The Orange County Register -- Joel Kotkin
Becoming America the not-so-beautiful
“Virtually all the leading reformers in our history – Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, the Roosevelts and Martin Luther King – couched their proposals in terms of fulfilling American ideals. Throw out the ideals, and those who originally formed them, and we lose the precious ability to meld our traditions with change. We are left simply with a postmodernist battle of interest groups, with no unifying or moderating principle.”
The Los Angeles Times -- Joseph J Ellis Op-Ed -- The Founding Fathers: Demigods or scoundrels?
“In the case of the founders, such disavowals also provide therapeutic opportunities to transform U.S. history into a morality play with a ready-made cast of villainous dead white males, thereby obviating the need to encounter history's ironies and paradoxes or to comprehend its intractable tragedies.”
International New York Times -- GARDINER HARRIS and ERIC SCHMITT
Obama’s Call at U.N. to Fight ISIS With Ideas Is Largely Seen as Futile
“This means defeating their ideology,” he said. “Ideologies are not defeated with guns. They are defeated by better ideas — a more attractive and compelling vision.”
Equality as an Affirmation of our Common Humanity
James Rutherford -- The Far Center Blog
“We are missing a defining opportunity in the history of the moral and political philosophy of the liberal tradition; first, by not defining our primary moral value as equality, understood as a respect for the dignity and worth of our common humanity; and second, by not defining our government as a constitutional democracy, which is the only way to convey both the substantive and the procedural concepts of equality that it incorporates.”
