Tag Archives: America

Essays, History, Politics

Essays On America: ‘The Legacy Of The Revolution Is Still Up For Grabs’

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BOSTON GLOBE (April 3, 2025) by Ted Widmer:

“O! What a glorious morning is this!”

So Sam Adams is said to have responded to the news of fighting at Lexington and Concord, on April 19, 1775, arguably the most consequential day in the history of New England.

That day, most agree, marked the beginning of the American Revolution. There had been other acts of violence, by both Britons and Americans, as they jostled over a host of issues relating to Britain’s imperial overreach.

It will be important not only to remember the story but to remember it well. As Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

But in the spring of 1775, low-level squabbling gave way to armies in the field shooting at each other, outside Boston. The so-called “shot heard round the world,” in Emerson’s phrase, was the first volley in a long war, followed by a struggle to establish the 13 Colonies as a coherent nation.

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These ideas were nourished by pamphlets, Election Day sermons, and newspapers — it would be difficult to overstate how important printing and literacy were to the founding generation, especially in Boston. Far from being derided, intellectuals and scientists were critical to the Revolution’s success. One Bostonian, Benjamin Franklin, translated his scientific prestige into stunning success as a diplomat to France, our essential ally. Another, Joseph Warren, was a doctor, much admired for his work inoculating patients against smallpox, before he was killed at Bunker Hill.

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Ted Widmer, a consulting editor for this special issue of Globe Ideas, is the author of “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington.” He helped to create the George Washington Book Prize, awarded annually to a book about the founding era.

Economics, Essays, Politics

Political Essay: ‘America’s Future Is Hungary’

ATLANTIC MAGAZINE (March 31, 2025) :

lashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., mourns Hungary’s lost 19th-century empire. Instead of war dead, the names of formerly “Hungarian” places—cities and villages that are now in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long granite walls, solemnly memorialized with an eternal flame.

But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year.

Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

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Essays, Foreign Affairs, Opinion, Politics

Foreign Policy: ‘DeepSeek’s Lesson – America Needs Smarter Export Controls’

THE WIRE CHINA (February 5, 2025): Last December, the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek reported training a GPT-4-level model for just $5.6 million, challenging assumptions about the resources needed for frontier AI development. This perceived cost reduction, and DeepSeek’s cut-rate pricing for its advanced reasoning model R1, have left tech stocks plunging and sparked a debate on the effectiveness of U.S. export controls on AI chips.

Select Committee Chairman Moolenaar and Ranking Member Krishnamoorthi’s letter to National Security Advisor Waltz on DeepSeek. Credit: Select Committee

Some argue that DeepSeek’s efficiency breakthroughs mean the controls have backfired and must be lifted. But this view overlooks the bigger picture: DeepSeek’s success in fact underscores the need for smarter export controls. DeepSeek exploited gaps in current controls, such as exports of chips to China that matched U.S. performance despite the initial October 2022 rules, chip smuggling, inadequate oversight on chip manufacturers like TSMC, and slow regulatory updates that enabled stockpiling. 

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