has very little value beyond that.

Sadly, perhaps even tragically, a much bigger problem is that almost none of them are proposing or even promoting any solutions to any part of our problems.

Diagnosing socio-political problems is really pretty easy: almost anybody can do it. And almost everyone has in some form or another.

But proposing even pieces of solutions — or even some process to arrive at solutions — requires some degree of intellectual courage.

Unfortunately very few of the …

people we want so desperately to respect have very much of said courage. And that, in my view, is America’s — and perhaps the modern world’s — biggest single problem.

And we’re all partly to blame for this by allowing our society to evolve with almost no mechanisms for respecting or transmitting any form of traditions, norms, or rules of order from one generation to the next. Most of us don’t trust anyone anymore, because there are no accepted community frameworks for building and sharing …

anything at all anymore. They get their learning from pop culture and entertainment, not from any kind of accepted frameworks for what life and society should value.

If religion ever did have any real value, it was at least providing frameworks that a large number of people would abide by. It’s no longer a big (or admitted) part of most people’s lives, but nothing has replaced it as a transmission source for shared values.

And MAGA has exploited all these conditions and cultural failures. …

By routinely and forcefully shouting down almost any credible positions or opinions, they have made it very risky for anyone with status or stature to speak up on just about everything.

Consequently, few speak much at all, but when they do, it’s mostly outrage, outcry, or contempt for what’s happening to us. Proposing even the smallest practical steps we MIGHT take is left to the “extremists” who we’re all implicitly taught to distrust because, well, “they’re extremists.” As a result, the …