American Right

• Drove My Chevy to the Levee

  In a post entitled Bye Bye Miss American Pie I wrote that traditional America contracted a terminal disease in the twenties and died in the sixties. Don McLean sang the funeral dirge and Marshall McLuhan wrote the obituary. The terminal disease was liberation fever, and the demon spirit that took possession of the corpse is consumer capitalism. American culture

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• 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

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• Is Magic a Thing?

  I've no personal interest in magic as most esotericists practice it, but I'm open to the possibility that the human psyche is capable of shaping reality in ways that make no sense if understood in purely materialistic, mechanistic terms. Materialists believe that Mind is an epiphenomenon of Matter, a kind of steam that is emitted

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• Heroes of the Fourth Turning

  I have just read Will Arbery's intriguing play. I  haven't seen it on stage. I read an interview with Arbery in Vox, which motivated me to purchase the play.which I read the other day.  I come out of the Catholic world, and this blog represents what I hope is an intellectually coherent presentation of a

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• 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

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• 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

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• Boredom, Dionysos, and the Ethic of Authenticity

  For people like Trump there is no good or bad; there is only boring and entertaining, and so anything is permitted so long as it is entertaining. The only sin is to be a bore, and it is better to be a boor than a bore.  This is a truth someone like Matt Gaetz well

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• Anne Applebaum on the Psychology of Collaboration

  Why do people collaborate with people they have before seen as their enemy? What explains a Lindsay Graham or a Ted Cruz or a Nikky Haley? Or perhaps the more interesting question is what explains the motives of those who resist–the Liz Cheneys or Adam Kinzigers? Well, there are so many good reasons to do

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• Filibuster Bust

  “I predict to you your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded, autocracy or democracy, because that is what is at stake.” —Joe Biden If this seems hyperbolic, then you really haven't a clue about the significance of the moment. It's understandable–we all tend to

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• Miscellaneous Thoughts on Impeachment, Culture, and the Surveillance State

  It's important that the U.S. have a post-Trump reckoning about how much damage has been done, not just by him but by his enablers. Will the impeachment play some role in that? I doubt it, since the whole point of it is simply to focus on what is already known about what Trump did before

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