American Right
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‘Animal House’ and the American Right
The kind of liberation the rude gesture brings has turned out to be not that liberating after all, but along the way it has crowded out previous ideas of what liberation meant—ideas that had to with equality, with work, with ownership. And still our love of simple, unadorned defiance expands. It is everywhere today. Everyone
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The Tea Party and the Mythos of ‘Real’ Americans
People in Red America are in pain, and it's deeper than just economic. I'd argue that a good deal of the pain comes from the disjunction between its mindset and the real world in which Red America lives. The world no longer makes sense for a mindset that was developed in the early 19th century.
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Socialism v. Neoliberalism
Corey Robin recently in a post entitled " Socialism: Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness for a Hundred Years" In the neoliberal utopia, all of us are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping track of each and every facet of our economic lives. That, in fact, is the openly declared goal: once
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Douthat on the Leftist Pope
But the church’s social teaching is no less an official teaching for allowing room for disagreement on its policy implications. And for Catholics who pride themselves on fidelity to Rome, the burden is on them — on us — to explain why a worldview that inspires left-leaning papal rhetoric also allows for right-of-center conclusions. That
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Evangelicals and Progressivism
Ira Chernus has an interesting article this morning in Salon on the necessity of Progressives finding way to ally themselves with evangelical Christians. Here are his closing paragraphs: It’s the religious right, long the progressive left’s favorite target, that is now the richest target of opportunity. Because politically progressive evangelical Christianity is not merely a
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Why Broad Consensus Is a Phantom
An article in Salon this morning about polling that shows how most Americans are to the left even of positions taken by the mainstream Democrats: With such a profoundly self-contradictory practice, it should not surprise us that the poll was even more misleading than Pareene described. Polarization in some sense is real — and yet also partial,
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Quote of the Day: Michael Lind
Commenting on the Konczal post I referred to yesterday: Unlike conservatives, who are right-wingers first and Republicans second, all too many progressives put loyalty to the Democratic Party — most of whose politicians, including Obama, are not economic progressives — above fidelity to a consistent progressive economic philosophy. These partisan Democratic spinmeisters are now treating
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Krauthammer on The Daily Show
I don't know what happened to Charles Krauthammer. I read him in The New Republic back in the 80s, and he was a run of the mill foreign policy realist. And then The New Republic went all neoconservative and crazy pro-Israel, and I stopped reading The New Republic, and the next thing I know Krauthammer is
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As California Goes . . .
So goes the nation. Not always a good thing, but it would be now: In the past month, California has been the stage for a series of celebrations of unlikely legislative success — a parade of bill signings that offered a contrast between the shutdown in Washington and an acrimony-free California Legislature that enacted laws
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Will the Cruz Coalition Feel Chastened? II
In the Senate, there were already signs that an emergent group of 14 centrist senators from both parties was looking to make an impact on the fiscal battles ahead. The group, led by Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, has already planned to meet in the coming weeks.