politics
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Hybrid, Plug-In Politics
Trump’s ideological flexibility and personality-based politics have allowed him to assemble a group that doesn’t agree on anything except loving Trump and hating Democrats, and . . – David A. Graham in The Atlantic I noticed this phenomenon in… Continue reading
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The Five Deadly Virtues
Like her hero Niccolò Machiavelli, Carol Darr delights in turning conventional (and Catholic) wisdom on its head. So in one chapter of her book Machiavelli 4 Everybody, being published next week, she describes five traditional virtues as “deadly” for a… Continue reading
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The Big Bad Prince
The Italian who invented political science, Niccolò Machiavelli, is not much appreciated outside of certain academic types who admire and debate his famous 16th century book “The Prince.” A bookstore I visited yesterday on Fano’s main piazza keeps paperback copies… Continue reading
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Pilgrims’ Progress
To prepare for walking the old Tuscan footpath of European pilgrims and Crusaders, I borrowed a 1919 book by an idealistic American walker who represented the American Red Cross in Palestine 30 years before it became the modern state of… Continue reading
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Antifa, 1945
“Liberation Day” was what President Trump called it when he began imposing his Let’s-Make-a-Deal tariffs, which turned out to be an unconstitutional tax on Americans. In Italy, it’s something else. It’s today, April 25, Festa della Liberazione, Italy’s emotional celebration… Continue reading
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Fascists or Clowns?
Italy remembers its proud past with names on streets and busts in the piazzas. Streets are named for poets, composers, liberators, historical dates (XX Settembre), Communist thinkers (Antonio Gramsci), Machiavelli, and even Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian-American anarchists executed by… Continue reading
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World-Wide Worry (and Work-Around)
In our balanced Constitutional system, the fifty states of the United States are said to be “experimental laboratories” of democracy. But a single state has limited authority to experiment with regulating internet networks. California is trying it with its Consumer Privacy… Continue reading
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The universal faith — money
How earthlings think about money is strangely consistent around the world. Looking at renting an apartment in an Italian city on the Adriatic, the same system that measures market values in Decatur, Ga., is in effect there too, or in… Continue reading
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Lessons for us today, from Italians
I love old books lining bookshelves. The collection in the North Carolina home of a couple of friends held classics of Machiavelli scholarship. I gently pulled out, like sneaking a square of chocolate fudge, a vellum-bound volume. Carol Darr, the… Continue reading
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Making Europe Miserable
Did Trump voters want to see America make Europeans suffer? Make them be on their own against Russia? Face inflation, recession and loss of American goods because of these new tariffs? I don’t remember our relationship with Europe being a… Continue reading
An American journalist heads for Italy to see his country changing from afar. 