The Mussolini from Caracas
Enrique Krauze takes on Hugo Chavez: “The wishes of his progressive post-Marxist admirers notwithstanding, Chavez comes from a more anachronistic tradition of ideas that does not see history in terms of the struggle of classes or masses, or of races or nations, but of heroes who guide the “people,” who incarnate them and redeem them. There is a name for this tradition. It is fascism.”

Moral Obligations
Mitchell Cohen on leaving Iraq: “We cannot contend simply that the U.S. must ‘get out quickly’ or that ‘we must stay.’ We need some complex thinking, moral and practical, about a situation that is as knotty as can be. We helped to make it, not just in 2003 but in 1991.”

A Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Theologian
Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel read John Rawls’s B.A. thesis: “The moral importance of the separateness of persons, a fundamental theme of Rawls’s work, is strikingly anticipated in the moral and religious conception of community that lies at the heart of the thesis.”

The Power of Ambivalence
Zadie Smith on Obama: “It’s my audacious hope that a man born and raised between opposing dogmas, between cultures, between voices, could not help but be aware of the extreme contingency of culture.”

The Springtime of Realism
Leon Wieseltier worries about Obama-Clinton diplomacy: “Is it really possible that in a Democratic administration the championship of human rights and the promotion of democracy will no longer figure conspicuously in the foreign policy of the United States?”