A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Politics

  • Thanks, Elizabeth Warren

    I’ve leaned toward Elizabeth Warren for most of the current primary campaign. Almost exactly a year ago, I placed her at the top of my preliminary candidate rankings. I cheered her on (and gave her a modest amount of money) as she ascended to near-front-runner status, driven not just by her famous “plans” but by Read more

  • Is animal rights the next great progressive cause?

    This article at the New Republic argues that we’re about to see an overdue reckoning on the left with the issue of animal rights. The reasons are that many of the issues that newly energized progressive activists are focusing on–e.g., climate change, labor rights–intersect in major ways with animal agriculture. Moreover, the left’s emphasis on Read more

  • The socialism question

    In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been a lively argument going on about the rise of “democratic socialism” within (or adjacent to) the Democratic Party. Obviously, the candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries is ground zero for this discussion, but we’ve seen a general shift, even among otherwise mainstream Dem pols, toward “socialist” Read more

  • “Original Sin Liberalism”

    I appreciated this piece from E. J. Dionne on what he calls “Original Sin Liberalism,” which is a pretty accurate label for my own political outlook. Dionne is responding to conservatives who accuse liberals of believing that people are essentially good, and are only made bad by social structures or conditions. Dionne notes that liberals Read more

  • The welfare state is good

    Dylan Matthews at Vox has an excellent article defending the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, which is (of course) under attack from the current administration. The piece is long and chock full o’ data, but the upshot is that the program serves people who really need it, not a bunch of freeloaders with backaches Read more

  • Toward utopia?

    I have always had a small-c conservative streak that makes me skeptical of utopian politics. The idea that human beings could, through their own efforts, abolish suffering, strife and injustice once and for all has always struck me as dangerously wrongheaded. Both history and my own religious tradition seem to tell pretty decisively against this Read more

  • Bernie Sanders and the progressive foreign policy turn

    Foreign policy was oddly absent for most of last year’s Democratic presidential primary. This is odd not just because foreign policy is obviously a large part of the president’s job, but because it’s an area where eventual winner Hillary Clinton was arguably the most vulnerable. You may recall that in the 2008 Democratic primary foreign Read more

  • Tom Paine, the Bible and wealth redistribution

    I enjoyed this interview with University of Michigan philosopher Elizabeth Anderson on how workplaces effectively function as “private governments” and often act in oppressive ways toward their employees. That lead me to this piece by Anderson on Tom Paine as an early theorist of social insurance. In Anderson’s telling, Paine was responding to revolutionary communist Read more

  • A brief case for #MedicareforAll

    I’ve long believed that people in a wealthy society (such as our own) have a right to health care regardless of their ability to pay. To me, this arises from a Christian conviction (though certainly not an exclusively Christian conviction) that each human being has intrinsic worth as creature made in the image of God. Read more

  • Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose

    Comparing America’s patchwork health care system to Europe’s social democratic paradise is a bit of a hackneyed genre at this point, but this op-ed by writer Anu Partanen does a good job of re-framing the rhetoric of “freedom” that Republicans have used as a rationale for reducing government’s role: The trouble with a free-market approach is Read more