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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 »

Alexander Dugin Explained

Many sense that the West needs to reconsider its philosophical foundations. Reflexive appeals to old pieties no longer persuade. But those who look to modern philosophy for answers run into a problem best articulated by Leo Strauss: “Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight. . . . . Continue Reading »

Bolsonaro's Brazil

In 1941, after fleeing ­Hitler, the Austrian Jewish writer ­Stefan Zweig wrote a book called Brazil, Land of the Future. The title became a cliché, tiresome to many Brazilians. On an official visit in 2011, President Obama declared: “This is a country of the future no more. The people of . . . . Continue Reading »

At Lenin's Tomb

History, to the modern mind, has a goal and follows the path of progress, so that new becomes identified with better. It was on this basis that, a century ago in Russia, communist belief seized the moment. Typically for the progressive tradition, the word “new” acquired a magical . . . . Continue Reading »

Our Socialist Moment

The Socialist Manifesto:  The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by bhaskar sunkara basic, 288 pages, $28 In the spring of 2019, even the staid old AFL-CIO began to dabble in guillotine imagery. The occasion was a dispute between Delta and the International Association of . . . . Continue Reading »

Specter of the Beatitudes

Workers’ Tales:  Socialist Fairy Tales, Fables, and Allegories from Great Britain edited by michael rosen princeton, 328 pages, $19.95 When I was a girl, I had a picture book, The Day the Fairies Went on Strike. This 1981 confection by Linda Briskin and Maureen FitzGerald, with . . . . Continue Reading »

Russian Jeremiah

Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 by aleksandr solzhenitsyn notre dame, 480 pages, $35 The first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s memoir of exile, Between Two Millstones, begins with the author’s expulsion from the Soviet Union and closes with him viewing the landscape . . . . Continue Reading »

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