Long Reads That Caught Our Eye This Week

We love to read. . . Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser]( We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. The Fatalist Conceit Noah Rothman | Commentary Progressives can’t remodel the country through politics—and it’s making them miserable. --------------------------------------------------------------- The psychological burden on liberals in the age of Donald Trump is immense. Barack Obama was a commanding presence on the American stage for eight years, but he left a small and ever-shrinking legacy. The Trump administration has cut short or outright reversed a number of his progressive initiatives, and many of the Obama policies that survive had already failed to deliver the results he had promised. And politically he left his party in tatters; by the end of Obama’s presidency, more than 1,000 Democratic officeholders had been unseated throughout the country. Progressive hope has turned to ashes. The liberal malaise that has followed Trump’s shocking victory is a by-product of the left’s unreasonable expectations. Many liberals and progressives were encouraged to see Barack Obama as messianic and to understand his politics as emancipatory, and they fell for it. But political shifts in America just aren’t that radical, and never have been—even though that’s what the flimflam men who run American politics always promise. [Read More]( GUN, UNDER GLASS Alan Huffman | Oxford American Thorn McIntyre III, who at eighty describes himself as “kind of a gun nut,” is a straightforward and unaffected man. He doesn’t flinch when asked about his dual role in one of the most heinous crimes of the civil rights era—the assassination of activist Medgar Evers, which McIntyre unwittingly enabled, then helped solve, in both cases with his own former gun. McIntyre has told the tale countless times: How he traded his 1917 Enfield rifle to Greenwood, Mississippi, fertilizer salesman Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist who used it to assassinate Evers at his Jackson home in June 1963. McIntyre first told the story to police investigators soon after the murder, then repeated it in testimony during Beckwith’s three subsequent trials, spanning thirty years, and in media interviews long after. [Read More]( The Populist Challenge to Liberal Democracy William A. Galston | Bookings For those who believe in liberal democracy, it is sobering to review the events of the past quarter-century. Twenty-five years ago, liberal democracy was on the march. The Berlin Wall had fallen; the Soviet Union had collapsed; new democracies were emerging throughout Europe, and Russia seemed to be in transition as well. South Africa’s apartheid regime was tottering. Even though China’s government had brutally repressed a democracy movement, it was possible to believe that a more educated and prosperous Chinese middle class would eventually (and irresistibly) demand democratic reforms. Liberal democracy had triumphed, it seemed, not only in practice but also in principle. It was the only legitimate form of government. There was no alternative. Today, the global scene is very different. Liberal democracy faces multiple external challenges—from ethnonational autocracies, from regimes claiming to be based on God’s word rather than the will of the people, from the success of strong-handed meritocracy in places such as Singapore, and, not least, from the astonishing economic accomplishments of China’s market-Leninist system. But there is also an internal challenge to liberal democracy—a challenge from populists who seek to drive a wedge between democracy and liberalism. Liberal norms and policies, they claim, weaken democracy and harm the people. Thus, liberal institutions that prevent the people from acting democratically in their own interest should be set aside. It is this challenge on which I wish to focus. [Read More]( Dear Humanities Profs: We Are the Problem Eric Bennett | The Chronicle of Higher Education Dismayed about American politics? Look in the mirror --------------------------------------------------------------- Can the average humanities professor be blamed if she rises in the morning, checks the headlines, shivers, looks in the mirror, and beholds a countenance of righteous and powerless innocence? Whatever has happened politically to the United States, it’s happened in stark opposition to the values so many philosophers and English professors, historians and art historians, creative writers and interdisciplinary scholars of race, class, and gender hold dear. We are, after all, the ones to include diverse voices on the syllabus, use inclusive language in the classroom, teach stories of minority triumph, and, in our conference papers, articles, and monographs, lay bare the ideological mechanisms that move the cranks and offices of a neoliberal economy. Since the Reagan era our classrooms have mustered their might against thoughtless bigotry, taught critical thinking, framed the plight and extolled the humanity of the disadvantaged, and denounced all patriotism that curdles into chauvinism. [Read More]( Cult leader? ‘Sinful Messiah’? 25 years after Waco, interest in David Koresh still strong Bobby Ross Jr., | Religion News Service WACO, Texas (RNS) — The curious keep coming. They turn onto a gravel road 10 miles east of Waco and pass through a black gate leading to a rural complex where David Koresh — leader of an apocalyptic religious sect known as the Branch Davidians — and 75 followers perished in a firestorm on April 19, 1993. That came after six Branch Davidians and four federal agents earlier died amid a flurry of gunfire in the government’s initial Feb. 28, 1993, raid on the 77-acre Mount Carmel property. “I was just really curious about seeing this memorial and seeing what’s out here,” said Eric Williams, a Seattle film producer who made it a point to visit the site during a leisure trip to Texas. Nearby, a woman snapped a picture of a monument listing the names of Koresh and the other 81 Branch Davidians — including 18 children ages 10 or younger — who lost their lives in the 51-day federal standoff that ended in a nationally televised inferno. Twenty-five years after the siege, interest in what happened outside Waco — and who’s to blame — remains immense. [Read More]( James Comey’s Stellar Windiness Jim Geraghty | National Review The enormously hyped memoir reads as if some of the best parts were strategically left out. --------------------------------------------------------------- A Higher Loyalty, by former FBI director James Comey, is far more fascinating for its odd omissions than for what it says. For starters, after 277 pages, readers still don’t have a clear picture of what Comey thinks of Hillary Clinton. Early coverage of the book focused on the former FBI director’s quasi-apology – “I have read that she has felt anger toward me personally, and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that I couldn’t do a better job explaining to her and her supporters why I made the decisions I made.” But Comey doesn’t apologize for any decisions or actions: “Even knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it differently.” For a fierce Trump critic and celebrity hero of the Resistance, Comey never quite gets around to saying anything nice about Hillary Clinton. [Read More]( Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. Our mailing address is: The Federalist 8647 Richmond Highway Suite 618 Alexandria, VA 22309 [Add us to your address book]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences]( The Federalist · 8647 Richmond Highway · Suite 618 · Alexandria, VA 22309 · USA