In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we saw how thousands of disaffected young people who’d been shut out of our society’s circles of privilege and denied the ordinary routes to adult independence turned to magic, for the same reasons that their equivalents have always turned to magic. As we discussed in the…
Tag: politics
The Kek Wars, Part Two: In the Shadow of the Cathedral
In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we talked about the way that America’s managerial aristocracy and its broad penumbra of lackeys and hangers-on retreated into a self-referential bubble to avoid noticing the consequences of their preferred policies. As they did so, those policies—the metastatic growth of government regulation that strangled small businesses…
The Kek Wars, Part One: Aristocracy and its Discontents
Every month or so since the 2016 presidential election campaign hit high tide, somebody has asked me to say something about the weirdest and most interesting aspect of that campaign: the role played in it by a diffuse constellation of right-wing occultists who united for a brief time under the banner of a cartoon frog.…
The Alt-Right, the Ctrl-Left, and the Esc-Center
When I predicted back in January of 2016 that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States, I suggested that his candidacy would mark a sea change in American politics and public life. That’s turned out to be even more true than I’d expected. It’s not just that Trump’s presidency challenges the…
An Astrological Interlude: Cancer Ingress 2018
Three months ago, we marked the beginning of the astrological year by discussing the Aries ingress chart for the United States. Those of you who weren’t part of that conversation may want to know that an Aries ingress chart is one of the basic tools of mundane astrology, the branch of traditional astrology that tracks…
An Astrological Interlude: Aries Ingress 2018
This fourth Wednesday of the month would normally be an open post for readers’ questions, but I’ve been asked by quite a few people at this point to cast and delineate a chart for the 2018 Aries ingress, and this is as good a time as any. Aries ingress? That’s the technical term for the…
A Rhetorical Education
Quite a bit of the discussion on this blog and its predecessors has focused on controversial issues, the kind of thing that causes rhetoric to fly fast and thick. Given the themes I like to discuss in these essays, that could hardly have been avoided. Ours is an age riven by disputes, in which debate…
The Babbitt Fallacy, and Other Ways to Lose
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about some of the habits of thought that form, or rather deform, the collective conversation of our time. Partly, of course, that’s because here in the United States, the collective conversation of our time has reached a level of weirdness that would make a surrealist gasp. Has anyone else…
A Dangerous Year
‘Tis the season for making predictions about the events lurking in wait for us all in the upcoming year, and I see no reason to demur from that common if risky habit. Those of my readers who’ve been following my blog since the days of The Archdruid Report know that my method in making these…
Systems That Suck Less
Last week’s post on political economy attracted plenty of disagreement. Now of course this came as no surprise, and it was also not exactly surprising that most of the disagreement took the shape of strident claims that I’d used the wrong definition of socialism. That’s actually worth addressing here, because it will help clear the…