Matt McManus is an assistant professor at Spelman College. He is the author of The Political Right and Equality and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism among other books.
Patrick Deneen’s new book American Odyssey offers a compelling diagnosis of American dislocation. But its prescription mistakes nostalgia for the shared material commitments that make real community possible.
Critics of socialism frequently charge that it rests on an overly optimistic view of human nature. The truth is that socialists want a system that guards against tendencies to greed and domination.
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a massive hit — and nearly everyone on the Right, from Elon Musk to the Daily Wire, is furious. Because what 21st-century conservatives really want is a profound cheapening of the Western civilization they claim to revere.
Gad Saad is a staple of the anti-woke dark web. But his new book, Suicidal Empathy, is proof that the supposedly “intellectual” wing of the New Right is running on fumes.
Dave Zeglen is a longtime pro-union, pro-tenant, pro-Palestine, anti-ICE organizer backed by the Democratic Socialists of America — and his sights are set on Ann Arbor City Hall.
The Right’s con men promise liberation for those who feel themselves superior but are held back by the leveling institutions of mass mediocrity. Their rhetoric intoxicatingly combines feelings of superiority with a sense of dispossessed victimization.
The defining feature of American imperialism is its combination of an enormous capacity for death and destruction with an equally enormous sense of self-entitlement. Cold War journalist Dwight Macdonald understood this outlook better than most.
Elon Musk is an heir to the reactionary modernists of a century ago, a man whose utopian speculations about the power of technology go hand in hand with apocalyptic doomsaying about the woke mind virus and the “great replacement.”
The death of Jürgen Habermas has left philosophy and the Left poorer. Central to his work was a profound critique of irrationality in all its forms. Taken seriously, his philosophy provides an indispensable guide in the struggle against oppression.
The theologian and historian Gary Dorrien has made it his mission to chronicle and revive the tradition of Christian democratic socialism. His work reminds the American left of our project’s spiritual dimensions.
The resurgence of right-wing populism has set the table for the far right’s renewed fortunes. Published in 1947, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus offers a guide to the mythmaking and rejection of reason that continues to animate authoritarian politics today.
American democracy seems to be falling into an ever greater crisis. A lottocratic system, in which citizens are randomly selected to serve as legislators, could empower ordinary people and stem political dysfunction.
Frustrated with the state of America, some on the Right have come to embrace postliberalism, an ideology that seeks to invigorate conservative politics by rejecting equality.
In recent decades, the American economy has been characterized by rising inequality, shrinking free time, and the growing concentration of economic and political power, increasingly undermining the democratic ideals to which the US is ostensibly committed.
Legendary novelist Cormac McCarthy is often hailed by the Right as one of its own. The truth is more complicated.
Over the past few decades, the Christian right has grown to wield tremendous power in the United States. Its conflictual, Manichean worldview has offered reassuring certainties to its followers in an era of social dislocation.
The unfreedom workers suffer on the job has been an abiding critique of capitalism, and for good reason. A society that allows for the full development of human freedom must allow people to collectively determine the conditions under which they work.
In his latest book, right-wing provocateur Jordan Peterson looks to extract existential and political lessons from the Old Testament. Far from probing deep truths, it’s a shallow, self-serving exercise in culture war.
Conservatives today often denigrate a concern with economic inequality as a deviant left-wing preoccupation. In fact, from antiquity to the present, canonical thinkers of diverse political orientations have diagnosed economic inequality as a great evil.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s original critique of liberal modernity has won followers on the Left and the Right. His account of how capitalism has undermined the conditions of human flourishing deserves the serious attention of socialists.