Progressives and liberals don't really value democracy. Instead, they value what they think of as enlightened policy - which is generally an idea held by an "enlightened minority". The Democratic process is simply supposed to affirm the position of the minority. When it doesn't, the people are either too stupid, too corrupted, too wed to tradition, or too easily manipulated by retrograde agents of reaction to "meaningfully" or "substantially" participate in governance.

Tom Friedman has long fit this bill, and this is the philosophy and outlook of the White House as well.

Affirmative Action will resurface in a major way as the jobless recovery staggers along and taxes and regulations go up. Further, now that the affluent, bohemian bourgeois base of the Democratic party realizes that the taxes they've been promoting as desirable will actually have to be paid - BY THEM - you'll see increasing impatience with set asides and quotas in college admissions because they'll want their tax dollars to serve themselves, not the "disadvantaged".

In other words, the Obama administration might very well prove to be less a changing of the guard to the post-modern politically correct than it will be their last gasp. The idea that, with Obama, the new Left has finally gained power is false: it's been exercising...

The absence of restraint generally characterizes the upper and lower classes - by lower, I mean the lowest. The upper class doesn't need restraint because their money gives them plenty of chances to make up for mistakes. The lowest classes can't exercise restraint - which oncsigns them to perpetual poverty and lives characterized by pathologies. It is these two groups that form the core constituencies of the modern democratic party; the great tragedy is that bohemian, liberal culture, while perhaps fun for the rich who can afford it, spells death for those who can't. It is this absence of a culture that cultivates restraint and other virtues that has eroded and continues to erode the American middle class. Cultural conservatives...

I always read that businesses are lamenting the poor analytical and communication skills of employees. As someone that can read and easily understand complex writing, can a businessman out there contact me for a three month trial as an employee? Or are these skills a little less in demand than Williams' article suggests?

There's no getting around it: corporations are people, just like all interest groups. Further, if you don't like their involvement in politics, then deny government the powers of taxing income and profits and regulating business. If you insist on giving government the power to control the lives of businessmen (more often than not simply to fleece them for the unearned personal gain and the unearned benefit of their constituents), then you can't insist that the people you're controlling do nothing to try to influence the government.

The most odious thing about Obama is that all of his lying about what he's doing is premised on an underlying hostility to democracy that yields any result other than complete consensus on his ideological program. That too is exactly what communist totalitarians have always said- that present opinion is too wedded to tradition and the past and too easily influenced by the entrenched enemies of progress to actually be the basis for policy. Hence, Obama speaks in the rhetoric of actual public opinion, all the while pursuing policies completely antithetical to that opinion. Obama doesn't even rise to the level of Orwellian. His strategy is based on adolescent denials of doing exactly what he's doing.

I saw bits of the Colorado Town Hall, and Obama denounced the "special interest" scare tactics. He then proceded to tell everyone that "there but for the grace of God go I", hoping to scare them into supporting socialized medicine- for which there will be plenty more scary stories that no politician will ever share.

On another topic, what right does anyone have to force insurance companies to do unprofitable things? It was nice to see a few real people who work in insurance ask why their industry is being demonized - the answer is simple: so the government can feed off of you. There was a business woman who was concerned about paying more in taxes, and she prefaced her question with all sorts of statements about how well she...

Isn't this what the press and their liberal puppet masters always complained about regarding Bush? It's time that people learn the basic psychological concept of "projection". Projection takes place when a person externalizes their own flaws onto someone else and then attacks that person. Everything liberals criticized Bush for was actually a confession of what they themselves would do (politicize science, violate the Constitution, etc). Now we see that's the case. Witness the IG firing -infinitely worse than the entirely legal firing of lawyers by Alberto Gonzales.

If you're looking for dramatic progress in test scores, forget about it - unless the tests have been written by state education departments so that a lot of students can pass them.

On this issue, Charles Murray is right: not all kids are intellectually equal and many, many more than people realize (or care to admit) are simply not intellectually capable of performing at the level tested. This is especially so in the higher grades (9-12), where American performance is particularly bad. The bottom line is that Algebra, Chemistry, History, Language and Literature and Foreign Languages all require cognitive abilities that most students lack. Thus, any legitimate test of those subjects will yield "unsatisfactory" scores. ...

The idea that the Republican Party can win the black vote on the basis of issues shows a complete misunderstanding of the reason the Democratic Party monopolizes the black vote: they simply call Republicans racists. And there is no winning this argument because it isn't an argument.

What you really have in this country, regarding winning the black vote is a constituency in one party, the Republican, that wants to discuss the merits of policy and another that evades discussion by leveling accusations of racism. The basis of black voting behavior has nothing to do with issues. On the issues, black voters are much more conservative than the party they slavishly follow. Privately, black voters are even more conservative!...