On October 1 in Beijing, teams of weather-modification specialists stood at the ready as advanced military hardware, elaborately decorated floats, and ranks of gun-toting women in silvery boots paraded down Chang’an Avenue to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. It was another immense spectacle at the dawn of a predicted Chinese century, following the 2008 Beijing Olympics and in advance of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.

The past generation of conservative rule in America has, among other things, dislodged the once unquestioned interpretation of American history as a study in the consolidation of liberal power. The shock of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 initially struck the keepers of the meliorative liberal “consensus” view of our political past as a momentary aberration—half backlash and half tantrum. Liberal scholars argued that Reagan and his backers were engaged in a massive exercise in magical thinking, seeking to blot out the fractious political controversies of ’60s liberalism with an unstable compound of supply-side dogma and family-values nostalgia. It was a

It’s hard to imagine a worse election cycle for this sort of project. McKay Coppins, a political reporter with BuzzFeed News, has produced, in The Wilderness, an expansively reported preview of the 2016 Republican-primary campaign, focusing on people generally considered by the smart set to be the most likely contenders for the nomination. But Coppins began work on his book years before the first primary vote would be cast, and it was released a month before the Iowa caucuses. Meanwhile, over the course of 2015, former reality-television personality Donald Trump, having reinvented himself as a sort of Twitter-era Joe McCarthy

The old saw that Los Angeles is a city without a past went into American culture’s discard pile some time ago. If the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, Charles Manson, Proposition 13—the dawn of modern conservatism’s anti-tax mania—and Rodney King aren’t history, what is? That doesn’t stop a hazy impression from persisting elsewhere in the country that LA somehow sprang into being with the birth of the movie business. Yet the Pueblo de Los Angeles was founded in 1781, making it older than Chicago and Washington, DC.

One of the strangest spectacles in contemporary American politics is libertarians’ schizophrenic attitude toward the power of the state. We are supposed to hate the government, we are told, but mostly just the feds: One of Rand Paul’s big crowd-pleasers is to demand the return of power to the states—whether to legalize marijuana, ban abortion, or make marriage a religious rather than a civil institution. The great fear, for today’s pot-smoking readers of Ayn Rand, is of a distant and faceless government, all those bureaucrats in Washington, DC; the utopian dream is the return of face-to-face power, the intimate, reasonable

Capitalism as we know it is failing, says Paul Mason, and it’s high time to anoint a successor. In his futurist tract Postcapitalism, he attempts to do just that, mixing Marxist theory, labor history, tech euphoria, and about forty other ingredients into something resembling a unified theory of political economy.

From the early 1970s though 2005, I was a loyal member of the Republican Party and the libertarian wing of the conservative movement. When I signed on in the ’70s, the movement was very small; it was possible to know everyone in Washington who was a significant player. And I knew almost all of them, some even from college.

Ghetto is one of those words that ring tinnily today. The put-down “He’s ghetto” implies that its target is low-class or unsavory—an association that only has meaning in the context of America’s poisonous culture of race. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, when social scientists fretted about a “ghetto underclass” of single mothers, welfare-dependent children, and “superpredators,” the term enjoyed a brief recrudescence. But then a diverse array of scholars, including historian Michael B. Katz, sociologist Herbert J. Gans, and political scientist Adolph Reed, stepped in to point out that ghetto and underclass alike were value-laden and inaccurate, reinforcing a

It’s no great exaggeration, these days, to say that the state of the white American working class is driving the American commentariat crazy. The non-college-educated white voter is notoriously the bedrock demographic aligned behind likely GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump—and leaders of the conservative movement, which has long pivoted on elaborate bait-and-switch appeals to its aggrieved, antigovernment, downwardly mobile base, are appalled to see that base swallowing whole the nativist, protectionist, and belligerently class-baiting nostrums bursting forth from the GOP’s unlikely orange-hued tribune of populist resentment. National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson recently sized up Trump’s ardent working-class supporters and