Op-Ed

Our prolific classmate, Jim Sleeper, has been publishing political commentary on the election in The Guardian, Salon and Commonweal magazine. Most of the essays use rich historical analyses comparing the current rightward movement in our politics to prior periods of American and world history, specifically ancient Rome and Weimar Germany.

Last week, on Presidents’ Day, Salon published an essay comparing the current Administration with the fall of the Roman Republic.  That essay, “Is Donald Trump more like Hitler or Augustus Caesar?   Honestly, it’s both” attracted a lot of eyeballs online and on social media. 

A few hours after Salon published the article, Breitbart News took exception to the thesis of Jim’s essay in a prominent article, set forth below. Read the Breitbart critique and Jim’s original. Who’s right?

[Op-ed from the Boulder Daily Camera, Boulder CO]

If there ever was a time for true adulthood, it is now.

This is difficult to acknowledge, but our collective home is in dire straits. We are in ecological overshoot: there are too many people on the planet consuming too much and producing too much waste for civilization as we know it to continue. We are already seeing increasing numbers of unprecedented storms, floods, fires and droughts around the world as well as conflicts over dwindling resources and masses of refugees driven by all of it. Climate change is but a symptom of the bigger problem of ecological overshoot. Our present economic and political systems…

Editor’s Note: Yale1969.org is not a bulletin board for proselytizing one’s opinions, but we do want to highlight when classmates’ positions enter the public discussion.  In this post, Jim Sleeper comments on an article in the Financial Times inquiring why certain US billionaires are strongly supporting President Trump … and featuring our own Steve Schwarzman.

Jim writes, “You might well think that I’ve had my say about Steve Schwarzman by now, and I do wish that someone else would take up the torch of remonstrance and dissent. Financial Times writer and American editor Edward Luce has done that today (October 23, 2024) in ‘What Croesus Wants from Trump.’”

Note: Op-ed published in Climate Psychology Alliance – North America, December 2023

Fundamentally, all psychology is ecopsychology and all therapy is ecotherapy. This is so because the psyche exists within society and society exists within the environment. A person, or a society, cannot be healthy or whole without a respectful, reciprocal relationship with the encircling hoop of the natural …

[Op-Ed] Author’s Note: I learned it when I watched some Democrats rigging an election 40 years ago. Today’s Republican Party is anti-democratic (as well as anti-Democratic) in a reactionary – “populist” way that’s trending toward fascism, but the harder, subtler truth — new to many in America’s neoliberal chattering classes — is that many ordinary […]

The late pundit prized civic trust and the common good. With his death, I wonder: Do America’s elite schools even teach those ideals anymore?

I recently got a notice that a high school classmate had died. I’m 76. We’re getting old. Such announcements are likely to become frequent, until there are few of us left. ,,,

Eulogies are the reverse of that. They summarize a life, emphasizing the best. But they are only written and delivered when someone dies. That’s a shame, and it’s unnecessary.

I’d like to start a new tradition of living eulogies.

Note: Jim’s Op Ed in Salon argues that it isn’t just the Second Amendment that is the problem. There is a broader problem with neoliberalism, commercial speech and social media.

Retiring existing plants, especially a problem-free facility like Diablo Canyon in California, will aggravate the real problems: energy dependence and climate change.

Editor’s Note: This is a recent Op-Ed published by a classmate.  Send in any that YOU have had published recently.

Putin must be stopped by force, and his American apologists must be thoroughly discredited, much as Hitler and Mussolini and their American apologists and collaborators were, even if doing so requires pain and sacrifice from the rest of us.

What T.S. Eliot called “very much reality” doesn’t stop there. […]

Note: This is a guest editorial published in the New York Times. Tom McNamee, Silliman ’69, is the author of nearly a dozen books, including two about wolves in the greater Yellowstone region of the West.

Op-Ed in Foreign Poilicy magazine:The university set out to train the next generation of U.S. leaders—but it often failed to educate them.

Yale professor Beverly Gage has been praised widely for defending academic freedom by announcing her resignation from the directorship of Yale’s Program in Grand Strategy. But there are more politically urgent, and arguably profound, questions at issue here beyond professors’ right to design their courses free of outside interference.

Note: This is an Op-Ed with a “pre-note” classmate Jim Sleeper added here for us Yale ’69ers.

As a lecturer at Yale when this joint venture with Singapore was announced, Jim had a 360-degree view of events. Here he offers evidence for his thesis that the US failed in Afghanistan AND in Singapore for the same reasons — both grounded in evangelical presumptions and military-economic motivations.

Note: The tragedy in Afghanistan has prompted Jim Sleeper to re-issue, with new comments, a 2017 column for The Washington Monthly.   He criticizes the “Grand Strategy” methodology of Yale faculty who sought to advance foreign-policymaking developed at the post-war Yale we’d attended and that persisted up through General Stanley McChrystal’s teaching stint at Yale from 2012-17.