Every Good Morning

What we are being pushed towards in this country needs a new word to describe it. Authoritarian will not do. It is a mushy word, even vaguely sentimental, as if referring to an overbearing daddy or slightly too strict teacher. I don’t think fascism works either, not as an exact definition. No organized gangs of black shirts or storm troopers are gathering by the 100,000 in stadiums and no one […]

Four million nine hundred thousand hits appear if one googles ‘new American Civil War”. I’ve been passing over and occasionally dipping into these announcements for, analysis of, a percentage likelihood of , and cheerleading for (and against) Civil War for some months now. A new American Civil War between Republicans and Democrats seems impossible to imagine as anything other than a bad movie or as being representative of the current […]

  In his History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides writes, “Everyone commands when he has the power to do so.” In his formulation, power is its own purpose. One’s power to control is limited only by the opposition’s power to hinder one’s control. This is a zero-sum estimation of politics and governance. Thucydides wrote a history describing the collapse of the Greek alliance and its ensuing civil war. He described a time when one either […]