Am. History & Culture
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And Now for Something Completely Different. Please.
After a bizarre couple of weeks of Trump thuggery, flip-floppery, and phantasmagoria coupled with anti-Trump protests, where are we? I have no idea. Am I alone in feeling that nothing real has happened? That it’s all theater—as much so on the Left as it is on the Right? No Kings? Okay. Sure. But does that
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Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary
[I’ve been reading Sam Tanenhaus’s rich, complex, and long-time-coming biography of William Buckley entitled Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. I’ve just finished the bit about his role in grand jury tampering to get Adam Clayton Powell indicted. I hadn’t known about his role in that, and it’s instructive about Buckley in
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Christopher Lasch on Late Capitalism
Throughout the twentieth century liberalism has been pulled in two directions at once: toward the market and (notwithstanding its initial misgivings about government) toward the state. On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle—the cardinal principle of liberalism—that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and
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The Bannon-Brooks Interview
Monday was consequential for being the day the Trump Immunity ruling came down and Steve Bannon went to jail. Again. His interview with David Brooks published on Monday is pretty disturbing, but clarifying in light of the SCOTUS ruling. Bannon even references Project 2025: Project 2025 and others are working on it — to immediately
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David Brooks and the Contradictions of Capitalism
Over the past few generations, the celebration of individual freedom has overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic obligations. Especially after World War II and then into the 1960s, we saw the privatization of morality — the rise of what came to be known as the ethos of moral freedom.
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It’s the Nihilism, Stupid
Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that
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Getting Sealed into the Techno-Capitalist Matrix
Early last year, the small magazine n+1 reiterated a longstanding policy. No dead people. Reading work from dead authors may be inevitable, but as literary critics tasked with creating and shaping the conversation, writing about dead people was considered unacceptable — because it was unfair to expect that contemporary writers, already struggling to secure attention
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Reality: Nice While It Lasted 2
From Thomas Edsall's column a few weeks ago: Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.” Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable
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Reality: Nice While It Lasted 1
My concern here is not that people aren’t taking Trump’s threat seriously enough (even if they aren’t) or that Biden isn’t getting some of the credit he deserves (even if he isn’t). Rather, the political reactions of American voters seem completely detached from anything that’s happened over the past several years, or even from things
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Taboo and Ontological Dizziness
Some years ago, I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America.