It is impossible to change people’s minds. Every new fact is taken as confirmation of pre-existing bias, every criticism of our in-group taken as a sign of the critic’s bad faith. We are more sure than ever that we are more sure than ever, we are of one
The standard story behind America’s founding goes something like this. In an effort to break the chains off tyranny and unrepresentative tax schemes, American colonists staged a rebellion and, soon, a full-fledged revolution against their mother country, Great Britain. After the hard-won, almost miraculous, victory some Americans realized that
Estimates of the headcount for the Tea Party protests of 2009 vary, but no one can deny their long-term significance. While the protests themselves were only organized in the loosest sense, their impact on our politics and culture can be seen mostly in the response of formal organizations to the
The desire for civility in an age of digital communication shouldn’t require chipping away at the edifice of the First Amendment. Yet, the chisels and pickaxes are out, and advocates have donned themselves in the cloaks of Michelangelo. These reformers evidently want to remake the First Amendment in a
Paul Crider’s recent piece Intersectional Liberalism is good evidence for how expansive the word “politics” has become. He says, “Any liberalism worth defending must be intersectional,” where intersectionality is defined as a “descriptive understandings for how lives can be shaped by identities and their interactions when they overlap.” “A
Arendt’s wisdom provides a unique of understanding the spectre haunting the American university – the spectre of protest. Across the country, universities have erupted in largely non-violent, very public protests. Aligning themselves with groups such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street, the new American protest culture is intimately
Al Franken is a strange hero for a 14-year-old in a petit-bourgeoisie household to have. Even stranger is the indifference felt by that same 14-year-old 13 years later when Al Franken resigned from the Senate in disgrace amongst well-documented accusations of sexual assault. Al Franken was a fixture in my
TaLynn Kel argues at The Establishment that Thor: Ragnarok is really a subversive takedown of white supremacy and colonialism. Spoilers follow. Hela, the film’s villain, tears off the mask of beautiful Asgard to reveal something wicked. As Hela points out in one particularly stunning scene, the spectacular gold of
In a talk given to the largely conservative audience of the Manhattan Institute, Jonathan Haidt discussed some of the reasons why Americans are becoming more polarized (transcript here). In doing so he uses a metaphor from physics, referring to centripetal social forces, those that pull people together, and centrifugal forces,
In the wake of the maelstrom (or, perhaps, horrific dumpster fire) that has marked our entry into a worrying, dark timeline, there’s been much discussion over the relative value of identity politics. One primary conflict is played out again and again: does identity politics require mere toleration or strong
* The new volume Freedom in Sweden: Selected Works of Erik Gustaf Geijer, ed. Björn Hasselgren, trans. P. C. Hogg (Timbro, 2017) rediscovers Geijer—pronounced yay-yer. Page-number citations in the following are to that volume. The name Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847) is little known outside of Sweden. But a book
“Four score and seven years ago” are words Americans learn in school and hear echoed in popular culture. To the child who memorizes them, as in the movie Kindergarten Cop, the words may seem to be a secular incantation. For me they seemed similar to the words of the liturgy