Trumpism
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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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Self-Transcendence, Constraints, and Social Order
Every society needs moral norms and behavioral codes. Without them we would all be in Hobbes's state of nature. The culture war that is tearing the country apart right now is about who gets to define what those codes are. The main combatants are the Left and Right wings of our Calvinist heritage–the priggish Neo
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Is It Finally the End of Trump?
The front page above is from one of Rupert Murdoch's right-wing propaganda media properties. I don't know that it means much. MAGA is toothpaste that Trump squeezed out of the tube. It was always there, and now that it's out, it ain't goin' back in. If the MAGA Jacksonian base is just as Trumpy now as
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Moral Parity
The former president recognized that the fact of an investigation was far more important than the results. It worked with the Benghazi investigation, about which House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was accidentally honest, and in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, which didn’t produce charges but did hobble her presidential campaign. By the time Trump
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Quote of the Day: Charlie Sykes
When Trump says that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing the support of the MAGA base, Trump is, of course marveling at his own popularity. But he is also admitting his deeply felt disdain for the rubes and marks who have fallen into his hands. Trump’s contempt for his
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The Coming Violence
These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into
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The Moderate Fallacy against Indicting Trump
If the matter culminates in an indictment and trial of Mr. Trump, the Republican argument would be more of what we heard day in and day out through his administration. His defenders would claim that every person ostensibly committed to the dispassionate upholding of the rule of law is in fact motivated by rank partisanship
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A Word about Liz Cheney
I can think of few jobs that are less desirable than being a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. There's a reason why so many Republicans with a lick of sense and a shred of human decency retired. Only a fool would think of it as a prize to be clung to.