essays, notes and poetry against cultural decay
The latest episode of The Burning Archive Podcast is out and available on all the usual platforms, including Apple and Spotify. When faced with cultural decay and ruined institutions, what…
The post-democratic society has arrived. We need to turn away from the old priests and performers who are muttering grand concepts of democracy as a prelude to another circus performance in the decaying coliseum. We need to find our own new way in the feral cities of our distressed republics.
The final forced impeachment of Donald Trump has ended in the result that should never happen in a show trial. The sacrificial victim of the authorities’ spite was acquitted. Jonathan…
2020 has taught us through bitter experience that our societies are not vaccinated against totalitarianism, and certainly not the mutant strain of “soft totalitarianism” described in Rod Dreher’s Live Not…
Today after the distressing events and death in the Capitol building of Washington DC that interrupted the process of confirming electoral college votes, I am reposting this piece from five…
Events threaten to overwhelm my mind. The world stands on the brink of a crisis, and I cannot tell whether the world will drown me, or whether a disordered mind…
Yuval Levin argues that the institutions of contemporary society, primarily America in his account, have become degraded. There is a good discussion with Yuval Levin on this topic over at…
Over the last week I have read the K.T. (Kathleen Troia) McFarland’s Revolution: Trump, Washington and ‘We the People’ (2020). I was led to this book by the remarkable case…
I found on my bookshelf by chance yesterday the 2018 jeremiad by two Harvard University professors (of government and the “science of government” no less!), Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt,…
To the citizens, office-holders and advocates of the United States of America, Your republic is breaking. Yet your empire holds on. And the conceit of manifest destiny as the primal…
“Never have human groups of such a size been so rich, so old, so educated, so devoid of collective beliefs.” Emmanuel Todd, Lineages of Modernity, p 21 I picked up…
The third impeachment of an American President in my living memory is now drawing to a close: Nixon in 1973-74, Clinton in 1998-99, and Trump in 2019-20. Nixon used government…
