Enjoying the view from Limbo
America Descending / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 25, 2025
Back on November 9th, 2020, in the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden’s election victory (known to this day among Trump loyalists as “The Steal”), I wrote here of the short-term future of America’s two main political factions. In that rumination, I posed a couple of questions about the prospects for the respective factions in 2024, questions which time has now firmly answered, though...
From W. H. Auden, we have this charming short:
Why are the public buildings so high? How come you don’t know?
Why, that’s because the spirits of the public are so low.
To extrapolate on that theme of matter and form in society, body and soul writ large, I shall dare to venture a few lines of my own….
Human, all too human.– When everything you and your friends once decried as a communist plot to overthrow your country, you and your friends now espouse and embrace with brio to achieve your own ends. And when you manage to convince yourselves — or rather accept without a moment’s doubt or hesitation — that this hypocritical adoption of the very totalitarian methods you...
Every few weeks, the news media on all sides of the issue try to find evidence of a substantial change of perspective in Donald Trump’s actions regarding the war in Ukraine. Being a quintessential pitchman and obfuscator for profit, Trump is excellent at offering superficial alterations to his rhetoric in order to string his customers along with false promises of appreciating their wishes....
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published September 13, 2025 · Last modified September 14, 2025
Luckily, I am not an American. In the past, I often felt quite the opposite sentiment, as anyone who has ever read my public writings from the pre-Trump era would know. One of the most flattering things that was ever said to me came from an American reader-correspondent many years ago, an elderly veteran with a highly independent and inquisitive mind, who defended...
A few hours ago, Charlie Kirk, a young man with a family, was shot dead at a university speaking event in Utah. An ugly occurrence no matter how you cut it. I notice that video of the shooting is all over the internet. I have not seen any of this video, and will do everything in my power never to see it. I...
There is nothing wrong with thinking there is something wrong with you. There undoubtedly is something wrong with you, and the precondition for any serious thought and growth is the recognition of this fact. Modern psychology is continually trying to persuade us that self-doubt, self-rebuke, and the periodic influx of shame and social discomfort, are illnesses to be cured, whereas these are rather...
With each new stage of Trump’s infinite self-diminution and national surrender before the will of Vladimir Putin, the Republican Party’s infinite elasticity and deference to the incredible shrinking president becomes more alarming and nauseating. I cannot help observing how all this Republican shrinkage before the Russian dictator is having the curious effect, whether it be absolute or merely relative, of enlarging and elevating...
by Daren Jonescu · Published August 27, 2025 · Last modified September 1, 2025
I have often argued that one of the diseases most responsible for the West’s decline is the increasing willingness to identify financial success with moral greatness or wisdom, and hence to regard the world’s wealthiest businessmen — social benefactors by the workings of the invisible hand, which is to say as an accidental feature of their private obsessions — as being unusually qualified...
A few spiritual reflections to stave off despair in these somewhat desperate times. First, from Epictetus: In every feast remember that there are two guests to be entertained, the body and the soul; and that what you give the body you presently lose, but what you give the soul remains forever. This deceptively simple contrast between the priorities of body and soul invites...
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