Stephen Bleil

One of the most notable failures of the leftwing pundit and academic commentariat scene over the 15 years is how they completely misdiagnosed the dynamics of what was happening on the American right. They dreamt up fantastical conspiracy theories about the history of "neoliberalism" and "market fundamentalism," both pejorative caricatures. And they focused their energies on attempting to show how all of their own political grievances, which were mostly economic in nature, traced back to Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and/or Buckley. In the process, the left punditry almost entirely missed the emergence of the Postliberal right, which also shares their own animosity toward Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and Buckley. When Deneen's book appeared in print, they joined Obama in soft praise for its "provocative" thesis. When JD Vance burst onto the scene with Hillbilly Elegy, they accepted him as a respectable and perceptive critic of alleged free market "excesses" from the right (and only really soured on him when he became a Trumpist cultural warrior). They barely even noticed Adrian Vermeule's rehabilitation of Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, save to also afford it intellectual respectability since (a) he was a Harvard elite who coauthored with progressives and (b) there was also a progressive strain of Schmittian rehabilitation in this same period. The left-pundits of this era also spilled barrels of ink trying to prove that Pat Buchanan's cultural crankery transmitted to the present day via the late-life political alliances of Murray Rothbard. In reality, Rothbard was simply trying to latch himself onto Buchanan, whose movement predated and was much larger than the paleolibertarian scene. And now that Buchananite movement has grafted itself into Trumpism as well, without any discernible influence of Rothbard whatsoever. The result is that the left-pundit class of the 2010s now struggles to comprehend the divisions on the right, even though the evidence is all around them. They can't process how much Buckley's Fusionism is despised by the Postliberal & Buchananite crowds that migrated into Trumpism. They can't comprehend how Postliberals like Deneen, Vermeule, and Pappin embrace anti-capitalist economic narratives that are not far removed from their own positions. They don't understand how the same Postliberals have adopted their own narratives and pejorative screeds about "neoliberalism" and "market fundamentalism." All they can do is repeat the same old tropes of the 2010s "neoliberalism studies" genre, and hope that by repeating the name "Trump" enough they can somehow make it stick to a Postliberal intellectual scene that, just like the far left, also views what it calls "neoliberalism" as its primary enemy.

The story of the internet doesn't start with Apple or Microsoft or the ARPANET, it starts much earlier: it starts with America's fight against communism and...the nuclear bomb. WELCOME TO VAMPIRE VALLEY.

This Mother’s Day, I’m thinking about my mom, and all the lessons she taught me. I'm proud to honor her memory with the Ann Dunham Water Terrace at the Obama Presidential Center.

Lutnick should be in jail