Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

It would be naïve to assume that any liberal democracy (or any society) can long survive with all of its conceptual foundations gutted. Either it will collapse into civil conflict, or those foundations will be replaced brick by brick by the New Faith, until it is transformed into an unrecognizable edifice that is neither liberal nor democratic. Now... See more

One critical factor in determining the region’s future will be the role that the United States chooses to play going forward. As already noted, one reason for the region’s phenomenal success over the past seventy years is the presence of the United States. Yes, the United States badly overreached by trying to unite all of the Korean Peninsula by fo

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This disappearance had many repercussions. If humans can be approximated as rational economic actors (and, ultimately, even Adam Smith and Karl Marx agree on this point), then those who seek glory in the name of God or country appear odd; but if such odd people are commonplace and capable of asserting themselves with explosive force, then the accou... See more

And so, as the pandemic shut down cities and states, half the country looked to science and the other half looked to Trump. Americans didn’t look to one another because there was no longer any trust between them. Into this void government by the people collapsed, leaving the unelected elites and the elected demagogue to battle it out. The struggle

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