This commentary will be my last. These somewhat rambling—and often too long—essays have had the purpose of helping me think through the present American crisis. I want now, for reasons of my mental and spiritual health—I am 80 years old—to return to the sort of writing I think I do better than analytic prose. In […]
The impeachment has come and gone. Trump, as anticipated, was not convicted. He crows that he was acquitted. He wasn’t acquitted in any moral or factual sense. He did what he did and everyone knows it; he is guilty as charged but the Republicans put on a show trial, called no witnesses, and whitewashed it. […]
The Republicans have made the charge that the Democrats are “socialists.” The implication is that Democrats are unamerican, that they are the enemy of a vaguely defined frame called “the American Way of Life.” If we are to understand what the Republican Party has become, we must understand why the “socialist” label is more than […]
As I write, the elected leaders of the free world have come together to commemorate a great battle that was the pinnacle of the four-year-long struggle to free Western civilization from a threat to its very existence. What was at stake was stark and clear. Nazism, for all its goose-stepping discipline and pomp, was barbarism. […]
