Michael is an attorney in New York, and the creator of Syncopated Politics, a blog focusing on the intersection of history and politics (with occasional side-trips to Supreme Court rulings, economic conferences, films, and opera). He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University (Political Science) and Fordham University Law School. He is fortunate enough to have married brilliantly and has two endlessly fascinating children, about whom he talks far too much. Email: mlissnyc [at] gmail.com
by Michael Liss It is March of 1944, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is dying. His physicians, Lieutenant Commander Howard Bruen and Vice-Admiral Ross McIntire, know it, as do a handful of others McIntire brought in. FDR probably knows it as well, no matter how much his doctors may have sugar-coated their findings. He has cardiac…
by Michael Liss On November 11, 2019, I wrote a review of Willful: How We Choose What We Do (Yale University Press, November 2019), by Richard Robb, Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and CEO of the investment firm Christofferson, Robb & Company. He was kind enough to let…
by Michael Liss Had enough of the 2020 election? Take heart, there are just 134 days left until Vote-If-You-Can Tuesday. That’s less time than it took Napoleon to march his Grande Armée into Russia, win several lightning victories, stall out, and then retreat through the brutal winter, with astronomical casualties, all the while inspiring the…
by Michael Liss There is a statue of Daniel Webster in Central Park. It is tucked in at the intersection of West and Bethesda Drives, massive and unmoving, implacable and forbidding. Despite its size, it goes largely unnoticed, except as a meeting point. Just a few hundred feet to the west of Webster is The…
by Michael Liss That Fifties-looking gent to your right is John J. Sparkman (D-Alabama) who was Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in 1952. Sparkman served in Congress for more than 40 years, the last 32 of them in the Senate. While not a star, he was associated with several pieces of important legislation and became Chair…
by Michael Liss I am one of those people who cannot sit still. I wasn’t good at it as a child, and as the decades pass, every indication is that I will never be good at it. I suspect I inherited this from my father, who lacked a single iota of Sitzfleisch, and have passed…
by Michael Liss He is an enigma. He sits up there in his marble chair, set in a Greek temple, literally larger than life, and he defies us to understand him. Many have tried. More than 15,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, to say nothing of countless columns, essays, Masters and Doctoral theses.…
by Michael Liss The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for, not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of the country, and upon the successful Management of which so much depends. —George…
by Michael Liss I have an awful confession to make. I haven’t made up my mind about whether President Trump should be convicted and removed from office. I know that sounds deranged. I am “troubled” by what Trump apparently did. “Disturbed” by the scorched-earth defense strategy put together by the Trump team. “Deeply concerned” about…
by Michael Liss How do you feel about an Imperial Presidency? Attorney General William Barr has been on a bit of a bender recently. He’s suggested that communities that are critical of law enforcement will lose police protection, disagreed with the Inspector General’s report about the FBI and the Russia investigation, and warmed the hearts…
by Michael Liss Economics. The dismal science. All those numbers and graphs, formulas and derivations, tombstone-sized copies of Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus’s Macroeconomics (now apparently in its 19th edition), and memories of the detritus that came with them: half-filled coffee cups and overfilled ashtrays, mechanical pencils and HP-45s. As you might imagine, with that…
by Michael Liss The Iceberg has broken off from the ice sheet, and it’s a whopper. It groaned and teetered and shook, hanging on maybe longer than science said it should have, and, then, with a mighty roar, it slid into the ocean. It’s been floating about ever since, banging into things. Last week, I…
by Michael Liss I’ve been thinking a lot about Joe Biden recently. Joe Biden and nostalgia, Joe Biden and memory. Joe Biden and Mad Men. There is a wonderful scene to close the first season as Don Draper pitches an ad campaign to two exceptionally nerdy guys from Kodak. The boys from the lab want…
by Michael Liss I don’t know a lot about guns. I live in New York, which has comparatively restrictive gun laws, I don’t own any, I don’t hunt (and didn’t grow up hunting), and I wasn’t in the service. I don’t have the emotional bonds that others who grew up around them might. The entire…
by Michael Liss The Supreme Court doesn’t play politics. In what was destined to be an inevitable ruling, by an inevitable 5-4 vote, inevitably written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court decided, in Rucho v. Common Cause, that it couldn’t decide how much “partisan” gerrymandering was too much partisan gerrymandering. So it wouldn’t.…
by Michael Liss It is a big cross. A really big cross. Forty feet in height, made of granite and concrete, The Bladensburg Peace Cross stands tall and straight for all to see. The Peace Cross, sponsored by the American Legion, was built in 1925 in the aftermath of World War I to memorialize the…
by Michael Liss “I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.” —Jefferson Davis, July 1864 By the time Sherman’s armies had scorched and bow-tied their way to the sea, by the…
by Michael Liss “Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.” —Henry David Thoreau It has been a little over a week since the redacted Mueller Report was released, and so many words have been spilled that there could be a drought by summer if the umbrage reservoirs are not…
by Michael Liss How do you raise kids in an increasingly harsh and atonal world? We all have our templates for seeking harmony. Mine were my own parents. They were not performing artists or even musicians; neither played an instrument (I think the kazoo doesn’t qualify), and neither could sing. But, as listeners, they were…
by Michael Liss The man for whom the word “Emergency” must have been invented (“serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action”) pulled the pin out of yet another hand grenade. Our President, Donald J. Trump, bollixed, frustrated, stymied, and parboiled (twice) by the evil Nancy Pelosi, went off and did just what he…