Sublime

Hobbes’s assumption that people are incapable of coexisting without authority implies that human online interactions on news sites would benefit from signage, structure and incentives to participate in a deliberative way.

“Freedom,” Tocqueville wrote, “is not the chief and continual object of their desires; it is equality for which they feel an eternal love.” Americans would rather give up their political liberty than their feeling of being equals. “They will put up with poverty, servitude, and barbarism, but they will not endure aristocracy.

Where to intervene? Where to bring democracy? Where to nation-build? I propose a single criterion: where it counts. Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity—meaning, places central to the larger war against the e

One way to give labor more power is to make it easier to organize workers by passing labor law reform bills—the perennial campaign promises of Democratic candidates that go perennially unfulfilled. Another is to direct large-scale government investments into key national sectors—clean energy, manufacturing, education, and caregiving—to create jobs,

But the technocrats draw a sharp distinction between themselves (predominantly white) who are at least engaged in a struggle to transcend oppression in thought and speech and those whites who continue to practice it.