Is anarchism the future of the cultural left? The specters that haunt the Western liberal imagination today are not fascism or communism (now confined, nominally, to China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam), but authoritarian ethnonationalism on the one hand and certain brands of anarchism on the other. In a recent post, the prolific political commentator Matthew Yglesias makes a compelling claim: that anarchism, not socialism, may well be the future of the cultural left.
When the managers of a small bookstore in this Appalachian mountain town received a call from a distributor wondering if they could take in 22,000 books rejected by a Florida school district, it felt like a colossal ask.