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Politics

The Long View: World Government and the Roman Catholic Church

One of the complaints about Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si is that he calls for a world government. This isn't really something new in Catholic social teaching. John frequently argued that Catholic social teaching and just war doctrine assume that something like a competent international authority already

2003-02-21: Imperial Catechism

While John was a fan of TR, he did admit that the colonies Teddy Roosevelt so enthusiastically helped to acquire were useless, both geostrategically and in domestic politics. However, when John talks about empire, the acquisition of Puerto Rico and the Philippines isn't what he means. The empire

The Long View 2003-01-29

This topical take on the 2003 State of the Union address is now mostly interesting because we have an opportunity to remember Rahm Emanuel's praise of W before he became Barack Obama's Chief of Staff. The State of the Union Just the Facts To put it

The Long View: Perverse Predictions

On the other hand, here are some predictions John got eerily right. John wrote this post at the beginning of W's presidency, but he could have just as easily been describing President Obama. Perverse Predictions: You can read about the future here; just try to look surprised when

The Long View 2003-01-01

Happy New Years' 2003. In retrospect, I think John was a lot better at understanding domestic politics [given his interests, this probably extends to the English-speaking countries, or even the whole of the West in some cases] than international relations. The predictions he made here are almost the exact

The Long View 2002-12-19: Lott, Lower Manhattan, and Vichy

This post of John's is interesting for the way in which you can see current trends in American politics in embryo. Trent Lott resigned as Senate Majority Leader after Andrew Sullivan and other bloggers made an issue of him mildly praising Strom Thurmond. At the time, this was

The Long View 2002-10-02: Wellstone's Wake

It really is the conventional wisdom even now that lower turnout helps Republicans, but who now remembers that 2002 saw increased turnout in the midterms and a huge Republican victory? This was an occasion where John praised President George W. Bush for at least having some ideas of how to