Archive
More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.
Articles
Left Behind
The New Power Eliteby heather gautneyoxford university, 336 pages, $29.95 In the annals of quixotic American presidential runs, the candidacy of Cornel West—the seventy-year-old academic, social critic, and activist—for...
Drag Queens
The queering of mainstream American culture has no more dramatic exemplar than the drag queen. RuPaul’s Drag Race, which began in 2009 as a competition reality show on the...
Prohibition Revisited
Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibitionby mark lawrence schradoxford, 752 pages, $23.80 Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States aspired to be a full-spectrum telling...
Why Glenn Youngkin Won Virginia
CNN dubbed Tuesday’s electoral results a “nightmare” for Democrats. The network’s political commentator Van Jones deemed them a “five-alarm fire.” In a race no one expected to be close,...
Abortion and Class
America’s abortion regime and the absolutist ideology that animates it is part of a war by the powerful on the weak. This is true not only because it targets...
Atheists Against Antiracism
The Elect:Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and Their Threat to a Progressive Americaby john mcwhorter substack, $5/month Cynical Theories:How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This...
The Continued Collapse of the Labour Party
For decades Americans and Brits have looked across the Atlantic at one another, seeking omens of the political future. Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal turn in 1979 was matched by the...
America’s History of Political Violence
In March 1791 the United States Congress passed the Whiskey Act, the new government’s first excise tax on a domestically produced product. Shortly afterward the United States of America’s...
Democrats Win In Wealthy Suburbs
The story of the defeat of Donald Trump was supposed to be one of “black and brown” voters rising up against the man Joe Biden deemed “one of the...
The Future of Conservative Populism
Amid the tumult of Election Night turned Election Week 2020, two United States senators made a striking and politically revolutionary claim: The Republican party will become a multiethnic, multiracial,...
Against Racialism
How to Be an Antiracistby ibram x. kendi one world, 320 pages, $27 White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by robin diangelo...
Under the Rainbow Banner
In June 1970, America’s first gay pride parades hit the streets. Four U.S. cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco—hosted crowds ranging from several hundred to a few...
Biden’s Comeback
Last Tuesday’s election results confirmed what most observers strongly suspected after the Super Tuesday returns a week earlier: Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2020....
Clashing Rights
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by christopher caldwell simon & schuster, 352 pages, $28 About halfway through his new book, Christopher Caldwell quotes John Stuart Mill...
The Future Is Mixed
Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majoritiesby eric kaufmann abrams, 624 pages, $35 At last count, 22 percent of Canadian residents and nearly 30 percent of Australian residents are...