“Today I saw the messiah of hamsters” From: David Bratchpiece on Twitter: “Today I saw the messiah of hamsters https://t.co/ppJvQitcDK”
Political Philosophy
“Human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds.” – Hegel
Just wanted to note the line, from the Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit (§69), for later use and overuse. I’m quite fond of the larger passage: Since the man of common sense makes his appeal to feeling, to an…
Si Vis Bellum, Part 1: “Militarism” and “Interventionism”
The un-clarity or confusion, or confusion of confusions, regarding the meaning of these two terms is typical of this historical moment, which in one sense can be thought to have simply befallen us, having never been willed into existence by anyone, but in another sense can be viewed as the predictable and desired product of choices made over the course of at least two or now three presidential elections, in as self-conscious a manner as a mass democratic system is able to undertake.
Omar Ali (@omarali50): Islam is the rock on which the liberal order broke? – Brown Pundits
[A]ll the other alternatives (most of them much stronger in “real-life” material terms than any Muslim country or party) like Great Russian Nationalism and its Orthodox Christian backstop, Chinese nationalism with Confucian and fascist characteristics, nascent Japanese nationalism, Hardcore…
Mark Lilla: The End of Identity Liberalism – NYTimes.com
We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority…
Marianne Constable: When Words Cease to Matter – Amor Mundi – Medium
Deliberate disregard of language poses a worse danger to political discussion and to the public realm than do ignorance and lies. Ignorance can be met with education. Falsehood and deception can be called out as illusion; they can be challenged…
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness, Political Philosophy, Politics Tagged with: Trump
Francis Fukuyama: US against the world? Trump’s America and the new global order – Financial Times
[T]he broader failure of the left was the same one made in the lead-up to 1914 and the Great war, when, in the apt phrase of the British-Czech philosopher, Ernest Gellner, a letter sent to a mailbox marked “class” was…
Posted in Neo-Imperialism, Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness, Political Philosophy Tagged with: Alt-Right, Fukuyama
Sam Tanenhaus: Rise of the Reactionary – The New Yorker
One of the strangest developments in the 2016 election has been the spectacle of West Coast Straussians who champion Trump—and lustily denounce his critics—in various forums, including the Claremont Review of Books, a well-written quarterly edited by Charles Kesler, and…
Zack Beauchamp: A conservative intellectual explains why the GOP has fallen to Donald Trump – Vox
One of my many concerns about Trump is that he makes it difficult, because he is so dramatic and so crass, to defend the occasional insights he presents. One of them was his formulation of “a country is a country,”…
Comments on “Islam is the rock on which the liberal order broke?”
History may instead record that what broke this latest “liberal order” (a typical contradiction in terms), as before and likely again, as inevitably, was the latest liberal order itself. Yet historians may alternatively – or also – someday record that it was liberalism that finally broke Islam or the Islamic Order, and, perhaps, in so doing repaired one or both – though it may always be too early to say so.