We are in an era of spiraling costs for core social goods—health care, housing, education, childcare—which has made proposals to socialize those costs enormously compelling for many on the progressive left. This can be seen in the ideas that floated around the 2020 Democratic primary. Proposals for free college and student debt relief, Medicare for All, free or nearly free universal childcare, and massive subsidies for renters in expensive cities were proposed by President Biden’s challengers, and continue to be at the top of the agenda for the left wing of the Democratic Party. Indeed, the current vogue for “socialism” on the left is, on closer examination, almost always about socializing these common household expenditures…

For the last two years, our nation has been engulfed by a health care crisis, as Covid-19 and its variants halted global supply chains, shuttered small and large businesses, and upended the everyday lives of countless Americans. Yet as the national and local media, elected offi­cials at every level, and health care experts focused on…

Film credits are generally a boring affair, and most audiences will have stopped paying attention once the reel rolls around to the gaffer, foley, and drivers for the production. For those patient enough to sit through the credits of Disney’s live-action remake of Mulan (released in September 2020), however…

The Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary recently de­scribed a nightmare experience dealing with the Internal Revenue Service. “My husband and I received a notice from the IRS in November indicating that we owed an additional $11,786 in income taxes for the 2018 tax year,” Singletary explained…

Perhaps nowhere is the gap between America’s cognitive elite and its populace larger than in their preferred urban forms. For nearly a century, Americans have been heading further from the urban core, seeking affordable and safe communities with good schools, parks, and a generally more tranquil lifestyle. We keep pushing out despite the contrary desires of planners, academic experts…

On a rainy August day in a United Mine Workers of America hall in Matewan, West Virginia, my fellow tourists and I got to meet an endangered species: real-life union miners. Most of them were retired. We were there to celebrate a hundred years since the largest armed labor uprising in American history. The Battle of Blair Mountain stands as a seminal moment…

For too long, politics has been seen in binary terms—a contest of Left versus Right, liberal versus conservative or, more recently, pro­gressive versus populist. Yet opposites can converge and even coincide, as with left-liberal and right-conservative support for free market globalization starting in the 1980s or authoritarian state control over ever more spheres of societal…

There is a disturbance in the main square. It’s the early ’90s in the southern Swedish city of Malmö, the country’s third-largest, and passers-by complain of groups of young men lurking in the shadows or acting menacingly on the street corner. They’re too old to behave like obstinate teenagers. And it’s too late at night. A meeting is held, social workers are assigned, a project is born…

Who wrote that the Chinese are “the wisest and best governed people in the world”? That they perfected “morality” as well as “political economy” to such an extent that “in those fields we need to be their disciples”? Today such comments would be presumed to come from the worst kind of “China apologist”—a “shill”—at best deluded, at worst brain­washed. But the man who wrote…

Russia has not been Communist for more than a generation. And yet, now that we are arguing about Russia again, it seems impossible to avoid arguing about Communism, too. When Russia was a basket case in the 1990s—shunned, stunned, and stagnant—there was little that Russians could say to the Western profes­sors and investors and philan­thropists who arrived in droves…

The question of authoritarianism in America has become a hot-button issue in our era of political discontent. A great deal of ink has been spilled by Left and Right on the rise of authoritarian threats in recent years—from Trumpian populism to Covid bio-surveillance—and many prominent social scientists have made strident arguments about democratic “backsliding,” “erosion,”…

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the dictatorship of Oceania subjects its citizens, or at least those within the ruling Party, to a ritual known as the “Two Minutes Hate,” in which a giant “telescreen” blares out propaganda to a captive audience. The narrative conveyed is simple but effective enough to repeat every day with only…

The most striking feature of Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Crossroads, is its sexual conservatism. The novel is an ambitious, almost six-hundred-page first installment of a family trilogy which has an equally ambitious title, A Key to All Mythologies. Yet for all the statements it makes—about altruism, about the dangers…