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Politics

The Long View 2008-05-31: Spelling Reform in the WSJ; The Socratic Struggle Session

John J. Reilly’s 2008 account of diversity training as a struggle session is a classic. He quickly intuited that the objective was mostly to provide legal and rhetorical cover in exchange for some time and money, a strange tax on business. A final point: Traditional autocracies were concerned with

The Long View 2008-05-26: The Return of History and the End of Dreams

Robert Kagan was a frequently reviewed author for John J. Reilly. The Return of History and the End of Dreams [Amazon link] was useful to John as he tried to generate a synthesis that would move us forward, instead of just arguing about which of our currently inadequate tribal positions

The Long View 2008-04-09: Entry Rights; WWZ film; Favorite Books; Quellos

John J. Reilly starts this entry off by looking at entry rights for migrants. Exit, with a capital E, the ability to leave whatever system you find yourself in, is an idea that is often contrasted with Voice, the attempt to change that system. In this case, the authors of

The Long View: The Making of the President 1960

Sixty years later, this is still fascinating. The Making of the President 1960 By Theodore H. White Atheneum Publishers, 1961 400 Pages, Various Prices ASIN B000BPDQ28 Historians have long since written the second and third drafts about the contest between John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Richard Milhous Nixon for the presidency

The Long View 2008-02-18: The Menace of the Yutes; Obama's Ontological Deficit; That Republican '70s Show

I rather enjoyed this paragraph of John J. Reilly’s from 2008 which uses the idea “socialize the risk, privatize the profits” without using that phrase. Turning from Senator Obama's ontological deficit to the implosion of the Reagan Coalition, we find the key to the latter in Steyn&

The Long View 2008-02-11: Rand & the New Atheism; Anne Rice Vindicated; The Softening of Steyn; Sharia at the Ernstfall

For someone as interested in political ideas and movements as John J. Reilly was, I appreciate this take on politics: All politics is opera. The semantic content is rarely the important part. As politics comes to be personal in the waning days of the Republic, we should keep this in

The Long View 2008-02-06: Ash Wednesday

Something I hadn’t remembered about John J. Reilly’s musings on politics was that he saw in the policies of the George W. Bush administration a failed attempt to move the Republican Party in a populist direction. Much of the received wisdom of political commentators in the intervening decade