When I was all of seven years’ old, I was treated to the following homily via the famous Carl Foreman-scripted western High Noon: In the fifth century BC the citizens of Athens, having suffered grievously under a tyrant, managed to depose and banish him. However, when he returned some years later with an army of…
Tag: globalism
Mind at the end of its tether, more or less.
If, in January 2015, someone had asked me if I could imagine that, in November 2024, the American people would be ready to re-elect as president a man who, on losing his first attempt at re-election in 2020 had summoned a mob on January 6, 2021 with the express purpose of pressuring the U.S. Congress…
Dan Drezner Impresses Me!
Damn straight he does! I’ve often been awfully hard on Dan, but, well, when Dan changes, I change too, and Dan has, in my opinion, served up a real stunner, bouncing off a recent piece by Paul Krugman, The Strange Decline of the Pax Americana, something I did too, but Dan and I bounce differently,…
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. surprises the heck out of me
He sure the heck does. In his stunningly prescient 1997 essay, Has Democracy a Future? (Foreign Affairs—may be behind a paywall), bow-tied, martini-sippin’ Artie,1 whom I frequently dismissed as the jerkiest of knee-jerk liberals, essentially writes the future as us young folks have lived it in the 21st century. The Arthur Schlesinger I read always…
The New York Times, searching for metaphors in the Suez Canal
In the past few days, the New York Times has run three articles—In Suez Canal, Stuck Ship Is a Warning About Excessive Globalization by Peter S. Goodman, Why the World’s Container Ships Grew So Big by Nirja Chokshi, and The Stuck Container Ship on the Suez Canal Was a Metaphor by Marc Levinson—all claiming that…
The Billiard Ball Causality of Francis Fukuyama, Together With Other Considerations
I have recently finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s excellent book, Identity The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, published back in 2018, trying to explain why the world isn’t behaving the way Francis and I think it ought, and not doing a bad job of it at all. I’ve written round and about Dr….
Twilight of Democracy: Anne Applebaum’s front-row seat to disaster
I have already written with great approval of Anne Applebaum’s recent article for the Atlantic, History Will Judge the Complicit, while snickering at Ramesh Ponnuru’s anguished protest—for surely the dude protested too much—that he was totally not—repeat not—“complicit”. He’s just friends with people who, it so happens, are complicit”.1 Which is like a totally different…
Are we having fun yet? Why living at the end of history has become the living end
When I went to first grade, I learned to print my name and hide under my desk in case of a nuclear blast. When I went to the movies, I saw news reels of U.S. above-ground atomic weapons tests in Nevada. (Nobody worried about fallout then.) In 1968, my parents could stand on their front…