Group items tagged

In a recent interview with the New York Times, the Ohio Republican answered a number of questions about faith and family with uncomfortable candor.

Asked about his conversion to Catholicism, he discussed meritocracy, his search for how to live a virtuous life, and appealing to the authority of his wife’s opinion: “She was, like, really into it. Meaning, she thought that thinking about the question of converting and getting baptized and becoming a Christian, she thought that they were good for me, in sort of a good-for-your-soul kind of way.”

Had she converted, the interviewer asked? “No, she hasn’t,” Vance said, laughing. “That’s why I feel bad about it. She’s got three kids. Obviously, I help with the kids, but because I’m kind of the one going to church, she feels more responsibility to keep the kids quiet in the church.”

Usually we have one majority party that has a big vision for the country, and then we have a minority party that tries to poke holes in that vision. (In the 1930s the Democrats dominated with the New Deal, and the Republicans complained. In the 1980s the Reagan revolution dominated, and the Democrats tried to adjust.)

But today neither party has been able to expand its support to create that kind of majority coalitio

Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin note in a new study, “Politics Without Winners,” we have two parties playing the role of minority party: “Each party runs campaigns focused almost entirely on the faults of the other, with no serious strategy for significantly broadening its electoral reach.”

Here are four things I wish my 2024 self could travel back and say to 2015 me, a much more naïve writer for National Review.

Community is more powerful than ideology. If you came of age politically during the Reagan Revolution, you thought of the Republican Party as fundamentally and essentially ideological. We were the party of limited government, social conservatism and a strong national defense, and these ideological lines were ruthlessly enforced.

The story we told ourselves behind closed doors was the story we told in public — the Republican Party was a party of ideas and those ideas defined the party.

The assumption that Mr. Trump represented an anomaly who would at last be consigned to the ash heap of history was washed away on Tuesday night by a red current that swept through battleground states — and swept away the understanding of America long nurtured by its ruling elite of both parties.

With his comeback victory to reclaim the presidency, Mr. Trump has now established himself as a transformational force reshaping the United States in his own image.

Populist disenchantment with the nation’s direction and resentment against elites proved to be deeper and more profound than many in both parties had recognized. Mr. Trump’s testosterone-driven campaign capitalized on resistance to electing the first woman president.

The planetary crisis is what I call the interlocking, complex, accelerating changes our actions are bringing on in the natural world.

There is an almost religious belief that by invoking the noble traditions of grand collective actions of the past, we can summon a new collective action large enough to unmake discontinuity itself.

In the real world, even the truly dire scenarios for the human future are no longer actually apocalyptic. Too much action is underway, and much more action is now inevitable

when you lose an election, a leadership void opens up. And that void will be filled — with people and institutions and, hopefully, with ideas — and I would like the ideas that fill the current void to be good.

I believe the answer is that the Democratic Party should embrace commonsense moral values and move away from academic fads and deliberate tent-shrinking, while redoubling their commitment to ideas that have been pillars of Democratic campaigns for decades.

Being a Democrat should mean caring more than Republicans about the lives of poor people, about equal rights and non-discrimination, about restraining big business in matters related to pollution and fraudulent practices, and about protecting social insurance for the elderly and disabled.

What do Democrats stand for? Over the last eight years, the answer has been simple: whatever Donald Trump is against. They have been the party of the so-called Resistance, defending institutions against a dangerous and fundamentally undemocratic movement

It has defined what it means to be a Democrat. And it failed spectacularly this week, helping clear a path for Mr. Trump to return to the White House with a clean victory in the popular vote

The first step for Democrats is reckoning with how they got here.

The diplomatic efforts were part of a coordinated effort by the governments of Netanyahu and Donald Trump in the US to place public and private pressure on the prosecutor and her staff.Between 2019 and 2020, in an unprecedented decision, the Trump administration imposed visa restrictions and sanctions on the chief prosecutor. The move was in retaliation to Bensouda’s pursuit of a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, allegedly committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.However, Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions package to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said.

team of economists recently analyzed 20 years of peer-reviewed research on the social cost of carbon, an estimate of the damage from climate change. They concluded that the average cost, adjusted for improved methods, is substantially higher than even the U.S. government’s most up-to-date figure.

That means greenhouse gas emissions, over time, will take a larger toll than regulators are accounting for. As tools for measuring the links between weather patterns and economic output evolve — and the interactions between weather and the economy magnify the costs in unpredictable ways — the damage estimates have only risen.

It’s the kind of data that one might expect to set off alarm bells across the financial industry, which closely tracks economic developments that might affect portfolios of stocks and loans. But it was hard to detect even a ripple.

Last year the Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 20 percent of people in the G7 countries thought that they and their families would be better off in five years.

Another Edelman survey, from 2020, uncovered a broad distrust of capitalism in countries across the world, “driven by a growing sense of inequity and unfairness in the system.”

Why the broad dissatisfaction with an economic system that is supposed to offer unsurpassed prosperity?

Without any laws in place that would tax Ms. Engelhorn’s inherited fortune, she decided to redistribute it herself, and she turned to the public to decide how her money should be spent. She is part of the group Millionaires for Humanity, which advocates wealth taxes, and she co-founded a group called Tax Me Now.

Before the project was announced in January, Ms. Engelhorn had publicly committed to giving away at least 90 percent of her inheritance. She is part of a small movement of superrich individuals who want to not only redistribute their money, but also to challenge the structures that allowed them to inherit their riches.

Ms. Engelhorn said she would continue to fight for a more equal and fair distribution of wealth in her country. She said she hoped that she would make other people talk about the issue, too.