Actor Chris Pratt finds himself a target of left Hollywood and various social media enforcers for his apparent lack of support for Joe Biden, a sin in his industry. Pratt has endorsed neither Biden nor Trump, which seems eminently sensible for a boy-next-door type who plays superheroes and adventurers in big blockbusters. But staying quiet is never enough for the political jackals, who insist silence is violence and a form of privilege. Trump is a Nazi; his electorate is full of hateful fascist enablers and this is no time for quietude.

Conservatives and progressives alike spent the twentieth century arguing for universal political principles. But the world is not so malleable; even in a hyper-connected digital age elites struggle to maintain support for globalism against a tide of nationalist, populist, and breakaway movements. Libertarians should embrace this reality and reject universalism for the morally and tactically superior vision of radical self-determination.

I’d like to speak today about what political correctness is, at least in its modern version, what it is not, and what we might do to fight against it.

To begin, we need to understand that political correctness is not about being nice. It’s not simply a social issue, or a subset of the culture wars.

It’s not about politeness, or inclusiveness, or good manners. It’s not about being respectful toward your fellow humans, and it’s not about being sensitive or caring or avoiding hurt feelings and unpleasant slurs.

The excellent British online magazine Spiked recently published “Caring for the elderly in an ageist society,” by Dave Clements, warning about deteriorating attitudes toward elderly people in the UK. As the article points out, there is more to the problem than logistical and financial concerns about providing socialist medical care to an aging population. Nor do increasing lifespans in the West, with attendant increases in loneliness and age-related morbidity, account for this unhappy state of affairs.

In my more than fifty years in academia and as a writer, I have found there are few people who see things as I do. Jeff Deist may be one of them. Along with many of his colleagues at the Mises Institute, Jeff carries on the traditions of the Old Right: opposed to leviathan state, antiwar and thus deeply suspicious of foreign interventionism, and traditional in cultural outlook.

Jeff Deist’s A Strange Liberty: Politics Drops Its Pretenses is a collection of more than forty essays that apply Austrian economics and libertarian theory, especially the writings of Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Ron Paul, to many of the big issues of the day: failure of democracy; the attacks on civil society; fake pandemics and the never-ending national emergency state; immigration; strategies for freedom.

Can the increasing politicization of life in America be stopped, or even slowed?

The cliché is true: September 11, 2001, represents a defining American moment. Generation X and Millennials suddenly had their own day of infamy, just as their parents and grandparents had Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination. 9/11 marked the end of a relatively untroubled time in the US following the 1980 and 90s, and the beginning of a dark turn that continues to this day. Optimism, an enduring feature of the American psyche (rightly or wrongly identified as buncombe by Mencken) suddenly was in short supply.