“We easily forget how fascism works,” writes the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of the distinguished Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, this week in “The Battle in Ukraine Means Everything: Fascism Returns to the Country It Once Destroyed,” an impassioned, eloquent essay in The New Republic. We also easily forget how intellectual observers work […]
Jim Sleeper
Jim Sleeper is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York and Liberal Racism.
Posted inPolitics
Brooks, Wieseltier: Cries of American Weakness by the People Who Weakened America
Cries for American military preparedness are growing louder and louder by the day, rising, circling, and echoing one another in a frenzy that even the awfulness of events in Ukraine and many other places doesn’t quite explain. The reason, according to Leon Wieseltier, David Brooks, and other prophets of American Destiny, is that (as I […]
Posted inPolitics
A Fond Farewell to Jonathan Schell
The writer Jonathan Schell, who taught courses at Yale on non-violence and nuclear arms through 2012, died of cancer last night at his home in Brooklyn. Although I doubt he would have put it this way, or even thought of himself this way, he was a luminous, noble, bearer of an American civic-republican tradition that’s […]
Posted inPolitics
Crimea vs Cuba: Remember, America Has Long Been Twitchy About Its Own Sphere of Influence
“Those who want to see a people’s democracy, let them come here and see this,” Fidel Castro told the UN General Assembly in 1960, after his Marxist insurgency overthrew Fulgencio Batista’s government in Cuba. The United States had long made forcefully clear that it preferred dictatorial banana republics (Nicaragua), coffee republics (Guatemala), or, in Cuba, […]
Posted inPolitics
Leon Wieseltier’s Moral Posturing on Crimea Suggests He Learned Nothing From his Moral Posturing on Iraq
“There is the question of how to respond practically to Putin’s aggression and there is the question of how to respond intellectually,” writes Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, in his most recent “Washington Diarist” column. “The latter is no less important than the former, because the Ukrainian crisis is not a transient […]
Posted inPolitics
Leon Wieseltier’s Moral Posturing on Crimea Suggests He Learned Nothing From his Moral Posturing on Iraq
“There is the question of how to respond practically to Putin’s aggression and there is the question of how to respond intellectually,” writes Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, in his most recent “Washington Diarist” column. “The latter is no less important than the former, because the Ukrainian crisis is not a transient […]
Posted inBooks, Magazine, May/June 2011
Misreading the New York Times
There’s plenty to criticize about America’s newspaper of record. So why do conservatives make up reasons that don’t exist?
Posted inMagazine
Folding the Race Card
Yet racial thinking can remain perversely comforting: It can seem to make instant sense of suffering when actual causes are more complicated. It can simulate “community” and social purpose for “people of color” and for others whose formative political commitments were shaped by race. Playing the race card still works sometimes for ideologues and opportunists–black […]
Posted inMagazine, March 2001
Manufactured Consent
How to win back civic faith after the non-election.
Posted inMagazine
Manufactured Consent
The reassurances were superfluous, not only because the Ted Kennedys and Chuck Schumers knew how to feign combat without them, but because it’s too late to forestall a general ebbing of respect for the presidency, the Congress, and of course, the Supreme Court, which has shaken “confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of […]
