Something strange happened to the news over the past four years. The dominant stories all resembled the scripts of bad movies—sequels and reboots. The Kavanaugh hearings were a sequel to the Clarence Thomas hearings, and Russian collusion was rebooted as Ukrainian impeachment. Journalists are supposed to hunt for good scoops, but in January, as the…

In China, corruption is the mother of political evils. For Confucians, the best life involves serving the community qua public official, and conversely, the worst life involves misuse of public funds for private purposes. Such ideas influence history. Why did the Ming dynasty collapse? Why did the Qing dynasty collapse? There are many reasons, but…

Reduced to a short abstract, The Age of Entitlement seems artificially and debatably schematic in the manner of a David Brooks op-ed. But the book is more capacious than this would suggest. It is an eccentric work of history that is simultaneously a narrative of the baby boomers and their parents; a revisionist, even patricidal, account of the Reagan administration; and an entry in the crowded genre…

After a year of three elections, it appears that Israel will now finally have a government. Former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Benny Gantz, who had run a yearlong campaign to supplant Benjamin Netanyahu, found himself out of options in April 2020. With the coronavirus as pretext, Gantz announced that he would join Netanyahu…

Piketty’s earlier thesis, which all but disappears in the new book, was that the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth threatens to undermine not only democracy but capitalism itself. Piketty, however, had little to say about the deeper political-ideological dynamics driving these trends. This latest book is an attempt to fill that gap. Capital and Ideology aims to explain not only what has happened but why. In particular, the book focuses on the relationship between inequality…

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Bernie Sanders campaign, there have been many calls for serious reflection—each immedi­ately followed by comforting explanations that negate any serious reflection. “What if Occam’s Razor applies and the explanation for Bernie’s loss is the simplest?” asked former Sanders speech­writer David Sirota. “In all of American history, a…

In the Spring of 2012, my battalion arrived in western Afghanistan as the Obama troop surge, meant to break the Taliban, drew to a close. The Taliban remained unbroken, but our new mission was training and assisting the Afghan security forces. Like all supposed changes in policy for Afghanistan, this one amounted to less than…

Physicist Richard Feynman had the following advice for those interested in science: “So I hope you can accept Nature as She is—absurd.”1 Here Feynman captures in stark terms the most basic insight of modern science: nature is not understandable in terms of ordinary physical concepts and is, therefore, absurd. The unintelligibility of nature has huge…

A new political formation has arrived on the scene: technopopulism, or the synthesis of populism and technocracy. At first blush, such a formulation might seem like a contradiction. Technocracy and populism are typically understood as being deeply antagonistic to each other, perhaps appearing even as polar opposites: the rule of the experts versus the rule…