A new study by researchers at the University of Illinois in Urbana, showing that young children who are fearful in childhood are likely to be conservative when they grow up got me to thinking.

It’s not just that a whole generation of kids who get regularly belted by their parents, who are warned that if they behave in a certain manner they’ll go to hell, or that their faces will freeze in some horrible contorted way, or that they will be thrown out of the house, are becoming Republicans. It’s that virtually the whole country is populated by adults who have been raised in a climate of fear by a media and a government that are hell-bent on scaring the shit out of everyone.

The result is that a nation that once, for better or worse, was full of people who could strike out for unknown regions to stake a claim on land when they didn’t even know how to farm (land admittedly belonging to native Americans who could understandably be expected to react with aggressive hostility to being expropriated), who could weather brutal winters with nothing to get them through but a musket and a store of root vegetables in the cellar, who could stand up to the mightiest military of its day and throw off a colonial yoke and boldly create a new country, now cowers in fear at the imagined threats of a landlocked group of uneducated and incredibly poor people living in a country that is a throwback to the 16th century.

America is supposedly the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,” as our unsingable national anthem puts it at its most unsingable point, but to tell the truth, it is no longer either of those things. Don't believe me? Just try telling a cop who stops you for standing off the side of the road with your thumb out and says you are breaking the ...

There is an old story from the heyday of the Soviet Union. As part of their May Day celebrations they were parading their latest weapon systems down the street in front of the Kremlin. There was a long column of their newest tanks, followed by a row of tractors pulling missiles. Behind these weapons were four pick-up trucks carrying older men in business suits waving to the crowds.

Seeing this display, the Communist party boss turned to his defense secretary. He praised the tanks and missiles and then said that he didn’t understand the men in business suits. The defense secretary explained that these men were economists, and “their destructive capacity is incredible.”

People across the world now understand what the defense secretary meant. The amount of damage being inflicted on countries around the world by bad economic policy is astounding. As a result of unemployment or underemployment, millions of people are seeing their lives ruined. The current policies have led to trillions of dollars of lost output. From an economic standpoint this loss is every bit as devastating as if a building had been destroyed by tanks or bombs. And people have lost their lives, due to inadequate health care, food and shelter, or as a result of the depression associated with their grim economic fate.

If an enemy had inflicted this much damage on the United States, the countries of the European Union, or the countries elsewhere in the world that have been caught up in this downturn, millions of people would be lining up to enlist ...

In every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition. This is why obituaries for the Occupy movement are in vogue. And this is why the next groundswell of popular protest—and there will be one—will be labeled as “unexpected,” a “shock” and a “surprise.” The television pundits and talking heads, the columnists and academics who declare the movement dead are as out of touch with reality now as they were on Sept. 17 when New York City’s Zuccotti Park was occupied. Nothing this movement does will ever be seen by them as a success. Nothing it does will ever be good enough. Nothing, short of its dissolution and the funneling of its energy back into the political system, will be considered beneficial.

Those who have the largest megaphones in our corporate state serve the very systems of power we are seeking to topple. They encourage us, whether on Fox or MSNBC, to debate inanities, trivia, gossip or the personal narratives of candidates. They seek to channel legitimate outrage and direct it into the black hole of corporate politics. They spin these silly, useless stories from the “left” or the “right” while ignoring the egregious assault by corporate power on the citizenry, an assault enabled by the Democrats and the Republicans. Don’t waste time watching or listening. They exist to confuse and demoralize you.

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The triumph of democracy and market-based economics – the “End of History,” as the American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama famously called it – which was proclaimed to be inevitable with the fall of the Berlin Wall, soon proved to be little more than a mirage. However, following China’s intellectual pirouette to maintain one-party rule while embracing the capitalist credo, history’s interpreters shifted their focus to the economy: not everybody would be free and elect their government, but capitalist prosperity would hold sway worldwide. 

Now, however, the economic tumult shaking Europe, the erosion of the middle class in the West, and the growing social inequalities worldwide are undermining capitalism’s claim to universal triumph. Hard questions are being asked: Is capitalism, as we know it doomed? Is the market no longer able to generate prosperity? Is China’s brand of state capitalism an alternative and potentially victorious paradigm?

The pervasive soul-searching prompted by such questions has nurtured a growing recognition that capitalism’s success depends not only on macroeconomic policy or economic indicators. It rests on a bedrock of good governance and the rule of law – in other words, a well-performing state. The West overlooked the fundamental importance of this while it was fighting communism.

The standard bearers of the Cold War were not just the United States and the Soviet Union, but, in ideological terms, the individual and the collectivity. When competing in newly independent or developing countries, this ideological opposition became Manichean, fostering a fierce suspicion, if not outright rejection, of rival principles. As a result, strengthening state institutions was too often seen in the West as communist subterfuge, while the Soviet bloc viewed the slightest notion of individual freedom and responsibility as a stalking horse for capitalist ...

North Korea's new leader faces a steep political learning curve: His doting father, Kim Jong Il, is now officially gone, memorialized Wednesday in a state funeral that saw hundreds of thousands of mourners flailing at themselves in sadness along the snowy streets of Pyongyang.

A quiet presence who presided over the solemn procession, the youthful Kim Jong Un, boyish looking in his close-cropped haircut and chubby cheeks, must now set upon the task of leading an impoverished and vilified regime that in recent years has failed to adequately feed its own people.

The 27-year-old, Swiss-educated successor has the mature guidance of two players from his father's old inner circle: his uncle Jang Song Taek and Kim Kyong Hui, Jang's wife and the late dictator's younger sister.

Yet experts predict that many perhaps-competing interests will be whispering into the ear of the young leader in the coming months as world leaders ponder whether he will follow in the footsteps of his father's take-no-prisoners diplomacy or set his own course.

For days, the såtate-controlled media has bestowed one new title on the young Kim after another, including the "great successor," "supreme leader" and "sagacious leader." The coming months will tell if those words hold water, North Korea watchers say. ...

Václav Havel, who died on December 18, epitomized the power of the pen. A playwright and actor, he was born in Prague in 1936, two years before Nazi Germany militarily occupied Czechoslovakia. As I have written elsewhere, the Stalinist effort to destroy internal opposition to the Czechoslovak communist regime and its worsening economic policies led to hundreds of executions and tens of thousands of imprisonments. Millions were left suffering. Rigid communist economic views, bureaucratization of all dimensions of life, and recurring shortages meant that people could survive under communist rule only through venality and by shortcutting regulations. Those who went along with the habitual corruption—including the great proportion of managers and professionals—found themselves subjected to blackmail and entrapped by lies.

Havel’s family property was confiscated after 1948 by the regime, and he was denied access to education because of his “bourgeois” background. Yet he managed to reach the university level. In 1959, he got a job as a stagehand in a Prague theatrical group and started writing plays with Ivan Vyskocil. By the late 1960s, Havel was a resident playwright of the Balustrade theatrical company.

One of the first Czechoslovaks overtly to refuse conformity with the totalitarianism that descended after 1948, he would be in and out of prison starting in 1977. On August 9, 1969, Havel sent a private letter to Alexander Dubček, first secretary of Czechoslovakia’s communist party, urging him to oppose reintroduction of callous one-party rule, following the Soviet-led invasion by 750,000 Warsaw Pact troops in response to the reforms led by Dubček and during what came to be known as the Prague Spring of 1968. In 1969, the government blacklisted Havel’s writings and charged him with subversion.

Under Stalinism, ...