In Law & Liberty, John O. McGinnis finds two causes behind the increasing polarization of western society. First is the rise of identity politics and the related need to label everything as either friend or foe. The second, perhaps surprisingly, is that our era of relative prosperity has made such activity possible. “Voters can indulge extreme beliefs because society and the world have been so relatively stable,” he writes.
Forget Everything I Said, or Backing Slowly out of the Echo-Chamber
Climate catastrophism suffered a Category 5 event with the recent confessional by Ted Nordhaus, among the world’s foremost prophets of doom, that he had it wrong all along. The models that forecast runaway global warming, Nordhaus writes in The Free Press, assumed simultaneously soaring populations, booming economies and flatlining technological improvement which, Nordhaus has belatedly recognized, simply can’t all occur at the same time.
