Marginal Christianity

Liberalism needs nothing less than a great rebalancing if it is to regain its intellectual and political vitality Jun 12th 2018 by BAGEHOT BREXIT is such an all-consuming process for the British—at once a drama, a muddle and a mess—that it is easy to forget that it is part of something bigger: a crisis of liberalism in the west. A growing number of countries have had their own equivalents of Brexit: Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election; the election of a populist government in Italy; the Catalan revolt in Spain; the rise of populist authoritarians in Russia, Hungary, Poland and, to some extent, India; the simmering rage against what Viktor Orban calls “liberal blah blah” in the intellectual dark-web. The list will be a lot longer by the time Brexit has been completed. It’s worth taking a break from the ins-and-outs of Brexit to look at the bigger picture, partly because the bigger picture helps us to understand Brexit better (NB...

By Andrew Sullivan That’s what’s scariest about Donald Trump. Democracies end when they are too democratic. And right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny. As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s  Republic . It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the...

The Reason Why We Should be Depressed About Bernie Sanders' Success by Charles Mudede • Feb 9, 2016 at 11:35 am   The key and devastating idea in Thomas Piketty's masterpiece Capital in the Twenty-First Century , an idea that many missed or failed to appreciate, is that there is no law-like link between democracy and capitalism. As he points out at the beginning of the book, there was after the Second World War great belief in the Kuznets Curve . The economist Simon Kuznets devised this hypothesis, which was eagerly accepted by those on the right and the left of his time (the 1950s). By using tax records, he saw a movement in the history of capitalism that began with things being very unequal and brutal for the poor to, step by step, things being more equal and democratic. It was therefore a law of capitalism that, as it accumulated more wealth, more of this wealth was distributed downward. But what did Piketty show? This curve was not a law but the result of a h...

                                                                                               By Tom Nichols By Tom Nichols ...

Slavoj Zizek   http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/088ee78e-7597-11e4-a1a9-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3QarbPV2B Economic models have proved more portable than political ideas, writes Slavoj Zizek   T o whom will monuments be built a century from now? Among them, perhaps, will be Lee Kuan Yew. He will be remembered not only as the first prime minister of Singapore, but also as the creator of authoritarian capitalism, an ideology set to shape the next century much as democracy shaped the last.   It was, after all, to Singapore that Deng Xiaoping came before enacting his far-reaching economic reforms in China. Until then, capitalism and democracy had seemed inextricably linked. Now the link is broken. It is often said that the west has failed in its attempt to export its civilisation to the rest of the world. That is only part right. No one dreams any longer of a global liberal democracy that marks the end of history. But economic models ha...

The Truth About Our Libertarian Age Why the dogma of democracy doesn't always make the world better By Mark Lilla It is time, twenty-five years on, to discuss the cold war again. In the decade following the events of 1989, we spoke about little else. None of us anticipated the rapid breakup of the Soviet empire, or the equally quick return of Eastern Europe to constitutional democracy, or the shriveling of the revolutionary movements that Moscow had long supported. Faced with the unexpected, we engaged in some uncharacteristic big thinking. Is this the “end of history”? And “what’s left of the Left?” Then life moved on and our thinking became small again. Europe’s attention turned toward constructing an amorphous European Union; America’s attention turned toward political Islamism and the pipe dream of founding Arab democracies; and the world’s attention turned to Economics 101, our global Core Curriculum. And so, for these reasons and others, we...

http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/democracy-no-longer-to-come/ 13 May, 2014   Carl Raschke   1 Comment   Current Events Or, Why Western Intellectuals Must Be Quickly Wakened from Their Dogmatic Political Slumber  The international crisis in Ukraine, combined with the precipitous and aggressive behavior of Russia toward the West, the docility of Europe and the fecklessness of American foreign policy in shaping events, has prompted after-midnight calls among many international experts for a radical and rapid rethinking of what the word “globalization” really means, or what it might look like even in the next five years. The various commentators, political theorists, and policy architects at  Foreign Policy  magazine, in particular, have been more than forthright in triggering the emergency alarm system with regard to what they perceive as a general failure on the part of Western leaders and the broader cognoscenti to recognize that a mass...