American Left
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Albee’s “The Goat” or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness
Last weekend 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. Martin, however,
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Cultures of Corruption
In a culture of corruption, like the ones that infected companies like Enron and continue to infect much of Wall Street and the political class in places like Washington, D.C., nobody really believes corruption is wrong. It's accepted simply as how things work, and so if you work in places like that, and you haven't
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Outrage Begets Outrage
And on and on it goes. Anytime one side sees itself as unambiguously on the side of light and righteousness, it calls up something dark and unrighteous. It's not in the people that the outrage is directed toward, but rather in the social system that binds the two in a kind of dyad. From the
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HyperNormalisation: Fake Truth and Political Reality
In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one
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Who Emerges from the Chaos?
The great fear among Trump-fearers is that he will deal with this elite opposition by effectively crushing it — purging the deep state, taming the media, remaking the judiciary as his pawn, and routing or co-opting the Democrats. This is the scenario where a surging populism, its progress balked through normal channels, turns authoritarian and
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Artists, Saints, Prophets, and Philosophers
This election of Donald Trump was driven by irrational factors, and overt racism is too simplistic a way to characterize them. The problem is broader in that it embraces fundamental issues of identity and acculturation in Red and Blue America. So it's important to understand what's going on rather than moralistically to dismiss his election as driven mainly
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Diversity Includes Everybody or Why Hillary Lost (Updated)
Last Spring during the primaries, when I argued with people who liked Bernie but thought he couldn't win, I would say that Hillary was going to be the Martha Coakley of 2016. I think the comparison holds. Liberals who think the country rejected her because she was a woman don't get it. Had Elizabeth Warren run, I guarantee you
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George Packer: The Dems are Dead; Long Live the Dems
The Democratic Party claims half the country, but it’s hollowed out at the core. Hillary Clinton became the sixth Democratic Presidential candidate in the past seven elections to win the popular vote; yet during Barack Obama’s Presidency the Party lost both houses of Congress, fourteen governorships, and thirty state legislatures, comprising more than nine hundred
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The End of the Experiment? (Updated)
The tragedy of the Trump movement is that one set of struggling people has been pitted against other groups of struggling people by someone who has known little struggle, at least in the material sense, and hence seems to have little empathy for anyone struggling, and even to consider struggling a symptom of weakness…. From
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Quote of the Day: Naomi Klein
They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry. But this leaves out the force most