A Thinking Reed

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

Politics

  • Rand Paul’s top-down conservatism

    Continuing the grand congressional tradition of monkeying with local D.C. affairs, supposedly libertarian G.O.P. senator Rand Paul has introduced amendments to a bill granting the District budget autonomy that would dictate city policies on guns, abortion, and unions. From the Washington Post: One Paul amendment would require the District to allow residents to obtain concealed Read more

  • Political purism and playing the long game

    Garry Wills wrote a good response to the video from Harvard Law professor Roberto Unger calling for the “defeat” of Barack Obama. Unger, who is invariably billed as Obama’s “former professor” (according to Wills he taught Obama in two classes at HLS), maintains that Obama has “failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States.” Unger’s video has Read more

  • The fog of (just) war: more on just war and the “kill list”

    To follow up a bit on the last post, here’s a good piece published in Boston Review by Georgetown law professor David Luban, looking at the “drone war” more broadly in the context of just war theory. Luban homes in on some of the thornier issues surrounding the targeted killing program: distinguishing between combatants and Read more

  • Do the evolution

    As everyone not living under a rock now knows, in an interview with ABC yesterday, President Obama–who recently had said that his views were “evolving”–announced that he now supports the right of same-sex couples to get married. Some liberal critics complained that Obama’s announcement does nothing to change the status quo, with marriage still being Read more

  • A dime’s worth of difference, 2012 edition

    If you follow writers associated with what I’ll broadly call the “disaffected Left,” you’d be forgiven for thinking that there are few if any substantive differences between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Both, we’re told, are content with the corporate plutocracy, support a hawkish foreign policy and an ever-expanding surveillance state, are open to making Read more

  • Let’s be clear: Romney’s a conservative

    A major part of the media narrative concerning the all-but-concluded Republican primary has been that Mitt Romney is “really” a moderate who has had to appear more conservative than he is in order to woo G.O.P. primary voters. This assumption of Romney’s moderation is based in part on his legitimately centrist record as governor of Read more

  • The failure of welfare reform

    The 1996 welfare-reform law, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Clinton (who famously said that the “era of big government is over”), has been hailed by people in both parties as a great triumph. It replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families Read more

  • Competing goods, sympathy, and democracy

    The Obama administration’s decision, as part of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, to require religiously affiliated institutions to provide contraception coverage in employee health plans has, not surprisingly, caused quite a stir. Personally, I’ve had a hard time forming a strong opinion on the issue, despite the fact that both conservatives and liberals Read more

  • Do we need a Christian party?

    Today I came across this article (via Crystal) arguing that American Christians should abandon the Republican and Democratic parties and form a “Christian party” that embraces something like Phillip Blond‘s “Red Tory” or “Big Society” program: British theologian and political philosopher Phillip Blond correctly notes that, “the current political consensus” in the United States is Read more

  • Silly season

    I haven’t been following the Republican primaries all that closely–partly because it’s too depressing, but also in part because I’ve been convinced virtually from the get-go that Mitt Romney will ultimately be the nominee. Nevertheless, what’s apparent even to the casual observer is that the G.O.P. intends to rerun the playbook they used in the Read more