Since the mid-2010s, “wokeness,” an evolving but recognizable set of progressive-coded formal norms and patterns of speech and affect, has swept through American institutions with an intensity, sweep, and speed far outpacing that of an earlier generation’s “political correctness.” This cultural shift has had significant effects on the day-to-day operations, on both the public-facing and…

We are witnessing an ongoing transformation of our political regime, in which sovereignty (that is, the authority to decide) has gradually been relocated from its constitutionally prescribed setting, which granted a presumptive deference to the majority, to a set of mutually supporting technical and moral clerisies. These staff a state-like entity that expands its dominion…

“Live not by lies.” —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn A “virtuous lie” is a false, misleading, or highly contestable claim that is promulgated without qualification as flatly true in order to serve a purportedly emancipatory end, despite the fact that evidence of its falsehood, deceptiveness, or contestability is readily available. We live by these lies. They underlie a…

Tyranny, Inc. is a book about the nature of labor relations, the conduct of corporations, and political possibilities in postindustrial America. Sohrab Ahmari, a journalist and editor whose magazine credits span the ideological spectrum from Dissent to the American Conservative, here combines anecdote and analysis with the awful ring of truth. It would be exhilarating if the portrait were not so grim. Ahmari’s first theme is coercion…

“Dictators are easy to read. Democratic leaders are more difficult to decipher. However, they can be just as unbalanced as dicta­tors and can play a truly destructive role in our history.” So Patrick Weil writes in the final paragraph of his thought-provoking treatment of Woodrow Wilson as the “madman in the White House.” His case is built on the seemingly irrational obstinacy—“no compromise or conces­sion of any kind,” Wilson vowed—that resulted in the U.S. Senate’s rejection…

There is no grander age of unelected heroes in American government and society at large than the early twentieth century. And in all the epic decades of the early twentieth century, there is no time more focused, more electric, more clear in its implications for the possibility of public action, than the gloomy crisis years of the 1930s and ’40s—years dominated on the American home front by that motley gallery of talented, sympathetic misfits from everywhere and nowhere called the “New Dealers”…