“The search for majorities always results in either greater disfranchisement or wider suffrage, and in this case, leaders reached out to poor white men for their victories.””
“In 1934, they sent Wall Street broker Gerald MacGuire to Europe to see how fascist leaders had mobilized veterans to enable them to seize power. When MacGuire returned, he tried to recruit retired U.S. Marine major general Smedley Butler to lead a similar paramilitary coup against FDR. MacGuire claimed to represent U.S. financial interests and to have $6 million to put behind the effort. Butler alerted the authorities and the attempt failed, but fascism had shown anti–New Dealers a way to marry their ideology to popular political activism. Get people fighting first and they can be led toward right-wing politics next. In America the hallmark of budding fascism was not intellectuals discussing how to take power; it was populist violence.[1] There was a straight line from the anti–New Deal violence of the 1930s to the street brawlers at Charlottesville. Since the 1950s, opponents of the liberal consensus had urged supporters to think of themselves as heroic, individualistic cowboys who had not only the right but also the duty to protect their families from the alleged socialism of the government. That””
“In his first two years in office, with a slender majority in the House of Representatives and a Senate split fifty-fifty, the Democrats managed to pass historic legislation that echoed that of FDR and LBJ, shoring up the economy, rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, and investing in the future, trying to bring the disaffected Americans who had given up on democracy back into the fold. In March 2021, Democrats passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic and stimulate the economy that it had hobbled. In November 2021, some Republicans were persuaded to get on board to pass the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to rebuild the country’s roads and bridges and to install broadband in rural areas across the nation. A few Republicans also backed the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which invested $52 billion in the domestic manufacture of semiconductors and boosted scientific research in the U.S. And in August 2022, the Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic investments in addressing climate change, expanded health coverage, reduced the deficit, and raised taxes on corporations and the very wealthy.””
Major Richardson was a Canadian author and soldier whose literary works primarily focused on historical themes and the complexities of early American and Canadian life. Born in 1796, he served in the ...
“But voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass eighty-four new laws to put the Great Society into place. They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community-development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students. The Social Security Amendments of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over age sixty-five, and Medicaid, which helped cover health care costs for those with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.””
“That was a triumph, but “those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning…. Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.” Johnson celebrated that the bill had bipartisan support of more than two thirds of the lawmakers in Congress and that it enjoyed the support of “the great majority of the American people.” He emphasized that the law “does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others.” He took on the old trope that Black Americans wanted “special treatment” and said that the law simply made sure those people the Founders had declared were created equal would now “also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.” “Its purpose is not to punish. Its purpose is not to divide, but to end divisions”
“The first thing to go was fair representation. By 1796, political leaders had divided into two camps, and Jefferson saw that he would have won the presidency if only Virginia’s electors had all voted as a bloc in the Electoral College rather than splitting their votes between him and John Adams of Massachusetts. Jefferson urged Virginia to adopt a winner-take-all system that would give all of the state’s electoral votes to whichever candidate got a simple majority. It was a stunning change and one that appalled Madison, who wanted to amend the Constitution to prevent””
“Elections in America were also becoming less free and fair. In 2010, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, a plan to take control of statehouses across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census. Through the process of what is called gerrymandering, after Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme (even though he didn’t like it), political parties could gain control of extra seats in a state by drawing districts to either “pack” or “crack” their opponents.””
“Echoing Lincoln, Larson explained, “Our underlying philosophy . . . is this: if a job has to be done to meet the needs of people, and no one else can do it, then it is a proper function of the federal government.” Americans had, “for the first time in our history, discovered and established the Authentic American Center in politics. This is not a Center in the European sense of an uneasy and precarious mid-point between large and powerful left-wing and right-wing elements of varying degrees of radicalism. It is a Center in the American sense of a common meeting-ground of the great majority of our people on our own issues, against a backdrop of our own history, our own current setting and our own responsibilities for the future.”[6]””
“Obamacare, he claimed, was “about capitalism versus socialism.” Republicans opposed socialism, O’Reilly said, “but Republicans have not been able to convince the majority of Americans that income redistribution is harmful.”[4] There was another solution to that dilemma, though: flooding the zone with propaganda. In January 2010, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, whose professional career had been spent opposing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision. It ruled that corporations could spend unlimited money in campaign advertising so long as they were not formally working with a candidate or a party.””
“Emerson’s interest in Plato would become a major preoccupation. Plato was the single most important source of Emerson’s lifelong conviction that ideas are real because they are the forms and laws that underlie, precede, and explain appearances. Emerson found Plato the way Schliemann found Troy. Over a period of many years, Emerson dug down through successive layers of translation, commentary, and editorial arrangement until he came to the real thing. Emerson could read Greek; he was familiar with the Platonic texts, but he preferred to work with translations. His general understanding of Plato evolved through at least seven discernible stages.””
“Emerson’s sympathies were with the existing government on this occasion, that is, with the bourgeois government that had replaced Louis Philippe in February and in which the poet Lamartine held a major position. “I am heartily glad of the shopkeepers’ victory,” Emerson wrote on May 17. He understood that “this revolution has a feature new to history, that of socialism,” but he had little faith in socialism by now. “For the matter of socialism,” he wrote, “there are no oracles. The oracle is dumb. When we would pronounce anything truly of man, we retreat instantly on the individual.”13””
“THE ISLAMIC REVIVAL The clearest reason to study and understand Islam, and specifically Islamic eschatology, is quite simply because Islam is the future. Yes, you read that correctly: Islam is the future. If present trends do not change dramatically, Islam will bypass Christianity for the title of the world’s largest religion very shortly. In fact, according to most statistics, this may take place in less than twenty years. A majority who read this book will live to see this. Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world, growing at a rate four times faster than Christianity.1””
“Meanwhile, the left seems more united than ever. They have drummed conservatives out of the Democratic Party. The major news media continue to root for leftist political candidates, for leftist legislation, and for leftist judges. And academia consists mainly of leftist indoctrination centers.””
“When developing the first version of an application, you often don’t have the problems that this architecture solves. Moreover, using an elaborate, distributed architecture will slow down development. That can be a major dilemma for startups, where the biggest problem is usually how to rapidly evolve the business model and accompanying application.””
“Here are the major drawbacks and issues of the microservice architecture: Finding the right set of services is challenging. Distributed systems are complex, which makes development, testing, and deployment difficult. Deploying features that span multiple services requires careful coordination. Deciding when to adopt the microservice architecture is difficult.””
“there’s no question that a major moment of unlearning and relearning is at hand for educators of all stripes.””
“As the island of knowledge grows, the surface that makes contact with mystery expands. When major theories are overturned, what we thought was certain knowledge gives way, and knowledge touches upon mystery differently. This newly uncovered mystery may be humbling and unsettling, but it is the cost of truth. Creative scientists, philosophers, and poets thrive at this shoreline.””
“A brief overview of the major theories and pedagogies of the field will show that it has struggled to come to terms with how to do right in a wrong world.””