David Brooks has written an eloquent, bruised elegy for a conservatism he once believed in—a conservatism that, in his telling, began with Burkean virtue and ended in MAGA nihilism. He mourns a country that no longer believes in the moral underpinnings of democracy, in the quiet dignity of public service, in the slow work of civic knitting. He describes a nation ravaged by the acid of Trumpism...
The United Kingdom is no longer one nation under a faded flag. It is a kaleidoscope mid-shatter—its colors spinning, its structure cracking, its politics in open revolt against itself. Labour is shapeshifting into a cautious centrist hydra, the Tories are cannibalizing themselves like a snake confused by its own tail, and the Liberal Democrats are caught in an existential séance, trying to summon...
Let’s start with a scene ripped from yesterday’s headlines: A U.S. president, fresh off threatening to revoke federal funding from Harvard, takes aim at foreign student visas. The move reeks of petty vengeance—punishing institutions he deems disloyal, undermining education as a tool of enlightenment, and signaling to his base that “elites” are the enemy. Sound familiar? It should. This...