Sublime

In 1932 FDR broke the conservatives’ hold on the Democratic party and made it the instrument of liberal reform.

Defending his medical and unemployment insurance schemes in 1884, Bismarck argued that “the greatest burden for the working class is the uncertainty of life. They can never be certain that they will have a job, or that they will have health and the ability to work. We cannot protect a man from all sickness and misfortune. But it is our obligation,

Ever since Reagan, the Republican Party has been a coalition of business interests and downscale whites, many of them evangelical Christians. By 2010 it was like a figure in a hall of mirrors whose head and body have been severed but continue to move as if they’re still attached. The persistence of the coalition required an immense amount of self-d

presented the Durkheimian vision of society, favored by social conservatives, in which the basic social unit is the family, rather than the individual, and in which order, hierarchy, and tradition are highly valued. I contrasted this vision with the liberal Millian vision, which is more open and individualistic. I noted that a Millian society has d

All of this was a part of what Robert Reich has called “America’s first great merger boom,” which crested during the years 1898–1902. In that brief, four-year interval, over twenty-six hundred business mergers took place in the United States, involving assets worth more than $6.3 billion. This sharp trend toward monopoly, or at least oligopoly, pro

On Yeltsin’s watch, the ignorance of many, combined with the cleverness of a few, allowed for the biggest, fastest, and most egregiously unjust reallocation of wealth and resources in the history of the world. It was klepto-capitalism on a monumental scale, but it wasn’t the first time. The Bolsheviks had done something similar under Lenin.

The right’s obsession with liberty qua free choice is as arbitrary as the left’s pursuit of equality qua sameness is abstract. The right champions freedom and equal opportunity as an expression of its belief in the individual and self-advancement, whereas the left speaks the language of social justice and morality as an expression of its belief in

The companies, and the families back of them, that poured money into politics in Texas—Gulf Oil (the Mellons), Sun Oil (the Pews), Standard Oil (the Rockefellers)—were the same companies and families who had been financing the Republican Party—and selected Democrats—for decades in Washington and in various states of the Northeast. Their political a