“the economy and the structure of work are not the way they used to be. This has had devastating effects on the family and on community life”
For the first few decades after the Second World War, per-capita U.S. economic growth averaged between two and three per cent a year. In the nineties, however, it dipped below two per cent. In the early two-thousands, it was less than one per cent. This past decade, it remained below 1.5 per cent. Different populations […]continued…
“We Americans are reluctant to acknowledge that our economy serves the educated classes and penalizes the rest”
When it comes to people whose lives aren’t going well, American culture is a harsh judge: if you can’t find enough work, if your wages are too low, if you can’t be counted on to support a family, if you don’t have a promising future, then there must be something wrong with you. When people […]continued…
“…there are ultimately four characteristics in candidates that I think drive our perceptions and our decisions…”
I think there are ultimately four characteristics in candidates that I think drive our perceptions and our decisions: competence (can this person do this job); policies (does this person have clear prescriptions to deal with issues that matter to us); character and persona (will I feel proud, or appropriately represented, by this person in this […]continued…
“we would often be better off worrying about what the appendages in legislatures and localities are doing than about what some ultimate head is thinking”
This idea of power simply emanating downward still animates apologetics for authoritarianism, but it also leads to excitement about top-down health-care programs that everyone knows will never be enacted by executive fiat. It inspires, too, the belief that there are “diseases” in the body politic, in need of a cure, rather than a multitude of […]continued…
“…liberalism has, to an unusual degree, been defined by what it wasn’t”
…liberalism has, to an unusual degree, been defined by what it wasn’t. For French liberals in the early nineteenth century, it was a defense against the excesses of Jacobins and ultra-monarchists. For the free-trading Manchester Liberals of the mid-nineteenth century, it was anticolonial. Liberals in Germany, on the other hand, were allied with both nationalists […]continued…