Tag: maga
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Begin with a fact that is easy to dismiss and hard to explain. The United States is building a detention system with 92,600 beds by the end of 2026, at a cost of $38.3 billion. It is converting warehouses into jails, contracting with county sheriffs, leasing state prisons, and buying access to carceral facilities in…
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The colonial regime that could not be discontinued, and the category that became the constitution The first argument described a lag. The second described an export. This one describes a continuity. Europe’s colonial regimes were, for the most part, discontinued. Decolonization was an event—sometimes negotiated, sometimes violent, always a rupture. The metropole withdrew, the colonial…
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I. The Trap Is Not a Theory of Structures. It Is a Theory of Collective Nervous Systems. Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap is usually taught as a structural claim: when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, war becomes likely. The structural reading is correct as far as it goes. But it is incomplete,…
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The Arithmetic of National Decline Every nation runs on a demographic ledger. Births minus deaths equals natural change. Immigration minus emigration equals net migration. Add them together and you get population growth or decline. The arithmetic is simple. The politics are not. For decades, the conventional wisdom in low-fertility countries has been that immigration can…
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The Powell Memo: The Blueprint Nobody Reads But Everyone Lives In August 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell—soon to be elevated to the Supreme Court—sent a confidential memorandum to his friend Eugene Sydnor at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He titled it “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” The tone was martial. Powell wrote:…
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By an observer of the long cycle There is a story the commentariat keeps telling itself, and it is wrong. The story is that the transatlantic alliance is enduring a “rough patch” — a temporary spat between allies who will, once the current occupant of the White House leaves, return to business as usual. That…
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I. The Epidemiological Frame: A Door Closing on the Delayed Echo Every major Ebola outbreak leaves behind more than grief. It leaves behind a reservoir—a cohort of survivors who carry the virus in immunologically privileged sites for months or years, unaware that they remain infectious. The 2013–2016 West Africa epidemic, which produced over 28,000 cases,…
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There is a pattern that repeats across history. A power structure rises, peaks, plateaus, and then begins its long, predictable decline. The conservative mind, as Corey Robin observed, is not merely resistant to change—it is structurally incapable of recognising this curve until it is too late. The conservative defends the present, which is already waning.…