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by Ken MacVey
Now that Americans are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is worth visiting its metaphysical foundations. Many don’t talk about “the metaphysics of the Declaration of Independence.” But the story about where this metaphysics has taken America and where it could take it can be both inspiring and surprisingly alarming.
What is meant by “metaphysics”? A Merriam-Webster dictionary definition is as good as any: “the philosophical study of the ultimate causes and nature of things.” That the Declaration of Independence is steeped in metaphysics is evident from its opening paragraphs. The first paragraph opens by invoking the authority of “the Laws of Nature” and “Nature’s God.”
The second paragraph famously continues: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, andt of happiness–That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it . . .”
The Declaration then proceeds to submit “ facts . . . to a candid world” that document 27 alleged breaches and wrongs committed by King George III against the American colonies and their inhabitants.
The Declaration closes by asserting it is “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World” for a declaration that the political connections between [the American colonies] and the State of Great Britain . . . ought to be totally dissolved” and that the colonies were now “free and independent states.”
Thomas Jefferson authored the first draft of the Declaration. Although revised with input from Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and others, the structure and themes of Jefferson’s initial draft remained largely intact. Read more »
by Ashutosh Jogalekar
This Fourth of July I find myself feeling more patriotic than I have in years. That may strike many people as strange, even tone-deaf, given the political moment we are living through. I understand the reaction. Yet the feeling is genuine, and it rests on two convictions that have only grown stronger over the two decades I have lived in this country.
I arrived in the United States more than twenty years ago as an immigrant drawn by the same things that have drawn millions before me: the promise of American science and technology, and the promise of American freedom. My father, a professor, was a great admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. He regularly told me stories about them, and ones about Jefferson and Edison and George Washington Carver. World War II was another huge interest of my father’s, and he vividly communicated to me the storming of the beaches at Normandy, the dogged resistance at the Bulge, the decency of American GIs in dealing with enemy combatants. Later, when I was in high school and college, I found myself laughing until I cried while reading “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”. And reading Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” became a turning point. It told the story of brilliant scientists – Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe – who fled fascist Europe and found in America a beacon of freedom and opportunity. Those images were deeply inspiring. America was deeply inspiring.
When I came here to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry, then postdoctoral work, and eventually a career as a scientist, I carried that picture with me. Over time I built a life and a family here. Now, as I teach my own children about the same heroes my father taught me, I also try to give them American history in full – its flaws, its failures, its betrayals, and its stubborn, unfinished promise. Importantly, I tell them that this country is not great because it has no flaws, but that it is great in spite of those flaws – and that the same is true of the men who founded it. There is no contradiction between loving your country and acknowledging its flaws. What is wrong is in believing that those flaws make your country irredeemable and steeped in original sin.
Twenty years later, after everything that has happened in between, I remain as hopeful about this country as I was on the day I arrived. Read more »
by Mike Bendzela
With the Strait of Hormuz in a state of constipation, we’re forced to think about things we’d rather not think about, or, rather, things that until now seemed beneath thought because they are so ubiquitous as to be effectively invisible, like air. I can’t think of an adequate analogy for our predicament, except to imagine an organism that has managed to swap out, molecule for molecule, its native substrate constitution for a freshly discovered, new and improved substrate that allows the organism to perform at levels it never before dreamed possible.
Suddenly, the organism can fly, live comfortably just about anywhere on the planet it pleases, grow more food than it needs rather than scrounging for it, extend its lifespan beyond its natural limits, and chat freely with others of its kind all around the globe. One thing these organisms discuss with one another (fruitlessly, it seems) is that this new molecular substrate has two catastrophic drawbacks: It is both highly toxic and ephemeral. The organism’s progress has an expiration date, it seems, beyond which its substrate poisons the organism and the environment, then it vanishes.
Our new substrate (by “new” I mean merely about 250 years old, approximately since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, a mere blink for a genus that has walked the globe for close to two million years) is fossil carbon, which has shouldered aside living carbon and set up house even within our very bodies and culture. Coal gives us heat, smelting of metals, and electricity generation. Oil gives us liquid fuels and chemical feedstocks. Natural gas (methane) adds to that mix the ability to synthesize nitrogenous fertilizers from mere air, which compounds are then incorporated into our very bodies. Energy expert Vaclav Smil has famously pointed out that this fossil carbon allows us to prop up modern civilization on four mighty pillars: Concrete, steel, ammonia, and plastics. Given that even wind turbines and solar photovoltaic cells depend utterly upon the products and processes of this fossil carbon substrate, it should be apparent that “green” technologies really aren’t so green after all. They’re just the latest users of fossil carbon. Read more »
by John Allen Paulos
The director of the National Science Foundation, appointed by newly elected President Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., just announced a number of heretofore largely secret findings. At a hastily organized press conference, Ed Cayce, the rather pugnacious man at the helm of the agency, stated that his staff had convincingly verified a number of controversial claims regarding UFOs, psychics, and other hot button issues.
The first involves a strange piece of metal found in Roswell, N.M., where many believe an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947. Cayce declared that the fragment has quite an amazing property. “Sensitive measurements have revealed that it exerts a faint physical attraction on every information‑processing instrument so far tested. Moreover, this attraction is nine times as strong one foot away from the metal as it is one yard away.”
What to make of the fragment’s effect is open to differing interpretations, Cayce admitted, but he maintained it can no longer be denied. He pointed out that “perhaps this strange attraction is related to new evidence for the sentience of animals, plants, and perhaps even of metals and rocks.
Continuing in this vein, Cayce also cited developments involving psychic readings. Specifically, he referred to an AI analysis of extensive data mining from labs all over the globe that demonstrated psychics are indeed commonly correct in their perceptions of others. Moreover, there are countless cases where psychics have accurately described the characteristics and life experiences of dead relatives of subjects. Read more »
by Scott Samuelson
The first noble truth is that life is full of needless suffering. The second noble truth, only slightly less well-known, is that the cause of needless suffering is maxxing.
What’s the problem with maxxing? As I see it, it involves replacing our enjoyment of the goods in front of us with a twisted desire for more, more, more. We end up destroying the only goods that we’ll ever have.
For instance, a young man wants to hook up with a young woman, comes to think that he needs to be better looking, starts microdosing a GLP-1, and soon is smashing his cheekbones with a hammer. Or a university wants to educate young people, thinks that it needs to attract more students, shifts its focus to shiny dorms and bigtime sports, and soon is jettisoning all its educational standards and laying off faculty to finance its associate VPs of consumer satisfaction.
Even in the good old days of Siddhartha or Epicurus, the misplaced desire for more, more, more was regarded as the central problem of the time. Still, it’s unsettling just what a digitized science our age has made of gymmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, softmaxxing, hardmaxxing, moneymaxxing, statusmaxxing, careermaxxing—really, anythingmaxxing, even booksmaxxing and jazzmaxxing!
I’ll go out on a limb and characterize modernity itself as prosperitymaxxing and longevitymaxxing. The maxxing spirit has even infected modernity’s ethics. The central tenet of utilitarianism is that actions or rules are right insofar as they max the moral good and wrong insofar as they do the reverse. As far back as the eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham was trying to figure out the precise equation for moralitymaxxing. Now radical altruists and longtermists leverage data to max their impact. We’ve gone from wanting to make the world a better place for our children to not having children so future generations can be in a better place. Read more »
by Herbert Lui
The team at product studio Good Enough, which has made software like blogging platform Pika, has a channel in their instant messaging dedicated to bad ideas. Bad ideas are useful because it helps lower inhibitions. The spirit of this idea reminds me of Tina Fey’s rules for improv comedy, and is why I think being prolific is generally useful advice.
The next time you feel stuck or blocked, just try writing down 10 bad ideas. You’ll feel recharged in minutes.
The indirect path to finding good ideas—by finding many bad ones first—is more useful than attempting a direct path to finding a good idea. When Vin Verma started blogging again, he noticed he stopped in the first place because, “I started to only want to publish the best things, so I didn’t publish at all. I stopped writing to just riff on things, or to explore things in a way that was honest to where I’m actually at.” Sasha Chapin says this another way, “Stop lying about who you are, and write the things that are actually inside you.”
“Good” and “bad” ideas are just labels. Writing all your ideas down, and being honest, is useful because it allows you to access your subconscious mind. When you feel psychologically safe enough to express any idea honestly, including bad ones, the good ones will also flow out. Read more »
by Anton Cebalo
Daniil Kharms was a strange man. Born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, he was the son of Ivan Yuvachev, who was persecuted for his involvement with the revolutionary group People’s Will (Наро́дная во́ля). He adopted the surname “Kharms” while still in school as a fusion of the English words “charm” and “harm.” His literary output would follow the avant-garde, particularly absurdism—first as a founder of the collective “Union of Real Art” (ОБЭРИУ), then as a playwright, and later as a children’s writer due to Soviet censors. He gained a reputation for being eccentric. His work was non-rational and non-linear, and he lived as an oddity among his peers.
Kharms found the absurd to be the closest thing to reality: a collision between “this” and “that,” one normal and the other on the margins. Absurdism was for him effectively realism. In his work, outcome takes on an independent existence. Logic is easily suspended, violence lacks motive, and mere chance often seeks revenge on structure.
Sometimes, what’s revealed in his work is nothing at all: an empty void of nonsense. As he wrote in his diary in 1937:
I am interested only in nonsense; only in that which has no practical meaning. Life interests me only in its most absurd manifestations.
Kharms’s short stories circle this nonsense theme. In one, a freak string of deaths leads the narrative to conclude that these were “all good people but they don’t know how to hold their ground.” In another, two individuals fight and one knocks the other in the head with a large cucumber, killing him: “What big cucumbers they sell in stores nowadays!” Read more »
by Thomas Fernandes
In a previous post I tried to explain most of quantum physics using the analogy of a spinning wheel. The blur of the spinning as a wave function, the stopped spoke as a particle. Now I want to see if the same wheel can explain quantum computing. To understand what makes a quantum computer different, it helps to start with the classical one.
A classical computer runs on bits, each one either 1 or 0, on or off. In wheel terms bits are levers, either up or down, fully committed to a single state. These levers are arranged into logical gates. AND only rises if both inputs are up. OR rises if either is up. NOT flips whatever it receives. String enough gates together in clever ways and you can compute almost anything.
Your processor contains billions of transistors doing the flipping for you, each one a tiny electrically controlled lever. Computing speed is limited by how fast a switch can be flipped, which is gated by how fast an electron can travel across the transistor. Smaller transistors mean shorter distances and faster switching, which is why chip manufacturers spent decades shrinking them down to a few nanometers.
A quantum bit, a qubit, is more like our wheel than a lever. While spinning it holds all positions in superposition, not restricted to 0 or 1 but everything in between simultaneously. When stopped it resolves to one answer. Define the upper half of the wheel as 1 and the lower as 0, and an even spin gives you 50/50 odds. You can bias those odds by adjusting what portion of the 360 degrees counts as 1 and which counts as 0. If you ever read about quantum gates, this is what they do, they set the qubit’s wave function in a controlled way before measurement. Get the wheel spinning if you will.
A quantum computer does not compute by flipping switches sequentially since all switch states are true at the same time. The infinitely fast wheel is both 0 and 1 all the time. So, the steps in quantum computing are not computation steps in the classical sense. They are steps necessary to stop the wheel on the correct solution. The difference becomes clearer with a specific example. Read more »
by Mindy Clegg
I recently visited Dublin Ireland with my family. As you might imagine, it was a great vacation. We stayed near the river Liffy which divides the city center. We mostly walked around town (Dublin is compact compared the sprawling ATL) but we took public transit a couple of times—the DART out to Howth and the street car to the national museum housed at Collins Barracks. We visited the Kildare street National museum (archaeology), the Chester Beatty library / museum including a meal at the Silk Road cafe, and the fun Little Museum of Dublin (a true home for Dublin theater kids). We shopped for souvenirs on the Grafton street, including the crowded Aran Sweater Market, one touristy knick-knack shop, and a second hand book and record shop squirreled away down a hallway.
We also took part in one organized tour up to the Hill of Tara and the UNESCO protected site Newgrange. That trip and the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence has put me in mind of the importance of history in creating and reifying our modern political structures and national identities. Nation-states employ history to naturalize itself for its citizens and the world. As such, what is and isn’t preserved for the public is a highly political act, not a neutral one. Ireland provides one such case and an interesting one, as unlike much of Western Europe, it is a post-colonial state.
Ireland’s tourist industry excels at teaching Ireland’s troubled history to citizens and visitors alike. Read more »
Elderflower tree growing out of a small drainage hole in a massive concrete wall in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.
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by Steve Szilagyi
Few topics in American history are treated with more solemnity than the Civil War. You could (as some men do) spend your entire adult life reading nothing but Civil War histories, arguing about tactics, and visiting battlefields, and never crack a smile.
Our scorchingly irreverent satirists don’t find anything funny about the Civil War; it hasn’t inspired absurdist comedy as the First and Second World Wars have, or spun off sitcoms like Hogan’s Heroes or M*A*S*H. Even the gruesome Indian Wars generated a sitcom – F Troop – and dozens of insensitive movie satires.
Major Civil War films like Gettysburg and Gods and Generals tend to be as reverent as old-fashioned religious epics, or sad as hell, like Glory.
What most critics agree is the finest film about the Civil War, Buster Keaton’s The General, is nothing if not a comedy – but it’s a peculiar kind of comedy: as dark as a daguerreotype, with a star who never smiles, culminating in that massive train wreck, whose budget-breaking expense derailed Keaton’s real-life career.
“It is altogether fitting and proper,” as Abraham Lincoln might say, that the Civil War gets this kind of hats-over-heart respect. The gravity of the stakes, the awfulness of slavery, the complexity of the constitutional crisis, and most surely, the number of dead (620,000 at least), have combined, in the case of the Civil War, to temper the national tendency to jeer and make fun of anything anyone takes seriously.
So we might conclude that there is nothing to laugh at about the Civil War. But that would be wrong. Read more »
by TJ Price
In last month’s column, as in the month’s before, I began telling a story that has its beginnings in a therapeutic modality called “narrative reprocessing.” Essentially, this is the act of re-authoring one’s trauma(s) in order to defragment painful memories, which in turn allows for a type of spiritually retroactive agency over events that caused distress in the past. I would advise reading the prior segment first before reading this one, and the one which preceded that as well. (I apologize for the falsehood in the first post that there would only be two parts; the story rather took on a life of its own, and went to some surprising places—this is the third, and final instalment.) To those of you who have followed along with me to this point, thank you. For those of you who have read the thing in various states of its composition—and, in some cases, urged me to press through to the end—thank you isn’t enough.
Please be advised that—in this instalment, as in the first and second—there will be a number of sensitive topics involved, including mentions of sexual assault, suicidal ideation, threats of physical violence, and general injustice.
5.
I did go back to school in the fall, as planned. My old roommate, Eddie, even stuck with me, and we were granted a spacious room to share on one of the top floors of the building, looking down over the entrance into the dorm itself. The summer had done things to us both, and in different ways. He came out to me fairly early on, and saved the grand reveal for a few months later, expecting it to be a huge surprise. Instead, it was met with a lot of amusement and laughter—what, you thought we didn’t know?—and nothing changed except for how he spoke in mixed company regarding his feelings for other men. I didn’t envy him. He did seem happier after he came out, though it was tempered with a bit of brittle arrogance, as if he had attained this fragile apotheosis of identity, and now had no time for those of us who still mucked around in the quagmire of confusion. His way forward was clear to him, and he had ever been goal-minded. From that moment on, it seemed he was making up for lost time. He became driven, and focused—I probably could have learned a lot from his hustle, if I’d been in the right place to understand it. Eventually, he and another musical theater major took up with one another, a guy that my roommate had apparently been completely enamored of for some time, but who had also felt uncomfortable with announcing his sexual preference (and who also, when he finally came out, was greeted by the same response we gave Eddie.) They seemed happy. They spent a lot of their time together. I think they eventually broke up, but for a long time they lived together, in an apartment off-campus. I even visited them once or twice, before we all faded away from each other, as photographs and friendships are liable to do.
I didn’t get to find out what happened to Ricky. The last time I saw him was that fall, in the top-floor room I shared with Eddie, busy with my own creative endeavors. I was writing a full-length play, a fictionalization (loosely) of my own awakenings as a college student, as a man who desired the company of other men but was repulsed by the urge, someone who couldn’t abide being touched. The play is interspersed with scenes held at a local coffee shop, during open mic sessions, in which the protagonist and his cohort of various artists take turns reading poetry, or speaking monologues. Read more »
by Peter Topolewski
Doesn’t it feel like the extravagance of the Roman games rose as the empire stepped and then stumbled ever closer toward ruin? In fact, the grandeur of Roman entertainment peaked at the height of the empire’s power. Considering the spectacle of sport in 2026, the Roman example suggests we are living through the height of “Western” civilization. Perhaps for not much longer.
All around, you can see it without peering too hard: the Roman policy of “bread and circuses”, so named because emperor after emperor gave out portions of grain to the common people while also sponsoring entertainment to keep their minds from society’s troubles. The entertainment included gladiatorial games, chariot races, theater, public works projects, and festivals and religious celebrations with feasts, parades, and music. The troubles the people needed distracting from included poverty, inequality, corruption, military humiliations, and evaporating political rights.
These days the grain has evolved into a buffet of social programs, and shopping is now in that mix of entertainment. In fact, when it comes to bread and circuses, the most significant difference between days of old and today is that both the distractions and the problems come to us from governments and corporations—with the line between them getting fuzzier by the moment.
Plenty to rail about on this front, but for today it’s interesting that the Roman poet Juvenal first used the “bread and circuses” when complaining about how easily the common people forgot the bigger concerns in their lives and society. He was condemning, in his way, those who are so easily distracted. Read more »
by Mary Hrovat
When I began to photograph the sky every day, the first thing I noticed is how quickly the sky changes. If I want to photograph a particular configuration of clouds, I need to go outside immediately, or stop walking to wherever I was going, and take the picture. Those clouds are probably on their way somewhere else, or busy forming or dissolving. The sky, so constantly present, is also the essence of the ephemeral.
I love being so enchanted with what I see out the window that I leap up and run out to take a picture. (And then I turn around and face the other direction and, as often as not, say “Oh!” and take another picture.) However, in general I tried to avoid chasing things. I do a lot of my sky-watching as I walk to the grocery store or the library or to see friends or family. Although I’m sometimes frustrated by human clutter that blocks an otherwise lovely view of the sky, I generally don’t like to search for a better place to see or photograph a particular sky—for example, to chase after a better view of a sunset. I don’t want to turn my love of the sky into a matter of obligation, of time pressure, of ought and should.
Sometimes I feel present and engaged when I’m photographing the sky, but at other times, taking pictures gets in the way of the actual experience. So I’ve formed the habit of sometimes just looking, of engaging only with my eyes and mind, not with my camera. Even if I want to, I can’t possibly photograph every cloud, every shade of blue, every change in the light, because the sky is so changeable. Read more »
Sughra Raza. Light Breeze, Lincoln Center, June 27, 2026.
Digital photograph.
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by Mark Harvey
There’s a video of Ivanka Trump going on breathlessly about how she and her husband, Jared Kushner, happened upon an island named Sazan in the Mediterranean while yachting with friends. In her story, they noticed the island in the middle of nowhere, swam to its shores, then hiked barefoot to the summit. She describes the whole sequence of events as if she and Kushner discovered the land a la Vasco de Gama. Then she describes their plans to develop a multi-billion-dollar resort there, but with a light touch so that people can live the way she likes to live.
If you knew nothing about Sazan, and nothing about the gaslighting genes of the Trump family—practically an annex genome—you might envision a virgin isle enshrouded in a soft mist, fairly begging to be transformed by the light touch of Ivanka.
But as with all things Trump, Ivanka’s version of the world travels through a snookering prism so bizarre that it has anyone with a marginally functioning brain hopping up and down yelling, “That’s not true.”
Ivanka’s blasé comments about developing Sazan may not be entirely responsible for tens of thousands of Albanians taking to the streets in May and June to protest what they consider to be a corrupt government and flagrant abuse of power, but the Contessa from Florida definitely added fuel to the fire, in an uprising nicknamed The Flamingo Revolution.
Sazan is a tiny Island of just two square miles and sits where the Adriatic Sea meets the Ionian Sea. It’s part of Albania and is only virgin land in the sense that the Flushing Line of the NY subway system is virgin land. In fact, Sazan shares some features with the NY Subway system in that it is riddled with more than 3,000 Cold War bunkers and 10 miles of secret tunnels. Enver Hoxha, Albania’s dictator from 1944 to 1985, went on a bunker-building spree that made the Soviets look downright Haight-Ashbury, live-and-let-live. He is said to have considered Soviet leaders like Kruschev much too soft and ultimately aligned Albania with China in an effort to find a partner more committed to Marxism-Leninism. Read more »
by Sean Murphy
John Williams’s Stoner is having a moment.
Or, it’s always been having a moment, but right now, in 2026, only more so. With the recent awareness that it was the monthly pick for the (amazing, awesome) Anthony Jeselnik’s Book Club, it seemed time to dive in.
You can usually tell you’re dealing with a cult classic—either unjustifiably obscure or egregiously overhyped—by how often it comes up in conversation. Over the years, I’ve noticed not only that Stoner is among a handful of books routinely mentioned, it’s never equivocal. Each person doing the recommending deeply loves the book and is happy to predict the ways it will change my life.
An observation about cult classics. Certain treasured works never capture the zeitgeist in part because they’re not easily identifiable with a particular time or place. Stoner, when it arrived in 1965, was describing a largely extinct America; to contemporary readers half a century later, Williams’s Missouri is as remote and unfamiliar as Hawthorne’s Massachusetts.
The most common and consistent accolades I hear or read involve the novel’s nuanced and loving portrait of a man whose passion—in this case for reading and teaching—transcends material wants. In our contemporary climate of social media, vapid influencers, and academic self-censorship, Stoner sounded like just what the doctor ordered, equal parts throwback and antidote.
And therein lies the rub. What disappointed me so immensely about Stoner is that I was predisposed to adore it. I’m the target audience; I’m that guy. A book about someone who loves art more than life itself? You had me at hello. I was, through the first half, disappointed and, by the end, astonished that this is the book, this is the character capable of changing lives. Read more »
by Dilip D’Souza
Let’s get this out right away: I want to write about defecation.
It’s not the first time, I’ll admit. Some years ago I wrote an article about, of all things, a mathematical model for defecation. This was based on a 2017 paper I read with great interest. It had the fascinating title “Hydrodynamics of Defecation” and was published in a journal with the even more fascinating title Soft Matter. The researchers’ finding? That all mammals big or small take about 12 seconds to defecate.
As one of the authors commented, “The smell of body waste attracts predators, which is dangerous for animals. If they stay longer doing their thing, they’re exposing themselves and risking being discovered.”
Now let’s get this out right away too: most humans I know – mammals all, certainly – take rather longer than 12 seconds “doing their thing”. They are, of course, usually behind closed doors and not taking any particular risk of “being discovered”, or even attracting predators.
Yet there’s the rub: closed doors. Hold that thought.
Some years ago, I found myself in a tiny village in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. I had to spend the night, and it turned out the only place to lay down to sleep was the terrace of a local temple. It was actually a very pleasant night, breezy and quiet. Read more »
by Thomas R. Wells
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. —H. L. Mencken
Neoliberalism is doomed because everyone hates it. They are mostly wrong about the reasons they think they have for hating it. But explaining what neoliberalism actually is – classical liberalism updated for the era of big centralised government – only presents new and clearer reasons to hate it. For liberalism itself has always been a minority view: most people have always viscerally rejected the idea that other people – the wrong people – deserve freedom and rights. Its influence came not from convincing the majority of its principles, but from offering the arena within which more powerful political doctrines and cabals could safely compete with blunted weapons for a reduced prize. Now the political tides have turned back against moderation, and liberalism’s gift of proceduralist constraints has itself become the target of our rage.
I. Neoliberalism is not what you think you hate about it
The term ‘neoliberalism’ was successfully expropriated by the left shortly after its coining and now functions in public, political, and academic discourse as an exonym: “a term for another group, which signals that the speaker does not belong to it” (Moira Weigel, quoted out of context). The left’s success here has been so great that almost the only people talking about neoliberalism these days are those trying to explain why they hate it.
On the one hand this means that there is near universal agreement that neoliberalism is terrible and should be overthrown. On the other hand, there is rather less agreement about what neoliberalism means and hence what needs overthrowing – except that it has something to do with capitalism and controls the world somehow. In the absence of opponents willing to call themselves ‘neoliberal’, everyone is free to make up their own version of neoliberalism to hate. Activists and academics have created dozens to hundreds of different theories of neoliberalism as projections of their pet peeves about what’s wrong with the world and what should be done about it.
Naturally these theories contradict each other. After all, they aren’t about the same thing. Read more »
