New Left Review 126

4/5 ( ratings)

Mike Davis: Trench Warfare
Granular analysis of America’s 2020 election results in rustbelt counties, the small-town Midwest, Red exurbs and Texan borderlands. With record turnouts on both sides of an otherwise immobile voter divide, the economy—not the pandemic—provides a key to the equivocal verdict on Trump’s four years in office.

Dylan Riley: Faultlines
American politics cast as a zero-sum battle between party coalitions for state-led divisions of the spoils—cheap money, bailouts, health insurance, tax—lending the electoral battle its peculiar intensity. Dominant and recessive logics of the party system in a stagnant economy.

Jeremy Adelman: The End of Landscape?
From Carleton Watkins to Edward Burtynsky, shifting relations between portrayals of nature and techno-economic regimes registered in successive eras of landscape photography.

Michael Maar: By Their Epithets Shall Ye Know Them
In response to Paul Claudel’s dictum—‘fear of the adjective is the beginning of style’—a defence of adjectival extravagance, mobilizing Nabokov and Mann, Joseph Roth and Herta Müller, to showcase the literary power of the epithet, and its ability to alchemize the noun.

Tor Krever: Into the Bramble Patch
With Biden pledging to restore the ‘rules-based order’, a redemptive history—describing the triumph of a peaceful new world order over its war-torn forerunner—has taken shape in the field of international legal theory. Tor Krever scrutinizes this narrative through the work of two recent propagators.

David Harvey: Value in Motion
How to re-engineer the compound-growth spiral of the capital- accumulation process? A global blueprint for challenging the profit motive, pitting process against the atomism of the neoclassical tradition, in the search for a workable use-value alternative.

Susan Watkins on Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy. The new right-wing forces in America and Europe assailed by a fierce old-right opponent.

Tom Mertes on Alexander Keyssar, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? The oligarchic mechanism at the heart of the US presidential system and persistent failure of attempts to reform it.

Agnès Maillot on Daniel Finn, One Man’s Terrorist. Complex relations between republican-nationalist guerrillas and socialist campaigners fighting military occupation in Britain’s oldest colony.