Why Americans Disagree on Everything
By Mark Edmundson

Our culture is amok with binaries. We have two major parties, just two, and they are forever opposed. When a group tries to start a third party, it can be summarily disabled by the existing powers. We love sports, generally the most binary of activities. One side wins; one side loses. Root hard for your squad, and the devil take the opposition. We savor debates where one side wins and one side loses.

In the larger world, we find allies, and we find enemies. We are, as I say, Democrats or Republicans, realists or idealists, people of much faith or people of none. We wear our team jerseys with pride and scoff at the opposition’s colors. We indulge in what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences” to keep the binaries alive.

Binary thinking is not always destructive. It can clarify complex situations and help us get oriented and make decisions. But when all thought is binary, we are in trouble. It can result in crude and insensitive conclusions. And it can be an inducement to conflict.

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What explains the genius of the American Founders?
By Gordon S. Wood

English politics were dominated by about 400 noble families whose fabulous scale of landed wealth, political influence and aristocratic grandeur was unmatched by anyone in North America. The English aristocrats were arrogant, complacent about their constitution and unwilling to think freshly about most things. When they thought about the outlying and underdeveloped provinces of their greater British world at all, they tended to look down upon them with disdain. In the eyes of the English ruling class, not only North America but also Scotland was contemptible and barely civilized.

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The Revolt of the Elites
By Christopher Lasch

The radical movements that disturbed the peace of the twentieth century have failed one by one, and no successors have appeared on the horizon. The industrial working class, once the mainstay of the socialist movement, has become a pitiful remnant of itself. The hope that “new social movements” would take its place in the struggle against capitalism, which briefly sustained the left in the late Seventies and early Eighties, has come to nothing. Not only do the new social movements–feminism, gay rights, welfare rights, agitation against racial discrimination–have nothing in common; their only coherent demand aims at inclusion in the dominant structures rather than at a revolutionary transformation of social relations.

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Gaza and the End of the Rules-Based Order
By Agnès Callamard

Universality, the principle that all of us, without exception, are endowed with human rights equally, no matter who we are or where we live, lies at the heart of the international human rights system. It was the foundation of the Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both adopted in 1948, and it continued to inform new means of accountability over the years, including the International Criminal Court, established in 2002. For decades, that legal infrastructure has helped ensure that states uphold their human rights obligations. It has defined human rights movements globally and underpinned the twentieth century’s greatest human rights achievements.

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The Unsung Hero Who Coined the Term “Genocide”
By Michael Ignatieff

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin—and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word “genocide.” He was also its victim. Forty-nine members of Lemkin’s family, including his mother and father, were rounded up in eastern Poland and gassed in Treblinka in 1943. Lemkin escaped to America, and in wartime Washington gave a name to Hitler’s crimes in his monumental study of the jurisprudence of Nazi occupation, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944.

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Lemkin belongs historically to a select list of humanitarians such as Henri Dunant, who founded the Red Cross in 1863, and Eglantyne Jebb, who created Save the Children after World War I—or going farther back, to John Howard, the eighteenth-century sheriff of Bedfordshire who single-handedly awoke Europeans to the cruelty of their prison systems. These were all people who by their own solitary efforts, with an obsessional devotion to a private cause, changed the moral climate of their times.

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