America

This category holds my writing about America: its history, its character, its contradictions, and the things about it worth defending and worth criticizing. I write about my country honestly, which means neither blind praise nor reflexive condemnation.

America is a place with an extraordinary record of doing good and a real record of doing harm, often in the same era. I think you can hold both of those truths at once without flinching from either. Pretending the country is flawless is dishonest. So is pretending it has done nothing of value. The honest view requires holding the whole picture.

The posts here look at American history and American life with that standard in mind: examine the evidence, give credit and criticism where each is due, and resist the easy comfort of a one-sided story.