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The dorm system's inequalities
Like most traumatic memories, I remember it like it was yesterday.
Catalonia at an impasse
For all their ideological intricacies, Marxists are remarkably pragmatic. Nowhere was this better demonstrated than in Lenin’s Oct. 17, 1921, address to the All-Russian Congress, when he stated, “The whole question is — who will overtake whom?” He thus reduced the entirety of class conflict, at its core, to a question of which side will achieve domination, making all incidences of debate, compromise and agreement between opposing sides in the great class struggle ultimately nothing more than disguised attempts to gain mastery. This ultimately reduced all political debates to confrontations of power, not arguments on right or wrong. Could this framework be applied to similar debates over popular sovereignty?
Liberalism going global
As IS swept across the Near East, an international consensus emerged: IS and its ideology must be wiped out. Helpfully, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, America’s most pivotal ally in the region, proclaimed that IS and the ideas it represented “are not in any way part of Islam.” The stage for an ideological war seemed set: the constructive, just forces of Western liberalism and its allies versus regressive fanatics dedicated to destroying the entire region. Yet it is Saudi Arabia's Islam, where decapitation punishes offenses from apostasy to adultery, and women are forbidden from exiting the house without a male relative, so different from IS’s? IS and Saudi Arabia share a devotion to the austere Wahhabi creed of Islam, created by an 18th-century political-religious alliance between the Saud clan and Islamic scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. IS “circulates images of Wahhabi religious textbooks from Saudi Arabia in the schools it controls.” Interestingly, as American officials and NGOs urge modernization, secularization and liberalization in Arab states, between America’s foremost Middle-Eastern ally and bitterest enemy, it is hard to imagine two polities that more thoroughly reject western liberalism. Perhaps rejecting modernity is better than accepting it. Of the various post-colonial project states imposed on the Middle East, all either lay dead (Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen), dying (Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, Afghanistan), or mired in stagnation (Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon). The political prospects of states that have rejected Western paradigms of governance are brighter. Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading Sunni Arab power, stands tall as the guardian of Mecca and Medina. IS, although it appears to finally be snapping under the weight of the global coalition assembled against it, carved out a state in a stunning series of conquests, while becoming the central locus of hardline Islamic religious enthusiasm, thus gaining enormous social and political relevancy. Beyond their disconcertingly similar brands of Islam, Saudi Arabia and IS both reject the Western state order, as do two of the Islamic world’s other politically and economically dynamic societies, Turkey and Iran. Both states were, like Saudi Arabia, never fully colonized by European powers, and are presently led by Islamists politically well outside the norms of Western politics. Could it be that modern liberal democracy is a “historical derivation from the particular experience of modern Europe,” and unsuited for universal application?
Race, wealth and justice
Hedge fund or mustard seed
The dorm system's failure
Certain works are so powerful they act upon their material, forming perspectives and shaping realities of the object they describe. One such tract was initiated when, in 1831, the French government despatched diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville on a nine-month survey of American jails. Although Tocqueville dutifully completed his official report, his masterpiece was only revealed four years later, when he published “Democracy in America,” a book of epochal significance for Americans’ understandings of themselves. Tocqueville argued America’s unique character owed much to Puritan institutions, particularly New England’s townships, where “power has been broken into fragments,” and thus “the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs.” Tocqueville praised this inclusive community governance, writing “the New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent” and “he shares in its management.” Furthermore, self-governance leads citizens to “practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.” This vestment of common persons with autonomy and political responsibilities formed the citizens who constructed an America removed from Old World rigidities of class and state.
(Un)bend the knee
During the most recent season of Game of Thrones, HBO’s wildly popular fantasy series, perhaps no theme was more vital — nor was any phrase more often repeated — than the question of allegiance invited by characters’ incessant exhortations to “bend the knee” and affirm the political submission symbolized therein. Viewers await each Sunday to find out if each character will choose or decline to bend the knee, and to enjoy the fallout.
Regretting Rousseau
The new McCarthyism
How to stop worrying and love unions
Why the Cold War stayed cold
In the years following the Allies’ triumph, optimists’ hopes for a tranquil and amicable new world order governed from Washington and Moscow were disappointed as, seemingly inexorably, the world was divided into opposed spheres. After the Korean War, Suez Crisis and the failed Hungarian revolution, humanity trembled in terror at the seemingly incipient prospect of nuclear holocaust. Yet the Cold War remained so, and could be turned to inferno by neither the Cuban missile crisis, nor the war in Vietnam nor even the USSR’s unstable final years. How did two utterly hostile powers, diametrically ideologically opposed, engaged in proxy and secret conflicts in every corner of the earth, with vast arsenals directed towards each other, avoid war? Could it be that it quite simply never made sense for either power to make war on the other, and that thus Russians and Americans were guided, if not towards peace, at least away from the unimaginable horrors of nuclear exchange and modern total war? This may seem like a startling proposition to modern Americans, conditioned by the odious rattling of the military-industrial complex’s mouthpieces recklessly all too often showcased on the cable news. Yet the possibility of Russo-American mutual interest in peace merits at least exploration, for if the notion held true 25 years ago it holds true today, and recognition of such a situation could prove invaluable in our increasingly uncertain world.
We need to talk about prohibitionism
Marriage and the state
Trumpism and empire
An Eisenhower Republican's manifesto
Bring him home
Tribune and tyrant
The night was, like most in Paris, a fashionable one. It was Oct. 1, and a luminous collection of aristocrats had gathered to fundraise for the standard-bearer of the reigning world order. Though in most respects this event was not much different from most of Secretary Clinton's rarefied gatherings — unlike Trump's rallies, which share more in tenor and audience with an Indiana State Fair or a South Chicago flea market than they do with a haute Paris gala; trust me, I've been to two — the attendance of Barbara Bush, daughter of George W., must have raised a few eyebrows. Yet Barbara's attendance at the event, alongside Anna Wintour and other gentility, is not so surprising. George H.W. Bush, Barbara's grandfather, was vice president to contemporary rightist fetish object Ronald Reagan, the 41st president, and the father to a veritable clutch of Republican figures, not least our nation's beloved 43rd chief executive. Yet in a September conversation, H.W. announced he would be abandoning the GOP’s candidate for the presidency, who had been nominated with a deafening majority of delegates by primary voters even before the Democrats could finalize their champion's investiture. What does it say about the Republican candidate that much of his own party runs in fear from him? What does it say about this man that the two great dynasties of American politics — House of Clinton, House of Bush — are unified in opposition to this menace to their interests?