Mark Lilla claims MAGA isn’t even conservative, let alone fascist. This kind of cowardice won’t age well Published November 1, 2025 in Salon.com If there is one thing you are supposed to know about Mark Lilla, it is his status as a public intellectual. A professor of humanities at Columbia, Lilla is a longtime contributor to…
Creation of a political martyr: The dark history behind this moment
Charlie Kirk is not the first — totalitarian regimes have long understood how to build myths on violence Published September 28, 2025 in Salon.com Horst Wessel was the son of a Lutheran minister, a law student enrolled at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and something of a musician and lyricist. But he led a double life,…
Will we even notice when democracy is gone?
Normal life continues for most of us, most of the time — but everything we took for granted is slipping away Published September 1, 2025 in Salon.com e’d better start by stating that the metaphor involving boiling a frog by gradually increasing the temperature of the water is a myth. That the story is so widespread shows its…
Why Are Conservatives So Destructive? It’s Everyone Else’s Fault
Why are the rest of us supposed to respectfully indulge people who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old? Fascists are victims only of their own delusional understanding of the world, not the alleged problems a so-called “woke” culture imposes on them. Published Aug 26, 2025 Common Dreams David Brooks, the New York Times’ philosopher in residence,…
We need a new theory of democracy — because this version has failed
It’s time to look in the mirror, America: We chose catastrophe — there’s no one else to blame Published August 24, 2025 in Salon.com According to polling data, 62 percent of Americans favor the government being responsible for the health coverage of all people in the country. Sixty-five percent of Americans polled favored the infrastructure bill passed during Joe Biden’s…
How did we get from the ’60s to Trump’s kitsch White House?
Our culture turned on itself, stagnated and went rancid — that’s how Published August 9, 2025 Salon Quite apart from the fact that 20 years ago, almost none of our supposed thought leaders foresaw that the United States would slide into a fascist-style dictatorship by 2025, there have been surprisingly few retrospective analyses that seek to…
David Brooks faces the truth of US history — and runs away
NY Times’ pet conservative offers a lengthy apologia for America — and gets pretty much everything wrong Published July 26, 2025 9:00AM America’s so-called sane conservatives have had a lot of explaining to do since 2016, and even more since January of this year. How do they dissociate themselves from Donald Trump and still justify their own continuing belief in…