American Right
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Jim Sleeper on White Male Rage
White guys who succumb to ressentiment aren’t as trapped and brutalized as black guys. But unlike blacks, who’ve been denigrated, mauled and murdered forever in almost routinized ways that whites can barely imagine ever happening to themselves, the white guys are reeling now because their loss seems so recent, humiliating and, to them, inexplicable. In ressentiment some of them
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The Torture Report (Updated)
From an interview with Glen Greenwald: The more you look at just how many people and institutions were involved (either actively or by looking the other way) — the doctors, the psychiatrists, the media, members of Congress — the more it starts to sound like a society-wide failure. It reminds me of what Arendt wrote
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Deep-Staters in CIA Celebrating GOP Takeover of Senate
What goes on in Washington committees would be comic opera or even institutionalized buffoonery but for the fact that there are real world consequences. If torture is not discredited as a tool for national security it will undoubtedly be used again in the wake of another terrorist attack, further damaging U.S. credibility and inevitably distancing
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The Neocon Nightmare World
[Ed. Note: While Neocons are not in the news so much these days, but they are waiting in the wings, and for reasons given in recent posts, it's just a matter of time before they make their comeback. This is a repost of a 2007 piece (slightly edited) that was a repost of a 2005 piece.
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Contempt for the Liberal Class
Last week, with the Republican campaign robo-calls coming one after another over the phone in suburban Kansas City — at least a dozen of them every day, the right-wing super PACs’ version of a World War I artillery barrage — I picked out one phrase from the hailstorm of words: “Washington’s liberal class.” That phrase,
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Dewey, Lippmann, and the Problem of the “Public”
After WWI, Lippmann was very pessimistic about the prospects for American democracy. Dewey while he was more optimistic nevertheless agreed with Lippmann about the social dynamics that were hollowing out democracy. Lippmann wrote The Phantom Public in 1925 and Dewey wrote The Public and Its Problems in 1927 in response. For Lippmann the public was
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Election Day
Significance of GOP victory deserves a thought or two. The bottom line is that our democracy has become so hollowed out and most people so alienated that what we're watching is simply a street fight between factions in the country's power elite. For some it has entertainment value, but it's not even an interesting matchup
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How Liberalism Lost Its Good Name
I look forward to reading Rick Perlstein’s The Invisble Bridge, his latest chronicle on the development of American movement conservatism since the 1950s. When reading Nixonland, his previous volume in the series, I was disturbed by how much I needed to reminded about what happened during the 1960s. But as I read through it, I remembered
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The Left-Right Spectrum: Time for a Realignment?
Reader Mike McG sent me Crispin Sartwell's Atlantic article "The Left-Right Political Spectrum is Bogus" I agree with much of what Sartwell says, and I like his point that we should stop thinking from the Left or the Right, and start thinking about the Left and the Right. If we understand Left-Right in its most basic