Jeffrey Polet is professor emeritus of political science at Hope College and director of the Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation.
Some years ago, only tangentially related to the reading we were doing in our seminar class, the students and I got into a conversation about jobs we found especially unappealing. I began with “guy who sprays de-icing chemicals on planes in the middle of winter from a cherry picker,” and the students quickly followed suit. Continue Reading...
At its best, a democratic polity ought to deal well with complexity, this complexity composed of clashing ideas and principles as well as the interests of multiple actors and stakeholders. Such a polity will seek proximate solutions that require constant fine-tuning. Continue Reading...
Betsy DeVos thinks the Department of Education “should not exist.” She’s not the first secretary of education we’ve had who understood her central purpose to be the dissolution of the agency of which she was in charge (until she resigned on January 7, 2021). Continue Reading...
In his “Parable of the Madman,” Nietzsche, reflecting on the death of God, observes that “this tremendous event is still on its way,” continuing that “deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.” Continue Reading...
Ilya Shapiro, a Russian émigré, a serious scholar of the American Constitution, and formerly of the libertarian Cato Institute until he was scheduled on February 1 to begin running Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution, has found himself in a thicket of racial controversy. Continue Reading...
Jordan Peterson, the bête noire of the left, resigned his position at the University of Toronto in enviable fashion: on his own terms while issuing a blistering condemnation of the ideological corruption of the academy. Continue Reading...
Political theorists have engaged in much debate concerning the “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,” such quarrel evidence of the opposing claims of the two worlds. Leo Strauss, the best known articulator of an absolute rupture, counterposed classical Greece to modern liberalism and its culmination in Nietzsche. Continue Reading...
Conservatives tend to be skeptical of the uses of the word diversity, but they love variety. They believe that American higher education is better when you have a rich choice among schools—uniformity being a feature of progressive ideologies—that each has a particular mission and identity. Continue Reading...
God being dead, Nietzsche warned us, meant that new gods had to be created to fill the void. Our age is godless in some ways, to be sure, but in other ways we have become polytheists with jealous gods competing for our allegiances. Continue Reading...
It’s become a commonplace observation that while we are indeed a divided nation, we have been divided before and, some claim, in much worse ways.
The first part is undoubtedly true, while the second seems more debatable, and this particularly in light of a recent poll coming from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) at the University of Virginia that shows roughly half of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum seriously indulging fantasies of secession. Continue Reading...
