Am. History & Culture

The Reckoning

In the final days of his presidency, Mr. Trump has been snubbed by foreign allies and banned from social media. Some members of his cabinet fled, and some in his own party helped deal the final blow of a second impeachment. High-profile friends, like the New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, are declining national honors
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From Edsall’s Column This Morning:

Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, put it this way in an email: We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president;
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Reason for Hope

During his political career, Trump has given comfort to and conferred logistical coherence upon a coalition that will not die without him—but also will not thrive. The United States is a divided nation, but only a tiny fraction of Trump’s more than 74 million voters showed up in Washington, D.C., eager to fight. The way
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News Flash: Nation’s Village Idiots Riot to Support the Nation’s Idiot

“Who could have seen this coming? Everyone? Even dummies like me. This is the most shocking, most tragic, least surprising thing I’ve ever seen.” — STEPHEN COLBERT And the wildest part is these MAGA marchers think Donald Trump cares about them. He doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t care about your wife or your job
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Trump’s Big Lies: Mission Accomplished (Updated)

For his opponents, the lies were intended to be profoundly demoralizing. Neither counting them nor checking facts nor debunking conspiracies made any difference. Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to
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Status and Legitimacy on the Trumpian Right

I wrote this in February right after the Senate acquittted Trump in the impeachment trial: The problem isn't Trump; it's the Republican Party. Republicans simply do not care about the rule of law, i.e., the constitution, except when they can use it as a club to hit their political enemies. This isn't new; it been
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It’s not Trump Love; It’s (Neo)Liberal Hate

A machinist named Tim carried his steelworker union card in his wallet for years after the factory closed, just to remind himself who he was. Tim grew up in a union household. His dad had been an autoworker; his grandfather, a coal miner. “We always voted Democrat because they looked after the little man,” Tim
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Ontological Dizziness and Fear of the Future

Their portrayal of what the country would look like if the Democrats win big in November is indeed a frightening one to Trump supporters: a White House with Senator Bernie Sanders as the shadow socialist president; a Democratic House of Representatives where Representative Ilhan Omar calls the shots; a society in which mask mandates are
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Obamanation

Many Americans who had welcomed Obama concluded that the game was rigged for the rich and well connected. While he sat through agonizing meetings in his first 100 days, outside the White House the Tea Party rose up like a vicious storm. Democratic Party suffered a massive defeat in the 2010 midterm elections, resulting in
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Republics vs Democracies

Some of the earliest contrasts between “democracy” and “republic” in Lee’s sense, according to Cornell historian Lawrence Glickman, came from conservative opponents of the New Deal. At the time, President Roosevelt sold his policies — both domestic and foreign — as a means of defending and enhancing American democracy. Some of his opponents, who saw
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