Why Does Communism Persist Despite Its Record of Failure?

 Communism presents something of an intellectual paradox. Few political ideologies have produced such a substantial historical record of economic dislocation, political repression, shortages, famine, and mass death, yet communism continues to attract adherents in parts of the Western world. The question, therefore, is not simply why communism failed in so many historical experiments. It is why the ideology remains compelling to people who have never experienced life under a communist system.

Part of the answer may lie in the fact that many contemporary advocates of communism have never actually lived under a communist regime. Their understanding of communism is therefore often theoretical rather than experiential. They encounter the ideology principally through books, social media, university courses, political activism, or the rhetoric of its contemporary advocates. The shortcomings of their own society are immediate and visible, while the shortcomings of an alternative system can remain abstract. The grass can indeed look greener on the other side of the fence when one has never had to live there.

There is also a powerful romantic element to communism. At its most attractive, communism does not merely promise a different economic arrangement; it promises a transformed society. It offers an ideal of equality in which exploitation disappears, material insecurity is overcome, and class divisions cease to exist. In this sense, communism possesses an almost utopian appeal. It speaks to the perennial human desire to create heaven on Earth.

The difficulty is that the distance between an ideal and its implementation can be enormous. Human beings are imperfect, incentives matter, information is limited, and societies are vastly more complicated than political theories sometimes assume. Yet the emotional power of the communist ideal can make these practical objections seem like unimaginative defenses of the status quo. The rhetoric of liberation can overwhelm the empirical evidence. The ideology therefore possesses a romantic quality in which what ought to be becomes more important than what experience suggests is possible.

This is particularly evident in the communist preference for central economic planning. Markets can be unsettling because they introduce uncertainty. Prices fluctuate, businesses fail, wages differ, investments sometimes go wrong, and economic outcomes are not always predictable. Central planning appears to offer an alternative: if experts could simply determine what society needs and allocate resources accordingly, perhaps the uncertainty could be eliminated.

But uncertainty is not necessarily a defect of a market economy. It is partly the price of having a system capable of responding to dispersed information. Prices communicate information about scarcity, demand, preferences, and opportunity costs. Millions of individual decisions are incorporated into these signals without requiring a central authority to possess all the necessary knowledge. A central planner, by contrast, must attempt to make decisions using information that is inevitably incomplete, delayed, or distorted.

This helps explain why shortages have historically been such a recurring problem in centrally planned economies. The problem is not necessarily that planners are unintelligent or malicious. It is that no planning authority can possess the constantly changing information generated by millions of producers and consumers. The market's apparent chaos is, in part, a mechanism for processing that information. What looks like irrational uncertainty at the individual level can produce remarkable coordination at the system level.

Communist rhetoric also has an obvious psychological appeal because it speaks in the language of entitlement. It asks not merely what people can reasonably expect from one another, but what they are owed. The distinction is important. A political philosophy that emphasizes rights and responsibilities must wrestle with scarcity and competing claims. A philosophy centered primarily on what people "ought to have" can encourage the belief that every unmet desire represents an injustice perpetrated by someone else.

When expectations are framed as entitlements, disappointment can easily become grievance. Grievance, in turn, can become political mobilization.

One of the more persistent problems for communism as an empirical theory is the tendency of its defenders to redefine the ideology whenever historical evidence becomes inconvenient. When a communist experiment fails, the response can be that it was not genuinely communist, that external enemies sabotaged it, that the leadership misunderstood Marx, or that the particular historical circumstances were responsible. There may be truth in some of these explanations; history is rarely as simple as a single ideological variable.

But there is a danger when an ideology becomes effectively unfalsifiable. If every failed example can be dismissed as "not real communism," then the theory is protected from empirical criticism by definition. This resembles the No True Scotsman fallacy: examples that contradict the proposition are excluded from the category rather than used to reconsider the proposition itself.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent transformation of much of the communist world did not eliminate this problem. Instead, communist ideas have often been reformulated in ways that make them less vulnerable to historical criticism. The economic system may become secondary to questions of power, identity, culture, or social justice. The vocabulary changes, but some of the underlying assumptions remain.

There is another dimension to communism that should not be overlooked: its capacity to identify an enemy.

Marxism traditionally divides society into classes with conflicting interests. This provides a simple and powerful narrative: there are the oppressed and the oppressors, and justice requires the defeat of the latter. Such narratives can be extraordinarily effective because they transform complicated social problems into moral dramas. The individual is no longer simply an individual confronting the uncertainties of life; he or she becomes a member of a larger historical struggle.

This can be particularly attractive to people who understand their identity principally through perceived victimhood. Grievance provides belonging, and belonging provides meaning. The political struggle becomes more than a disagreement over policy; it becomes a struggle between good and evil. In this respect, Marxism can be understood as offering not merely an economic theory but a comprehensive interpretation of human conflict and power.

History also matters enormously. An ideology cannot be assessed properly without knowing what happened when people attempted to implement it. Yet historical memory is selective. In contemporary Western culture, the crimes associated with Nazism are rightly taught extensively, while the history of communist regimes can sometimes receive considerably less attention.

The twentieth century provides an extraordinary body of evidence that deserves to be confronted honestly: Stalin's collectivization, famines, purges, and system of political terror; Mao's Great Leap Forward and the catastrophic famine that followed; the Cultural Revolution; the Khmer Rouge's destruction of Cambodian society; and the political and economic disasters experienced under various Marxist-Leninist regimes elsewhere.

The lesson should not be that every policy associated with the political left is equivalent to these regimes. Nor should historical complexity be ignored. Rather, the lesson is that grand schemes for radically restructuring society can have devastating consequences when political power becomes concentrated, dissent is suppressed, private decision-making is displaced, and ideological objectives are treated as more important than empirical results.

Communism has also demonstrated a remarkable ability to mutate.

Class struggle was central to classical Marxism, but contemporary radical politics can place race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or other forms of identity at the center of social conflict. These movements are not necessarily communist, and it would be intellectually careless to label every contemporary campaign for racial or gender equality "Marxist." Nevertheless, there are recognizable intellectual continuities between classical Marxist analyses of power and some modern theories that interpret society primarily through categories of oppressor and oppressed.

The same complexity applies to religion and environmentalism. Liberation theology, for example, incorporated Marxist concepts of class and structural oppression into parts of Christian social thought, while elements of the environmental movement have sometimes adopted critiques of capitalism that overlap with older Marxist arguments. None of this means that Christianity or environmentalism is inherently communist. It does mean that Marxist concepts have proved remarkably adaptable and capable of entering intellectual traditions far beyond their original economic framework.

The persistence of these ideas has also been facilitated by what Antonio Gramsci described, in a very different historical context, as the importance of cultural and intellectual institutions. Rather than focusing exclusively on seizing political power, a movement can seek influence within universities, the arts, journalism, education, religious institutions, and government.

The broader point is that ideas acquire power partly through institutions. When particular intellectual traditions become influential within universities and cultural institutions, they can shape the vocabulary through which subsequent generations understand politics and society. Critics of the political left sometimes describe this process as a "march through the institutions." Whether one accepts that characterization in its strongest form or not, the underlying observation is worth considering: political movements that successfully establish themselves within institutions can acquire a legitimacy and cultural influence far greater than their electoral strength alone would suggest.

Finally, communism has characteristics that can make it resemble a secular religion.

It provides a story about the nature of the world, an explanation for why suffering exists, an account of who is responsible, a vision of redemption, and a picture of the society that will emerge after the existing order is transformed. It offers adherents a community and a sense of historical purpose. The individual becomes part of something larger than himself.

This may help explain why communism can retain its appeal even when its historical record is difficult to defend. People do not choose political philosophies solely by comparing economic statistics. They also seek meaning, identity, belonging, justice, and hope.

In a post-Christian society, the desire for these things does not necessarily disappear simply because traditional religious belief declines. It may instead migrate into politics. An ideology that promises redemption through the transformation of society can therefore take on some of the psychological functions once supplied by religion.

This, ultimately, may be the key to understanding communism's persistence. Its survival cannot be explained simply by ignorance of history, although historical ignorance certainly plays a role. Nor can it be explained entirely by economic dissatisfaction. Communism persists because it addresses enduring human desires: the desire for equality, security, belonging, justice, meaning, and the hope that the imperfections of the human condition can somehow be overcome.

The historical record suggests that these desires cannot simply be translated into a political program without enormous risks. Human nature does not disappear when private property does. Scarcity does not disappear when markets are abolished. Political power does not become harmless because it is exercised in the name of equality. And economic information does not become more accurate merely because a central authority wishes to possess it.

The challenge, then, is not to dismiss the aspirations that attract people to communism. Equality, dignity, justice, and solidarity are legitimate human concerns. The challenge is to distinguish legitimate ends from political systems that have repeatedly produced consequences radically different from those they promised.

Communism remains attractive because its promises are attractive. Its historical failures are therefore not sufficient, by themselves, to make the ideology disappear. An effective critique must address not only what communism has done, but why its promises continue to resonate.

The enduring question is not simply why people believe in an ideology that has failed. It is why the dream remains more compelling to some people than the historical evidence.

Charlie Kirk: The Man, the Message and the Meaning of His Assassination

This was written a frew days after  Kirk's assasination on the 10th September, 2025  when Candace Owens and co. had not distorted all meaning with their conspiracy nonsense.

There is something profoundly disturbing about the assassination of Charlie Kirk that goes beyond the tragedy of one man's death. Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, while doing what had become the defining feature of his public life: engaging people in political debate. The FBI has described the killing as a murder and has emphasized that an attack on the First Amendment is an attack on the foundation of American democracy. 

Whatever one's opinion of Charlie Kirk, nobody should be violently attacked, let alone killed, for exercising the right to express an opinion. If you dislike what someone says, defeat them with a better argument. Challenge their assumptions. Expose their contradictions. Debate them publicly. Vote against them. Write against them. Organize against them. But once political disagreement becomes a justification for violence, the argument has already been lost.

That is why I find the reaction of some people to Kirk's death almost as troubling as the killing itself. I have unfortunately seen people I know personally either celebrate the assassination or attempt to rationalize it. There is no moral sophistication in doing so. One does not have to admire Charlie Kirk, agree with his politics or even particularly like him to recognize that celebrating his murder is morally repugnant. The same standard must apply regardless of who the victim is or which side of the political spectrum he occupies.

And that principle cuts both ways. Advocating tit-for-tat violence against those who celebrated or justified Kirk's death is equally deplorable. If our response to political violence is to demand more political violence, we have learned precisely the wrong lesson. A civilized society cannot operate according to the logic that my side is entitled to violence because your side used it first. The answer to political extremism cannot be political vengeance.

Nor do I believe that every person who says something tasteless or offensive should automatically lose his or her livelihood. Free expression becomes meaningless if it protects only opinions we find agreeable. That does not mean there should be no consequences for speech. Institutions have legitimate standards, and people who use positions of authority to promote hatred to a captive audience—particularly schoolchildren—can reasonably be held accountable under the rules and mandate of the institution that employs them. But there is an important distinction between institutional accountability and the increasingly fashionable impulse to destroy anyone whose political opinion falls outside an approved ideological perimeter.

It is in that context that I think Charlie Kirk deserves to be remembered more honestly.

Kirk was not a saint. He had faults, said things I thought were wrong and occasionally expressed himself in ways I found unnecessarily provocative. But I believe he was, on balance, a good man with considerable strengths who was making an honest attempt to change the political and intellectual conversation on American campuses. He understood that something had gone badly wrong in the culture of debate at many universities, where wokeness, cancel culture and increasingly divisive forms of identity politics had narrowed the boundaries of acceptable opinion.

His response was not to retreat from those institutions but to walk directly into them. That was, in many respects, his greatest contribution.

Youth outreach was Kirk's bread and butter, and he possessed an unusual combination of energy, verbal fluency, confidence and optimism that made him exceptionally effective at connecting with young people. He understood something that many established politicians and commentators never quite grasped: young people don't necessarily need to be lectured; they want to be challenged. Kirk was willing to stand in front of a crowd of students, invite disagreement and argue his position in public.

That approach made him enemies on both the political left and the political right.

It is worth remembering that Kirk was not an ethnic identitarian. His conservatism was fundamentally political rather than racial, which helps explain why he was criticized not only by the far left but also by elements of the far right, including the so-called Groypers. Nick Fuentes, among others, was a persistent critic of Kirk. Given that history, I find some of the subsequent expressions of sympathy from that corner of the political world difficult to take at face value.

Kirk was also an unapologetic Christian. His faith was not merely a branding exercise; it was central to his worldview and public identity. At the same time, I never regarded him as a Christian nationalist in the sense in which that term is commonly used. His political vision was rooted in the American constitutional republic rather than in an attempt to establish a specifically religious state. That distinction is important in an era when political labels are routinely stretched beyond recognition.

Politically, I agreed with Kirk on many issues. His opposition to illegal immigration was broadly consistent with my own views. I agreed with his defense of open debate and meritocracy, and I thought he was often right to challenge some of the intellectual orthodoxies that had become embedded in contemporary institutions. His criticism of DEI initiatives, in particular, struck me as addressing a genuine problem: the substitution of identity categories for individual merit and the creation of institutional structures that sometimes seemed more interested in ideological conformity than genuine equality.

But agreement should not require pretending that Kirk was always right.

I disagreed strongly with his position on abortion. I do not believe that life begins at conception, and therefore I found his position on abortion too categorical. I also thought his position on gun rights could be too dismissive of measures such as background checks. Nevertheless, I respected the consistency with which he held his views. It is entirely possible to believe that someone is wrong while recognizing that he has arrived at his position honestly.

I was also skeptical of his decision to platform Tucker Carlson through Turning Point USA. I thought there were good reasons to regard that decision as a mistake. But Kirk also took pride in refusing to create a one-thought political bubble, and that principle should be applied consistently. If the objective is genuinely to encourage debate, then inviting controversial voices into the conversation cannot automatically be treated as an endorsement of everything those people believe.

Foreign policy was perhaps the area in which I found Kirk least compelling. He generally seemed to understand the realities of international affairs better than some of the more committed American isolationists who attempted to pull him in their direction, but I don't think foreign policy was ever his strongest area. Indeed, I suspect Kirk himself would have acknowledged that.

One issue on which I think the caricature of Kirk has been particularly unfair is Israel and the Jewish community. Kirk was a strong supporter of Israel and a vocal friend of the Jews. There are clips circulating in which he appears to say things that can be presented as evidence of hostility toward Israel or Jews, but many of these snippets are stripped of their surrounding context. In an era of social media politics, the shortest and most inflammatory interpretation almost always travels further than the complete argument.

That does not mean every statement Kirk made should be defended. It means that public figures deserve to be judged on what they actually said and believed rather than on selectively edited fragments designed to produce maximum outrage.

The same principle applies to accusations that Kirk was racist or homophobic. He was frequently described in those terms by political opponents, but I don't believe those labels accurately describe the man I observed. Like every public figure, Kirk could say things that offended people and could frame arguments in deliberately provocative ways. That is not the same thing as holding every hateful belief attributed to him.

Perhaps the best way I can describe Charlie Kirk politically is as a classical liberal who had been schooled in the Burkean conservative tradition. That may sound contradictory to people who have come to associate the term “liberal” exclusively with the contemporary American left, but historically it isn't. Classical liberalism places considerable emphasis on individual liberty, free expression, constitutional government and the ability of people to pursue their own lives without unnecessary interference. Burkean conservatism, meanwhile, emphasizes tradition, institutional continuity and skepticism toward grand attempts to remake society from the ground up.

Kirk occupied much of that territory. The problem is that the Overton window—the range of opinions regarded as politically acceptable—has shifted dramatically, particularly on university campuses. Positions that would have been regarded as conventional conservative arguments only a generation ago can now be characterized as extreme. Opposition to affirmative action, skepticism toward DEI bureaucracy, support for merit-based advancement, concern about illegal immigration or an insistence that controversial ideas should be debated rather than suppressed can suddenly place someone beyond the boundaries of what certain institutions consider acceptable.

Kirk understood that shift, and he deliberately challenged it. That does not make him infallible. It does not make every argument he made correct. It certainly does not make him a saint. But it does make the manner of his death especially tragic. A man whose life's work was largely about political argument was killed in the midst of exercising the very freedom that allowed that argument to exist.

That should concern everyone. The appropriate response to Charlie Kirk's assassination is therefore neither hagiography nor revenge. We should not pretend that he was perfect, nor should we demonize those who disagreed with him. We should reject the temptation to answer ideological violence with ideological violence of our own. And we should be especially wary of those who suggest that political opponents somehow deserve what happened to him.

They don't.Charlie Kirk's family has suffered an unimaginable loss, and I wish them strength and peace in the years ahead. I also hope that the people who believed in Kirk's mission will carry forward the part of his legacy that mattered most: the willingness to walk into hostile rooms, engage people with whom you disagree and argue rather than silence.

That is ultimately the legacy I would prefer to see survive him. Not vengeance. Not censorship. Not political tribalism. Argument.

Charlie Kirk spent much of his life insisting that ideas should be confronted rather than feared. In the aftermath of his assassination, that principle is more important than ever.

Abortion: A Difficult Compromise Between Principle and Pragmatism

My position on abortion begins with a recognition that this is not a problem that can be resolved simply by choosing between two opposing political camps. I support a woman's right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy, but I do not regard that right as unlimited or morally uncomplicated. I believe there is a legitimate point at which the interests of the developing fetus acquire sufficient moral weight that society is justified in placing restrictions on abortion.

For me, that point is approximately three months following conception. This position is, admittedly, a compromise. It does not fit neatly into the conventional categories of either the pro-choice or pro-life movement. I am firmly opposed to the idea that the state should compel a woman to carry every pregnancy to term regardless of her circumstances. At the same time, I am uncomfortable with the proposition that the moral status of the fetus is irrelevant throughout pregnancy and that abortion should therefore remain unrestricted at every stage.

The difficulty is that abortion involves two competing moral considerations, both of which deserve serious recognition.

On one side is the autonomy of the woman—the right to make profoundly personal decisions concerning her own body, her health, her future, and the circumstances in which she brings a child into the world. Pregnancy is not an abstract biological event. It can profoundly affect a woman's physical health, psychological well-being, relationships, economic circumstances, education, career, and entire trajectory through life. To compel someone to continue a pregnancy against her will is therefore an extraordinarily consequential exercise of state power.

On the other side is the developing human life itself. Whatever one's philosophical position concerning precisely when personhood begins, it is difficult to regard a late-stage fetus as morally equivalent to an undifferentiated collection of cells. As pregnancy progresses, the fetus develops increasingly sophisticated biological structures and capacities, and the moral considerations surrounding its destruction consequently become more difficult to dismiss.

This is where I find myself uncomfortable with absolute positions on either side.

The most uncompromising versions of the pro-life position can underestimate the profound moral significance of forcing a woman to continue an unwanted or dangerous pregnancy. Conversely, the most uncompromising versions of the pro-choice position can sometimes treat the developing fetus as though it has no moral significance whatsoever, regardless of how far a pregnancy has progressed.

Neither extreme adequately captures the complexity of the issue.

My support for a roughly three-month period following conception is therefore not based on the belief that a magical moral transformation occurs on a particular day. Biology does not operate according to the political or legal calendar. There is no precise moment at which something morally insignificant suddenly becomes morally significant.

Rather, a three-month boundary represents a pragmatic attempt to establish a point at which the competing interests should be weighed differently.

Early in pregnancy, the argument for preserving a woman's autonomy is, in my view, considerably stronger. The pregnancy is at an earlier developmental stage, and the state has a weaker justification for overriding the woman's wishes.

As development progresses, however, the moral argument becomes increasingly complicated. The developing fetus becomes more biologically organized and increasingly recognizably human in its characteristics. At some point, society has a legitimate interest in protecting that developing life.

The precise boundary is therefore necessarily somewhat conventional. But the fact that a boundary is imperfect does not mean that boundaries are unnecessary. Law frequently has to establish thresholds in circumstances where nature itself provides no precise dividing line.

For essentially the same reason, I am opposed to late-stage abortion except where compelling circumstances make it necessary.

The phrase "partial-birth abortion" has been used in political debate in highly charged ways, and I recognize that terminology itself can obscure rather than illuminate the underlying medical circumstances. My concern is with late-term procedures in which a pregnancy has progressed substantially and the fetus has consequently acquired greater moral significance.

I would therefore support restrictions on such procedures, while recognizing important exceptions.

If continuing the pregnancy presents a serious threat to the mother's life, for example, the moral calculus changes dramatically. There can be circumstances in which there is no genuinely satisfactory outcome and where terminating the pregnancy becomes the least harmful available option. Similarly, catastrophic fetal abnormalities or other extraordinary medical circumstances can create situations in which rigid rules become morally indefensible.

The principle I would apply is that the later the pregnancy, the stronger the justification required for terminating it. That strikes me as a reasonable middle ground between two propositions that are both difficult to reject entirely: that women should possess meaningful control over their reproductive lives, and that developing human life acquires increasing moral significance as pregnancy progresses.

Ultimately, I regard abortion as one of the clearest examples of a moral tradeoff. There are issues in which the morally correct course seems relatively obvious. Abortion is not one of them.

Here, two legitimate values collide: individual autonomy and the preservation of developing human life. Neither can simply be wished away by declaring the other irrelevant.

This is why I find the polarization surrounding abortion somewhat misleading. The political debate often presents the issue as though there are only two possible positions: unrestricted abortion on one side and an absolute prohibition on the other.

But most people, when confronted with sufficiently difficult circumstances, recognize exceptions and qualifications. Even many people who describe themselves as pro-life acknowledge circumstances in which abortion may be justified. Likewise, many people who describe themselves as pro-choice recognize that there is a moral difference between an abortion performed very early in pregnancy and one performed much later.

Once those distinctions are acknowledged, the apparent gulf between the two positions becomes considerably narrower.

The real disagreement is often about where the boundary should be drawn, what circumstances justify crossing it, and how much weight should be assigned to the competing interests at different stages of pregnancy.

That is a much more interesting—and much more honest—conversation.

There is another aspect of my position that I find important to acknowledge. Although I support the woman's right to choose, I do so with something of a heavy heart.

My position is not based on the conviction that abortion is morally benign. Nor do I believe that the developing fetus has no moral value. Rather, my support for legal access is grounded substantially in utilitarian reasoning: given the competing interests, the consequences of prohibiting abortion, and the enormous consequences of compelling women to continue pregnancies against their wishes, I believe that allowing abortion within reasonable limits produces the better overall outcome.

But acknowledging the utilitarian basis of my position also means acknowledging its discomfort.

Utilitarianism can force us to make decisions that are rationally defensible while remaining emotionally or morally troubling. Something can be the least harmful available option without being entirely good.

That distinction matters to me. I do not believe that because abortion should be legally available, it should consequently be regarded as morally trivial. Nor do I believe that the existence of a legal right automatically settles the underlying ethical question.

There is a difference between saying "the state should permit this" and saying "there is nothing morally significant about this.".I support the first proposition without necessarily accepting the second. The  most important element of my position is that I recognize the limits of my own certainty.

Questions about when human life acquires moral status, whether biological humanity is equivalent to personhood, and what obligations society has toward developing life are ultimately philosophical as well as scientific questions. Science can tell us enormously about embryonic and fetal development, but it cannot by itself determine the moral value we should assign to those biological facts.

That requires philosophy, ethics, and ultimately individual judgment. For that reason, I am wary of people who speak about abortion as though the answer is self-evident and anyone who disagrees must therefore be either immoral or intellectually deficient.

Reasonable people can look at the same moral dilemma and assign different weights to autonomy, potential life, suffering, responsibility, and social consequences. The appropriate response to such disagreement should not be contempt.It should be humility.

My position, therefore, is neither that abortion is simply a matter of personal choice nor that the state should categorically prohibit it.

I believe women should have a meaningful right to choose, particularly during the early stages of pregnancy. I also believe that this right should become increasingly constrained as pregnancy progresses because the moral claim of the developing fetus becomes increasingly significant.

A roughly three-month period following conception represents, for me, a reasonable point at which the balance should begin to shift. Beyond that point, abortion should generally be restricted, with exceptions for circumstances in which the continuation of the pregnancy poses a serious threat to the mother or involves other extraordinary medical conditions for which reasonable alternatives are virtually nonexistent.

This is not a position born of certainty.  It is a position born of compromise.

I recognize the moral argument for protecting developing human life, but I also recognize the extraordinary consequences of subordinating a woman's autonomy to that principle. I therefore arrive at a position that attempts to preserve both values rather than pretending that one can simply eliminate the other.

Perhaps that is ultimately what makes abortion such a difficult moral question. It does not offer us the comfort of a completely clean answer. It forces us to choose between competing goods, competing rights, and competing forms of human suffering.

And perhaps the most honest position is to acknowledge that even when we believe we have chosen correctly, there can still be something deeply unsettling about the choice itself.

That is why I support the right to choose—but do so with a heavy heart, conscious that the position rests not on the belief that abortion is morally uncomplicated, but on the judgment that, within reasonable limits, preserving a woman's autonomy and minimizing overall harm is the least objectionable course available to us.

I Am Not Pro-Ukraine or Pro-Russia. I Am Pro-West.

 That distinction outlined in the heading seems increasingly difficult for people to understand. In the current political climate, refusing to adopt one of the competing orthodoxies is often interpreted as cowardice, ignorance or secret allegiance to the other side. But foreign policy should not be a football match in which we are required to wear one team's jersey. My primary loyalty is to the Western political tradition: constitutional government, individual liberty, national sovereignty, free expression, the rule of law and the preservation of democratic institutions. Those principles should inform how we judge both Ukraine and Russia.

My attitude toward Ukraine is complicated, and deliberately so. Jewish history makes it impossible for me to romanticize Ukrainian nationalism. Jews have suffered terribly at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists, particularly during the Second World War. The horrors of Babi Yar are seared into the history of European Jewry, and the record of Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany and the darker elements of the Bandera movement is something that should never be sanitized or forgotten. The historical legacy of Banderism makes me deeply uncomfortable with attempts to portray Ukrainian nationalism as an uncomplicated struggle for freedom.

But history does not give Russia a license to invade Ukraine.Whatever sins Ukraine has committed, whatever corruption exists within its political system, and whatever legitimate grievances Russia may have regarding NATO expansion or Western policy, Ukraine remains a sovereign country. I cannot simply ignore that fact because parts of Ukrainian history are repugnant to me.

Russia's invasion was wrong. That conclusion does not require me to become “pro-Ukraine.” It requires me to believe in the principle of national sovereignty. If we accept the proposition that a larger and more powerful country is entitled to invade its neighbour whenever it believes its security interests are threatened, then we have abandoned one of the most fundamental principles upon which the modern international order rests.

Did the West make a mistake expanding NATO? Yes and no. There is a legitimate argument that the relentless expansion of NATO eastward after the collapse of the Soviet Union contributed to the deterioration of relations with Moscow. We should not pretend otherwise. From the Russian perspective, watching a military alliance that had been created largely to contain the Soviet Union move progressively closer to Russia's borders was hardly going to be welcomed in the Kremlin.

I understand that argument. But I also understand the argument on the other side. The countries of Eastern Europe had lived behind the Iron Curtain. They had experienced Soviet domination firsthand, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, many of them understandably wanted guarantees that they would never again be abandoned to the geopolitical ambitions of a larger neighbour. The West had already made the mistake once: after the Second World War, Eastern Europe was effectively handed into the Soviet sphere of influence. The people who had lived under communism had every reason to be suspicious of another arrangement in which their security depended upon Moscow's goodwill.

So was NATO expansion wise?Perhaps not in every instance. Perhaps the West could have handled the process more intelligently and with greater sensitivity to Russian security concerns.But there is a difference between saying that NATO expansion was strategically provocative and saying that it justified invasion. The first is a legitimate foreign-policy argument. The second is not.

Neither side gets a moral free pass. I have no particular affection for the Zelensky government. Ukraine has serious problems with corruption, oligarchic influence and political dysfunction. Volodymyr Zelensky is not some immaculate democratic hero simply because he happens to be opposing Vladimir Putin.

But the alternative is hardly more attractive. Russia is corrupt. Its political system is authoritarian. Its ruling class has accumulated enormous wealth and power while ordinary Russians have been asked to accept increasing restrictions on political dissent. The idea that Putin represents some kind of morally superior alternative to the Ukrainian leadership is difficult to take seriously.

One does not have to admire Zelensky to recognize that Putin represents the greater threat.

And that is where I part company with those on both the isolationist right and the Western left who seem determined to reduce the conflict to a morality play in which their preferred villain explains everything.

The world is not that simple.

One of the strangest developments of the current political era has been the willingness of some Western conservatives to look upon Vladimir Putin with something approaching admiration.

Why? Because Putin opposes “wokeness.” and  talks about traditional values.Yes he criticizes progressive social politics and presents himself as a defender of Christianity and Western civilization against cultural decadence.

This is an extraordinary basis upon which to assess a foreign dictator.. Conservatives, of all people, should understand the danger of confusing rhetoric with reality. Putin can condemn transgender ideology, mock Western political correctness and invoke Christianity until the cows come home. None of that makes him a friend of the West.

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Indeed, sometimes the enemy of my enemy is simply another enemy who has discovered which buttons to push.

This is where the rise of Duginism deserves particular attention. Aleksandr Dugin and the broader ideological currents associated with him represent something fundamentally different from traditional Western conservatism. Dugin's vision is not a defence of classical liberalism, constitutional democracy or the individual rights that underpin Western civilization. It is a rejection of much of that tradition in favour of a civilizational and geopolitical order in which Russia occupies a dominant role.

That should concern Western conservatives enormously.

You cannot defend the West by embracing an ideology whose fundamental assumptions are hostile to the liberal political order that made the West what it is. The irony is almost comical. Some conservatives have spent years warning that progressive activists are attempting to dismantle Western institutions, only to turn around and romanticize a Russian state whose geopolitical project is explicitly aimed at weakening Western unity and influence.

Putin does not have to believe everything his Western admirers believe. He only has to understand what they want to hear.And he does.Stop being seduced by the rhetoric This is the part that I think deserves the greatest emphasis. Words are cheap.

A politician can talk about Christianity without being a Christian democrat. He can talk about traditional values without believing in individual liberty. He can condemn progressive ideology without supporting free institutions. He can criticize Western decadence while simultaneously working to weaken the very civilization he claims to admire.

We should judge governments by what they do, not merely by what they say. Putin's Russia is not the defender of the West simply because Putin dislikes some aspects of contemporary Western culture. Russia is a geopolitical competitor with interests that frequently conflict with those of the United States and its allies. Moscow has spent decades attempting to undermine American influence and Western cohesion in various ways, and the fact that the Soviet Union has been replaced by a different ideological formulation does not mean the strategic competition has disappeared.

The packaging has changed.The objective has not necessarily changed with it. That is why Western conservatives need to be particularly careful. Our political enemies do not always look like our political enemies. Sometimes they discover that the easiest way to influence a political movement is to tell that movement exactly what it wants to hear.

Putin's anti-Woke rhetoric should therefore be treated with the same skepticism we would apply to any other political propaganda.Being pro-West does not mean being blindly pro-American. It does not mean believing that NATO is infallible, that Ukraine is virtuous, that Zelensky is a hero or that every decision made by Washington is wise.

It means recognizing that the Western political tradition, despite its enormous flaws, has produced something worth defending - Individual liberty,representative government. freedom of speech, religious freedom, constitutional restraints on government, the rule of law and the principle that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed.

Those principles are worth defending against progressive excesses. They are also worth defending against authoritarianism masquerading as conservatism.I can condemn Ukrainian nationalism without endorsing Russian imperialism. I can acknowledge that NATO expansion contributed to Russian insecurity without believing that Russia therefore had the right to invade Ukraine. I can criticize Zelensky without becoming a Putin apologist. I can oppose Woke ideology without pretending that Vladimir Putin is some kind of champion of Western civilization.

There is no contradiction in any of that. In fact, I would argue that it is precisely what a genuinely Western perspective should look like.The West does not need to choose between Kyiv and Moscow as competing objects of worship. It needs to decide what principles it is prepared to defend.

Those  principles should not change simply because an authoritarian leader learns how to say the right words.The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Sometimes he is simply an enemy who has figured out that we are listening.

What Should We Call the Twentieth Century?

 Every age eventually acquires a name.

The names are rarely chosen by the people who lived through the period. They are imposed later, when the immediate passions have faded and historians can look backward with greater distance. We call one period the Renaissance, another the Enlightenment, another the Industrial Revolution. Such names inevitably simplify enormously complicated periods, but they also reveal something about how later generations understand the world that came before them. So what will future historians call the twentieth century?

We tend to think of it as the century of extraordinary progress: the century of science, technology, mass education, longer lives, antibiotics, aviation, space exploration, computing, and unprecedented economic growth. All of that is true. But it is only part of the story.

The twentieth century was also a period of extraordinary violence, social upheaval, ideological conflict, consumerism, mass communication, financial transformation, and an increasingly sophisticated ability to manipulate information. It may therefore acquire a very different collection of names from those we would instinctively choose today.

Here are ten possibilities.

The Age of Greed

The twentieth century witnessed an extraordinary expansion of wealth, but it also saw the increasing elevation of material accumulation as a measure of success. Economic growth became not merely a means of improving human welfare but, increasingly, an objective in itself.

Consumerism transformed societies. Advertising encouraged people to define themselves through what they purchased, while financial systems became increasingly sophisticated at converting almost every aspect of human activity into something that could be bought, sold, or speculated upon.

Future historians may look back and conclude that we became extraordinarily good at creating wealth—and extraordinarily poor at deciding when enough was enough.

The Age of Insanity

The twentieth century produced some of humanity's most remarkable achievements alongside some of its most horrifying acts.

Two world wars, genocide, totalitarian regimes, nuclear weapons, and industrialized mass killing all emerged from societies that simultaneously regarded themselves as increasingly rational and civilized.

Perhaps that contradiction will be one of the century's defining characteristics.

We developed the ability to send humans into space while perfecting ways of destroying millions of people on Earth. We expanded our understanding of psychology while creating political systems capable of manipulating entire populations.

Future generations may reasonably wonder whether the twentieth century was an age of rationality—or an age in which rationality became extraordinarily effective at serving irrational purposes.

The Era of Border Collapse

For much of human history, geography imposed powerful limitations on human interaction. The twentieth century began to dismantle those barriers.

Steamships, railways, aircraft, telephones, radio, television, and eventually digital communications compressed the world. Political borders remained, but their ability to isolate populations weakened.

People, capital, ideas, diseases, technologies, and cultures could cross boundaries at speeds previously unimaginable.

The century therefore began the transformation of humanity from a collection of relatively isolated societies into something resembling a single, interconnected system.

The Age of the Frivolous

Mass production created something historically unusual: enormous numbers of people with access to goods and entertainment that previous generations could scarcely have imagined.

Popular culture became a global force. Music, cinema, sport, fashion, celebrity, advertising, and eventually television occupied an increasing proportion of everyday life.

There is nothing inherently wrong with frivolity. Human beings need entertainment. But future historians may ask whether the twentieth century marked the point at which entertainment ceased to be merely a diversion and became one of the principal organizing forces of society.

The First Media Age

The twentieth century was the first period in which mass media became an unavoidable part of everyday life.

Newspapers reached enormous audiences. Radio brought voices into people's homes. Cinema created shared visual experiences. Television eventually placed moving images into virtually every living room.

For the first time, governments, corporations, political movements, and individuals could communicate simultaneously with millions of people.

This transformed politics and culture—but it also transformed persuasion.

The century may therefore be remembered as the moment when humanity first learned how powerful control over information could become.

The Era of Total War

If one characteristic of the twentieth century stands above almost all others, it may be war.

The First and Second World Wars transformed warfare from conflicts largely fought between armies into struggles in which entire populations became targets and participants. Industrial production, science, transportation, communications, and bureaucratic organization were all harnessed to the machinery of war.

The ultimate expression of this development was the atomic bomb.

Humanity acquired, for the first time, the technological ability to destroy civilization on a global scale.

The twentieth century therefore became the century in which war ceased to be merely a contest between nations and became a potential threat to the survival of humanity itself.

The Era of Protest

The twentieth century was also an age of protest.

Workers, women, racial minorities, students, colonial populations, political dissidents, and countless other groups challenged established authorities and social structures. Civil rights movements, anti-war demonstrations, independence movements, feminism, environmentalism, and student rebellions all contributed to a growing rejection of inherited authority.

The century did not simply change because governments decided to change it.

It changed because ordinary people increasingly demanded that it change.

The Age of Virtual Gold

Money itself underwent a remarkable transformation.

For centuries, wealth had been closely associated with physical things: land, livestock, precious metals, buildings, and tangible goods. During the twentieth century, however, an increasing proportion of wealth became abstract.

Money increasingly became numbers recorded in ledgers rather than objects that could be physically possessed. Credit, stocks, bonds, derivatives, electronic transfers, and increasingly complex financial instruments created enormous quantities of what might be called virtual wealth.

The twenty-first century would take this process even further, but its foundations were laid during the twentieth.

Future historians may therefore see the period as the beginning of the age in which wealth became increasingly detached from anything tangible.

The Era of Growth Obsession

The twentieth century developed an extraordinary faith in economic growth.

Governments measured progress through production, income, consumption, employment, and gross domestic product. Growth became synonymous with prosperity, and prosperity became one of the principal measures of successful government.

But the planet has physical limits.

The century dramatically expanded humanity's ability to extract resources, transform landscapes, consume energy, and produce goods. It also began to reveal the environmental consequences of doing so.

Future historians may therefore see the twentieth century as the period when humanity became obsessed with the idea that tomorrow must always be larger than today.

The Age of Disinformation

Finally, the twentieth century may be remembered as the period in which humanity became extraordinarily sophisticated at manufacturing belief.

Propaganda was nothing new. Governments had always attempted to influence populations. What changed was the scale and technological sophistication of the enterprise.

Radio, film, television, advertising, public relations, political messaging, and eventually the internet created an environment in which information could be manufactured and distributed to enormous populations almost instantaneously.

The distinction between information and persuasion became increasingly blurred.

By the end of the century, humanity possessed more information than any previous generation—and simultaneously faced greater difficulty determining what information could be trusted.

Perhaps that is the ultimate irony of the twentieth century.

We developed unprecedented means of discovering the truth while simultaneously developing unprecedented means of obscuring it.

So, What Should We Call It?

It could be that no single name will ever adequately describe the twentieth century.

It was the Age of Greed and the Age of Insanity. It was the Era of Total War and the Era of Protest. It was the beginning of mass media, global interconnectedness, virtual wealth, economic obsession, and industrial-scale information manipulation.

It was also a century of extraordinary human achievement.

Perhaps that contradiction is what future historians will find most fascinating. The twentieth century was a period in which humanity simultaneously became more powerful, more knowledgeable, more interconnected, and more dangerous.

We learned how to split the atom, leave the planet, communicate across oceans, manipulate genes, and build machines capable of extraordinary computation.

But we never quite solved the older problem: What should we do with all this power?

In the end, that is what the twentieth century was really about—the century in which humanity acquired extraordinary power without acquiring an equally extraordinary understanding of how to use it.