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**** NYTimes.com: Are Democrats Whistling Past the Graveyard?

Are Democrats Whistling Past the Graveyard?

The political strategist Mike Podhorzer discusses what polls can — and can’t — say about 2024.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-michael-podhorzer.html?smid=em-share

But the act of making it seem like if this could all change if we just had a different person at the top of this is fantasy. It’s just fantasy. And that’s part of why I think it’s a real problem that important media institutions support the idea that our problems are as superficial as who we put on the ballot as different human beings, when we need to solve the underlying institutional problems.

******** NYTimes.com: Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism rj

Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism

A coalition of catastrophists is trying to make the next generation of Republicans believe that the country is on the verge of collapse.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/04/opinion/sunday/conservative-intellectuals-republicans.html?smid=em-share

****** NYTimes: The Laws of Campus Culture War

The Laws of Campus Culture War www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/opinion/columnists/campus-speech-culture-war.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

“I’ve long appreciated the pseudonymous writer Scott Alexander’s description of liberalism: “People talk about ‘liberalism’ as if it’s just another word for capitalism or libertarianism or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism,” he wrote on his Slate Star Codex blog. “Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war.”

He’s exactly correct. And as the Supreme Court has repeatedly observed, our nation’s educational system — and especially its college campuses — is the place where we learn liberalism. It’s the place where we are supposed to practice pluralism. Our system of government was built to accommodate conflict but only as long as that conflict is channeled through a Constitution that protects our liberty from the government and empowers that government to protect its citizens from one another.

Students are entitled to be free. They are entitled to be safe. But enduring hard words and hearing dreadful ideas isn’t just an inescapable element of pluralism; it’s also the price of peace itself. Break that system, and the conflagrations abroad will have violent echoes here at home. Trust that system, and we can manage the conflicts that tear other nations apart.”

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