"The Ugliness of Politics - Is It Necessary?"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“The Ugliness of Politics – Is It Necessary?”

December 27, 2021

 

“Politics is about power, the power to make people 

do what you want them to do, so that you gain leverage.”

                                                                                                                Bruce Thornton

                                                                                                                www.frontpagemag.com

                                                                                                                December 15, 2021

 

Democrats, who have failed on so many fronts in the first eleven months of the Biden Administration – immigration, inflation, COVID-19, crime, Afghanistan, China and Russia – have resurrected their nemesis Donald Trump, as a foil to promote their claim that the Republican Party “has,” in the words of Dan Kennedy of Northeastern University, “embraced authoritarianism and voter suppression” – a red herring to deflect attention from Democrats’ efforts for self-empowerment. Trump is demonized because, more than anyone, he is seen as standing athwart the federal regulatory Leviathan progressives have erected.

 

There is something bizarre about supposedly intelligent and well-informed columnists like Dana Milbank of The Washington Post and Jason Linkins of The New Republic, when they claim threats to democracy emanate from the Party that embraces limited government, free markets, deregulation and low taxes, rather than from the Party that supports greater regulation, higher taxes, packing the Supreme Court, nationalizing voting and (in New York City) allowing non-citizens to vote, while urging conformity, and censoring conservative speech on college campuses. The lead essay in the January 2022 issue of The Spectator concludes: “The transformation of free societies by bureaucratic stealth, corporatization, and end-of-world doom-mongering pose greater dangers to America democracy than do China or climate change.” Yet Barton Gellman of The Atlantic, in contradiction to common sense, calls Democrats “protectors of democracy.” 

 

Partisan progressive reporters have made the ludicrous charge that current media coverage of Mr. Biden is more negative than it was of Mr. Trump in his last year in office, an allegation my youngest grandchild would recognize as absurd. The accusation is a Trojan Horse to camouflage their own biases, displayed for four years in the discredited Russian collusion story, and now in a transformation of last January 6, from a protest that got out of hand into an alleged insurrection. Political criticism should be welcomed. But in this new world, criticism of Republicans is encouraged, while criticism of Democrats is treasonous. Jason Linkins headlined an article in The New Republic: “Is Criticizing Joe Biden a Danger to Democracy?” While he did admit that “blind fealty” is a hallmark of dictatorships (which it is), he overrode that admonition when he wrote: “…the GOP is the enemy of democracy, full stop…” Trump is an easy target. He speaks Brooklynese; he is an overweight, incurable narcissist, who speaks without thinking. Republicans have supporters in the media who are unfair in their treatment of Democrats, but the situation is David versus Goliath-like, with progressives controlling most of mainstream media, big tech companies, Wall Street, schools, universities, government bureaucracies, cultural institutions and professional sports. 

 

The arrogance of political elites toward those with differing opinions is mind-numbing. That White House press secretary Jen Psaki belittles those who ask tough questions is legion. Recently, she called Senator Joe Manchin a liar when he said “no” to the Build Back Better legislation. If Ms. Psaki had read The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The New York Sun or The New York Post over the past few months, she would have seen that Senator Manchin’s reservations regarding the legislation were well aired. In the preface to his unfinished book (published posthumously in 1856), The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “…a man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.” That is what we are seeing among the progressive branch of Democrats.

 

Trump can be personally insulting, but he is not condescending. But we did see condescension in the words of Barack Obama when, in 2008, he spoke at a fund raiser in San Francisco about working class voters in an industrialized Pennsylvania town: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” And we saw it in 2016, when Hillary Clinton lashed out at Donald Trump’s supporters, as a “basket of deplorables.” We see that condescension in Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumer’s briefings We see it in the treatment of COVID-19. We are told to “follow the science,” with no admission that science evolves. The Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) – authored by Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford and Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and which focused on protection of the most vulnerable while encouraging the non-vulnerable to resume life as normal – expressed “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing Covid-19 policies.” The document, which was signed by 60,000 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, was ridiculed as “fringe” by Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institute of Health (NIH) and called “nonsense and dangerous” by Dr. Anthony Fauci. (Dr. Collins later resigned as director of the NIH after government documents suggested he lied to Congress when he claimed his agency did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Lab.)

 

Progressives who dominate the Democrat Party – more through fear than numbers – distort our past and forecast a dystopian future. The Founders, they tell us, were old white men who founded a nation based on oppression and slavery. They argue that 156 years after the end of the Civil War, a war fought to end slavery, we remain a “systemically racist” nation. We are, they claim, a nation comprised of victims and victimizers. As for our future, without adoption of their statist agendas and policies, racial tensions will increase, gender discrimination will persist, and man-caused climate change will bring an end to our world. A salad bowl has replaced the mixing bowl, as a metaphor for the American experience. Ignoring the economic consequences, Cassandras argue the world needs fewer not more people, and that capitalism creates economic unfairness. Yet, according to an NBC poll, cited by Frank Bruni in The New York Times in November, 71% of Americans feel the country is on the wrong track, a sense of pessimism reflected in Census Bureau numbers that showed the U.S.’s population gain in 2020 was the lowest increase on record. 

 

…………………………………………………..

 

What is wanted in this fractious political environment, where sanctimonious politicians belittle opponents and politicize issues like infectious diseases and climate change, is an injection of common sense, leavened with the good feelings and optimism of a President Reagan, who spoke of a bright future, a “shining city on a hill.” The reality is that the United States is a good nation with a diversity of free people, who have been infused by progressives with self-hatred and self-doubt. In truth, we are a mixing bowl, not a salad bowl. In 2015, 17% of marriages were interracial, up from 3% in 1967. In that same year, 39% of U.S.-born Hispanic and 46% of U.S.-born Asian marriages were between spouses of different races and ethnicities. In 1960, about 5% of U.S. women had a college degree. In 2020, that number was 38.3 percent. In 1992, among working blacks, 15.9% held a bachelor’s degree. By 2018, that number had increased to 31.2 percent. The U.S. has never claimed to be perfect, but its attractions and promises make it the most sought-after nation in the world for immigrants. We can achieve an era of good feelings. But our republic, based on ancient Western ideals, cannot be left to professionals. It requires the participation of the people.

 

In the December 27, 2021 issue of National Review, Peter Wood wrote: “The West, in its ideals, is a universal culture open to all, but always on the condition that those who hope to enter it recognize its unceasing demand to reach for those ideals that promise unity...” Political ugliness doesn’t have to prevail. We can, and we should, be optimistic for the future. But it requires study, confidence, effort and wisdom.

"Friendships - Old and New"

                                                                     Sydney M. Williams

Essay from Essex

“Friendships – Old and New”

December 18, 2021

 

“’Friendship,’ said Christopher Robin, ‘is a very comforting thing to have.’”

                                                                                                                                Winnie the Pooh, 1926

             A.A. Milne (1882-1956)

 

An unexpected benefit of writing essays has been old friends retained and new friends made. With an e-mail list that approaches two thousand, included are friends who go back to boarding school days, a few from college, and from my first job on Wall Street with Merrill Lynch in 1967, to my last at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co., from which I retired in 2015. While not everyone agrees with my political opinions, they tolerate my right to express them. Some on the list are friends of friends and even friends of those friends. Many I have never met but hearing from them is pleasurable, as they are provocative and energizing. In a letter to Lidian Jackson Emerson, wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau wrote: “Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and the longitudes.” In my case, I don’t think of latitudes and longitudes; what I do think is that friends make the world smaller and more intimate – a happier and better place.

 

Some of my more personal Essays from Essex are based on nostalgia – that time cleanses memory of past unpleasantness. Quoting studies by Professor Clay Routledge, a psychologist at North Dakota State University, Elizabeth Bernstein wrote in the November 17, 2021 issue of The Wall Street Journal: “Nostalgia increases positive mood, self-esteem and self-confidence…It makes us feel more socially connected and optimistic. It helps us feel that life has more meaning.” Recently, I attended a lunch with a few alumni from Williston Academy, three of whom were 1959 classmates. While our genetic determinants are decided at conception, our character is molded over time, especially in our early years, from families, friends and school. So, it is unsurprising that we prize returning to those days when our identity was being formed. Each of us is unique, but we share certain of life’s experiences, like teachers, coaches, bosses and even drill sergeants. A shared past allows us to recollect, companionably, of former times. 

 

Friendship is a non-obligatory, reciprocated relationship between two people who share common interests. Most of us have friends, orbiting different spheres. For example, I have school friends, work friends, friends with whom I skied, friends my wife and I see in Florida, or on the New Jersey shore where we go in August. My wife and I have friends at Essex Meadows, where we now live. I have friends with whom I enjoy ROMEO (retired old men eating out) lunches, and friends from volunteering at local organizations. Friendships outlast separation. In his collection of essays Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: “I was going to say, when I was interrupted…” The interruption to which he referred had occurred twenty-five years earlier. That quote would come to mind during my first evening in Vail with skiing friends, when the conversation would pick up just where it had left off a year earlier. 

 

“To be without friends is a serious form of poverty,” speaks Victor Moore as Aloysius T. McKeever in Roy Del Ruth’s 1947 comedy, It Happened on Fifth Avenue. He is right, and I am fortunate to have all of you as friends, as well as a wife who is my best friend – and has been for almost sixty years.

 

Thank you for your friendship, and I wish you the best for the Holidays and for all of the New Year.

"Scientist - E.O. Wilson: A Life in Nature" Richard Rhodes

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Scientist – E.O. Wilson: A Life in Nature, Richard Rhodes

December 17, 2021

 

“I wrote this biography in part because I saw in Wilson a

quality rare among human beings: he has never stopped

growing in knowledge or expanding in range.”

                                                                                                                                Richard Rhodes

                                                                                                                                Scientist – E.O. Wilson: A Life in Nature

 

My introduction to Edward O. Wilson was twenty years ago when I read Naturalist. Since, I have read three more of his books: Anthill, Wilson’s sole work of fiction, Social Conquest of Earth and Tales from the Ant World, which I reviewed on October 27, 2020, a small percentage of the thirty-five books he has written. Mr. Wilson is a retired professor of entomology at Harvard, where he specialized in myrmecology, but became famous for his writings on eusociality. He has been called Darwin’s natural heir.

 

Though never a student of flora or fauna, I have always enjoyed nature – Hiking through the White Mountains and sculling across marsh creeks in the Connecticut River’s estuary (as I once did), and now walking the trails in the woods near where we live. When I read the autobiographical Naturalist, Professor Wilson had been retired for five years. But, for me, the book was an awakening to a new world –that of ants. As a child in rural, coastal Alabama, Wilson was enamored with nature. An early accident destroyed his vision in one eye, which led him to focus on smaller forms of life. 

 

Richard Rhodes captures this ninety-two-year-old man whose curiosity has never waned. Mr. Rhodes begins his story in an unusual but creative way. Mr. Wilson, in interviews with the author, spoke little about his private life and thoughts. But he granted access to letters he had written his fiancée, Irene Kelly, over a ten-month period between November 1954 and September 1955. Mr. Wilson, then a junior fellow at Harvard University, traveled to the South Pacific, Australia, India and Europe to collect specimens for Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. On Fiji, he wrote to Miss Kelley that he only carried a hands lens, forceps, specimen vials and notebooks. Mr. Rhodes added: “His real high-tech instrument was his brain, his heart its engine.” While still on Fiji, Mr. Wilson wrote his fiancée: “I am really in a foreign country now,” and that natives in the interior “still live rather primitively in grass huts.” And he could be amusing. Cannibalism had been given up some time earlier, however an older (and former) cannibal passed on the Fijian’s assessment that “human flesh was salty, not as tasty as pig.” Wilson and Kelley were married upon his return at the end of September 1955.

 

While there is no question that Mr. Rhodes admires his subject, he does not shy from the most controversial period of Mr. Wilson’s career, which followed the publication of the textbook, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, in 1975. Most biologists at the time believed that culture accounted for about 90% of human behavior. But based on his studies of social insects and animals, including humans, he argued that about half of a human’s behavior, including traits like altruism, were a consequence of genetic inheritance (nature), not culture (nurture). Wilson was attacked by those who identified him with earlier eugenicists like Herbert Spencer, Margaret Sanger and Theodore Roosevelt who claimed that deviant behavior and racial differences in intelligence were genetically based, even though “Sociobiology explicitly rejected the concept of race as applied to human beings.” Forty years later, Wilson was vindicated. Mr. Rhodes explained: “In 2015, in the scientific journal Nature Genetics, a study appeared that settled the argument about how much of human behavior is nature and how much nurture…the conclusion of the study: ‘Across all traits the reported heritability is 49%.’” 

 

The size and complexity of the field Wilson chose to study is mind boggling, and Mr. Rhodes does yeoman’s work in simplifying Wilson’s history. There are an estimated 10,000 trillion ants in the world, whose combined weight would match that of all humans and exceed that of all elephants. But Wilson’s interest in the natural world extends beyond ants. There are, according to his estimates, about 1.7 million species that have been named, with an estimated seven million species yet to be discovered. Each species, as Wilson says, is “the terminus of a lineage that split off thousands or even millions of years ago.” As for the complexity of any species, Richard Rhodes wrote: “Wilson described the information density of a single strand of mouse DNA. Stretched out, such a strand would be about one meter (3.3 feet) long, but invisible to the naked eye (and small enough to curl up inside an equally invisible cell), because it’s only twenty angstroms – two-billionths of a meter – in diameter.” Mr. Rhodes quotes Wilson: “The full information contained therein, if translated into ordinary-sized letters would just about fill all 15 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica published since 1768.”

 

This is a short book (at 221 pages), but it provides a close look at one of the most fascinating men of our times: Edward O. Wilson grew up in the rural south during the Depression, in a dysfunctional family that moved multiple times. He overcame a terrible accident that caused the loss of one eye. Filled with the wonder we associate with a young child, Wilson followed his dream of becoming a naturalist and still follows it. Along the way, he has won more than 150 awards and medals, including two Pulitzers and 40 honorary degrees. It is his child-like awe for all things nature that is infectious and his persistence and emphasis on empiricism that is admirable. 

 

Scientist is a fine introduction to this remarkable man.

"It's Not My Fault!"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“It’s Not My Fault!”

December 11, 2021

 

“In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process

never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.”

                                                                                                                                Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)

                                                                                                                                You learn by Living, 1960

 

Being accountable for one’s actions and taking responsibility are fading qualities in our “woke” age. In the mid 1960s, on a snowy street in New Hampshire after a day’s skiing, my father, driving home, knocked a woman down, sending her to the hospital. The police told him it was not his fault. Nevertheless, he assumed responsibility, visiting her regularly until she recovered and was released. Such chivalry no longer exists. Like merit, hard work and objective truth, gallantry and graciousness are now, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in the December issue of The Spectator, “manifestations of heredity and ‘whiteness,’” – therefore to be condemned. 

 

“Victory has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan,” is an old quote used by President Kennedy. Today’s politicians no longer take blame for policies gone wrong. Instead, they follow advice Napoleon is alleged to have given: “Never retreat, never retract, never admit a mistake.” When the January 6 march on the Capitol turned disastrous, Donald Trump never admitted that his words that afternoon helped provoke it. But neither has Hillary Clinton accepted blame for the Steel dossier, which was at the heart of the $40 million (taxpayer money) discredited Mueller investigation. Governor Andrew Cuomo placed COVID-19 infected patients in nursing homes, leading to a plethora of unnecessary deaths. Has he expressed remorse or assumed responsibility? No. Has he expressed sorrow for abusing women who worked in his office? No. “Oh yes, the past can hurt,” says the shaman Rafiki in The Lion King, “but you can either run from it or learn from it.” Politicians choose to run from their past, not learn from it.

 

Dr. Anthony Fauci belittles those who disagree with him by claiming an attack on him is an attack on science. Yet the science about COVID-19 has changed as more has been learned. But his arrogance forbids any display of humility, or admission of personal responsibility regarding helping to fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Dr. Fauci’s denial gained two Pinocchio’s from left-leaning The Washington Post.) The recent rise in energy prices, according to Senator Elizabeth Warren, is due to oil and gas producers “putting their massive profits, share prices and dividends…ahead of Americans.” Apparently higher prices have nothing to do with restrictions on drilling and cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline extension, policies which the Massachusetts Senator supports. In a recent article in The Epoch Times, Victor Davis Hanson wrote, regarding the disastrous flight from Afghanistan: “Few, if any, high-ranking officers have yet taken responsibility – much less resigned – for the worst military fiasco in the past half century.”  

 

“It’s not my fault; the dog ate my homework!” has become a common response. Running away from personal responsibility has infested society. “Failure is not an option,” is a phrase one associates with NASA; but was taken literally by Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos who never apologized for misleading investors, instead placing blame on her Svengali-like partner. There have been no mea culpas from journalists following four years of filling airtime and front pages of newspapers regarding the discredited Russian collusion story? Teachers are not held responsible for the failure of their students in international testing. Global warming is the fault of selfish consumers, not the elitists who pompously pontificate when stepping off private jets. The surge in crime during the “summer of Love,” when billions in dollars in property was destroyed and twenty-five people were killed, was not the fault of the perpetrators. It was the ‘system’ and white supremacists who made them do it. The Biden Administration places blame for the increase in crime on COVID-19 – “…the virus is a root cause in a lot of communities,” is the way White House press secretary Jen Psaki put it last week. In a June 18, 2020, New York Times article, Professor Robin D. G. Kelley of UCLA, wrote: “Given that we are in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, looting should not surprise anyone...stealing commodities isn’t senseless” Really? And that makes it okay? Mightn’t the surge in crime have something to with disparaging and defunding the police? 

 

Alec Baldwin – certainly inadvertently – shot and killed cinemaphotographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the movie Rust, a film of which he is one of the producers. Has he taken responsibility? No. In fact, he claims he didn’t pull the trigger. Nevertheless, Ms. Hutchins was killed by a bullet discharged from the firearm he was holding. Still, Mr. Baldwin says the killing was not his fault. Has Jussie Smollett expressed remorse for concocting a crime meant to increase his ratings? This nationwide attitude of denying personal responsibility suggests a “woke” and nihilistic culture that permeates our society and threatens our nation.

 

Mahatma Gandhi is quoted in his posthumously published The Essential Writings: “It is wrong and immoral to seek to escape the consequences of one’s acts.” The United States has survived for almost 250 years because its people are free to succeed or fail, to act in their own interest, within the law. In the same book quoted in the rubric, You Learn by Living, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote: “Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.” Being free means being accountable. The words, “It’s not my fault,” have become too pervasive and suggest we are moving in the wrong direction. Errors are the fault of those making them. There may be understandable excuses, but faults should be acknowledged and corrected.

"Why Can't We Talk?"

                                                                 Sydney M. Williams 

Thought of the Day

“Why Can’t We Talk?”

December 4, 2021

 

“It is better to debate a question without settling it

than to settle a question without debating it.”

                                                                                                                Joseph Joubert (1754-1824)

                                                                                                                French moralist & Essayist

                                                                                                                Recuil des Pensées, 1838

                                                                                                                published posthumously

 

Ambrose Bierce, in his 1906 The Devil’s Dictionary, provided two definition of the transitive verb “Defame:” 1) “To lie about another.” 2) “To tell the truth about another.” People of myriad cultural backgrounds have long had difficulty communicating, as Rudyard Kipling expressed in the first two lines of his 1889 poem “The Ballad of the East and West:”

 

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great judgement Seat;”

 

Most politicians do not communicate honestly. They promise one thing while campaigning and promote another when governing. Speaking before the 2004 Democratic National Committee, Barack Obama embraced unity: “There is not a black America, a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” But four years later when he became President, he chose discord over unity. In the words of Jason Riley, writing in last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal: “…he started talking about racist policing and black voter suppression, and he embraced divisive racial provocateurs... All the colorblind talk went out the window.” Mr. Obama is not alone. Politicians on both sides have long campaigned on the promise of unity and then ruled with a “divide to conquer” strategy. 

 

We are sorted by identity into “hot issue” buckets, like race, gender, immigration, climate and abortion. For example, if one does not agree with the preferred woke policy prescriptions of President Biden, one is a racist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a denier or a sexist. Case closed, no room or time for debate. Social media companies, instead of being impartial arbiters permitting the free exchange of ideas have closed Twitter accounts of conservative “deplorables” and declared opinions contrary to what is currently “woke” to be “harmful” or “hurtful.” Given their political leanings, this has meant that conservative speech is shut down. The same thing is true on college campuses where speeches by conservatives are cancelled.

 

I was reminded of Bierce’s definition of “Defame” when reading an op-ed last week by Greg Sargent of The Washington Post. Mr. Sargent sees risk to our democracy coming from the right; I see it coming from the left. The truth is that despotism can come from either the left or the right, as we know from history: Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and more recent examples in North Korea, Iran and Venezuela. It is extremism, regardless of whether right or left, that should concern us. And we should never forget that a failure to freely exchange ideas abets extremism. 

 

But perhaps things are not so bad as I fear. Over the 232 years since George Washington was elected our first President, the United States has been tried several times: On August 24^th, 1814, the British burned the White House. During the years 1861-1865, the United States fought a Civil War that left about 700,000 dead, when the country was less than 10% of its size today. We have suffered economic collapses, including a decade of depression in the 1930s. We have lived through periods of violent racial and religious prejudices. American soldiers have gone overseas to fight (and die) for freedom in at least eight wars. We were attacked on our homeland on 9/11 by Islamic terrorists. Yet, the United States has always rallied when down. As Churchill observed, in a backhanded compliment: “Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else.” How long will it take for politicians now – when governing, not campaigning – to admit that we are Americans first, rich or poor, black or white, female or male, believer or non-believer. Will they speak without hyperbole? Will they be tolerant or patronizing? In the third and fourth line of Kipling’s opening stanza in the poem quoted above he offers hope based on mutual respect:

 

“But there is neither East nor West, Border nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.”

 

But that is not us today. There is no mutual respect. We are more politically divided than at any time I can recall in my eighty-plus years. And what discourse we have is too often uncivil. Either you are with me, or you are against me, to borrow a phrase from George W. Bush. We cannot agree on problems that should be easy to resolve. For example, no nation can exist without borders, yet we cannot agree on how to handle the thousands of illegal immigrants who daily cross our southern border? The earth’s temperature is changing, yet the subject has become so politicized that reasonable people cannot discuss adaption, or man-made versus natural causes. COVID-19 has been ravishing our country and the world for almost two years, yet debate is not allowed as to its origin or even its science. The Constitution gives the right (and duty) to vote to all American citizens (who are not felons) above the age of 18. Proof of age, address and citizenship should be all that is required. Why should that be so difficult to implement? Inflation has become ubiquitous, but one side says pass the $1.8 to $5 trillion Build Back Better bill and inflation will recede. The other side says inflation is a function of deficit spending paid for by monetary expansion. Is not that something we should be able to discuss? One side claims racism is endemic in our white-supremacist nation. The other says that to treat blacks as needing special attention is condescending. Are we only to listen to one side? Do we only hear what we want to hear? The economy has been recovering for over a year, since 2020’s second quarter debacle; yet pessimism permeates the country, as can be seen in birthrates below replacement. Why? Francis Fukuyama famously declared “the end of history,” with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and victory for a democratic, liberal West. Now, thirty-two years later, Russia is in ascendancy, China is militarily expanding in the Pacific and interning its Uighur citizens, while the West questions its foundations of individual freedom and free-market capitalism. History is storming back.   

 

Extremism on social media platform gets thousands of “likes.” Extremism sells books, newspapers and cable news. Yet most Americans, I am convinced, are moderate in their politics, leaning slightly left or slightly right. Most are patriots who love their country and who want to live peacefully. Most admire the success the United States has had over its almost 250 years of existence, and most recognize what a marvel the Founders created. They know we are the envy of the world. Our nation is not perfect, but that was something the Founders also knew – they created a “more perfect union.” In Philadelphia, the Founders had different agendas and represented different parts of the country. If they had been unwilling to debate, where would we be today? We will never agree on all issues, nor should we. However, as Joseph Joubert stated in the rubric that heads this essay, we must be willing to debate all issues. Why can’t we talk?