It’s easy—far too easy—to get drawn into the candidate freak show of the current California Gubernatorial Recall Race. The candidate statements in the Official Voter Information Guide contain a treasure trove of monomaniacs and narcissists with no one in their life who loved them enough to stop
It was once said that the role of boredom in political life is rarely appreciated. This is especially true when it comes to assessing the political right, which is often conceived of by its liberal opponents as stodgily committed to upholding tradition and convention even in the face of looming
From governments looking to sue or regulate and politicians grandstanding, through to journalists or politically-inclined observers raising a concern about corporate power, the idea of “monopoly” is often used to set the stage for a discussion on the market position and power of companies like Google and Facebook. Many in
Most Americans take pride in our Constitutional order, and the basic grade school version of it—with checks and balances, the three branches, and so forth—that they are familiar with. But they do not really know our system, because you cannot understand a system without some grasp of how
When analyzing events in foreign countries, it is important not to overemphasize the importance of one’s own – all politics are local, as they say, and every election is determined by a variety of factors, most of them internal. At the same time, a country the size of the United
It is allegiance which defines the condition of society, and which constitutes society as something greater than the ‘aggregate of individuals’ that the liberal mind perceives. It is proper for conservatives to be sceptical of claims made on behalf of the value of the individual, if these claims should conflict
“America is back,” anti-war and erstwhile progressive journalist Glenn Greenwald sneered on Twitter after it was announced that Democratic president Joe Biden had launched airstrikes against facilities in Syria and Iraq. Andrew Murray at Jacobin cosigned the sentiment in an article labeling Biden and British Labour leader Keir Starmer as
It’s no secret that America has a criminal justice problem that has been seeping into prisons and jails since the 1970s. Figures from the Prison Policy Initiative, found that nearly 2.3 million people are held in 1,833 states prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities,
The average person, but especially conservatives, would likely tell the story of American progress, how we became so affluent, healthy, and well-educated, as filtered through the lens of capitalism and freedom—the gradual unleashing of the power and efficiency of the market. The free market, in this telling, is just
Senator Josh Hawley’s Tyranny of Big Tech sets out competing expectations. On the one hand, Hawley is a notoriously partisan figure with a clear political agenda and the aim of eventually becoming President. On the other hand, he’s sometimes praised as a relatively intellectually respectable member of the
Andrew Yang, once the leader in the race for New York mayor, finished a distant fourth in the first round of polling. Even ranked-choice voting is unlikely to save him. Many commentators, including Edward Luce of the Financial Times and Paul Krugman of the New York Times have blamed the
“I am the antichrist/I am an anarchist,” John Lydon famously snarled on the Sex Pistols’ 1976 debut single “Anarchy in the UK.” The song is an angry punk rock call for revolution and destruction—an elemental rejection of your staid, oppressive social structures. Lydon wants to destroy the Man