Political Hope in a Time of Disillusionment
Journalist, author, professor, and political commentator E.J. Dionne, Jr., will present a lecture titled, “More Successes Than We Seem to Want to Know: Rekindling Political Hope in a Time of Disillusionment,” on Thursday, March 26 at 6 p.m. in the Jeanne Y. Curtis Performance Hall on the Assumption Campus, 500 Salisbury St., Worcester. Dionne’s lecture is sponsored by the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Center for Scholarship and Statesmanship at Assumption University.
“Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan explored the limits of social policy, but also had an elevated view of what public action could achieve,” shared Greg Weiner, Ph.D., provost and academic vice president of Assumption and director of the Moynihan Center. “Drawing on the insights of Senator Moynihan, Reinhold Niebuhr, Saint Augustine, and Jean Elshtain, among others, Dr. Dionne will argue that realism and hope are not adversaries.”
The lecture is free and open to the public, however, attendees are asked to R.S.V.P.
Dionne is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and Senior Fellow for Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is also a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post and a professor of the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at Georgetown University. Dionne began his career as a reporter with The New York Times, where he spent 14 years reporting on politics from around the world, including stints in Albany, Washington, DC, Paris, Rome, and Beirut. He joined The Washington Post in 1990 as a reporter and has been writing his column since 1993.
Dionne is a regular political commentator on MSNBC and National Public Radio. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of several books. His most recent, Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country (St. Martin’s Press) was published this month. His other works include One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported (co-authored with Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann, 2017), and Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism – From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (2016). His book, Why Americans Hate Politics (1991), was nominated for the National Book Award, won The Los Angeles Times book prize and Newsday called it “a classic in American political history.”
A native of Fall River, MA, Dionne is a graduate of Harvard University and received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He lives in Bethesda, MD, with his wife and three children.
The Daniel Patrick Moynihan Center for Scholarship and Statesmanship, established in 2018, is an endeavor with national reach that aims to cultivate thoughtful citizens who are inspired by the late senator’s example to appreciate the link between ideas and action. Located in Assumption’s Department of Political Science, the Center is funded by generous grants from the Thomas W. Smith Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, whose Madison Initiative focuses on strengthening the values, norms and institutions of U.S. democracy—in particular, Congress—in a time of political polarization.