by jpitney | Jun 8, 2022 | Democracy, Reagan
Forty years ago today, President Reagan spoke to the British Parliament: No, democracy is not a fragile flower. Still it needs cultivating. If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist...
by jpitney | Mar 14, 2022 | California Politics, Deliberation, Democracy, Mexico
Nathan Gardels at Noema: Until 2000, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) won every presidential election for some 70 years. This led the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa to mock Mexico as “the perfect dictatorship,” which perpetuated one-party rule through...
by jpitney | Dec 13, 2021 | China, Democracy
Nathan Gardels at Noemi: If Biden’s aim is to challenge China’s one-party system that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and modernized its infrastructure in record time — while the likes of democratic India still lack toilets for 50% of its population 70...
by jpitney | Dec 6, 2021 | Declaration of Independence, Democracy, George Washington
Nathan Gardels at Noema: If the freedom to expose historical wrongs ends up delegitimizing the common American story of the enlightened founding of a constitutional republic by deconstructing it into the mere bad faith of slaveholders, then the very conditions for...
by jpitney | Nov 19, 2021 | Democracy, Foreign Policy
Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic: The centrality of democracy to American foreign policy has been declining for many years—at about the same pace, perhaps not coincidentally, as the decline of respect for democracy in America itself. The Trump presidency was a four-year...
by jpitney | Nov 4, 2021 | Civic Education, Democracy, Education, Higher Education
At AEI, Jenna Silber Storey has a report titled Liberal Education and Liberal Democracy. Major points: The problems in contemporary liberal education are exacerbating problems in our practice of liberal democracy. Liberal education today does a poor job of teaching...
