Sublime

The change began in 2014. That was the year when the views of some Americans—white Democrats and people with college degrees—took a sharp turn to the left on identity issues. Is bias the main cause of racial inequality? Do slavery and past discrimination still hold Black people back today? Do immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard

David Brooks has suggested that Trump is the wrong answer to the right question. That question, Brooks believes, is how Americans should deal with upheavals and social shifts like globalization.69 More broadly, the question is how people should react when faced with institutions that appear to be both ill-equipped to cope with contemporary realitie

L’originalité de Trump, c’est de conjoindre dans un même geste, premièrement, la fuite en avant vers le profit maximal en abandonnant le reste du monde à son sort (pour représenter les « petites gens » on fait appel à des milliardaires !) ; deuxièmement, la fuite en arrière de tout un peuple vers le retour aux catégories nationales et ethniques (« 

Globally, America has grown more alarmed about its enemies, less generous toward its friends, more wary of everybody.

As someone who had spent several years on American campuses, all of these ideas rang familiar to me. They echoed the sixties’ revulsion to military strength, the romance with developing societies, and the questioning of American primacy. Regarding the Middle East, in particular, one could discern the reverberations of Edward Said’s Orientalism, whi

“We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.”