Article
The Curious Fate of Populism: How Politics Turned Into Pose
Shop like a populist," wrote a columnist in The St. Petersburg Times earlier in the month, recommending a local store that specializes in quirky collectibles like old soap boxes and bowling pins.
That's what the "pop" of "populist" has come to, a century after the disappearance of the Populists, or People's Party, who were a powerful political force in the 1890's. They advocated restrictions on corporate power, the direct election of United States senators, an eight-hour day, and a graduated income tax - proposals that led critics to call them "wild-eyed, rattle-brained fanatics."
Today, though, populism can be as much a matter of style as substance. In Boston Magazine, Jon Keller speaks of John Kerry's difficulty in "convincing southern Nascar dads and Wal-Mart moms of the populist empathy of a windsurfing New England multimillionaire." National Review's Jay Nordlinger writes that "President Bush is engaged in a little populist campaigning himself today - he's going to Indiana and Michigan, for a bus tour."
Bilingualism in Canada
"Every time you look at the world and life and humanity through the key, which is language, you discover another profile, another vision of the same world & So, learning another language makes you bigger, gives you a wider vision, makes you feel subtleties that you don't get in one language." --Antonine Maillet
Redefining Personal Responsibility
The phrase "personal responsibility" or "individual responsibility" has often been taken by the Left as code for conservative policies that reinforce the divide between the haves and the have-nots. That's not surprising: the Right routinely invokes the phrase to imply that government should not do much to help ordinary people, who should rather just help themselves.
This is not the kind of "individual responsibility" I am interested in here. But nor am I talking about the apparent alternative: abdicating personal responsibility by trusting a cadre of elites to promote our best interests through a variety of social programs and policies. Instead, I'm advocating an understanding of individual responsibility that goes beyond such traditional formulations, which tend to be more politically divisive than they are constructive.
"Values" Play
With the presidential election looking as if it will depend on the votes of nine welders in Cleveland, it was pretty much inevitable that the V-word would rear its head sooner or later. Out on the hustings last week, President Bush said that Senator Kerry is "out of step with the mainstream values that are so important to our country." Meanwhile Kerry was reminding voters of the importance of "relying on the values that made this country great.”
A foreigner listening to those claims might think that this election was simply a question of who has better values, like Walmart versus Costco. But it goes deeper than that -- it's really about what the word "values" means, and what role it should play in political life.
"Values" Play
With the presidential election looking as if it will depend on the votes of nine welders in Cleveland, it was pretty much inevitable that the V-word would rear its head sooner or later. Out on the hustings last week, President Bush said that Senator Kerry is "out of step with the mainstream values that are so important to our country." Meanwhile Kerry was reminding voters of the importance of "relying on the values that made this country great.”
A foreigner listening to those claims might think that this election was simply a question of who has better values, like Walmart versus Costco. But it goes deeper than that -- it's really about what the word "values" means, and what role it should play in political life.
The -Ism Schism; How Much Wallop Can a Simple Word Pack?
The long-term defeat of terror will happen when freedom takes hold in the broader Middle East,'' President Bush said on June 28, as he announced the early transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis.
The ''defeat of terror'' -- the wording suggests that much has changed since Sept. 11, 2001. In his speech on that day, Mr. Bush said, ''We stand together to win the war against terrorism,'' and over the following year the White House described the enemy as terrorism twice as often as terror. But in White House speeches over the past year, those proportions have been reversed. And the shift from ''terrorism'' to ''terror'' has been equally dramatic in major newspapers, according to a search of several databases.
Broad linguistic shifts like those usually owe less to conscious decisions by editors or speechwriters than to often unnoticed changes in the way people perceive their world. Terrorism may itself be a vague term, as critics have argued. But terror is still more amorphous and elastic, and alters the understanding not just of the enemy but of the war against it.
The Elephant in the Room
Read orginal story here.
Americans have been ignoring the elephant in the room. It's that huge thing that's in front of everyone, but that no one mentions by name. Most people can't see it, while others intentionally disregard it, but many people just have a hard time articulating what it is.
Even its opponents direct little attention to the elephant itself; at best they tend to describe its various parts. Its ears are deregulation, its trunk trickle-down economics, its mouth media consolidation, its tail a pre-emptive war in Iraq, its legs record deficits, and its feet cutbacks in education, social security, America's safety net, even veterans' benefits.
Yet, by only describing its individual parts, Americans fail to grasp the massive weight and dimension of the elephant. The big picture is obscured. We can't see that what's in front of us is all part of the same beast: failed conservative policies.
Resurrect the Office of Technology Assessment
Over the last several years, the relationship between science and politics has grown increasingly controversial. From stem cell research to global warming to new surveillance technologies, our political leaders are confronted, on a daily basis, with important policy decisions involving highly complex scientific issues. Unfortunately, their ability to understand these issues, to get reliable information and unbiased analysis about them, has been hamstrung by the 1995 closing of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).
America’s Fascination with Personality
The Commonweal Institute’s Uncommon Denominator has lamented our society's increasing dependence on images and the rise of domestic fundamentalism, and, as a response to these anti-democratic trends, called for a renewed emphasis on critical thinking in the public educational system: "The qualities of thought we wish to promote should be promoted among younger students . . . such that they enter their adult years already better equipped to make good decisions for their lives, and to understand the forces and processes that shape their world."
Critical Thinking -- Critical Indeed!
Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Western Enlightenment has been the elevation of individual reason and judgment over dogma and received wisdom. The celebration of independent thought -- not to mention independent thought itself -- has played a central role in the rise of both secular government and religious ecumenicalism; in the steady expansion of liberty and civil rights; in the major scientific and economic advances of the last 500 years; and in the philosophical underpinnings of all these achievements.
