“If you wonder who made [liberal] hauteur respectable, try Adlai Stevenson. The most celebrated exchange of his two campaigns against Dwight D. Eisenhower went like this: ‘Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you,’ cried a woman at a rally. Ever humorous, the Democratic nominee twinkled. ‘Madam, that’s not enough,’ he said. ‘I need a majority.’ That quip was one of the most appalling things ever said in public by anyone running for president, because either you believe in democracy or you don’t. Yet to educated liberals at the time—confounded that Ike’s war-winning grin counted for more than their hero’s plummy savoir faire—it was balm. Almost 60 years later, the attitude has hardly vanished.”
Tom Carson in The American Prospect
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
June 25 editorial cartoonsCartoons Wednesday's cartoons include war on a loop, the New York City mayoral race, and one almighty F-bomb
-
How generative AI is changing the way we write and speakIn The Spotlight ChatGPT and other large language model tools are quietly influencing which words we use
-
How long can Nato keep Donald Trump happy?Today's Big Question Military alliance pulls out all the stops to woo US president on his peacemaker victory lap
-
Viewpoint: Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winterfeature From The New York Times: “Nearly half of all people now live in countries where women, on average, give birth to fewer than 2.1 babies...
-
Snowden’s silence on Putin
feature If Edward Snowden truly is a moral paragon, then he should announce that he can no longer stomach Vladimir Putin’s oppressive behavior.
-
The irrelevance of the United Nations
feature Once again, the United Nations has been “rendered impotent by a small group of thugs.”
-
Millions of closeted gay men
feature “What percent of American men are gay?”
-
The smug confidence of libertarians
feature Why are most libertarians white dudes?
-
Seeing racism for what it is
feature Riley Cooper’s case shows just how poorly he and most other Americans understand “what a racist is.”
-
Searching for a libertarian paradise
feature Not one of the world’s 193 sovereign states—not even a tiny one—has adopted a full-on libertarian system.
-
Viewpoint: Juliette Kayyem
feature From The Boston Globe: “It is now clear that the Tsarnaev brothers had no strategic plan but to kill in a very public fashion....