Michael Medved had an interesting presentation last night at Theatre on the Square. He recently wrote about "The 10 Big Lies About America" and during the presentation he covered three of the lies he covered in his book.

One–that America is in an irreversible state of moral decline I've long believed to be false, and I'm glad Medved argued against it as passionately as he did.

The second–that America is "uniquely" responsible for slavery and that slavery in the US was worse than anywhere else in the world … I found to be a bit of a strawman's argument. I don't think I've really heard anyone say that the US is "uniquely" responsible for slavery in a way that other nations with slaves were not. And a passing knowledge of what was done to slaves in South America, for example, would disprove that slavery in the US was the most cruel form of it, horrific as it was. In short, this is a lie, yes, but not a lie I've heard a whole lot of people espouse.

And finally–Medved did make me re-think Ranked Choice Voting, though that wasn't his goal. The "lie," he said, is that America needs a third-party in order to challenge the stranglehold the Democrats and Republicans have on the country/politics/etc. I've never believed that, but a lot of my support for RCV comes from a notion that it's a good thing to make third-party candidates more viable. Medved threw at me some food for thought on whether that's true, and whether it's not better to have those activists fight to get their voice heard within their parties instead of in an ideologically pure third-party. I'll be thinking on that one for a bit, but I'm tending to agree.

Anyway, I certainly did not support many (most?) of Medved's arguments or positions. But he was smart as a tack, funny, and a good speaker. And, as you can see above with RCV, gave me something to chew on later. So I'd call that a pretty successful event, though having 130 people show up, including lots of new faces to City Club, certainly help me call it a success as well. 🙂

Thanks to so many people who showed up!