Man in the Mirror

Abstract

Write about politics for long enough and you'll put some arguments into the world you come to regret. This issue's special section on the global right has me reconsidering a long piece on American conservatism that ran here in Dissent in 2019. That's before Joe Biden steamrolled over a primary field that was supposed to be the future of the Democratic Party, barely scraped together a victory over Donald Trump in an election that was supposed to signal the arrival of a new progressive majority, and then pre sided over an administration that was supposed to mark the end of neoliberalism. It's also before the summer of George Floyd, when the largest protests in American his tory were supposed to launch a reckoning that would transform the country.