New Left Review

3 weeks ago | newleftreview.org | Ross Douthat

Interviewed by Nick Burns Your first book, Privilege, is at once a devastating take-down of Harvard, as a bastion of a self-satisfied elite careerism, and a rueful love letter to it. Since those days, you’ve always unmistakeably been an adversary of American liberalism, yet in some ways continue to be a beneficiary of it. Where would you locate yourself—politically, then intellectually—on the map of the contemporary American sc ene?

4 weeks ago | newleftreview.org | Joshua Craze

The 15 April marked the two-year anniversary of a civil war in Sudan that has left tens of thousands dead and millions displaced. I published an essay in Sidecar, ‘Gunshots in Khartoum’, two days after the war began, which tried to trace its emergent lineaments. The conflict initially pitted the Sudanese army against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – a paramilitary organization formed during the reign of dictator Omar al Bashir (1989-2019).

1 month ago | newleftreview.org | Corey Robin

Tariff, Donald Trump has said, ‘is the most beautiful word in the dictionary’. He won’t be pleased to learn that it comes from Arabic. Ta‘rīf is a notification; ‘arrafa means to make known. Despite his many notifications, Trump hasn’t really made known why he’s imposing the tariffs – or why, as of Wednesday, he has put a pause on them. Trumpologists believe they know. Trump hates the rules-based international order. He loves the masculinity of manufacturing.

2 months ago | newleftreview.org | Tom Hazeldine

The Trump Administration’s high-handed behaviour towards NATO allies has dismayed liberal Atlanticists. But whereas Scholz and Trudeau were already for the chop, and Macron is a lame duck, the falling out between the White House and Europe over Ukraine has boosted the domestic standing of Keir Starmer to record heights within the Westminster bubble. In its first six months the new Labour government was universally derided, at home more vociferously than abroad.

2 months ago | newleftreview.org | Loren Balhorn

With a couple of weeks of hindsight, the biggest surprise in the German federal elections was that the political mainstream ended up doing as well as it did. Granted, the traditional parties of the centre-right and -left faced historically low returns, with the Social Democrats (SPD) scraping together some 16.4%, their lowest result since 1887, and their Christian Democratic (CDU) counterparts 28.5% – not quite as bad as last time around, but still their second-worst result in history.