“A yearend conversation.”
The Scrum’s founding editors gather to look back and forward. This afternoon, our last of the year, we convened via Zoom to take a (not so fond) look back at the year that was. We spoke from Washington, Toronto, and…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Trump’s Foreign Policy Explained
Trump arrived in Washington as a New York property man unfamiliar with the permanent DC establishment, but determined to make deals where others dare not go. Chaos was the result. “Some friendly health advice to Iran,” President Donald Trump tweeted last Wednesday….
“The Russia question.”
The Scrum’s James W. Carden converses with Thaddeus Russell. Shortly before Christmas I conversed for nearly two hours with Thaddeus Russell, the historian, podcaster, and author (A Renegade History of the United States, Free Press, 2011). The YouTube recording of…
“The great realignment II.”
Populism and its enemies. This is the second of our two-part series on the ongoing American political realignment. In Part I we explored the historic backdrop of these momentous shifts. Here we consider alternatives to the neoliberal/fusionist consensus that has…
“The Biden blackout.”
“Soft despotism” is upon us. This article first appeared on The Scrum. DECEMBER 17—Those who followed events in 2016 with sufficient acuity will have registered events it is now well to recall. In the infra dig response of liberals to…
“Politics, tragedy, sovereignty.”
The meaning of today’s Russia. The Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy recently hosted a panel discussion on U.S.–Russia relations and Russia’s place in the world. The full video of this exchange, recorded December 2nd, is here: The discussion was moderated…
Who will Biden bomb first?
The President-elect’s ‘global leadership’ is a return to the failed policies of Obama and Clinton This article first appeared on Unherd on December 4, 2020. “America is back.” So President-elect Biden declared after announcing his cabinet nominations last week, and after…
“The Great Realignment.”
Shifts in political allegiance. As Democrats continue their transformation into the party of the 1 percent, Republicans appear poised to become the party of the working class. This profound shift in American politics, historic in proportion and significance, will have…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Assassins & Iran
Any thought of Biden and his people riding into town on white horses to save the nuclear deal is strictly naïve. I was on the telephone with a friend in Tehran Sunday and found myself telling him about a Christmas card…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Empire with a Human Face
The Biden people are unlikely to speak of a new cold war with China, but they appear likely to wage one all dressed up as a sophisticated trans–Pacific strategy. Those boneheaded Trump people explained their hostile, xenophobic, fated-to-fail policy toward…