Max Stephenson Jr.

Other Recent Posts

• Can a democratic electorate be held accountable?

  May 07, 2012 Comments (0)

  The Economist this week raises an important and intriguing issue of democratic theory in a column entitled, “Are the Republicans Mad”? The magazine reached its subject by treating a new book by Thomas Mann, of the Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute: It’s Even Worse than it Looks (New York: Basic Books, 2012). Both men are long-time and deeply respected Congressional analysts. Indeed, I had the privilege of studying with Mann while in graduate school. These two authors’ new book argues that the Republican Party is not only behaving as a parliamentary style organization in its lockstep ideological stands, but also, more importantly, has become, “an insurgent outlier--ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of the political opposition.”

  

• Pondering the Nexus of Nature, Politics and Affection

  April 30, 2012 Comments (1)

  I have commented in this column on the implications of the challenge of alterity for democracy and occasionally, too, I have remarked on the role of imagination both in defining community and for leadership. Now comes an opportunity to reflect on both of these themes at once. It is occasioned by the delivery of the prestigious 41st Thomas Jefferson lecture in the Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities last Monday evening by the eminent and irrepressible writer, thinker and rural philosopher, Wendell Berry.

  

• Leonard Cohen: A Villanelle for our Time

  April 23, 2012 Comments (1)

  Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934-) has frequently and rightly been described as one of the most influential writers, poets and songwriters of our time. Critics often mention the deeply modest and always dapper Canadian in the same sentence as Bob Dylan, high praise indeed. Unlike Dylan, however, Cohen is also a novelist, mystic and a gifted painter, and was for a time as well a Buddhist monk. His work has been covered and admired by artists all over the world and yet his interests are difficult to pin down, and while his writing is spare and elegant, he does not rely on a single style.

  

• How shall we Define Freedom?

  April 16, 2012 Comments (1)

  I have written recently on Republican objections to the supposed tyranny of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. In this view, the law, by requiring that citizens obtain some sort of health insurance, robs them of their freedom to make such choices as they might wish. GOP party leaders excoriate the statute as disallowing Americans their freedom to make their own decisions. They contend the nation has never acted in this way before. But President George Washington signed the Militia Act of 1792 that required that every “free able-bodied white male citizen” between the ages of eighteen and forty-five “provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints and a knapsack,” among other equipment. The sort of government requirement in the 2010 health care law is not nearly so novel as its opponents often contend.