Much of the world has always believed America’s defense of democracy to be hypocritical, and that American-led economic integration was self-serving. But now even the people who sincerely believed in the postwar American project are discovering that it no longer exists.
~ Anne Applebaum via The Atlantic
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Among the people, democracy is thriving. After decades of decline in voter turnout, there has been a steep and steady rise in participation over the past 20 years — at least for parties whose candidates reflect a genuine popular sentiment. As this has happened, liberal commentators — who tend to back what Wolfgang Streeck calls “parties of the standard model” — have changed their definition of democracy, he writes: They see high electoral participation as a troubling expression of discontent, “endangering rather than strengthening democracy.”
~ Christopher Caldwell
via This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time
published by The New York Times on November 28, 2024
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The erosion of American manufacturing superiority is an old story, but it is a key element for understanding the end of the American age. The U.S. could once outbuild other powers by tapping into civilian production. During World War II, Americans retooled the automotive industry to build aircraft. Today, relative to the rest of the world, the United States does almost no civilian shipbuilding. China, in comparison, makes about 50 percent of the ships in the world and controls about 80 percent of the world’s drone manufacture.
~ Phillips Payson O’Brien via The Atlantic
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The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate
for incompetence and lack of discipline.
~ Jim Collins
From dozens of academic studies, there is a consensus that faecal incontinence is a combination of multiple factors, rather than a simple cause and effect. Fundamentally, it boils down to the body’s gastrointestinal system coming under extreme strain during intense efforts.
~ Jacob Whitehead via The Athletic
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History is made as much through rumor as through fact.
~ Doreen St. Félix via The New Yorker
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l paint what cannot be photographed, and l photograph what l do not wish to paint.
~ Emmanuel Radnitzky
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Politics is the process by which a society chooses the rules that will govern it.
~ Daron Acemoğlu
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In recent years, San Francisco, a seven-by-seven-mile port whose population has never exceeded nine hundred thousand, has produced a Vice-President, a Speaker of the House, and a number of redoubtable legislators, making it perhaps the country’s hottest forge for powerful Democrats.
~ Nathan Heller via The New Yorker
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In modern times, every major revolutionary movement has sought to change not just the politics of a single country but the international system itself. Napoleon marched the French Revolution across Europe. Lenin and Trotsky believed that their Bolshevik Revolution would succeed only when the Soviet Union was surrounded by other Communist states. Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors built proxy movements to spread their ideology across the Middle East.
~ Anne Applebaum via The Atlantic
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