Adapting a lecture into a book is difficult. A good lecture, even one that lasts an hour, should only cycle through a single full idea. The lecturer should introduce some supporting concepts, and present to her audience a range of evidence that sustains the arc of her argument. But a lecture is inherently confined, since nobody’s attention span can visit multiple ideas properly in one sitting. A book, in contrast, should take its reader on a journey with an itinerary.
Is the honeymoon already over? Democrats who were basking in the afterglow of wins in Virginia and Alabama got the jitters over the weekend when the victorious candidates—Governor-elect Ralph Northam and Senator-elect Doug Jones, respectively—both sounded a moderate note. The Washington Post reported that Northam could try to leverage his landslide win by plucking “a few Republicans out of the General Assembly—where the GOP is holding onto the majority by a thread—and give them jobs in his Cabinet... Читать дальше...
On August 1, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona published Conscience of a Conservative, a compact but fiery denunciation of the Republican Party’s turn towards demagoguery, nativism, and Donald Trump. Decrying the “Faustian bargain” the party made in accepting Trump in return for conservative judges and the occasional policy victory, Flake slammed his colleagues for supporting a petty and unstable tyrant bent on undermining American democracy. “We pretended that the emperor wasn’t naked,” he wrote. Читать дальше...
