Tagged: populism

The Republican Catastrophe Continues

The danger of the Republican Party’s fateful decision, back in 2016, to hold onto its traditional voter base by playing along with Donald Trump, was never primarily that he would promote or embark upon explicitly anti-republican policies (although he has certainly done that), or that he would convert the GOP into a populist apologist faction for tyranny on the global stage (although he...

A Sad Allegory

Does anyone — including those millions who were personally invested in it until eight years ago — remember the American Tea Party movement? This genuine grassroots uprising, as civil as it was reviled by the establishment, and as feisty as it was indignant at the progressive usurpation of American society, thrived on a devotion to certain essential tenets: republican constitutionalism, a reason-based anti-establishmentarianism,...

What “People” Do the Populists Serve?

The populists of the world today, eager above all causes to bury Ukraine, though sometimes euphemizing the death they are willing as “fiscal responsibility” or “not getting mired in others’ problems” or “an end to endless wars” — whose interests do these populists seek to serve?  It is not their own to be sure. For in abandoning a large and courageous nation to...

Notes on The Wars, Major and Minor

No war strategy is rational which does not include a sober accounting for how you will live next to your former enemy after the fighting has ended. How will relations be normalized? How will past conflicts be put aside under the new post-war conditions? How can some measure of good faith and good will be achieved in the aftermath of the extreme measures...

Mike Pence: The Republican Party Personified

Mike Pence, vice president to Donald Trump, has suspended his 2024 Republican presidential campaign months before the first votes will be cast, in the face of abysmal poll numbers and empty coffers. No man’s fate more clearly exemplifies the truth and trajectory of the entire Republican Party since it allowed itself to be hijacked by a reality TV grifter and his moron cult...

The Moral and the Political

You can completely and vociferously sympathize with Israel’s position, and unequivocally condemn the ends and methods of Hamas and its radical Islamic allies, without necessarily believing that it is your country’s official duty to give material support to Israel’s self-defense. To take this position, one merely has to have the intellectual subtlety to grasp the distinction between the moral and the political, private...

Random Reflections On American Politics

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...

The Panderers’ Tango

Ron DeSantis, who is planning to run for U.S. President in 2024, and must therefore suck up relentlessly to the Republican Party’s MAGA-QAnon base, which is in love with Vladimir Putin, has publicly adopted the standard position of all current Republicans who have need of gaining the favor of the grassroots, without necessarily being one of them. That is to say, he has...

Three Reflections on What People Need to Believe [Updated With Trumpiness!]

You can make absolutely any factual claim you wish, supported with the boldest and most unflinching evidentiary assurances to back it up, by merely promising that this overwhelming supporting evidence will be made public very soon. How about not making any factual claim at all unless you are prepared to present the evidence at the same time you make the claim? But no,...

Necessary Conditions for A Just Revolution

One of the great falsehoods of late modernity is that our political structures are so ingeniously self-renewing and self-correcting that the days of the just revolution are over. This position is not only untrue, but likely an indication of devious motives on the part of those who maintain and seek to perpetuate it. For political leaders to say, as President Biden and others...