What is the Pre-Political?
For decades, it has been fashionable to blur the line between what is political and what is not. This hasn’t been a good thing for either side.| Damage
For decades, it has been fashionable to blur the line between what is political and what is not. This hasn’t been a good thing for either side.| Damage
The present moment is severely damaged and in need of some wide-ranging assessment.| Damage
AI chatbots create the fantasy of the always available, understanding Other. Such pseudotherapy inhibits subjective growth by undermining our abilities to tolerate frustration and promotes regressive, infantile ways of relating to others.| Damage
On September 8th, François Bayrou became the first Prime Minister to have lost a confidence vote during the Fifth Republic. His demise is a clear indication that the centrist project lacks the imagination to grapple with the current political moment.| Damage
Neoliberal free trade agreements in the 90’s dealt a crushing blow to the working class. The Left should learn the lessons of that period and support targeted tariffs paired with other industrial policies.| Damage
Apple in China tells the incredible story of China’s industrial development through the lens of America’s most iconic tech giant.| Damage
Trump just announced a partial nationalization of one of America’s biggest tech giants. This is not contrary to Biden-era industrial policy but an extension of it, as well as an opportunity for greater public control over private capital.| Damage
The splashy new liberal rag says there is no war on workers and doubles down on open borders. Future President Steve Bannon must be thrilled.| Damage
Alyssa Battistoni’s ‘Free Gifts’ sets itself the ambitious goal of demonstrating how capitalism’s distortions of our relationship to nature imposes limitations on human freedom. But without a constructive vision or concrete political prescriptions, that freedom remains rather abstract.| Damage
A review of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (Macmillan, 2023).| Damage
A forthcoming new collection of the writings of Bayard Rustin, challenging the shibboleths of the Left and with commentaries from contemporary writers connecting those challenges to the present.| Damage
Peter Brown’s Wild Robot series transcends the anti-humanist moralism of much contemporary children’s literature and presents a much-needed vision of a habitable future.| Damage
A new history dismantles the conventional wisdom—and implicit premise of much pessimistic critical theory—that Marx’s ideas never gained ground in America.| Damage
Steroid use is up, especially among young people seeking to display a particular physique online. The turning of the male gaze upon itself represents a radical form of alienation—and one with some nasty side effects to boot.| Damage
Why precisely does the contemporary Left persist despite its great unpopularity and political failures?| Damage
The crises of the twenty-first century demand conscious public control. But this power is conspicuously absent, on both right and left.| Damage
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) argues that we can free identity politics from its “elite capture.” But why not simply pursue a politics of class?| Damage
A review of Pelle Dragsted’s Nordic Socialism: The Path Toward a Democratic Economy (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025).| Damage
Comparing Trump to Hitler and Mussolini obscures the basis of his mass appeal, prevents us from confronting the neoliberal center, and demonizes a large segment of the population that we’d like to win over. There are better analogies out there, and ones that are closer to home.| Damage
In worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, protestors are fantasizing their participation in America's problems, and in the process ignoring their own.| Damage
