Author Archives: Timothy Burke

The terrible thing about what has happened in the Senate is this: the intellectual and institutional infrastructure of legal and political systems can confer a kind of revenant legitimacy even on claims and verdicts that destroy those systems. You can … Continue reading →

In the last two weeks, it’s been hard to miss the sudden turn among centrist punditry–the kind of people who presume to be kingmakers and political tastemakers, the viziers of the voters–towards trying to knock Bernie Sanders down before he … Continue reading →

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one orange-faced man to dissolve the legal restrictions which he finds incovenient and to assume among the powers of the earth, the permanently dominant station to which the Laws … Continue reading →

What we commonly call “concern trolling” in online discussion has far deeper rhetorical roots in the public sphere. In many ways, it’s a style that was honed to near-perfection by centrist liberal intellectuals and academics in the 1960s, the sort … Continue reading →

Let’s stop talking about guns and gun control. Guns and gun control in America function as an intensifying signifier of cultural division. They amplify the idea that this historical moment is a division of rural white ‘traditional’ communities vs. urban … Continue reading →