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An Alliance of Socialists and Conservatives Against Liberal Centrism: Not Such Strange Fellows After All
Orientation The socialist left trashes attempts to unite the left and right Is it possible to oppose this centrist drift to the middle of the political spectrum by uniting socialists and conservatives? In the United States socialists howl at the prospect of uniting with conservatives. “How stupid” they might say. “Conservatives are pro-capitalists, pro-war and […]
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Liberal Democracy at the End of its Rope: The Participatory Democracy Alternative Part II
Orientation Unfortunately, in the United States the terms “liberal, “democracy” and “capitalism” are all mushed together according to the following logic: All democratic societies are liberal; All liberal societies are capitalist and All democratic societies are capitalist In Part I of my article, I challenged this logic because many capitalist societies have dictatorships and some […]
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Liberal Democracy at the End of its Rope: The Participatory Democracy Alternative
You’ve always looked for leaders, strong men with no faults. There aren’t any. There are only men like yourselves. Speaking of leaders, they change, they desert, die. There are no leaders but yourselves. A united people is the only lasting strength. — Emiliano Zapata, 1952, to his followers In Yankeedom, the terms “liberal”, “democracy” and […]
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The Russian Wolf Speaks: Alexander Dugin and the Fourth Political Theory
Rise of the populist right In two previous articles I pointed out that the 18th century political spectrum makes no sense in the world today and it hasn’t made sense for at least the past 10 years. Today the leading forces against global monopoly and finance capital in the West are coming from the right […]
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Losing Honestly and Gracefully
After election defeats, political writers are quick to explain that if only the politicians had read my book and followed my advice, things would have been different for our side. My pitch is a bit different. Please read It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics, but not for a winning electoral strategy. If candidates opposed […]
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Cross-Cultural Comparative Politics
Orientation What is politics? Nine Questions for Determining What is Politics In Part I of my article Seven Theories of Politics I posed ten questions for narrowing down what the range for defining what is politics. Temporal reach How far back into human history does politics go? Does politics go back to pre-state societies? Or […]
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East or West? West is Best
Konstantin Kisin emigrated to Britain in 1993 at age 11, to join the flood of Russian emigres, high and low, looking for a new life. Kisin is the usual: loves the West, hates the Soviet Union, hates Putin. Ironically, the best writing in this billet doux is Kisin’s depiction of the Soviet Union as genuinely socialist: health care, […]
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Fighting Dragons
I love Naomi Klein. Strong, courageous, principled. In her latest, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023), willing to open her life for us to see for ourselves what makes her tick. A world of doppelgangers, shadow selves of many varieties from our repressed inner Other, to an AI construct of who you are in […]
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