I'm not referring to my marriage to my lovely wife of 23 years, but to my 25-year relationship with the Republican Party. In recent years especially, I have found fewer things in common with the party. I feel used and abused. We've obviously grown in different and incompatible directions.
It's a groan-inducing cliché, I know, but it applies here: I didn't leave the party; the party left me.
But when it comes to the South, myth always overwhelms reality. The Republican Party has come to rely on the mystical powers of its "solid South" to produce nearly two-thirds of the electoral votes its presidential candidates need every four years. National Democrats have leaned on the myth, too, using it to justify their drift from economic populism toward a Clinton-style, Wall Street-friendly centrism.
'No subject in the world is as complex as foreign affairs. You are dealing not just with natural facts, such as disasters and disease, but also with social facts such as human beings who change their minds and behave creatively. Natural facts — like a virus — don’t do that. They behave according to fixed laws. Further, social facts are embedded in different cultures. People from different cultures interpret the same facts differently. What does a devout Muslim see when he or she walks by a Christian church? In some cases, an infidel institution. Not exactly what a devout Christian sees. Individual human beings and diverse cultures create multiple meanings from the same set of facts. Given this enormous complexity, how do we make any sense at all out of international
affairs?'
