The Ideas Letter

Are there two more wildly different personages than Alexander Dugin and Timothy Snyder? The former is a rightwing obscurantist, profoundly suspicious of modernity; the latter the ultimate darling of embattled Western liberals. But Marlène Laruelle, a gifted comparative political scientist, discovers some surprising continuities between these two. Now based at LUISS in Rome, Laruelle is an important voice in understanding the current Russian condition, the postliberal phenomenon, and much else. She not only pulls off this comparison with cool, analytical logic, but she does so without any normative backsliding.

Next, we welcome an original diagnosis of the US economy’s many post-2008 ailments. Esteemed sociologist Dylan Riley has been meditating on the concept of political capitalism for some time now, and we are pleased to feature his distinctive account of it. Not only does he complicate the mainstream view of capitalism and democracy, he asks for no less than a reimagination of the political economy itself.

Pablo Stefanoni then examines the end of an era in Bolivian politics. Evo Morales’s Movement for Socialism (MAS) has dominated the country for nearly two decades, but after Rodrigo Paz Pereira’s election last autumn, the MAS didn’t just lose power—it collapsed as a political force entirely. Stefanoni takes stock of the last twenty years in Bolivia, a story with multiple meanings and contradictions.

Hans Kundnani’s preferred intellectual position is aslant the conventional wisdom, one of the many reasons he shows up in our pages. For this issue, Kundnani takes his scalpel to the often misconceived concept of populism and discovers that misconceptions about it obscured how the notion helped mainstream the far right in Europe.

We have two curated pieces on offer: first, from the pen of João Caetano Leite,