How Four-Year Colleges Shafted Community Colleges, Why Harry F. Byrd Needs To Be Stuffed Back Into His Grave, Plus What's Wrong With "Ideas"
A bouquet of my recent pieces for the New Republic.
My latest New Republic stories:
Bad enough that President Joe Biden’s plan to provide free community college got struck from the reconciliation bill. Far worse is that four-year colleges lobbied against it.
Will the ghost of Harry Byrd, who from time to time haunts mostly-blue Virginia, elect Glenn Youngkin the next governor? Yes, I know, Byrd, the segregationist machine politician who ruled Virginia politics for half a century, was a Democrat. But after he died he switched parties and became a Republican.
Bonus track: A. Linwood Holton, Jr., the Republican Virginia governor who broke the Byrd machine, died this week at 98. (That’s him, above left, escorting his daughter Tayloe to her new public school after he insisted on applying a judge’s busing ruling to the executive mansion, which had been exempted. Tayloe’s sister Anne is married to the Democratic Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.) Read Holton’s obit and weep that Virginia Republicans no longer resemble in the slightest this principled man who brought Virginia into the 20th century on race.
Why The Atlantic is well rid of the Aspen Ideas Festival, and why, whenever you hear the word “idea” spoken with reverence, you should reach for your wallet.