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| My current read. Fascinating & well-done |
In party politics, for the hard right, the modern liberal status quo is not something to be proud of but something to be overturned. Outside party politics, among the right’s ethical and cultural critics, that same status quo is a wrong and ugly way to live.
In party politics, for the hard right, the modern liberal status quo is not something to be proud of but something to be overturned. Outside party politics, among the right’s ethical and cultural critics, that same status quo is a wrong and ugly way to live.
One major drawback to this concentration upon the worst [Hitler] is that lesser crooks and smoother murderers slip by. By looking closely at Hitler, we may miss the demon closer to home. Faceless corporate boards and political administrators make decisions that wreck communities, ruin families, and despoil nature. The successful psychopath pleases the crowd and wins elections. The thick glass of the TV tube and its chameleonlike versatility in displaying whatever is wanted favors distance, coldness, and the front of charm, as do many of the sleek accoutrements of high station in the political, legal, religious, and corporate structures. Anyone who rises in a world that worships success should be suspect, for this is an age of psychopathy. The psychopath today no longer slinks like a dirty rat through the dark alleys of black-and-white 1930s crime films, but parades through the boulevards in a bullet-proof limo on state visits, runs entire nations, and sends delegates to the U.N. Hitler is therefore old-style and can divert us from seeing through the mask worn by the demonic today, and tomorrow. The demonic that is timeless nonetheless enters the world disguised in contemporary fashion, dressed to kill.
The ghost of a silly seventeenth-century squabble still haunts our classrooms, infecting teachers and pupils with the lunatic idea that studies must be either ‘classical’ or ‘modern’. I was equally well fitted to specialize in Greek and Latin, or in modern history and languages (I spoke and read French and German almost as easily as English), or in the natural sciences; and nothing would have afforded my mind its proper nourishment except to study equally all three; but my father’s teaching had given me a good deal more Greek and Latin than most boys of my age possessed; and since I had to specialize in something I specialized in these and became a ‘classical’ scholar.
Davos, the debate of the century, the monad of a decade. Stretched to bursting from within, on March 26, 1929, it gave birth to two radically different answers to the same eternal question: Where can we find the essence of philosophizing? Or indeed: What is a human being?
But in truth the U.S. government simply had no interest in creating an international order that would diminish American power. The Roosevelt administration was clear-eyed about raw-power realpolitik considerations, but FDR and many of his top diplomats were also influenced by misunderstandings about the causes of the Great Depression and infused with a righteous Wilsonian sense of national destiny.
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