Punishing people for their words does not make the words vanish from memory. The unsayable is not unthinkable. Indeed, the punishment of the word may actually magnify the impact of the thought. Never mind abstract free-speech principles: Purely on pragmatic grounds, when a member of a community says something that bitterly divides the community, the way to a resolution is not to suppress the thought, but to argue it out.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
:::
Kamala Harris’s words seem focus-grouped to please every imaginable constituency. The trouble is, at exactly the moment when communications staffers are satisfied they have pleased everybody, they have in fact left everybody frightened that the candidate is confused and hesitant. Strong leaders get in front of public opinion. Strong leaders make choices and accept consequences.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
:::
America’s old republic was born of rebellion against Britain’s more ancient monarchy. Yet, by strange fate, the passage of time has only joined America and Britain more closely together in war and peace.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
:::
America’s old republic was born of rebellion against Britain’s more ancient monarchy. Yet, by strange fate, the passage of time has only joined America and Britain more closely together in war and peace.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
:::
The American system of government is based in large part on that of 18th-century Britain. The powers of the American presidency look a lot like those of the British monarchy before the American Revolution—the power to propose and veto legislation, to pardon crimes and commute sentences—powers that no British monarch has wielded for ages.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
:::
The British monarch is both the head of state and that state’s most closely watched prisoner, forbidden to say or do anything remotely human, let alone political.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
:::
The British stumbled upon an unexpectedly powerful idea: Sever the symbolism of the state from the political power of the state, and bestow those two different governing roles on two different people. Power has little majesty in the British system. Prime ministers reside in an apartment over their office. People are rude to them all the time.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
:::
You do not need to withhold any single criticism of Woodrow Wilson, the man and the president, to regret the harm done by the unbalanced and totalizing censure that has been heaped upon him over the past decade. Wilson was a great domestic reformer. He was the first American president to perceive and explain how American power could anchor the peace of a future democratic world.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
:::
In a world that otherwise values competition, effort, and merit, the British have allowed their state to be governed by the purest chance. It seems like a formula for disaster. Instead, it has produced 350 years of constitutional stability.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
:::
Woodrow Wilson was the first world leader to perceive security as a benefit that could be shared by like-minded nations. Until then, each great power had clambered over others to field bigger armies, float bigger navies, and accumulate more colonies. This competition had culminated in the disastrous outbreak of the Great War. Wilson glimpsed the possibility of a different way: that shared values might provide a more stable basis for peace among advanced nations than the quest for military dominance.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
:::