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Category Archives: America
Are There Realistic Ways Of Unifying America?
John Mearsheimer (b. 1947) holds that humans are survival-driven social animals who live in groups, that groups need thick shared cultures to function, and that nationalism beats liberal universalism because the nation is the best survival vehicle on offer. David … Continue reading
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Robert Putnam: The Man Who Counted What America Lost
Port Clinton, Ohio, sits on Lake Erie between Toledo and Cleveland, a town of factory workers, farmers, shopkeepers, and professionals. In the 1950s the fathers of its children punched clocks at auto plants and carried United Auto Workers cards, or … Continue reading
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Julius Krein
On the night of Tuesday, February 21, 2017, one month after Donald Trump (b. 1946) took the oath of office, a crowd gathered at the Harvard Club of New York on West 44th Street for the launch of a new … Continue reading
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Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (2012)
Applying the anthropology of John Mearsheimer to Dennis Prager’s Still the Best Hope reveals a conflict between Mearsheimer’s realism, which emphasizes the structural inevitability of group competition and nationalism, and Prager’s moral universalism, which seeks to export “American values” as … Continue reading
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Christopher Caldwell: America is still an English country
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, this column by Christopher Caldwell is not a lament for a passing political order. It is an empirical validation of realism. Caldwell strips away the universalist rhetoric of the American empire to reveal … Continue reading
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‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’
Here’s an excerpt from the new book, Regime Change: On March 27, 2025, the White House website had announced a new executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” In the order, Trump took aim at federally funded … Continue reading
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Regime Change and the Misunderstanding Myth
Mainstream intellectuals receive a book like Regime Change by Maggie Haberman (b. 1973) and Jonathan Swan (b. 1985) with predictable alarm. They read a narrative of institutional rot, cognitive bias, and political madness. Reviewers write long essays on the tribalism … Continue reading
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How Wide the We: David Hollinger and the Quarrel Over Solidarity
David Hollinger (b. April 25, 1941) keeps an office on a hill above the Bay, and the hill matters to the story even now that he has retired from it. Berkeley sits in the line of sight of the whole … Continue reading
The Man Who Lived in the Conjunction: A Hero System Reading of Stephen J. Whitfield
Stephen J. Whitfield (b. 1942) built a life out of a single word, and the word is but. Read his sentences on southern Jewry and you find the pattern everywhere. None of the features of Jewish life in the South … Continue reading
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I Can’t Remember A Leader As Unpredictable As Trump
Who am I missing? Trump uses volatility as a strategy. It blows my mind. I’d never choose the chaos he welcomes. How does he sleep at night? How does all this craziness serve him? Trump views predictability as a strategic … Continue reading
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