About Rhetorics & Heretics
Rhetorics & Heretics explores the complexities of the democratic-capitalist politics that define the United States of America. R&H keeps a keen eye on the interplay between public policy and free markets, the two dominant and prevailing mechanisms for preserving order and equality (and by extension, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness") in a waning superpower populated by a diverse and divided 307 million Americans.
Rhetorics & Heretics is, therefore, a meditation on a three century-old American narrative whose cast of the governing and governed include individuals and tribes, heroes and villians, capitalists and socialists, followers and apostates, extremists and moderates, isolationists and internationalists, territorialists and refugees, svengalis and pariahs, patriots and ex-patriates, true-believers and heretics, savants and idiots, hawks and doves, saints and sinners, electors and electeds, middle and fringe, thinkers and tinkers, inventors and plagiarists, con-artists and suckers, idealists and cynics, sophisticates and parochialists, fundamentalists and relativists, activists and absentees, individualists and communalists, consumers and producers, protectionists and globalists, speculators and hoarders, historians and history-makers, statists and anarchists, traditionalists and deviants, theists and atheists, classicists and post-structuralists, corporatists and populists, white-collars and blue-collars, revisionists and literalists, landlords and tenants, philanthropists and misanthropes, bosses and laborers, carnivores and vegetarians, Marxists and marksmen, Jesus-freaks and carpenters unions...who all nevertheless have one thing in common...they are each a unique actor in a dynamic American polity, and through their ever-competing beliefs, interests and actions, comprise the chaotic mosaic of America's unrelenting theatre of political warfare.
Rhetorics & Heretics is written for a general(ist) audience who is curious about, if not invested in, the future of America with all her wicked problems at home and abroad. This blog's political bias, though it should be irrelevant to the reader, is that of a scrappy and tribeless Independent voter who is neither a political scholar nor a professional politico by any stretch of the imagination. I write this blog as a disciplined and systematic way to get my head around all that is the United States of America, for all her projected might, distortions of democracy, self-inflicted wounds, moral overreach, and moments of transcendental bare-knuckled genius.
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Photograph by Brian Ulrich http://notifbutwhen.com
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