Author: Joel Levin

We are surprisingly bloodthirsty people. We impose the longest prison sentences in the world. We are one of only seven countries that inflict more than ten death penalties a year, with the others hardly our demographic, developmental, or political peers (China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, and Singapore).

We have just celebrated the 4th of July, with its parades, speeches, and fireworks announcing our pride, even conceit, that America’s Independence Day is the greatest of all Independence Days, as America is the greatest of all nations, offering its citizens the greatest of all governments. The complexities of that claim – and putting aside its apparent inadequacies, inconsistencies, incoherence, and disappointments – necessarily include a shortlist of what is critical to a view of America’s ascendant greatness. Democracy, prosperity, opportunity, and liberty are on the shortlist, and so is the rule of law.

Free speech is worse than messy. It is unruly, annoying, chaotic, unsightly, loud and intrusive. It is full of individuals who are uninformed or misinformed, full of statements of exaggeration and hyperbole, many crude and false, and taken together, too often bothersome, irritating, overblown, and endlessly repetitive.

The three college presidents testifying last week did the almost impossible: they made Congress – this Congress – look good. That is, testifying before the most dysfunctional, uninformed, petty and parochial House of Representatives in American history

At least since the Enlightenment, that is, at least since about the time the Pilgrims landed in the 1600s, what is fundamentally important to us has been fought on several different grounds: political, economic, social, commercial, military, religious, and moral (perhaps others).