Neoliberalism

• Stephanie Kelton, Big Gummint, Central Banks, and the American Future

  An MMT view of the monetary system changes the way we think about what it means for currency-issuing nations to “live within their means.” It asks us to think in terms of real resource constraints—inflation—rather than perceived financial constraints. It teaches us to ask not “How will you pay for it?” but “How will you

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• State of the Race 3

  It's looking more and more like it's going to be Bernie, and it's looking more and more like the establishment types are in full freak out. I think it's fine to go after him with all guns firing between now and Super Tuesday, but I hope that the establishment types are savvy enough to get

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• Calvinism + Baconism = The Toxically Arrogant Technocratic State

  I've been a bit rough on the Calvinists, and I haven't been giving them enough credit for the genuine idealism that motivated the best among them. It's easy to criticize what's worst and in doing so to obscure what's best. Catholics wouldn't have any reason to be taken seriously, to what extent they might be

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• Zizek, McCain, Trump, and Big Daddy

  I'm no expert on Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian psychotherapist and edgy philosopher from Slovenia, but I find his distinction between the Oedipal Father Figure and the Primal Father Figure an interesting frame through which to observe the events surrounding the death of John McCain in the last week. Elites in the American media and political

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• HyperNormalisation: Fake Truth and Political Reality

  In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one

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• It’s the Meaninglessness, Stupid

  I've just finished Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging after just having read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Both focus on what I've been writing about here for years, which is that the problem at the root of American societal dysfunction since the sixties is the lack of a meaning narrative that gives Americans a

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• Socialism v. Neoliberalism

  As I wrote in the my last post Sanders' candidacy is important for his attempt to legitimate a certain range of ideas. The word "socialism" is one that timid liberals think is radioactive, but Bernie to his credit won't back away from it. Instead he seeks to define it in terms that make sense to

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• Jim Sleeper on White Male Rage

  White guys who succumb to ressentiment aren’t as trapped and brutalized as black guys. But unlike blacks, who’ve been denigrated, mauled and murdered forever in almost routinized ways that whites can barely imagine ever happening to themselves, the white guys are reeling now because their loss seems so recent, humiliating and, to them, inexplicable. In ressentiment some of them

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• Frank & Perlstein . . .

  . . . take their act on the (rail)road. Great conversation about the tragedy of the 1970s in the U.S. A few excerpts: RP: Before Reagan is even elected. And then when Reagan does run for president in 1980, the secret weapon in his quiver ideologically is supply-side economics which basically breaks the back of

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• Contempt for the Liberal Class

  Last week, with the Republican campaign robo-calls coming one after another over the phone in suburban Kansas City — at least a dozen of them every day, the right-wing super PACs’ version of a World War I artillery barrage — I picked out one phrase from the hailstorm of words: “Washington’s liberal class.” That phrase,

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