What those on the political right have missed about postmodernists (mainly because they haven’t read them) is that these writers are more often describing something than endorsing it. When Guy Debord looks at the sunless horizon of alienation left behind by the eclipse of meaning, he’s not in a deckchair drinking a cocktail. He is saying this is just how things are now, so we’d better get on with it. “The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation,” he wrote in The Society of the Spectacle. “Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender ‘lonely crowds’.” [People] identify with the lone hero not because they are heroes, but because they are alone.

Richard Cooke on depiction versus endorsment.

… ouch.

Americans, you must remember, grew up in the shadow of endless war. With two “sides” who championed atomic individualism, lionized competition and brutality, and despised weakness and fragility. And thus, America forgot — or maybe never evolved — the notion of a public interest. Each man for himself, everyone against everyone himself. So all there is left in America is extreme capitalism now. Few championed a more balanced, saner, healthier way of life, about a common good, about virtue, about a higher purpose. And in that way, America has become something like, ironically enough, a mirror image of its great enemy, the Soviet Union. It is a totalist society, run by and for one end — only a slightly different one: money.

Umair Haque on American exceptionalism.

There but for the grace of a comprehensive public liberal arts education go we…

Also, do Americans really not give up their seats on public transport? Like… really? I thought everyone did that.