“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” That statement is often misattributed to Edmund Burke. After Russia invaded Ukraine, many Americans who didn’t have anything to say about the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, much less torture at Guantánamo and elsewhere, or Yemen, or Palestine, suddenly started wearing blue and yellow flags. They weren’t good before, so how can these self-serving souls think they are suddenly being good now?
Defenders of President Biden keep pointing out that he’s doing the best he can, or that progressives need to be willing to compromise. But there’s a big difference between compromise and nothing at all.
he people, Marxists always said, won’t revolt unless they’re hungry enough. Mass unemployment and poverty, along with government in action, are about to test that proposition.
America’s strategic interests are at odds with its purported values. Then how exactly do our values manifest themselves?
This one resulted from a few conversations I’ve had lately with conservative friends. There are other differences between lefties and righties, of course, but one of those we’ve neglected is this one. Many Republicans wonder, given all the things America does right, why we whine so much about what it does wrong. We, of course, wonder why conservatives don’t want to make our country even better.
