A flurry of articles, many from the pages at Salon, have attacked the Republican candidates for their attack on the moderators of the recent CNBC debate, and on the media in general. William Saletan, in Reality Sucks, insists the issue is not a division between the press and the public …
E. J. Dionne, in Conservatives used to care about community. What happened?, comments on several divergent elements in conservative thought and practice. He begins by lamenting that conservative Republicans “have abandoned American conservatism’s most attractive features: prudence, caution and a sense that change should be gradual.” This description of conservatism follows closely …
When I was contemplating the political mind, I imagined that you could devise a test that had nothing to do with politics and economics, and on the basis of the answers have a fairly good idea what the politics of the test-taker were. Turns out, of course, that many others …
After spending a couple of weeks with liberal George Lakoff and Corey Robin’s sometimes objective but definitively contrarian takes on the conservative mind, it was refreshing to get a more positive perspective, even one from yet another liberal, Jonathan Haidt, in The Happiness Hypothesis. “A society without liberals,” he writes, “would …
Jonathan Haidt devotes a chapter to Reciprocity in his book The Happiness Hypothesis. Reciprocity is the glue which holds large societies, of certain other animals as well as of humans, together; lack of reciprocity, tit-for-tat, is what keeps them apart. Reciprocity, and its absence, seems to be what is driving …
I know it’s no longer a new article (October 16, 2010), but I just read and want to comment around Jonathan Haidt’s What the Tea Partiers Really Want, from The Wall Street Journal. Karma is the word he thinks describes how tea partiers and conservatives view the world. “The law …
Thomas DiPrete takes a slightly different view of the poll I quoted the other day from David Gergen and Michael Zuckermann in a CNN article. In Is This a Great Country? Upward Mobility and the Chance for Riches in Comtemporary America, Nov 28, 2005, he thinks this an extreme interpretation …