The world is moving rightwards at a staggering pace.

Leading this race to the worst is a breed of rulers who make their countries great again by brutalizing their neighbors and licensing their favorite oligarchs to plunder the planet. Taken alone, however, the ways of a few strong men and their cronies cannot fully explain our current trajectory. Other enablers include moderate politicians ready to reach across any aisle, reasonable experts who confuse impartiality with complacency, and large constituencies eagerly absorbing the phobias stoked by the entrepreneurs of ressentiment. To hinder these global trends, the first task at hand is to get a better understanding of them, even as the spaces devoted to the critique of common sense are rapidly being defunded or closed. Diagrams thus seeks to join a resilient network of sites still attempting to diagnose our contemporary condition – one where freedoms are corroded in the name of liberty and inequalities are celebrated in the name of the people.

Diagrams will pursue five intersecting programs. The first will be devoted to the recent mutations of capitalism, with a special emphasis on the prominence of asset managers and the return of “robber barons”. A second program will examine the advent of a multipolar geopolitical order, distinct from both the old Cold War and the interregnum of US hegemony that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Thirdly, we will map the diversity of far-right movements, focusing on how they manage contradictory impulses to forge new alliances, both across national borders and with mainstream political parties. The fourth program will address the persistence but also the evolution of climate denialism, at a time when even the net zero commitments that critics used to lambast as mere greenwashing are being challenged by a Washington-led drilling frenzy. Finally, our fifth program will tackle the urgent and challenging question of what can be done, both by asking what lessons the left can draw from the current rightward drift and by seeking out the emerging modes of left resistance already at play.

A new issue of Diagrams will appear online every three weeks. It will feature one or several in-depth interviews with scholars, journalists and activists working at the intersection of our five programs. These interviews will be filmed and accompanied by a dossier designed to introduce, illustrate and connect them. Our aim is to showcase research that illuminates the present, to explore the resonances between our different interviewees, and to gain a more lucid perspective on the fault lines of our brave new world.