Republican Follies

Obama is extraordinarily lucky in his selection of opponents this time around. Though hard to believe, the Republican Party is more internally divided than the Democrats, though the individual divisions have more ideological and participatory coherence than their counterparts in the Democratic Party.

Modes of Reaction and Revolution

I am all about distinctions. It matters that we study differences between political actors and correctly identify points of congruence as assiduously as we try to separate the political world into the members of the Beloved Community and those who are beyond the Pale. That's why I was very pleased to read a deceptively simple article in the latest New York Review of Books by Mark Lilla, Republicans for Revolution. It is a review of a Corey Robin's book "The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism form Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin," and it gets to the heart of many of the observations and criticisms I've posted on this blog about misapplication of political labels, though with fewer polemics and greater elegance.