Category Politics/Culture

In these not-much-United States, we live, by any statistical measure one applies, in a new Gilded Age. Not since the age of the robber barons and the current president’s favorite predecessor, William McKinley, has the gap been so yawning between the upper and lower wealth strata of our society, not to mention the gap between the developed and undeveloped economies around the world.

The data are most everywhere one cares to look, a bare fraction of which we will touch on in this post. The common fact binding them together is that the rich keep getting richer at an accelerating pace.

According to the Federal Reserve, in the U.S. as of 2022, the bottom 50% of the population owned only 2.8% of the wealth. On the near-bottom rung in a country of 340 million that has long been the richest in the world, somewhere between 27 million-40 million people live below the official poverty line, which is $32,150 for a fam...

So many fine memories and testimonials to the spirit of former President Jimmy Carter this past week. The entire nearly three-hour service and many individual clips can be viewed on You Tube from a number of sources. For my money, a touching eulogy from his good friend and foe, former President Gerald Ford, whom Carter vanquished in the 1976 election, may have topped the list.

Ford, of course, is now dead 19 years, but in a pact made between him and Carter long before, they agreed to write eulogies for each other’s funerals, with the survivor delivering the other man’s himself, and the first-deceased arranging for a family member (in this case, Ford’s son Steve) to do the honors of reading it into the record when the survivor finally met his end.

Two archrivals in a hard-fought contest for the most powerful position in the world, out of which came a mutually respectful, lifelong friendship, tinged with pla...

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” So begins the influential (and eerily prescient) 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which first appeared in “Harper’s” magazine (available here) and a year later led off historian Richard Hofstadter’s collection of the same name.

In it, Hofstadter takes readers on a condensed but powerful tour (just over 16 book pages) through the landscape of an America roiling just beneath its veneer of civility and constitutional order. Irrational, extremist fears and delusions have always darkened those caverns of the nation’s psyche, most often (but not always) emanating from the right-wing, nativist end of the political spectrum.
He writes:

“I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy I have in mind.”

That suspiciousness has charac...

Some 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus penned a line, “Ethos anthropoi daimon,” which most translators and the popular world of pithy, poetic phrasemakers have settled on meaning, “Character is destiny.” It’s a compact framing of what may be the most important truism applied to human beings and the struggles they endure to lead a meaningful and worthy life.

To wit: Above all and in the end, a person’s character will hold sway in how they conduct themselves and how they affect other people through the course of their lives.

Recently it occurred to me that the phrase may be key to understanding both Donald Trump, who in his every increasingly deranged word and action is no longer even pretending to be a person of decent character, and his followers...

A note from “Kamala Harris for President” among my emails this morning, under the subject line: “Is there ANYTHING we can say?”

“We are writing to ask—humbly—if there is anything at all we can say to convince you to make one more contribution to Kamala Harris’s campaign before our final FEC deadline ends. Please give us a chance to try: What if we told you that as you read this, we are getting outspent and attacked in several key battleground states? What if we told you that if we were able to increase our budget by just a bit, we’d be able to reach and turn out a lot of persuadable Democrats who don’t vote frequently—and that that could be the margin of victory?”

Another a couple of hours later from Hakeem Jeffries:

“I need to pull back the curtain and explain where things stand right now: There are 33 Red-to-Blue seats that Democrats are poised to win in November. Let me be clear:

– These 33 dist...