Columns, pieces and posts
Isolationism is essentially emotional. You’re angry at the cost in blood and treasure of your country’s international forays and adventures and want to withdraw from the world. Emotionalism can hold sway and dominate politics for a time, even an era, but you can’t build anything on it. It doesn’t last because emotions change because facts […]
This is how I read Donald Trump now: He’s in the greatness game. He’s already won the other games in politics. He’s established himself as the powerhouse who transformed the nature of a major political party; he’s the colossus who’s changed the direction of politics in other major democracies. It’s big, but it isn’t all […]
The fiery Tucker Carlson interview with Sen. Ted Cruz is the perfect distillation of the split among conservatives on Iran. And that split is all about the unhealed wound of Iraq. Mr. Cruz made his personal case—it seemed to rest on his reading of the Bible—for joining the Israeli action against Iran. Mr. Carlson pushed […]
I’m going to say something old-fashioned. It’s a thing we used to say a lot but then we got bored with it or it seemed useless. “We don’t do that.” If we don’t say it we’ll forget it, so we have to keep it front of mind. President Trump this week gave a speech at […]
I want to attempt a sort of bird’s-eye view of both parties as we enter the first summer of the Trump administration. For the Republicans, the headline is moving forward on various Trump policies (immigration, trade, budget) that, in the aggregate, have sparked neither widespread support nor overwhelming alarm. It’s all wait and see. The […]
On Memorial Day we have a duty to remember. Part of how we remember is through film. Its makers should be thanked for capturing war’s valor and loss. World War II got the great movies, scores of them. There are acknowledged classics—“The Bridge on the River Kwai,” directed by David Lean, with a long-uncredited screenplay […]
You know of broken-windows theory. It is the insight, promulgated by the social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982, that visible signs of disorder, left untended, stimulate further disorder and crime. This was common sense presented with an academic gloss, and is exactly what your grandmother told you: If you don’t replace […]
White smoke. The cardinals moved quickly, after only four or five ballots. Is that a good sign? But the smoke is white, and people came running, and the crowd in St. Peter’s Square burst into sustained cheers, with chanting and then laughing, and the huge ancient bells began to ring. On the Vatican feed the […]
Donald Trump, an overview: America continues divided into two groups. One thinks, “He is something that happened to us.” The tone is shocked, still, and bewildered: Did I live in this country all this time and not understand it? The other thinks, “He is something we did.” The tone is pride and, still, surprise: I […]
Pope Francis’ great contribution was to present the Catholic Church as a lover of all people. He called it “a field hospital after battle,” a refuge and place of repair. It must “go to the peripheries, which are often filled with solitude, sadness, inner wounds and loss of a zest for life.” Many saw in […]