An Endless Seeing (behind paywall), The New York Review of Books, January 13, 2022, Jacqueline Rose.

“Simone Weil’s political and moral vision always looked beyond her own earthly sphere of existence… Absence of joy, she suggested, is the ‘equivalent of madness.’… To revolt against God because of human misery is to misrepresent God as a ‘sovereign’ or tyrant who rules the world, as opposed to a deity who has laid down his power. It falls on humans to create a better world… A truer reality beyond and above this world…can be recognized only by those who bear equal respect to all human beings…whoever they may be. Marguerite Porete…had the nerve to enter a zone of absolute spiritual daring in which the self or ego dissolves… It would take some time before (Weil) herself would embrace such a radical disorientation of the ego as the only possible spiritual and psychic path to take. ‘What we believe to be our self [moi], she wrote, is as ‘fugitive’ as ‘the shape of a wave on the sea.’ (read more, behind paywall). Posted on Americans for Humanity in Personal/Spirituality.

• What America Would Look Like in 2025 Under Trump (behind paywall), The New York Times, Feb. 2, 2022, Thomas B. Edsall.

  What will happen if the political tables are turned and the Republican Party wins the White House in 2024 and the House and Senate along the way?

  One clue is that Donald Trump is an Orban worshiper — that’s Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, a case study in the aggressive pursuit of a right-wing populist agenda…

  Kitschelt’s last point touches on what is sure to be a major motivating force for a Republican Party given an extended lease on life under Trump: the need to make use of every available tool — from manipulation of election results to enactment of favorable voting laws to appeals to minority voters in the working class to instilling fear of a liberal state run amok — to maintain the viability of a fragile coalition in which the core constituency of white noncollege voters is steadily declining as a share of the electorate. It is an uphill fight requiring leaders, at least in their minds, to consider every alternative in order to retain power, whether it’s democratic or authoritarian, ethical or unethical, legal or illegal. (read more)

• So, You Think the Republican Party No Longer Represents the People (behind paywall), The New York Times, February 2, 2022, Russ Douhat.
  

  …But when it comes to the work of government, the actual decisions that determine law and policy, liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities… So just as a conservative alternative to Trump would need to somehow out-populist him, to overcome the dark side of right-wing populism, American liberalism would need to first democratize itself.

  (read more)

• Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off of Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison, Peter Schweizer. “One of the biggest scandals in American politics is waiting to explode: the full story of the inside game in Washington shows how the permanent political class enriches itself at the expense of the rest of us. Insider trading is illegal on Wall Street, yet it is routine among members of Congress.” (1/20/2022: Pelosi opens the door to stock trading ban for members of Congress.)

  The Trouble with Cultural Evolution, Massimo Pigliucci. “Ultimately, it is still very much an open question whether we can develop a coherent Darwinian theory of cultural evolution, or whether it may be better to abandon the analogy with biological evolution and recognize that culture is a significantly different enough beast to deserve its own theory and explanatory framework. Of course, cultural evolution is still tied to biological evolution, for the simple reason that we are both cultural and biological creatures. But we may have a long way to go before untangling the two and arriving at a satisfactory explanation of how precisely they are related to each other.”