The Nature of Things

I admit to being a lifelong bleeding-heart liberal. Yes, I'm the one who adopts stray cats and gives whatever money I can manage to a variety of causes in support of downtrodden and forgotten members of society; the one who supports politicians on the left who have plans for and a record of making life better for ordinary people; the one who wants to save the Earth and all its endangered species and ensure that women and girls are educated and able to control their own bodies and lives; the one who wants to stop global warming and make sure everyone has safe water to drink. My heart bleeds for all these causes and on some days my heart despairs that my causes will ever win the day. And when I do despair, I remember one of my favorite bleeding-heart liberals. He lost one of the most lopsided elections for president in our history, but he was a great man who never stopped fighting for the causes he believed in, a man who inspired many of my generation to believe that we could build a...

Karen L. Cox, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, had an op-ed piece in The New York Times a couple of days ago that caught my attention. She had me with her first sentence: "It's tough being a Southern liberal."   As a Southern liberal who has lived most of her life surrounded, not to say overwhelmed, by a multitude of rabid conservatives, I know the truth of that sentence only too well. Cox was discussing the recent election results, of course, but she had an interesting point to make - a point that I had not seen made anywhere else. Many pundits analyzing the election have made much of the fact that although President Obama won the country, Romney won the former slave-holding states of the Confederacy, except for Virginia and Florida. In doing this, they opine that this section of the country is very different from the rest of the nation. Professor Cox reveals that her analysis proves just the opposite - that, in fact, the South very muc...

I'm not a big fan of David Brooks and I admit I don't often read his column in The New York Times , but a couple of days ago, he wrote one which had a title that intrigued me. It was "Obama's Christian Realism." The gist of the column was that President Obama's thought processes are revealed by his speeches and that his public speeches, taken as a whole, have reflected a remarkably consistent philosophy throughout. It is essentially that there is evil in the world which must be confronted, and, as Brooks states it, that "life is a struggle to push back against the evils of the world without succumbing to the passions of the beast lurking inside." This is what Brooks calls the liberal internationalist approach. It is an approach that demands that we, as a nation, act in concert with others to achieve our aims. From this philosophy grew our backing of NATO and of the United Nations and of many regional alliances around the world. It is an approach...