Salon

If they agree on nothing else, much of the right and left in America agree that big is bad and that "small is beautiful" -- to borrow the title of the British economist E.F. Schumacher's 1973 book. Around the time that Schumacher's book became a bestseller in the United States, American culture underwent a transvaluation of values. New Deal liberalism, which took pride in hydropower dams, highways and rockets, was dethroned by the counterculture, which opposed dams, loathed automobiles and preferred the exploration of inner space.

If any fictional character symbolizes the present moment in American politics, it is Mrs. Jellyby. In Chapter 4 of his novel "Bleak House," Dickens introduced readers to this "telescopic philanthropist," who devoted herself to long-term projects intended to help people in distant continents in remote futurity, while failing to notice the chaos in her own household.

In spite of the controversy that has followed the hasty release of their plan for the federal budget by Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, the co-chairmen of the president’s commission on the deficit, the way that the discussion of the federal budget is framed has generally gone unquestioned. According to the conventional narrative, there are three positions on the political spectrum, with conservatives and progressives at opposite ends and "fiscal conservatives" in the middle.

Conservatives have long succeeded in persuading business that they are its friends and liberals are its enemies. In reality, the reverse is true. Liberalism saved American capitalism during the depression, and if American capitalism is to be saved from the Great Recession, liberals will have to rescue it.

The setbacks Democrats are poised to suffer in the midterm election have to be viewed in a trans-Atlantic context. The backlash against Barack Obama and the contemporary Democratic Party is part of a global wave of popular disapproval of social democratic parties that abandoned their traditional working-class constituents in order to woo bankers and professionals.

President Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission, which is scheduled to issue its report on the budget in December, has been criticized for being stacked with conservative deficit hawks, including its co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles. In order to present an alternate view, Esquire magazine created its own "Commission to Balance the Federal Budget" made up of two retired Democratic senators, Bill Bradley and Gary Hart, and two retired Republican senators, John Danforth and Bob Packwood.

Tim Wu's "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" has been out for a few weeks now and has already become one of those books that prognosticators and opinionators feel obliged to respond to. ...

In the six years that drone strikes have been used in the fight against Pakistan, researchers at the New America Foundation estimate that between 1283 and ...

In the aftermath of a global economic collapse brought about in part by the corruption of big government by big finance, many pundits expected a voter backlash in America to take the form of a combination of populist anti-elitism and statist anti-capitalism. But that has not happened, nor is it likely to occur. In the United States, the populists are anti-statist and the statists are anti-populist.

Are critics of the Chinese dictatorship’s mercantilist trade strategy the unwitting enemies of the poor people of the world? Are multinational corporations that transfer production from unionized American workplaces to a low-wage country where independent unions are illegal and dissident democrats like Liu Xiaobao and his wife are jailed the true benefactors of humanity?