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Theory & political commentary
In his post at The Stone on Wednesday, Gary Gutting urges us to recalibrate our assessments of presidential candidates in two ways: (1) by putting less stock in candidates’ successes or failures and (2) by voting for a party, not a person. The first suggestion makes a lot of sense. The second, I ...
After his loss in Tuesday night’s debate, the Republican nominee for president is now known as the candidate who goes out of his way to compile resumes on female job candidates and stuff them into binders. The response from the GIF community has been fast and furious. Here are a few of the best ...
In a hilariously foul-mouthed video last month, comedian Sarah Silverman called attention to Republican-led attempts to suppress turnout among left-leaning voters in November. “Hey black people, old people, poor people and students,” the video begins, “guess what you have in common? Lawmakers are ...
As the candidates gear up for Tuesday night’s second presidential debate, it occurs to me how strange a ritual this is. President Obama, according to Helene Cooper of the New York Times, is focusing his preparation on tactics rather than substance: This time, instead of focusing on the nuts ...
Mitt Romney, the candidate who has made a career out of shifting his positions to suit the political climate and maximize his electoral prospects, may have gone too far with his most recent (now retracted) policy pivot. Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century political theorist, would be especially ...
On Wednesday, affirmative action will be back on the Supreme Court’s agenda when it hears oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas , a case in which a white woman claims she was rejected from the university because of her race. Nine years after the Court ruled in Grutter v. Bollinger that the ...
The votes are in: Mitt Romney won Wednesday night’s debate. A CBS poll showed 46 percent of uncommitted voters pegging Romney as the winner, versus 22 percent choosing Obama. Even the analysts at MSNBC were disappointed with the president. Ed Schultz was “stunned” by Obama’s weak performance, and ...
Is de facto racial segregation in public schools a problem? A strong and vocal majority of readers responding to my Economist post on the dearth of blacks and Hispanics at some elite high schools in New York City think the answer is clearly no. My post looked at a federal civil rights complaint ...
As Obama and Romney attack each other for waging “class warfare,” a new study from the Public Religion Research Institute shows how little anyone really knows about the largest block of American voters: the white working-class. As this graph from the report illustrates, 36 percent of the ...
Arguments on both sides of this question were aired at a thought-provoking colloquium sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College on September 21-22: “Does the President Matter? A Conference on the American Age of Disrepair.” Video recordings of the proceedings are available here. Let’s ...
Mitt Romney dug himself a deep hole this week when Mother Jones released a secretly recorded video of him speaking to a group of millionaires and complaining that 47 percent of Americans “are dependent upon government” and “believe that they are victims.” Scores of commentators have pointed out ...
Are you convinced that your moral and political views are the right ones? If you were to lay out all of your views and examine them, would they fit together in a coherent package? Are you open to new ideas that run contrary to your intuitions? In my last post I explored Bertrand Russell’s ...
Yesterday, nearly two thousand people “liked” this quote posted by Big Think on Facebook: Several subscribers appreciated the irony in Russell’s quip. Here are two: Below, I’ll return to the irony Thomas, Nancy and a few other Big Think Facebook perusers noticed — by the way ...
The Democrats have a lot to cheer about after a terrific convention in Charlotte. God, however, is shaking her head. On Wednesday, Mitt Romney lambasted the Democrats for removing a reference to God in their party platform. The sanctimony was thick: Our founding document the Declaration of ...
As I begin to come back to earth after Michelle Obama’s spectacular speech at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night, what strikes me most about Day One in Charlotte is the contrast between the ways that the Democrats and the Republicans are talking about education. Looking over the ...