Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Both George Soros and Charles Koch believe that the foreign policy of the United States has become unhinged from any defensible conception of national interest or human rights, and together they hope to use their vast fortunes to move the US toward diplomacy and peace, away from the endless war to which it now seems committed. Charles Koch is one of the “Koch Brothers,” renowned for having long offered financial assistance to Republican and conservative candidates for public office. Soros is the Hungary-born financier who notoriously said in 2003 that removing President George W. Bush from office would be the “central focus of my life” over the following year, as it was “a matter of life and death.” A headline in the  Boston Globe  has called it an “astonishing turn” that these two men have teamed up. Astonishing or not: Koch and Soros are combining to endow a new foreign-policy think tank, called the “Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.” The name is in homa...

Hmmm. To review the recent bidding, friends. The Trumpettes of the White House leaked that the administration is considering a policy to bus asylum seekers to designated cities in retaliation for the political views of the people running those cities. Certain news outlets accurately informed us of this idea. The first reaction of the Trumpettes was "Fake news! Nobody here is thinking of anything so horrible!" Until the Orange Dynast said, "Actually, that's a good idea and I am considering it, because using human beings as pawns is what I'm all about." So: the "enemies of the people" had been exactly right and should take a bow. Keep on keeping on with that truth-telling trick, enemies. Trump doesn't care, but it does seem to confuse the Trumpettes now and then.

It may seem a perverse subject for meditation on inauguration day for Donald J. Trump, but I'd like to take a Big Picture look at the woman who conspicuously isn't the center of today's ceremonies, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Think back on 2007, the early jockeying on the Democratic side, before any actual primaries or even caucuses had been held. HRC at that time was using the phrase "help make history." Support for her was helping to make history. She wasn't using the phrase "glass ceiling" much in that cycle, but the appeal suggested by the phrase was the same. This would have been a perfectly sensible appeal for her to make, if the chief intra-party opponent had turned out to be Christopher Dodd or Joseph Biden, just another WASPy white guy. It might have been somewhat less sensible if the intra-party opposition had coalesced around, say, Joseph Lieberman or Bernie Sanders. But we'll get back to that. A less hypothetical point is this: th...