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Condition of America
Nick Burns quizzes the New York Times columnist on the contradictory ideological forces and factions driving the second Trump Administration, the strengths and weaknesses of American liberalism and the state of the country that he’s described as sinking into economic and cultural stagnation.
Hyperpolitics in America
Pathologies of American political culture, where—as Engels once put it—two great gangs of political speculators battle for power. Echoing social media’s strange mix of activism and atomization, a fervid hyper-politicization has replaced the quiescence of the Clinton–Bush years, Jäger argues, but the determination of US policies remains beyond popular reach.
Leaving Zion
The rejection of Israel’s hegemony by a new generation of Jewish Americans—and their radical critique of its revenge war on Gaza—have altered the political-intellectual terrain in the US. Arielle Angel, editor in chief at Jewish Currents, discusses the journal’s role in this rupture with the Zionist establishment.
Bidenism Abroad
Panoramic survey of US foreign policy as Washington attempts to maintain its global hegemony in conditions of faltering growth. Containing China, confronting Russia, driving decarbonization: each of Biden’s stated aims has been beset by insoluble contradictions from the outset, Richard Beck argues, now compounded by Israel’s punitive war on Gaza.
Gaza and New York
America’s exorbitant levels of military and diplomatic support for Israel have long been sustained by the hold of pro-Zionist advisors, donors and lobbies over US Middle East policy, Congress, the media and the cultural world. With the latest Gaza war, might their grip on the latter be weakening?
Climate Bidenomics
What light do the contradictions of Democratic climate policy throw on the situation of American capitalism today? In reply to Riley and Brenner’s ‘Seven Theses’ (NLR 138), positing a post-growth regime of accumulation with bitterly divided zero-sum politics, Battistoni and Mann see a flawed attempt at a green-growth strategy, its lopsided logic exemplified in the current autoworkers’ strike.
Notes on Tone
An aetiology of flatness, traced through close readings of three radical American poets. In tension with the expressive subjectivity of lyric and the forceful register of political commitment, resonances of the muted, withdrawn or deadpan affect of this poetry with a broader cultural mode, as the sound of the historical present.
Reflections On ‘Political Capitalism’
In a probing response to Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner’s ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’, Lola Seaton interrogates the claim that a novel regime of accumulation has emerged from the long downturn and unravels the conjunctural complexities—political, economic, environmental, geo-political—at stake in the debate that has ensued.
Weapon of Power, Matrix of Management
NATO’s twin dynamics—eastward expansionism within Europe, aggregated military operations outside—have brought it to the brink of a major international war, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But what is Washington’s real interest in the Alliance? Grey Anderson provides a sweeping historical analysis of a key instrument of American hegemony.
A Dissipating Glut?
Can Biden’s green fiscal stimulus kickstart a sustained dynamic of capital accumulation? Replying to critics of Riley and Brenner’s ‘Seven Theses’, Aaron Benanav defends and extends Brenner’s account of the long downturn, charting the epochal implications of shifts in demand, from agriculture to industry to services.
Party and Class In American Politics
In reply to Riley and Brenner’s ‘Seven Theses on American Politics’, mapping class and party shifts to a new regime of accumulation, Matthew Karp asks how far they break with conventional cultural explanations for the blue-collar GOP vote. Have deeper transformations in the Democratic Party—its hegemony within the country’s most dynamic capitalist sectors—elicited a backlash from its historic base?
Brecht In L.A.
From the author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, a rediscovered appraisal of Bertolt Brecht’s war-time exile in California. Tracing the swirl of interconnections between salonnières and stars, exiles and dissidents, artists of stage and screen. Beyond Hollywood frustrations, what of a Brechtian cinema?
Capital and Cybernetics
Current debates on techno-capitalism often underplay the relative autonomy of the digital realm. Responding to Evgeny Morozov’s ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’ in NLR 133/4, Timothy Ström outlines the abstractionist and expansionist logic of a novel cybernetic-capitalist form, originating at the apex of the US imperial system.
American Decline?
Predictions of American decline have multiplied over the past half-century, in tandem with the country’s expanding world power. Marco D’Eramo balances the strengths of a novel mode of dominion—military, financial, digital, diplomatic—against growing domestic strains levied by political deadlock and economic globalization.
Two Atlantic Lefts
The legacies of the Sanders and Corbyn waves include new cohorts of democratic-socialist elected representatives. As a provisional synecdoche for the electoral turn, Caitlín Doherty examines the records to date of the Democrat ‘Squad’ on Capitol Hill and their Labour equivalents at Westminster.
Caste, Race—And Class
A critical engagement with Isabel Wilkerson’s revival of the ‘caste school of race relations’ that flourished in the US social sciences in the 1940s. How might other international outcast groups—Dalits, Jews, Roma, Burakumin—compare to African-Americans? What logics explain their unique condition?
Trench Warfare
Granular analysis of America’s 2020 election results in rustbelt counties, the small-town Midwest, Red exurbs and Texan borderlands. With record turnouts on both sides of an otherwise immobile voter divide, the economy—not the pandemic—provides a key to the equivocal verdict on Trump’s four years in office.
Escalating Plunder
In the US, amid soaring unemployment, loss of health insurance and rising poverty, a $4 trillion hand-out to capital, with Biden’s party and Trump’s shoulder to shoulder. Robert Brenner analyses the Covid-19 bailout in the broader context of a faltering productive economy and growing elite predation.
What Is Trump?
The pitfalls of bad historical analogizing laid bare in ubiquitous attempts to pin a ‘fascist’ label on the 45th president. Instead, Riley argues, Trump is better grasped as an incoherent amalgam of Weberian forms of rule—ramshackle patrimonialism, weak charisma—operating like a foreign body inserted into America’s capitalist-bureaucratic state.
End of the Neoliberal Era?
Prognosis for the US economy, after a decade of unprecedented monetary stimulus. Does the distempered character of the recovery—soaring profits, feverish asset prices, anaemic wage growth—signal a structural crisis in the existing regime of capitalist accumulation, and transition to a new institutional framework?
The Year 1960
Prelude to the explosive struggles of the sixties in California, as the social actors, left and right, gather in the wings. Black student militants, white aerospace workers, City developers, RAND Corps dropouts, Latino activists—and Lena Horne, taking direct action against racism in Beverley Hills.