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
Liberalism and socialism are modernist doctrines committed to the moral equality and freedom of all human beings. Both doctrines responded critically to the ancient belief, espoused famously by Aristotle in his Politics, that some were by nature unequal (which is a nice way of saying inferior)—whether in virtue, piety,
For decades after World War Two, the signing of the Bretton Woods agreement, and the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, systematic removal of barriers to trade dramatically increased the role of international trade in the global economy. The economic gains were immense, and while critics pointed
I first encountered Fyodor Dostoevsky through Alexei Nilych Kirillov, one of his characters in Demons—not in the novel itself, but in Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, much of which grapples with the philosophical reasoning behind Kirillov’s decision to shoot himself. Camus counters that life’s absurdity
Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer has served on the Supreme Court for almost 27 years. He is 82 years old. Right now, there is a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate. That means this is his chance to retire and be replaced with a justice who broadly shares his values, and
When it comes to racism in the United States, there is a divide on the left between those who think we need a kind of spiritual reckoning, a full and honest confrontation with our past—with slavery, with racism, with something called “whiteness”—and those who think that it’s