US trapped in weed of wretched election
By Tom Plate LOS ANGELES ― Has this ugly American presidential election gotten on your nerves? It has on mine. About democracy of the Western sort, I used to be as faithful as anyone. For a time the inspiring thinker Sir Isaiah Berlin was my Einstein whom I read almost religiously. His mind was a library of such books that his essays on liberal freedom almost whispered to you with wisdom. What conversations we could overhear! The Oxford-based political philosopher and historian of ideas died in 1997 ― the same year, we note, as did Deng Xiaoping, China’s epochal Great Innovator who represented a radically different political faith. But it was a much different thinker and doer of Chinese ethnicity who urged me to think smarter than either: Lee Kuan Yew. Planting himself somewhere between Berlin and Deng, the late leader of the People’s Action Party that founded modern Singapore was anything but a one-citizen, one-vote fan. It was a risky system, he would warn, that left on its own would yield “erratic results.” And so it is in a
