The liberal consensus is dead and buried—not just in the United States but abroad as well, and the triumphalist narrative the West spun for itself after the fall of the Berlin Wall is coming apart at the seams.
Sopo Japaridze describes the post-election protests that have roiled Georgia since October 2024. The country was once held up, among its post-Soviet brethren, as a “golden child” of extreme democratic (and capitalist) potential in the early 2000s. We can see where decades of deregulation and privatization has delivered it. Meanwhile, Fred Turner considers the blend of neoliberalism and Christian nationalism that defines the culture of Big Tech’s new homeland: Texas.
Elsewhere, Max Pearl writes on the landscape paintings of José María Velasco, which were used to justify and reinforce the nationalist ambitions of his native Mexico. Conor Truax reviews the first three books of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series. And new fiction from Ashleigh Bryant Phillips follows a medieval scholar through the streets of New Orleans, walking side by side with Joan of Arc.
“Today, as Silicon Valley leaders turn to the right, and particularly when they migrate to Texas, many are embracing the simultaneous celebration of entrepreneurship and Christian discipleship.”
“The deeper mystery of the books is not the cause of the time loop but the elusiveness of a distilled language to accurately describe the feeling of the condition.”
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