Democracy

Wednesday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Do politics matter at all?

It is likely that the ordinary man, not being an ideologue, would agree as he grows older with Arthur Balfour’s famous epigram: “In politics nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.” This is only partly to do with sub specie aeterni, etc. For the rest, there is the simple recognition that politicians always make politics (and the questions and policies with which they concern themselves) out to be much more substantial and consequential than they actually are.

balfour
Garrison Keillor

How Garrison Keillor is living at 83

I’ve been having a wonderful year since I turned 83 and decided to lighten up on world affairs and let other people agonize over corruption in high places and the fate of American democracy, which concern me too. But at this age one can only take on so much. Time is running out. Time to leave the problems to the young and energetic and devote myself to writing limericks. Better to do one thing well than wave your hands and yell at a brick wall. One day an old man in ManhattanSaid at the library he sat in,“Enough politics,I’ll write limericks.So light up your pipe and put that in.” A remarkable metamorphosis:One door opens, one closes.What a reliefTo give up that griefAnd happiness is the prognosis.

Saturday

Peter Jones

How the Roman ranking system actually worked

For otherwise healthy plebs in the Roman world, survival depended on four Fs: farming (the sole source of food and money), fighting, family and friends. Everything else that made life worth living meant having some degree of political control over your own existence, which could be summed up in a fifth F: freedom, or political equality. But the elite had little time for such goodwill towards men. For the plebs, there was the rub. In the 20s BC Livy began writing a history of Rome from its foundation in 753 BC. It was first ruled by a series of seven kings (none actually Roman) who were finally thrown out as tyrants in 509 BC.

roman ranking

Friday

Cockburn

Kamala: ‘Democracy is dead. Buy my book’

Kamala Harris reappeared last night, making a 30-minute guest appearance on the now-canceled Late Show with Stephen Colbert, to deliver this message of hope to the American people: The country is irretrievably broken and there’s nothing anyone can do to fix it. Hilarious! Momala said that everything terrible that was going to happen if she lost to Donald Trump has now happened (relatively strong economy, world peace) but the worst thing is that her fellow Democrats have “capitulated” to Trump’s fascist program of trade protectionism and renaming everything after himself. Harris, who recently announced that she’s not running for California governor, said she probably won’t run for President in 2028 either.

Tuesday

Sean Thomas

Why is intelligence declining?

In 1906, the famous polymath Sir Francis Galton visited a country fair on the edge of Plymouth, England. A bullock had been tethered for slaughter and almost 800 locals were invited to guess its dressed weight: how heavy it would be after butchering. Galton – an obsessive measurer of people, weather and intelligence – gathered the entries, calculated the average and found something remarkable. The crowd’s collective estimate came within a single pound of the ox’s actual weight. This elegant experiment would become one of the founding truisms of modern democratic thought. Galton had shown that while individuals may err, the group, in aggregate, can reason with uncanny accuracy and prescience. He had discovered “the wisdom of crowds.

IQ

Thursday

Cockburn

Biden bids an ominous farewell to a falling America

President Joe Biden delivered his farewell address last night in the Oval Office. While he started with strong patriotic themes, he ended by warning the country of some “things that give me great concern.” Biden declared that America is an oligarchy now. Cockburn thought it was turning into a dictatorship? He can’t keep track. Overall, though, he thought Biden’s speech presented an idealistic view of America. It featured inspiring snatches, with stories about the Statue of Liberty and references to the words of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, saying America is “a nation holding the torch of the most powerful idea ever in the history of the world. That all of us are created equal.

biden farewell

Monday

Roger Kimball

Trump is Team MAGA’s last chance

Elon Musk has often commented that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election.” He often adds that, “far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it.” I believe both statements are essentially true. I say “essentially” because, should Trump lose — or to follow Musk more accurately, should he not be elected, which is not quite the same thing as losing — then there would still be events called elections. Only they wouldn’t be like elections of yore.  According to the Constitution (another thing that would retired should Trump fail to be elected), the qualifications to be president of the United States are pretty minimal.

trump

Wednesday

Roger Kimball

Trump and his lawyers take on the Syndicate

Who has better lawyers: Donald Trump or the Syndicate? The fate of the election, and hence the fate of the country, may well come down to the answer to that question.  By “the Syndicate” (what I sometimes call “the Committee”), I of course mean the shadowy board of overseers that controls the Democratic Party and, by extension, the administrative apparatus that governs us. No one knows exactly who sits on this board. I suspect that even those who, in retrospect, we can see have occupied senior positions in its ranks are often uncertain about their place in the hierarchy.  Elsewhere, I have invoked C.S. Lewis’s idea of “The Inner Ring” to explain the dynamics of this phenomenon.

lawyers

Monday

Dave Seminara

It’s not too late for the press to start doing their jobs

One night last week I got a robocall asking me to participate in a candidate town hall. “If you’d like to ask Ed Montanari a question, press star three,” a female voice instructed me as I joined the call to satisfy my curiosity. Though I had previously not given any thought to the Florida District 60 state House race, I spent the next hour listening with interest as Mr. Montanari, a Republican challenger, fielded questions from voters. At one point, I pressed one to ask a question. I told the screener my question was about crime, and fifteen minutes later I was connected to the candidate to ask my question. Isn’t this how democracy is supposed to work?

Monday

Daniel McCarthy

Is the fate of democracy truly at stake?

In a few months, the stolen election narratives will start in earnest. There was one in 2020, of course, but there had been another in 2016, a liberal myth about Russian interference stealing victory from Hillary Clinton. Disgruntled Democrats similarly said the Republican president before Trump was “selected, not elected” — put in office by the Supreme Court, not voters. Claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t a natural-born citizen of the United States, as “birther” Republicans did in 2008 and 2012, was another variation on the stolen-election theme. Even when elections run smoothly, ideologues easily find cause for complaint. Discontents can even apply to foreign elections.

democracy

Tuesday

Elisenne Stoller

Hong Kong justices decide to keep Jimmy Lai in jail

Hong Kong’s top court decided Monday to uphold Jimmy Lai and six other pro-democracy activists’ convictions for their campaigning during the anti-government protests that rocked the city in 2019. In a unanimous agreement, the court dismissed the bid to overturn the convictions of the seven activists.   Among the justices who voted to uphold the conviction was British justice David Neuberger, who is still serving as non-permanent judge in the former British colony.   Lai, seventy-six, the founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, was found guilty in 2021 of organizing and participating in an unauthorized assembly in August 2019 during months-long pro-democracy protests in the China-ruled city. He was sentenced to seventeen months in prison.

jimmy lai

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

The Democrats do not care a whit about democracy

The events of the last few days have made incontrovertible something that candid observers have known for some time now: that the word “democracy” in the maw of Democrats bears the same relation to really existing democracy that the Russian word “Pravda” bore to really existing truth in the Soviet era. If you look it up, you’ll see that “Pravda” means “truth.” At least, that’s what the dictionary says it means. But anyone on the ground, experiencing the full-court press of Soviet disinformation knew that the newspaper Pravda deployed the word “truth” only to undermine it. It was necessary to pay lip service to the charade.

Vice President new car smell kamala harris

Sunday

Roger Kimball

Who’s the real threat to democracy?

Last week at a fundraiser, Joe Biden said that it was time to get beyond his poor performance at his June 27 debate with Donald Trump. Now, said Biden, “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”  Politico described that as a “forceful message from Biden.” I guess someone was paying attention. Shortly after 6 p.m. ET last night, just minutes after Donald Trump took the stage at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, several shots rang out. One person was killed, two were seriously wounded. The real target, of course, was the former president. He escaped with a flesh wound to the top of his right ear. Images of a defiant Trump, bloodied but waving his fist in the air as he was shuttled off stage by a gaggle of Secret Service agents, have flooded the internet.

democracy

Friday

Newt Gingrich

The Biden-Trump debates won’t measure up to the past

It’s happening. Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump will debate. Of course, the Biden team is making sure the debates are dominated by the left-wing media and held in studios with no citizens present. Given this surprisingly undemocratic arrangement, it occurred to me it might be useful to look at the most famous candidate debates in American history. In 1858, while running for the US Senate in Illinois, incumbent Senator Stephen A. Douglas agreed to debate his opponent, Abraham Lincoln, seven times — once in each congressional district in which they had not yet spoken. Douglas was frustrated. Lincoln had spoken in Springfield and Chicago one day after Douglas and just torn apart all of Douglas’s arguments leaving him with no chance to respond.

Saturday

Joe Lindsley

Ukraine’s vitality is its greatest strength

Lviv, Ukraine Deep in a forested park, hundreds of people — men, women, children — in traditional embroidered clothes danced, clapped, and sang in a wild circle around fiddle-playing musicians. It was war, but it was also Easter, celebrated then according to the old calendar by the Greek Catholics of Lviv.  In that forest grove on a chilly afternoon, I stood next to Linda Netsch, a professor at Harvard Law, who had just arrived by train to give wartime guest lectures at Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University.  “Now I know why Russia cannot defeat Ukraine,” she told me as she pointed at the crowd of people dancing on the chilly grey afternoon while a friend poured me a whiskey. “It’s this. This is real power.

ukraine

Wednesday

John Pietro

In defense of America the arms dealer

As the world enters a new era of great power competition, countries are arming themselves at a rate unseen since the end of the Cold War. The war in Ukraine, China’s increasing belligerence and angst over rogue states like Iran and North Korea are driving defense spending and weapons purchases the world over. Amid all this, the United States does not have the luxury of being too picky as to who among its friends gets the weapons they need to defend themselves. Nor can Washington continue to avoid drastic reforms to its arms export controls to face the challenges of the twenty-first century. Standards are necessary — they are what should set America apart — but they must not become so onerous that the security of the US and its partners suffer.

Thursday

John Pietro

Democracy in Peru is under attack

For over a month, Peru has been in a state of near-constant unrest. In December, as the legislature threatened to impeach President Pedro Castillo for, among other things, allegations of corruption, Castillo tried to dissolve the legislature and “govern through decrees.” By all measures, this was an attempted coup, and it resulted in his impeachment (by a vote of 101-6), arrest, and condemnation from left and right. In his place, Vice President Dina Boluarte was sworn in as president, having denounced her former boss’s attack on the country’s democracy. This was a success in a country that has seen six new presidents in the past seven calendar years. The Congress has repeatedly been at odds with the president, and scandals have rocked administration after administration.

Wednesday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Democracy by numbers

The world of 2023, which scarcely speaks for the intelligence, the competence, or the success of the human race, does revive the age-old question of whether the individual is wiser than the species. One answer, stated in its simplest form, is the old saw that two heads are better than one. But is that true? And if so, are three heads better than two, und so weiter? Where do we come to the end of this? The key to the conundrum relates to government. Does oligarchy provide wiser rule than monarchy, aristocracy than oligarchy, and democracy than aristocracy? Consider the history of Britain and British government over the past centuries. Has democracy, in progressively greater measure, improved the management of British affairs since the eighteenth century?

democracy numbers

Wednesday

Charles Dunst

Among Dubai’s weary migrant workers

The E100 bus is not somewhere you will find an Emirati. Departing about every thirty minutes from 4 a.m. onward and taking passengers from Abu Dhabi to Dubai for just 25 AED ($7.80), this is not a place for the rich. It is the domain of the weary peoples, the migrant workers who make this minuscule monarchy work. At 5:13 a.m. in late December, this crowd was ready to go. Bags packed for whatever indignity might come next. They were ready long before most Emiratis are awake because, for them, the United Arab Emirates is an opportunity.

Thursday

John Pietro

Zelensky spoke to the American soul

When Volodymyr Zelensky entered the chamber to address Congress, the applause and cheers took on a particularly emotional character. It was not the stilted, forced applause that the president receives at the State of the Union; it was an affectionate show of admiration for a man who has come to embody the twenty-first century struggle for freedom. Though delivered to Congress, the opening words of the Ukrainian president’s speech revealed his true audience: “Dear Americans... all those who value freedom and justice.” It was a speech for all of us. He pulled the dusty tarp off of America’s deepest identity as the shining light of liberty in a world of tyranny.

volodymyr zelensky