Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elites appear to believe that, across a range of metrics, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is gaining ground in its bid to replace the United States as global hegemon. Americans might, therefore, at least consider the possibility that the PRC is outcompeting the United States. If the CCP is correct, this success would be due in large measure to Washington’s confusion…

Given Israel’s prominence as a developer and exporter of weapons and military technologies, the collapse of its defense systems on October 7, 2023, has raised concerns among security services in Europe and the United States. Central to this discussion is whether the operational success of Hamas’s attack was due to structural weaknesses in the technological…

The idea of America as the Arsenal of Democracy in World War II—innovative, productive, and hard-working—is now firmly a part of the story we tell about ourselves. It is a source of pride, patriotism, and inspiration. And it’s a true story. But that was then, and this is now. Today, Americans are waking up to the reality that we can’t make things in sufficient quantities to keep us safe, while our principal adversary is flooding the world with its manufactures…

The AMI has been operating since 2020 and has exceeded our expectations in terms of reach and impact. Demand far outpaced our initial projections, as more than 350 manufacturers signed on in the first three years. Our original goal was for two hundred enterprises within four years. Manufacturers who work with the AMI have experienced a 22 percent increase in labor productivity…

Since late 2021, the Biden administration has set aside more than $1.6 trillion in infrastructure spending. Almost three years later, it’s very hard to know where most of that money has gone. The Biden administration’s infrastructure laws are built upon two distinct and competing philosophies of industrial policy. The first, demonstrated by the CHIPS…

The world is about to need more energy. A lot more. The combination of providing basic energy services to emerging markets and powering a new generation of data centers and manufacturing activity means the era of flat energy demand is over. Grid operators all across the United States are grappling with a rapid uptick in…

Eskom’s recent history can teach us many things. It illustrates what happens when the power sector fails—not in one heaping collapse, but gradually through diminished reliability, with a resulting social stratification between those able to privately do something about it and those who cannot. It is a warning about a politics of energy that debates attachments to particular technologies and fuels…

Early in my teaching career, I sat in a meeting at my public school district; projected up front was a colorful graphic with the word “equity” placed at the very center. It was the conceptual cornerstone and guide star of this governmental entity—justifying and affecting every one of its policies, practices, curricular decisions, even down to the organization of classroom desks (rows were said to create a hegemonic power struc­ture wherein the teacher is oppressor and the student is oppressed). In the past decades, American education has undergone a fundamental shift in its telos, replacing achievement, equality, and merit as foun­dational ideals with this notion of equity, and, until very recently, few have stopped to question the goodness or rightness of this transformation…

As a cultural subject in, and by extension of, hypermodern America, you cannot believe in Rousseau’s return to nature, or Winckelmann’s return to the ancients, or the late Romantic insistence on the imaginative power of the poet. The closest you’ll get to the sacred is liking pictures of cathedrals on X, and the only way you’ll approach the infinite is through the secularized infinity of the scroll…

Byung-Chul Han is one of most popular figures in contemporary German philosophy. More a derivative than an original thinker, he applies ideas of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, etc., to such facets of modern life as professional burnout, dating apps, and social media. His work mostly announces the disappearance, decline, or death of some previously cherished aspect of human existence…

In this era of heightened racial and ethnic tension, few academic concepts have enjoyed as much success as “settler colonialism.” This approach has been used to explain conflicts taking place in Israel-Palestine, Australia, Russia-Ukraine, Latin America, and the African continent, as well as within the Western world. Yet the most fervent “anticolonial” regimes have generally done little to improve the lives of the oppressed…

Today, many self-described liberals in the professions—including in my world of academic political philosophy—inhabit what the histo­rian Darrin M. Mc­Mahon calls “a kind of egalitarian plateau,” convinced that the orienting value of their lives is equality. Yet liberalism’s relationship to equality has, his­torically, been far from a warm embrace…

It’s a rare buccaneer who runs a book club. But in October 2012, the chief administrator of the Silk Road drug market, under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was on the dark web assigning readings from the anarchist libertarian philosophy of Murray Rothbard. Roth­bard had argued that markets and individual connections were really all we…

What do we talk about when we talk about the frontier? For more than a century, Americans haven’t been able to avoid using that term to describe our society’s past, present, and future. It may be time to find a better one. A new concep­tual frame is needed to examine the political, social, and economic logic of the periodic upheavals in American life that result from these dynam­ics. We might call this process filibusterism, after its protagonists…