My column in Salon this morning is about left v. right and why time—history, tradition, past, present, and future—is not what divides left from right. With the help of two new books by Steve Fraser and Kristin Ross, I discuss the bloody civil wars of the Gilded Age, the Paris Commune, Marx’s archaism, and how the memory of pre-capitalist society can fire the anticipation of a post-capitalist society. Ever since Edmund Burke, founder of the conservative tradition, declared, “The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror,” pundits and scholars have divided the political world along the axis of time. The left is the party of the future; the right, the […]