Activity

Anthropologists tell us that when the structure of a core myth begins to change, everything else about society changes around it, and fresh new possibilities open up that weren't even thinkable before. When myths fall apart, revolutions happen.

[...] As Britain and France were withdrawing from their colonies, they needed a new way of explaining the gross inequality that persisted between themselves and the people they had ruled for so long. The story of development--that the nations of the world were simply at different positions along th…

[...] politics has assumed an economistic guise. As Wendy Brown has argued, neoliberalism is, among other things, the conquest of political argument by economic reason. The dominant rationale for public policy is not drawn from political philosophy but economics: choice, efficiency, competition, ex…

[...] In his objection to people who oppose casinos, Trump says there’s only one difference between gambling and investing: “the players” in the New York Stock Exchange “dress in blue pinstripe suits and carry leather briefcases.” Bets are a way to make money; casinos are just another market. Such …

[...] Without a genuine enemy to tutor it, the right has allowed the long-standing fissures of the conservative movement to deepen and expand.

That absent tutelage is most visibly embodied in Trump, whose whims are as unlettered as his mind is untaught. Trump is a window onto the dissolution of …