Category: Current Politics
Moral Realism, Public Health, and Truth-telling Amid COVID-19
As the lockdown proceeds with no official end date in sight, we must turn our attention to a new reality confronting us: It is impossible to proceed with a lockdown to prevent COVID-19 deaths without other harms resulting. This was...
What America Needs Now: A Williamson National Unity Cabinet
By the Mere O Editors In the last Democratic debate, Joe Biden declared that he would nominate a woman as his vice-presidential running mate. That felt right at the time. But times have changed. Biden needs to go much, much...
Our Lives or Our Freedoms: The Fear of Tyranny in a Time of Pandemic
There’s a famous scene in the movie, Braveheart, a 1995 film that became something of a classic among embattled Christian conservatives who liked to see our own battle with “Big Government” in the romanticized terms of a Scottish epic. Riding...
Waiting for Conservative Renewal
Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: Yes, yes, we’re magicians. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, there is a much promised advent that dominates the lives of the hapless Vladimir and Estragon....
Deaths of Despair and Lives of Hope in a Cynical Age
Upon falling into the hands of Giant Despair, Christian and his friend Hopeful were imprisoned without any provisions for days on end and while enduring beatings. In John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian eventually laments, “Brother, what shall we...
The Perpetual Motion Machine and the Pandemic
My grandmother is eighty-five years old. She will die someday. I want her to die well and, in the meantime, to live well. She lives with my aunt about ten minutes from where I live with my wife and four...
Public Reasoning in a Pandemic: Responding to Moore, Reno, and Littlejohn
The rapidly expanding number of Covid-19 cases in the United States poses an extraordinary test of our nation’s institutions and their leaders. In recent days, a discussion has broken out about how we should integrate our interest in preserving and...
“No Wealth But Life”: Moral Reasoning in a Pandemic
Two weeks ago we awoke from our dogmatic slumber of American exceptionalism to realize that the coronavirus was not merely some “Chinese virus,” or the bane of aging Italians. America, and her public officials in particular, have been playing catch...
Learning in Quarantine
For my students On 9/11, I was a senior in college. It was my birthday, in fact. After sleeping in (as I said, it was my birthday), I came downstairs in my off-campus apartment. I couldn’t find anyone. It was...
Grift Before the Storm: Three Days at CPAC 2020
For three whole days late last month the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center in Fort Washington, Maryland became the pulsating core of the Conservative Political Action Conferrence’s annual Republlican extravaganza. Its soaring, glass paneled interior serving as the blighted ovum...