Something Worse than Liberal Hegemony
On the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the Economist published an essay entitled “How America wasted its unipolar moment.” It was a familiar story in a popular genre…
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Posts by author
Matt Johnson
11 posts
Matt Johnson writes for Quillette, The Bulwark, Haaretz, Areo, Arc Digital and many other publications. He's the author of the forthcoming book, How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment, to be published by Pitchstone in fall 2022.
Putin’s Pointless War
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been in the making for a long time. It’s a reverberation from the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago and the fall…
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A Tribute to Christopher Hitchens
Listen to this week’s episode of Areo’s associated podcast, Two for Tea, hosted by editor-in-chief Iona Italia. My guests this week were Ben Burgis, author of Christopher Hitchens—What He Got Right, How He…
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Christopher Hitchens, Anti-Totalitarian
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Christopher Hitchens recalled a brief and “blissful” period when liberal democracy seemed ascendant around the world: There would be possibly a new internationalism, a new…
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Secularism and American Pluralism
In this 2018 article, Shadi Hamid discusses the importance of a “modest” American pluralism that can accommodate the fact that “there isn’t a common good to be found; that, because…
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What Yoram Hazony Gets Wrong About Cancel Culture
The open letter in Harper’s Magazine on the dangers of ideological conformity and the suppression of speech, signed by more than 150 leading writers and intellectuals, has been explosively controversial.…
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Tucker Carlson’s Populism: An Ominous Sign of Things to Come
Image by Gage Skidmore On 2 June 2020, Tucker Carlson delivered a 26-minute monologue on Fox News, as part of what he described as an effort to “create a record…
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Robert D. Kaplan, Covid-19 and the Anarchy that Never Came
Photo by Drew Hays Robert D. Kaplan’s February 1994 Atlantic article “The Coming Anarchy” was one of the most influential articles of the years immediately following the Cold War. The subtitle…
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Is Social Justice Really a Religion?
As traditional religious belief wanes, a new faith has rushed in to fill the spiritual vacuum. Its adherents are just as dogmatic as the most devout fundamentalists and its strictures…
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The World Isn’t Entering a New Age of Nationalism
In his 1981 book, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress, Peter Singer argues that our sense of moral responsibility has steadily grown to encompass larger and larger groups…
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What the Intellectual Dark Web Can Learn from Orwell
At the end of a 1940 essay on Charles Dickens, George Orwell described his subject as a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open…
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