L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, written by the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, is now a bestseller in China, a phenomenon which can be explained, at least, by three obvious reasons.
In 1776, had the American revolutionaries tried the Barack Obama approach of "reaching out" in a spirit of "cooperation" with the Tories and the British Crown there never would have been a United States of America in the first place.
The biggest threat to America's future is not foreign competition. It is the political paralysis that keeps us from rising to the challenge of foreign competition.
While we are indeed currently politically divided and somewhat polarized, this is actually our normal state as a nation -- and on the polarization scale, we're nowhere near the "most divided" we've ever been. Far from it.
Research from the Women's Philanthropy Institute show that women, in general, score higher on motives of care and empathy. However, further research needs to examine other motivations for giving by gender.
The Hudson Review has published 40 pages of Alexis de Tocqueville's Letters from America, the back story of Democracy in America, his future classic.
The fall of The Wall signified the fall of the Soviet Union, and an end to the Cold War. And while this was of enormous historical import, I fear that future generations won't really pay much attention to it.
A culture's moral compass is not an innate or logical determination, but an underdetermined product of historical contingency and willful choice.
The problem with the word "change" is that it's soft and vague -- and that's how too many blue collar and undecided voters perceive Obama.
