Deep State
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Continuists vs Discontinuists: Setting Up a Critical Look at Yoram Hazony
Let me start by saying that I don’t think that Yoram Hazony is an ideological hack, even if he's associating with hacks that I think diminish his credibility with the non-hack community. Nevertheless, I think he's writing in good faith, and his ideas have to be taken seriously if for no other reason that they
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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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Moral Parity
The former president recognized that the fact of an investigation was far more important than the results. It worked with the Benghazi investigation, about which House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was accidentally honest, and in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, which didn’t produce charges but did hobble her presidential campaign. By the time Trump
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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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Some Random Thoughts on Afghanistan
Despite whatever level of culpability Biden has for not planning the logistics of the evacuation effectively, it's also become abundantly clear that those Afghanis who supported the twenty-year American boondoggle in Afghanistan as translators, etc. should be very happy that Biden was in office rather than Trump. This withdrawal was going to be a mess
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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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Drift toward Authoritarianism
I am sympathetic to those who think that liberal democracy is failing, was, in fact, always doomed to failure. After all it gave us Trump, who presently is at an all time high approval rating with Gallup at 46%. The U.S. had a flawed but good run for a good quarter millennium. But it's time
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Trump v. the “Deep State”
For my conservative friends: So in his escalating clashes with Beltway institutions, what we’re watching is not the “deep state” trying to reassert control over policy and bring a tribune of the people low. If so I would be more often on Trump’s side (as I welcomed Brexit and entertained the case for Marine Le
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Who Emerges from the Chaos?
The great fear among Trump-fearers is that he will deal with this elite opposition by effectively crushing it — purging the deep state, taming the media, remaking the judiciary as his pawn, and routing or co-opting the Democrats. This is the scenario where a surging populism, its progress balked through normal channels, turns authoritarian and