Posts Taggedamerica

Crowded herd of white sheep with orange ear tags, facing the camera in a dense flock.

Everything in moderation, or so the saying goes. Not too much, or too little; not too fast or too slow; not too hot or too cold—but just right. This, we have been led to believe, is a reasonable, rational, practical stance on everything from food and sex, to politics and justice. It is the centrist position that appeals to our innate desire for fairness, a testament to our belief that it’s entirely possible to take the best of both worlds and form a middle path between the two. The problem is that this is a logical fallacy, and simply not true.

The people of Manchester break lockdown to join the global Black Lives Matter protests.

In 2013, political scientist Erica Chenoweth proposed the 3.5% rule, which argued that according to historical data from 1900 to 2006, whenever nonviolent protests against an authoritarian regime reached the tipping point of 3.5% of a country’s population, that government was almost always certain to fall. There was something about that number that created a tipping point that would go on to engulf the entire country and eventually cause regime change.

No one ever accused John Wayne of being an intellectual. From Daniel Boone and Wyatt Earp to Huey Long and George Wallace, there has always been a strong populist strain woven throughout our national mythology. Forget for a moment that any list of great Americans, from Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Frederick Douglass, contained a multitude of brilliant intellectuals. 

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