[T]he Korea issue is but an extreme expression of a tendency that blights the entire field. We are uncomfortable with democratic accountability, unwilling to subject ourselves to public debate, and uninterested in the constraints public opinion and popular politics place…
Stephen Pomper, former Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs, Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, National Security Council: Thursday night’s missile strikes have the potential to be enormously consequential, not just for Syria and the other…
We are now condemned to live in exciting times. Boredom is, quite clearly, underrated. At the same time, I must confess that as Trump’s victory settled, my despair was coupled with a rush of blood to the head. I felt…
Would-be proponents of a liberal society would cease being liberals at all at the moment they ceased their opposition to “shutting down” discussion, and to the precise extent they did so.
How can a nation survive, can its institutions function, can it prosper and triumph, can the People experience or aspire to satisfaction without recourse at some point to such “tribalism”? The President cannot answer, because no one can.
The necessary transtemporal and social re-construction of the identity of the individual is a process we conventionally define as a matter of “religion,” and a common materialist explanation of religion refers precisely its utility as coordination solution, and so we’re back to where we began, with the littlest possible story, of one person and his or her desires and needs somehow to be related to the self-organization of a global mass of 7 billion souls, via political theology.
The danger for torture opponents in accepting collateral damage to the bases of public discussion, not least in the involvement of the proponents of public reason in habitual defamation of designated enemy political combatants, is the topic for a different discussion, or, more likely, non-discussion.
It is hard to imagine a world in which acts like the murders of James Foley and Steven Sotloff simply as Americans, in connection with an American decision to rescue others from imminent annihilation, did not produce among Americans a demand for punishment as both practical and moral necessity. Yet there is a tendency even among many would-be supporters of President Obama, or of his plans to “degrade and ultimately destroy” “the group known as ISIL,” to diminish and disdain politically aggravated homicides as actual and compelling bases for a specifically American reaction.
