MAY 12, 2025
Sebastian Bennett is a foreign affairs officer in the nation’s capital. He has held a number of jobs in government, including as an aide to a Senator on Capitol Hill and as a presidential management fellow at a major federal department. Sebastian has also worked for think tanks, both in the nation’s capital and in Madrid. He was also a White House Intern. Sebastian has a post-graduate degree in international relations. Due to the sensitive nature of his current position, he is writing for The Daily Dissident, which he co-founded, under an assumed name.
Special interests exert enormous and outsized influence in American politics. Think of the NRA or Cuba lobby. Then there's the pro-Israel lobby, with AIPAC at its head, which is arguably the most powerful of its kind in Washington. According to Stephen Waltz, this comes at enormous cost to all involved, not least Israel, which is on a path of self-destruction. Continue Reading...
Debate about the 100-year-plus Jewish-Palestinian conflict is full of hyperbole. Some critics of Israel utilize terms like "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" and minimize the indefensible deeds of Palestinian militants. Meanwhile, ardent Zionists often downplay or ignore the consequences of the Jewish state's multi-decade-long occupation of the West Bank and its isolation of Gaza. It's an orgy of willful ignorance. What a relief, then, to Continue Reading...
If you want a good example of why a winner-takes-all society of the sort that warms the Koch Brothers' cockles is eventually self-defeating, take a look at La Liga, the Spanish Football League. Two teams are world beaters - Barca and Real - while half of the entire League's clubs are in bankruptcy. A good metaphor for US income distribution. Continue Reading...
The acrimonious debate over abortion, contrary to what you might think, doesn't date to the Supreme Court's seminal decision, Roe vs. Wade. That generated a reliability muted response from the right. So what turned abortion into the wedge issue par excellence? An IRS decision to rescind Bob Jones University's tax exempt status because of its racist policies. Amazing, but true. Telling, too. Continue Reading...
Are you poor? If so, you're at fault. That's at least according to half of all self-identified Republicans, as well as a host of leading GOP luminaries, such as Paul Ryan. That 47 percent gaffe wasn't a gaffe whatsoever. The right really believes that poverty is moral failing. Continue Reading...
A fantastic primer on how the Second Amendment, through great effort by the right over many decades, was ultimately interpreted by a conservative Supreme Court in 2008 as endorsing the individual right to own and possess arms. Scary stuff, but also some useful lesson for liberals contained within on the power of perseverance and organization. Lesson: anything in politics is possible, provided you've got enough perseverance - and money! Continue Reading...
Remarkable interview of a remarkable man, anthropologist and academic David Graeber, by another remarkable man, author Thomas Frank. The scope of Graeber's ideas, including about why right-wing populism appeals to the working class, precisely who are subjugated by the right, is astoundingly insightful. A must read. Pithy and perspicacious. Continue Reading...
Yes, George W. Bush took a massive gamble by invading Iraq, a disaster that the US and, critically, the long-suffering Iraqis are paying dearly. Yet, the country's ill-conceived establishment in the wake of WWI all but guaranteed that it would be riven by internecine conflict. Another conclusion drawn from the country's history: never trust those damned Brits! Continue Reading...
Speaking in New York last April, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a dire warning about Muslim extremism. This aberrant strain of Islam, he said ominously, constitutes a grave threat to international peace and security. We’d better take note. In an earlier post, I argued that the terrorist menace to the West, specifically that with a Muslim persuasion, is highly exaggerated. The infrequency with which Americans in particular Continue Reading...
Behold Tony Blair. A radical Sunni outfit so noxious that even al-Qa’ida disavowed it is threatening to overrun Baghdad, but the indefatigable former British Prime Minster who abetted the 2003 invasion of Iraq that touched off the country’s mayhem continues to hold forth. Continue Reading...
Few isms endure. Most are perishable. Not capitalism. From the dawn of the industrial age in the late-eighteenth century, capitalism has delivered, creating spectacular wealth wherever it has been adopted. It’s the only game in town—the only viable economic system around which a prosperity-seeking society can organize. Continue Reading...
Perhaps a flinty pioneer spirit that extols rugged individualism explains Americans’ discomfort with government. Or maybe it’s a cultural hand-me-down from the country’s European settlers who fled tyranny in the Old World. Regardless, despite our professed reverence for democracy, we also distrust the very institutions established as democratic cornerstones. Continue Reading...
Bill de Blasio is waging “class warfare.” New York City’s Democratic mayoral nominee is running a divisive campaign that, according to his Republican opponent Joe Lhota, is “separating people apart.” It’s undignified, or worse. One anonymous banker characterized de Blasio’s rhetoric as “terrifying.” Continue Reading...
What happens when the Land of Hope and Opportunity is no longer? What’s a man to do? Arthur Miller had an answer. Few characters in America’s cultural oeuvre are more associated with the American Dream gone horribly wrong than Willy Loman (“low-man”), the down-on-his-luck protagonist of Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In the sunset of an unexceptional 34-year career, and having Continue Reading...
Women have indisputably arrived. Full-time female workers in America may still make only 77 cents for every dollar earned by males in equivalent positions, but the wage gap disappears and even reverses in certain cases. Take single, childless urban workingwomen between 22 and 30. According to the research firm Reach Advisors, this group earns eight percent more than their male counterparts. Continue Reading...
