American Right
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Edsall on White Identity
In this morning’s NYT. Key grafs: In a 2005 paper, Cara Wong, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, and Grace E. Cho, a psychology professor at St. Olaf College, found that many whites identified with their race, but “white racial identity is not politically salient.” Wong and Cho went on, however, to make what
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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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Bannon Out, Allies with Mercers to go to War
According to Axios. We'll see how this plays out, but it looks like Bannon will not go quietly as Priebus and Scaramucci did. A look at the Breitbart website this afternoon makes it appear that the bond between it and Bannon is as strong as ever: This article about Ann Coulter's tweets points to the
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Elites vs. Bannon/Trump
If Bannon goes, then the elites will have won. If he stays, then it will be interesting to see if Kelly and others stay. It might come down to some variation on some key establishment type saying either Bannon leaves, or I do. If Bannon stays, it will be because Trump realizes that he cannot
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Some Thoughts on the Events in Charlottesville
On the morning of the Charlottesville riot Saturday, I just finished reading Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the American Presidency, by Josh Green. It’s essential reading if you want to understand the crossroads we’re at in this moment of our history. If you think the influence of the Right wing
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Trump v. the “Deep State”
For my conservative friends: So in his escalating clashes with Beltway institutions, what we’re watching is not the “deep state” trying to reassert control over policy and bring a tribune of the people low. If so I would be more often on Trump’s side (as I welcomed Brexit and entertained the case for Marine Le
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Charles Taylor on the Ascendance of the Dark Right
The camp of unbelief is deeply divided— about the nature of humanism, and more radically, about its value. I want to offer another framework to understand these struggles, not as a struggle between two protagonists [belief vs. unbelief], but rather as a three-cornered, even perhaps four-cornered battle. The entry of what I called above “the
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Clint Watts on Putin’s Disinformation Objectives
As we noted two days before the presidential election in our article describing Russian influence operations, Russia certainly seeks to promote Western candidates sympathetic to their worldview and foreign-policy objectives. But winning a single election is not their end goal. Russian Active Measures hope to topple democracies through the pursuit of five complementary objectives: Undermine citizen
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The Ascendant Dark Right (Updated)
The rubes noticed that liberal Democrats, distressed by the notion that Indiana would allow bakeries to practice open discrimination against LGBTQ couples, threatened boycotts against the state, mobilizing the considerable economic power that comes with an alliance of New York and Hollywood and Silicon Valley to punish retrograde Gov. Mike Pence, but had no such