Tag: communism
Thinking About Wendell Berry’s Leftist Lament (and More)
Wendell Berry’s sprawling, uneven, brilliant, and sometimes frustrating The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice will likely not, I think,...
Phantom Menace: America’s Enduring Fixation with Fascism
The reader may be none the wiser regarding the definition of fascism, but this book affords a wisdom and moderation of sorts all the same, one that stems from the awareness that in popular rhetoric, fascism is a word full of sound and fury, signifying not much.
Open and Closed: From Russia to China to America, the Largest...
Despite Americans’ instinctive openness, decades of deadly overdoses and mass shooting victims remind them that there have to be boundaries. The difficulty of controlling protests in Russia and China reminds them that closing down too hard can destabilize the government’s hold on society and trigger an exodus. The question that remains to be answered is whether these vast societies will push their limits to the extreme such that they lose the things that closure was meant to secure and that openness was meant to allow.
A Review of Verlaine Stoner Mcdonald’s The Red Corner
In her 2010 book, The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana, Verlaine Stoner McDonald resurrects the surprising but largely forgotten episode of agrarian radicalism in Sheridan County, Montana. Over ten years after its publication, McDonald’s stellar work of microhistory continues to provide food for thought to readers interested in both the political promise and limits of agrarianism, localism, and left-wing populism.
Words, Meaning, and Power
Kearneysville, WV. The publication of Sarah Palin’s autobiography, Going Rogue, provides an opportunity to discuss contemporary political rhetoric, especially the use of certain...
The Fall of the Wall
In my misspent youth, I was a politician. And in my role as a politician, I did all the things that politicians do. Well,...
Agrarians Rejoice!
We do live in a remarkable age. The last time agrarianism and distributism were taken seriously in America was during the 1930s. The economic...