Campaigns are no longer high-minded exchanges of ideas, even though God knows we need more good ones - ideas, that is.
Charlie PierceIt's better to be black than gay because when you're black you don't have to tell your mother.
Charlie PierceBill Clinton was not a symbol. People did not invest in him their idea of what America should be or, worse, their pride in what they thought America had become. There was no great moral self-congratulation in having elected a president from Arkansas.
Charlie PierceThere is a barbarism in the American soul, and we must protect some of it by law. To root it out is to endanger our lives on the one hand, and our liberty on the other.
Charlie PierceFor all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.
Charlie PierceThere is a reason why conservatives talk about 'government' and not 'self-government,' because to refer to the latter is to concede that 'the government' is really the most basic product of our political commonwealth, that it is what we produce among ourselves so as to order the production of everything else that we do together.
Charlie Pierce