Conservative students will talk about how they’ve been censored or had to self-censor. Liberal students will respond that while their conservative ideas are fundamentally wrong and dangerous, so too is censorship. It will be an exchange that would make Thomas Jefferson proud.
Then, one student will note that it’s ironic that these adults are so worried about the coddling of Millennial minds, while these same adults have created policies that have left this generation very uncoddled economically: saddled with debt, dim wages and no benefits. The class will rise up in agreement and anger, also citing the environment, endless wars, and half a dozen other catastrophes that they are supposed to solve while deep in debt and while older generations wring every last drop out of the system on their way to retirement and death.
This anger and sense of betrayal has, according to a poll by Pew Charitable Trusts, left this generation significantly less trusting than other generations. After teaching for more than a dozen years, this is the biggest change I’ve seen in my students. There is no institution or governance system that these students trust, including, as a Harvard study found last year, democracy. There is no leader who isn’t a hypocrite. No ideals that can’t be picked apart with counterfactuals. And, it is this dynamic that animates their lack of faith in democracy and free expression.
To a generation formed during financial crisis, influenced by social media and witnessing a failing political system, laws are just instruments to be leveraged or ignored for the purpose of the day. In this way, there are shocking similarities between them and President Trump ...
What makes this generation different is not their lack of support of free speech, it is that they simply don’t believe in law or politics as a means to protect it (emphasis added).
The disorienting nature of Trump’s presidency has already managed to obscure what should be an obvious fact: Viewed from the broad sweep of history, Donald Trump is the resistance. We are not.
But why the short commitment from Kyl in the first place? It's hard to say, but here's a theory: If GOP Rep. Martha McSally, who is running for Kyl's old Senate seat (now open thanks to Sen. Jeff Flake's retirement), loses this fall to Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, Ducey [the Governor of Arizona] could then appoint her in Kyl's stead. McSally would then be able to run in the special election in 2020 as the incumbent. We'll just have to see what happens in November (emphasis added).
As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.”
What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”
This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.
The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.
And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.
Much of our “polarization” seems to be cooked up in a vat of social media, cable TV and talk radio to the benefit of those who gain from our divisions. Put average citizens in the woods, miles from home and away from their phones and other devices, and chances are they’ll lend you their stove, strike up a conversation and perhaps share beer.More than anything, it seems that Americans want to be happy campers, if only for awhile.
One of the dominant features of our time is that more and more people define themselves by what they hate. For many partisans, what motivates them the most isn’t support for their side’s policies but their hatred of the other party. Most Republicans didn’t vote for Donald Trump; they voted against Hillary Clinton. Most Democrats didn’t vote for Clinton; they voted against Trump.
This year’s victorious candidates, like so many winners before them, aren’t prevailing simply or even mainly because of the labels they’re wearing or the precise points on the political spectrum to which they can be affixed.
They’re powered by their personalities, their organizations or both. They communicate effectively. They have backgrounds that make sense to voters or temperaments that feel right to them. And they’ve devised ways to reach voters that their rivals haven’t.
The lesson of 2018 isn’t novel. But it’s overlooked because it doesn’t come wrapped in fancy analytics, it can’t be integrated into sweeping pronouncements about the arc of America, and it transcends our beloved binaries of progressive versus moderate and blue versus red.
Candidates matter. Campaigns count. Voters use more than bullet points, spreadsheets and the marching orders of the Democratic Socialists of America or the New Democrat Coalition to make decisions. We use our hearts. We use our guts. (Sometimes we even use our minds, though not nearly often enough.)
Women of my generation — I’m 61 — were supposed to grow up to be wives, mothers, nurses, teachers or stewardesses, not brave independent, adventurous women with a van that gives them the freedom to live anywhere they want.
In the northern New Jersey town where I grew up, girls weren’t allowed to wear pants to school until I was 12.
Rule #2: “Remember You're In Charge.” There is a bureaucratic momentum present in every institution (certainly including government). An elected official needs to remember that he or she was elected to run the bureaucracy not the other way around.
Rule #1:
"Remember You're In Charge.” There is a bureaucratic momentum present in every institution (certainly including government). An elected official needs to remember that he or she was elected to run the bureaucracy not the other way around.
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Politicians and the press still invoke obviousness in the hope of summoning some conviction we all still share, some bedrock of group belief we can agree on. To see them fail, repeatedly, is unsettling; it makes our deepest values seem impotent. It had seemed obvious to some that a modern presidential administration would not defend white nationalists or that the United States government would seek to avoid taking babies from their parents’ arms — or that a man who bragged about harassing women wouldn’t be elected in the first place. Last summer, NPR celebrated the Fourth of July by tweeting, line by line, the text of the Declaration of Independence; its account was immediately attacked by angry Americans accusing the organization of spreading seditious anti-Trump propaganda. The nation’s founding values have come to seem, somehow, unfamiliar and contentious; we can’t recognize the Declaration of Independence when we see it. Let the obvious sit too long and it becomes like an animal in a zoo: pointed at, but never exercised, and idly wandered past by people who have forgotten how powerful it is in action.
“The purpose of Judaism,” as you see it, “is to sanctify one people with the goal of sanctifying all people.” The Palestinians don’t need to be sanctified by Israel. We simply want the right to control our fate, a desire I know you must understand well from studying Jewish history.
I agree with you that peace can come only if we succeed in sharing this land and living on it with justice and fairness for both nations. And I will forever agree with your sentiment that the “violence, suppression, rage, despair” that characterizes our relationship must end. But perhaps the problem with your letters is that they don’t read as if they are seeking an answer, hoping for that Palestinian neighbor — me — to respond, but instead seem like lectures, half a conversation with a partner who is expected to stay quiet and listen.
To simplify Berlin’s arguments brutally, negative liberty was “freedom from,” or the enjoyment of a zone of noninterference, of guaranteed exemption from coercion, while positive liberty was “freedom to”—the freedom to be (or, more sinisterly perhaps, the freedom to choose) one’s own master. These, Berlin argued, might seem to be “concepts at no great logical distance from each other,” but in fact they were in “direct conflict,” because the adept of positive liberty might conceive of “the real self” as “a social ‘whole’ of which the individual is an element or aspect.” In pursuit of the will-o’-the-wisp of positive liberty, in other words, the individual risked surrendering herself to voluntary servitude, indentured to some seemingly transcendent cause; and then, sliding down a slippery slope, she might feel herself entitled to coerce others too “blind or ignorant or corrupt” to recognize what was in their own best interest.
The president's a disaster; we're all going to die.
For someone his critics say is a compulsive liar, Mr. Trump has been remarkably true to his word. Especially compared with his predecessor, he doesn’t moralize. It’s classic Trump to be openly exasperated by the Group of 7’s hand-wringing hypocrisy. Unlike almost every other democratic leader, Mr. Trump doesn’t try to placate critics. He knows it’s more important to get things done than to be loved.
The holder of the world’s most significant office should always be taken seriously. Erratic and ill-disciplined though Mr. Trump often seems, there’s little doubt that he is proving a consequential president. On the evidence so far, when he says something, he means it—and when he says something consistently, it will happen.
He said he’d cut taxes and regulation. He did, and the American economy is at its strongest in at least a decade. He said he’d pull out of the Paris climate-change agreement and he did, to the usual obloquy but no discernible environmental damage. He said he’d scrap the Iranian deal, and he did. If Tehran gets nuclear weapons, at least it won’t be with American connivance. He said he’d move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and he did, without catastrophe. He said he’d boost defense spending. That’s happening too, and adversaries no longer think that they can cross American red lines with impunity.
In Mr. Trump’s first year, he acted on 64% of the policy ideas proposed in the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” agenda—not bad compared with Ronald Reagan’s 49%.
It’s a pity that he kept his promise to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But his concerns about that deal shouldn’t be dismissed. In the short term, freer trade can be better for rich people in poor countries than for poor people in rich ones.
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| Tony Abbot, Former Australian Prime Minister |
