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In today’s edition:
WpGet the full experience.Choose your planArrowRight- How Brazil saved democracy — and how the U.S. can, too
- Pay every public school teacher $100,000 a year
- Why listing judges’ party affiliation matters
Prudencepuff or Justiceclaw?
Cut the doomscrolling. The future of the republic depends upon it.
The United States is at an inflection point, writes Jeffrey Rosen, an author and head of the National Constitution Center, and finds itself teetering on the brink of inescapable demagoguery.
The Founding Fathers foresaw such a juncture, and they knew that steering the country in the right direction would start at home. Rosen writes, “In the Founders’ view, the only thing standing between America and an authoritarian demagogue was the virtuous self-control of citizens who would find the wisdom to choose virtuous leaders.”
Rosen’s essay is a primer on personal virtue, the favorite topic of our Athenian-steeped Founders. (It is easy to imagine them variously identifying with the four virtues — prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice — like millennials with their Hogwarts houses.)
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Their thinking was, if individual Americans couldn’t personally master these traits, how could we collectively construct a republic that possessed them? Rosen worries that the Founders today would see how easily we give ourselves over to indulgence — especially the Twitter-y kind that just inflames our factionalism — and fret for the future.
Or does James Madison just need to kick back with a caipirinha and look to Brazil for a lesson?
Eduardo Porter writes that the cases of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro are pretty close to parallel, including shared physical assaults on the seats of government. But how the United States and Brazil dealt with their demagoguing presidents in the aftermath, Eduardo writes, “couldn’t look more different.”
Bolsonaro, passport-less and barely not in jail, has been neutralized as a threat to Brazilian democracy. Trump, in case you haven’t noticed, is the Republican favorite for president.
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Alas, the differences don’t stop there, and Eduardo writes that institutional incompatibilities mean Brazil’s solutions probably can’t transfer stateside. Brazil has stricter laws about criminals running for office, as well as a — very useful, it turns out — electoral court.
But the biggest difference, Eduardo says, is that Brazil just doesn’t have America’s Republican Party. He explains how Brazil’s party free-for-all prevented half the country from getting stuck in Bolsonaro’s thrall.
Eduardo’s conclusion suggests that the Founders might have been on to something, albeit in flouncier words: “To preserve American democracy, there is no choice but for the Republican political class to recover its guts.”
That sounds pretty virtuous to me.
From the first full entry of contributing columnist Daniel Pink’s “Why Not?” series, in which he reimagines elements of American life often thought intractable.
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Such as low teacher pay! The average salary for the 2021-2022 school year was just over $66,000 — an almost 8 percent pay cut from a decade ago in terms of real money. You could have taken high school statistics from a flamingo and still see that this is no good.
This country is blessed, however, with a great many instructors more talented than any wading bird, and they deserve to be recompensed appropriately for their work, not driven from the profession by meager pay.
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“Nothing against actuaries (median salary: $113,990),” Daniel writes, “but isn’t helping a first-grader learn to read as valuable as assessing insurance premiums on your Hyundai Elantra?”
A hike to $100,000 would be extremely expensive, Daniel allows; he attaches a few strings to help allay price-tag concerns. But at the end of the day, support for such a radical proposal would require taxpayers to really think: How much do we value education — and educators?
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Chaser: Teacher pay is a big issue for one Kamala Harris, too. In 2019, she campaigned for president on it.
More politics
Everybody at The Post occasionally receives emails from disgruntled readers; not everybody receives them from federal appeals court judges.
Ruth Marcus got a message from the bench recently when a judge complained about her consistent identification of the president (and party) who appointed whichever jurist she’s writing about — the way she would identify an elected politician with a D or an R after their name.
The judge complained that this practice maligned the judiciary as just as political as the rest of government, and Ruth writes that of course “no one wants to be thought of as a partisan hack, doing the bidding of … allies.”
But the truth, Ruth writes, is that party appointment has become an excellent predictor of outcome in judicial rulings, and readers deserve to see that connection. Of course, #NotAllJudges adhere so stringently to the camp they come from — to which Ruth says, “if they are ruling contrary to what might have been expected, that’s significant, too”!
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And it’s not just on guns or abortion or similarly hot topics that rulings are predictable. Ruth ropes in a study that suggests predictability reaching a stratospheric percentile.
Chaser: Antiabortion Republicans are often knocked for being pro-life only up until birth. Catherine Rampell writes that even that is too generous.
Smartest, fastest
- Attempting climate activism via “green” investment in big emitters isn’t working, the Editorial Board writes. It has some ideas for what might actually serve the planet.
- Jen Rubin writes that Fani Willis, the district attorney prosecuting Trump in Georgia who has been accused of an improper relationship with a special prosecutor in the case, is turning the tables on her bad-faith attackers.
- William Burr, Richard Lawless and Henry Sokolski, a trio of natsec and nuke experts, write that Israel obviously has nuclear weapons and the United States needs to stop pretending it doesn’t.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Money or teaching?
Wait! Can we make “or” an “and”?
Conjunction juncture
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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You’re reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
In today’s edition:
Cut the doomscrolling. The future of the republic depends upon it.
The United States is at an inflection point, writes Jeffrey Rosen, an author and head of the National Constitution Center, and finds itself teetering on the brink of inescapable demagoguery.
The Founding Fathers foresaw such a juncture, and they knew that steering the country in the right direction would start at home. Rosen writes, “In the Founders’ view, the only thing standing between America and an authoritarian demagogue was the virtuous self-control of citizens who would find the wisdom to choose virtuous leaders.”
Rosen’s essay is a primer on personal virtue, the favorite topic of our Athenian-steeped Founders. (It is easy to imagine them variously identifying with the four virtues — prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice — like millennials with their Hogwarts houses.)
Their thinking was, if individual Americans couldn’t personally master these traits, how could we collectively construct a republic that possessed them? Rosen worries that the Founders today would see how easily we give ourselves over to indulgence — especially the Twitter-y kind that just inflames our factionalism — and fret for the future.
Or does James Madison just need to kick back with a caipirinha and look to Brazil for a lesson?
Eduardo Porter writes that the cases of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro are pretty close to parallel, including shared physical assaults on the seats of government. But how the United States and Brazil dealt with their demagoguing presidents in the aftermath, Eduardo writes, “couldn’t look more different.”
Bolsonaro, passport-less and barely not in jail, has been neutralized as a threat to Brazilian democracy. Trump, in case you haven’t noticed, is the Republican favorite for president.
Alas, the differences don’t stop there, and Eduardo writes that institutional incompatibilities mean Brazil’s solutions probably can’t transfer stateside. Brazil has stricter laws about criminals running for office, as well as a — very useful, it turns out — electoral court.
But the biggest difference, Eduardo says, is that Brazil just doesn’t have America’s Republican Party. He explains how Brazil’s party free-for-all prevented half the country from getting stuck in Bolsonaro’s thrall.
Eduardo’s conclusion suggests that the Founders might have been on to something, albeit in flouncier words: “To preserve American democracy, there is no choice but for the Republican political class to recover its guts.”
That sounds pretty virtuous to me.
From the first full entry of contributing columnist Daniel Pink’s “Why Not?” series, in which he reimagines elements of American life often thought intractable.
Such as low teacher pay! The average salary for the 2021-2022 school year was just over $66,000 — an almost 8 percent pay cut from a decade ago in terms of real money. You could have taken high school statistics from a flamingo and still see that this is no good.
This country is blessed, however, with a great many instructors more talented than any wading bird, and they deserve to be recompensed appropriately for their work, not driven from the profession by meager pay.
“Nothing against actuaries (median salary: $113,990),” Daniel writes, “but isn’t helping a first-grader learn to read as valuable as assessing insurance premiums on your Hyundai Elantra?”
A hike to $100,000 would be extremely expensive, Daniel allows; he attaches a few strings to help allay price-tag concerns. But at the end of the day, support for such a radical proposal would require taxpayers to really think: How much do we value education — and educators?
Chaser: Teacher pay is a big issue for one Kamala Harris, too. In 2019, she campaigned for president on it.
Everybody at The Post occasionally receives emails from disgruntled readers; not everybody receives them from federal appeals court judges.
Ruth Marcus got a message from the bench recently when a judge complained about her consistent identification of the president (and party) who appointed whichever jurist she’s writing about — the way she would identify an elected politician with a D or an R after their name.
The judge complained that this practice maligned the judiciary as just as political as the rest of government, and Ruth writes that of course “no one wants to be thought of as a partisan hack, doing the bidding of … allies.”
But the truth, Ruth writes, is that party appointment has become an excellent predictor of outcome in judicial rulings, and readers deserve to see that connection. Of course, #NotAllJudges adhere so stringently to the camp they come from — to which Ruth says, “if they are ruling contrary to what might have been expected, that’s significant, too”!
And it’s not just on guns or abortion or similarly hot topics that rulings are predictable. Ruth ropes in a study that suggests predictability reaching a stratospheric percentile.
Chaser: Antiabortion Republicans are often knocked for being pro-life only up until birth. Catherine Rampell writes that even that is too generous.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Money or teaching?
Wait! Can we make “or” an “and”?
Conjunction juncture
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
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