It would be difficult to imagine a greater example of oblivious stupidity and hubris than Jeffrey Sach and Bandy Lee’s recent article for Project Syndicate, “Trump’s Psychopathology Is Getting Worse.” Having read Lee before, and written about her in my column “The Age of Expert ...

In all of the U.S., a nation of well over 300 million people, there are perhaps fewer than 10,000 actual white supremacists. Language, however, creates confusion here. People reflexively equate white nationalism with racism and white supremacy, as if it were not possible for a white person to be a ...

The grim corollary of what I have called human nature’s difficult need for esteem is that nothing is safe from resentment. For so vital is human pride, and so powerful our concomitant urge to be esteemed by others, that there is no area of human affairs to which people will not apply their ...

Progressives and their neocon brethren have been predictably outraged this week, because at the press conference after the Helsinki summit on Monday, our president appeared to give the detested Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt. Despite the contrary views of Director of National Intelligence ...

Far from being a controversial figure like conservative judge Robert Bork, whose confirmation was denied by the Senate in 1987, Brett Kavanaugh will probably be confirmed to the Supreme Court. There is a decent chance, moreover, that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now 85, will be replaced by a conservative ...

From the Never Trump Republicans to Hollywood to academia, moralistic criticism of Donald Trump has been common ever since he became a serious candidate for the presidency. And certainly, there has been plenty to find fault with. After all, despite the many misunderstandings, distortions, ...

Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand, They rave, recite, and madden round the land. —Pope American democracy, said H.L. Mencken, is “the worship of jackals by jackasses.” This definition is as harsh as it is colorful, but Mencken was a kind of philosopher, and his judgment is ...

If there is one thing we can count on in our age of expert ignorance, it is that experts in their intellectual and moral smugness will offer opinions that, if acted on, would simplify complex issues and therefore harm the national good. Thus, Jessica Henderson Daniel, president of the American ...

It is an old theme of literature that men and women, in the throes of passion, tend to fool themselves and each other. As Schopenhauer argued in “The Metaphysics of Love” (1818), the strange business aids the survival of the species. By believing our partner has qualities that he or she does ...

There is a striking passage in Edith Hamilton’s study The Echo of Greece (1957) that reads like a description of America in 2018. Reflecting on the decline of democracy in ancient Athens, the great classicist tells us that What the people wanted was a government which would provide a comfortable ...