This note is occasioned by John McWhorter’s piece in the NY Times, basically praising Clarence Thomas as a thinker who has been too easily dismissed. While I agree with Mr. McWhorter on some subjects, I think he is very wrong on this one. …

Today about half the United States electorate seems to think that the end of democracy would be great-they could just keep on winning. It’s not said enough: that’s a fallacy regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum. The end of democracy means the end of leverage. As history…

Monotheism amounts to an imperialistic assertion of primacy. That sounds like one of those wild-eyed slogans from the radical left or right. But in fact it is simple statement of what drives quite a lot of both domestic and international politics. Let’s start close to home. In both Britain and…

Schumer and Manchin seem finally to have reached agreement on meaningful climate action. If we can do that, the next step has got to be reforming the Supreme Court. This Court is responsible for even more than it gets blamed for. Roe v Wade is the tip of the iceberg…

There’s nothing particularly novel about this conclusion, but it still needs to be said over and over again. There is only one objective now: the mid-term elections. …

It’s hard to think about anything other than politics these days, but sometimes it helps to think about something completely innocuous. For what it’s worth, I’m going to talk about Mozart operas. There are reasons to do that. First of all, the four big Mozart operas (Marriage of Figaro, Don…

The Supreme Court, Manchin, and the Senate Republicans have now made it much harder for the United States to do anything substantial about domestic usage of fossil fuels. It’s hard not to get worked up about this, as the perpetrators are self-serving traitors to both our country and the rest…

The most important division in American society is not between Republicans and Democrats. It’s within the Democratic Party itself. As an indication of what I’m talking about, I think about an episode of the program Peaky Blinders. In that episode the hero Thomas Shelby’s sister’s boyfriend is a communist, and…

RIP USA Clarence and Ginni Thomas are running the country now. This was a genuine coup engineered by the Koch organization — creator and manager of the Federalist Society, the source for all our conservative Supreme Court justices. Read Dark Money. Check Wikipedia for recent Federalist manager Leonard Leo. …