Sublime

L’Etat au service des personnes ne doit ni les contraindre ni se servir d’elles comme d’instruments aveugles pour des fins qu’elles ignorent.

Trump will render Messina’s and Rove’s entrenched systems functionally worthless in the blink of an eye. The secretly gathered information, the well-honed political connections, the smears, the cozy Washington, D.C., alliances, the revolving door, the backscratching, the favors bought and earned, the whole darn establishment.

inevitable. The only question is: Which form? Most populist movements have been characterized by some desire for wealth redistribution. Yet populism really becomes a threat to the survival of the free-enterprise system when markets lose legitimacy as a way of allocating rewards—in other words, when the system looks unfair to growing numbers of peop

In the notes he made for a speech in the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote of the “real or supposed difference of interests” between “the rich and poor”—“those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings”—and of the fact that over the ages to come the latter would com

While he called it “loyalty,” the capacity he prized most in his subordinates was actually the capacity for subservience.

But self-government starts in ourselves. The most basic way Americans can acquire what Tocqueville called “habits of the heart” is by killing their Twitter or Facebook accounts and spending time in the physical presence of other Americans who don’t look or talk or think like them. Study after study shows that antagonistic groups begin to lose their

Selon Madison, la démocratie, qu’il rejette, se caractérise au contraire par le pouvoir du peuple dans son sens social, c’est-à-dire de la plèbe, des non-propriétaires, des pauvres. Or, du point de vue des défenseurs du gouvernement représentatif, les pauvres sont porteurs d’un danger pour la société, parce que fondamentalement, ils veulent le chan

terrorists resemble a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot move even a single teacup. So how does a fly destroy a china shop? It finds a bull, gets inside its ear, and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened after 9/11, as Islamic fundamentalists

That, I have always believed, is one of the core reasons for the left to exist: to provide a structural analysis of wealth and power that brings order and rigor to the prevailing (and correct) sense that society is rigged against the majority, and that important truths are being hidden behind pat political rhetoric.