Everybody should read The Communist Manifesto, and read it more than once.  Short, fast-moving and written to be understood by a wide audience, it’s a gripping read, a huge intellectual accomplishment, and a way of thinking about the world that has shaped almost everything that came after it.  It was once said that the second [...]

Recently, on a trip to Washington, D.C., I stopped by the offices of The American Interest and sat down to discuss the Tea Party movement in the context of historical American populism, something I wrote about in my recent post, “Do Soldiers Drink Tea?“. Here it is:
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
(You can also [...]

A report from the Pew Research Center out this morning isn’t getting huge play in the press, but it offers a much bigger clue to the shape of our future than anything you will read on the front page of today’s New York Times.
The report is on public attitudes toward unions, and it finds that [...]

Regular longtime readers of this blog know about E. Benjamin Skinner, a former Team Mead research associate who has gone on to great things.  He wrote a book on slavery in the contemporary world, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, which received the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for nonfiction. In the course [...]

An editorial in today’s New York Times acknowledges something that everybody who doesn’t read the Times has known for several weeks now: sloppy work by climate scientists and the IPCC has severely dented public confidence in climate science generally, and has undermined the political prospects for government action on the issue.
Climate skeptics won’t be happy [...]

Two stories this morning cast some light on where the country is headed.  The news isn’t good for the upper middle class.  If you are, or you plan to be, a lawyer, a tenured university professor, a manager, an architect, a civil servant or a doctor, be afraid.  Be very, very afraid.
The bell is tolling [...]

Almost 500 years ago, Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.  There’s no doubt that a lot of serious prayers were prayed and good sermons preached in the Castle Church where Luther posted his theses.  But over the years a lot of holy crap had collected [...]

The driving force in American politics today is a struggle to restructure and modernize some of our most basic institutions.  It’s only going to get more intense.
Back before the global warming mess blew up, I wrote a post about the breakup of the ‘blue social model‘.  Not to regurgitate the whole post, but the mid-twentieth [...]

According to a recent Gallup poll, 55 percent of Americans want Congress to put health care reform aside for a while.  Only 39 percent want the Democrats to struggle on.
The majority is right.  The problem isn’t that the bills in the House and Senate are too sweeping.  The problem is that they are so timid [...]

The collapse of the climate change movement is entering a new stage: the liberal media is waking up to the story.  Slowly.
This, in a nutshell, is what’s happened.  A whole series of missteps and misjudgments at two of the leading institutions of the climate change universe (the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change and the [...]

Last week, I wrote about the following global trends that will be shaping our world in the coming decade; each are listed below, with links to the longer, more detailed predictions.
Interesting Times: All of these global trends will be fueled by, and responding to, the unprecedented rate of technological change. The acceleration of advancement that [...]

Matthew Yglesias really, really doesn’t like me.  He’s come after me again on his blog, attacking me for being a graduate of Groton and Yale and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and yet presuming to know what populism is.  Please, Mr. Yglesias; I may not quite measure up to your severe standards [...]

The accelerating pace of world history poses a single, common challenge to all the world’s governments, cultures, religions, businesses, civil society groups and individuals.  But if the challenge is the same, the capacity to respond is profoundly unequal.  Some governments, some people, some cultures, some businesses and even some religions and civilizations are better placed [...]

The look at the ten trends that will shape the new decade continues today with the next three trends on the list.  The series began on Monday with a post on the hidden force that shapes our times: the acceleration of world history.  On Tuesday I posted on economic turbulence and proliferation of disturbing new [...]

Nobody really knows what will happen in 2010, although Larry Sabato’s Jeanne Dixon-inspired post at Politico comes pretty close.  But there are ten stories that will shape the world this year — for better or for worse.  Other crises may erupt (I have not, for example, included the long-running conflict between Israelis and Palestinians on [...]