Once widely considered the gathering of the elite of a future world government, the World Economic Forum is leaving a legacy of increasing irrelevance. To be sure, the snow was good; the AI art installation and occasional forays into witchcraft may have stirred some; but the whole thing has devolved into a cocktail party for the self-important, with diminishing bearing on world politics.
The Western world is experiencing the most dramatic political realignment since the rise of socialism over a century ago. The driving force then was the rise of the working class, created by the Industrial Revolution. Today, it is the shift to an economy dominated by information industries, technology, finance and media. Read more
Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism examined the three devastating ideologies that led to the undermining of European democracy in the 1930s. Today, democratic life is also under threat – and there are also three basic forms that this authoritarian threat takes.
Few developments have more cheered progressive activists than the perceived resurgence of labor unions. This has been sparked by largely symbolic efforts to unionize in places such as Starbucks and Amazon, as well as more sizable wins by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild and United Auto Workers, the country’s most important private labor union. In 2022 strike activity more than doubled from the previous year.
As the COP 28 climate shindig comes to a merciful end, history is truly unfolding, as Marx once remarked, as farce. Read more
With the 2024 election looming on the horizon, the Democratic Party faces a contradiction. By some important measures, the US economy is booming—third-quarter GDP growth figures were recently adjusted upward to a whopping 5.2 percent—but these numbers aren’t translating into political support for the current administration. A mere 32 percent of respondents approved of President Biden’s handling of the economy in a Gallup poll last month. Read more
Coming from a country that may soon choose to be led by either a cognitively challenged second-rate codger or a vengeful lunatic, one would like to look north, to Canada, for some inspiration.
This is an idea many Canadians no doubt find inspiring. A decade ago, The Globe and Mail published an essay that made the case that Canada was a better role model than the U.S. due to its approach of “mutual accommodation” — what the late Quebec premier Robert Bourassa called “one of the world’s rare and privileged countries in terms of peace, justice, liberty and standard of living.”
The most important political event this week will not be the upcoming GOP debate but Donald Trump’s expected visit with striking UAW workers as the walkout expands to other states. In that one appearance, Trump demonstrates one of the most critical parts of political change, the emergence of the populist right.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” wrote the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. This may prove no problem to the West’s climate-obsessed elites, who rail about the coming apocalypse, even while undermining the production of the very resources that would be essential if they are to have any chance to reach their cherished “net zero” utopia. Read more
Are we living in a new age of agitprop? It is not unusual for journalism, culture and the arts to reflect the political bias of societies and individual writers. But in the past few decades, the business of providing information and insight has sharply deteriorated. Read more
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