Political Thought
Several of the topics on Mike Stenhouse’s In the Dugout show, yesterday, had that theme, whether it was state GOP Chair Sue Cienki talking about Governor Dan McKee’s insult to the opposition party, talk about a Worldwide Freedom Rally in RI, or arrests of COVID-lockdown-resisting Christians in Canada.
Although Jonathan Swan appears to have positioned a recent essay on Axios with a view toward explaining away President Trump’s electoral gains among Latino voters as a “counterintuitive” political benefit-to-him of the coronavirus, I think the real lesson is quite different. Swan argues that by “shifting Trump’s rhetoric from immigration to fears around the economic impact…
Ethan Yang, in a post for the American Institute for Economic Research, asks, “Why Have the Courts Been Deferential to Lockdowns?” Yang addresses legal principles and tests, such as “rational basis” and “the narrowly tailored standard” and writes: Hollow phrases such as “the common good,” “the public interest,” and “reasonable” give enormous discretion to judges…
Each instance is a small thing, and especially in a small state, one wants to limit one’s time spent lurking around social media like a sort of contrarian anthropologist. (Of course, most insiders aren’t on there purely for fun and distraction, but are working angles, too.) Still this subtle dynamic may be one of the…
The Providence Journal recently published a multi-author op-ed on the idea, written by civic engagement “consultant” Cynthia Gibson, Providence College global studies professor Nicholas Longo and activist Pam Jennings. “Participatory budgeting” — which the authors link to the Rhode Island Foundation’s non-governmental “Make It Happen” initiative to spend federal stimulus money — belongs on the…
As conservatives move on from assessing Rhode Island and America’s situation and begin working out what to do about it, we should look to the experience of Jews and early Christians for a lesson that may seem counter-intuitive at first.
Political science professor Eric Kaufmann recently appeared on City Journal’s 10 Blocks podcast to discuss diminishment of academic freedom as well as increasing gaps in our perceptions of reality. The latter he attributes to a “new ideology… that sacralizes race, gender, and sexuality which then means that people aren’t able to get an objective story…
A few weeks ago, Sarah Hoyt commented as follows on Instapundit in response to a Victory Girls post by Lisa Carr concerning CNN assertions that Republicans are terrified of the darkening of the average American skin color: … when I didn’t like academic, Marxist [science fiction] I got told that’s because I didn’t like women, immigrants and…
RI Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos took to the pages of the Boston Globe to herald the state’s Census-count success as a model for the provision of services, but progressives like her are redefining the relationship of the people with their government.
It’s funny how obviously incentives play a role in people’s actions, such that you get the same response to the same incentive even though the issues at hand are completely distinct. Consider Katherine Gregg’s recent article in the Providence Journal after the attorney general confirmed that the RI Convention Center can no longer hide its payroll…