The Unfair Safety Net for Success
Rinzen Widjaja, a writer in Australia, wonders if for the children of the wealthiest Americans, it is almost too hard to fail.
EssayLegacy
A collection of 845 articles.
Undoing Civilization: The Degeneracy of America’s Political Elites
“With Vice President Vance as President Trump’s heir apparent, it is difficult to envision a restoration of principled conservatism any time soon. Meanwhile, the country’s political class is plagued by general senescence and by kakistocracy among the younger politicians (think Congresswoman Alexandr
Fieldnotes: Annie Christain’s “The Vanguards of Holography” and Caroline Harper New’s “A History of Half-Birds”
“There is a sense of preparation through formal and informal erudition, meant to complicate what it means to write adequately about natural and human worlds, with fewer donnéees and more of a sense of a non-human cosmos, one of manatees and marsupials, in which each creature’s essence is not given t
Strawberry Fields Forever: Amie Whittemore’s “Nest of Matches”
“Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them.”
Making Sense of the Rotherham Child Sex Abuse Scandal
“British cultural and political life is governed, accordingly, largely by emotion and instinct.”
Cosmic Comic Kvetching in Anthony Immergluck’s “The Worried Well”
“The grand Guignol exaggeration provides an excellent comic read, as we fail to take completely seriously his worrywart grandstanding. Chances are, we have known someone exactly like him, who upon greeting us, got straight to describing their various medical conditions, real and imagined in excrucia
Walking and Thinking
“Nevertheless, I am often struck by how many great thinkers have also been great walkers.”
Germany’s Lingering Hegelianism
“And so things continue as before, because in a post-historical era, sprinkled with German-Hegelian state worship and a view of oneself as the summit of civilizational development, there is no need to move from the spot one has occupied.”
Christianity and the West―Criticizing Lawrence Auster
“It was Christianity that became Europe’s unifying ideology and inspired figures from Charlemagne to Columbus.”
The Rooted and the Restless
“I was born in the 1990s, into one of the countless middle-class Indian families that were sprouting like saplings after the rains, in the wake of the 1991 economic reforms. India was shaking off the dust of its socialist decades and finding its footing in a world suddenly wider and freer.”
Midwestern Mice in Silk Kimonos: Yuki Tanaka’s “Chronicle of Drifting”
“[Yuki] Tanaka’s singular view, somewhat detached yet not lacking in compassion, soberly reckoning while allowing for flights of optimism, is, again, the product of the angle of vision of the flaneur, the stranger in town, the person who has seen it all but decides not to linger on individual premis
Phantasmal Chaos
“As geography is transcended, the feverish antipathy between ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’ stands to be sublated…in that, from the standpoint of cyber-space, ‘somewhere’ already means ‘anywhere’.”
Getting to Better American Health Outcomes
“We should think about health inequity not as differences in outcomes across categories of individuals but as structural injustice that harms the health of everyone.”
Language for Throat and Tongue: Elise Paschen’s “Blood Wolf Moon”
“[Elise] Paschen’s writing give new meaning to the term ‘ethnopoetics,’ taking it outside the boundaries of ‘traditional societies,’ ‘the informant,’ and the outsider who goes in to record ‘pre-literate narratives.’”
What Moby Dick Still Teaches Us
Andy Owen, who served in the British military in the Middle East, revisits the 19th century classic, believing it can shed light on some of the most important questions of our day, when it comes to both foreign policy and ourselves.
The Myth of Neocon Anti-Nationalism
“However, it seems unlikely that this is because neoconservatism inherently favors open borders, as some critics have suggested. A more probable reason is neoconservatism’s penchant for compromise, pragmatism, and moderation.”
The Speech of Herbs: Melissa Kwasny’s “The Cloud Path”
“Yet what might in lesser hands become mere effusions is tempered with a wise, sometimes steely, sometimes self-abnegating, sometimes mournful contemplative voice that speaks of philosophical and personal concerns combined…”
Understanding Orwell on the Lesser Evil
“Five years later, Orwell published an essay called ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War,’ in which he states, ‘War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.’”
Second Thoughts on Airline Deregulation
“The deregulation of air travel and other sectors of the economy in the 1970s was (and continues to be), in my view, a profound mistake. While controversial, I assure you that this contrarian take is not (entirely) a product of big-government sentimentalism from a crabby online socialist.”
Letter: On “Our Life-World, Its Enemies, and the Enduring Power of Common Sense”
“Vice President Harris’s phrase could be described as the animating principle behind the whole modern project, as well as much of what we think of as progress: The more we unburden ourselves from nature and history, the more human ideas can determine what can be.”
The Buster’s Hand: Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s “Rodeo”
“In her exquisitely physical Rodeo, Sunni Brown Wilkinson takes her place among those superb modernists, early and late and post, who recognize the combination of mutability and continuity across poetic epochs that is a key to lyric’s continuing strength and relevance…”
How Close Are We to Escaping Dying? The Current State of Cryonics
“This mainstream acceptance raises a key question: If vitrification can preserve embryos and organs like kidneys, why wouldn’t similar principles apply to brain preservation of cryonics?”
What James Lindsay Gets Wrong about “Right-Wing Postliberalism”
“Recently, however, James Lindsay has sparked a contentious debate on this topic by disparaging postliberals as ‘woke right.’ We will examine [Alasdair] MacIntyre in the context of this vibrant debate.”
Spinoza and the Unrest of Capitalism
“To succumb to pressure to suppress or disguise his true beliefs would have been, for Spinoza, a concession equivalent to defeatist self-abnegation.”
Jimmy Carter: A Man Ahead of His Time
“It should be noted, however, that President Carter was not only the Great Humanitarian. He was also the Great Deregulator.”
God’s in the Weeds: Daneen Bergland’s “The Goodbye Kit”
“Eve about to be cast out of the Garden kills as the mistress of straight-faced understatement. There is no fury, no rebuke, or if there is, it has not set in yet. Instead, we get rationalizing, looking on the bright side, and philosophical self-doubt.”
Letter: Reflecting on “These People All Know Each Other”
“Collegiality may grease the wheels of society, but when does it become dysfunctional or oppressive? Or, to raise another question, what are the advantages of rudeness?”
In Reply to Walter Block: Sticking with Democratic Socialism
“Of course, the question of whether healthcare should be socialized is only a small piece of my general disagreement with [Walter] Block on political economy. Still, it is a vivid enough example to stand in for all the bigger questions.”
Our Life-World, Its Enemies, and the Enduring Power of Common Sense
“Similarly distinct from the regular life-world is the world of academic theory, in which, as in the fantasy world, theoretical constructs are often divorced from any dependency on practical outcomes.”
A Three-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
“As Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said on the White House lawn in 1993 during the Oslo Accords, the progenitor initiative of what is required exactly now: ‘Enough of blood and tears. Enough.”
Sand, Ash, or Mud: Valerie Witte’s “A Rupture in the Interiors”
“As for most poets, [Valerie] Witte’s writing is intensely personal, whatever form it may take. No ‘experimental’ poet could be more candid and direct about her intention of ‘examining in a new way’ matters close to her heart.”
Rejoinder to Ben Burgis: The Case for Laissez-Faire Capitalism
“According to that tried and true statement, ‘wealthier is healthier.’ Free enterprise leads to greater wealth and, thus, to greater health and longevity, ceteris paribus.”
Start Making Sense: “Say Hello to Metamodernism”
“Just as [Greg] Dember’s generation inherited modernism and felt a need to rebel, today’s younger generations have inherited postmodernism and no doubt feel the same urge to keep the sense of cultural evolution progressing.”
Little Engines of Self: Joy Manesiotis’ “Revoke”
“It is a remarkable feat of poetics to create epic sense out of the most micro of human materials.”
The Case for Democratic Socialism
“Capitalism has done much to develop the economic machinery of the modern world to the point where all of this is possible. But it is long since time to move past the capitalist phase of our history and institute something better.”
On the Trump Coalition
“The economic situation during the Biden administration eroded and degraded the average American’s ability to participate in the life of the nation as an economically self-sufficient citizen.”
Itching for the Infinite
“Further examples abound, but suffice to say, at least as far as these prominent modern thinkers were concerned, epicureanism for the masses does seem to denote something quite real.”
Appreciating America’s Distinctly British Heritage
“The United States’ British roots also have value because they provide a link to a history older than any homegrown alternative the United States possesses.”
At Home in the War
“At the end of the summer, I got a bit too close to a Russian artillery round, a mistake that earned me a week in Kharkiv Regional Hospital. When the doctors cleared me, I walked home.”
Notes on Kitsch: Janice Harrington’s “Yard Show”
“As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”
These People All Know Each Other
“Charles Krauthammer used to pride himself on not going to cocktail parties, instead preferring to be at home with his wife quietly reading, writing, doing whatever. And he was probably better for it.”
Winds of the Great Shame
“And as she lay on her death bed, as she must have felt a cancerous tumor slowly taking her life, she would also have looked around her and seen the stern and damaged but also joyous legacy she would leave behind.”
How to Read Poetry
“If I have become something of an expert reader of poems, it is in part because long ago, I learned to linger on the surface of things, rather than push past their specifics in order to arrive quickly at instant profundity.”
Why Most Americans Didn’t Buy the Harris Campaign
“Hard as they tried to suck us through the black hole leading to their alternative-facts universe, inundating us in a steady stream of misinformation even as they, again ironically, accused us of peddling misinformation, we resisted.”
The Dead Are Difficult: Jenny George’s “After Image”
“The tone of After Image is simultaneously calm and feverish, as the bereaved one moves along a spectrum from numb to utterly passionate, up and down, yet never hysterical, never heaping ashes on her head.”
The Dueling Cases for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris
A Merion West contributing writer and editor respectively make the case for each candidate for President of the United States.
The Discontents of Capitalism
“Why, in fact, do we feel compelled to ask if capitalism is failing? Why do we wonder if capitalism is moral? Why do 57% of respondents in an Edelman Trust Barometer survey believe that ‘capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world?’”
Wrackable as Arguments: Anne-Marie Turza’s “Fugue with Bedbug”
“[Anne-Marie] Turza shows dramatic flair for summoning our attention, that of a town crier or carnival barker who was handed a surprise announcement at the last possible minute, and now must sell its premise before a skeptical gathered audience with all the bravado she can muster.”
Why We Should Still Read Charles Bukowski
“The author of this essay is the proud owner of 25 books, poetry collections, and short story anthologies written by the man widely recognized as the godfather of the literary movement known as ‘dirty realism.’”
Richard Dawkins Wins in the End
“Admirably, Dawkins continually made it clear that his objective was to promote a clear understanding of the world as discovered through the scientific method, and if scientific facts caused offense with anyone, then so be it.”
The Origins of a Partisan
“Citizens wore red and white, the colors of the Pahonia, the traditional flag of Belarus, a symbol made illegal in 1995 shortly after President Aliaksandr Lukashenka came to power.”
Why Postmodernism Still Matters
“Finally, postmodernism influenced numerous intellectual variants that today are popular public philosophies, and we need to understand the intellectual foundations of such systems of thought if we want to evaluate them properly.”
You Can (and Perhaps Should) Repeat Yourself
“And, relatedly, one also begins to wonder if there are certain ways of phrasing the key points that have already been formulated, capture them perfectly, and, thus, cannot really be improved upon.”
Reading Samuel Moyn’s “Liberalism Against Itself” in an Election Year
“It becomes apparent that, while not a Marxist himself, Moyn regrets Marxism’s arguable descent into irrelevance, if only because its extended dialogue with liberalism enriched the latter while spotlighting liberal failings and hypocrisies.”
“No One Is Ever Really Just One Thing”: Laurel Nakanishi’s “Ashore”
“What stands out in Nakanishi is that she possesses an acute awareness of the root poetic traditions of her native islands and brings them forward with respect while also being influenced, as she herself professes, by poets such as Californian Gary Snyder—whose verse, like hers, is thoroughly immers
The Paradox of Capitalism
“For example, how many retirees can relate to Jack Nicholson’s professional exile in About Schmidt, a film about a man trying to find purpose after a career as an actuary, when the title character returns to the office one day in a pathetic last-ditch effort to show he is still relevant?”
Darryl Cooper: Revisionist History and Misplaced Empathy
“Perhaps it is because of my own bias toward [Darryl Cooper as a friend, but the responsibility for such imprecise talk is something I place on [Tucker] Carlson, not on his interview subject.”
Bruce Springsteen Turns 75
“It is just Springsteen and his sparse vocals seeming to sing out into the empty expanse of the American West and its sprawling landscapes where hope—at least until the final track—is nowhere to be found. One can feel it was recorded in winter.”
Mythos Americanos: Who Took the Grit out of Integrity?
“Trying to nail down the source of the intensity of my response, I kept coming back to a sense of a deep, existential nostalgia for what I could only think of as integrity.”
Scribe in Disguise: Amy Beeder’s “And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey”
“[Amy] Beeder’s nimble adaptiveness and ability to key her lexicon to a wily set of speakers and dramatic personae in And So Wax Was Made and Also Honey are what make this rare book command attention.”
Why Transhumanism Is Unrealistic and Immoral
“Utopians often produce evil because their movement’s aspirations become paramount—that is, more important than avoiding acts ‘traditionally perceived as immoral.’ If enough people follow Istvan on the transhuman roller coaster, people could eventually get hurt.”
Fierce Lyric in Karla Kelsey’s “Blood Feather”
“Blood Feather stages scenes of both unexpected victory and chronic defeat in the three featured lives, while allowing us to imagine an alternative history for these women, had they been listened to and given latitude to exercise their rightful prerogatives in the culture at large, rather than retre
Portrait of a Stubborn Ukrainian
“He was flanked by fields of dead sunflowers that could not be harvested because of the renewed Russian offensive.”
Eighty-Five Years of the Dark Knight
“It is precisely because we all break our rules that we enjoy this story about this man who never breaks his rules. The knight in shining armor, or in this case the Dark Knight, is the hope that there is someone who can remain good no matter what.”
The Hidden Obstacles of Parenting from Prison
“But enhancing the experience of children with incarcerated parents does not require a wholesale restructuring of prisons. Most parents in prison desperately want more contact with their kids, hoping to break the destructive cycles they have been caught in.”
Ekphrasis and Eugene Datta’s “Water and Wave”
“Once the speaker’s psyche and voice are introduced via questions, the photo in a sense begins to dissolve, becoming secondary, important, vital in its own right, but not ultimately defining. Thus the fecund faithlessness of poetry.”
Optimism vs. Reality in Longevity Science: Analyzing Zoltan Istvan’s Senescence Inference
“Although [Zoltan] Istvan’s general pessimism is understandable, the Senescence Inference takes the pessimism too far for a number of reasons.”
How To Write Lyric Poetry
“This lyre-derived heritage survives robustly in the lyrics of pop songs, guitars now taking the place of the lyre and the orality of the human voice singing taking precedence over all.”
When We’re Overly Optimistic about the Pace of Life Extension Research
“Sadly, biological humans are likely to be mortal for centuries more unless a dramatic increase in both resources and life extension scientists is marshaled.”
The Danger in NATO’s Slow Attrition Strategy in Ukraine
“Aside from the hazard of China or Iran adding to the number of ongoing wars, the currently slow attrition strategy is only working against President Putin because he is trapped.”
Our Fractured Togetherness: The Political Realism of Lynn Nottage
“Given the depth and severity of the divisions displayed in Sweat, we are led to wonder if healing is even possible. But as a ‘doctor of American democracy,’ [Lynn] Nottage not only offers troubling diagnoses of our diseases but also prescribes remedies.”
On the Idea of National Decline
“It is, I believe, more than anything else, the undeniable reality of technological progress that lulls us into accepting the more general—and plainly false—proposition that things will just keep on improving in every respect.”
A Different Kind of Knowledge: Matthew Zapruder’s “I Love Hearing Your Dreams”
“The combination of dread and cheer these reveries bring about could accurately be called the optimist’s nightmare. The poet-speaker holds compassion as the stalk of a dandelion holds juice, hidden yet keeping the flower active and aloft through sheer tensile strength.”
The Triumph of Eros Over Thanatos: The Imperishable Beauty of “Holding the Man”
“In short, I am in love with the story of Tim and John. It has enchanted and devastated me for years now, which is why I will use their first names.“
The Taliban Dilemma: How to Engage with Those Whose Values We Oppose
“In this instance, should those who believe in the rights of women sit down with those who do not, potentially risking legitimizing groups like the Taliban, in the hope that through dialogue they can influence them?”
This is England? Thoughts on Nigel Farage and Keir Starmer
“Prime Minister Starmer’s father wanted his children to lead ‘useful lives’ and Starmer undoubtedly succeeded in that—two, three, four times over. Yet it is unclear, as yet, just how useful he will be as Labour Prime Minister.”
The French Election and Europe’s Post-Historical Collapse
“While I was always a philosopher, I was originally a fairly apolitical one, and it was my first year in France that awoke the political part of my being, for I saw all around me where socialism, oikophobia, and multiculturalism were leading.”
The Power of Chicken Soup for the Anti-Woke Soul: Nellie Bowles’s “Morning After the Revolution”
“While it might be intellectually fascinating to dig into the Marxist or postmodern roots of wokeness, Bowles’s book is a welcome reminder that sometimes things are simply crazy on their face. And maybe all that is required to defeat the crazy is to point it out.”
Poems Without a Passport: Solmaz Sharif’s “Customs”
“Sharif’s style throughout Customs is neither bland nor baroque. It has the directness of what one overhears while waiting in line to cross on foot an international border or passing through immigration at an airport. It is a stylization of how people talk in such circumstances.”
Why I Stand by Relocation: A Rejoinder to Ben Burgis
“To kick him or them out of the country would indeed be to violate the non-aggression principle (NAP) of this strict version of libertarianism. But I do not always write from this point of view. Sometimes, often in my writings on Israel, I do so from the perspective of classical liberalism…”
Was Chamberlain Actually More Strategic than Churchill, Roosevelt, and Biden?
“Prime Minister Chamberlain’s premature death in 1940 and his transformation into a cautionary tale has meant that he was not available to remind his successors that appeasement was just one-facet of a multi-dimensional diplomatic strategy.”
The End of Capitalism
“For Herbert Marcuse, German philosopher and notorious member of the Frankfurt School, Marx did us a service in trying to expose capitalism as a historically-contingent mode of production based on reified social relations that do not facilitate—in fact, impede—the harvesting of reason as the path to
When Glen Campbell Sang “Galveston”
“But with that said, what has always bothered me about the story told in ‘Galveston’ is that there seems to be so much of life left unruminated over, a fact remediated only slightly by the mention of the seascape at the end of the song (and ‘the sea waves crashing’ in the Campbell version).”
Jordan Peterson, Martin Heidegger, and the Inescapability of Stories
“But Heidegger and Peterson differ when it comes to the origin of our stories, the meaning of nihilism, and the limits to the stories we can tell. To begin, it is useful to explore the question of the origins of our stories. In both Peterson and Heidegger, there is talk of something coming from noth
Syllabic Fits of Speech: Cedar Sigos’ “All This Time”
“Sigo is a poet of utter seriousness, one who feels strongly about justice, the revindication of Native American identity, the calling out of cruelty and neglect, and many other pressing social matters. But he comes at the task with a meditative indirection, insisting on approaching these realities
Factors of the War in Ukraine
“Instead of a ‘police operation’ to capture the former colony, Russia got a full-scale protracted war for which it was simply not prepared.”
Wrangling Our Political Herds: Upholding Intellectual Standards, No Matter Who Gets Angry
“It may sound naïve in a time of intense political polarization, but in It’s Debatable I make a case for more humility and a bit of hubris. We need to be willing to argue with passion for our political positions but at the same time remember our limitations.”
In Reply to Walter Block: Relocation Must Be Off the Table
“It is not particularly interesting that I disagree with Block’s argument. I am a bleeding-heart left-winger who thinks every human being has a right to healthcare, housing, education, and much more…The interesting part is that [his arguments] fly in the face of the values he cares about.”
Lynn Xu’s Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight
“Here reposes the reverie-inducing freedom of Rilke and Proust, where you get to say ‘dreaming’ twice, or a thousand times, and even ‘et cetera’ twice, in case you forgot to fill in the blank with your own lyrical, rapture-adjacent images the first time.”
Aprinism: A Worldview
“As mentioned, comparisons with other life-forms are often useful for understanding our human existence. Accordingly, I have derived the word ‘Aprinism’ from the Latin ‘aprinus,’ meaning ‘boar-like.’”
When the Elites Declare War
“Show trials, we had thought, were totalitarian relics, a blunt tool wielded by dictators like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong in order to show people, quite literally, what would happen to those who dared to defy the regime. And here it was, happening in 2024, in America.”
On the Music of John Prine
“For me, though, there is one Prine song I find the most philosophical, though many of his songs do indeed have that bent…The song is ‘Fish and Whistle,’ the first track on his 1978 album Bruised Orange…”
J.S. Mill: Equiliberal
“For [Patrick] Deneen, the most nefarious influence in the history of liberal political thought is John Stuart Mill, son of Enlightenment radical James Mill, godson of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and the author of the canonical 1859 liberal text, On Liberty.”
Chasing Immortality, Living on the Edge: A Review of “Transhuman Citizen,” the Biography of Zoltan Istvan
“Although the project to end death is clearly important to Istvan, his forthcoming biography, ‘Transhuman Citizen: Zoltan Istvan’s Hunt for Immortality’ by Ben Murnane, reveals that he has arguably lived his life in response to a related but slightly different question…”
You Actually Do Co-Parent with the Government, So Make It Co-Parent Better
“Although pithy and pugnacious, the slogan is wrong. The moment parents drop a child off at the schoolhouse door, they entrust the school to take over some of their parenting responsibilities.”
Kink or Worship or Both: Megan Fernandes’ “I Do Everything I’m Told”
“In invoking (and sometimes tweaking) cherished predecessors, this gently impious collection also helps refurbish form.”
Commodification in America: Old and New
“And yet, today, we continue to engage in various forms of commodifying the human person, even if they are less visibly brutal and bloody.”
On Not Responding to Email
“Henry David Thoreau, writing in 1854, remarked: ‘I never received more than one or two letters in my life…that were worth the postage.’ What would he make of the modern email inbox?”
Review: “The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs” by David Runciman
“The Handover is, at bottom, a plea for liberal democratic states to discipline, if not disempower, the sociopaths and psychopaths who currently have control of the technologies and resources which are changing us and our environment and promise to change both ourselves and the planet we inhabit mor
All University Protests Must Stop, Period
“Holding myself to this standard, I am comfortable in saying that in each and every one of those scenarios, my view would be unchanged: The protests, all the university protests, must be stopped.”
“The Rhapsodic Fallacy” and Maurice Manning’s “Snakedoctor”
“The ‘free’ in ‘free verse’ was never meant as a free pass, an anything goes, for to succumb to it does, in fact, leave us standing in a well-intentioned mush.”
Critiquing Stoicism
“However, my impression is that there is something more fundamentally toxic about Stoicism. In line with [Will] Durant’s assessment, its dominant theme seems to be retreat: retreat from unpleasant emotion into indifference (despite protestations to the contrary)…”
A Dangerous Partnership: the Managerial Revolution and the Immigration Revolution
“New populations moving into a country creates ready-made client groups to which the managerial state can administer, gaining new voting blocs, which continue to vote for the party of the managerial state.”
Nitazene: Scenes From Britain’s Struggle with a Powerful New Drug
“Meanwhile, the death toll rises. John told me he was 44—the same age as me—when we first met. That is just under the average age of death for homeless men in Britain. This is more than 30 years shorter than the country’s average male life expectancy.”
Too Many Excuses for Tyrants
“Despite all of this, [Robert D.] Kaplan’s analysis of the greater Middle East should not be ignored. His travels throughout this vast region across the decades give him insights into its diverse challenges that few Americans possess.”
In Defense of the Bugmen
“But I am not interested in chiding Bronze Age Pervert—as other publications, such as National Review, have done—for his use of dehumanization. Instead, I want to offer a full-throated defense of these nasty bugmen.”
Irregular Beats: The Surprising Politics of Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg
“It is hard to say whether this philosophy would have had any adherents other than Kerouac, but it would have represented something new and uplifting—a counterculture to the counterculture.”
For Whom the Nobel Tolls: Tomas Tranströmer’s “The Blue House”
“The lines, like long, rolling ocean waves on a cold Baltic sea, create their own reasons, their own rhythm, their own understanding. Anaphora is used, as Whitman did, to summon us to the great historical pageant of life, of happenings beyond our immediate knowledge.”
Rescuing Religion from Atheism
“It seems, then, that religious practice is beneficial but unpalatable to many highly analytical people because they deem religious doctrines unpersuasive. The question therefore arises how one can make it palatable to them.”
By the Known Rules of Ancient Liberty: A Review of Masha Karp’s “George Orwell and Russia”
“Lest I should have appeared overly critical, allow me to restate that even in this, her analysis is exceptional and that overall, George Orwell and Russia is a uniquely penetrating study of Eric Blair’s life and legacy.”
Reckoning with Medicine’s Unseemly Past
“How does such an advanced nation and forward-looking profession embrace ‘medicalized mass murder’ and a philosophy calling for the ‘annihilation of life unworthy of living’? How did those who pledged to follow ‘the Hippocratic tradition of healers,’ they ask, ‘become killers’?”
Lessons from Machiavelli and Guicciardini for an Unstable World
“The world is in flux. November’s elections in the United States will speed up the pace of change. There is a danger that politicians across the West are positioning themselves to govern a world that will no longer exist by the time they come to power.”
People over Place: Reviewing “The Culture Transplant” by Garett Jones
“Any serious government would, therefore, develop and implement immigration policy with the utmost care. Instead, our governments are experimenting with unprecedented peacetime increases in immigration that further expand ethnic and cultural diversity.”
Review: “A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation” by Antón Barba-Kay
“Barba-Kay’s central claim is that digital technology is categorically different from prior technologies. It is not just a matter of degree but, rather, a matter of kind.”
The Jewish People Are Both Middle Eastern and European
“Given that the Middle East used to be far more ‘Western’ and even ‘European’ than it is now, there is no cultural disconnect between ‘Western’ and ‘Middle Eastern’ Jews. Jews can be both at once.”
In Defense of TikTok
“Like most members of Generation X, I had never used TikTok, but when the political push to ban it intensified in 2023, I pulled out an old smartphone and installed TikTok to see what the fuss was all about.”
Not All Self-Immolations Are Made Equal
“Aaron Bushnell was not a hero or a martyr akin to the self-immolators of anti-imperial conflicts past; he was likely a mentally ill, terminally online man in his mid-20s who was in a lot of pain that he transposed onto a conflict halfway around the world that in no way personally affected him.”
Mass Immigration and the American Nation
“The monthly encounters under President Biden have been like nothing else seen in American history. There are estimates that, in 2023, there were more illegal alien encounters per month than babies born to American mothers.”
Grappling with Liberalism
“Modern liberalism, equally, cannot go on as it is at the moment, veering toward destruction, becoming ever more decrepit and ineffectual, incapable of meeting the challenges—domestic, geopolitical, planetary—of the 21st century.”
What an International Environmentalist Movement Misunderstands
“Scientific progress has the potential to be more salutory than legal regulation. To return to Odin’s advice in the Hávamál once more, the power of the human mind is mankind’s most reliable ally.”
Why I Don’t Rely on Hope
“People have told me that this approach is a kind of hope in itself, that I have found hope in the way I abandoned hope. At that point, the words we choose do not matter much. What does matter is getting out of bed in the morning and finding work worth doing.”
What Thucydides Can Teach Us About Today’s Multi-Matrixed World
“The History of the Peloponnesian War teaches that victory in such a war comes at enormous cost to both sides, so much so it can blur the distinction between victor and loser: everyone loses. This is the same lesson the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza impart.”
The Politicians Who Almost Never Were
“Although these no doubt play a role, even a cursory glance at recent election results (not to mention those of the past) makes clear that variables beyond the control of the candidate are often determinative, as well as that the best man does not necessarily win.”
Social Justice Segregationism: Is Separate More Equal After All?
“These claims put forward by critical social justice-oriented scholars and educationists all lead to the same conclusion: educational justice for black and OC students begins with schools or classrooms segregated by race and ethnicity.”
The Sophistry of the New Right Activism
“Rufo’s ‘New Right Activism’ is not the prescription of one who, following Socrates, seeks to be virtuous, but rather one who, following Faust, sacrifices his soul to achieve victory.”
On the Redundancy of the Terms “Right” and “Left”
“Is there anyone who can give a clear definition of Leftist or Rightist doctrine with which even half of those who consider themselves to be on the Left or the Right would agree? I am inclined to doubt it…”
To Give Ukrainians Justice, Look to Nuremberg
“While allies should provide Ukraine with the resources needed to push as far toward the Russian border as possible, they should also start to think about post-war justice. Resolving the war will involve more than just agreeing to where lines are drawn on a map.”
Young Voters Do Not Belong Inevitably to the Left
“However, outside of the contemporary United States and United Kingdom, a look at the composition of certain right-of-center political movements casts doubt on the reflexive association many hold between young people and voting for the Left.”
“Neoliberalism” Is a Delusion of Marxists
“I have written previously that much of this ‘neoliberal’ nightmare is a myth, not because the world is without problems, but because the problems of the world are much too multifaceted, internally complex, and situationally unique for each problem to regarded as just another mutation of an invincib
A Warning From South Africa
“One might notice that unlike in the 1990s, apart from a few occasional flare-ups, the struggle is no longer primarily between Xhosa and Zulu, or any African ethnicity for that matter. A crusade against whiteness had united black South Africans who would otherwise have been fighting among themselves
“Systemic Racism” Is the Biggest Conspiracy Theory of Them All
“The reason, as we will shortly see, that it is fair to characterize systemic racism as a nutty and sweeping conspiracy theory is that racism is, again and again, simply assumed to be the universal, underlying, unitary cause of multifarious phenomena for which other, more parsimonious, accurate, and
Taiwan and World War III
“The question of Taiwan is never far from the Chinese President’s thoughts, and nor should it be far from ours. The fortunes of the world rest on that island. No conflict in Eastern Europe or the Middle East is as likely to spiral into a global war.”
Yes, January 6th Was an Insurrection
“The attempted insurrection by President Trump and his supporters had failed. But make no mistake: The violent events of January 6th were the direct result of a deliberate months-long campaign by President Trump to overturn illegally an election that he did not win.”
It’s a Somber New Year for K-12 Schools
“If the recovery effort is not expanded to involve all the resources that every community has to offer, our young people, especially the most vulnerable, face a diminished future.”
Islam and the West: Culturally and Theologically Divided
“The cultural and theological division between Islam and the West is real, and these differences in religious philosophies play themselves out in a very concrete way in the modern world, just as they have in the past and will continue to do in the future.”
Woke Kids Are Speaking; Weak Adults Are Listening
“The university protest movement largely took shape at the same time when our society’s disproportionate valorization of youth and youthful opinion began in the 1960s, when our whole nation began to come apart at the seams, an unraveling that, despite brief periods of rollback, has continued apace t
The True Origin of Palestinian Suffering Was Not 1948
“However, there was one man who positioned himself very early on as an opponent to this growing Jewish presence in his homeland. This man was Haj Amin al-Husseini, who, in 1921, became the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.”
Beyond Profit: The Value of the Humanities
“When privileging science and math in the curriculum at the expense of the humanities, education sacrifices what is most essential: the important civic function of the humanities. As a result, we produce ‘a nation of employees, not citizens.’”
How Scholars and Activists Have Reinvented Our Understanding of Racism
“In short, we have dogma, and from dogma, cognitive errors in reasoning inevitably ensue.”
Ireland Attempts to Silence Critics of Its Immigration Policies
“The Irish state will undoubtedly have one of the most extensive, if not the most totalitarian, hate speech laws in Western Europe if the bill becomes law, despite the government’s insistence that it contains a provision to ‘protect genuine freedom of expression.’”
The Legacy of Henry Kissinger
“If, as President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger rightly believed, it was in America’s interest to extract itself from the mess their predecessors had created in Vietnam, it was not necessary for them to keep fighting the war for so long.”
Review: “In Defense of Civilization” by Michael R. J. Bonner
“Bonner has done a great service in reminding us what true civilization means, the cost of losing it, and how we can regain it.”
Excerpt: “Moral Courage: 19 Profiles of Investigative Journalists”
“To understand India’s slippery descent, one should read the reportage of Neha Dixit, a 37-year-old New Delhi-based freelance journalist.”
The Press Mustn’t Ignore America’s Gang Problem
“There is a formula—unfortunately, I have noticed—when it comes to many in the reality-denying national press: Make a few accurate micro-points but use them to arrive at a conclusion that no reasonable person should believe.”
Excerpt: “Getting Elected Is the Easy Part”
“Although an overt threat is never clearly articulated, the potential for serious political consequences makes it all the more trepidatious to consider crossing the aisle on a big bill where every vote is counted and closely watched.”
What One Must Understand about the New Israel War
“The ‘peace process’ and the ‘two-state solution’ are other thought clichés that must be questioned because ultimately whoever speaks of these, or even more generally of a ‘political settlement,’ has not understood the conflict at all.”
The Problems with Diversity Training
“This is an admirable aim, but there is just one big problem: Diversity training is not working.”
Why I Left the Democratic Party to Support Donald Trump
“I realized that if my Columbia education were to have any meaning, I would have to be bold and risk my music career and go public with my support of President Trump, who was the President of the United States at the time of my graduation in 2017.”
Reflections on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Vision of the American Dream
“I was not there at the Memorial in the sweltering heat and humidity of Washington. I saw it through the magic of our black-and-white Muntz television set in my family’s Italian tavern in Cleveland, Ohio.”
Urgently Reconsidering the Doctrine of Multiculturalism
“As is sadly often the case, it is only when an issue becomes overwhelmingly acute or when it is too late to correct course, that those once derided as alarmists are dutifully acknowledged to have been correct all along.”
Harvard Needs to Be Consistent on the Virtue of Free Speech
“As my co-author Kai Whiting and I argue in an upcoming book…free speech debates have become not simply a matter of whether or to what extent certain ideas should be banished from the public domain, but why, how, and for whom they should be restricted.”
Incurious: George and the Postcolonialists
“Schwartz-DuPre is dedicated to putting an end to the idea that Curious George is nothing more than an amusing story.”
The Russo-Ukrainian War: A Very Simple Conflict
“The Rada’s final decree is a reproach to all those who think of Ukraine as nothing more than an appendage of Russia, without a culture and a history of its own.”
What Socrates Can Teach Us about Political Discourse
“Rather than treating the other in a Socratic manner—which is to say, as a partner in the communal quest for truth—the polemicist roundly delegitimizes the other and reduces him to an ‘adversary, an enemy, who is wrong and whose very existence constitutes a threat.’”
Plato and the Pursuit of Justice
“Those who do not make justice the central concern for Plato are not talking about Plato at all.”
Excerpt: “How Hitchens Can Save the Left”
“When he saw his old left-wing comrades busily hatching excuses for neutrality as Slobodan Milošević waged war on Bosnia, he realized that much of the Left was either indifferent about this confrontation or on the wrong side.”
Heidegger and Nazism: The Philosophy of Being and the Politics of National Socialism
“I argue against the apologetics of the sycophantic defenders of Heidegger who claim that his involvement with National Socialism is wholly reducible to his political naïveté, which includes his gross overestimation of philosophy’s power to sway and influence the development of Germany’s ‘political’
Black War Cinema and the Representation Paradox
“For all of their insistence on cultural revolution, progressives are not yet ready to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”
Confessions of a Beautiful Soul
“Despite the book’s homage to Friedrich Schiller via its title, we get nothing even remotely reminiscent of the profound intellectual mind meld between him and his great friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.”
Review: “Crassus: The First Tycoon” by Peter Stothard
“Now, Peter Stothard has given us the final decades of the republic through the eyes of Crassus—Rome’s wealthiest man and former consul who famously embarked on a vainglorious and ultimately failed conquest of Parthia that culminated in his embarrassing death.”
Excerpt: “Heal Your Daughter”
“As one example, some time in 2018 and 2019, many of the young people in my practice suddenly started reporting gender dysphoria and declaring themselves trans. Charismatic social media stars were effectively saying: ‘If you don’t fit in, if you don’t like your body, then you’re trans. Everything wi
Review: “Uncommon Wrath” by Josiah Osgood
“[Josiah] Osgood’s book is a welcome and exciting read about the rivalry between Caesar and Cato; Cato, in the process, finally receives some much-deserved due in the story of the republic’s final decades.”
On Literary Science and the Bounds of Knowledge
“But philistinism is not limited to the arts. I believe that those who cannot appreciate the wondrous beauty of the real world as revealed by science are philistines, too.”
Do They Really Believe in Eugenics?
“While denouncing the eugenics movement, one must also recognize that its repudiation by the progressive mainstream signals the rise of a self-centered ethos that is destructive in its own right.”
Review: “How Hitchens Can Save the Left” by Matt Johnson
“[Matt] Johnson believes that by adopting [Christopher] Hitchens’s approach—his allergy to party politics, his hatred of racism and nationalism, his emphasis on pluralism and humanism—the contemporary left will not just benefit at the ballot box but will also benefit morally and intellectually.”
Review: “The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On ‘Liberal’ as an Adjective” by Michael Walzer
“Reading between the lines, we learn in fact that [Michael] Walzer believes that the Right, wrong in its continuing adherence to capitalism, but correct in its eschewal of intellectual fashion, currently has a monopoly on political wisdom.”
Prelude to War: Lessons from the Second Spanish Republic
“The Second Spanish Republic has many parallels with modern American politics. Much like its counterparts in Spain, the American left of today is no less preoccupied with terraforming the cultural landscape.”
Would Socrates Be Anti-Woke? A Stoic Critique of Identity Politics
“For the Stoic, however, personal identity is not a fragmented life of intersecting cultural identities but rather a holistic and unified embodiment of rationality endowed by nature.”
Review: Spencer Klavan’s “How To Save The West”
“Being a classicist and student of Greek philosophy, Klavan turns to his education to solve these philosophical dilemmas.”
Review: Waller Newell’s “Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger”
“Beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proceeding through the luminaries of German Idealism and Romanticism—climaxing with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—then marching beyond Hegel to Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, Newell gives a reading of philosophy gone wrong. Horribly wrong
Marxism Has Been No Deliverer from Ethnic Strife
“Any utopian project that tolerates humanity’s diverse values and identities only to the extent that they help advance a narrowly defined vision of progress can only end in indiscriminate violence.”
Review: Carl Trueman’s “Strange New World”
“It bears repeating that this is a very good book. Trueman performs a thorough but concise excavation of the intellectual, philosophical, and metaphysical currents that he sees as moving below the crashing waves of our present cultural storm.”
From Tanks to Think Tanks
“One can judge the winds of change in foreign policy by the sudden proliferation of think tanks piping up and stating the obvious. There are tanks and think tanks and, despite the commitment of the Leopards, it may be the think tanks that are gaining the upper hand.”
Review: Bowen Blair’s “A Force for Nature”
“Nancy Russell was one of those great heroines whose quest to save the Columbia Gorge in Oregon serves as an inspirational tale that embodies the best of American grit and determination.”
How Enmity Imperils Liberal Democracy
“Rather than calm debates about policy and its implications, both good and bad, we now live in a political era defined by emotion, where political discussions mutate into threats to our personal and group safety.”
The Value in Reading Byung-Chul Han
“Han occupies a somewhat unique position in today’s world that defies typical Right-Left categorization. This is partly because of Han’s bridging of multiple worlds: East and West; art and philosophy; theology and politics.”
The Case for Retiring “Confederate Heroes Day”
“As we come to know more about the morally repulsive aspects of our national history—and, more importantly, face those realities—removing symbols of our collective failure in the past is not an attempt to deny our history. Rather, it is a sign of growth, a willingness to face our history.”
Multiculturalism Is Madness
“The fact is that, historically, Great Britain has had a remarkably stable demographic makeup for at least a thousand years, if not much longer. The idea that what we have experienced since 1997…is in any way comparable or equivalent to the past is nonsense, at best, and disingenuous, at worst.”
Free Speech: An Eternal Struggle
“While Americans and other Westerners may be living in a golden age of free speech, there are still billions of people in the world who have yet to enjoy its blessings.”
Philadelphia Schools Have Replaced Critical Thinking with “Criticality”
“Like so many school districts in a post-George Floyd America, Philadelphia’s is rushing to embrace anti-racism.”
We Are All Socialists
“Echoing this notion from on high, in 2016 the [World Economic Forum] announced the imminence of a post-historical future in the Marxist sense: ‘Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.’”
What Is a Human?
“In fact, heterosexuality and the male-female binary can be observed across countless species. The onus of proof, therefore, is on those who claim that we are an exception.”
The Boredom of War
“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s biggest enemy is not the West’s reticence to sending more drones, more weapons, and more fighter jets. President Zelenskyy’s biggest enemy is boredom.”
Review: Maurice Glasman’s “Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good”
“For Labour forgot that life involves loss and tragedy. It forgot that ‘human beings are not commodities, but creative and social beings longing for connection and meaning.’”
No, Let’s Not: Perpetrators of Pandemic Authoritarianism Cannot Be Forgiven
“It must become embarrassing to admit one ever supported uninformed and nonconsensual participation in a medical experiment or mass house arrest and coerced isolation.”
No Easy Answers: Facing Ecological Crises Honestly
“But we need to replace fanciful dreams of endless energy from renewables with full-cost accounting, which an increasing number of experts are taking seriously. There are destructive environmental and social consequences to constructing the infrastructure for that energy production.”
The NatCons v. Ukraine
“At least Hazony recognizes that the democratic world should defend Ukraine. Other nationalists do not agree.”
Jordan Peterson’s “A Conservative Manifesto” Is Not Conservative
“It is instead Hayekian liberalism delivered with a Calvinist grimness.”
Review: Slavoj Žižek’s “Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed”
“Combining inanity with compelling anecdote, idiocy with sensible instruction, Žižek addresses himself to the ‘mess we’re in.’”
The Joy of the Knife: On Autoimmune Responses in Politics
“If we look at culture as a superorganism with its own immunological mechanisms, we can recognize modern societies as being profoundly dysregulated, and this gets worse the more modern they get.”
The Second Elizabeth, a Life Appreciated
“From that distant day when I saw her ride down Poonamallee High Road in Madras, the epitome of regality and restraint, Elizabeth II did her best in balancing the demands of tradition, the weight of history, the requirements of society and culture both at home and abroad, and also attended to her fa
Canada and the Many Problems with Euthanasia
“The story goes on to detail another Canadian citizen who was repeatedly and continuously offered euthanasia, to such an extent that he began recording these occasions.”
The Queen: 1926-2022
“It is too much to say that the world will not see her like again; there is within all of us the potential to aim for the higher moral life that the Queen embodied, if we engage in the striving that she did that is necessary to attain this.”
Review: “People Love Dead Jews” by Dara Horn
“All of this is captured in twelve essays in novelist Dara Horn’s powerful and coruscating book on why people still love dead Jews over living Jews. It is a book that shreds modern piety and sophistry in equal measure.”
British Conservatism Is Doomed
“To put it simply, if one cannot accumulate capital, he will not support capitalism; and if one has no solid basis for conserving one’s family and community, which property provides, then he will not become a conservative.”
Review: Matthew Continetti’s “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism”
“It is to Continetti’s credit that he develops his narrative after this with fair-minded even-handedness for the most part, even if he lets his own views bleed through in the chapters concerning President Trump’s rise and fall, as well as the mix of grift and genuine intellectual ferment that he dra
Excerpt: Jason Pack’s “Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder”
“And hell, if General Haftar was going to win, President Trump would happily give him some tips about where to buy vacation properties in Virginia Beach. His steering of the private ‘confidence building’ chit-chat with General Haftar to real estate matters was not actually as ridiculous as it might
Review: China Miéville’s “A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto”
“Sentimental and sycophantic in turns, it may be hard to dispel the impression that Miéville is merely a hysteric. All the same, A Spectre, Haunting is a post-Nietzschean book, which leans into the charge of ressentiment. Spurning subterfuge, Miéville quite openly asserts that justice and revenge am
Review: Barry Strauss’s “The War That Made the Roman Empire”
“Barry Strauss, America’s foremost popular classicist, brings the story of Actium to life in ways that rival and surpass Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra…”
Why Is This Not Enough?
“Jackson was out walking on his property in Kansas one spring day and called Jensen with a simple question: ‘Why is this not enough?’”
Being Critical of Enlightenment Triumphalism Isn’t Always Wrong
“Having considered the evidence, it seems more accurate to say that the Enlightenment project presented itself as a savior from ignorance and poverty but was really a movement to dethrone the old social order rooted in hierarchies and aristocracies.”
The Oversimplification of the American Founding
“Devotion to reading non-politicized history and putting it into context is necessary and something to which we should diligently commit.”
The Quarrel within American Conservatism
“The current politics of California, which more than any other American state has been shaped by mass immigration from Mexico, should likewise shake the confidence of conservatives who scoff at the alleged illiberalism of immigration hawks.”
Limits in a World That Erases Them
“There is a paradox to life that an acceptance of limits, borders, and boundaries can be the most liberating thing of all.”
What Type of Religion Is Wokeness?
“As we might expect, the Woke, often well educated and articulate, have generated their own convoluted and comprehensive ‘theology’ replete with saints and sinners, priests and heretics, and even their own kind of Heaven and Hell.”
The Greatness of Ronald Reagan
“With bloated bureaucracies and top marginal tax rates at 70% when he entered office, President Reagan also carried in his mind a basic script about overreach of the federal government that resonated with Americans after a decade of stagflation and presidential scandals.”
Review: “Conservatism: A Rediscovery” by Yoram Hazony
“In my own life, being disabled and living with an acute example of life’s predicament means that the worldview Hazony describes and prescribes has made far more sense and has offered far more consolation than liberalism ever could.”
A Decent Level for All: Economic Justice and Universal Basic Income
“Instituting UBI could help us to transcend traditional distinctions between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor that have shaped poverty policy for far too long.”
Review: “Obedience is Freedom” by Jacob Phillips
“Denial, as Jacob Phillips deftly shows in his fascinating and staggeringly original new book Obedience is Freedom, is precisely what the liberal-left excels in, substituting for a world of limits and constraints a schizoid universe where subjectivity is all that counts.”
Cancel Culture and the Tolerance of the Natural Aristocracy
“To really thrive in our own communities, we need more than just Law and Order; a strong social fabric is required that encourages virtuous behavior as much as it punishes delinquency.”
Why We’ll Always Be Talking about George Orwell
“It is a shame, though, that whenever Orwell reappears it is almost always in the context of his dystopian political novel.”
On Cultural Poverty
“Similarly, we should understand the notion of greater cultural wealth in connection with greater cultural equality.”
Let Them Fight: The Case for Leaving Syria
“If the United States and its NATO allies consider Turkey to be a partner worth keeping—and both the size of its military and its contributions to NATO’s budget suggest that it is—then a situation placing Turkey in conflict with Russia is to their benefit.”
Review: “Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel” by Domenico Losurdo
“First published in Italy, [Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel] has finally been translated into English by Gregor Benton and released as part of the Historical Materialism Book Series with Haymarket Books.”
Karl Marx’s Theory of Primitive Accumulation Is Wrong
“It is a win-win situation—not the zero-sum world of Marx’s gloomy dystopia. Institutions that reduce transaction costs and enforce well-defined property rights provide an environment in which incentives to economic initiative can thrive.”
Review: “Don’t Burn This Country” by Dave Rubin
“This book undoubtedly represents an evolution in Rubin’s thinking, and contrary to those who accuse him of changing to suit others, changing one’s mind on philosophical beliefs is not automatically a disqualification.”
To Win Wars, Cut the U.S. Defense Budget
“It is time to slash the United States defense budget. The money wasted on weapon systems designed to win last century’s wars is staggering, as are the opportunity costs.”
Woke Culture Isn’t Nihilistic
“If the woke activists who are willing to wake up at 5:00 am to march for racial justice are nihilistic, they sure seem to find nihilism plenty meaningful and inspiring.”
The Many Problems with Race Reparations in the United States (Part Two)
“The analyses attempting to quantify reparations, cited above, will likely encounter strong and ongoing resistance, if only based on the price tag alone.”
Rediscovering “Third Place” Friendships in a Post-Pandemic World
“By taking part in ordinary activities like visiting a bar or restaurant or a park or library, we are doing something which is important to the health of our neighbors, neighborhoods, and communities.”
Review: Michael Millerman’s “Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political”
“However, its veneration of far-right thinking (sometimes qualified but always in the most intellectualized vein) undermines its claims to genuine seriousness.”
Yemen and the Weaponization of Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid
“A country on the brink well before war arrived, Yemen’s humanitarian crisis has been labeled the worst of our generation.”
The Many Problems with Race Reparations in the United States
“What accounts for the gap between scholars and activists who advocate reparations and broad public resistance to the idea?”
The Pandemic and the Scientific Gnostics
“As Deneen says, Voegelin ‘argued that modern Gnosticism was an effort to ‘redivinize’ the political world—not now by bringing the gods in to the service of the city, but by making the city into a heaven on earth.’”
Blame Putin, Sure, But Also Blame Biden
“The fact—one that should surprise no one—is that the same folks who gave us the grossly mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan have also taught a master class on how to bungle our crucial relationship with an already insecure nuclear superpower.”
A Better Way to Promote Equality of Opportunity Through Education
“Now is no time to double down on a crumbling status quo. Instead of universalizing college and directing young people through a single pathway to opportunity, we should be multiplying pathways to opportunity.”
A Millennial Technologist’s View on Jaron Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future?”
“Lanier draws a straight line from the idealism and optimism that ‘information wants to be free’ to the dystopian problems facing today’s world, including but not limited to a declining middle class, filter bubbles, and dysfunctional politics.”
A Response to Cathy Young: Let’s Be More Dispassionate When Discussing Ukraine
“Young knows all too well what a chilly climate for dissent can devolve into, regardless of good intentions. This can undermine the West’s moral high ground more than any Russia-backed stooge could.”
Neither Putin Nor Russia Are “Based”
“For a start, American conservatives are either unaware of or ignore that Russia has the highest abortion rate in the world and the third highest divorce rate.”
Drivel’s Advocate: Why Nonsense Is Necessary
“To us it should be plain that bad information accompanies the good: that it is (as death is to life) the necessary dark background against which one might see any light at all.”
Gods and Beasts: An Aristotelian View of the “Corona-Years”
“Yet, today, what seems most poignant about this story of just a few years ago is not so much that the young man had the opportunity to meet his friend in person as that meeting face-to-face was still considered an essential requirement by either him or his community—the consummation, if you like, o
Children of Men: Are Birth Rates Declining Due to Anti-natalism or Economics?
“For the first time ever, more than half of women aged 30 in England and Wales are childless. This is not a normative condemnation but a descriptive statement.”
Ukraine: Reality Bites
“Now, we face a second reminder of reality. First plague, now war has come to Europe, the biggest since 1945.”
Bring Back “Bums”…and Then Kick the Bums Out
“And we very much do need to start telling ourselves and these street people the hard (but ultimately more humanizing and compassionate) truth again: We need to call the bums by their rightful name.”
Right-Liberalism Won’t Cut It
“Given the potential for a more populist conservatism that appeals to those seeking to reweave America’s weakened bonds of social and economic mutual loyalty, the right-liberalism of Murray and others is exactly the opposite of what is needed and wanted.”
Dr. Fauci and Our Pandemic of Distrust
“To challenge Dr. Fauci is, thus, to challenge a kind of revealed truth. Those who question Dr. Fauci are not merely expressing differing opinions; rather, they are apostates, ‘science deniers,’ ‘anti-vaxxers’ spreading dangerous ‘misinformation,’ and they are worthy of ridicule, censorship, and, of
In Reply to “Jesus Mythicism Is About to Go Mainstream”
“As a former graduate student in religious studies and writer of the classics, it is deeply regrettable that the scholarship of the academy does not reach further and that century-old myths no longer of any substantial prominence in academic study still hold public sway.”
The Great American Disconnect
“A disconnect ensues: Even as the American public has indeed polarized, our elected representatives have fled to the extremes to an even greater degree.”
Jesus Mythicism Is About to Go Mainstream
“So, yes—my friend has a point: To someone who has never given a moment’s thought to whether Jesus was a real person or not, he does seem like an entirely fictional character.”
Remembering Sir Roger Scruton, Two Years On
“At the time, I would not have guessed my encounters with Roger through YouTube and a handful of books would lead me to studying with him just prior to his death.”
Against David Brooksism
“The only thing Brooks’s ‘true conservatism’ is ‘responsible’ for, however, is progressivism’s thoroughgoing dominance of our culture. For Brooks, a ‘responsible’ conservatism must concede the moral legitimacy of every progressive ‘advance.’”
The Failed Attempt to Rescue Marx’s Labor Theory of Value
“Without the notion of socially necessary labor time, nothing in Marx’s value form or overall theory of exploitation makes sense.”
The Power of Facing: A Review of “Christopher Hitchens” by Ben Burgis
“One of the causes of tension with Noam Chomsky, for example, Burgis observes, was Hitchens’ recognition that the forces of anti-imperialism today are dissimilar to ‘Ho Chi Minh or the Sandinistas.’”
Who Will Guard the Guardians: Dilemmas of Policing
“Policing needs to be seen as a profession to whose ranks people of every class might plausibly aspire.”
What Karl Marx Got Wrong About Value
“As a matter of economics, scarcity is the source of all value, even if it is a combination of ‘manufactured’ scarcity via monopoly control and relative scarcity due to the costliness of extraction and the preferences of consumers.”
Editor’s Choice: The Best Interviews of 2021
Here are our editor’s choices for his favorite interviews of this past year.
Editor’s Choice: The Best Articles of 2021
“As is tradition at Merion West, here are our editor’s choices for his favorite Merion West articles of this past year.”
The Material Roots of Wokeness
“So, the fact that what is now called wokeness is a minority persuasion, believed by a small group of elite left-liberals and pursued through the instruments of the managerial state and corporate oligarchies, should not be surprising.”
From Libertarianism to National Conservatism
“National Conservatism, one strand of a broader emergent post-Cold War fusionist conservative movement, has the potential for both capturing youthful energy and enthusiasm while grounding and directing it with prudence and realism.”
Keeping Wounds Green
“In the aftermath of the fiasco that was the Fall of Kabul, it was predictable that American commentators would detect a mirroring effect of the Afghan loss on political crises in the United States.”
Excerpt: “Setting the Bar”
“I pedal away with an all-too-familiar question bouncing around my head: ‘What are we doing to these kids?’”
Excerpt: “Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency”
“The End of Suburbia lays out the argument that with oil production peaking somewhere around 2027–28, and from then on heading into a steep decline, the living standards of those in suburbia will decline also.”
The Queens on the Throne of Kings
“Presiding over a declining empire is more arduous than presiding over one that is rising.”
“Is Nothing Sacred?”
“And this is exacerbated by a situatedness in a contemporary culture that has removed the sort of guardrails that would tell a would-be troublemaker that to defile something like a grave or a tribute to those lost in a mass casualty terrorist attack is unacceptable…”
Libya, Syria, and the Future of Intervention
“No country, even the most powerful, can save lives in every conflict, but if it judges itself to be able to and its conscience is sufficiently moved by the killing, it should step in.”
My Generation Is Afraid to Live
“We are inheritors of incredible cultures, yet we have no appreciation or understanding of them. We have more informational resources than any generation prior, yet we are as ignorant as ever.”
What Punk Rock Has Taught Me about the Radical Left
“The question, of course, is why an underground counterculture known for its outspoken, contrarian, and anti-authoritarian attitude would toe the woke party line, disavow empiricism, and do the bidding of elite ideologues rather than admit that the emperor is naked.”
“Heroism” and the “World Soul” at Jena
“The flattering portrait Hegel wrote of Napoleon to his friend has subsequently spiraled into mythic legend. Why did Hegel have this seemingly lofty view of Napoleon?”
Roberto Calasso: A Man Possessed
“Roberto Calasso passed away this year at the age of 80. There is no one quite like Roberto Calasso; perhaps there is no one remotely like Roberto Calasso.”
The Mirage of Media Objectivity
“Writing becomes a contest between mutually incompatible conceptions of public life. We do not simply have varying prescriptions for social ills; the afflictions we observe are fundamentally different.”
Review: “The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality”
“Now, given that genetics matters for these things, which, in turn, drive inequality, we should take genetics seriously if we are truly committed to egalitarianism.”
Andrew Sullivan Invites Us All Out Onto the Limb
“That commitment to truth seeking made Sullivan one of the earliest advocates for gay marriage and one of the most potent and consistent critics of ‘wokeness’ today.”
If Anything Is Sacred, the Human Body Is Not It
“The body is certainly something we should appreciate, but it is not the most obvious thing to be considered sacred. A far better candidate would be consciousness.”
Review: “The Memeing of Mark Fisher”
“Located within the framework of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, The Memeing of Mark Fisher boldly riffs on everything from conspiracy theories and memes to economic policy and election campaigns…”
“A Certain Terror”: A White Male Perspective on Being an Ally
“But that raises another thorny question: Given all the excellent books by women and people of color, why am I writing at all? Why am I not simply recommending other people’s work to men and white people?”
The Political Import of Jonathan Rauch’s “The Constitution of Knowledge”
“Rauch takes as his subject how we know what we know in public life, and what the greatest contemporary threats to our shared public knowledge are.”
A Culture War Worth the Fight
“The predictable consequence is that instead of striving together toward the ethereal glow at the top of the highest peak, we are coming apart and stomping each other and ourselves further down into the abyss…”
Why We Should Love Democracy, with a Few Caveats
“But even if we should accept and defend democracy as an ideal, we should not make the mistake of forgetting that anti-democratic—or, at least, non-democratic—procedures and institutions are necessary for sustaining a liberal democratic society like our own.”
The Psychology of Critical Social Justice
“Adherents of the Woke worldview disallow this more complex approach to social issues (psychologically, an ambivalent position) and, instead, succumb to the simplistic and often pleasurable permission to demonize entire categories of people according to immutable traits.”
Afghanistan and the West’s Failure
“Whether America likes it or not, the unipolar moment, Pax Americana, is over.”
It’s Time for a Two-State Solution…for America
“If a nation is an ‘imagined community,’ to invoke Benedict Anderson’s metaphor, then how can we live together when the communities we imagine are, at every level, incompatible?”
Politics: Not an End in Itself
“As such, politics has eclipsed its primary purpose—namely, to provide the means by which people can seek out and, in turn, live good lives, lives that have nothing to do with politics.”
City of Thugs
“If, on the other hand, we as a society make excuses for thugs and use pretextual claims of racism to emasculate law enforcement, we will promote the continuation of our rapid race to the bottom.”
Hiding the Ball on Critical Race Theory
“Marcuse and Bell might not be on the reading lists at elementary schools, but CRT’s cynical mentality and Marxist tenets are still present in the pedagogical exercises being exposed by Christopher Rufo’s investigative journalism.”
Excerpt: “The End of the End of History”
“History ended in 1989. In 2008, the economic order was shaken. The political reckoning arrived in 2016. By 2020, the End of History was over.”
Tunisia and Egypt: Two Tests for Biden and Democracy
“The Biden administration has not yet decided whether to call Saied’s power grab a coup.”
How Things End
“As Joshua Foa Dienstag reminds us, the essential tragedy of being human (or being anything, for that matter) stems from the passage of time.”
The Eviction Ban: A Case Study in Congressional Dysfunction
“Our members of Congress—no matter how extreme their ideological predilections—have a duty to quit using the institution as a performative stage and begin working within it to actually forge policy solutions to our most pressing issues.”
Unleashing the Hounds Upon America
“How did it happen that the Wolves came to wield such power here, infiltrating academia, journalism, and other segments of society that were supposed to be high-minded bastions of truth and light?”
The Burden of Choice
“But, if I have learned anything, it is that choice is best when it is counterweighted by a serious moral framework.”
Ranked-Choice Voting: Technocracy Run Amok
“20 years of RCV in San Francisco has neither moderated the city’s politics nor produced any novel outcomes worth replicating.”
Withdrawal Symptoms
“Dear doves and hawks and other feathered brethren: It is already over.”
When Tolerance Goes Too Far
“Implicit in this choice was the belief that tolerance of all values was more important than inculcating any particular set of values and, thus, that tolerance was the most important aim of society.”
Propaganda Art
“Yet now the Enlightenment too, like ancient thought before, finds its enduring legacy threatened by a fundamentalist competitor.”
UFOs, Zombies, and Our Cyborg Futures
“However, without wishing to entertain hyperbole, we may conversely deem this great exposé to be rather trivial—even inconsequential—especially when considering the increasingly ‘extraordinary’ nature of our own existence.”
From Revolting Masses to Revolting Elites
“Although reaching immense influence in the 20th century, the mass man is the ‘spoiled child of history,’ and when he goes in search of bread, says Ortega, he always does one thing, ‘He wrecks the bakery.’”
Review: Robin DiAngelo’s “Nice Racism”
“One thing that sets Nice Racism apart from her other books is the depth of its cynicism.”
In Reply to Tomasz Witkowski: To Foster a Culture of Common Sense
“What is needed is a return to a culture of common sense and personal well-being, in which one is judged according to what kind of person one is and how one conducts one’s life.”
The Power of Stories to Tear Us Apart
“In his TED Talk ‘Be suspicious of stories,’ Tyler Cowen explains that, when we create stories, ‘We’re imposing order on the mess we observe.’”
Why Porn? Why This Porn? Why So Little Concern?
“I want to explore this conclusion by asking why pornography is so prevalent, why themes of domination and subordination are so prevalent in pornography, and why so many people defend or celebrate it, even in progressive and feminist circles.”
The Press and Violence against Asian-Americans
“It seems as though they will do anything to avoid actually backing approaches that would begin to remedy these problems, all of which start with taking a harder-line on those who routinely commit violent crimes.”
A Rocking Chair with a Fan? Parallels with Psychotherapy
“This modest and inconspicuous doctor published a 2018 guide for lay people, describing simple methods for helping people with mental health problems, entitled Where There Is No Psychiatrist.”
Patriotism: The Supreme Political Virtue
“Here, Smith steps in, and he admirably makes a case to both the Left and the Right that patriotism is a worthy political virtue in need of resuscitation here in the United States.”
In Support of Snobbery
“The work of totalitarianism takes a lot of muscle, but most of it is done by just one: the wooden tongue.”
An Open Letter to The Rumpus
“…I cannot stand by while supposedly smart, thoughtful, and vocal leaders in the literary world choose to misuse (or condone the misuse of) the word ‘genocide.’”
Review: Chris Bail’s “Breaking the Social Media Prism”
“To explain why the echo chamber corrective flopped, Bail puts forth an alternative theory of how today’s social media is helping drive polarization and mutual contempt between partisans.”
Sohrab Ahmari and Michael Brendan Dougherty on Reclaiming Faith, Family, and Nation
“In an age of iconoclasm, Ahmari reiterates the indispensable need for the icon of tradition that points beyond itself to the everlasting, and Dougherty captures how the icon of national particularism can also point beyond itself to the universal.”
The Greatest of the Forgotten Conservative Thinkers
“A polity of such geopolitical importance would surely be expected to have birthed an intellectual reaction to the French Revolution that was comparable to its formidable military response.”
Buy Out the Settlers
“The United States can offer a very innovative solution to a seemingly intractable conflict: Pay Israel to withdraw its settlers.”
The Cult of Democracy
“The bigger the election’s participation, the bigger the mandate, and so universal suffrage elections have grown into unwieldy, ugly beasts.”
Beware of False Humanists
“At the same time, I cannot find a single discovery in the history of science that has been made by following the conviction that everybody is different.”
The Two-faces of Classical Music: the Bureaucratic Tyranny of Music Schools
“The reasoning has nothing whatsoever to do with functionality; indeed, it has nothing whatsoever to do with viruses or health safety. The reasoning is about symbolizing conformity to bureaucratic rule.”
Stoicism Offers an Antidote to Cancel Culture
“From a eudaimonic well-being perspective, the act of cancelling those we do not like—more often than not—leaves us worse off, precisely because it robs us of an opportunity to create the best version of ourselves.”
Review: Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman’s “Backsliding”
“With that said, there is considerably more to democratic regression than the simplistic idea of evil, right-wing leaders whose ideas resonate with bad people.”
A Brit’s Friendly Advice to American Conservatives
“In order to win, the American Right needs to bury dead dogmas, get its head out of abstract Platonic idealism, and look reality in the face.”
Time To Get Vaccinated…Against Propaganda
“To these people, lockdown has been a raging success. To everybody else, it has been an unmitigated disaster.”
Lessons from Labour’s 2021 Election Defeat
“It is a crushing defeat that signals that Labour’s loss of several of its Northern constituencies under former Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in the 2019 general election was not a one-off occurrence that could be fixed with a new leader.”
George Orwell’s Vision for a Socialist Britain: What Did He Actually Want?
“But every now and again, it is worth looking at his own vision of an ideal society. Interestingly, this is where this sharp-eyed critic comes across as short-sighted.”
George W. Bush’s “Out of Many, One”: A Message of Gratitude
“And at a time when so many, on both the Left and Right, seem intent on tearing everything down, President Bush reminds us how much we have.”
James Burnham: Foreseeing Our Managerial Domination (Part II)
“Ultimately, in order to thwart the managerial system, the American conservative movement needs to co-opt the managerial system.”
Independent Wealth: a Prerequisite for Speaking Up?
“This point deserves all the more consideration today, at a time in recent history that has become uniquely critical of concentrated wealth, both of the inherited and earned variety.”
A Big, Bad Word
“But the thinking man ought to deploy le mot juste—the precise term—because of the heartburn it gives petty tyranny, as all truths reliably do.”
Review: John Boehner’s “On the House”
“On the House does not provide a clear answer, but, if one reads carefully, one might find that Boehner’s short-term pessimism and long-term optimism are both warranted.”
James Burnham: Foreseeing Our Managerial Domination
“This depoliticization of the public realm extends to the selection of the managerial class itself. Elections matter not at all. The managers perpetuate themselves…”
A Brief History of Nothing (Part IV): Wars of the Spirit
“Lewis observes that young people are no longer being taught to experience a unity with greater powers but, rather, to accept themselves as separated from greater reality.”
Review: Jamal Greene’s “How Rights Went Wrong”
“Greene uses abortion jurisprudence as a real-world example of how American law’s approach to rights has gone wrong—and has helped split us up into warring tribes competing for a zero-sum rights pie.”
DEI: a Trojan Horse for Critical Social Justice in Science
“As a result, the time has come for scientists to place themselves on the right side of history and reject Critical Social Justice in science as well as its Trojan Horse, DEI as it is currently justified and conceived.”
Preparing for the Work Only Humans Can Do
“Merisotis has written extensively about higher education and the future of work, but Human Work is a departure from much of his past writing.”
Penn’s Imprisoned Black “Guinea Pigs” Deserve an Apology and Reparations
“Upon my father’s return, I was shocked by the change in his appearance. His arms and back were a series of scars and discolored blotches.”
Growing Up with the Intellectual Dark Web
“It was around that time that I, a decidedly aimless and apathetic 15-year-old, would stumble upon a still somewhat blossoming The Rubin Report, along with The Joe Rogan Experience and Sam Harris’ podcast Making Sense.”
Where Race and Language Meet
“Dropping one term in favor of another will not, by itself, solve any great problem, but it can make finding a solution a bit more likely.”
Understanding the Mind of a Rioter
“This tendency to equate nuanced thinking and nonviolence with a lack of political conviction is typical of radicals.”
When They Say Abortion and Capital Punishment Are One and the Same
“One cannot help but wonder if this is little more than a tactic adopted by supporters of abortion to seek to discredit pro-life activists by implying that their entire worldview rests on a contradiction.”
Rialpolitik: The New Iranian Dealmakers
“Policy towards Iran must be suited not to religious ideologues who happen to be flush with petrocash but, rather, to racketeers who happen to be religious ideologues.”
The Civic Moment
“Instead, we should follow President Biden and Gorman’s lead and frame our political debate and public discourse within an overarching language of civic virtue.”
Joe Biden: the New Face for Much of the Same on Immigration
“Democrats have long gotten away with murder this way, shaking migrant hands in public view while mercilessly oppressing them out of sight.”
Is Joe Biden the Future of Liberalism? Let’s Hope So
“Will the Democrats prove captive to cultural grievance, identity politics, anti-racism, and the like? Or will they throw their lot in with Biden-style moderates…”
Flexible Government Is Good Government
“When to allow discretion on the part of public servants is not an easy question to answer.”
Europe’s Descent into Wokeness
“In Austria, for example, police have shot a dozen people since 2008; none of them were black.”
Let’s Make the Founders Less Unique
“If our halls of power are rife with mini Aaron Burrs, what does that say about us?”
Is Jordan Peterson Doomed by Liberalism Itself?
“The publication of Peterson’s latest book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life is an opportunity to reflect on the impact this man has had on the cultural debate…”
Robby Soave and What a Libertarian Is to Do
“Soave’s new book, Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn’t Fear Facebook and the Future, will be published on September 28th…”
It’s Time for the Draft, with a Twist
“‘They say the great equalizer is death, but bootcamp is a close second.’”
Who Qualifies for a Second Chance?
“Can their good works ever balance out any of the harm they have caused?”
Germany’s Been Down the Road to Serfdom; Now, China Is Doing the Same
“Like 20th century Germany, the PRC’s embrace of socialism, nationalism, and the worst elements of collectivism have resulted in unspeakable horrors.”
Conservatives Are Getting Lost in “Ideas”
“Shapiro’s most recent book How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps presents the United States’ problems, which he sees as near-fatal if left unaddressed, as rooted in the world of ideas and political philosophy.”
When John F. Kennedy Saved the World (Part II)
“Kennedy no doubt considered his relations with Khrushchev in making his decision. He had been groomed by his father to be a ruthless competitor.”
A Brief History of Nothing (Part III): From Dada, to Dachau, to Davos
“While seemingly contrary in ‘theory,’ the great totalitarian systems—fascism and communism—would have a great deal in common in practice. Both are manifestations of the human Ego flailing about in a world reduced to Nothing.”
James Madison, Greg Weiner, and What to Do about the Filibuster
“Patience ‘is the central constitutional virtue—and it is, by all signs, a lost one.’”
When John F. Kennedy Saved the World
“Kennedy proved his mettle in response to a Soviet breach of the Monroe Doctrine, defusing a crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster.”
When Reading about Abraham Lincoln, in 2021
“As historian James Oakes writes in his new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, the Republican Party was once home to a tight union of moral principle and constitutionalism.”
The Necessity of Acceptance
“What place does acceptance have in this wasteland of a year? My view, informed and influenced by living with a severe inherited disability, a fragile skin condition is that it has a central, vital place.”
Lefties Have More Fun
“Left movements exude the zest of adolescence, which is why they can generate so much thrill and camaraderie and—when they occasionally succeed—such deflated confusion and hollowness.”
An Alternative Take on Cancel Culture
“But this, in my view, has little to do with people being overly sensitive and much more to with the very economic system that conservative critics of cancel culture regularly prop up.”
When Conservative Christians Invoke Nietzsche
“Given this, we can recognize that Nietzsche would have seen layers of irony in these contemporary conservative figures appealing to his ideas to critique contemporary socialists…while simultaneously expressing concern about declining Christian values.”
On the American Economy Being “Rigged”
“The evidence is overwhelming; the American economy is rigged in favor of the government-business elite and has become more so over time.”
Cutting Through Identities: to Alter the Body or to Heal the Mind?
“But this article is not actually about cutting. If one has not yet guessed what it is really about by now, it is time for me to pull back the curtain.”
The Inhumanity of Disease
“Worst of all, it isolates us.”
Forgiving All Debt Is a Step in the Wrong Direction
“In financial markets, the basic unit of cost is risk.”
A Fatal Convergence: What Led to the Storming of the U.S. Capitol
“They persuaded 138 Republican members of Congress to vote against the certification of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, the most significant demonstration of no confidence in American democracy since the secession of the Confederate states.”
Review: Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay’s “Cynical Theories”
“…it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the authors might have profitably started with an opening chapter dedicated to early American identity politics as well as postmodernism.”
Immanuel Kant: a Conservative Philosopher as Much as a Liberal One
“This suggests that Kant’s Copernican turn in metaphysics, in both the theoretical and practical spheres, has the potential to be interpreted in both liberal and conservative directions.”
Finding Value in Diversity Training: the Case of Microaggressions
“That is why in my work with schools and non-governmental organizations I try to model an open and judicious approach to CSJ orthodoxies, one that sifts through the kooky stuff in order to highlight the important parts.”
What Is the Intellectual’s Duty to Society?
“In his new book, Hope & Scorn: Eggheads, Experts, and Elites in American Politics, historian Michael J. Brown adeptly probes questions such as these as he delves into ‘the uncertain role of intellectuals in a democracy.’”
Journalism Deserves Better Than Mehdi Hasan
“Without a doubt, journalism of this nature is as irresponsible as it is biased.”
Kant: the Greatest Liberal Philosopher?
“So what, then, makes someone a liberal? In this piece, I am going to argue that the philosophy of Immanuel Kant provides some clues.”
Francis Fukuyama: Making Identity Politics Work
“One of the core conclusions of Fukuyama’s Identity is that identity politics—the ‘demand for [political] recognition of one’s identity,’ whether that be a racial, ethnic, religious, or national identity—is here to stay.”
Twitter Bans: a Portal into “the Synthetic State”
“Thus, corporate policy at Google, Apple, Amazon, et al. becomes a second set of laws by which Americans must live.”
How to Honor the Legacy of Michael Brooks
“When it comes to theorizing about cosmopolitan socialism, Michael, unfortunately, passed on before he could spell out the details. However, we can infer much from his criticisms of conservative histories.”
“After Trump”
“In what ways can we further immunize our governing institutions from the political malaise of today and tomorrow?”
A Brief History of Nothing (Part II): Something for Nothing
“We presumed to be no longer worshipping anything, but were we not actually worshipping Nothing?”
Desperately Seeking Consistency
“And, as Michael Lind pointed out in Tablet, Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill was not the only Capitol Hill taken over by extremists thanks to a lax police presence—witness ultra-progressive Seattle.”
Transgender Rites: How Trans Activism Manipulates Public Opinion
“The notion that gender identity is a matter of self-identification, separate from biological sex, not only flies in the face of science but also leads to circular reasoning.”
Our First Year without Roger Scruton
“At his best, Scruton was a panoramic thinker of formidable intellect who puts to shame many of the lesser polemicists who have followed in his giant footsteps.”
What Ails Us?
“The loss of faith in America, its promises, and its constitutional and democratic ideals augurs not only American decline, but American collapse.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: a Post-Modern Philosopher?
“Struck by this realization, Wittgenstein insisted that the best thing now was simply to stop doing philosophy and to try and find in life what could not be said with certainty.”
The Historic Unifying Potential of the U.S. Constitution
“Professor McConnell’s extensive study of the substance and scope of presidential power under the Constitution has convinced me that the unifying capacity of the Constitution could perhaps be revived.”
Book Announcement: “The Emergence of Post-Modernity”
“This is one of the reasons for the remarkable loneliness and alienation from others many have detected in the post-modern landscape.”
From Pornography to Agriculture: Challenging Hierarchy
“At the core of this analysis is a claim that, at first glance, may seem to be a stretch: The erosion of human dignity in our broken world starts with the erosion of the planet’s soils.”
Yoram Hazony’s “NatConTalk”: Enlarging the Conservative Conversation
“NatConTalk is a recent entrant into the conservative conversation, or what remains of such under the hegemony of social media, our contemporary digital coliseum.”
Fitter and Happier? Work after the Coronavirus
“Of all changes that have already been made to mitigate the threat of the deadly virus, the way we work has arguably undergone the biggest transformation.”
Editor’s Choice: the Best Interviews of 2020
As has become something of a tradition each year at Merion West, here are our editor’s choices for his favorite interviews of this past year.
Walter Lippmann and the Dilemma of Democracy
“In his 1922 book, Public Opinion, Lippmann notes that in a representative democracy, members of the public are expected to form opinions regarding public affairs with which they have no direct contact.”
Editor’s Choice: the Best Articles of 2020
“As is tradition at Merion West, here are our editor’s choices for his favorite Merion West articles of this past year.”
An Experiment in (Lefty) Roleplaying?
“Sadly, for past the 40 years, this yearning for an impossible yet fantastical other is one that has become increasingly shared by those on the Left.”
An Enchanted Christmas with John Wesley
“Wesley’s hymns remind us of all that is good in the world and all that is true about the human condition.”
Kristof and WuDunn’s “Tightrope”: an Essential Book
“Whether one agrees with none, some, or all of their policy prescriptions, Tightrope approaches the status of a must-read.“
Slavoj Žižek, Leszek Kołakowski, and the Ontological Gap
“I would argue that we must vigilantly guard against viewing ourselves as gods or otherwise infusing and inflating our fallible natures and politics with a divine authority.”
Escaping Tumblr
“I was also on Tumblr with an agenda. Over the past ten months, I had stumbled deeper and deeper into the neurodiversity movement, which frames autism as an identity as well as a disability and blames society for ‘oppressing’ autistics.”
A Brief History of Nothing
“Historically, human beings worshipped gods or God; modern secular man worships Nothing.”
Blowing Up “The Big White Ghetto”
“Williamson puts his finger on a certain, pervasive resignation that hobbles so many lower-class Americans—a resignation that must be explicitly attacked if our nation is to live up to its promises…”
Four Ways Freedom Has Been Understood
“In this brief article, my final for the year, I will discuss four different ways freedom has been conceived of in the European philosophical tradition.”
The Irrationality of Rationalism
“This condition, Epidermolysis bullosa, with which I was diagnosed after birth, is as painful as described. Singer’s language is compassionate, but what he advocates for is infanticide.”
Can a Constitution of Genius Work for a Nation of Imbeciles?
“Ricks writes: ‘In a nutshell, Washington was sensing the limits of virtue as a driver of the new country. He is not often seen as a political philosopher, but in his own quiet way he was ahead of most of his peers.’”
Gad Saad’s “The Parasitic Mind”: A Reasonable Premise Gone Awry
“At the time the aforementioned Heterodox Academy report was published, firings of conservatives had doubled, yet left-leaning professor firings had spiked by 950%.”
Review: H.R. McMaster’s “Battlegrounds”
“As citizens, though, thankfully we can do more than just hope. We can engage in the sort of good-faith, learned analysis which General McMaster has provided us in Battlegrounds.”
Christian Conservatism and Neo-Gnosticism: A Reply to Nick Opyrchal
“However, Žižek’s entire point is that the dialectical method reveals a shocking truth about the world: that certain limitations cannot be overcome because they are built into the structure of reality itself.”
Casting Spells: The Enduring Allure of Leftist Mysticism
“In the case of leftist mysticism, the greatest obstacle to this transformation appears to be human nature, which, in part, explains the bloody reality of socialism and communism.”
America: An Appreciation
“No matter how frustrated or aggrieved you may be with your current life in America, know there are countless people in the world who would gladly trade places with you.”
Preview: “A Critical Legal Conception of Liberalism and Liberal Rights”
“My new book, A Critical Legal Examination of Liberalism and Liberal Rights, holds that liberalism is best understood as a political and moral doctrine committed to two fundamental principles.”
The Center Must Hold
“Having engaged with Schlesinger’s thinking, readers should ask themselves: Here in the 21st century, what are the greatest threats to the liberal democratic project at home and abroad?”
The Monstrosity of Gnosticism
“Milbank is perhaps correct, then, in seeing that Žižek is so heterodox in his reading that he has crossed the Rubicon into something detached from the stream of Christian thought.”
Review: Carlos Lozada’s “What Were We Thinking”
“Lozada’s book provides a comprehensive, incisive analysis of the intellectual debates that defined the Trump-era. As we plunge forward into a post-Trump presidency politics, it is a must read.”
Letter to an American Agonist
“What the United States shares with Athens is not the pretense of democracy, or any other feature of the content of her tradition but, rather, her citizens’ uncommon commitment to contesting it.”
I Voted for Trump, and I’m Not a Racist
“But I had never voted in a presidential election until this year. So why did I vote in 2020?”
Review: Ted Cruz’s “One Vote Away”
“One Vote Away serves as a useful primer on some of the great constitutional issues of our day, while also proving that legal judgment and political judgment are separate matters.”
What the Winning Conservative Coalition Looks Like
“Those who work with ideas increasingly vote for the Democrats, while those who work in physical reality with their hands or machinery increasingly vote Republican.”
Meritocratic Tyranny: Big, If True
“But Sandel’s critique of meritocracy runs deeper than lamenting the obvious gap between meritocratic ideals and reality; Sandel takes issue with the ideal of meritocracy itself.”
Ibram Kendi’s Thesis Could Use a Lot More Rigor (Part II)
“In short, Kendi’s consequentialist view of racism as rooted in policy (which, however unpredictably and unintentionally, results in racial disparities) does not explain everything.”
A Soviet Immigrant Reminds Americans What They’ve Forgotten
“This country confers upon people the basic, fundamental dignity—starkly absent in Soviet Russia and in many other places on Earth—of drawing a more-or-less direct line between our life choices and our lives’ outcomes.”
Žižek and Milbank: The Monstrosity of Christ?
“However, the purpose of this reading is to stress—contra more conservative interpreters like Milbank—that the disordered post-modern world that we inhabit is not a firm break with Christianity.”
We’re Divided. But Will We Fall?
“French dedicates his book to James Madison, saying, ‘May we remember that you were right.’”
How Biden Did It
“The Economist’s less-than-ringing endorsement of the former Vice President—resignedly titled, ‘Why it has to be Biden’—typifies the sentiment.”
Ibram Kendi’s Thesis Could Use a Lot More Rigor
“For Kendi, it is policy first and racism second. Debatable? That is a racist question. Maybe a presentist interpretation of history? Also racist.”
To Resist Participating in the Great Lie
“Solzhenitsyn observed through incredible hardship and deep reflection, that, in his country, the lie had ‘become not just a moral category but a pillar of the state.’”
“A Cry from the Far Middle”: Lots of Laughs, And a Few Important Insights
“If there is an underlying argument here, though, it is that Americans ought to quit taking themselves—and their own tribe’s political convictions—so darn seriously.”
What the Gospel Story Can Tell Us about Identity Politics
“From this vantage point, it would be difficult to imagine a more intersectional person than Jesus.”
To My Fellow Catholics, Just Before Election Day
“We must face the reality that the prevalence of abortion is a manifestation of our distressed sociality and corrupted sense of mutual responsibility.”
How Online Meme Culture Fails the Left
“As such, it is not simply the case that coherent political dialogue is difficult via the Internet; it is difficult, in large part, because of the Internet…”
Stop Saying Biden Is “A Lot like Trump” on China
“All the headlines about how we will see a continuation of President Trump’s China policies under a potential Biden administration ignore their radically divergent views about the United States’ role in the world.”
Jordan Peterson and the Return of Solzhenitsyn
“The world was on this brink of this fiery hell when Jordan Peterson read Solzhenitsyn and began to turn from despair toward hope.”
Paging Mr. Moynihan
“We can only hope that Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s approach to politics will be rediscovered. Books like American Burke should function as essential guides in this most necessary search.”
On Donald Trump, the Person
“Throughout my writings on post-modern conservatism, I have generally avoided discussing President Donald Trump’s personality.”
Patrick Deneen: Grappling with the Failures of Liberalism
“This conquest of the engines of social formation is, as Patrick Deneen argues, why liberalism is failing.”
That Day
“Ten years ago I received a call from my father, Mario Vargas Llosa, telling me that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.”
America at the End of History
“The universal end-state society, Kojève argued, was the society in which any individual could attain what he desired with ease and without opposition…”
The Problems with Porn
“And whether or not one believes that sex is sacred, it is hard to deny that the porn industry has commodified sex in ways that rid it of all that made it human.”
Pharmakon V: Culture Wars—Trickle-Down Economics vs. Trickle-Down Morality
“Without this circumspection, advocacy appears heavy-handed, tone-deaf, mistimed, and ultimately self-defeating, to the detriment of the downtrodden.”
Van Morrison’s “Dangerous” Songs
“But, furthermore, there is virtue in urging society to introspection over blind obedience to narratives.”
How to Be a Non-Racist
“Non-racism, thus understood, implies colorblindness, not in the sense of literally not seeing skin color, but in the sense of treating it as insignificant.”
Ten Books Every Progressive Should Read to Understand the Right
“One question I am often asked by engaged leftists is what texts are most helpful for understanding the political right.”
Patrick Deneen: A Primer
“Or is man—like some argue of Odysseus—a restless seeker of new places, people, and experiences?”
A Vision for Human Flourishing
“Just like we would not accept the transportation technology of the 1800’s, we should not compulsorily accept archaic attitudes toward work, education, possessions, and leisure.”
The Crowding out of a Humanities Education
“Taken to its logical apotheosis, this trend all but guarantees that the humanities—philosophy, literature, journalism, etc.—will become the exclusive domain of the economic elite.”
Book Review: Steven Higashide’s “Better Buses, Better Cites”
“A well-planned and well-funded bus transit system opens up a community to a larger world, better paid jobs, educational opportunities, and the potential for a better life.”
Herbert Marcuse and Dismissing Conservative Views
“Marcuse’s efforts, for the most part, have proven successful, however. To this point, the idea of a right-wing, pro-capitalist status quo has been thoroughly ingrained into the public imagination…”
When Identity Politics Meets the Punk Scene
“But to me, an observer with intimate knowledge of punk’s radical history, much of today’s woke rhetoric feels like a throwback.”
Book Review: “Canceling Comedians While the World Burns”
“Now, in what is sure to be a more controversial move, Burgis is turning his analytical skills towards criticizing the political left.”
Power Over Principles: the Dual Dangers of Trumpism and Anti-Racism
Donald Trump rode the politics of power and emotion to the White House. If his opponents continue to respond in kind, he might have killed the politics of principle in the process.
A Better Way to Understand the Intellectual Dark Web
“In a different world where the culture war never happened, I might have seen myself as their ally in some areas.”
George Orwell: from Hell to Salvation
“Leaving behind a bucolic past, the engine of modernity has nature on the run as it speeds towards an uncertain future.”
Science: Not Everyone’s Cup of Tea
“It bears to repeat, however, that our genes do not directly decide the actions we take in life—as fatalism would like one to believe. They are not the means to our destiny but, rather, are the keys to our hypothetical reality.”
Do Americans Vote Too Much?
The United States does not have low voter turnout; Americans actually are asked to vote too much, and this hurts our democracy.
Identity Politics and the Death of Moral Imagination
“The problem—as has been said so many times before—is that identity politics takes a kernel of truth about embodied human experience and pushes it to its destructive conclusion.”
Preview: “A Critical Legal Examination of Liberalism and Liberal Rights”
“While we may be cursed to live in interesting times, this presents an opportunity to rethink some of our basic assumptions about the democratic politics of liberal states…”
The Case for Civic Nationalism
“If carefully constructed, civic nationalism in the United States can take both conservative and progressive forms.”
Pharmakon IV: Secret Family Recipe
“Due to the repetitive observations made by most in their daily routines in a country with little socioeconomic mixing, there is poor visibility into how the lives of those in other classes transpire.”
The Problems with Cultural Christianity
“In this respect, it is not a defense of Christianity but its final undoing: the subordination of eternal God to the human, all too human need for reactionary political order and tribalistic identity.”
The Ideological Takeover of British Psychotherapy
“The problem with this conception is that access to truth or objectivity becomes something not open to universal access but, instead, becomes something distributed on the basis of social position.”
Why Europe Is Weak on Iran
“It can be argued that the European failure to stand with the United States in maintaining sanctions on the Islamic regime is a symptom of their prolonged appeasement policy, which is masqueraded as diplomatic engagement.”
Review: Roger Scruton’s “On Human Nature”
“The result is a thoughtful and nuanced book that testifies to both his theoretical and exegetical talents, solidifying Scruton’s legacy as the most talented conservative writer of his generation.”
Looking Beyond Easy Explanations for Divorce
“Maybe there is something in our environment that makes staying together so hard.”
Kayleigh McEnany: a Tough Act to Follow
“However, after the departure of three spokespeople before her, it seems that President Trump has found his keeper—and the media their match—in a 32-year-old Harvard Law School graduate: Kayleigh McEnany.”
Clarifying My Comments on Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian
“The picture of science that they defend, however, is what merits the most attention.“
Augustine of Hippo: Patron Saint of Political Criticism
“In a brilliant stroke of irony, Augustine’s reading of Roman history not only reveals the many falsities of the Roman imperial mythology but also points the way to Christ and the Heavenly Jerusalem.”
What Is Unity, Anyways?
“Without some clarification on this point, calling for unity looks less like an appeal to historical precedent and more like the nostalgic projection of order and stability onto time periods that were anything but.”
Anti-Racism Is Weird
“Weird is the only word available to describe the implicit rules, rituals, and taboos that surround the issue.”
Pharmakon III: Parable of the Talents
“Even more disturbingly, the odds of a state governor’s child eventually holding the same title is 1 in 51; 1 in 47 for Senators; 1 in 13 for Presidents; and 1 in 9 for billionaires.”
“It’s the Economy, Stupid”: What Marx Can Teach Us about the Pandemic
“Indeed, when COVID-19 hit, the sunny stock market forecasts President Donald Trump boasted of were belied by record levels of corporate debt and a low rate of productivity growth.”
Why the Left Can’t Agree on Anything
“The irony is that this is in stark contrast to how our rivals on the political right often portray the Left.”
On the “Sokal Squared” Trio
“Now, this is not a review of the book, nor a critique of them personally but, rather, a critique of their function as public intellectuals.”
Partisan Identity and the Death of Representative Governance
“Importing these ideas into your sense of self—to think of yourself as a liberal or a conservative—is irrational and corrosive. It is a recipe for error.”
White Jesus and the “Other” Jesus: When Activists Come for Gods
“A civilization that worships at such altars is one that no longer believes in itself, that considers itself irredeemably guilty, sinful or evil…”
The Places Where Patrick Deneen and the Left Can Agree
“I agree with Deneen—and I suspect many others on the Left do too—that the local community is the optimal setting to pursue the good.”
Why Cancel Culture Won’t Last
“This is the thing about moral panics—while threatening, they can be illuminating.”
Blackface: When Nuance Meets Taboo
“One of the first lessons my students of undergraduate literary studies learn about text analysis is to distinguish between internal and external communication.”
How Ben Shapiro Might Consider Locke More Carefully
“Locke’s theoretical arguments prefigured another thinker who had a lot to say about labor and property: Karl Marx.”
Pharmakon II: Sold to the Corporate Libertarian
“Indeed, economist Thomas Piketty observes that the United States presents for the first time in history a society headed towards extreme inequality, driven not by hyper-patrimony (inherited wealth) but hyper-meritocracy…”
How We Can Finally Put the Reparations Question Behind Us
“With that in mind, what I want to do below is to advance a proposal that, I think, lets everyone concerned out of this conundrum gracefully.”
Innocence, Guilt, and Living with a Disability
“This puts me in a strange position as someone who can be unequivocally categorized as a victim and yet who has always had a difficult time seeing myself as one.”
To Be a Caring Conservative
“All the while, the existing social safety net—combined with various anti-poverty programs—in the United States already provides for our nation’s poor by offering them an adequate standard of living.”
A Tribute to Michael Brooks
“It is truly hard to believe that he is gone and that this burgeoning collaboration and friendship will never get the chance to grow.”
Review: Ronald Beiner’s “Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right”
“During the past few years before, I had struggled with—and then firmly said goodbye to—the Catholicism of my upbringing, and I was searching for a new philosophy of meaning that did not seem to depend on so many leaps of faith.”
Leave Lincoln’s Statues Alone but Engage with His Legacy More Critically
“Indeed, Michael Scharf reports that ‘Milošević saw himself as a modern-day Abe Lincoln, employing force in a valiant effort to hold his crumbling Yugoslavia together.’”
How Sam Harris Changed My Opinion of Jordan Peterson
“This is why Peterson genuinely believes in Dostoevsky’s eminent saying in The Brothers Karamazov: ‘Without God all things are permitted.’”
Jorge Luis Borges and the Philosophy of Memory
“For this reason, Borges’ short story reveals that the human mind is intelligent precisely because it does not recollect too much.”
The Land of Lost Content
“As we move forward in the present struggle, where the question of race and religion becomes an endemic part of our theaters of division, we must strive to reject the retributive impulse and embrace what Martha Nussbaum keenly called the ‘rational faith.’”
A Reply to Elizabeth Powers: “Woke” Activists and Deconstruction
“The respective propriety of each strand of said activism must be engaged with on a case-by-case basis, rather than be lumped together with all other causes before being explained away with references to academic trends.”
Pharmakon I: Post-Mortem
“The country is no longer predominantly rural but urban, and the frontier mindset has been largely superseded by a cosmopolitan one.”
The Pernicious Influence of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Sophistry
“In one of the great exercises of academic sophistry in our times, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva wants to persuade us that color-blindness is racism, and color-consciousness is anti-racism.”
The Authentic Conservative vs. the Reactionary Conservative
“The reactionary outlook is, consequently, hostile to the commitment to moral equality that authentic conservatives, liberals, and progressives share.”
Nathan J. Robinson’s Curious Critique
“If people’s convictions about those particular issues are weak enough that they could be changed by watching Rising, they surely could be changed in many other ways…”
Review: “Welcome to the Rebellion: A New Hope in Radical Politics” by Michael Harris
“Although set ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….,’ the Star Wars narrative feels increasingly relevant with a very real empire, one of corporate domination, at large on earth today.”
What Is the “Real Deal” at Jordan Peterson’s Thinkspot?
“However, in this piece, I will explain precisely why Thinkspot was created. The story starts shortly after the turn of the millennium, with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.”
The Foundational Integrity of Imants Ziedonis
“In other words, Ziedonis, knowingly or not, recognized that for a state to be free, its people must recognize a shared tradition and must be themselves free to build upon it.”
The Discrete Ideology of Thomas Piketty: Successes and Failures of ‘Capital and Ideology’
“Whereas Piketty’s earlier book was often accused of ignoring the role that political doctrines played in naturalizing inequality, he has here devoted an entire text to that very subject.”
The Puppet Masters of Yemen’s Humanitarian Crisis
“The question worth asking is: Who stands to benefit from the continual fueling, participation, and organization of a war that threatens to destabilize Yemen irreversibly?”
Running Wild: Hulk Hogan, God, and the Coronavirus
“While feeding on an unclean beast alone may seem like a trivial act, it is arguably symbolic of mankind’s time-honored bastardization of the natural order.”
Allan Bloom at Harvard, a Lesson Reverberating through the Years
“ The university is nothing less than the institutionalization of Socrates. So the end of philosophy in the university portends the subversion of democracy itself.”
And They’ve Come for the Founders
“However, as one watches the Founders find their way into the crosshairs of so many, perhaps the obvious needs to be restated.”
Are Conservatives “Virtue Signalling” Too?
“Of course, virtue signaling from the Right regarding the protests has come in many forms other than writing.”
Does Jordan Peterson Misconstrue “Myth”?
“This, however, poses another problem because it presumes that mythical truth is somehow free from ideology.”
Understanding the Reactionary Outlook
“One of the defining features of the reactionary outlook is how thin its conception of life’s meaning is, and this, in turn, explains why reactionaries tend to be so anxious about it all falling apart…”
Against the Concept Creep Of “Racism”
“This is why I was dismayed by a recent essay published at Arc Digital (on June 9th) by Akiva M. Cohen, entitled ‘Systemic Racism Is Real. We Need To Fight It, Not Deny It.’”
Columbus Belongs Not Only to History
“And one example of this—among others—is how prominently he features in a particular tradition of philosophy: that of philosophical pessimism.”
No, Antifa Is Not Synonymous with “Anti-fascism”
“So, in the same way that a country with the word ‘democratic’ in its name tends to be anything but, Antifa appears overwhelmingly to be anti-fascist in name only.”
The False Dichotomy in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Intersectionality
“Why is this important? Because grammar shows that Crenshaw’s distinction between identity politics and liberal universalism is artificial.”
In Place of Columbus’ Statue, Build One for Francisco de Vitoria
“Perhaps the strongest argument considered by Vitoria relied on what today we might call “humanitarian intervention.”
The Fuzzy Logic Behind the Movement
“But this discrepancy makes perfect sense if we consider the tone of racial discourse in the United States for half a second.”
When Josh Hawley Overplays His Hand
“But that is no reason to allow Senator Hawley to misrepresent history in the service of a political narrative that will cause even greater damage to an international system that is already under immense strain.”
Finding Common Ground in Times of Anguish
“My progressive friends and I are united in wanting to see an end to police brutality, even though we may differ when it comes to the means to bring that about.”
How Close We Are to Unravelling
“The religion of Social Justice is redolent of the old paganism but without even the mortal transcendence of its pantheons.”
Is “the Long Peace” Sustainable?
“Furthermore, one of the most—if not the most—crucial contributor to the Long Peace is the spread of democracy.”
Navigating Whiteness: Between White-Shaming and White Indigenous Rights
“White-shaming is a political tactic aimed at invalidating the opinions and experiences of people of European descent. Premised on a belief in collective guilt, it judges white folks not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin.”
Liberty and the Left
“Prominent proposals by left-wing parties such as democratizing the workplace or introducing universal public healthcare (in the United States), they argue, are best framed as positions that further the cause of freedom.”
The Dangers of Campus Speech Codes: Revisiting the Water Buffalo Affair
“The history which preceded the magazine’s shutdown and resurgence involved a controversy sufficient for the Red and Blue to be ‘expelled from the Student Activities Council (SAC)’ and to have ‘archives…trashed by the University.’”
What Cormac McCarthy Saw When He Saw Evil
“When asked to describe Chigurh, the few people lucky enough to have encountered him and survived claimed he that ‘looked like anybody.’”
These Are Not “Peaceful Protests”; Their Violent Rhetoric Incites Violence
“If that is the result of George Floyd’s killing, he will have not only died in vain but, more, died as a critical girder supporting the enemy’s battlements.”
The Protests Are Not About Police Violence
“Racism and racial inequality are barriers for many non-whites, but viewing these disparities as a morality play between powerful whites and enraged minorities is a recipe for untold conflict.”
As the Word “Racism” Loses Its Meaning
“Ambiguity, however, is the name of the game when it comes to defining racism, while Whiteness Studies is similarly plagued with ‘critical’ obfuscation.”
Why Wendy Brown Remains as Relevant as Ever
“Brown makes the bold choice of echoing conservative critics in scrutinizing left-wing variants of identity politics from a Nietzschean perspective; however, she takes a far more nuanced and less polemical approach.”
A Few Questions for My Social Justice Colleagues
“What I left out of that piece are the many questions my immersion has raised whose answers, if I could find them, might help what I’ll call the reasonable unwoke better assess SJ/DEI claims. I would like to air those questions here.”
Excitement about the Coronavirus’ Effect on Emissions Obscures the Big Picture
“Should individuals collectively decide to make radical changes to lower their carbon output, they—and the economy at large—will suffer. As a result, individuals won’t. And, their individual choices would not be enough, regardless.”
Can Free Speech Help Us Beat the Coronavirus?
“We must remind those like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Susan Wojcicki that they should not silence ideas from the get-go because they fear that people are incapable of evaluating information for themselves.”
Bhaskar Sunkara’s “The Socialist Manifesto” and Understanding Millennial Socialism
“What has become ‘millennial socialism’ arguably got its start in 2011, with the founding of Jacobin, a proudly left-wing magazine that was trendy, readable, and erudite.”
The Plague in New York, the Pox on America
“With our political and cultural situation having deteriorated far beyond where it was two decades ago, it is my hope that the long-overdue national cleansing and cultural revitalization this pestilence brings in its wake will last.”
The Limits of Political Reasoning
“However, regardless of it being mathematically the same task, the politically-charged task’s results came out in a polarized fashion…”
Lessons from Antiquity for Our Current Pandemic
“Thucydides subsequently goes on to say, ‘In other respects also Athens owed to the plague the beginnings of a state of unprecedented lawlessness.’”
Psychoanalytic Darkness and Reflections on the Coronavirus
“The ‘viral’ aspect of the Coronavirus pandemic and the disproportionate effect on the aged similarly suggests a Jungian reading of systemic breakdown and a lurch towards either symbolic or literal death.”
Why Jordan Peterson Is Worth Defending
“And, in the midst of it all, a Canadian psychologist told people to clean their rooms before trying to change the world and has not ceased to be excoriated for his efforts years later. History will be kinder to him than his opponents.”
Has Dave Rubin Found His Intellectual Stride?
“I do want to give Rubin the fairest shake I possibly can. As such, instead of commenting on the book generally, I will look at some of the book’s arguments in detail and break them down…”
If There Were Ever a Time for Bipartisanship, It Is Now
“COVID-19 presents a unique opportunity for governments to build trust. According to a recent update of the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in government around the world spiked by 11 points between January and May 2020.”
The Outsourcing of American Tennis
“Should American tennis enthusiasts be deprived the opportunity of receiving a financial scholarship and the college athletic experience because coaches—and an increasing number of them from overseas—believe foreign players are their best chance to win matches?”
The Irrelevance of the Intelligence Debate
“By contrast, those on the Left tend to prefer more transparently social determinants, such as ethnic or economic background and push against anything which seems to ‘naturalize’ inequality by explaining it biologically.”
Lacan’s “Real,” Jung’s “Psychoid,” and Jordan Peterson’s “Dragon of Chaos”
“It may hearten aggrieved fans of Jordan Peterson, whose status as representative of Jungian thought I took umbrage with in a previous article, that I recognize some value in this aspect of Peterson’s work from a psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic perspective.”
Conservatives Are Not the Only Ones Who Ignore “Facts and the Science”
“…this and countless other scientific findings led the President of the American Sociological Association—in his 2005 presidential address—to call upon members to, ‘Prepare to defend against the genomic data juggernaut heading their way down the pike.’”
The Book-Length Critique of Jordan Peterson Isn’t Perfect, Either
“The authors have done well in providing the substance for a critique of Jordan Peterson, but they need someone to spice up their style, which is precisely what Jordan Peterson, himself, did in his own career.”
Why Thomas Piketty Thinks We Should Not Naturalize Inequality
“Piketty wants to re-orient the political left away from cultural and educational issues, which dominate the mindset of the elitist ‘Brahmin left’ in his telling, and back to the economic concerns that were once the Left’s bread and butter”
Review: Bart Ehrman’s “Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife”
“Bart Ehrman, ever loyal to his engaging style, approaches this topic in Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. As expected, he delivers the goods, covering religious texts from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the writings of Augustine.”
Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson—Sample Chapter
“One can see here that Peterson, while even less convinced of the equitable distribution of competences than Hobbes, clearly shares his view that life outside the confines of society would necessarily be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’”
Viral Truths and the Mouthpieces of Unreality
“What I want is to praise Hunt because what he had done has been incredible—and to praise those whose truths Hunt was in a position to make go viral.”
The Problem with Edmund Burke and Defenders of “Tradition”
“The problem here is that one man’s stable hierarchy and proud tradition is another’s tyrannical oppression and ideology.”
Palmar de Troya and a Broader Question: Cult or Religion?
“A religion becomes mainstream simply because of its sheer demographic power—not because of the reasonableness of its beliefs and practices.”
Jordan Peterson and Carl Jung’s Worldviews Have Been Greatly Oversimplified
“With respect to McManus and Hamilton, who have admittedly produced a very interesting article, there are characterizations and theoretical points within their article that I feel need to be addressed.”
The Time Has Come for the Left to Sink the Democratic Party
“If the Left were to abstain from participating in this election en masse, the consequences would be deep.”
Thank you for Taking Our Thoughts on Jordan Peterson Seriously
“But good or bad, the extent of discourse around Myth and Mayhem at Merion West would have been edifying for any author, and we are very pleased the book has generated such interest and strong feelings, even before its release.”
To Stand up to China, the West Must First Re-Discover Itself
“The lack of backbone displayed by Western leaders when dealing with China is symbolic of the malaise that has been gripping Western culture for decades.”
Coronavirus Blood Tests May Bring a Reckoning
Antibody testing will soon clarify how many have contracted COVID-19, and its real mortality rate. Those results could determine who survives the political fallout.
Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek’s Differing Approaches to Psychoanalysis
“Peterson and Žižek, perhaps the best-known public intellectuals of the Right and Left respectively—are exponents of psychoanalysis: Peterson of its Jungian variety, and Žižek of its Lacanian one.”
Joe Biden Is Aided by “Policy Indifference Syndrome”
“Let’s leave aside the fact that Joe Biden has been publicly inactive since leaving office as Vice President in January, 2017, except for making over $15 million in speaking fees and publishing royalties.“
The Many Problems with Marxism
“I recently met up with an old friend, a staunch Marxist, at a traditional Viennese café to catch up and talk about our political differences. After hours of discussion, he admitted, ‘Well, ultimately, it’s a question of faith.’”
The Coronavirus and a “Coup d’état” of the Brain
“Today, we are witnessing the medical equivalent of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Moon Mission.”
Watching William F. Buckley and James Baldwin at Columbia
“At age 55, I was the oldest in my class of about 20 students, and most of my classmates were between the ages of 18 and 21.”
In Reply to McManus: Harping on Income Inequality Ignores the Data
“The Economist noted: ‘Just as ideas about inequality have completed their march from the Academy to the frontlines of politics, researchers have begun to look again. And some are wondering whether inequality has risen as much as claimed—or, by some measures, at all.’”
Reading in the Age of Coronavirus
“Notably, during these times of self-isolation, it should be a near-requirement to use our time to delve into certain subjects.”
Pandemic Pandemonium: Has America Gotten It Wrong?
“Since a vaccine is years away, natural herd immunity is the only remaining feasible route. But current governmental actions are directly preventing the development of widespread immunity, thus guaranteeing the prolongation of the pandemic.”
Michael Brooks’ New Book Hits the Mark
“Brooks argues that, far from this façade of ideological diversity, the IDW is built around a single and deep ideological commitment. This commitment is the preservation of presently established power hierarchies.”
Patrick Deneen, Henri Bergson, and Understanding Time
“The decision to break time into past, present, and future reflects a tendency to see time as more or less analogous to space.“
What Søren Kierkegaard Can Teach the Left About Ayn Rand
“The view of Rand as a self-absorbed, even solipsistic, apologist for the greed of nefarious capitalists…was always a myopic misreading of Rand, at least if one pays close attention to her novels.”
Free Lunch as the Key to a Free Market: a Reply to Jonathan Church
“Thus, in respect to buildings and services, the landlord is selling his or her labour. Part of the rent he or she charges constitutes wages. So far so good, but what about the land component of real estate?”
“Keep America Great”: Wrestling with the Coronavirus
“With the lines between wrestling and politics decidedly blurred, we can neither take comfort in the guile of our leaders nor the well-meaning distraction of wrestling.”
Robert Nozick and the Strongest Argument for Property Rights
“It is long past time that we abandon the transcendent appeal to rights as ways to settle more arguments, in part because—following Derek Parfit—it is far more constructive to ask why and which rights matter.”
Jordan Peterson Is Fair Game for Criticism
“…where Peterson is fond of citing the brutal nature of chimpanzees as proof of nature’s pitiless character, we should recall that the Left can just as easily cite the relatively co-operative nature of bonobos.”
Critiquing the Intellectual Dark Web: Michael Brooks’ “Against the Web”
“Peterson comes across no better in Brooks’ telling. He acknowledges that much of the Canadian psychologist’s self-help is quite useful, and he even jokingly admits that many leftists could do with some tough love about cleaning their room.”
In Defense of My Work Critical of Jordan Peterson
“The irony of this exchange is it has only reinforced my opinion that Peterson’s political rhetoric often has a stultifying impact on sincere intellectual debates.“
When We Imbue the Stock Market with Religious Properties
“These things seem all too familiar when thinking about a somewhat abstract entity with arguably outsized power over billions of people’s lives when—on a whim—it decides to violently go ‘up’ or ‘down.’”
In Reply to Ben Burgis: Capitalism, Socialism, and Marx
“…one can go into business with the long-term goal of instituting a worker co-op. But the first and most fundamental aim is to supply the market with something consumers want, in as profitable a way as possible.”
Nietzsche and Godless Post-Modernity
“All of this culminated in the works of Nietzsche, who rejected the ontological and moral truths of monotheism, while retaining their stress on individualism.”
Balance Is Needed in the Fight Against the Coronavirus
“Since there is no vaccine coming anytime soon, the only way to properly handle this pandemic at this time is to allow the population to develop natural immunity to it in a controlled manner that avoids overloading the healthcare system.”
Robin DiAngelo Is Correct about the Psychic Weight of Race
“Although one empirical study indicates that whiteness may not be as invisible to white people as is assumed, DiAngelo is not widely off the mark about the psychological advantages of being white.”
Margaret Thatcher, Libertarianism, and the Etherization of the Single Tax
“Margaret Thatcher was a self-described libertarian from that era. She did something quite different with the single tax problem; she altered the class structure of the country.”
Where Social Justice Activists Persuade Me—and Where They Don’t
“What follows are examples of topics where SJ/DEI activists have persuaded me, where they haven’t, and where they have led me to fresh, if heterodox, insights.”
Erdoğan and Taking Advantage of Europe’s “Pathological Altruism”
“For them, the feelings of guilt over Europe’s past seemed to require inviting in the world to redeem Europe of its sins. Erdoğan is playing on this fear by referring to the Greeks as Nazis, attempting to destabilize the collective psyche of the European leadership.”
Three Lessons from Nine Years of Conflict in Syria
“However much Americans and their leaders may want to turn away from wars and atrocities geographically far away, sooner or later they will be impacted by them, usually in a jarring and harmful way.”
The Coronavirus: Exacerbated by Cultural Pathology
“Make no mistake; we are in a war, and wars tend to be easier to win when it is generally acknowledged that they are happening.”
The Critics of “Social Justice,” from Jonah Goldberg to Jordan Peterson
“The conservative critiques of social justice are, therefore, wrong on two different fronts.”
Going Deeper Than a Famous Quotation or Two
“By inviting further exploration of a quotation’s origin, we might re-discover great and complicated thinkers, who, it turns out, have far more to offer than a single phrase.”
Hannah Arendt’s Concept of “Impotent Bigness”
“Impotent bigness uses empty violence to lash out against the vulnerable to compensate for its own utter inability to change the world in any meaningful way. “
At the Border with Reality: the Coronavirus in Italy and Memes
“Italy, the first European country to close its links with China, also became the first nation in Europe in terms of the numbers infected. With this development came the tragic counterbalance of being transformed in one fell swoop from repellers to rejected.”
Why Millennials Are Angry
“Millennials occupy the rather strange position of being both an angry and apathetic generation.”
Why the “New Socialist Man” Runs into Trouble
“The knowledge encoded in the profit/loss system that emerges in a free market cannot be recovered by a socialist Leviathan.”
When We Oversimplify Darwin
“Charles Darwin himself was quite wary of the metaphysical or religious implications of his discoveries.”
The Coronavirus: On Risk and Idiots
“As I have no skills to help with the virus, I would like to at least try to help in this small way instead. In any case, take precautions, stay calm, do not listen to dangerous idiots, keep yourself and your family safe, and good luck.”
Slavoj Žižek, Viktor Orbán, and Understanding “Post-Truth”
“This does seem to be occurring in the academy, as the contemporary academic stars of critical theory such as Alain Badious and Slavoj Žižek tend to be hostile to the extreme skepticism of post-modern theory.”
Announcing the Release of “Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson”
“Peterson himself described some of its symptomatic features in Maps of Meaning when he discusses how the breakdown of traditional mythopoetic traditions generated a sense of nihilistic uncertainty…”
Shakespeare and Social Justice Ideology: Othello Is Not About Racism
“Unfortunately, I don’t think it simply comes down to the location of a portrait. In recent years, social justice ideology has infiltrated many of our institutions, especially the universities and, particularly, in the humanities.”
From Nietzsche to Trump
“This explains the turn to nostalgic and resentment-driven politics to seek to elevate authority figures who will not only halt the flow of time but turn back the clock.”
What Douglas Murray’s Book Does Well (And Where It Falters)
“I will begin with the pros of Murray’s book before outlining my disagreements. First, it is well-written and well-organized. His prose crackles with wit and salt, with pointed examples often blending seamlessly with political commentary.”
The Biggest Issue with Richard Dawkins’ Tweet
“The latest of these Twitter controversies that I think warrants being addressed started with Professor Richard Dawkins expressing his opinion on the very delicate topic of eugenics.”
Jonathan Haidt and Understanding First Nations Protesters
“In the current Canadian context, I think the protestors are justified in blocking railway tracks and highways to make their point.”
A Jordan Peterson Biographer Missing the Mark
Jim Proser’s new biography on Jordan Peterson portrays him as a Christlike figure plagued by personal demons. Yet the real devil here is in the details.
“People of Color” Do Not Exist
“Looking at the highest income Americans by ethnicity, we likewise find a hodgepodge of people of many colors, with peoples largely from East and South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East at the top.”
How to Respond to the Global Right Phenomenon
“Veterans of the entertainment industry like Steve Bannon and the reality television star Donald Trump instinctively understood how to cater to the resentment of those who felt left behind by neoliberalism but were unwilling or unaware of left-wing alternatives.”
Lord Heseltine Holds Up the Georgist Lens
“Michael Heseltine was a minister under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and was heavily involved in urban regeneration (i.e. had direct contact with the economics of infrastructure and land).”
The “Orthodox Conservatives” and the Essence of British Conservatism
“Orthodox Conservatism believes that the culture we have is held in trust—and that it is particular to us and our shared history; it is distinctive, not exclusive and is open to those who wish to join.”
Is Jordan Peterson the New Ayn Rand?
“I compare Peterson with Ayn Rand because—as I read this book—her name constantly came to my mind (she is mentioned only once in the book).”
The All Too Brief Life of the Father of Thermodynamics
“This ability to deliver scientific progress amid a sea of errors is more common in the history of science than one might expect.”
The Human Impulse for Tyranny
“Reading Pericles’ Funeral Oration as a standalone speech—independent of the whole work to which it belongs—makes us prone to falling for the seduction of tyranny which Thucydides so subtly investigates and rebukes in his work.”
This Is How Bernie Wins
“We have sold genuine socialism to a hitherto unimagined portion of the electorate: the young, the idealistic, and the middle class. We now need to sell it to the people it was designed for.”
How to Create a More Inclusive Left
“Viewpoint diversity, when it treads on certain progressive articles of faith, is scorned, and the ideas considered within the bounds of respectable discourse on contentious issues is increasingly narrow.”
The Modern University: A Reply to Nate Hochman
“What makes Hochman’s essay far more interesting than the usual screed against academics and critical theory is his effort to locate the cause in the history of Western rationalism and ultimately nihilism.”
Actually, Howard Schultz, Unions May Just Be the Answer
“Howard Schultz famously state that unions ‘have a role to play’ but are ‘not the answer.’ But, are they not? Thankfully, there is an empirical answer to this question.”
“Three Big Ideas” to Transform How We Think
“In fact, I can think of three ideas that are so deep, so potentially useful, and so paradigm-shifting that widespread acceptance of even one of them would transform civilization for the better.”
Why Is Iowa a Purple State?
And why is Iowa so important in presidential contests?
Another One-Dimensional Portrayal of Jordan Peterson
“It is hard for even those of us who disagree profoundly with Peterson’s diagnoses of society to fail to empathize with his common struggle to get through being human.”
The Predicament of Contemporary Academia
“As a result, liberal arts education has been dragged down into the world that it previously resisted, subjugating honest intellectual inquiry to cheap ideological attachments and the profanities of political activity.”
In Praise of “Self Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race”
“With the benefit of distance—writing from the other side of the Atlantic—Williams came to understand how poisonous the concept of race is in the United States.”
Merion West: Why We Do What We Do
“Just as some married couples renew their vows, we, as a publication, will take a moment to do the same and explain why we’re still doing what we’re doing.”
Who Was Carl Schmitt?
“As just another political theology—albeit an especially vulgar one—liberalism would, paradoxically, be put into contexts where it abandoned a commitment to rights for the sake of protecting itself.”
Dear Jordan Peterson Fans, Try to Actually Be More Like Him
“Peterson is neither sacrosanct nor untouchable. He would agree with that statement himself.”
Nietzschean Thirst
“Those known as ‘the rabble,’ whom Zarathustra describes as fit only to be slaves, ultimately dwell within every human soul. It is that lowly thing in each of us which must be pitilessly overcome.”
Listen, Jordan Peterson: Marx Is Your Friend!
“Peterson should also reconsider his antipathy towards Marx because—perhaps surprisingly—if properly read, Marx would come across more as Peterson’s ally, rather than the origin of everything that is wrong with modernity.”
From Ben Shapiro to Stefan Molyneux: How the Right “Uses” Philosophy
“For the many activists and intellectuals on the Right, who identify with the ambiguously defined “Western civilization,” a nostalgic and selective association with Western civilization’s philosophical grandeur can be extremely appealing.”
On Mourning for One’s Enemies: Remembering Sir Roger Scruton
“And that is why I will miss Roger Scruton, enemy of my beliefs that he was.”
Killing of Soleimani Presents Opportunities, Not Just Challenges
“…it can be argued that the challenges emanating from this sequence of events have the potential to be turned into golden opportunities to clip the Islamic regime’s wings in the Middle East and beyond.”
Enough Empathy: the Case for Punching Down
“…because heedless empathy for the worst among us is currently leading us on the downward-sloping path to mediocrity and beyond.”
From Ayn Rand to Amartya Sen: Using the Concept of “Rights”
“Again, there seems to be no ideological bias against the concept of rights; views on the subject come from various distinct standpoints.”
Review: “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas” by Corey Robin
“Despite this, Thomas has also long acknowledged the history of racial discrimination in the United States and has never accepted the popular conservative trope that the impact of racism is merely a historical issue in the present day.“
Review: “Can the Left Learn to Meme? Adorno, Video Gaming, and Stranger Things” by Mike Watson
“Despite the majority of voters aged 18-39 resisting the smear campaigns and voting for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, Britain’s aging population overwhelmed the voice of its youth to take the landslide victory.”
Why Greta Thunberg Should Go Back to School
“As a fellow person with autism, I hope to make clear why educational support—and going to school—is so essential to the lives of people with autism.”
What Sohrab Ahmari Has Failed to Sense
“Such specious reasoning is so problematic that it may well produce more of the existential instability Ahmari is keen to reject, rather than placate it.”
Reflecting on the Start of a New Decade (and the Wisdom of Augustine)
“I must admit that as for many others, the last ten years were neither a singular triumph nor an unmitigated disaster. There were joys and sadnesses, the melody of life soaring high and crashing low. No one finds heaven on earth.”
The Decline of the Intellectual Dark Web
“…if one truly believes that the better argument can and should win the day, more formidable ammunition will be needed on the part of the Intellectual Dark Web.”
Pope Francis, the Consummate Politician
“From its very beginnings, Christianity has been fond of buddy tales, i.e. stories in which two great defenders of the faith become close friends.”
A Few Thoughts on Christmas
“If historical debunking is waging a ‘War on Christmas,’ then we must fire our artillery because, indeed, the story of Christmas has no historical basis whatsoever.”
When Neuroscience Interjects Itself into Debates on Sexuality
“The concept is called ‘reverse inference.’ It’s both neuroscience’s greatest ambition, and the origin of its most frustratingly breathless overstatements.”
Harold Macmillan, Roger Scruton, and Putting the U.K. Election in Context
“As Matthew Goodwin has repeatedly written, it is easier for the Conservatives to move slightly left on economic issues than it is for Labour to move right on cultural issues.”
As the Year Closes: Appreciating One’s Political Opponents
“In this spirit I would like to thank all the many individuals who have written or commented on my writing the last year, especially those who have offered sincere and interesting criticisms that have helped me develop my understanding of the world.”
Fact-Checking the Tweet that Got Andy Ngo Banned from Twitter
“While both of Ngo’s claims are technically true, the proper context paints a widely different picture.”
Understanding the Great Divide in Our Politics
“How could a movement predicated on free expression and identity-blind principles come to be associated with the Right and described as reactionary by smart progressive critics like Vox’s Ezra Klein?”
How ‘Ideology’ Can Hold Us Stuck in Place (Part II)
“Rapid innovations in communications technology and new media have made it so that any individual can access more knowledge at their fingertips than prior generations could have by traveling to the world’s most esteemed centers of learning.”
Why Karl Marx Is Wrong
“Running a profitable enterprise is not the same thing as Smaug guarding a pile of gold.”
Why the Left Should Take Hayek Seriously, Too
“As a student pointed out during a lecture on this subject, this Hayekian market is probably closer to the Open Source movement in software development than to what is commonly invoked with the words ‘free market.’”
Why Everyone Is Talking about Josh Hawley
“Hawley talks again and again about the importance of community and criticizes those on both sides of the political aisle who pay fealty to an individualism that puts the self-creating individual at the summit of what constitutes the good.“
Actually, Bernie Sanders, Billionaires Should Exist
“To deny the billionaires of today the aspiration to earn as much as they do (let alone the right), we deny the possibility for everyone else to earn it tomorrow.”
In Reply to Geoffrey Miller: Polyamory Becomes Polygyny
“Miller is a bit naïve here. He does not seem to notice that, as a general rule, polyamory eventually becomes polygyny.”
How ‘Ideology’ Can Hold Us Stuck in Place
“What it means is that when we begin to coordinate our lives according to an ideological worldview, it begins to generate a social world that can look a lot like the image presented by the ideology.”
Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, and the Utilitarian Road to Nowhere
“American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind has determined six fundamental human values: fairness, liberty, hierarchy, care, loyalty, and sanctity. But utilitarian thinkers have reduced people’s values to just care and equality.”
What Share of Socialists Want to Abolish Families?
“John Rawls, surely the most relevant philosopher of justice in the 20th Century, was aware of this problem and notoriously asked if the family should be abolished, with no clear answers.”
Developing a Progressive Theory of Rights: A Preview of Liberalism and Liberal Rights
“Finally, even a thinker as cynical and sharp as Michel Foucault invoked the language of rights to discuss the ‘right to intervene’ to liberate suffering individuals from the imposition of tyrannical sovereignty.”
The Particular Discomfort Neurodivergents Have with Speech Codes
“The patterns of behavior that characterize a broad part of the autistic spectrum are indirectly viewed as a hindrance towards the 21st-century diversity and inclusion goals.”
A Chapter from Our Forthcoming Book Critiquing Jordan Peterson
“Peterson consistently invokes the Schopenhauerian-Nietzschean trope that the most important thing is to strengthen the self against the suffering of the world. The stronger one becomes, the greater and more worthy of respect and emulation by those around him.”
“OK, Boomer!” Understood
“Old leftists fully wish to hold Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Salvini and co., to account for their post-truthism. Meanwhile the younger leftist is likely to be ‘post-truth’ themselves.”
Why We’re Writing a Book-Length Critique of Jordan Peterson
“Diverse as they may be, these four authors are united by a desire to confront Peterson on his own terms—that is, to eschew tawdry criticism and ad hominem attacks and instead to get to the nucleus of his thought.“
The Solution to the “Incel” Problem
“A State that hopes to mingle in the bedroom is one step closer to totalitarianism, and that is why sex redistribution is a horrifying prospect. But, while not enforcing it, the State, and most importantly, leaders of civil society (most crucially, intellectuals), should send the message that monoga
The Driver of the Trumpian Movement: Resentment?
“But the more interesting argument Nietzsche puts forward is that resentment was at the base of many of the West’s egalitarian philosophies.”
Getting to the Bottom of Ben Shapiro’s Popularity
“Robinson’s article is both interesting and useful because it summarizes neatly and cogently almost every argument that those on the Left might make against Shapiro. However, it also begins to lay out a broad notion of why critiques of Shapiro usually fail.”
Thomas Friedman, Barack Obama, and the Longstanding Tumult in Syria
“Had Obama intervened strongly enough in 2013, Syria could have been his Bosnia, a long-running humanitarian disaster that a U.S. president halted after initially dragging his feet.”
Where Did Post-Modernism Come From?
“In this short essay, I will argue that there were three factors, which contributed to the emergence of post-modern culture.”
Pope Francis and “What Is Idolatry, Anyways?”
“And Pope Francis himself is wrong for, once again, being a populist and refusing to call a spade a spade; he wants support from the Left and thus defends Pachamama, but he also wants support from the Right and thus condemns idolatry.”
Yoram Hazony, Russell Kirk, and the Conservative Fascination with “Order”
“By contrast, Kirk insists that progressives are the real fools in thinking that unbridled reason alone can provide us with an adequate sense of meaning in the world.”
Augustine and the Politics of Love
“Compared to the other classical political philosophers, Augustine stands apart from not articulating a preferred political order or what the ideal order would be. And that is the point.”
Halloween Moral Panics, on Both the Left and Right
“Despite the absurd views of evangelical pastors, college diversity officers, and Latin American leftist nationalists, Halloween is unstoppable, and this is for the good of humanity.”
Injecting Nuance into the Reparations Debate
“But when addressing a problem of justice, popularity is neither the sole nor the primary factor for adjudication.”
Franco’s Exhumation: An Opportunity to End One-Sided Narratives
“In fact, many of the generals who participated in the 1936 rebellion used the 1934 rebellion as an excuse: if the Left was not willing to give recognition to a legitimately constituted government, then now the Right was not under the obligation to do so, either.”
What Socialists and Creationists Have in Common
“[W]hile you see the products and services provided for you by the government, you are forever blind to the benefits that would have been provided by those same resources had the government not confiscated them…”
Somewhere Between the Marquis de Sade and the Twist
“…nor could [Houellebecq] have emerged from the hundreds of wallet-siphoning creative writing MFA programs, whose grasp on the American literary world has sanitized literature to an unreadable degree.”
Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and the Left’s False Anti-Imperialist Crusade
“Through rallying anti-war movements and opposing any Western intervention (including humanitarian missions), many Western socialist intellectuals have, in fact, turned themselves into foot soldiers for authoritarian and undemocratic regimes.”
Identity Politics, Coleman Hughes, and the Left: A Reply to Samuel Kronen
“We should be aspiring to establish a far more egalitarian society in accordance with principles of fairness. But this cannot come at the expense of respecting alternative doctrines which have a right to political expression.”
“Things We Pretend Not to Know”: Douglas Murray and the Futilitarian Paradigm
“Mill is pointing to a driver, perhaps the chief driver of inequality in our economic system. The ‘capital’ that young people today are unable to accumulate is, in fact, land (i.e. location) value.”
Sorry Noam Chomsky, the World Needs the United States
“The United States has no other option but to, as Niall Ferguson phrases it, cease to be an empire-in-denial, and come to terms with the fact that, for now, the world needs a global policeman, and the United States is the one country that can play that role.”
The Similar Artistic Appeal of Jordan Peterson and Ta-Nehisi Coates
“In a media environment where heady intellectuals spray the air with heady jargon, it is a joy just to have people who keep the spirit of human aspiration alive through art and creative representation.”
The Left Is No Stranger to Conspiracy Theories Either
“Matt McManus analyzes conspiracy mongering in the United States by focusing on President Donald Trump and Dinesh D’Souza (a right-wing nut), but he neglects to mention Oliver Stone or Louis Farrakhan, conspiracy theorists who sing to the tune of the Left.”
Review: Matt McManus’ “The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism”
“McManus draws a historical trajectory that sees conservatives responding to the challenges of socialism, communism, and fascism by hardening Burke’s pragmatic project into an ideology: what we now call neoliberalism.”
Enduring Lessons from Early 20th Century Neuroscience
“More importantly to Cajal, however, is that theorists care more about telling a good story than giving it to us straight. When the current state of knowledge is disorganized and uninteresting, according to Cajal, that’s exactly what we should be saying.”
Slavoj Žižek, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Philosophy of Climate Change
“It does not take an expert logician to deduce that if climate catastrophe were really upon us, we would also observe people giving extreme warnings, and it could even be the case that they still would not support, for example, nuclear power.”
Coleman Hughes and Critiques of the Left: An Open Letter to McManus
“Although the line seems quite clear as to when right-wing ideas have gone too far, the same clarity just isn’t there for when left-wing ideas go bad.”
Review: Axel Honneth’s “The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal”
“While this may be a fair criticism of socialist intellectuals, it isn’t obvious to me that all socialists were as myopically economistic as Honneth suggests.”
Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility Theory Falls Prey to Logical Fallacies
“Unfortunately, in so blithely dismissing individualism, DiAngelo hinges her theory so heavily on collective, rather than individual, identity and experience that it dies on the sword of a logical fallacy.”
Shakespeare, a Political Theorist Too
“That they are tragedies also reveals Shakespeare’s pessimistic outlook on politics. Politics is a tragic necessity. But it comes with a cost. Namely, the forsaking of love.”
Answering Slavoj Žižek’s Question: Kant’s Unpopularity
“In his book, Žižek analyzes why Kant and his progeny have been struggling philosophically in recent years, while offering a partial defense of their views.”
The $1 Per Day Issue
“Given the endless current debates on immigration-related topics, the ‘$1 Per Day Issue’ issue has, at times, arguably been lost amid other questions that are frequently raised about our current immigration policies.”
Napoleon Chagnon and the Myth of the Noble Savage
“Two hundred years later, Venezuelans speak of natives as a national asset—and sometimes even a touristic attraction—that enhances their national pride, very much like oil fields, beauty queens, Miguel Cabrera, or Angel Falls.”
Slavoj Žižek, Jason Stanley, and Understanding Fascism
“Žižek observes that while many thought this kind of politician was an anachronistic oddity in mid-2000’s neoliberal societies, Berlusconi may actually have been an archetype of the future.”
“Give Them An Argument: Logic For The Left”—A Review
“Give Them An Argument, at times, reads like an instruction pamphlet on how to use logic to defeat our political opponents, a social democratic version of Sun Tzu’s Art Of War, and, in that sense, Burgis might have more in common with his overzealous conservative opponents that he might realize.”
Writing in the Tradition of Rawls—to Understand Trump
“McManus…is much closer to the analytic tradition represented by authors such as John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum. Yet, his work is much richer thanks to his engagement with Marxist class analysis and post-structuralist philosophy…”
How Slavoj Žižek Can Help Us Understand Climate Change
“There have been several assaults on this conceit before in the Western world; the philosopher Slavoj Žižek directs our attention to three in particular.”
Jordan Peterson, Nietzsche, and Avoiding Living for Happiness Alone
“The resistance displayed towards these important thinkers is most regrettable, and for all the Complacent Men quick to criticize them, doing so makes you no closer to achieving your ever so desired—and elusive—’happiness.’”
A Brief History of Viktor Orbán
“Lendvai believes that we should never underestimate the role that ‘personalities’ play in politics.”
Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories
“The paradox of believing in conspiracy theories is that—despite the distrust and paranoia reflected in them—adherents often deeply desire a sense of order in the world.“
What’s Next for British Conservatism?
“While material prosperity should be a priority, it shouldn’t be the only priority. Simply possessing the latest consumer goods won’t provide a meaningful life that comes from a sense of dignity, purpose and responsibility rooted in community.”
Edward Snowden: Courageous Whistleblower or Useful Idiot?
“Sadly, Snowden suffered from a syndrome that is too typical among activists in the West: in their zeal for criticism of their own country or civilization, they end up favoring other countries or civilizations that are far worse.”
The Roots of Totalitarianism
“The totalitarian movements offered the promise of not just belonging, but total belonging. The individual would be swallowed into the movement, becoming a single homogenous mass with one’s fellows.”
The Spanish Philosopher Who Best Understood Populism
“For Ortega y Gasset, the elite has nothing to do with class or any other kind sociocultural factors. The elite are simply those who make great demands of themselves.”
Dostoevsky, Milton, and the Changing Definition of “Meaning”
“In the case of our current crisis of meaning, it was only in the 19th century that sensitive figures truly began to grasp the profound changes which had transformed societies.”
Review: J.A. Smith’s “Other People’s Politics: Populism to Corbynism”
“So confident were many in the apparent neutrality and sensibility of the third way approach that the difference between Conservatives and Labor, much like the Republicans and the Democrats, started to look merely cosmetic.”
Better Understanding Plato’s Republic
“Plato’s Republic is not, primarily, asking the question ‘what is justice?’ as much as it is asking what kind of city do we live in? Before we can address any political issue we must first know whether we are living under a regime of tyranny or liberty.”
Why Christians Should Oppose Sohrab Ahmari
“In many ways, it was far better to see Christendom shrunk down to a few genuine believers than to see it ballooned and enforced into a parody of itself”
Jordan Peterson, Noam Chomsky, and What We Mean by “Left” and “Right”
“For these reasons, I think it is not unreasonable to identify this nature-nurture or nature-history spectrum as the basic guiding principle behind the left-right spectrum.”
The Uses and Misuses of Philosophy
“I wanted to take this opportunity to consider some of the ways philosophy has been used and misused in contemporary political debates to justify a broad range of positions.”
On the Death of Immanuel Wallerstein
“For that reason, I hold that Wallerstein’s ideas are very questionable, but his work is still worthy of consideration.”
The Philosophy of Human Rights (Part II)
“The state must respect the freedom and autonomy of those fleeing violence by accepting them within its boundaries and offering them hospitality, which makes for a precursor to modern refugee law.”
The Philosophy of Human Rights
“Even those who agree that rights exist struggle to locate where they come from, what counts as a genuine right, and how to realize them.”
Sophocles and the Necessity of Family
“Instead of the gods being our deliverance, the family is the instrument of salvation and the bulwark against tyranny in his surviving plays.”
Slavoj Žižek and the Quillette Hoax
“But this just shows that Žižek is right in that there is no such thing as seeing the world as it really is. There is always something that mediates perception.”
The Four Competing Approaches to Higher Education
“Many critics point out that this one dimensional approach to education helps produce citizens who are selfish, disinterested in politics, and unprepared for dealing with moral complexities, which are not reducible to cost-benefit analysis.”
Euripides: Oracle of Modernity
“Euripides’ gods are the gods of Hesiod given a new, cunning, and manipulative makeover. Furthermore, they are depicted as clear threats to the human social order.“
Taking Science Fiction Seriously
“Today, it is science fiction that often carried the torch of the utopian aspiration.”
Orwell: the Best Student of the Left
“The typical socialist often had very little concrete experience with the actual conditions facing those they purported to care about. They were often middle class, well educated, and highly resentful of the rich.”
Where Hayek and Marx Part Ways
“The most committed liberal would believe that perfection is unattainable, while the socialist would contend that it is not only possible but necessary.”
Where Tolstoy Departs from Dostoevsky
“Tolstoy was not naïve in thinking that social and political reform would end all forms of evil in human life. Like Dostoevsky, he was very well aware that much wickedness flowed from the pride and vanity of men like Napoleon or the Russian tsars.”
“Frozen Desire” By James Buchan: As Relevant Now As Ever
“The Romanticism of the 19th century was a direct response to not only the materialist underpinnings of the Enlightenment but also the increasingly monetary-centric worldview that subsumed all human relations.”
Kevin Williamson, “The Bard of Anti-Socialism”
“Perhaps Williamson’s own ability to overcome those obstacles has led him to underestimate how formidable a challenge they can pose, a clear example of upward mobility hardening the hearts of the precious few it bestows itself upon.”
Slavoj Žižek, Music, and the End of Capitalism
“The basic thought is that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
Dostoevsky’s Extremely Thoughtful Critique of the Left
“People do not truly want an end to suffering in all cases…They need challenges in order to feel the thrill of victory, guilt over their actions to have a chance at redemption, and the possibility of rejection and hatred to feel any deep form of love.”
Jordan Peterson’s Thinkspot and Public Utilities
“Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media platforms are much more like churches or clubs than they are like a public plaza, regardless of their size.”
I Love a Black Ariel, But I Hate Identity Politics
“So, all those people that tweet #notmyariel are probably arguing that if Black Panther necessarily has to be black, Ariel necessarily has to be white.”
The Shallowness of the Intellectual Dark Web
“Edmund Burke’s arguments against the French Revolutionaries resonate because he understood the revolutionaries’ position quite well.”
Preview: Human Dignity and the Law
“If individuals are able to become authors of their lives in a substantive way, we can say they have lived a dignified life.”
Is the Apostle Paul Relevant in the 21st Century?
“Famously, Nietzsche despised Paul for distorting Jesus’ original message and bringing forth an obsession with sin. The result, in Nietzsche’s view, is Christianity’s unhealthy emphasis on guilt and renunciation.”
Jordan Peterson: A Libertarian Reading
“In a few hundred pages of personal anecdotes, lessons from history, and psychological expertise, Jordan Peterson offers strategies for the individual to rise and face life’s hardships, and to find meaning in the fight for personal betterment.”
When We Debate “Biological Differences”
“The framing of these arguments, I believe, is largely misguided. Right and Left are, after all, moral and political positions and not scientific ones.”
Burke’s Aesthetics Formed the Core of His Politics
“Those who deal in political aesthetics have long noted that Burke’s aesthetics is the core ground of his outlook.”
Review: Kevin O’Rourke’s “A Short History of Brexit: From Brentry to Backstop”
“Importantly, he notes that it was initially the Conservative party that embraced European integration and the Labour Party which vehemently opposed it.”
A Closer Look at Simón Bolívar
“Insomuch as the historical figure of Bolívar still has considerable influence in contemporary Latin American politics, some demythologizing and criticism is in order.”
A Preview of “The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism”
“Perhaps it would be a great Christmas present for the depressed Leftist in one’s life?”
Jordan Peterson’s Thinkspot Probably Isn’t about “Free Speech”
“It makes sense to frame the issue as being about free speech, however, because it is likely seen as a much more worthwhile cause.”
Review: “Big Business” by Tyler Cowen
“Pulling from history, economic data, and even psychology, Dr. Cowen explains why the anti-business sentiment is mistaken, how it originated, and what we should do about it.”
The Secular Age Fails to Escape Its Roots
“These transformations in understandings of sacrifice culminate in what today we think of as our ‘liberation’ from centuries of naïveté and superstition.”
Pope Francis’ Change to the Lord’s Prayer: Another Cheap Applause Line
“His purpose seems to be diverting attention from these real concerns, by projecting a revolutionary image of a kind Pope who preaches a loving God, far removed from the deity who destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with sulphur.”
The False Binary Between Freedom and Equality (Part II)
“What constitutes a sufficiently high level of education and intelligence to participate in politics is unclear, and advocates of these elitist positions are suspiciously prone to announcing the cut-off point lies with individuals roughly as capable and qualified as themselves.”
Godzilla and Environmental Pessimism
“But like his philosophical cousins before him, Godzilla cannot exist because the ideas upon which he is based are incorrect. He cannot exist because pessimism is false.”
When Superstitions Govern World Leaders
“Maduro claims communication with Chávez via birds, but let us recall that George W. Bush once said that God told him to invade Iraq.”
Where Conservatives Go From Here
“While it may seem strange to some to see people on the Right express skepticism—and even disdain—for the free market, it is increasingly common.”
We Will All Be Banned
“TechCrunch uses the word ‘hate’ so many times—and so without any obvious meaning, that it strikes me as likely a form of attempted Pavlovian conditioning.”
The False Binary Between Freedom and Equality (Part I)
“It is not hard to infer that Locke may have been concerned that universal suffrage would result in concerted efforts to establish a more egalitarian society.”
St. Peter and St. Paul: A “Bromance” That Never Was
“Yet, Christianity is a more complicated religion, because in its traditions, fact and fiction intermingle, and it is not always easy to determine which is which.”
Is the Intellectual Dark Web as “Reasonable” As It Claims?
“Once one actually delves into the positions put forward by many of members of the Intellectual Dark Web, it becomes clear they are just as fallible as their intellectual opponents.”
Nationalism: No Longer a Dirty Word, But Complicated as Ever
“If it is possible to have symbols and narratives that bind an imagined community of 300 million people or of one billion, it should be equally possible to imagine a community of seven billion and to construct a coherent narrative around it and create appropriate symbolisms.”
When Marx Attacked The Single Tax
“Georgism dissolves socialism; it is pro-worker and pro-capital at the same time. This is impossible for the socialist who believes to his core that labor can only win if capital loses.”
When David Harvey Writes on Marx
“While I do not always agree with Harvey’s appraisals of Marx’s arguments, there is no better secondary source to learn what that argument happens to be.”
Is “Western Civilization” a Worthwhile Conceptual Framework?
“This exposes a basic problem of the conservative idealization of the Western tradition; it relies on an artificial, if not arbitrary construction that only makes sense in retrospect.”
A Deep Dive into Ben Shapiro’s Book
“That ‘conservatives’ today celebrate the book speaks volumes of the leftward drift of conservatism and the confused state of existence conservatism is in.”
“Classical Liberals” and the Alt-Right
Do some classical liberals and libertarians have more in common ideologically with the alt-right than they’d like to believe?
The Perennially Difficult Debate Around Tyrannicide
“It is, for the most part, a taboo, presumably because of how morally outrageous it seems—and because no sensible person wants to go down as proposing assassinations.”
Climate Change Makes a Thanos of Us All
“We need a philosophy of problem-solving, not problem-avoidance. And yes, while stalling techniques are useful, their primary function is to give us more time to create active solutions, not avoid them all together.”
Nietzsche’s First Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Nietzsche has little unqualified good to say about individual modern philosophers—save one: Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
“The Mirror Test”: A Way to Assess Philosophies?
Is “The Mirror Test” a new tool by which to evaluate philosophies?
What Ben Shapiro Gets Right
“Shapiro’s book is a well-written and, at times, moving defense of Western Civilization.”
Who Was Joseph de Maistre (And Why He Matters) Part II
“Maistre is a fascinating thinker not so much due to the quality of his arguments themselves but instead what they represent and anticipate.”
Jordan Peterson and Equality
An investigation of how Jordan Peterson engages with the idea of “equality.”
On Nihilism and the Power of Nothing
“While the mass man is the product of his history, the mass man recognizes no necessary connection or debt to his past. He is ‘the spoiled child of human history’ with a, ‘radical ingratitude to all that has made possible the ease of his existence.’”
Who Was Joseph de Maistre? (And Why He Matters)
“Notice how Maistre does not consider the actions of the people valid because they committed a crime against the nation by undermining its sovereign.”
Steven Strogatz’s “Infinite Powers”: Science Is a Story of People
“Because we tend only to see the final product of an intellectual endeavor, it is easy to forget that even titans such as Archimedes cannot know the final answer before they get their hands dirty with the problem at hand.”
On Trump Hatred: A Plea from the Heart(land)
“Many features of this region have stood out—but few more prominently than the generosity of its people. They are devoted to their churches; they volunteer their time; they give to charity; they start charities; they adopt children.”
The Enduring Relevance of Philip K. Dick
“We turned to technology as a substitute for our inability to deal with the persistent riddles of existence and the lack of meaning in our life in a post-God era.”
“Democracy” and the Language of the Founders
“A republic that moves too close to an oligarchy would require democratization.”
Conservatives Can’t Hide Behind the Trope of “Common Sense”
“Simply invoking ‘realism’ or ‘common sense’ doesn’t add up to anything resembling an argument.”
Book Preview: Making Human Dignity Central to International Human Rights Law
“Analyzing the relationship is important because, as we all know, oftentimes law is not a medium for justice. Rather it is one that operates to repress, marginalize, and even tyrannize under the right circumstances.”
Roger Waters Has a Point: Foreign Aid Is Flawed
“In the end, whether it is rich businesspeople donating their money for the reconstruction of a national monument or ‘average Joe’s’ trying to help others in need, foreign aid is, and always will be, flawed.”
Beyond Ideology
“How alien this experience of total control is to our everyday existence in the chaotic, inexplicable universe. For just this reason, we fashion ideologies to live out our fantasies of control.”
Slavoj Žižek’s Concept of Rupture—and Post-Truth
“In the matter of politics, our society has become a consumer of emotions, constructed values, and ambiguous promises.”
Understanding Hitler’s Worldview (Part II)
“The risk in our increasingly polarized and tribally divided times is that these societies —ours among them—are thrashing around in a sea of hopeless liquid modernity and risk coming apart in a storm of violence.”
Has Ben Shapiro Outgrown Being a Polemicist?
“But there are times in every polemicist’s career when he must take a genuine stab at intellectual respectability, put away sloganeering and manic hyperbole and see not through the dark lens of partisanship, but grasp the complex world as it truly is.”
Slavoj Žižek, Jordan Peterson, and Atheists Who Believe in God
“Peterson’s importance is his powerful and influential insistence that religion is not arbitrary or malevolent—that in every developed form we encounter it, religious stories are archetypal of the human condition in a way nothing else can or ever will be.”
Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek Ended Up with Much in Common
“Despite these contrasts, one of the striking things about the debate was how frequently Zizek and Peterson seemed to agree with one another.”
The Cinnabon Made Me Do It: Surprising Influences on Moral Behavior
“These factors seem to have a demonstrable impact on our behavior, and yet are morally irrelevant in the sense that they should not matter to what a morally virtuous person would do. What should we make of results like these?”
An Age-Old Question: Why Would God Allow Notre Dame to Burn?
“Ultimately, it seems to me that the Notre Dame fire may indeed prove that that particular place of worship is not the abode of God.”
Three Lessons from the Rwandan Genocide, 25 Years Later
“The 1994 tragedy proved that the concept of sovereignty must have limits, and that major powers do have a duty to intervene to alleviate humanitarian crises, such as genocides.”
What Notre Dame Says about Civilization
“The destruction of Notre Dame has shaken our complacent belief in the permanence of things and the ability for our culture to last without care and cultivation. It reveals and reminds us that life is a fragile thing, and even the strongest bastions dedicated to the eternal can still be brought down
Liberalism and Relativism (Part II)
“The argument that people should value ideals beyond the pursuit of their self-interest and subjective opinion was an elitist way of looking at things, and De Tocqueville’s Americans would have none of it.”
Understanding Hitler’s Worldview (Part I)
“[Werner Catel] called for the continuation of the Nazi program of involuntary euthanasia, saying, “…We are not talking about humans here, but rather beings that were merely procreated by humans and that will never themselves become humans endowed with reason or a soul.”
The Racism Dialectic
“In the contemporary political landscape, racism seems to be an indefatigable issue. I have noticed that those who advocate anti-racism, ironically, have a tendency to fight fire with fire—that is, racism with racism.”
Mexico Demands Apology from Spain as Trump Bears Down
“The ‘Spain Affair’ is not a foreign policy strategy, but a national strategy to achieve López Obrador’s political goals. At 7 am tomorrow, we are convinced a new controversy regarding Mexico’s foreign policy will arise. This is not over yet.”
Liberalism and Relativism (Part I)
“The point of politics can, therefore, never be to try and make individuals act well. Indeed, for Hobbes the very idea that there is any good or evil beyond our subjective desires is vainglorious and foolish.”
What Can Thucydides Teach Us About China’s Rise to Power?
“The problem with America as a maritime power in Asia is that, like the United Kingdom of yesteryear, the United States is not an Asian power.”
The Modernity Project Can Create Confusion
“For some, the possibilities for self-creation and emancipation promised by modernity were exhilarating. For others, it has proven to be a serious social problem.”
Is Elizabeth Holmes an Outlier: Women in STEM (Part II)
“We know a lot of cases of corrupt and fraudulent men, but we are not used to seeing female names associated with this type of behavior. One of the main reasons is because the percentage of women in leadership and influential positions is quite low.”
Is Elizabeth Holmes An Outlier: Women in STEM (Part I)
“There are more men named John running large companies than women.”
McManus: A Preview of My Forthcoming Book
“Neoliberal society and post-modern culture emerged together on the promise that they could provide greater economic prosperity and opportunities for self-development than any other social form.”
Politics and Nihilism
“Because the youth of today are primarily taught that the point of life is simply to achieve satisfaction, they are prone to a kind of easy relativism which seeks to not judge between superior or inferior ways of life.”
The Splits in Anglo-Saxon Conservatism
Emre Kazim and Matt McManus discuss the differences between the British and American brands of conservatism and how they come to bear on current political debates, including “Brexit.”
Jordan Peterson and Christianity (Part II): Culture and Immortality
“In our lifetimes, many populations in Europe will age and shrink drastically due to their lack of belief in the possibility of transcending death, a belief that undergirds culture.”
A Review of Bash Bash Revolution by Douglas Lain
“Lain’s novel Bash Bash Revolution is not just a very funny work of science fiction (though it is). It is also very much a piece of engaged leftism; its irony and satire are never declaratory or moralistic…”
Emotion and Conservatism: Edmund Burke vs. Jordan Peterson
“Similar to Peterson’s argument that happiness is not the sole purpose of life, Burke claims that the ‘pain’ the sublime instills in us is extremely helpful.”
Standing Up to Machismo
“Just being a woman in politics has not necessarily meant supporting policies in favor of other women. For example, a deputy in Veracruz proposed establishing a 10pm curfew for women to avoid more femicides in her state.”
“Feminism”: A War Against Women?
“I am a single college student with jobs but no set career. Unlike Newman, I cannot speak for anyone else, but I can say that I did not appreciate her representation of our sex.”
In Defense of Jordan Peterson’s Religious Beliefs
“However, [Peterson’s] general statements about God do, or would, find a home in Catholic and Orthodox theological dogma and tradition.”
The Decline and Fall of Neoliberal Hegemony
“Another problem of Friedman’s analysis is the way that he, like many neoliberals, condemns government intervention, yet is nevertheless willing to take credit for all of the positive gains it has accrued.”
Religion and the Left: A Reply to McManus
“The ideas of the Right are more powerful precisely because they are more primitive. Fraternity between differing religious, racial, and linguistic communities is of greater abstraction than fraternizing with one’s co-religionist and inter-linguistic community.”
In Further Defense of Nations: A Response to McManus
“As such, quiet gratitude rather than arrogant pride is, I believe, the right attitude to take towards the idea of the nation.”
What Is an Intellectual?
“What is it, then, that intellectuals should do? In order to answer this question, it is first necessary to return to a claim made earlier, namely that the telling of truth cannot be the responsibility of an intellectual because being an intellectual, in its very definition, is truth-telling.”
On Winners, Losers, and Tribalism
“This means conservatives are actually quite willing to engage in radical social change, but only if they feel that it is necessary to counter efforts by the Left to destroy these hierarchies.”
Jordan Peterson and Christianity: Doctrine and Truth (Part I)
“Like Pelagius, Peterson thinks we can achieve salvation through our own efforts of will, without the grace of God. Like the aforementioned Gnostics, Peterson repeatedly argues that we each have a spark of the divine in us, so can manifest the divine here and now in our damned world of suffering.”
The Failure of Nations: A Reply to Henry George
“So claiming that the Nazi’s nationalism and imperialism were exceptional strikes me as untrue. Almost all of the modern nation-states held up as examples made exceptions of Westphalian principles for themselves, often invoking national glory or superiority as an excuse.”
The Need for Nations
“It may sound trite to say so, but the national state is the worst way of arranging and governing human societies, apart from all the others.”
Roberto Unger is the Philosopher the Left Needs
“Whether one buys into his system, the Left needs more thinkers with Unger’s courage and intellectual ambition.”
The Intellectual Dark Web: An Analysis from the Left
“Strangely enough, for all its notoriety, the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ has few of the characteristics of a unified movement oriented around concrete goals.”
Sisterhood and Solidarity: A Feminist Utopia
“Intra-sexual competitive behavior remains a major barrier to women’s full inclusion in the university workplace, and we would be wise to break it down.”
A Review of “Too Fat to Go to the Moon” by Rob McCleary
“Like any good satirist, McLeary directs a lot of his vitriol against the powers that be. He condemns the wealthy families and politicos that encouraged the country to give into its worst impulses, and then fled into space when the inevitable decline set in.”
Edward Said: Bad Scholar and Bad Character
“Changing the meanings of previously understood words is what ideologues do.”
The Case for Humanity (Part IV)
“A technologically-advanced species with the capacity to destroy itself had better learn how to work together.”
Why Edmund Burke Would Oppose Originalism
“Burke’s place in the American conservative pantheon is peculiar if not paradoxical.”
Progress and Poverty at Amazon HQ2
“As has sometimes been noted, one can buy a castle in some parts of Europe for less than a modest condo in San Francisco.”
The Case for Humanity (Part III)
“Rather than emphasizing abstract duty like Kant—or God, as Kierkegaard did—Nussbaum maintains that we become who we are through the people we interact with and the projects we are capable of pursuing.”
What Howard Zinn Forgets
“No one people, nation or culture has a monopoly on the shadows of human nature. Historians influenced by Zinn and the story he tells should try to remember this.”
A Reply to Matt McManus: The Last Man
“There appear then to be two kinds of people: those who presume history has ended and those who do not presume history has ended.”
The Case for Humanity (Part II)
“And this is the rub of Kant’s political critique of nationalist-type arguments. If the nationalist allows too much deviation from the shared identity of the nation, then his society risks becoming one of liberal individuals.”
Analysis: Why Is Iowa a Purple State?
What factors make Iowa in play for both Republicans and Democrats?
The Case For Humanity (Part I)
“We needn’t regard internationalism as a failed or misguided project, which the 20th century demonstrated was destined for the ash heap of history. Rather we should regard it as our first, clumsy, and tentative steps towards establishing a more complete global union.”
What Can Machiavelli Teach Us About the Midterms?
“For it is through political conflict that greater representation is born, more interests come to the table, and the expansion and development of liberty and order comes about.”
Is Steven Pinker Wrong About Violence Declining?
“In many parts of the world, the anarchy came, and those like Pinker who insist otherwise should reflect on whether their claims really reflect reality, or whether they are simply bromides used by those thought-leaders who see the horror and turn away, looking to statistics as consolation against th
Book Review: “Fashionable Nonsense” 20 Years Later
“Moreover, this also implies postmodern writers should be far more modest and careful when criticizing the virtues of science and reason, since it is not clear that they fully appreciate what it is that scientists actually do and believe.”
Why the Left Needs to Think About Religion (And Other Big Questions)
“The political right has long been better at playing the Nietzschian game of values than the political left.”
Can Carl Schmitt Explain How We Got from the Cold War to Trump?
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States and the West lost their common foreign enemy. Would the sense of rivalry that characterized these tensions abroad then turn inwards, once no common enemy remained?
The Rebirth of History: Part II
While post-modern conservatism is not doomed to failure due to some immanent dialectical process, it is utterly unable to rectify the social and political problems of the day.
A Reply to Henry George: “The Virtue of Nationalism”
“Unless there are certain universal mores, then a preference for the national values of the United Kingdom over those of Iran seem purely aesthetic, not moral.”
Where the Alt-Right Really Comes From
“As Ross Douthat says, you may have hated the religious Right but wait until you see the post-religious Right.”
The Rebirth of History: Part I
“Proponents of identity politics tended to push for these historically marginalized groups, in all their intersectional complexity, to have a greater say in the cultural and political dynamics of the day.”
What the Left Can Learn From Søren Kierkegaard
“I believe the Left has a great deal that is can learn from these arguments. For too long we have left problems of meaning to the Right, while largely focusing on issues of material equality and political participation.”
Is Jordan Peterson More Postmodern Than He Thinks?
“Peterson is aligned with the alt-right not because he is a card-carrying member but because both he and the alt-right are nostalgic for previous paradigms. They yearn for the America of yesteryear—the same time period Trump and his supporters envision when they call to ‘Make America Great Again.’”
A Review of Yoram Hazony’s “The Virtue of Nationalism”
“David Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, embodies the opposite view to that of the EU. Auschwitz was possible because there was one nation not in existence: Israel.”
On Critical Legal Studies and the Limits of Critique
“While the task of critique is always important, it is not sufficient if the expectation is simply that deconstructing regimes of marginalization will immanently lead to the emergence of some vaguely conceived egalitarian society.”
Forget “Don’t Worry Be Happy.” Suffering Can Be Good for You
“We are constantly told to free ourselves from our traumas and pain, but what if we just accepted them?”
A Year and a Half After Mark Fisher’s Death, His Thinking Rings True
“It is easier to imagine Emperor Palpatine of the Sith falling than to imagine a politician effectively challenging the power of Wall Street.”
It’s Nostalgia That’s Driving Modern Politics
“If the present seems increasingly like nothing more than a depressing prelude to a dark and unchanging future, it is unsurprising that individuals may look to past for answers to their personal problems.”
“Canada in Decay” is True to Western Liberal Values: A Rejoinder
The final exchange in the debate between Professor Ricardo Duchesne and Professor Matt McManus over the book Canada in Decay and Canadian immigration policies.
On Antonin Scalia and the Problems With Originalism
“It is the appealing but ultimately confusing conflation of textualism with Constitutional conservatism, of facts and norms, which gives textualism its ideological power.”
Jordan Peterson and Living with My Disability
This article is more personal. I have some experience with Peterson’s description of suffering, and I believe that what he says is right.
Jordan Peterson and God
“After my most recent piece on Jordan Peterson, a string of correspondents contacted me with further questions and comments about my opinions about the controversial Canadian Professor (not words one usually sees strung together).”
Standing By My Criticism of “Canada in Decay”
“One wonders what Socrates, that foul destroyer of Western civilization, might say about appealing to book sales and public opinion as an argument for the correctness of one’s views.”
A Reply to Matt McManus’s Review of “Canada In Decay”
“How do we explain, then, the fact that the liberal nations that fought Nazism, Australia, Canada, and the United States, had immigration policies aimed at preserving their ethnic heritage? Should we call European nations with liberal constitutions racist if their populations vote for immigration re
Immigration, Technology, and the Winding Road to Trump
“Neoliberal economic policies have deepened the anxiety of many rural conservatives, who felt they were gradually being ‘replaced’ or outdated by an economic system which no longer prioritized the resource, industrial, and agricultural sectors.”
Why I Object to a “Left vs. Right” Political Spectrum
“The left, in all its myriad forms, is unified by a utopian vision and end goal. Meanwhile, ‘the right’ has no such vision and is made of many disparate groups who do not share end goals beyond a general opposition to the left.”
What Wordsworth and Kanye West Have in Common
It was Wordsworth who wrote in the language of the common man, thereby giving a microphone to those on the edges of society. Are the rappers of today following in his footsteps?
What I Learned from Corresponding with Jordan Peterson’s Supporters
“I very much understand why Jordan Peterson might appeal to many who feel attracted to the kinds of questions he is asking. My problem is with the specific answers he gives at a political level.”
What They Don’t Tell You about Jeremy Corbyn
“Since the days of his childhood, Corbyn has been able to engage in his socialist and New Left fantasies, insulated from the catastrophic consequences when they are put into practice.”
A Critique of Ricardo Duchesne’s “Canada in Decay”
“Wouldn’t the French-speaking Quebecois have more in common with, say, francophone Roman Catholics from Haiti who happen to be black? To avoid this conclusion, Duchesne shows a truly ugly side by just biting the bullet and claiming that skin color and race matters.”
Nietzsche Might Have Something to Say about Politics Today
“The right has clearly learned how to deploy the language of values, while recognizing that we have entered an era where blatantly contradictory positions can be a strength rather than a weakness.”
What is Post-Modernism? (Part Two)
“The world is not becoming meaningless; it is becoming so saturated with symbolism that meaning itself no longer means anything.“
Why I Am No Longer a Brexit “Remainer”
“Those who proclaim their concern for the poor in the abstract nearly always find that they hate what the poor believe in when confronted with it.”
What is Post-Modernism? (Part One)
“My point, and the point of the post-modern philosophers, was to demonstrate that even a simple word like apple can beget numerous interpretations, let alone words like justice, equality and so on.”
What Dave Rubin Gets Wrong
Henry George takes aim at today’s popularization of so-called “Classical Liberalism,” a movement that fails to appreciate that, for true conservatives, economic priorities are always subservient to ensuring social order.
The Age of Anxiety and the Rise of the “Postmodern Conservative”
“While we should note the absurdity of simultaneously blaming global elites and destitute refugees for the collapse of tradition and order, we also recognize that this confluence is the transference of a real but unsignified fear.”
“Purity Politics” Is Ruining Progressivism
The American Left needs to spend less time hitting the pavements criticizing government and institutions outright. Instead, they must do the less glamorous: study the policies that best help working people and then go to the polls and vote that way.
All Good Things Must Come to an End: An Overview of “Why Liberalism Failed.”
“So is Deneen right? Has liberalism failed? I think in the long run nothing wrought by the hand of man lasts forever. This includes political ideologies. We have a tendency to naturalize the world as it is and assume that things can never change.”
British Politics is Degraded and Divisive
“Trump’s visit saw him declare Britain to be in chaos (it is), that the current Brexit wasn’t what people voted for (it isn’t, and never would be), and that Boris Johnson would make a great prime minister.”
Who Was Martin Heidegger? (And Should Progressives Care?)
“This is especially true in large urban areas. Forces beyond our control compel us to focus on the now “yolo?” and live fragmented lives of needs and satisfaction. In these contexts, we focus on being like animals rather than selves, and become increasingly homogenous and indistinguishable.”
What is Human Dignity? Kant Sheds Light
“We are not just material objects in a value-free universe. Kant makes the radical and highly innovative argument that autonomy of the individual is the enabling condition of moral philosophy.”
What is a “Post-Modern Conservative”?
“As Harry Frankfurt of On Bullshit indicated, a liar is someone who still has some tangential sense of what the truth is. They are aware of what is true and choose to dishonestly present the opposite. This is not true of Mr. Trump and his acolytes.”
All the Fake News That’s Fit to Print
“This means that fact-checking is the fake solution to the real problem of fake news. It helps debunk the simple hoaxes, but it only adds undeserved gravitas to fake political narratives and metanarratives.”
Jordan Peterson and Conservative Critiques of Modernity
“If we value our heritage, conservative intellectuals like Peterson need to stop pandering to their followers, and instead start motivating them to be more reflective about the culpability of complex social forces.”
On Bias and Truth in the Public Sphere
“The unceasing accusations of bias are no longer used to promote dialogue and bridge interpretive frameworks. Instead, they are used to seal ourselves off inside bubbles that allow us to preserve the integrity of our world view, free from contamination by the views of others.”
Carl Schmitt, Liberalism, and Post-Modern Conservatism
“The practice of politics is always a form of violence, whether literal or figurative, as different groups of friends and enemies attempt to overcome one another and seize control of the state.”
Literature Meets Identity Politics: Lionel Shriver vs. Penguin-Random House
“Writers should be judged first by the quality of the content of their prose, not their identity. If we forget this, then the world of literature will be much poorer, and with the loss of this source of consolation, so will we all.”
Part Two: The Argument Against Jordan Peterson
“My suspicion is that many of Peterson’s readers feel an affinity to the advice he offers and so don’t look to question his political commitments that deeply. This is problematic because it leads to deep inconsistencies in doctrine that, if applied as stated, would lead to a rather unusual politics.
Does Loneliness Give Rise to Totalitarianism?
“What prepares men for totalitarian domination…is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”
A Critique of Jordan Peterson
“Why does Peterson get this so wrong? He simply doesn’t care to present a more complex narrative that would problematize his cute and hyperbolic story about the left.”
A Brief Critique of Originalist Constitutional Histories
The problem for originalists is that there is little truth or historical validity to their argument, which amounts to just a feel-good story of the Constitution’s natural legitimacy.
Misunderstanding Terrorism in Europe
Everywhere is becoming like Israel in the need to take security measures that encroach further and further into daily life. One would not be surprised if Israelis did not feel a sense of schadenfreude; after all, those who criticized Israel as a police state now indulge in the same practices.
On Marxism, Post-Modernism, and “Cultural Marxism”
The attempt to conflate Marxism and post-modernism under the label of “cultural Marxism” is, at the very least, highly problematic.
Leisure: When It Becomes an Unexpected Curse
“It’s what Irving Babbitt meant when he wrote that happiness is to be found in work if at all. Or why John Adams would write that he was happiest on days he felt most purposeful.”
Political Journalism: Rarely Scratching the Surface of Life
“But the columns that stick with us most of all rarely touch on the polls or the name-calling. Instead, they might be retired Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Bill Lyon’s ‘viewpoints’ columns, which chronicle the dissolution of his memory as he suffers from Alzheimer’s.”
The British Far-Left, A Culture Acquiescing to Anti-Semitism
Israel deserves criticism like any state, but its castigation on the Left (and elsewhere) goes way beyond that. Israel is now the world’s demonic Jew, subject to the calumnies and libels Jews have faced throughout history.
The Conflict over Character Education: Faith Schools in Britain
In the UK recently, there has been concern over the growth in private and unregistered faith schools.
Freedom of Speech? Meet the British Border
Lauren Southern’s unjust arrest is a threat to freedom of speech and philosophy. This is an example of how the UK Border Force’s efforts to keep citizens safe are misguided.
Three Free Speech Myths
Steve Simpson’s guide on how not to defend free speech.
You’re Probably Not Actually a Libertarian
Most college students claiming to be libertarians are actually just traditional conservatives misidentifying themselves. It’s because universities still take libertarian arguments seriously.
The Winter Olympics was a Show of Great Unity and Healthy Patriotism
The Winter Olympics encourage a healthy feeling of patriotism that does not unleash the tiger of unthinking nationalism.
Free Speech is Scary. The Solution: Speak Up
The parade of world leaders through the streets of central Paris made a mockery of the dead cartoonists; some of those who linked arms did all they could to suppress freedom of expression in their own countries.
The Left’s Silence on Iran Is Shameful
Most of Western media, leftist politicians, and feminist organizations have been largely silent on the recent protests in Iran. Sadly, this was to be expected.
Want to Help Disabled People? Treat Them as Individuals
Our human nature, something that is capable of cruelty or goodness, is something we all have in common, whether able or disabled.
The Media’s Nostalgia for the Bush Years Is Ridiculous
This is the President, after all, who did everything that the modern Left supposedly despises; this is the man who sent thousands of young Americans to their deaths in Iraq.
I’m Disabled, and I Despise Cultural Victimhood
As it currently stands, university campuses across the Western world are being eaten from the inside out – this is just an undeniable reality.
Pepe the Frog: The Roots of a Symbol
Opinion: This frog is the banner of the forgotten young male, with no place in the world.