- KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images
- “We speak for free markets and free people.”
The second half of 2013 is beginning, offering a chance for second-half resolutions—ones we didn’t make on New Year’s Day, or made but failed to keep.
I’m going to try the resolution proposed by Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist, at the end of last year: reading against type. Douthat noted that 2013 would be as far from a presidential election as could be, and also would be without midterms. We should use the political respite to free ourselves from the “toils of partisanship,” letting our minds “rove more widely and freely,” he wrote. Conservatives should read liberals, and liberals should read conservatives.
Since I’m not afflicted with the conservative condition, it’s the latter advice that applies to me.
“Whenever you’re tempted to hurl away an article in disgust, that’s exactly when you should turn the page or swipe the screen and keep on reading, to see what else the other side might have to say,” Douthat went on.