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Left Behind

In the annals of quixotic American presidential runs, the candidacy of Cornel West—the seventy-year-old academic, social critic, and activist—for the 2024 election is among the more fantastic. Though Americans have shown a willingness to vote for politically inexperienced candidates so . . . . Continue Reading »

The Failure of Evangelical Elites

There are times in history when Christianity feels its place in ­society coming under threat. As it finds itself pushed to the margins, two temptations emerge. The first is an angry sense of entitlement, an impulse to denounce the entire world and withdraw into cultural isolation. In the early . . . . Continue Reading »

Class Acts

Another summer, another moving season in Northern Virginia, a region filled with peripatetic military and federal families. Some folks, like us, move by choice—our three-bedroom townhome with no yard had become ­inadequate for our four small children. Others, like the family of six across the . . . . Continue Reading »

The New Status Signaling

For those of upper-middle class sensibilities, the neoliberal order predicted by the 1990s remains inevitable. It’s as dreamy and poetic as it ever was, separated from practical reality only by the thin veil of a populist interregnum. Continue Reading »

The Elephant in the Room

The global system—which is committed to the free flow of labor, goods, and capital—works well for the leadership class in Europe and North America, as it does for striving workers in China, India, and elsewhere. It doesn’t work so well for the middle class in the West. Thus, in the West, the led no longer share the economic interests of their leaders. Continue Reading »

Confessions of an “Elitist”

I believe that a sense of honor is essential in a political leader and includes commitments to telling the truth (no matter how discomforting) and to doing one’s duty (irrespective of political risk). I believe that a knowledge of history and an openness to learn from it are essential qualities in any public official who proposes to bend the curve of history in a more humane and just direction. I believe that politicians who ignore the danger of unintended consequences inevitably make matters worse rather than better. Continue Reading »

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