Enjoying the view from Limbo
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 22, 2025
Back in 2013, when Barack Obama was well into his second term of running roughshod over American principles and destroying the last remnants of the constitutional guardrails against excessive executive power, I wrote an essay for American Thinker in which I attempted to outline the wide array of forces that had been gradually corralled into a generational shift away from the moral premises...
Remember how, back in the formative days of the so-called Tea Party conservative movement, the Republican grassroots mocked and ridiculed a woman who infamously gushed about how, if Barack Obama were elected president, he would pay her mortgage and put gas in her car? Today, these same Tea Partiers are listening to Donald Trump’s spokescheerleader answering a reporter’s question about whether the White...
In about three weeks, the United States of America — a formerly awe-inspiring name which now has about as much real world resonance as “the British Crown” — will elect its next president. As has been the case for a number of elections, the mainstream options fall into the “Could it get any worse?” category, while the non-mainstream options, such as they are...
A few notes on the Democratic National Convention, a political event I would be even less likely to watch than a Republican National Convention. At least this year’s RNC (of which I watched a total of about one minute) involved some intrigue concerning how the party was going to frame itself so as to hold the wide range of voters it needs in...
As has been the case for years, the progressive authoritarians are loving every minute of this deterioration of any plausible resistance to their schemes. Trump, as I and others predicted publicly at the beginning of this charade, has effectively sullied the cause of liberty for a generation with his demagogic fakery and personality cult appeal, just as the progressive establishment of both parties...
The heirs of Frankfurt. — The American left’s intellectual strategists have long believed that the way to break the country’s resistance to progressivism was to forge ahead, with their vanguard fringes displayed in bright colors, in open defiance of the popular consensus, precisely because those fringes would be perceived by the “silent majority” as too much, too extreme, too immoderate and anti-American. The...
America Descending / What is The Establishment?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 26, 2023 · Last modified July 27, 2023
In keeping with his annual tradition, Barack Obama has posted his 2023 summer playlist, which is to say the collection of songs he claims to have on his portable listening device at the moment. Amusingly, one musician, someone called Lucy Dacus, objected to being included, using the opportunity to accuse Obama of being a war criminal. Good for her, I say! After all,...
When Vladimir Putin’s regime finally falls, or the Botox Tyrant himself withers and dies, probably in prison somewhere, will the apparent entity we call “Tucker Carlson” actually go poof, and the last two years of his “life” simply disappear entirely from the universe and the collective memory? I commit this thought to writing here in the nature of an experiment. Specifically, if my...
A U.S. president should only be truly relevant during a crisis, when someone — someone with authority over the military, for example, or even just having the sobriety and character to set the right national tone — must have the capacity and the will to make essential decisions on the fly, based on a combination of adequate information, sound principles, long-range vision, and,...
The United Nations Secretary-General actually used his speech addressing Russia’s unprovoked attack on a sovereign neighbor to use one of the stupidest and most corrupt bromides of this age: “Give peace a chance.” That phrase was a childish and ignorant denial of common sense back when John Lennon coined it. Under the current circumstances, it is an outrage against the human race. “Give...
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