The Globe and Mail
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Trump stalwarts to the right of them, angry progressives to the left of them, into the valley of impeachment-trial defeat ride the Democratic Senate leaders.
Stormed at with Republican shot and shell – and about a dozen votes short of the 67 required to convict Donald J. Trump of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” set out in the American Constitution – the Senate nonetheless presses forward Tuesday with its trial of the 45th president.
With his first Senate trial (and acquittal) almost exactly a year in the past, this second trial (and its likely acquittal) has been transformed from what the American Founders considered a forbidding rite of judgment into what since the ascendancy of Mr. Trump has become nearly a rote ritual.
How social justice stopped the Keystone XL pipeline Follow Us
Question of the Day
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
It is rather ironic that those most active in trying to repress the freedom of speech and thought of others are most often found in the academy, high-tech information giants, and the press or precisely those who ought to be the strongest defenders of liberty. Why is this?
From history, we know that periods of great flowering of human knowledge and material advancement were strongly associated with periods where free speech and thought were allowed e.g., for a few decades in ancient Greece, during the Roman Republic (before the Empire), and the Enlightenment (Scottish, not French).
Civic Virtues as Moral Facts: Recovering the Other Half of Our Founding
Commentary
Until a half century ago or so, there was a moral consensus, however fraying, that informed and shaped the exercise of freedom in the Western world. The self-determination of human beings, of citizens in self-governing political orders, presupposed a civilized inheritance that allowed free men and women to distinguish, without angst or arduous effort, between liberty and license, good and evil, honorable lives and dissolute and disgraceful ones. Few would have suggested that liberty and human dignity could long flourish without a sense of moral obligation and civic spirit on the part of proud, rights-bearing individuals.
Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission released their report, a self-described “definitive chronicle of the American founding.” Like the commission overall, the report was intended as an overt rebuttal to the
New York Times’s 1619 Project, as illustrated by the opening section on slavery and the founding of America: “The most common charge levelled against the founders, and hence against our country itself, is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.”
The Solution Is a Convention of the States
This is the fifth essay in a five-part series.
Almost immediately upon taking office, President Joe Biden signed a series of executive orders wiping away the progress of the Trump era and resurrecting some of the worst abuses of the Obama era. In addition, he proposed massive new spending and more national debt to be added to the extravagant expenditures of the past few decades.
For more than 80 years, Americans who love their country have been fighting a defensive political battle to preserve the values and traditions that made our country great. But we have suffered one defeat after another. Even the incremental successes of the Reagan and Trump administrations have been wiped away in the “progressive” tide, like sandcastles on the seashore.