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Elizabeth Warren Needs a Version 2.018

Elizabeth Warren Needs a Version 2.018

James P. Freeman

Even with the knowledge that it was meant to be an occasion for celebration, they still needed a coping mechanism against the anticipated overcast, overearnest, and overwrought monotony. So, they put their fully formed, still sober minds to work, realizing there would be no safe spaces from which to escape. They created in advance The Elizabeth Warren Drinking Game.

Simultaneously honoring and mocking "Massachusetts' favorite Senator," UMass Amherst's theblacksheeponline.com instructed The Class of 2017 to "rip a nip" if Warren "says and/or mentions" during her commencement address any of the following:  How She Started Law School with a Two-Year Old Daughter; Student Debt; W.E.B. Du Bois; The Disappearing Middle Class; Female Leaders; "It's time to fight back"; and, The Donald. Seriously.

Pernicious Conceit and the Limits of Democracy
Commentary

Pernicious Conceit and the Limits of Democracy

Glen A. Sproviero

"In the long run democracy will be judged, no less than other forms of government, by the quality of its leaders, a quality that will depend in turn on the quality of their vision."  So wrote Irving Babbitt, the famed Harvard professor who left few acknowledged disciples, yet whose influence has been distilled to the contemporary world through his many students, T.S. Eliot most prominent among them.

Babbitt was no hater of democracy, but like most serious political thinkers, he understood the limits of any political system, and, particularly, our own.  He held no belief that a fixed theory of government could effectuate a permanent solution to the problems of order, justice, and freedom.  He did not believe that government, democracy included, could remake man or alter his fundamental nature.  But this did not preclude Babbitt from believing in the power of government to accomplish great things, so long as it was constructed upon the moral and ethical habits of virtue, discipline, and self-restraint.

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