Enjoying the view from Limbo
In the immediate aftermath of the Democratic Party’s massive sweep of the midterm elections, Donald Trump is out in public pushing three main motifs, namely that “I wasn’t on the ballot, and if I had been on the ballot we would have won,” that “I will work with the Democrats,” and that the Republicans — his National Trump Yes-Man Team — lost “because...
I am sitting in my office on Wednesday afternoon here in Korea, watching the live Tuesday night (U.S. time) coverage of the midterm elections. As things now stand, the Democrats will certainly control both houses of Congress at the end of this affair, in what will turn out to have been one of the great drubbings in U.S. midterms history — especially in...
In 1998, Harry Jaffa began a critique of the new vanguard of the American conservative movement with the following pithy summation of what was at stake: The end of the Cold War has also brought an end to the remission of the disease of moral relativism that is corroding the life of western civilization. It would certainly seem that the salvation of the...
Ideas and Reflections / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 29, 2026 · Last modified October 30, 2026
Donald Trump has attempted to whitewash his absolute handover of U.S. foreign policy to the interests and demands of Vladimir Putin by pointing to the latter’s pathetic gesture of releasing an American prisoner who had been held in a Russian jail for four years on charges of — oh, the irony of it all — fighting for Ukraine. As though this release were...
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 25, 2026 · Last modified October 26, 2026
Barack Obama has appeared at a campaign rally for U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, from which appearance the headlines blazed with this takeaway from the former president’s praise of El-Sayed: “He’ll finish the job we started.” In fact, the full sentence continued by specifically identifying the “job” Obama was talking about, namely the “guarantee” of “quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.” In...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 20, 2026
The standard critical explanations circulating in the public discussion to account for Donald Trump’s recent caution-to-the-wind support for Vladimir Putin’s aims in Ukraine, and his simultaneous overt branding of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine as the only true impediment to peace in the region, have been variations on the theme of Trump’s shortsighted eagerness to lower American fuel prices in a desperate attempt to turn...
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 14, 2026 · Last modified October 15, 2026
Today, my YouTube algorithm informed me of a recent Dispatch podcast featuring Jonah Goldberg’s interview with a certain “Hannah Arendt scholar,” Roger Berkowitz, focused on Professor Berkowitz’s new book about Arendt and friendship. The topic was interesting on its face, so I took the bait and clicked on the recommendation, which turned out, as such things typically do, to be an excellent reminder...
Donald Trump is so frustrated with NATO and the EU for refusing to reward Vladimir Putin for his invasion of Ukraine that he has decided to take matters into his own hands, openly condemning Volodymyr Zelensky as the cause of America’s energy problems, problems Trump is now “solving” by overriding his own country’s sanctions against Russia in order to directly buy Russian fuel...
The following is from a written exchange with a student who has been reading Plato recently. Why should I love wisdom? Loving wisdom and being wise are helpful for a truly good life? No, loving wisdom and being wise are not helpful for a truly good life. They are the truly good life. Loving wisdom is the truly good life for a human....
America Descending / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 2, 2026 · Last modified October 9, 2026
Any member of the U.S. military, past or present, who is not humiliated by “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth must be even more buffoonishly pathetic than he is. So much of Donald Trump’s second term administration seems to be a grand effort to highlight the existence and effects of wee man syndrome. Have fears of personal inadequacy ever found themselves more overtly exposed...
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