El Paso

Mass killings in El Paso and Dayton perpetrated by young men with guns. The motives are still not known and it is doubtful that we will ever fully understand what motivates people to such behavior. The anti-gun activists will as usual blame weapons, but this alone cannot explain what we are seeing in America. The …

What Trump and Republicans Ignore at Their Own Peril

The economy is good—perhaps the best it has ever been—at least by the standards of the stock market, GNP, and unemployment rates. Yet Democratic Presidential candidates claim that Americans continue to suffer economically and apparently large blocks of voters agree. So what is the problem? Interestingly, the answer was given in 1951 by a self-educated …

Trump, the Fox, and the Hedgehog

The title of this blog may sound like a fairy tale, but it’s not. It refers to the famous essay, the Fox and the Hedgehog, by the political critic Isaiah Berlin, which adopts the distinct goal-achieving strategies of these two animals as a metaphor for how history is made. The hedgehog, according to Berlin, is …

Fighting Back

Americans are a people averse to confrontation. They are also hypersensitive on matters of race. So it is little wonder that we are witnessing outrage on the left and amongst some conservatives in their reaction to President Trump’s negative Tweets about Rep. Elijah Cummings and the state of his congressional district of Baltimore, MD. True …