Maybe America’s racial history makes it uniquely hostile to redistributive fiscal policy. But the Republican Party’s brand of economic conservatism is also uniquely extreme, unpopular, and ill-equipped to meet the demands of our second Gilded Age — as the current…
It matters that Trump drew a sparse crowd to inaugural festivities that he had billed beforehand as a historic, Jacksonian uprising of the People. And it matters much more that millions of Americans came out on a Saturday to register…
The alliance of Trump’s corruption and Paul Ryan’s social Darwinism presents Democrats with the simplest messaging challenge any opposition party has faced in memory. The most unpopular nominee in the recorded history of polling managed to very, very narrowly beat…
Trump genuinely does pose threats to the integrity of American institutions and political norms. But he does so largely because his nascent administration is sustained by support from the institutional Republican Party and its standard business and interest group supporters.…
Throughout 2016, our party triumphantly presented itself as the embodiment of America’s multi-cultural, multi-racial demographic future. Of course, our national convention was the peak expression of that triumphalism, featuring Mothers of the Movement, the electrifying speeches by Mr. Khan and…
She defended rather than apologized for her vote in 2008, willing to pay a political price for standing by her principles and decisions. Partially as a result of that, she was universally seen as the leader who could answer the…
If one party goes far, far left and the other goes nativist-populist, the center-left and center-right would need to join forces and put forth an alternative that fills in a huge ideological gap. They would: Refuse to favor one-half of…
It is now Democrats who appear benefit from culture and identity being the central issue in American politics, at least in a national election like the one for president. And as the Democrats are increasingly split internally by class, this…
Nominating Trump opened a wide lane for the Democrats, and while their own surging left wing would never allow them to fill it all, they occupied parts of it. President Obama’s Wednesday night speech rang notes of human fallibility and…
The Republican neo-imperialists believe that the empire needs to be more aggressively defended and wherever possible expanded. The Democratic neo-imperialists believe that the empire needs mainly to be secured, or, if expanded, expanded via collaboration. The citizenry appears somewhat agnostic or passive on the main questions, except when unsettled by events suggestive of a possible un-managed and abrupt rollback that would also entail a downward adjustment in consumption and other disruptions of accustomed expectations – a possibility or set of possibilities that few outside the neo-imperial mainstream seem equipped to analyze concretely.
