Lorenz Kraus is (or was) a candidate for US Senate, based in Troy, New York. My knowledge of his candidacy is based on about ten minutes’ Internet search after he sent me a crank email cc’d to Counter-Currents Publishing, a white nationalist website, among other recipients. Ten minutes is all it took to figure out […]
Readers of this blog know of my obsession with the topic of character-based voting. Suppose that we accept some workable distinction between matters of character and matters of policy with respect to politicians and political candidates, each a potential consideration for or against their continued stay in office or their candidacy.* What role should judgments […]
Back in 1950, during the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur was famously (“famously”) invited by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) to give a speech at one of their annual conventions. Given the exigencies of war, MacArthur was unable to attend, but accepted the invitation and sent the VFW the text–we’d call it a “hard […]
I am colossally overdue in finally editing and posting the fifth installment in my supposedly five-installment-long series on character-based voting. Resolution: before the year is out. But here, at any rate, is a passing thought on that same subject, inspired by a New York Times article on Pete Buttigieg. In previous posts on this topic, […]
I’m not normally a fan of either Ross Douthat or Sarah Chayes, but both of them have articles on the Ukraine-Biden-Trump crisis that strike me as simultaneously out-of-the-mainstream and completely on-target. Douthat’s “The Corruption Before Trump” is in today’s New York Times; Chayes’s “Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption” is in The Atlantic from a few […]
Apologies for the delay in posting the fourth part of my five-part series on character-based voting. Here are parts one, two, and three, which are probably necessary as background to part four. Earlier in the series, I make reference to what I call a “Murad-type meeting,” referring to Donald Trump’s behavior at a recent meeting […]
Here’s the third part of my five-part series on character-based voting and the ambiguities of “policy.” (It was supposed to be a four-part series, but I ended up adding a fifth.) Here’s part 1, and here’s part 2. The point of the series is to probe ambiguities in the thesis that character-based voting is only […]
Continued from part 1. In my last post, I suggested that Trump’s recent meeting with Nobel Laureate Nadia Murad focuses our thinking on character-based voting. I take it to be uncontroversial that Trump’s behavior at the meeting was an expression of bad character, but the question is, how relevant is something like that to voting […]
After blogging somewhat obsessively about it for awhile, I’ve put the issue of character-based voting on the backburner to chase other things, but this column the other day by Roger Cohen caught my eye. It describes Donald Trump’s conduct at his July 17 meeting with Nobel Prize winner Nadia Murad at the White House. Murad […]
Here’s yet another post from my project on character-based voting (CBV). It’s the first of three posts on CBV and leadership effects, and one of many on CBV. As I’ve said in previous posts, “character-based voting” is voting for or against a political candidate on the basis of what the voter takes to be his […]
Policy of Truth 