American Left

• Albee’s “The Goat” or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness

  [Ed. note: I posted this originally in 2018, but I was reminded of it by Will Arbery's play that I wrote recently about. Both are about challenging in interesting ways the more superficial presuppositions of the late modern cosmopolitan imaginary.] Last weekend I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or

  read more

• Waiting for the Music

  Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up

  read more

• Animal House and the American Right

  Watching it again today, I didn’t think so much of righteous defiance, or underdogs and outsiders; I thought of Wall Street. This particular iteration of Ramis’ martinet vs. slob theme pits—as everyone knows—a prissy, militaristic college fraternity against a fraternity where the boys like pleasure, which is to say, where they drink beer and throw

  read more

• From Edsall’s Column This Morning:

  Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, put it this way in an email: We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president;

  read more

• It’s not Trump Love; It’s (Neo)Liberal Hate

  A machinist named Tim carried his steelworker union card in his wallet for years after the factory closed, just to remind himself who he was. Tim grew up in a union household. His dad had been an autoworker; his grandfather, a coal miner. “We always voted Democrat because they looked after the little man,” Tim

  read more

• Ontological Dizziness and Fear of the Future

  Their portrayal of what the country would look like if the Democrats win big in November is indeed a frightening one to Trump supporters: a White House with Senator Bernie Sanders as the shadow socialist president; a Democratic House of Representatives where Representative Ilhan Omar calls the shots; a society in which mask mandates are

  read more

• Republics vs Democracies

  Some of the earliest contrasts between “democracy” and “republic” in Lee’s sense, according to Cornell historian Lawrence Glickman, came from conservative opponents of the New Deal. At the time, President Roosevelt sold his policies — both domestic and foreign — as a means of defending and enhancing American democracy. Some of his opponents, who saw

  read more

• Quote of the Day: Eliot Cohen

  Other thoughtful Republicans (or former Republicans) are mulling over their own complicity in a party that was compromising its values for power. But equally, or more so, there has not been a full reckoning on the left. Particularly given the impending release of what is sure to be a gracefully written and elegiac memoir by

  read more

• Quote of the Day: Barack Obama

  I recognize that there are those who believe that it’s time to discard the myth—that an examination of America’s past and an even cursory glance at today’s headlines show that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to

  read more

• David French’s America

  In the end, the souls animating both the red hats and the honking cars want a restoration—they want things to go back to normal. In the end, they will all be disappointed. There’s no saving America’s soul. There's no restoring the soul. There's no fighting for the soul of America. There’s no uniting the souls

  read more