Lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living

Count the things that are wrong in this statement

Dennis Kucinich on impeaching George Bush:

This isn’t a political question, by the way…this is a matter that’s beyond politics. This is a matter that relates to a democratic system of government…. We cannot let our political system trump the requirements of the law.

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Change must come through the barrel of Democratic party procedure

Much as I dislike George Bush, I don’t think he’s actually a Nazi. Which makes it doubly odd that he’s such a fan of facist-sounding language (the one that really does my head in is calling America “the homeland”). It seems like a strange kind of cultural illiteracy: Bush adopts certain authoritarian tropes from fascism […]

Arendt in the West Wing

On the way out after a talk on Arendt last week, a friend turned to me and said, “so, I guess you’re pretty pissed off.” And indeed I was; I’m not especially knowledgeable or enthusiastic about Arendt, but she’s certainly more interesting than her American epigones (but I repeat myself; are there any Arendtians anywhere […]

The melancholy of post-Marxism

In the excellent “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Wendy Brown writes: Put simply, what liberal democracy has provided over the last two centuries is a modest ethical gap between economy and polity. Even as liberal democracy converges with many capitalist values (property rights, individualism, Hobbesian assumptions underneath all contract, etc.) the formal distinction […]