Desperately Seeking ConsistencyThe Center-“And, as Michael Lind pointed out in Tablet, Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill was not the only Capitol Hill taken over by extremists thanks to a lax police presence—witness ultra-progressive Seattle.”Michael D. Purzycki1/15/2021
Mr. President, Please Consider Following John Adams’s ExampleThe Center-“So, if President Trump sticks to his plans not to attend the inauguration of President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, he has a remaining option that still very much respects the peaceful transfer of government set into place by our nation’s Founders.”Zachary Rose1/13/2021
The Woke Mob vs. the Trump Mob: the Real Double StandardThe Center-“There is a real double standard at work. It is a glaring one, not the one President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris claim exists but, rather, the one they want to gaslight us into accepting.”Alexander Zubatov1/13/2021
What Ails Us?The Center-“The loss of faith in America, its promises, and its constitutional and democratic ideals augurs not only American decline, but American collapse.”Thomas Koenig1/12/2021
The Trump PutschThe Center-“While I am happy to endorse some of President Trump’s policies, I am not willing to endorse his self-serving legal maneuvering simply for the sake of these policies I support.”Jonathan Church1/6/2021
The Historic Unifying Potential of the U.S. ConstitutionThe Center-“Professor McConnell’s extensive study of the substance and scope of presidential power under the Constitution has convinced me that the unifying capacity of the Constitution could perhaps be revived.”Thomas Koenig1/6/2021
Editor’s Choice: the Best Interviews of 2020The Center-As has become something of a tradition each year at Merion West, here are our editor’s choices for his favorite interviews of this past year.Erich J. Prince12/31/2020
H. R. McMaster: How He Sees China, and the WorldThe Center-“And so I think we have to resist the tendency to try to define a new administration’s foreign policy mainly as an opposition to the administration that came before it.”Thomas Koenig12/30/2020
Walter Lippmann and the Dilemma of DemocracyThe Center-“In his 1922 book, Public Opinion, Lippmann notes that in a representative democracy, members of the public are expected to form opinions regarding public affairs with which they have no direct contact.”Thomas Koenig12/29/2020
A Janus-faced AmericaThe Center-“Yet, despite the extremes we have confronted this year, there might be a way of turning away from this ‘great divide.'”John Tuttle12/27/2020
Slavoj Žižek, Leszek Kołakowski, and the Ontological GapThe Center-“I would argue that we must vigilantly guard against viewing ourselves as gods or otherwise infusing and inflating our fallible natures and politics with a divine authority.”Nick Opyrchal12/17/2020
Escaping TumblrThe Center-“I was also on Tumblr with an agenda. Over the past ten months, I had stumbled deeper and deeper into the neurodiversity movement, which frames autism as an identity as well as a disability and blames society for ‘oppressing’ autistics.”Lucy Kross Wallace12/17/2020