39 Posts found for Source: Vox

In red world, being called a racist — that accusation has no purchase, really. Here’s what’s the terrifying thing on the right that can be a career- and reputation-ending allegation: “You’re weak. You’re a coward.” So the transformation, this flipping upside down of morality, turning bullying into strength, turning restraint into vice, all of that, what has then happened is it enables the Trumpists and … [ Read more ]

Author: David French | Source: Vox | Subjects: America, International, Politics & Public Policy

Nomadic society is always more equitable, more egalitarian than sedentary, agricultural society, where you can accumulate wealth and pass it on through generations. The beginnings of class structure start with agriculture.

Author: Sebastian Junger | Source: Vox | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Life & Society, Material Possessions

I’ve always thought of freedom as an activity, not a condition. There’s a tendency, especially in our culture, to think of freedom as “freedom from.” To be free is to not be tyrannized by some outside power, and that’s fine, but it’s incomplete. You can be free of tyranny, but if you’re destitute, if you’re abandoned, if you don’t have agency because your most immediate … [ Read more ]

Author: Sean Illing | Source: Vox | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Conservatives are concerned with an outside threat, and liberals, they’re much less worried about outsiders. In fact, they’re often quite open to them culturally. What they’re worried about is internal unfairness. If you take those two concerns and you marry them together in one society, you have a society that can both protect itself and run a fairly equitable system. Either one by itself wouldn’t … [ Read more ]

Author: Sebastian Junger | Source: Vox | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for if not died for. That raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. […] The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. … [ Read more ]

Author: Sebastian Junger | Source: Vox | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

As the political scholars (and brothers) Hyrum and Verlan Lewis write, “ideologies do not define tribes, tribes define ideologies.” To the Lewises and likeminded social scientists, “progressivism” and “conservatism” don’t name enduring philosophies of government, so much as ever-shifting rationalizations for the interests of rival alliances.

[…]

But in the Lewises’ view, the belief that all of the left and right’s disputes reflect one essential moral … [ Read more ]

Author: Eric Levitz | Source: Vox (January 12, 2026) | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

The upside to mechanical values is that they’re easy to apply. It’s very hard to agree with other people about what counts as a full life, as great art, or as a soul-nourishing vocation. But it’s easy to agree about what leads to statistically longer lifespans, more page views and engagement hours, or more money. When we turn our values mechanical, we make it easy … [ Read more ]

Author: Christopher Thi Nguyen | Source: Vox (January 13, 2026) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

[A] public figure’s persona is a collectively created construct. It’s built by the celebrity and what they present to the media and the public, and then built by the media and the public and how they interpret and interact with the famous person. Once fans have created a personal parasocial relationship with their celebrity of choice, they will project whatever positive attributes they want onto … [ Read more ]

Author: Aja Romano | Source: Vox | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

When we’re emotionally invested not only in the narrative being bolstered by the truth-teller but in the chosen truth-teller themselves, it becomes even harder to extricate an “objective” version of reality from the version they’re dispensing because the stakes feel so high.

Author: Aja Romano | Source: Vox | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

[Truth depends] on the assumption that certain actors tell the truth, and that these actors have been authorized with the mantle of veracity in their understandings of the world and of themselves.

Author: Sarah Banet-Weiser | Source: Vox | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry

We understand our world less through reasoned deliberation of facts, and more through stories and symbols and metaphors.

Author: Stephen Duncombe | Source: Vox | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Facts | Bias, Intelligence | Knowledge, Learning, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Capitalism has a way of hijacking our culture’s best ideas. Regardless of the domain, industry turns almost every promising movement into a product.

Author: Sean Illing | Source: Vox | Subjects: Consumerism, Economics | Economy, Life & Society

Philosophically speaking, the right has long been defined by its emphasis on the value of stability — as odd as it may seem in the era of Trump’s radically destabilizing administration.

Conservative theorists, most notably Edmund Burke, have long maintained that political flourishing depends on the existence of stable social rules developed gradually and from the bottom up over the course of generations. Those who seek … [ Read more ]

Author: Zack Beauchamp | Source: Vox (June 11, 2025) | Subjects: America, Articles & Links, Excerpts, International, Politics & Public Policy

The Republican Party stands for lower taxes, especially on the rich; lower spending on programs for the poor; and big spending on defense. That’s what Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and other figures who defined the party have all stood for, for nearly half a century now… The essential Republican message may become blurred around the edges, the way that George W. Bush messed … [ Read more ]

Author: Dylan Matthews | Source: Vox (May 22, 2025) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy

It’s pretty horrifying to realize that at the end of our lives, one of our biggest regrets will almost certainly be that we wasted so much of our attention, that we cared about the wrong things. And yet very few of us live as though we’ve internalized that insight… Most of us live as though we think we’re going to live forever because that would … [ Read more ]

Author: Sean Illing | Source: Vox | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management

Ask any conservative about what defines their worldview, and one of the first things they’ll tell you is that they stand for eternal truths against passing fads. Liberals, they believe, have an unjustified faith in the plasticity of human nature — which for conservatives is a fixed and unchangeable thing.

Author: Zack Beauchamp | Source: Vox | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

[Liberalism] refers … to the centuries-old philosophical tradition that sees politics as fundamentally oriented around the values of freedom and equality. Government, for liberals, exists to enable people to live according to their own vision for their lives; it has no business telling people what god to worship or giving certain groups of people more rights than others.

Author: Zack Beauchamp | Source: Vox | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

We have a society which is structured so that social esteem or value is connected to what we can consume. And so the inability to consume affects the kind of social value that we have. Money displayed in terms of consumer goods just becomes a measure of worth, and that’s really important to people.

Author: Juliet Schor | Source: Vox | Subjects: Consumerism, Life & Society

The key impetus for contemporary consumer society has been the growth of inequality, the existence of unequal social structures, and the role that consumption came to play in establishing people’s position in that unequal hierarchy. For many people, it’s about consuming to their social position, and trying to keep up with their social position.

It’s not necessarily experienced by people in that way — it’s … [ Read more ]

Author: Juliet Schor | Source: Vox | Subjects: Consumerism, Economics | Economy, Life & Society

Fairness cannot be defined by capitalism, which measures the value of the earth, its creatures, and humanity by how their production benefits those in power. Christians take God’s metric into account. What does God value, and then value most? Love will always be the answer. What could the earth, its humans, and all of creation look like with a lot more love and a lot … [ Read more ]

Author: Vahisha Hasan | Source: Vox | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Love, Power, Religion