April 2nd, 2025
But your father abandoned India.

A New Republic writer condemns as unpatriotic cowards the three Yale professors leaving Trumpian America for Canada. “[T]hey have decided to check out of their own communities long before they face actual state violence… [There is a difference between a person] who chooses to face down oppressors and one who ignores or betrays the call for solidarity in the face of oppression.”

Yet the author himself is here only because his father betrayed India, his native country. Does he also condemn his father’s preference to live in a freer, less corrupt, less tyrannical country? My grandfather hadn’t yet faced state violence when he left Cherkasy for the US. Should he have girded his loins and stayed?

Is the writer familiar with the excellent book, excellently titled Exit, Voice, and Loyalty? “In 1989, in the GDR it was the escalating dynamic of out-migration that led those who wanted to stay to take to the streets to demand change. Exit triggered voice, and both worked in tandem.” Many variants of exit and voice exist, and it’s quite possible that a powerful rejection by powerful intellectuals like the Yale Three will turn out to be far more galvanizing among protesters than their staying home.

The writer also overlooks the positive gesture toward Canada that their resettlement represents. Humiliated by the territorial rhetoric and economic targeting coming from the Trump administration, our far more democratic (at the moment) neighbor deserves as much support as we can give it, and few gestures of support are as powerful as actually going there and contributing, in this case, your prestige and institutional strength to a legitimate democracy under threat.

March 25th, 2025
‘There’s nothing realistic about aiding a dangerous adversary, undermining allies, breaking agreements, extorting concessions, threatening annexations, and destroying an order that has expanded American influence and made the past eight decades uniquely stable and prosperous in modern history. These are the policies of crude power worship, not realism. They are extensions of Trump’s character around the world, and they will destroy all that Americans and others value about this country, turning the United States into a shinier image of Putin’s Russia.’

Well. You get what you vote for.

March 20th, 2025
András Schiff says Nope.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BZK35yCTD

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And a reminder of his tragic homeland:

March 5th, 2025
‘The court split 5–4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberals in refusing to set aside a lower court order mandating disbursement of [foreign aid] funds.’

Trump loses, and the rest of us learn not to jump to conclusions about the Supreme Court.

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And permit me a nyah-nyah — I’ve been telling my political friends for years that all is not lost with the Supreme Court. I’ve told them that the Supreme Court will surprise them. They have laughed at me when I said that.

That’s one for UD.

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UPDATE:[W]e’ll find out [in subsequent rulings] whether the Supreme Court intends to serve as a bulwark against a president who is hell-bent on asserting the unilateral power to control federal spending. If not, yesterday’s order may come to look like a momentary, ephemeral reprieve in Trump’s ongoing assault on Congress’s power of the purse.

March 3rd, 2025
The first cut is the deepest

“What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen…

And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.”

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David Brooks

March 1st, 2025
Ireland increases aid to Ukraine …

… on all fronts.

March 1st, 2025
Locals Line Up to Welcome Vance to his Vermont Ski Vacation.
February 27th, 2025
Go for it, Pete.

At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach [out] to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

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Too right. But UD ain’t optimistic about things changing.

February 23rd, 2025
“I am under absolutely no illusions about Trump. The top priority of my government will be to secure step by step independence from a dangerous and unpredictable Trump-led US, which essentially could care less about Europe and has an inexplicable relationship of dependence with Russia. Unclear whether we will still speak of NATO in present shape; we may need to have a European substitute by June. Look at these recent interventions into Germany by Elon Musk.”

Germany’s new leader offers some introductory remarks.

December 16th, 2024
Political theorists on the debacle on the left.

A party whose base consists of culturally liberal, largely well-educated white Americans and a shrinking share of voters of color is almost by definition going to find it impossible to defend American democracy…

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[The future] requires a flexible Democratic Party platform that is willing to compromise on various social and economic issues (immigration, trans rights, tax policies) in the short run to protect democracy in the long run. It requires an ideological pivot toward more moderate voters who may not always agree with socially and culturally liberal whites.

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One theme that repeatedly emerges in the comments of political analysts is the need for the Democratic Party and its candidates to regain the center and to avoid the adoption of more extreme cultural and social policies that alienate the middle and working classes.

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From the comments section on this opinion piece:

The problem now is Democrats never have found a successor to the New Deal policies to mitigate wealth inequality and, as a result, leaned into the more successful cultural element until it literally became self-parody, possibly cresting in 2020 with calls for free health care for illegal immigrants and taxpayer paid …. gender affirmation treatment for prison inmates.

Until the Democratic party recenters on cultural issues to a simple, non-strident goal of fair and equal treatment for all self-identifying groups and finds its voice, and policy prescriptions, addressing the growing economic disparity, they won’t have a viable philosophy of governance – just an amalgam consisting of a combination of radical cultural advocacy groups and lawmakers passively supporting the economic status quo with small tweaks that fall far short of what is needed.

Yup, and it’s what UD‘s always saying: Read Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country. It’s short. It’s a terrific elaboration on this comment, and, for UD‘s money, remains the best account of the suicidality of the left.

November 21st, 2024
He leaves the nation a brief but distinctive juristic legacy…

Matty We Hardly Knew Ye

November 12th, 2024
‘Ruben Gallego Wins Arizona Senate Race, Defeating Kari Lake’

Some good news.

But this frees her up to be appointed Secretary of State.

November 11th, 2024
‘”For many, especially Iranian women, who know firsthand what that symbol represents in terms of gender-based oppression, it was deeply insulting, it was a shock and frankly a disappointment,”[Mina] Fakhravar told CBC News on Monday.’

No, you don’t have to react that strongly to an image of a woman in a hijab, and yes, hijabs obviously should be tolerated (UD‘s readers know she ain’t crazy about them); but the city of Montreal was kinda dumb to feature an image of a hijabi beetled over by two men in western garb in its WELCOME TO THE CITY sign in the town hall. The mayor has announced that it will be taken down — oodles of Montrealers have complained that this pic represents quite the opposite of the secularity near and dear to their hearts — and though there’s the usual insistence that acts of this sort will bring Montreal’s democratic values crashing down, everyone knows that this will not happen.

A small point also, but UD has noticed that, in discussions of the hijab, people tend to overlook the larger total body wrapping that often accompanies the headgear and certainly features in this image. It ain’t just that Montreal is boasting that it welcomes the hijab; it welcomes the total draping of the female body in a modesty gesture that tells the world the female body must be hidden. I wonder why it must be hidden.

Anyway, you’re welcome to traipse about Mont Royal all covered up except for your face and hands, but Montrealers have a right to object to that look for women being made a symbol of their city.

November 6th, 2024
‘Respecting the will of the people, there can be no doubt, lies at the heart of any democratic system…’

And UD will proceed on the assumption that a democratic system is in fact what the people continue to want.

For me, it’s a dark day. But an American majority has spoken, and respecting the will of the people lies at the heart, etc.

And so. We proceed.

November 4th, 2024
If Moldova can elect a woman who’s not a Putin stooge for its president…

so can we!

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LOLOLOL

[In a 2016 presidential run,] Sandu faced open discrimination during the race for being a single woman, and was openly attacked by former Moldovan president Vladimir Voronin who accused her of betraying “family values” and calling her the “laughingstock, the sin and the national disgrace of Moldova” in remarks widely regarded as profoundly misogynistic. She rejected the insults in an interview, replying that “I never thought being a single woman is a shame. Maybe it is a sin even to be a woman?”

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