Sublime

expended on the jerrymandering of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner obstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there is a permanent block on the line.

sybaritic

“I am greatly impressed by his central idea, which is that we can reduce the power of the corporate state only by making it less important in our lives,” wrote John Kenneth Galbraith, speaking for many.

Also, lacking civil liberties and property rights, representative democracy is left with nothing to represent except the will of the mob or—as it’s called these days—“activism.”

don’t mean that you should put it as bluntly as “What motivates you, Mr. Jones?”

Americans are usually too comforted by our stable creed and distracted by the flash of novelties to look hard at ourselves. Only a few times in history have we been forced to doubt the survival of self-government. It takes a very large shock to alert us that the engine room has gone silent. A shock on the scale of 2020.

caprices

Populism gives life to Michel Foucault’s celebrated reversal of the Clausewitz dictum: Politics is the pursuit of war by other means.