This thing will fail

Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II... See more

Basically, there are always a lot of problems in the world, and the media is always happy to deliver them right to your doorstep in order to drive engagement. And so there’s a natural tendency to read the news and think that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket. But these problems aren’t all related, and in fact sometimes some of them help am... See more

Which brings us back to the question of traditionalism and dynamism, and their potential interaction: if you have had a cultural revolution that cleared too much ground, razed too many bastions and led to a kind of cultural debasement and forgetting, you probably need to go backward, or least turn that way for recollection, before you can hope to g... See more