At long last, after years of campaigning, rallies and rhetoric, and after billions of dollars spent to sway the opinions of a tiny sliver of the electorate residing in seven of its fifty states, the US 2024 elections have concluded. The people have spoken, and what they said was Donald John Trump will be the… Continue reading American Democracy 1776 – 2024
Tag: constitution
2024 Election Crosses the Godwin Event Horizon
As regular readers of this Web log know, when my older sister Rose has a day off from work as a school teacher in Fairfax, Virginia, she often meets me for lunch at a good restaurant in downtown Washington. Today, however, she took a day off volunteering with the Kamala Harris for President campaign, which… Continue reading 2024 Election Crosses the Godwin Event Horizon
Silence of the Gats
The proposition that democracy is an imperfect form of government is nothing new. Plato wrote a book about his proposed alternative, where a class of philosopher kings would replace the rule of the people, and this year is the two-thousand four-hundredth anniversary of his writing it. Who would actually be good enough, wise enough, just… Continue reading Silence of the Gats
Dueling Dotards
Throughout the history of civilization, great nations have risen and fallen, most often, according to the commonly accepted wisdom, by rotting from the inside out; usually, it seems, because of some virtue that proves, in the manner of Greek tragedy, to be a fatal flaw. While that may not be true in every case (the… Continue reading Dueling Dotards
Supreme Irony
As the New Year dawns, America girds its loins for its most crucial national election since 1864, when Abraham “Rail Splitter” Lincoln ran against his former Commanding General of the Army, George B. “Fuss and Feathers” McClellan. The major issue then was, of course, America’s Original Sin, racism, embodied at the time in a fratricidal… Continue reading Supreme Irony