Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style Revisited
Hofstadter argued that McCarthyism was simply the latest iteration of a longstanding American tradition.
Michael J. Totten
· 8 min read
Politics
A collection of 613 posts
Can California Change?—An Interview with Michael Shellenberger
In October 2021, environmentalist activist and author Michael Shellenberger published his bestselling book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. He is now campaigning to be the next governor of California on an independent ticket and a platform that promises to address the crises he identified in that book—a homeless
Peter Clarke
· 10 min read
Is Moral Expertise Possible?—A Roundtable
Is moral expertise really a thing—normatively, theoretically, or metaphysically? All three major Western schools of moral philosophy seem to think so, including virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism.
The Limits of Narrative
Societal crises of self-confidence can result from distorted and oversimplified narratives.
James Jeffrey
· 8 min read
Get Ready for the Return of the Abortion Novel
The abortion novels that proliferated in the late 1960s were filled with characters who are forced by carelessness and circumstance to make the most agonizing of personal choices.
Kevin Mims
· 26 min read
Revolution Betrayed
A review of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism by Matthew Continetti, Basic Books, 496 pages (April 2022) “So inevitable and yet so completely unforeseen” was Alexis de Tocqueville’s verdict on the French Revolution. Much the same can be said of Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of
Brian Stewart
· 15 min read
Piketty’s Progress
A review of A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press, 288 pages (April 2022) As I write this, the city of Rotterdam is considering a request to dismantle one of its historic bridges to grant Jeff Bezos’s super-yacht (too monstrous for normal ports) safe passage to
Jared Marcel Pollen
· 10 min read
Putinism and the Stalinist Legacy
From the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, justifications offered for Moscow’s aggression must have struck most non-Russian observers as unrealistic, to say the least. Many observers were incredulous that any educated Russian could possibly believe Putin’s claim that Ukraine required “denazification and demilitarization,” or that the country
Tomislav Kardum
· 7 min read
A Fracture Revealed, Not Healed
As the scale of her defeat in the Presidential election was announced, Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National (RN), was quick to gloss it. “Millions of our compatriots,” she declared (in a speech that must have been prepared for weeks), “have chosen the national camp and change,” and
John Lloyd
· 8 min read
The Dangers of Western Complacency
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revived the Western alliance. After years of drift and self-doubt, the West has been reminded of its historic and institutional uniqueness by seeing the contrast between the atavistic revanchism of Vladimir Putin and the heroism of Ukraine’s defenders. Once again, our collective purpose
Fredrik Erixon and Dalibor Rohac
· 7 min read
Macron Will Have to Do
A decent and competent Left might point out that France stands to gain exactly nothing from an “alliance” with Putin’s dictatorship proposed by the likes of Le Pen.
Brian Stewart
· 7 min read
Serfing the Future?
Escalating housing costs and regulations are confining young people to renting, straining the traditional democratic ideals of property and autonomy.
Joel Kotkin, Wendell Cox
· 11 min read
Shanghai on the Edge of Madness
Starvation will push and pull human psychology in unusual directions—it is one of the few things that can overcome fear of the authorities. When famine came to China 400 years ago, it made Chinese peasants receptive to the preachers of class war. When the government failed to provide crucial
Aaron Sarin
· 6 min read
Casualties of War
I have been a Russophile for as long as I can remember. Or, to put it more exactly, since I was eight years old, when I attended a school play performance of Gogol’s The Government Inspector. I loved Gogol’s sense of humour, the long names with their patronymics—
Robert Ginzburg
· 13 min read
Point of Compact
The late literary critic and social democrat Irving Howe once quipped that when radicals fail to build a movement, they start a magazine. Howe knew what he was talking about—his own magazine, Dissent, was one of them. The latest example of this truism is a new webzine called Compact,
Ronald Radosh
· 12 min read