Tag Archives: election

Healing the wound of election denial

So what to do about election denialism, the widespread claims that the election was stolen? If polls are right, something like 50 million fellow citizens, almost all of them Republicans, believe the election was stolen. That’s a lot of healing to do. Will polls show that Biden’s passionate and convincing plea in his inaugural address […]

February 1, 2021 – 6:10 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

ELECTION REVEALS THE SORT OF COUNTRY WE ARE

Four and a half million votes is a substantial margin of victory. And yet it is also true to say that if over half the country is feeling great relief, roughly half the country not so much. If it had been a landslide it would have been easier to believe that the last four years […]

November 12, 2020 – 5:36 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

SHORT TAKES On Our Current Situation

1/WHO GETS TO REPORT THE ELECTION RESULTS? Was there an actual difference in the network announcements (including Fox News) of Biden’s victory? Or was it just context that made me hear them differently, an awareness that for the first time this standard announcement was being made in the era of “fake news”? Trump has declared […]

November 11, 2020 – 6:53 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

MAGA versus voting the way forward

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion and MAGA—MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN– has been a powerful weapon for Trump and his forces. But of course it doesn’t hold up under more than two seconds’ scrutiny. Just when was that great America we want to go back to? That great period energized, for some anyway, by the pursuit […]

October 29, 2020 – 2:30 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

The election season of voting dangerously

You could almost thank Donald Trump for lessons about democracy. It’s almost as if he set out four years ago to expose our complacency and naivete and teach us about the vulnerability of our system to the impulses of one man of a certain sort. But that it would come to this, that only two […]

September 11, 2020 – 1:12 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Getting Biden’s Appeal

So (if one may take a moment out from the nonstop conversation about the virus) it’s come down for Democrats to Biden, our lowest-common- denominator candidate. A lot of us are having to deal with our disappointment. Really? From that attractive, smart, gender and racially diverse field of candidates? This sameold, white male is to […]

April 24, 2020 – 4:40 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged | Comments (0)

Democrats’ winning issue is defeating the danger of Trump

“Dems in disarray” is the theme since the Iowa debacle. (If they cant run their own nominating process, how can they run the country?) And now the puzzling NH results: The most progressive candidate wins but the more centrist candidates taken together get twice as many votes. How are we supposed to read that? And […]

March 2, 2020 – 8:05 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Confusion and clarity in the healthcare debate

Surely we can do better than the confusion which characterizes the 2020 election debate over whether or not such basics as healthcare or education should be treated as a human right. Should we have our government (of, by, and for the people, right?) run our healthcare system as it runs other key parts of our […]

August 4, 2019 – 12:54 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Dem debate: swamped with virtuous candidates

There were so many qualified-seeming candidates on the two nights of the Democratic debate it was actually a relief to find one or two I didn’t find especially prepossessing. It was, to begin, a veritable orgy of diversity. Women candidates, “black” candidates,” brown” candidates, a candidate both female, black and the other sort of Indian.. […]

July 5, 2019 – 2:34 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)

WHAT WILL HAPPEN? WHAT WILL WE DO?

Has ever a president-elect been held in such contempt by such a large portion of the electorate? These feel like dangerous times. Those signs protesting “F**k Trump” and “Not My President”–suddenly it seems not unreasonable to ask: are we becoming one of the many countries whose violence, instability and inability to govern themselves we’ve always […]

December 7, 2016 – 12:44 pm | By Brent | Posted in Columns | Tagged , | Comments (0)