Democracy

Notes on the Fifth District race

Featured image 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 »

Is Disunion In Our Future?

Featured image 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 »

The Washington Post Comes Clean

Featured image 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 »

Tom Perez looks back

Featured image 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 »

Voter suppression, Iowa style

Featured image 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 »

Getting Populism Right

Featured image 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 »

William Barr goes to Rome

Featured image 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 »

Democracy dies in global governance

Featured image 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? »

Climate Change Democracy Deniers Strike Again [With Comment by John]

Featured image 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 »

Brexit, The Musical

Featured image 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 »

Getting it wrong on democracy, Part Two

Featured image 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 »

Getting it wrong on democracy

Featured image Dan Balz of the Washington Post bemoans the “new world order” of “instability and populist unrest.” He writes: The particulars might be different, but the upheavals playing out in Britain and France this week have familiar and common undercurrents, born of the same forces — rebellion against globalization, fear of immigrants and distrust of traditional leaders — that have stoked discontent in Germany and other European countries and that are »