Sublime

Populism offers strongmen an ideological basis for making themselves dictators while pretending to be democrats. It is particularly useful when strongmen seek to neutralize or appropriate the self-correcting mechanisms of democracy. Since judges, journalists, and professors allegedly pursue political interests rather than truth, the people’s champi

City after city, night after night, packed arena after packed arena, the wrestlers play out a new, broken social narrative. No one has a fixed identify, not the way a Russian communist or an evil Iranian or an American patriot once had an intractable identity. Identities and morality shift with the wind. Established truths, mores, rules, and authen

The normal course of politics is various coalitions of elites and populace, each drawing from their own power bases. A normal political party, like a normal anything else, has elite leaders, analysts, propagandists, and managers, plus populace foot soldiers. Then there's an election, and sometimes our elites get in, and sometimes your elites get in

Reagan cared more about the functions of self-government than his most ideological supporters. He knew how to persuade and when to compromise. But after he was gone, and the Soviet Union not long after him, Free America lost the narrative thread. Without Reagan’s smile and the Cold War’s clarity, its vision grew darker and more extreme. Its spirit

government. And only if you

The tragic irony of the totalitarian deceit is that the epidemic of widespread and unchecked selfishness against which the lying totalitarian proselytizes is unlikely to exist in any circumstances other than the deprivation caused by totalitarianism itself. Wealth comes from capital. The destruction of capital, whether from total coercion or total