The recent outlook for Indian secularism hasn’t been optimistic. General disappointment within the left abounds in our state institutions, and violent attacks from the right continue apace. Neither these facts, nor the recent judicial abdications in the face of them, are particularly surprising or new. What was shocking was
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. – Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog Ayn Rand was a brilliant, inventive thinker whose contributions go largely unsung outside libertarian circles. Rand developed a secular eudaimonist ethics decades before the 20th century revival of virtue ethics ignited. She pioneered
Despite the hesitancy in some quarters to acknowledge the likelihood of an invasion before February 24, the landscape of analysis and punditry—including myself—has, since that entire calamity earnestly began, come to terms with the fact that what Russia is doing in Ukraine right now is absolutely dreadful. The
Conservatives have long cast a suspicious eye on American government. They have questioned the efficacy and indeed, the constitutionality of the modern American state. Political debate surrounding the administrative state has raged within the courts, within Congress, and within the administrative apparatus of the executive branch itself. Pejoratively dubbed “the
It’s hard to imagine that the country that gave birth to Big Tobacco may soon sentence Americans to prison for selling menthol cigarettes or flavored e-cigarettes. Yet in states that have forbidden these products, arrests and prosecutions are already occurring. The Food and Drug Administration is also expected to
In those days I had seen little further than the old school of political economists into the possibilities of fundamental improvement in social arrangements. Private property, as now understood, and inheritance, appeared to me, as to them, the dernier mot of legislation: and I looked no further than to mitigating
The UN has long been held up as a model of international idealism—supporters see it as a possibility to create a better world, while even detractors tend to characterize it as if anything too idealistic to achieve its goal of global peace. Indeed, looking at UN documents like the
There are many factors in a free society which conspire to make the public sphere an unseemly terrain. Citizen sovereignty increases the stakes of public persuasion by distributing voting power so broadly that personal persuasion alone cannot suffice to keep elected officials in office. Consumer sovereignty leaves political media constrained
In 2005, shortly after he started blogging, Glenn Greenwald wrote an infamous and incendiary anti-immigrant post defending reactionary bigot Tom Tancredo. “Current illegal immigration—whereby unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate, and who consequently have no need, motivation or ability
We should abolish the National Environmental Policy Act. Nobody is saying this—but a lot of people are walking right up to saying it. This is understandable, given that “we should abolish the National Environmental Policy Act” sounds like something a Captain Planet villain would say. But it is the
In 2005, Tony Blair’s Labour Party won reelection in the United Kingdom. The result severely cut the overwhelming parliamentary majority that his “New Labour” brand had won in 1997 and 2001, but his party still retained a governing majority of 65 seats. That was larger than many majorities that
Debates about race and the legacy of racism have long dominated American politics. This spans the political spectrum, from the recent feverish efforts of conservatives to detect critical race theory everywhere to the left-liberal characterization of Trumpism as a fundamentally racist and xenophobic movement. This would no doubt come as