Word: idea
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...Underpinning much of that diplomacy has been the idea that democracy is a long-term cure for the instability that spills across national borders, as happened on 9/11. That intuitively makes sense. Democracies, because they institutionalize and internalize bargaining and the representation of different interests, tend to be peaceable. And democratic rights are popular. If the question is simply: Do people all over the world want the same trappings of liberal democracy that we enjoy - the right to choose our leaders, to think and say what we like, to worship how we choose? Then the answer is: Well, of course...
...this context, it made sense to think, and speak, of "American leadership." If you were an American policymaker in 1945, you did not actually need to make a moral claim to leadership. You did not need to argue that because America was an idea, a city on a hill, the last, best hope of mankind, it had a right and responsibility to remake the world. It was much simpler than that. American leadership in the post-1945 world was not a moral aspiration, or a policy goal, at all. It was, as the Marxists would say, an objective reality...
...deference. Nations outside the U.S. have no special need or want to hear claims for American leadership today. If those claims are made, they are likely - in American eyes - to be met with nothing more than a sullen ingratitude. Better for all if we just dispense with the whole idea and come up with something better...
...America that is sketched in passages such as that - one that does not claim a monopoly of wisdom; one that recognizes that the world has changed; one that does not argue that simply because America was founded on a great idea 232 years ago, it has a moral superiority over everyone else today - is an America to which others would listen. We will soon know if such an America is taking shape...
...MOVIE Synecdoche, New York A theater director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has a Really Big Idea for a play, an obsession that upends his life and leads to madness. Charlie Kaufman's comedy about artistic ambition is challenging, invigorating and, if you go with it, brilliant fun. It's like a suicidal Fellini film--a downer...