As it turns out, the internet is not that exceptional after all. It may be one of the greatest inventions since the printing press, as the cliché goes, and it has unquestionably revolutionized communication and commerce. But as David Pierce observed in Protocol shortly after the January 6 Capitol riot, “Everything is IRL” now. “[T]he…

Some, perhaps Donald Trump himself, saw the Trump campaign as an infotainment experiment from the beginning. Others, especially his most passionate critics and fans, still resist this conclusion. Re­gardless, there is an analytical utility to viewing the Trump presidency as a multi-season television series called Presidential Apprentice, an extension…

Back in the mid-2000s, right around the time of America’s second conflict with Saddam Hussein, the idea of the decline of America (or of the West) began to resurface in political discourse. While most commentators still spoke of America as an “indispensable nation” in the midst of a “unipolar moment,” keen observers suspected that the…

Authoritarianism has long been viewed as undesirable in the Western world because it represents the “wrong” values and is a political system completely incompatible with Western liberal demo­cracy. For several decades, it was assumed that authoritarian systems would eventually collapse. This liberal democratic, media-driven view of authoritarianism, however, does little to help us understand how authoritarian governments function and why they persist…

Several commentators have taken Trump’s departure from office to mean that the so-called populist tide is ebbing and that we are witnessing the return to a pre-2016 “old normal.” In fact, Joe Biden’s cam­paign implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—promised the resto­ration of Obama-era technocracy, returning the reins of power to the “experts,” as seen in his choice…

The West’s involution finds its mirror image in the original coun­try of the future, the nation doomed forever to remain the country of the future, the one that never reaches its destination: Brazil. The Brazilianization of the world is our encounter with a future denied, and in which this frustration has become constitutive of our social reality. While the closing of historical horizons has often been a leftist, indeed Marxist, concern, the sense that things don’t work as they should is now widely shared across the political spectrum. Welcome to Brazil. Here the only people satisfied with their situation are financial elites and venal politicians. Everyone complains, but everyone shrugs their shoulders. This slow degradation of society is not so much a runaway train, but more of a jittery rollercoaster, occasionally holding out promise of ascent, yet never break­ing free from the tracks. We always come back to where we started, shaken and disoriented, haunted by what might have been…

Like the Trump administration before it, the Biden administration entered office with big plans for immigration reform. As of this writing, the proposed U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 sits in the House Judiciary Committee. It is too early to tell what will ultimately become of this attempt to resolve one of the most controversial issues…

For most of the twentieth century, the neoclassical synthesis in economics was generally believed to provide a solid basis for public policy. There were, nonetheless, significant dissenters. Hyman Minsky, for instance, wrote that “modern orthodox economics is not and cannot be a basis for a serious approach to economic policy…

One of the great paradoxes of recent economic history is how little the information technology sector has contributed to overall productivity. Economist Raicho Bojilov examined total factor productivity across the major industrial economies from the 1970s to the present and observed: Somewhat surprisingly, we do not witness, even with a lag, a major pickup in…

Operation Warp Speed1 (OWS) was launched on May 15, 2020. A partnership between the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Defense (DoD), other agencies, and the private sector, its goal was to “accelerate the testing, supply, development, and distribution of safe and effective vaccines, therapeutics, and diag­nostics to counter Covid-19.” As a result…