American Left
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Constructive vs. Futile Protest
There have been street protests in the streets of the capitals of cosmopolitan America. The people protesting are understandably upset that a thug like Trump has been elected. I'm glad this kind of spontaneous resistance is arising, but these protests are futile and will aggravate the problem if they continue to be simply the expression
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Understanding Tea Party Anger
From Nathaniel Rich's review of Arlie Hochschild's Inside the Sacrifice Zone in the NYRB Hochschild is also unpersuaded by Colin Woodard’s argument for regionalism as the main factor in shaping political views, and Alec McGillis’s argument that those in red states who most need government services vote at a much lower rate than wealthier conservatives.
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Realigning the Colors
What these figures suggest is that the 2016 election will represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters. From the 1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale whites voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true.
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Quote of the Day: Terry Eagleton
Culture had been among other things a way of keeping radical politics warm, a continuation of it by other means. Increasingly, however, it was to become a substitute for it. In some ways, the 1980s were like the 1880s or 1960s without the politics. As leftist political hopes faded, cultural studies came to the fore.
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Perlstein on Sanders
To me, this history reveals the frustrating paradox at the heart of Sanders’s success. The very thing that makes it so exciting—a Democrat dreaming big dreams and who’s rewarded with burgeoning political success beyond anyone’s prediction but his own—is also what makes for such a stark contrast with the rest of the Democratic Party. The
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Contempt for the Liberal Class
Last week, with the Republican campaign robo-calls coming one after another over the phone in suburban Kansas City — at least a dozen of them every day, the right-wing super PACs’ version of a World War I artillery barrage — I picked out one phrase from the hailstorm of words: “Washington’s liberal class.” That phrase,
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How Liberalism Lost Its Good Name
I look forward to reading Rick Perlstein’s The Invisble Bridge, his latest chronicle on the development of American movement conservatism since the 1950s. When reading Nixonland, his previous volume in the series, I was disturbed by how much I needed to reminded about what happened during the 1960s. But as I read through it, I remembered
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The Left-Right Spectrum: Time for a Realignment?
Reader Mike McG sent me Crispin Sartwell's Atlantic article "The Left-Right Political Spectrum is Bogus" I agree with much of what Sartwell says, and I like his point that we should stop thinking from the Left or the Right, and start thinking about the Left and the Right. If we understand Left-Right in its most basic
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Concentration of Power
Presents a greater danger to the public good than concentrations of wealth, but where there is concentration of wealth, concentration of power follows. Libertarians get upset with the idea of power concentrated in governments–and that can be a very serious problem–but the real problem in America has always been the way power concentrates in the