Howard Dean left the Episcopal Church because he disagreed with them about a bike path.
Kind of an interesting contrast, no? I think there's little doubt as to which man is more serious, more deliberative and more trustworthy.
"You dislike the Progressives so much as to think that all of them were social Darwinists"No, they weren't. That term has been overused; and this application of Social Darwinism to Americans has been wrong. The Progressives believed in Evolution; the Germans, in the Survival of the Fittest. They are two different things, you know. I admit: my American amateur scholar of race and such in this instance believes in both. But he is American enough to believe in the first even more than the second. The German Austrian doesn't. There's the rub: you cannot do much to further Evolution, but you can surely do something to ensure the survival of the fittest by eliminating their enemies and the unfit. And there is something in the cold categorical imperatives of his host that sets his American guest aback--a little. Their belief that men, witha cold brutality and will, can and will control much of nature. When he leaves the next day and goes down the valley to the rail station, the road widesn, running along the river, in the middle of which a great tree trunk flows downward in the roiling water, turning its large branches like an enormous screw. That view fills him with a bit of satisfaction, though I cannot be sure what it really makes him think.