Revolution

Thursday

Daniel McCarthy

Soviet America’s revolutionary wars

Niall Ferguson is far from the first intellectual to compare the United States today to the Soviet Union of old. But Ferguson’s Free Press essay “We’re All Soviets Now” stirred up more discussion, and outrage, than earlier forays by others on the same theme. (Ferguson himself credits the Princeton professor Harold James with originating the phrase “Late Soviet America.”) Joe Biden already seemed like America’s analogue to the superannuated Soviet premiers of the 1980s even before his disastrous June 27 debate with Donald Trump — who is himself older in 2024 than Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko were when they died.

Soviet

Monday

Roger Kimball

How the 1960s institutionalized us

I was recently on Steve Bannon’s show, The War Room, to talk about my book The Long March. It was first published in 2000, so you might think that it is steeped in the sepia tones of another age. Doubtless in some ways it is. But in essentials, I believe, we are living now with the fruits of ideas that were but tender shoots when I was writing that book. Its subtitle is “How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America.” The 1960s! Aren’t we done with that silly decade yet? It was sixty, not twenty, years ago that Sgt Pepper taught the band to play. Haven’t we moved on? You tell me.

revolution

Wednesday

Will Lloyd

You say you want a revolution?

In the early hours of May 30, after a night of violent protests in New York, two lawyers were arrested by the NYPD. Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, Princeton and Fordham graduates respectively, were charged with attempting to firebomb a police vehicle with a Molotov cocktail. Mattis and Rahman are now indicted on seven felony charges for which they could face life in prison. What drove two promising young professionals with top-flight educational credentials to risk everything like this? Gary Saul Morson, an expert on Russian literature at Northwestern University, offered an answer.

revolution