David Brooks nails it: Besides being offended by the racist comments made by members of the Los Angeles City Council — as so many people were — I was also struck by the underlying worldview revealed during their leaked conversation. […]
identity politics
Cornel West on identity politics
West’s thoughts here come from the transcript of a conversation on identity politics between West, philosopher Judith Butler, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and Simon Critchley. The entire transcript is at Public Seminar. Here is West: I want to begin, really, with […]
Should people examine communities to which they do not belong?
At the inaugural meeting of the New University Conference, an organization of New Left academics, radical historian Staughton Lynd called academics to live in solidarity with their subjects. As he put it, “to hope that upper-middle class white professors can […]
Lindsey Graham on a potential Biden Supreme Court pick: “Put me in the camp of making sure the court and other institutions look like America”
Good for Lindsey. Here is Quint Forgey at Politico: Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday broke with several of his Republican colleagues by seemingly expressing support for President Joe Biden’s pledge to nominate the first-ever Black woman to the Supreme Court. […]
George Will on the premodern origins of identity politics…
…and national conservatism. This is a really interesting column. A taste: Prophecy is optional folly but an irresistible end-of-year temptation. So, at the risk of allowing a wish to be the father of a thought, a plausible prediction is that […]
Historian David Blight champions teachers; criticizes Democratic Party’s “endless debates over the right language”
Here is the Pulitzer Prize-winner and Frederick Douglass biographer: Blight is also concerned about the current state of the Democratic Party:
The Jacobin editors on the “commonsense solidarity” of the American working class
The socialist magazine Jacobin recently published a study on the political views of the American working-class. The editors offer several takeaways: “Working-class voters prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, and who frame those issues in universal […]
“Democrats are misreading the room to an astonishing degree”
Here is a New York Times reader from Georgia responding to this New York Times op-ed: Democrats are misreading the room to an astonishing degree. Let this sink in: my Mexican yard man likes Trump. Although immigration laws should be […]
Is this what Ronald Reagan meant by a “shining city on a hill”?
Today as I read New York Times writer Jamelle Bouie’s recent column on vaccines, I was struck by these words. Is it any surprise that millions of Americans treat this fundamentally social problem — how do we vaccinate enough people […]
2021 Owen Strachan would condemn 2014 Owen Strachan as WOKE
Owen Strachan is an outspoken and bombastic conservative evangelical seminary professor who just published a book titled Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel–and the Way to Stop It. Here are some of his tweets […]