Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, said in an interview quote that “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” The animating method behind Facebook and other social networks is to move private communication into public, machine-readable formats. The philosophy behind it is that people should behave in private as they do in public, as a matter of integrity. What that means for most […]

When the ‘baby boom’ peaked in the early 1960s and began to decline, Western governments around the world began looking for substitute citizens to address the enormous change in reproductive behavior among the native stock. Because the entire Western world was going through a similar fertility pattern, particularly with the invention and promotion of the birth control pill in 1957 (along with other contraceptives), it was not entirely possible to maintain the older national origins quota system. By 1968, the Immigration and Nationality Act went into effect, which abolished most of the old quota system, opening the US to substantial immigration […]

Terrorism is not a terribly useful term to describe what the media often calls ‘terrorist attacks.’ What they are is some combination of hostage-taking, raiding, and sabotage, usually for religious and political purposes. When an actual Muslim cleric holds up a Lindt cafe in Sydney, it requires some impressive contortions to deny that the attacks had a religious motivation, that it was not a self-styled martyrdom cloaked in the symbols of the religion. The West has come to have a lot of trouble acknowledging the religious impulse as a source of deep motivation for people. Part of this may be […]

For a brief period of time after the development of the radio, when enormous central governments carefully regulated access to airwaves and wires, a small number of media organizations came to dominate culture. Whereas in previous eras, religious organizations were the only ones with the level of capital, organization, and manpower to influence culture internationally, once the mass media came into play, those organizations supplanted religions. To the extent that modern man is a mediated person, previous generations of men were relig-iated — every aspect of their lives was understood by them in reference to their religion, whereas now, every […]

The violent worldwide demonstrations provoked by the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO are purportedly motivated by moral outrage over police militarization. In my previous column on this topic, “Who Curb-Stomped Officer Friendly,” I wrote: Automatic rifles, APCs, tanks, gas, drones, helicopters, and ceramic plate armor are all necessary to maintain order in a society that is disorderly, culturally chaotic, and ridden by internal political conflict. As long as the underlying conditions remain unresolved, it’s not possible to restore the historic rights that the American people expect, guaranteed to them by the legal system that they still believe to […]

Thanksgiving, unique among all the other official holidays of the American republic, calls back to 1621, before the revolution. The holiday has explicitly religious origins. Although contemporary multiculturalists tend to vacillate between portraying the holiday as a celebration of tolerance and decrying the pilgrims for their white, cis-hetropatriarchal Christian fascism, the older spirit of the holiday as a religious feast day tends to fall through the cracks. As Lincoln himself said when establishing the holiday: I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are […]

The left has conquered all of its opponents, despite ferocious resistance and uncountable deaths among their enemies. It must pursue an unconventional conservationism in order to defend the territory that it has seized. After centuries of steady gains, the left now finds itself on the defensive From a disenfranchised minority of authors, it has won control of world-striding governments, gained influence over billions of people, and built durable institutions around its ideals of equality. Kings and patriarchs have been killed and toppled. Those who were low have been made higher. The revolution has deposed the old aristocracy, and it’s difficult […]

Conservatives, especially serious conservatives, will usually say that they believe in returning America back to the principles of the Constitution, with respect to the intentions of the Founding Fathers. In the American context, this is a conservative doctrine, being that it hopes to conserve at least the legal (if not the social) form that the country set out to promote. This is typically phrased with reference to notions of clearly demarcated natural rights, festooned with quotes, and, if on a TV documentary, with a baritone voice-over. The problem is not so much with the traditionalist impulse that motivates American conservatives, but with […]

Contemporary divorce law has placed legal authority in the hands of wives, and taken it out of the hands of their husbands. All married households are legally female-headed households, especially when considered in the context of how family courts typically operate. The many changes in the United States since the 1970s have caused countless debates between the mainstream left and right: the causes of the shrinking returns to labor, the increase in the cost of living, the growing social chaos, the inability of the state to meet its long term obligations, and many other topics. In popular politics, both wings agree […]

The main problem with the American right is that it is almost solely a set of democratic institutions. While there are a small number of right of center foundations and right-wing fundraising machines, most of the effort and money on the proper right goes towards encouraging people to vote for Republicans at the polls. Part of the trouble is that Americans tend to see elections as a legitimate way of resolving major social issues. Mandatory education trains all Americans into believing that a democratically elected government acting within the legal norms set by a written constitution can solve all human […]