Crisis will inevitably strike, so America needs stability and strength. Will Trump be ready?
2008 and the years just after (the crash and the weak recovery) had changed everything in America, and that the country was going to choose, in coming decades, one of two paths—a moderate populism or socialism—and that the former was vastly to be preferred, for reasons of the nation’s health.
.. Undergirding my thinking is the sense that a big bad day is coming—that we have too many enemies, and some of them have the talent to hurt us, and one or more inevitably will.
.. our country is stressed to the point of fracture culturally, economically, politically, spiritually. We find it hard to hold together on a peaceful day, never mind a violent one.
.. The priority is stabilizing and strengthening what we have, and encouraging wherever possible an atmosphere of peacefulness and respect.
.. This Thursday he may have launched a Republican civil war: The Freedom Caucus had better “get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & the Dems, in 2018!” That will help promote harmony.
.. Mr. Trump revealed that he has no deep knowledge of who his base is, who his people are. I’ve never seen that in politics. But Mr. Trump’s supporters didn’t like the bill. If they had wanted a Republican president who deals only with the right, to produce a rightist bill, they would have chosen Ted Cruz.
.. I had worked in a White House. I had personally observed its deeper realities and requirements. Their sense of how a White House works came from news shows and reading, and also from TV shows such as “House of Cards” and “Scandal.” Those are dark, cynical shows that more or less suggest anyone can be president.
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Crisis reveals the character, the essential nature of a White House. Seventy days in, that is my worry.
Michael Novak Crafted a Moral Defense of Democratic Capitalism
Philosopher served as ambassador under Reagan and impressed Thatcher
His philosophical heroes included Reinhold Niebuhr, Gabriel Marcel and Albert Camus... Recruited to teach at Stanford University in the mid-1960s, he joined protests against the Vietnam War, though he wavered over the years on whether U.S. involvement was justified. “I came out of it feeling that I had not been as steady in my thinking as I would have liked,” he wrote... So he took up a chance to write speeches for Sargent Shriver as the politician stumped for Democrats across the U.S. in 1970... Yet he believed the party was neglecting a large part of its base, including Irish, Italian and Slavic Catholic immigrants.Such voters, he wrote, “did not want their kids taking acid. They did not want their daughters sleeping around, or having abortions.”.. His 1972 book “The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics” described people who would become Reagan Democrats, as Mr. Novak himself became.
.. socialism was “the residue of Judeo-Christian faith, without religion. It is a belief in the goodness of the human race and paradise on earth.” Capitalism, he added, was “a system built on belief in human selfishness; given checks and balances, it is nearly always a smashing, scandalous success.”
.. In his book “The Joy of Sports,” he dismissed the idea that sports were a waste of an intellectual’s time. “The basic reality of all human life is play, games, sport; these are the realities from which the basic metaphors for all that is important in the rest of life are drawn,” he wrote.
How Clinton Could Knock Trump Out
And that leads to my second reason for pushing Clinton to inject some capitalism into her economic plan: The coalition she could lead. If there is one thing that is not going to revive growth right now, it is an anti-trade, regulatory heavy, socialist-lite agenda the Democratic Party has drifted to under the sway of Bernie Sanders. Socialism is the greatest system ever invented for making people equally poor.
.. I get that she had to lean toward Sanders and his voters to win the nomination; their concerns with fairness and inequality are honorable. But those concerns can be addressed only with economic growth; the rising anti-immigration sentiments in the country can be defused only with economic growth; the general anxiety feeding Trumpism can be eased only with economic growth.
.. It’s time that Hillary pivoted. The country today doesn’t need the first female president. It needs the first president in a long time who can govern with a center-left, center-right coalition, and actually end the gridlock on fiscal policy in a smart way.
Why American Sports Are Socialist
And why European sports are not
America’s more capitalist sports fans commonly acknowledge that their country’s most popular sports, like the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, have several rules that would please a Scandinavian social democrat. Salary caps and luxury taxes limit how much each team can spend on players, punish those that over-spend, and close the gap between rich and poor teams. In both sports, the top draft picks typically go to the worst-performing squads from the previous year. Revenue sharing redistributes wealth among the rich and poor teams. Overall, success is punished by design, misfortune is rewarded by design, and the power of wealth is circumscribed with spending caps.
.. public policies are an echo of national history. For example, in the U.S., the legacy of the 19th century’s “open frontier” made Americans skeptical of government intrusion, while the absence of an influential socialist party after World War II made it difficult for leftist policies to take root.
.. When a soccer team performs poorly, it’s not rewarded with a high draft pick. Instead the club is relegated to a less competitive league, a mighty blow to their revenue. Meanwhile the most successful teams from lower divisions are promoted to more competitive leagues where they can earn even more money.
.. Promotions and relegations were a tailored solution to a specific problem in English soccer: the problem of chaotic abundance.
.. In English football, where there are hundreds of similarly talented squads, the promise of churn keeps those fans interested: Late-season games between bad teams take on enormous significance when a loss might lead to relegation.
.. In American football, where there are exactly 32 similarly talented teams, the promise of parity keeps those fans interested