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Understanding Marion Maréchal

Since the 1980s, the French left and right have formed a front républicain or cordon sanitaire to keep the Front national (FN) out of power. When Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine took over the party in 2011, she understood that the only road to electoral success . . . . Continue Reading »

Culture War As Class War

The ongoing uproar after the election of Donald Trump led the sociologist James Davison Hunter to reflect in a fresh way on the engines driving political conflict and social division. Back in the early 1990s, he popularized the phrase “culture war,” the now-indispensable term to describe the . . . . Continue Reading »

Steven Pinker's Muscular Secularism

Enlightenment Now:  The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by steven pinker  viking, 576 pages, $35 Steven Pinker, as his blurb reminds us, has been reckoned by Time magazine among the “hundred most influential people in the world today.” In Enlightenment Now he devotes . . . . Continue Reading »

Fanon’s Warning

Alienation and Freedom  by frantz fanon  edited by jean khalfa and robert j. c. young  translated by steven corcoran  bloomsbury academic, 816 pages, $29.95 In the ferment of the present moment, with its surging floods of migrants and its ostensibly gratuitous but historically . . . . Continue Reading »

Cultural Realpolitik

On a clear June day in 2017, two million people lined the route of the New York ­Pride Parade to cheer as floats sponsored by Deutsche Telekom, Nissan, Facebook, and Toronto-Dominion Bank went by. Marchers wearing #Resistance T-shirts led the way, followed by ranks of New York’s Finest marching . . . . Continue Reading »

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