…If Roosevelt were delivering his Four Freedoms speech today, “he probably would have come up with more than four basic freedoms… That being said, the world as we know it and the needs of humans as we know them still can fit into his four freedoms… Maybe the simplicity of the four freedoms is something to bring us back to looking at what the core rights are and how to focus on ensuring those core rights are fulfilled.”
Read more on the U.S. State Department’s “Share America” site:
By (Washington Post Op-Ed,
…Public attitudes toward democracy, we show, have soured over time. Citizens, especially millennials, have less faith in the democratic system. They are more likely to express hostile views of democracy. And they vote for anti-establishment parties and candidates that disregard long-standing democratic norms in ever greater numbers…
Click here for information on the FDR Foundation’s “In Defense of Democracy” Program.
By Frank Bruni
The New York Times
We geniuses in the news media spent only the last month telling you how Donald Trump was losing this election. We spent the last year telling you how the Republican Party was unraveling.
And here we are, with the Democrats in tatters. You might want to think twice about our Oscar and Super Bowl predictions.
Despite all the discussion of demographic forces that doomed the G.O.P., it will soon control the presidency as well as both chambers of Congress and two of every three governor’s offices. And that’s not just a function of James Comey, Julian Assange and misogyny. Democrats who believe so are dangerously mistaken.
Other factors conspired in the party’s debacle. One in particular haunts me. From the presidential race on down, Democrats adopted a strategy of inclusiveness that excluded a hefty share of Americans and consigned many to a “basket of deplorables” who aren’t all deplorable. Some are hurt. Some are confused. READ MORE HERE
The question has haunted historians now for 70 years:
Was a fading President Franklin D. Roosevelt hoodwinked by a deviously clever Joseph Stalin into turning over Poland and much of Eastern Europe to the Soviets during the closing year of World War II?
Or was a dying, yet keenly engaged president focused on a much larger and more profound prize than simply how Europe might be carved up after the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany?
Ever since the start of this bizarre presidential campaign, Donald Trump has ensured that most discussions of immigration focus on Mexico and Mexicans. But his noxious rhetoric has obscured the fact that illegal border crossings are just part of the problem. The U.S. system for legal immigration also badly needs reform—and here the answers lie not south but north, in Canada.
Canada today has one of the highest immigration rates in the world. For the past two decades, it has admitted about 250,000 newcomers a year—close to 1% of the population—and Ottawa expects that number to grow to 337,000 a year by 2018. More than 20% of Canada’s inhabitants are now foreign-born—almost twice the proportion of residents of Sweden, Germany or the U.S., even if you lump in undocumented migrants.
Read more in the WSJ
By FREDRIK LOGEVALL and KENNETH OSGOODAUG. 29, 2016
American political history, it would seem, is everywhere. Hardly a day passes without some columnist comparing Donald J. Trump to Huey Long, Father Coughlin or George Wallace. “All the Way,” a play about Lyndon B. Johnson, won a slew of awards and was turned into an HBO film.
But the public’s love for political stories belies a crisis in the profession. American political history as a field of study has cratered. Fewer scholars build careers on studying the political process, in part because few universities make space for them. Fewer courses are available, and fewer students are exposed to it. What was once a central part of the historical profession, a vital part of this country’s continuing democratic discussion, is disappearing.
This wasn’t always the case….
Read more at the New York Times