Democracy
October 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Miranda Devine’s New York Post column revisits the 51 intelligence officers whose letter bore all the earmarks of a dirty political intelligence operation taking advantage of their former offices. Let us not forget that Politico acted the media arm of the operation. Devine’s column — “It’s been two years since 51 intelligence agents interfered with an election — they still won’t apologize” — confines itself to the Dirty 51. Having
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August 15, 2022 — Scott Johnson
You can’t help but notice that the absurdly named Inflation Reduction Act has been reborn in the press as a health care and climate bill. Performing its usual public relations work for Minnesota’s DFL, the Star Tribune celebrates the faceless Senator Tina Smith. Washington correspondent Hunter Woodall leads his story on the bill this way: After a series of setbacks over the last year, U.S. Sen. Tina Smith’s work on
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February 1, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
This past weekend, Donald Trump claimed that Mike Pence, as vice president, had the power to change the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump said: “Unfortunately, [Pence] didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election.” This claim is wrong and disturbing. It’s wrong because, as discussed below, once the states submit their slates of electors in compliance with state law and with no alternative slate authorized by an
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January 6, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
Of the articles I read yesterday and today about the events of January 6, 2021, I found two that are most closely aligned with my views. The first is a Wall Street Journal editorial called “Democracy isn’t dying.” Among the points it makes are these: On all the available evidence Jan. 6 was not an “insurrection,” in any meaningful sense of that word. It was not an attempted coup. The
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January 3, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff
E.J. Dionne advises Democrats on how they can avoid a “thumpin'” in this year’s congressional elections. Notice that Dionne isn’t offering a prescription for retaining a majority in the House. He’s merely talking about how not to “get crushed.” Dionne thereby exhibits realism. However, the same cannot be said of his strategy for escaping a shellacking. Dionne says the Democrats’ best hope is to make the 2022 election about democracy.
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June 13, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I just finished reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the first time. I read it over the past two years or so in weekly lunch meetings with my friend Bruce Sanborn. Carleton College’s Professor Larry Cooper, also a friend, served as our preceptor. We used the terrific edition translated, edited, and introduced by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop that is published by the University of Chicago Press. Like
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August 2, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Late Thursday one of Tucker Carlson’s producers invited me to come on the show this past Friday night to talk about Ilhan Omar’s campaign spending in the impending primary election. The invitation gave me all day Friday to study up. Having caught up with much of the recent news on the primary race, I want to offer a few notes on a race that merits national interest. Minnesota’s Fifth District
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July 12, 2020 — John Hinderaker
Until the last few months, the idea of disunion as anything but a historical relic had barely occurred to me. But lately, I have begun to wonder. Is there any basis on which we can share governance of America with people who hate our country and our traditions, institutions, culture and freedoms? Why, exactly, should we want to do so? Is there any set of shared assumptions and values that
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February 19, 2020 — John Hinderaker
This is straight out of InstaPundit, but it’s too good not to pass on. For a moment, the mask drops and WaPo tells the truth about the Left’s agenda: Satire dead @kenklippenstein: One of the more mask off headlines I’ve seen in awhile pic.twitter.com/Ci9qp9ZFwq” — John Cusack (@johncusack) February 19, 2020 What the Washington Post means by “democracy” is not what you and I mean. Keep this in mind next
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February 4, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Just before the Democratic meltdown in Iowa last night, the Democratic Party tweeted out Chairman Tom Perez’s reflections on the reforms that have been instituted under his leadership. If only Perez had waited a few hours, he could have elaborated on the Iowa fiasco. Quotable quote: “Some of our major changes this year have to do with how states administer their caucuses — and they are all geared towards making
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January 1, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Here’s a safe prediction for 2020. The Iowa Democratic caucuses will dominate the news at the end of January and beginning of February. My conservative cousin formerly from New York sees the caucuses as a “glaring example of voter suppression totally ignored by the mainstream media because it provides a boost to left wing Democrats.” He writes: The winner of the Iowa caucus has become the Democratic nominee in every
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December 31, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Modern democracies are said to be in the grip of “populism” that the dictionary defines as “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” Most of the learned commentary from academia and the news media describe populism as a harbinger of the apocalypse, a threat to democracy, and the second coming of fascism, all stemming from racism and
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October 2, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Mainstream media outlets and the former members of the Deep State who supply them with information and quotes are outraged that Attorney General Barr went to Rome to obtain information about Joseph Mifsud. Mifsud is the professor who helped ignite the controversy that led to the Mueller investigation. It’s almost as if these outlets and Deep Staters are fearful of what Barr might learn. Some critics suggest that flying to
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August 14, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Anne Marie Slaughter was an official in the Obama State Department. Now, she’s a professor at Princeton and head of New America (formerly the New America Foundation), a liberal think tank. Slaughter supports “global governance.” By this, she says she means that nations would cede sovereign authority to supranational institutions in cases requiring global solutions to global problems. But who would decide whether a given problem requires a global solution?
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July 22, 2019 — Steven Hayward
As I’ve been pointing our for more than a decade, the most ominous contradiction of the environmental left these days is the way in which they champion the rights of nature while going along with the rest of the left in denying human nature, let alone the natural rights of humans—which is the central premise of democratic self-government. The result, as I have been warning, is the increasingly open anti-democratic
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March 5, 2019 — Steven Hayward
We have Hamilton, the musical, but the British now have its, um, very rough (strong language warning!) equivalent about Brexit. I think the continuing clown show within the British government over Brexit is one of the key stories of our time, and the outcome, like the 2016 vote itself, contains significant meaning for the United States, for the question of Brexit is the same as the question with Trump: Are
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December 13, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, I argued that Dan Balz of the Washington Post missed the point in an article bemoaning the fact that “traditional politics, of the kind practiced in Western democracies for decades after World War II, is on shaky ground nearly everywhere.” The point Balz missed, as he complained about “instability and popular unrest,” is that the politics practiced by Western democracies are under attack mainly because these politics haven’t been
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