeare...
Follow: