15. July 2016

New York Times columnist, David Brooks, in his July 15, 2016 column "We Take Care Of Our Own"(http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/opinion/we-take-care-of-our-own.html?_r=0) analyzes American society has having two competing factions in terms of their attitudes towards their society. There are those who are parochial nationalists and moral particularists and those who are globalists and moral universalists. The first group is parochially tribal and subscribes to a type of us versus them philosophy...

02. July 2016

All of the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Brexit by those opposed to it (as well as many who voted for it) provides a lesson for both the political elite which created the EU (and elites in all liberal democracies) and the ordinary folks who felt alienated or betrayed by it. An elite will almost always have the upper hand in managing social affairs but when it pushes the little people too hard by taking away their economic security, their belief in authority structures, and even...

26. May 2016

Eduardo Porter's May 24, 2006 column in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/business/economy/weve-seen-the-trump-phenomenon-before.html?_r=0) raises again the issue of why lower and middle class Americans of both the right and left parts of the political spectrum are expressing their rage and frustration with their situations and our authority structures. They have great reasons to be unhappy but, unfortunately, they have no clear understanding of why things are as they are...