Tag: George Weigel

‘Intellectual godfather’ Michael Novak made case for democratic capitalism

     

Michael Novak came to my rescue when I had just been defrauded of millions of dollar, says analyst Andreas Widmer. It was late 2001, and the high-tech wave of the… Read more »

Engage Russia, but ‘grand bargain with Putin is a terrible idea’

     

Advocates of engaging Vladimir Putin’s Russia should avoid fueling unrealistic expectations of a breakthrough and instead seek incremental progress on specific topics based on a set of guiding principles, says… Read more »

How Putin became global ideological hero of nationalists, populists

     

Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved his current geo-political “prominence because he anticipated the global populist revolt and helped give it ideological shape,” argues analyst Franklin Foer. “With his apocalyptic… Read more »

Civil society countering Ukraine’s ‘corrupt counter-revolution’

     

In Ukraine, revolution and reform has given way to reaction, with vested interests entrenching themselves even further, notes Sergii Leshchenko, a Ukrainian journalist and a member of the Verkhovna Rada. Today,… Read more »

Eight threats to Europe’s democracies

     

Europe’s democracies face deeper problems than Brexit or the sometimes creaky, sometimes overbearing machinery of European governance, argues George Weigel, the Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy… Read more »

Defending democracy in a ‘post-truth society’

     

The long-term integrity of democratic institutions is threatened by “deteriorating norms of truthfulness and authority”, says Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy. The… Read more »

Ukraine: ‘democracy is not a free gift’

     

  Following Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004/ 2005 and the Euromaidan demonstrations that began in November 2013, Ukraine’s path towards democracy and European integration finally appeared to be a smooth… Read more »

Resisting the Tyranny of the Possible: Lessons from the Fall of the Berlin Wall

     

Resisting the Tyranny of the Possible. This was moral revolution, a revolution of conscience rooted in cultural reclamation, and it resonated through the region because it was entirely congruent with… Read more »

Obama rebukes Poland over constitutional paralysis, illiberal democracy

     

U.S. President Barack Obama expressed concern on Friday over Poland’s moves to shackle its constitutional court, in unusually blunt comments calling on the former communist EU country’s government to do… Read more »

‘American original’ Robert Pickus spoke truth to power

     

Robert Pickus, who devoted his life to developing non-violent alternatives to war, died on Friday in St. Helena, Ca. He was 92, The New York Times reports: War, he argued,… Read more »