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" It is often noted that it can be hard for democracies to fight wars because of changing public opinion. "
Noah Feldman
Fight
Because
Changing
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" Our post-denominational age should be the perfect time for a Mormon to become president, or at least the Republican nominee. Mormons share nearly all the conservative commitments so beloved of the evangelicals who wield disproportionate influence in primary elections. "
Noah Feldman
Elections
Age
Time
" The rise of the presidency began with the Louisiana Purchase, which in 1803 doubled the land mass of the United States. History taught the framers that, just as Rome changed from republic to empire with conquest of new lands, territorial acquisition would lead to the centralization of political power. "
Noah Feldman
Power
Rome
Rise
" Faced with the collapse of Iraq into something like Lebanon - or worse, Somalia - the Bush administration opted for a new counterinsurgency strategy. Violence was reduced because, for the first time since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraqis felt that there was a force capable of dominating the situation and ensuring basic order. "
Noah Feldman
Situation
Violence
Time
" The Mormons' passage from bugbears of the Republican Party to its stalwarts may be analogized to a similar move among middle-class white Southerners, to whom the Republican Party was anathema until the 1970s and '80s, after which it became almost the sole representative. "
Noah Feldman
Party
Passage
Move
" An empire that extends itself selectively is just being prudent about its own limitations. A republic that supports democratization selectively is another matter. "
Noah Feldman
Empire
Republic
Just
" It seems strange to the rest of the world, but we Americans can't seem to stop talking about how other countries should be democratic like we are. "
Noah Feldman
World
Talking
Rest
" Cyber war takes place largely in secret, unknown to the general public on both sides. "
Noah Feldman
War
Both Sides
Cyber
" Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation - itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust - marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community. "
Noah Feldman
Memory
Community
Marriage
" In politics, Joseph Smith was something of a radical. He preached, instead of democracy, a version of theocratic rule within a framework given by his own prophetic leadership. At Nauvoo, Smith affected a Napoleonic uniform and made himself into a general and quasi king of the polity he had constituted. "
Noah Feldman
Leadership
Politics
Democracy
" Even a lame-duck president can be affected by a clear midterm message if he wants to see his vice president elected and preserve his historical legacy. "
Noah Feldman
Historical
Message
Legacy
" The true test of whether Mr. Obama has improved on the Bush era lies in how his administration justifies its decisions on the 241 remaining Guantanamo detainees, whose cases will now be evaluated internally and reviewed by the courts. "
Noah Feldman
Now
True
Test
" Iraqi national identity under Saddam Hussein never truly incorporated Shiites or Kurds. Sunnis, who identified most closely with the Iraqi nation, remain in some ways disenfranchised relative to the other groups, or at least they perceive themselves that way. "
Noah Feldman
Some
Identity
Most
" Well-meaning Europeans sometimes argue that unlike the U.S., their countries are traditionally 'homogeneous' and have little experience with immigration. "
Noah Feldman
Sometimes
Experience
Immigration
" To hear both critics and defenders talk about the fitness of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, you'd think the most successful Supreme Court justices had been warm, collegial consensus-builders. But history tells a different story. "
Noah Feldman
Judge
History
Fitness
" Empires inevitably fall, and when they do, history judges them for the legacies they leave behind. "
Noah Feldman
History
Fall
Empires
" During the New Deal, people thought to be liberal was to reject socialism on one extreme and fascism on the other, and to preserve capitalism through regulation and a social safety net. "
Noah Feldman
Safety
People
Socialism
" The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years. "
Noah Feldman
Measure
Nation
Run
" Given the pervasive secrecy of the Bush-Cheney administration, and the sorry consequences of that disposition, President Barack Obama's early emphasis on openness in government seems almost inevitable. "
Noah Feldman
Early
Government
Sorry
" In 1953, after the armistice ending the Korean War, South Korea lay in ruins. President Eisenhower was eager to put an end to hostilities that had left his predecessor deeply unpopular, and the war ended in an uneasy stalemate. "
Noah Feldman
War
Ruins
President
" In an ideological age, diplomacy may seem weak and prosaic. But sometimes it is all we have. "
Noah Feldman
Seem
Sometimes
Weak
" I have a 2-year-old son, and I know I'm dealing with a big, grand word when I can't point to the thing when I define it. Right? If he wants to know what a chair is, I can point to the chair. If he wants to know what religion is, I can't point to anything in particular. The same is true of the state. "
Noah Feldman
True
Know
Religion
" The practical core of democracy, defined functionally, is the peaceful exchange of power between different groups of powerful political players arranged in parties. "
Noah Feldman
Power
Democracy
Peaceful
" The great difficulty with Guantanamo is it was perceived correctly as being a place where people were not being detained subject to rules. I don't think the world thinks that you can't detain suspected terrorists - the world thinks you can do that, but you have to do it pursuant to rules and to clear charges. "
Noah Feldman
You
Place
Think
" The world is littered with constitutions that have written guarantees of rights but that don't actually deliver rights. What differentiates the ones where rights are real from where rights are fake is that it's in the initial interests of the majority to actually deliver these rights. "
Noah Feldman
Rights
Real
Majority
" From a constitutional standpoint, the religion of a candidate is supposed to make no difference. Even before the founding fathers dreamed up the First Amendment, they inserted a provision in the Constitution expressly prohibiting any religious test for office. "
Noah Feldman
Office
Constitution
Up
" The 1994 elections that brought Newt Gingrich to power in the House decisively shaped the remaining years of Bill Clinton's presidency, pushing him further to the right and bringing out his latent tendency to govern every day as if an election were being held the next. "
Noah Feldman
Every Day
Power
House
" Cyber attacks are not what makes the cool war 'cool.' As a strategic matter, they do not differ fundamentally from older tools of espionage and sabotage. "
Noah Feldman
War
Cyber
Cool
" The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study. "
Noah Feldman
Curriculum
Where
Study
" Every generation gets the Constitution that it deserves. As the central preoccupations of an era make their way into the legal system, the Supreme Court eventually weighs in, and nine lawyers in robes become oracles of our national identity. "
Noah Feldman
Legal
Identity
Constitution
" The Chinese public is deeply nationalist, which matters to China's unelected political leadership as much as U.S. nationalism does to American politicians. As China becomes the world's largest economy, there is meaningful public pressure for its power status to advance in parallel. Any alternative would be humiliating. "
Noah Feldman
World
Power
Political