Liberalism
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Inside the Liberal Mind April 16, 2025
If you pay any attention to left-of-center commentary these days, you would know that an identity crisis is in full bloom. The left is having a major debate over what liberals should and shouldn’t believe. ...
The Empty Chair April 14, 2025
In twilight’s glow as candles shine,We gather ‘round the Seder table, divine.With matzah flat and bitter herbs arrayed,We tell the tale of how our freedom was made.From Pharoah’s bonds our ancestors fled,Across the parted sea, by Moses led.Tonight we...
The Muscular Humanities April 14, 2025
These are peculiar and disorienting times for those who believe in the life of the mind. The old university systems, which were the bulwark of the postwar American boom, now seem in doubt. Fewer believe in the dream of college, especially when exorbi...
A Man About Town April 09, 2025
One summer night in the early 1960s, at a rally in New York City, the great newspaper columnist Murray Kempton admitted to an audience full of battered old Reds that while America had not been kind to them, it was lucky to have had them. My mother tu...
Main Street Ahead of Wall Street April 08, 2025
Ever since Donald Trump’s first term as president, his detractors in the Democratic Party and their spokespeople in the mainstream liberal media have had a recurring refrain: his single achievement in office was a tax cut for him and his rich buddies...
The Limits of Queer Anti-Colonialism April 07, 2025
In May 1974, the queer Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini traveled to Beirut, Lebanon to screen three of his films. At the time, the country was in the midst of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist ferment, and like many young activists today, Pasoli...
The Pop Culture Branding Explosion April 04, 2025
Tonight’s the night. To get ready, you pour yourself a glass of Johnnie Walker Squid Game whisky and comb your hair with your Beetlejuice-branded hairbrush. You spritz yourself liberally with your “Dobby™ Is A Free Elf” body spray and apply some Brid...
Can ‘Abundance Liberalism’ Save the Dems? March 20, 2025
The lessons of the Democratic Party’s painful defeat in November turn on whom you ask. Moderates blame the excesses of wokeness. The party’s Left wing faults a tepid centrism that failed to inspire the base. ...
How Business Metrics Broke the University March 19, 2025
In a recent interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo pivoted from his usual focus on the ideological biases of higher education—the prevalence of “critical race theory and gender ideology and li...
The Bill Burr–naissance March 19, 2025
If you’re looking for a snapshot of Bill Burr’s worldview, I recommend listening to the comedian’s wide-ranging interview he sat for on NPR’s Fresh Air last week. Burr was promoting his latest stand-up special, Drop Dead Years, which premiered on Hul...
Liberals Are Ashamed Of Hamilton March 14, 2025
Last week, the producers of Hamilton announced they were pulling their upcoming run at the Kennedy Center in protest of the Trump administration’s recent changes to the Kennedy Center’s structure and funding. It’s just the latest in a long line of vi...
Where Has the Left’s Technological Audacity Gone? March 13, 2025
Techno-optimism – the belief that technology will usher in a golden age for humanity – is in vogue once more.In 2022, a clutch of pseudonymous San Francisco artificial intelligence (AI) scenesters published a Substack post entitled “Effective Acceler...
Are Men OK? March 12, 2025
On November 21, 2024, Richard V. Reeves stood in a greenroom at The Washington Post’s third annual Global Women’s Summit. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), was the only man in a lineup that included former Democ...
The Sensitive Young Meme March 12, 2025
One of the most beautiful paintings in the Caspar David Friedrich show The Soul of Nature, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11, shows a roiling ocean crashing against a rocky coast by moonlight. The tiny figure of a monk stares o...
In Defense of Tuning Out March 10, 2025
Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday was a total spectacle from both the president and his Democratic opposition. What’s the point of these speeches anymore? Politicians on both sides of the aisle acted like toddlers and Americans emerged less info...
Just Another Liberalism? March 05, 2025
If critique could kill, neoliberalism would long be dead. So far, however, neither decades of intellectual opposition from the left and right nor the past decade of populist politics has done more than erode some measure of neoliberalism’s ideologica...
A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
American Literature and a Liberal Way of Life December 16, 2024
The presidential election was never going to resolve the bitter ideological divides that have become a familiar part of our political culture. The project of peaceful coexistence with fellow citizens who see the world differently—perhaps the most sig...
Why I’ve Grown Skeptical Of Colorblindness December 12, 2024
Following years of censorious race consciousness at elite institutions and among cultural gatekeepers, many principled American liberals have come to a general consensus on how to think and talk about race. In short: with deep skepticism.In his incis...
The Coming Conservative Media Collapse December 12, 2024
The liberal media is in freefall. Ratings are cratering at MSNBC and CNN. The Washington Post is losing hundreds of millions of dollars and laying off staff. The Los Angeles Times has gotten so desperate that it’s hiring conservative columnists. Cons...
The Life-Affirming Vitality of Raw Milk December 12, 2024
I've been drinking raw milk for almost 15 years, ever since I made a sudden switch from veganism while visiting my sister in Europe. At the time, she was living in Germany and getting raw milk from a local farmer. I remember mocking her, interrogatin...
The Dirty Secret About OnlyFans December 11, 2024
Haven’t you heard? Prostitution is empowering. Liberated super-vixen and self-described feminist Lily Phillips, 23, has declared she is to embark on the sticky Sisyphean task of bedding 1,000 men in one day. Other OnlyFans “models” — a tellingly bash...
Was 'Fat Is a Feminist Issue' Liberating? December 10, 2024
The history of how women have endeavored to change, and usually shrink, the shape of our bodies is littered with artifacts so horrible they are often humorous: the massive, vibrating Magic Couch that promised 1950s husbands weight loss for their wive...
“The Civilized World Seems Tired of Its Civilization” December 09, 2024
“Israel is pressed, it is a suffering country,” a sympathetic visitor says with a sigh. International organizations, the intellectual Left, and much of Europe are arrayed against it. American support is shaky. The Israelis are fighting for their exis...
Gen Z Is Super Weird December 05, 2024
Since February 2023, artist, university lecturer, and internet culture writer Joshua Citarella has been conducting interviews with a wide array of subjects who have formed their politics out of internet subcultures. It would be a crude oversimplifica...
