MAGA
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The Intellectual Trump Optimists
Maybe the rest of you are ahead of me on this, but it’s only been in the last month or so that I’ve felt that my fears about what was happening have been confirmed. We’ve crossed the Rubicon, and there’s no going back. And so it’s interesting to me that Trump intellectual apologists are emerging
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Hazony vs. Neo-Marxism
I wouldn’t be giving Hazony this much air time if I didn’t think that it was important to understand what people on the Right like him are saying. He doesn’t fit into most of the cubbies that most Americans put someone who is MAGA friendly. As I said in a previous post, his team that
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The Phony Left: Pawns in a Game It Doesn’t Understand
Few communities in America prospered as much as Texarkana during President Joe Biden’s four years in the White House, and few communities were more ungrateful than the voters of that region, which is anchored around twin cities spread across the Texas-Arkansas border. In 2024, in spite of economic growth under a Democratic president at rates
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Epstein’s Revenge
And a project at the University of Maryland to track radicalization by QAnon found that 83 percent of the women who had committed crimes in the name of the conspiracy theory had children who had been abused by a romantic partner or family member. The QAnon movement doesn’t draw adherents online the way it once
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Have We Pinged Our Last Pong?
Thomas Edsall’s column this week focuses on the problems that Dems have with voters without a college degree, aka Populists. He talks to various experts about this. Most interesting to me were the comments of Michael Podhorzer and Herbert Kitschelt. Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and a founder of the Analyst
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The Bannon-Brooks Interview
Monday was consequential for being the day the Trump Immunity ruling came down and Steve Bannon went to jail. Again. His interview with David Brooks published on Monday is pretty disturbing, but clarifying in light of the SCOTUS ruling. Bannon even references Project 2025: Project 2025 and others are working on it — to immediately
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It’s the Nihilism, Stupid
Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that
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Reality: Nice While It Lasted 2
From Thomas Edsall's column a few weeks ago: Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.” Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable
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Reality: Nice While It Lasted 1
My concern here is not that people aren’t taking Trump’s threat seriously enough (even if they aren’t) or that Biden isn’t getting some of the credit he deserves (even if he isn’t). Rather, the political reactions of American voters seem completely detached from anything that’s happened over the past several years, or even from things