I’m reading this… Kent Sorenson Was a Tea Party Hero. Then He Lost Everything.
Molly Jong-Fast has a nice essay about getting old.
John Jay Professors Face Allegations of Drug Sales and Sexual Misconduct
How to write the perfect sentence.
Steve has been gushing about Anne Applebaum’s essay in the Atlantic.
Photo: The Hoboken Ferry. The commute home from Steve’s job.
Apt. 11d 
I agree with Steve. I think the comparison to the anti-Dreyfusards is very apt. I hadn’t thought of it before.
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The blurb on the Atlantic article is rather deceptive. The article shows that democracy in some unimportant Eastern European countries may devolve into something less than fully democratic. Such regimes, what you might call plebiscitary authoritarianism, have long been common in Latin America. But none of that says anything about the United States. American democracy survived Woodrow Wilson firing all black federal employees and imprisoning Eugene Debs for opposing his war, it survived FDR using the IRS to lock up publishers who criticized him, and I have no doubt it will survive the minor deviations from the ideal we witness today. For years to come, there will be regular contested elections, rotation in office, free speech within a fairly broad window of acceptability, orderly trials before anyone is imprisoned, and all the other elements of liberal democracy which theory has identified.
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American democracy let Wilson fire all black federal employees because America’s commitment to democracy at the time was limited to white people voting. That’s not really a ringing endorsement of how we might recover from Trump, but I agree that it is the Republicans preferred option these days.
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” It persists today, in the struggle between Marine Le Pen’s “France for the French” nationalism and Emmanuel Macron’s broader vision of a France that stands for a set of abstract values: justice, honesty, and the neutrality of courts, as well as globalization and integration.
From my point of view, the Dreyfus affair is most interesting because it was sparked by a single cause célèbre. Just one court case—one disputed trial—plunged an entire country into an angry debate, creating unresolvable divisions between people who had previously not known that they disagreed with one another. ” It is a very good essay. And is Kavanaugh our Dreyfus?
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