December 14th, 20180The other day, a friend asked what surprised me most about politics. This may seem strange, but I’d never really thought about the question.
My response was off-the-cuff but heartfelt. The biggest surprise is also among my biggest disappointments with American political life: The ongoing effort by politicians to suppress...
October 16th, 20180What does it actually mean to be an American? Tell me. In the press of day-to-day events and amid the ongoing tumult of politics, we don’t think about this much. Yet it’s a crucial question, one that each generation in this country is called upon to answer for itself.
Despite our differences, there are some traits that I think we...
September 29th, 20180We live in a divided country. And I don’t just mean politically.
Our economy is creating winners and losers, with no clear way up the ladder for millions of Americans. The last few decades have produced great inequality of wealth and with it, unequal access to the levers of power. We’re split along regional lines. We’re divided...
September 16th, 20180It’s so easy these days to despair about the future of our country. It feels like half the people I run into just want to pull the covers over their heads and ignore the news.
There’s dysfunction at the highest levels of government. Recent reports — the new book by Bob Woodward and a New York Times op-ed — reveal that top...
September 1st, 20180If you take a dim view of our political parties, you’re in sterling company. So did George Washington.
In his famous farewell address, he warned us against “the baneful effects of the spirit of party.” A political party, he wrote, “agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of...
August 5th, 20181You know these words, but how often do you stop to think about them? “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…”
They...
May 25th, 20180I was chatting with a group of students the other day when one of them looked me in the eye and commented, “You’re very tough on journalists.” I had to plead guilty.
Of course I’m tough on journalists. Maybe even as tough on them as they are on politicians.
Our representative democracy depends on journalists doing their...
May 11th, 20180Politicians and commentators these days like to point to an array of threats to our constitutional system. There’s one, though, that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should: Our national debt.
We may not yet be in imminent danger of fiscal collapse, but we’re moving into uncharted waters. We are among the most indebted...
May 1st, 20180Our republic is under stress. So much so, in fact, that if you’re not worried about its future, you probably haven’t been paying attention.
What makes me say this? Our public discourse has become uncivil and shrill. Corruption and unethical actions by prominent politicians headline the daily news. Too many politicians make their...
March 30th, 20180For the most part, we Americans value expertise. We want our physicians to possess knowledge and experience.
We want our lawyers to know the law inside out.
We want our clergymen, our engineers, our farmers to bring the kind of proficiency and skill to their work that comes only with familiarity and practice.
So here's a...
March 2nd, 20180You could choose any number of marquee dilemmas to illustrate how broken Congressional politics has become. Guns, Russian interference, climate change — Americans want progress on all of them and get little from Capitol Hill. But to my mind, nothing illustrates the dire state of our politics better than how we act on the federal...
July 27th, 20170There's no shortage of threats to our democracy. Russian meddling in elections, the vulnerability of state voting systems to hacking, politicians' assaults on the media and political leaders' growing fondness for policy-making in secret — all of these pose a real challenge to our system's viability.
As worrisome as these are,...
