A power-hungry socialist Prime Minister has struck a deal with separatists that will dissolve the country as we know it. — Wherever Spain is headed once a looming confidence vote later in November likely confers another mandate on Pedro Sánchez, future historians will struggle to relate that trajectory to the way the month started. Even as the caretaking socialist PM unveiled his intent two weeks ago to cling to power with…

Mary Harrington’s scorching polemic urges us to rediscover feminism’s reactionary potential. — Feminism Against Progress. By Mary Harrington. Forum; 345 pages; $29.99. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Harvard maverick sociologist Daniel Bell popularized a new lens to grasp, translate and decipher the West’s post-industrial dysfunctions, a three-way slicing of society into “realms” or “spheres”: the techno-economic, the cultural and the…

The reason why Lance Morrow matters is that he may well be the last living bridge to a bygone age in journalism. — 84-year-old Lance Morrow is a national treasure, and America has only so many more years left of him alive to wise up and begin reading him as such. Not that his accolades, mind you, could be any more august. In 1981, for essays contributed to Time, Morrow earned the National…

To evolve from libertarian icon to statesman, the Argentinian candidate needs to think beyond the material. — Ever since the Brexit-cum-Trump dual shock of 2016, most of the international press has resorted to labeling candidates and causes to the right of establishment liberal-conservatism as “far-right,” “fringe,” or even “extreme.” To the extent these national-populist leaders have challenged entrenched orthodoxies on free trade and relatively free migration, this…

To defeat the ruling far-Left, PP and VOX should have run as a bloc instead of against one another. — On Sunday around midnight, with the last few locales vote-counting Spain’s way to a hung parliament that virtually no poll had predicted, I sat dejected on the backseat of a jam-packed Uber van rolling through downtown Madrid. A two-month inebriating spell of gung-ho eagerness, giddy stumping, and the complacency bred…

Their alliance once deemed the obvious and favored alternative to Pedro Sánchez’s far-left ruling coalition, PP and Vox are now falling apart — and endangering that alternative. — As politics goes, the Kingdom of Spain could just as well be called “Kingdom of Spin” — denoting the ability of events to whirl around at dizzying speed. In the two months since May’s local-cum-regional races and leading up to Sunday’s general showdown, the country’s political epicenter — the voting…

What if there’s nothing the country could do to unalienate its restless, riot-ready ethnic youth? — As France awakens, shell-shocked and ash-strewn, from a nearly week-long hexagon-wide blitzkrieg against the Republic’s symbols and sanctuaries, readers intrigued by what’s next should pick up The Geometry of Despair (2006). The title could resonate with any number of Houellebecqian themes, but this particular bildungsroman stands thematically apart from anything…

How long can the South American nation withstand the onslaught from Washington and Brussels? — A fierce, nail-biting contest is being waged between Brazil and Argentina, and this time it’s not what FIFA calls “the essence of football rivalry.” Nestled betwixt the two South American giants is landlocked Paraguay, straddling the tropic of Capricorn, flanked by mighty rivers and lush forests on all sides, and…

A new book traces the words and deeds of eight leaders who devoted their lives to their fellow Jews. — And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel. By Rick Richman. Encounter Books; 368 pages; $29.99. Following the Torah’s account of Jewish bondage before Moses led the Israelites into the Holy Land, the Hebrew Bible devotes no less than 19 books to as many…