jimsleeper.com

This website is a buffet or smorgasbord of civic republican “dishes” — columns, essays, podcasts, interviews, and videos that you can sample and, when you’re tempted, dig into.

Each “meal,” or thematic section — “What is Civic Republicanism?”, “Why Foreign Policy Isn’t so ‘Foreign’ Anymore,” “Why a Skin Color Isn’t a Culture,” and eleven others here below — opens with an appetizer, followed by a menu of recent and not-so-recent entrees on that theme.

Some things haven’t been swept away and probably won’t be: Greed, power lust, and yearnings to belong to tribes, faith communities, or herds antedated capitalism and post-modernism by millennia, and they’ll outlast them: Tyrants, fanatics, and rogues will rush into abysses opening at our feet and in our hearts. Stressed, dispossessed people will follow them, believing — craving — lies about who to blame and who to trust.

But others of us will walk forward on both a “left” foot of public provision and a “right” one of individual autonomy and responsibility, and some of us will keep “looking for America” with urgency and depth, as I do in some of these sections. Sample here what I’ve looked for and found. The chef is at