Mark Lilla

Clown Show

In every era a certain kind of unprincipled demagogue driven by an insatiable need for attention and a sense of what will capture the public’s imagination rises to the fore. In the early years of France’s Third Republic, it was the ludicrous Marquis de Morès.

Chthonic Forces

“The responsibility falls to anyone who wants to stay alert and actually understand the radical right and combat it, not just make theatrical gestures.”

Storm Warnings

The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.

Father Knows Best

Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of William F. Buckley helps explain how an elite intellectual could have seen less-educated voters’ distrust of intellectuals as offering the possibility of a new kind of American conservatism.

Another Change Election

On the need to preserve our institutions

The Tower and the Sewer

Catholic postliberal thinkers opposed to modern liberal individualism are less interested in transforming people’s unhappy lives through the power of the gospel than in jockeying for political power as the vanguard of a conservative revolution.

The Writer Apart

Who is the “nonpolitical” man Thomas Mann tried to defend even as he couldn’t escape politics?

Keep Your Wits

How to Write About the Right: An Exchange

Two Roads for the New French Right

Something new is happening on the European right, and it involves more than xenophobic populist outbursts.

On Robert Silvers

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review’s editor.

How the French Face Terror

Four recent books show a country going through the classic stages of trauma

France: Is There a Way Out?

Economic stagnation, political paralysis, terrorism, and migrants

France: The Myths

The Strangely Conservative French

Slouching Toward Mecca

Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Soumission’

France: A Strange Defeat

Éric Zemmour’s ‘Le Suicide français’

France on Fire

It is hard to escape the feeling that a major battle is beginning

France: The Ground Shifts

In Paris after the attacks, the shock is that things are far worse than anyone had feared.

Arendt & Eichmann