Culture Wars
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Is Moral Maturity a Thing?
[Inspired by David Bentley Hart’s All Things, I’m going to use this dialogic form from time to time in hopes that it will make some of my arguments easier to engage with. In this post, I’m attempting to set up why it’s important to understand the argument that Alasdair MacIntyre is making in his After
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Have We Pinged Our Last Pong?
Thomas Edsall’s column this week focuses on the problems that Dems have with voters without a college degree, aka Populists. He talks to various experts about this. Most interesting to me were the comments of Michael Podhorzer and Herbert Kitschelt. Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and a founder of the Analyst
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And Now for Something Completely Different. Please.
After a bizarre couple of weeks of Trump thuggery, flip-floppery, and phantasmagoria coupled with anti-Trump protests, where are we? I have no idea. Am I alone in feeling that nothing real has happened? That it’s all theater—as much so on the Left as it is on the Right? No Kings? Okay. Sure. But does that
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Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary
[I’ve been reading Sam Tanenhaus’s rich, complex, and long-time-coming biography of William Buckley entitled Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. I’ve just finished the bit about his role in grand jury tampering to get Adam Clayton Powell indicted. I hadn’t known about his role in that, and it’s instructive about Buckley in
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Reality: Nice While It Lasted 2
From Thomas Edsall's column a few weeks ago: Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.” Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable
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Here We Are
Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it
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Consensus Reality and Conspiracy Theories
I understand the impulse to believe conspiracy theories. It comes from a largely correct view that most people are living in a consensus trance. It comes from that feeling that Neo had before he took the red pill: Something is deeply wrong. Why does everyone around me seem to accept these attitudes and behaviors that
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A Simulacral Age
The past decade has been defined by how life, the real thing, so often resembles fiction — the first Black president succeeded by a reality TV star and serial conjurer of failed businesses, the pandemic, the astounding and scary new artificial intelligence marvels monthly. “You can’t make it up,” people say. But for those of
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Defending the Western Canon
A part of my mission at After the Future has been to save the Western Canon from being captured by conservative ideologues. That is a heavy lift these days, and it shouldn't be. There's a reason why people like Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt–and really anybody who is truly culturally literate–have spent so much time