“You have to have a steel spine in your liberalism. ‘What kind of government did you create, sir?’ ‘We created a republic, if [you] can keep it.’ The ‘if you can keep it’ part requires a steel spine.”
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Erich J. Prince
Erich J. Prince is the editor of Merion West. Erich has contributed to a variety of publications including The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Hartford Courant, The News & Observer, the Orlando Sentinel, and The Hill. He studied political science at Yale, completing his thesis on polarization in the United States Congress.
Author: Erich J. Prince
Erich J. Prince is the editor of Merion West. Erich has contributed to a variety of publications including The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Hartford Courant, The News & Observer, the Orlando Sentinel, and The Hill. He studied political science at Yale, completing his thesis on polarization in the United States Congress.
James Lindsay: “Counter Wokecraft” and Responses to Institutional Takeover
Editor’s Choice: The Best Interviews of 2021
Here are our editor’s choices for his favorite interviews of this past year.
Editor’s Choice: The Best Articles of 2021
“As is tradition at Merion West, here are our editor’s choices for his favorite Merion West articles of this past year.”
Sean Spicer: The Steele Dossier and “Radical Nation”
“I got the call on January 10th [2017] from CNN and then BuzzFeed about them running with this hoax. I pointed out at the time that it was wrong. I could demonstrably prove it was wrong. And yet, they stuck by it…”
Warding off Scurvy
“Because there’s little more to friendship than warding off scurvy or having a catch.”
Anne Kim: The AP Exam and the Standardized Testing Debate
“I think the downside of going test-optional, the downside of ignoring what assessments tell you, means that you might end up ignoring the underlying structural problems and never fixing the inequities.”
“Is Nothing Sacred?”
“And this is exacerbated by a situatedness in a contemporary culture that has removed the sort of guardrails that would tell a would-be troublemaker that to defile something like a grave or a tribute to those lost in a mass casualty terrorist attack is unacceptable…”
she asked me to get her a green card
“Although I would have liked to have taken a photograph, my camera was full, and they’d already walked away towards a shop with a sign advertising Calzones.”
Politics: Not an End in Itself
“As such, politics has eclipsed its primary purpose—namely, to provide the means by which people can seek out and, in turn, live good lives, lives that have nothing to do with politics.”
How Things End
“As Joshua Foa Dienstag reminds us, the essential tragedy of being human (or being anything, for that matter) stems from the passage of time.”
Kay Hymowitz: The Devaluation of Higher Education
“This brings in the status issue again, doesn’t it? Because there are so many careers that people just wouldn’t consider because how would they tell their friends?”
The Press and Violence against Asian-Americans
“It seems as though they will do anything to avoid actually backing approaches that would begin to remedy these problems, all of which start with taking a harder-line on those who routinely commit violent crimes.”
Gov. Brian Kemp: How to Stand up to Corporate Pressure
“We lost the All-Star Game, but I think we won the battle because that fight has moved to other states now because we are on the right side of this issue, and we push back so hard.”
Mary Harrington: Family Formation in the 2020s
“The long-term problem there is that if your feminism becomes associated with anti-natalism, sooner or later it’s going to trigger a backlash, and that backlash is not going to look very nice for women.”
Independent Wealth: a Prerequisite for Speaking Up?
“This point deserves all the more consideration today, at a time in recent history that has become uniquely critical of concentrated wealth, both of the inherited and earned variety.”
