Am. History & Culture

• Zombie Traditionalism I

  Liberation fever is not new; it's at the heart of the Modern impulse. It started with the Reformation, progressed through the Enlightenment, and ultimately manifested in the liberation movements of our own era. The modern spirit from its earliest manifestation has always been a movement to shuck off the constraints of the traditional premodern social

  read more

• Muslims in France

  Right after college in the seventies I had a job as a deckhand on a charter boat that worked in the West Indies. It sounds better than it actually was. The interesting thing for me,though, was the island hopping, which gave me the opportunity  to experience the various island cultures  and to see how they

  read more

• Style and Substance

  Todd Gitlin at TPM Cafe reproduces parts of a talk he gave in November 2002 in which he tried to make the case for a sane anti-war rationale before the invasion.  It’s difficult to do, because so much of our political discourse is about style rather than substance: But the peace movement in its way

  read more

• Naive Idealists

  During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever motivated

  read more

• Thin Ice.

  The best kind of conservative understands how fragile civilization is, that we're all walking through history on a thin sheet of ice which separates us from the barbarism that lies beneath. Occasionally a society breaks through the ice. We saw it in Germany in the thirties and the Balkans in the nineties. We saw it

  read more