Back to the Root

Beneath the pavement, the beach; beyond the neon haze, the heavens

ReCreational

re-creation

Offering semi-regular, semi-coherent commentary about social and political matters.

The perspective is unabashedly, uncompromisingly, unapologetically, and unstrategically leftist.

The mode of discourse will usually be irony-laden snark mixed with outraged polemics. Sorry.

Posts

(when I get around to them)

Things on my mind as they occur to me…

  • The Vulgarity Is the Point

    How Trump Didn’t Break the Rules-Based Order—He Dropped the Mask, and Power Forgot to Pretend Trump’s vulgar display of power is dangerous. But its danger does not lie primarily in its novelty. What is new is not the reckless ambition, but the abandonment of etiquette itself — the stripping away of procedural language, moral pretense,…

  • Liberalism’s Double Inheritance — and Why Democratic Socialism Became Necessary

    An Overhaul of Thought A few months ago, I published an essay, Liberalism’s Double Inheritance and Socialism’s Rescue, arguing that democratic socialism could be understood as the fulfillment or rescue of liberalism’s highest humanist ideals. I wrote it sincerely, and I still stand by much of what it argued: that liberalism’s commitments to dignity, freedom…

  • Liberalism’s Double Inheritance and Socialism’s Rescue

    Liberalism’s Double Inheritance and Socialism’s Rescue

    First in a series examining how democratic socialism might yet rescue liberal democracy from its debased and self-negating commitments to capitalism. This post opens a series I’m going to go ahead and call Democratic Socialism at the Twilight of Liberal Democracy—my attempt to make sense of how a political tradition that promised human flourishing ended up…

  • Abundance: The Scarcity of Political Imagination

    Podcast-tested and campaign trail-ready, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance agenda aims to fix stagnation with speed and scale. But in bypassing democracy, it revives the worst habits of the order it claims to replace. The newest Pokemon card of middlepath optimism now being eagerly traded among sensible-center political thinkers and messaging mavens — who…