Trumpism
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Trump: Delusionist or Illusionist?
If we remember Norman Vincent Peale’s belief that “attitudes are more important than facts,” and chaos magick’s aim to escape our existing “cognitive habits”—not to mention Hitler’s power to release his followers from the “limitations of all conventional restraint”—we can, I think, see a connection between Trump’s “bullshit” and much of what we have been
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The Case against Trump–and the GOP
Liz Cheney's indictment as summarized by Amanda Carpenter: Trump’s misinformation campaign provoked the violence on January 6th. Trump corruptly planned to replace the Attorney General of the United States so the U.S. Justice Department would spread his false stolen election claims. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes on January
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Imagining a Positive Human Future
The anti-liberals Rose profiles all believed that liberalism prescribed a life without sacrifice, an age when individual contentment reigned supreme and collective struggle disappeared. This was not true then, and it is not true now. What they missed is what liberalism actually believes: that there is a collective identity to be found in collective betterment,
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Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability
Because the politics of inevitability assures you that whatever the good things are, they’re being brought about automatically by some invisible hand, right? The market is like Mom. You know, it’s going to take care of you with that invisible hand. And you don’t have to think about what the values might be, what you
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Ukraine Silver Lining
But Mr. Putin’s savaging of Ukraine, which many of his right-wing supporters had said he would never do, has recast the Russian president more clearly as a global menace and boogeyman with ambitions of empire who is threatening nuclear war and European instability. For many of his longtime admirers — from France to Germany and
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Authoritarian Psychopathy
Like other authoritarians, he equates his own well-being with that of the nation and opposition with treason. He is sure that Americans mirror both his cynicism and his lust for power and that in a world where everyone lies, he is under no obligation to tell the truth.–Madeleine Albright This is Albright's description of Putin,
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Jamelle Bouie on Civil War
…if you’re worried about a second Civil War, the question to ask isn’t whether people hate each other — they always have and we tend to grossly exaggerate the extent of this country’s political and cultural unity over time — but whether that hate results from the irreconcilable social and economic interests of opposing groups
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Edsall on White Unhappiness
Graham and Pinto measured poll respondents’ sense of purpose, sense of community and their financial and social well-being and found that “blacks and Hispanics typically score higher than whites,” noting that “these findings highlight the remarkable levels of resilience among blacks living in precarious circumstances compared to their white counterparts.” Graham and Pinto write: The
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Edsall on the Big Lie
Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at N.Y.U., describes the danger of this political dynamic: In capturing the party, Trump perfectly embodied its ethnonationalist and authoritarian tendencies and delivered it concrete results — even if his policy stances were not always perfectly aligned with party orthodoxy. As a result, the Republican Party and Trumpism have become fused