In the longer perspective of history, “multiculturalism” does not denote one moment in a local debate about American identity; it signifies the normal condition of humankind.
I look at the practice of democracy not so much as a fixed set of procedural requirements, but as a process that needs to have certain kinds of symbolic markers and consummations that define where people are in relation to each other.
Cosmopolitanism commits you to a global conversation, or a set of global conversations, about the things that matter.
For the people to be sovereign, they need to form an entity and have a personality.
The unending high-decibel partisan warfare has led many Americans to look back with nostalgia to the old consensual, if muddled party systems.
The nature and purposes of the family, education, science, faith, business, the media, and government itself are all disputed at a fundamental level.
American differences are neither random nor ad hoc.
The Frankfurt School scholars were motivated by their admiration for and their critique of American social science.
When people’s personal friendship networks become more religiously diverse, that seems to make them more accepting of other faiths, but it also turns out that if you add friends within a congregation, more church friends, you actually become more civically engaged.
The relationship of money to the romantic ideal of meaningful work is profound and problematic.
The lack of focus on the self-made man in recent times is remarkable when one considers how intensely, and how long, it has functioned as a central trope of the American experience.
The original definition of the American Dream was rooted in the democratic principles of both the Founding Fathers and nineteenth-century transcendentalists.
We have become a nation and a people that simply cannot abide risks.
Much like the old wars of religion that shaped Europe, the new wars are fought on the ground of the image.
How Chinese and Indian modernizers adopted and transformed modern Western notions of “spirituality” in order to criticize Western materialism.
The role of frank speech in democratic culture is something worth considering, especially in light of the renewed ferment over political correctness.
Between Jefferson’s profession of faith in the virtues of republican simplicity and the style of his own life the contradiction could hardly be greater.
The question now is whether contemporary American democracy can even be fixed.
Today the threat against liberalism is one of atrophy rather than violent death.
Far from being the hope of cosmopolitan liberal democracy, Europe is experiencing a reemergence of the national identities and antagonisms that European values and the union they were meant to bring about were supposed to prevent.
The post-Auschwitz consensus that made overt anti-Semitism strictly forbidden is rapidly fading.
If there is one, overarching, redeemable quality to our moment, it is that ours is a time in which there can only be alternatives.
Can neoliberalism’s conceptual structure be traced directly to medieval Western Christianity?
The highly abstract and immaterial phantom economy is inextricable from the “real economy.”
While structures of power may change quickly, the building of a new social order is a longer and more precarious process.
Untruth—information that could be described as unverified, misleading, or an out-and-out lie—has been spreading with new ease and abandon, and often to undemocratic effect.
Liberalism today finds itself in the strange position of being the political philosophy that everyone lives by and no one wants to defend.
Is modern-day philanthropy a disease in the democratic body politic?
The personal diet has become not only a cult; it has become a political statement.
We are living through a vertigo in political culture.
A neglected hard-boiled novelist wrote on the greatest conspiracy of all.
Both Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey endorse the same belief: that there are only winners and losers.
As a child, I thought that to be American was to believe in individuality, to support pluralism and equality, and to celebrate common holidays and eat common foods.
Could the great size of companies like Apple and Walmart actually be a good thing?
Writing a book about Thomas Jefferson means entering a very crowded field.
King’s arguments for freedom and justice were not only constitutional but also profoundly ethical.
Cosmopolitan liberalism has reshaped international institutions and practices.
Democracy and science can be mutually reinforcing only if there is a recognition of the limited authority of each.
Once attacked for rejecting American exceptionalism, liberals now are in almost sole possession of it.
It is the irreducibly human dimensions of the radical life that are to be most cherished, and most feared.
A historian charts the evolution of her own center-right liberalism.
Cancel ’s murkiness has made it a very useful word for pushing already contentious or delicate matters into the realm of total confusion.
We might be murderers, and we might not, but isn’t it safer to assume we are and be proven wrong? Maybe not.
What do we mean by culture? Don’t ask me, I’m a political scientist.
“White Christian nationalism” remains a grievance-driven mode of whiteness.
In studying Keynes, we watch radical ideas emerge filtered through a conservative sensibility.
As a history of art and thought in the Cold War era, The Free World is enthralling but unsatisfying, inevitably so.
In any case, trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration.
Over the last half century, there has been a transition from regular to irregular forms of cultural and political combat.
What is clear is that the great divisions in our country rest on our different systems of cultural capital.
The less politics effects change, the more politics will affect mood.
Consider embracing utopia at once as indeterminate speculation about a qualitatively better future and as a hypothesis, by assuming it to be possible.
If not minimized as an aberration, mob violence is often justified as the legitimate expression of popular will.
Awareness is not the opposite of ignorance. Rather, it’s a stand-in for performative gestures of all kinds.
Concern with authenticity seems to be unique to societies marked by conspicuous racial or ethnic hierarchies.
Black Americans still embrace the exodus story as the defining trope of their collective experience.
The liberty of the adult citizen depends on the subordination of the prepolitical child.
Virtual worlds have to be built by someone, and whoever builds them tells the story, writes the rules, composes the laws of physics, inscribes the boundaries of the possible, exerts an imperceptible influence on every thought, act, and outcome.
Putting the cult back into culture in the analysis of politics.
We can’t properly define the Enlightenment without making reference to happiness.
The mythic bipartisan center was never a matter of niceness.
The eureka moment came when Popper perceived an affinity between Plato and fascism.
We see the peculiar features of neoauthoritarianism as quite real modern-day reincarnations of the ancient tradition of divine kingship.
Carrying forward an evolving “we” of the democratic imagination.
The bulk of The Dawn of Everything is devoted to the exceptions.
Perhaps we can tuck our disagreements about fundamental things away into our private lives, and let the public sphere be a place for adjudicating public things.
Rawls tried to avoid metaphysics because he felt that it interfered with his great game.
We are living through a time, however, when we cannot take our shared identity—and therefore our shared stories—for granted.
Putin continues to play the Third Rome card that has brought him this far.
What prospects are there today for assessing American politics and history from an early Hofstadterian remove?
Fantasies of freeing ourselves of the baggage of the past run aground on the fact that humans are history-bearing animals.
Tocqueville was acutely conscious of living in a special moment in history
What, then, of democracy? I doubt it will survive—at least in the form we know.
Does anyone still need advice on how not to think like a liberal?
The essential component of the liberal project might be the marketplace of ideas.
Bellah held the conviction that religious matters were not purely intellectual, much less merely academic.
Contending with a radical distrust of the created world.
Ambivalence captures the internal nature of liberalism’s discontents.
There is the looming sense that critical theory is somehow near the center of the crisis of our time.
Amid the social turmoil of postwar Vienna, Othmar Spann’s class auditorium became a political battlefield.
There is a world within the world, and that world is not, as it is for the Marxist, a metaphor. It’s where the lizard people meet.
Where do the Hasidim fit in the American picture of religious liberty?
COVID made visible the usually subterranean core of the liberal project, which is not merely political but anthropological.
Transparent has become one of the staples of our commercial discourse, a form of bureaucratic-corporate-therapeutic-speak.
Friedman’s viewpoint went far deeper and has been more lasting than the politics of 1970.
Are we all in an industry? What happened to “occupation”?
Work is hard in large part because it is a site where people place serious demands on each other. Meeting those demands can be painful.
The greatest challenge presented by modern corporations, small as well as large, involves purpose.
True adulthood in a true liberalism depends on properly using God’s gift of liberty of the will.
Friendship is the reason for our lives. Nothing is more important.
For many tech billionaires, citizenship is just one more consumer option in a competitive global marketplace.
Deneen’s politics of resentment primarily seeks to seize power from political enemies.
We have a book that seems aimed at thwarting efforts by decent humanist scholars to read Heidegger for any reason other than to condemn him.
The case for defending democracy abroad needs to be made anew.
At the climax of this progress into the inner depths of the mausoleum, a glimpse of Lenin himself suddenly appeared before us.
The young will be formed. The question is how.
The histories and literatures of antiquity can help us address some of our contemporary ethical deficit disorder.
Today, the “college experience” centered on a residential life that promises to envelope students in a warm, intimate community has hardened into something more totalizing than even the blundering late-twentieth-century project of enforcing political correctness.
The growing damage to truthfulness reflects something more—not just a personal discrepancy but a deep social discrepancy as well.
Moyn’s Cold War liberals might rightly be called “post-Holocaust liberals.”
Revisiting Meredith v. Fair, we get the inside story of how critical race theory was developed in the years after Brown.
Ideologues who understand that they are consulting human-made maps will be more open to alternative interpretations when their maps conflict with reality.
Our contemporary culture is a culture of nihilism without nihilists.
John J. Lennon, incarcerated journalist, talks about education, censorship, mental health, and rehabilitation.
An argument that the formidable strength of right-populism in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism in 1989 is more a product of economics than of culture.
If Foucault is right, then we are by no means approaching an end to neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism rejected the assessment that the absence of constraints on desire undermined systemic viability.
The colonization of the market by corporations has accelerated the process of business and wealth concentration.
Family policy is at the heart of an intense debate about the future of any plausible post-neoliberal governance.
Polite society must get over its aversion to talking about nationalism.
Racing to catch hold of the boons of progress, we trust in our power to secure our lives, singly and together, through “smart” decisions.
What is lost in translation can be recovered if one begins to understand the nuances and significance of what has been placed on the margins.
In decrees and other political and civic inscriptions of the ancient world, historians have begun to recognize that various emotions such as fear, pride, and excitement were expressed to generate solidarity that held groups together in a place and with a shared name (Spartans in Sparta).
Part of the political bizarreness of our time comes from the fact that the possibility of data’s neutrality is rarely disputed as such.
For Marc J. Dunkelman, the verdict is clear: “The township, in essence, is dying.”
Bernie Sanders at Liberty University is more than a momentary truce in the culture war.
Do Trump’s supporters represent a new Know-Nothing movement?
As we remember the Challenger disaster, let’s not forget the engineers who tried to convince NASA not to send up the Space Shuttle on a cold morning thirty years ago.
In identifying “the system” as the issue of this election, Trump has managed to find a singular concept by which to encompass issues from wage stagnation to political corruption.
Many began watching last night’s debate wondering: Which Trump would it be? But there’s only one.
Just as Obama became a symbol of progressive diversity, Trump has become a symbol of longing for a pre-Obama America.
A zero sum reality, in which every win is someone else’s loss, exists in a constant state of crisis.
Liberalism today finds itself in the strange position of being the political philosophy that everyone lives by and no one wants to defend.
In France, wearing a COVID-19 mask will mean a real revolution in norms governing behavior in its public space.
The point of reopening is not to free voluntary workers but to place more into the category of “mandatory worker.”
Who will emerge as the new elite from this particular moment’s cast of winners and losers?
Herzen won’t stop striving for social transformation with every ounce of energy he has, but also won’t pick up Chernyshevsky’s axe.
Donald Trump’s manner was a declaration of indifference toward the values that make democracy possible.
The events of January 6 went off script.
Americans have been making arguments about the nature of their unity from the beginning.
A trick that only the most gifted demagogues can bring off.
It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.
As the titans of big tech see it, the reticence to upgrade is nothing less than resistance to progress. But a willingness to upgrade does not benefit customers in the long run.
Corporations are not defanging a threatening ideology but welcoming it back home from a field trip.
Once upon a time there was a publication that was doing all it could to tell a straight story and to listen to all sides.
Western liberal democracy is something worth aspiring to—an optimal destiny, not an imminent fate.
Everyone contributes to the pandemic, so all bear responsibility.
Models are only valuable in the long run if we are free to take them apart.
Postliberalism comes to embody a form of cultural criticism that ultimately does not believe in culture itself.
We view the concept of “compromise” from all sorts of oblique angles.
Perhaps the older Auden merely wants to have the humility to accept the terms on which agape offers itself.
It would be prudent to take the Chinese at their word––especially if it is bound up in the mystifying language of Carl Schmitt.
Throughout the book, Sherrell eschews the phrase “climate crisis,” substituting a much more nebulous term: “the Problem.”
The modern state is founded on a dream—the dream of perfect knowledge that secures perfect power.
Because this cannot be ignored. And because it may be prologue to the future.
Media executives have honed the craft of attracting national interest to flair-ups and clashes over school board proceedings, controversial small business practices, or more recently, police misconduct.
The red vs. blue electoral map has contributed to the toxicity of our politics.
Mainline Protestant ministries to migrants had unintentionally opened the door to their diminished cultural dominance
A conversation about the role of mythmaking in modern politics.
We’ll have to confront the chasm between our self-conception and our actual behavior
Ukraine has become the geography of vicious truths
The war has ruined any chance of Russo-Western cooperation any time soon; whatever hope the Biden administration has had of peeling Russia away from China lies in tatters.
Where is culture that gave humanity the symphonies and operas of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov?
It is my belief that rapid technological “progress” will always threaten a culture with social regress, and that mitigating that threat should be a priority.
Are we willing to undertake the long, slow work of persuasion in a time of the politics of personal destruction?
Viktor Orbán has become a canvas for the projection of hopes and fears about the future of democracy in the West.
Warikoo might have explored the ways in which Asian cultural repertoires matched up with the neoliberal transformation of our schools and colleges.
What we are seeing, then, is a fictional spectacle—a pseudo-iconoclastic event.
The primary social forces disrupting American society today are modern versions of two false religions.
What might the world look like if we refined our understanding of progress?
Plausible forecasts may help us avert the worst political calamities.
Candidate as an adjective—was this the newest lingo, something a copy editor like me should know about?
Could it be otherwise? Probably not, at least at the moment.
Kissinger the scholar studied power. Kissinger the statesman acquired power, guarded it, and wielded it.
Turkey presents an inversion of the usual presumptions about the current global struggle between liberalism and conservatism.
The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies.
Understanding the extent of the threat posed by Bibi requires a broad historical perspective.
What are the implications for any society that emphasizes monuments to power and domination over imagination and the arts?
What pleasure, what gratification, can we offer to people that exceeds the pleasure of hating?
When someone so much as touches a state vehicle, the wheels of justice begin to turn, and that’s that.
Trump is a man for our moment. Both that man and moment are less authoritarian than anarchic.
Camus embodied an existence that was itself conflicted, caught between the vectors of history and lived experience.
By affirming one side and suppressing the other, we make ourselves into half men and half women.
Every country needs triangulation in order to achieve self-understanding and prudent decision-making.
If I have to stand on my own two feet, epistemically, how can I be sure that my knowledge really is knowledge?
If politics is your life, then you must tell yourself a political story in order to live.
Intellectualism’s core activity is analysis—investigating how and why certain occurrences take place around us.
A renewed attention to the American literary tradition may be one of the most important imaginative and spiritual exercises for restoring our liberal way of life.
The unlikely connection between podcast studios, Renaissance libraries and man-caves.
“Getting management to take your side” is the almost inevitable strategy, the natural default, for people who disdain the work of persuasion.
The times may be captive, but the thinking has to remain free.
Compartmentalization is better than the production of work that is half-hearted.
In trying to get a little for myself, why must I push someone else down?
Monarchy and its symbols seem to retain an allure that is hard to resist—even if in jest.
The most creative, innovative, and profound MacIntyre was the one who thought about moral rationality.
Mann understood, almost too well, the allure of tradition and irrationalism, of the poetic and the mystical.