Culture Wars
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What Is After the Future About?
Note: Every once in a while I revise my About statement at the top of the left column on this site. I thought I'd post my most recent revision here today: After the Future is a public diary that I've been writing for over twenty years. It's what I'd be writing anyway if there were
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Middle American Radicals Twelve Years Later
In December 2010, at a time when thoughtful readers frequently commented on my posts, I put up an essay entitled "Thanksgiving Encounters". It was about visiting with relatives at a Thanksgiving gathering in North Carolina where my father had retired. I found myself astonished to learn that these thoughtful, well-educated relatives, people I care about, were
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Some Thoughts on Equity Language
Like any prescribed usage, equity language has a willed, unnatural quality. The guides use scientific-sounding concepts to lend an impression of objectivity to subjective judgments: structural racialization, diversity value proposition, arbitrary status hierarchies. The concepts themselves create status hierarchies—they assert intellectual and moral authority by piling abstract nouns into unfamiliar shapes that immediately let you
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Some Thoughts on ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’
Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic? I would expect it
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Is It Finally the End of Trump?
The front page above is from one of Rupert Murdoch's right-wing propaganda media properties. I don't know that it means much. MAGA is toothpaste that Trump squeezed out of the tube. It was always there, and now that it's out, it ain't goin' back in. If the MAGA Jacksonian base is just as Trumpy now as
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Sincerely Bad Religion
I wrote a post last week about Tolkien, fantasy, and escape that attempted to make a relatively nuanced argument that fantasy escape can be a healthy thing if one is truly imagining a world that represents a reality that is more real than the prison in which we are currently confined. It is healthy if,
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The Coming Violence
These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into
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Toward a More Perfect Union
I've used this phrase a few times in the last couple of weeks. It's from the Constitution's preamble, and famously echoed in Lincoln's first inaugural, and eloquently elaborated in Obama's famous campaign speech in 2008. It struck me as I was thinking about it that both the Right and the Left want a more perfect
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Toward a Normie Progressive Politics
I'm getting a little self-conscious about my incessant references to Ezra Klein, but he is quite remarkable for having his finger on what I see as the critical issues. This week he had on Michelle Goldberg, a woman I respect as a sensible Progressive and like for her intellectual honesty and personal authenticity. But she's