The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Burying Lindsey Graham Won’t Be Easy Karen Kwiatkowski Photo by Simone Pellegrini on Unsplash Long ago, great Senators existed. Resolute and accountable, they represented their governors and state legislatures and asserted those interests in Washington. They aspired to conduct themselves as statesmen; we the people expected statesmanship. We the people also hoped they would be better than we could be, while we agreed with the fundamental truth of Colonel Ludlow in Legends of the Fall . No longer. A regal Senate with a bold populist House of Representatives do not exist. What we call Senate and House do not make federal law, nor do they perform the small number of defined duties described in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. The making of law has become the work of lobbyists and the regulatory bureaucracy, while other Constitutional duties have become entirely too frightening to even consider, much less perform. The hydra-headed executive branch has become the permanen...

  When Argument Becomes Opium: Amartya Sen, Indian Paralysis, and the Indianization of the West Words without actions and the magic of turning defeat into victory Hua Bin I wrote an essay titled “The Myth of India Becoming the Next China” last November to debunk a popular but fallacious Western narrative. https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-india-becoming-the-next The essay continues to get views and feedback. A reader recommended the 2005 book The Argumentative Indian , by an Indian author Amartya Sen, to understand the cultural roots of the state of affairs in the self-claimed Bharat empire. I got a copy and skimmed through. While Sen’s title seems to suggest a cultural weakness, his central argument is the opposite. India, Sen argues, possesses a millennial tradition of public debate, skepticism, and pluralism. This argumentative heritage, far from being a weakness, is the true source of Indian democracy’s resilience. It is why famines have been prevented, why secul...