The Apocalyptics
They’re like a heavy metal band. Dress them up in black, put some Goth makeup on them, give them a name like The Apocalyptics, and they’d fit right in with the head-banger crowd. After all, it’s mostly...
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The Next Marx
Lenin depiction on recent cover of The Economist Lenin graces the cover of a recent issue of The Economist. The Financial Times is running an entire series on the “crisis in capitalism.” Francis...
View ArticleThe Price of Democracy
We pay a lot of money for health care in the United States, more per capita than anywhere else in the industrialized world. If you point out this inescapable fact to opponents of socialized medicine,...
View ArticleThe Disease of Short-Termism
It was famously described as the “end of history.” The collapse of Communism and the victory of liberalism near the end of the 20th century seemed to suggest that the great ideological conflicts of the...
View ArticleThe Jellification of Politics
The world will not end with bang or a whimper. It will end with the silent slither of jellyfish. Literally. And figuratively. On the literal level, jellyfish are indeed taking over. As a result of...
View ArticleThe Surveillance Blitz
Some years ago when I was fielding complaints from authors through the National Writers Union — about not getting paid, about their work being spiked — I received a phone call from an irate woman. She...
View ArticlePiketty in Elysium
At the beginning of last summer’s blockbuster film Elysium, three rogue shuttles from Earth approach a space station that houses a super-rich enclave. It’s the ultimate offshore gated community, where...
View ArticleDisrupting Hillary
In one of the most enduring images from the lead-up to the 2008 Democratic primaries, frontrunner Hillary Clinton appeared in a rogue political ad as Big Brother. It was a take-off on the infamous...
View ArticleWhen Government Breaks the Fourth Wall
You’re at the theater. You’re sitting in your seat, paying attention to what’s going on in front of you. If the play is any good, you’ve completely forgotten that you’re sitting in a theater. You are...
View ArticleObama and the Gordian Knot of Politics
With the exception of a spike immediately after September 11, Americans don’t trust their government. Take a look at a graph of public trust from 1958 to 2014, and you’ll see the rate drop from around...
View ArticleThe Life and Times of Michael B
Economic inequality is a hot topic in America these days. It is the subject of hefty bestsellers, presidential addresses, and even Hollywood movies. The issue has even appeared on the radar screen of...
View ArticleRobot-in-Chief
To: John Brennan, Langley HQ From: Operative 650, McMurdo Sound Re: Politics 2.0 Greetings from Antarctica. It’s not so bad here, as long as you like tinned peas and snow blindness. But seriously,...
View ArticleThe Missing
There are several types of missing persons. Some missing people are missed so publicly that their absence is a presence. Vanished children reappeared on milk cartons and then later in amber alerts....
View ArticleVenture Capitalists Rule the World
Before the gale-force hurricane of Reaganomics swept through the United States in the 1980s, America very briefly entertained the adoption of a deliberate industrial policy. As in South Korea and...
View ArticleObama’s Recent Victories
It would have been difficult, after the 2014 elections, to imagine that President Barack Obama could achieve much of anything in his last two years in office. After all, the opposition Republican Party...
View ArticleTrump: Foreign Policy’s Useful Idiot?
He wants to cut back on U.S. military commitments overseas. He calls the Iraq War “one of the worst decisions ever made in the history of our country.” He promises to make deals with America’s...
View ArticleDonald Trump: Joker’s Wild
In poker, a wild card can add to the fun of the game. But it throws off the odds and makes the hands more unpredictable. That’s why poker purists prefer to keep jokers and other wild cards out of the...
View ArticleDonald Trump and America B
The voters vowed to take their revenge at the polls. They’d missed out on the country’s vaunted prosperity. They were disgusted with the liberal direction of the previous administration. They were...
View ArticleThe Gunman
Every era has its representative figure. The Neolithic era had the Farmer. The avatar of the Middle Ages was the Monk, bent over an illuminated manuscript. For the period before and after 1492, the...
View ArticleThe Myth of Trump’s Alternative Worldview
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has staked out a foreign policy position quite distinct from his opponent, Hillary Clinton. It is not, however, “isolationist” (contra Jeb Bush and many...
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