The Post-Partisan Emporium

Why Don’t They Believe Us? You’re struggling to understand where all this vaccine hesitancy comes from. Let me help you. BY KONSTANTIN KISIN Imagine you’re a normal person. The year is 2016. Rightly or wrongly, you believe most of what you see in the media. You believe polls are broadly reflective of public opinion. You believe doctors and scientists are trustworthy and independent. You’re a decent, reasonable person who follows the rules and trusts the authorities. Imagine your shock, then, when Brexit, which you were assured couldn’t happen because it was a fringe movement led by racists for racists, happens. The polls, which widely predicted it wouldn’t happen, were wrong. The experts and pundits who told you day after day that it wouldn’t happen were also wrong. “Oh well,” you say, “these things happen.” Imagine that soon after Brexit, Donald Trump is running for president. You are told by the most trustworthy media outlets that he is going to lose. Some experts  say  his ...

Four Big Questions for the Counter-Revolution Has liberalism run its course? If so, what comes next? by N.S. Lyons June 25, 2021 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1974. (Photo: Bert Verhoeff Anefo / CC0 via Wikimedia Commons) This article originally appeared on N.S. Lyons’s Substack, The Upheaval . It has been republished here and lightly edited for style. In recent weeks my thoughts have been roiled by a series of questions. These questions are, essentially, root questions about the nature and future direction of what I will call, for lack of any better term, the Counter-Revolution—the informal and disorganized, but growing, and already global, network of people thinking about, writi...

Transcending Racial Divisions: Will You Stand by Me?, by Christine Louis Dit-Sully   Can humanity transcend racial divisions? It might seem like a quixotic venture, given how pervasive race-related thinking still is in society. Not a day goes by without a race-related controversy flaring up somewhere. Ideas about race are a key battlefront in today’s so-called culture wars . And yet there is not even general agreement on what race means. Although most people are unable to explain clearly what they think races are, they have an intuitive sense of what they mean by racism : most decent people abhor genocide and ethnic cleansing, support laws against racial discrimination and hate crimes, have no problem with interracial relationships, believe that national identity can co-exist with multiracialism—and regard calling someone racist as one of the most damning accusations possible. Being against racism is a creed of our liberal, multicultural society. And yet, ideas about r...