Am. History & Culture
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The Radically Centrist Narrative
I have been over many months now arguing that the terms conservative and liberal don’t really mean much and create more confusion than they clarify. At the root of the meaning of conservative is to conserve, but the people who call themselves conservative in this country are not conserving but destroying a system set up
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Virtue, Machismo, and the Last Man
I’ve been reading Somerby about the GOP strategy to feminize Democrats, and his withering criticism of Maureen Dowd whom he depicts as doing in a more sophisticated, NY Times kind of way the same work being done by Ann Coulter. I think he’s right about this, and I think he’s doing an important service in
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The Neocon Nightmare World
When I first picked up Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in the nineties, I feared that it would be a Rush Limbaugh-like rant against Liberal decadence. In some ways you could say it is, but unlike Limbaugh, you have to take Bloom seriously. He's got a case to make, and both he and Christopher
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The Power of Myth
As anyone who's been reading ATF for awhile knows, I'm a big proponent of the the power of mythic narratives. To live without a narrative is to live without meaning, and even nihilists have narratives. Who was a greater mythmaker with his Eternal Return and Zarathustra stories than nihilist-in-chief, Friedrich Nietzsche. The choice is not
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The Paranoid Style
We didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy. Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever. And we
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Naive Belief vs. Seinfeld-Costanza Syndrome
Principled conservatives (as contrasted with the power conservatives that control the GOP) have legitimate concerns about the nihilism that pervades our popular culture. I share them. We part company, however, when such conservatives think that a remedy lies in the political sphere. Solutions to problems in the cultural sphere need to be developed in the
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We’re All Cosmopolitans Now
I think it’s useful to think about the cultural sphere and the poltical sphere as separate although obviously related areas of social activity. Lot’s of people tend to conflate them, as if for them our politics is in the profoundest sense a representation of their deepest sense of self or identity. In de Toquevilles’s time
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The Indian Wars
There are basically two American stories, and depending on which any given American thinks or feels is more true, so is his sense of identity shaped by it, and usually so does his politics flow from it. There are other American narratives that don’t quite fit into this bi-polar division, but American history has been