Ever since Benjamin Franklin’s infamous 1754 “Join or Die” debut, political cartoons have remained an American pastime, ironically serving as both welcome diffusers of political tension and galvanizers of activist sentiment. The historical luckiness of our ability to poke fun (and holes of irrationality!) …
I have long suspected that the sheer endurance of religion through millennia is a powerful stamp of validation to the idea of God. In this time-lapse view of humanity, the collective-unconscious shines through. …
One of the intellectually enjoyable questions of the free society is how it must mediate the competing demands of order and liberty. The democratic state has long made these complicated trade-offs between freedom and security that end up shaping culture, psychology, and generations of political thought.
To entertain this age-old…
It’s that time of the year again: A fresh calendar awaits us, the clean sweep of unlived months. Many of us eye the new year with a fusion of excitement and relief. Why? It is a container of hope. …
1.
What is something both dead and alive at the same time? A fine answer might be bureaucracy, with its flurry of paperwork and wandering hunger for more and more regulatory sanction.
This convincing performance of life is contrasted with bureaucracy’s static, inert policies, with the brick-like thud of its weight…
We’re in love with the idea of democracy. Its rapturous freedom, its ennobling vision, its earnest endorsement of the common man. Sentiments of equality manage to arch over present polarization to a hopeful extent. One wonders, where did this affectionate devotion to the democratic ideal come from?
I speculate it…
Our country has curdled over recent months into a land replete with arm-twisting coercion, resigned shrugs, and policies of suppression, and is wearing thin the old American legacy of our republic. …
1. Boredom
In an earlier installment of The Slouch Towards Postliberalism I laid out the “problematics” disease afflicting the precepts of western liberalism, the hubris of societal organization, and the regressive flavor of identity-based politics. There is more to the story, however.
And for this chapter we yet again call upon the…
It seems the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama keeps surfacing in op-eds these days, his name dredged up to spill disillusionment over his bullish thesis that Western politics had culminated in liberalism and would fall from this perch no more.
To Fukuyama, mankind had transcended the great ideological clash and had…
Psychoanalysis was once a hot intellectual sensation in its 20th-century heyday. With forays into the frontier of the human psyche still young, psychoanalytic theory was a bold stab into the wilderness of this exciting unknown. …
