at times seems there are
no national principles
just partisan ones
I recently read the New York Times Opinion Essay, This Prophetic Academic Now Foresees the West’s Defeat by Christopher Caldwell.
Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”
The “Prophetic Academic” in the headline is one Emmanuel Todd, who is, according to Wikipedia, a French historian, anthropologist, demographer, sociologist and political scientist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris. His research examines the different family structures around the world and their relationship with beliefs, ideologies, political systems, and historical events.
The article itself was interesting in its gloom and doom for the United States and it had many interesting points, it was one short paragraph that had me take notice.
Mr. Caldwell writes that Mr. Todd has said:
Fighting a war based on values requires good values. At a bare minimum it requires an agreement on the values being spread, and the United States is further from such agreement than it has ever been in its history — further, even, than it was on the eve of the Civil War. At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.
At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.
At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones.
I grew up in a time there WHERE principles that transcended politics.
At my Church there were both Republicans and Democrats as members of the congregation.
Can’t see that much today it seems.
I cannot imagine two sides of the same party being members in the same Church let alone, opposite parties.
Well, for a least one party one section of the Church.
(According to Pew Research More than eight-in-ten of this one group of voters who attend religious services frequently (85%) voted for this one feller in the most recent election.)
Mr. Caldwell also writes that Mr. Todd says: “… educational progress has brought educational decline, because it has led to the disappearance of those values that favor education.”
I don’t know quite what to do with this.
I had to read a few times to get to the understand the point.
It reminds of something John Cleese once said along the lines of you to have be smarter than you can be to understand how stupid you really are.
You have to have national principles to understand just how fair we have fallen from having national principles.
You have to have values, shared values to understand just how fair we have fallen from having any shared values.
And that’s where we are.
Hard to see any comeback.
No Haiku For You 