Articles in the New York Daily News
A Day of Ignominy in the U.S. Senate, One Year Later: Remembering Trump’s Impeachment Acquittal
This opinion essay remembers Saturday, February 13, 2021, as a day of tragic, failed civic virtue in our elected officials. On that day 43 Republican senators voted to ac
quit President Donald Trump of the charge of incitement of the insurrection, thereby thwarting a conviction by the required two-thirds majority. By not convicting and then disqualifying Trump from holding future federal office, those 43 senators single-handedly enabled one of the most destructive politicians in U.S. history to campaign again for president and to return to the White House for a second term. The essay argues that, with time, Americans should forgive the senators, but we must not forget. We must not forget that they held in their hands a constitutional power to permanently exclude an authoritarian demagogue from federal electoral politics. But they chose self-interest and party over nation. We do not yet know the full consequences of Trump's acquittal that day, but we must hold the senators accountable for their dereliction of duty.
Why America Must Not Reelect a Demagogue: That's What Trump Is, and It Matters
Trump’s election to the American presidency has exposed a fatal Achilles' heel of democracy. It is demagogues. The great danger of this political personality type is that demagogues are temperamentally wired to run roughshod over everything we hold dear in our representative government: the Constitution, Bill of Rights, impartial courts, the rule of law, institutional norms, and, not least, free and fair elections followed by the peaceful transfer of power. In order to arrest our constitutional democracy’s descent into chaos and breakdown, we must get Trump’s "political diagnosis" right. According to the political science of democracy, he is not a fascist, autocrat, or dictator. He is a demagogue — and therefore the worst poison possible to a democracy. Voters must understand this clearly. The health, and possibly survival, of our democracy depends upon it.
How to Remember the Founders
Published in the aftermath of George Floyd's death and the toppling of white-dominant statues throughout the nation, this essay proposes dialectical thinking as the best way to remember the founding fathers on the Fourth of July. Only through dialectical thinking can we tolerate the cognitive dissonance of remembering both the horrors of the United States' original sin of slavery and, simultaneously, the founders' fierce and brilliant establishment of equality and justice as our nation’s founding principles. Our common American narrative centers on the undying fight for equality and justice for an ever-widening circle of "We the People."