After driving more than 500 miles around Iowa over three days this past weekend and listening to almost 20 candidates, the two strongest impressions I received were just how fragile Joe Biden’s front-runner status is, and how Elizabeth Warren’s ascendancy continues to be underestimated. Granted, you didn’t need to drive […] Read more »
How to Fix Democracy
Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has been immersed in U.S. politics since the late 1960s and has watched the evolution of the Republican Party with concern. Ornstein no longer views the GOP as conservative, he tells Andrew Keen, but as radical, leaving behind its ideology for […] Read more »
In God’s country: Evangelicals view Trump as their protector. Will they stand by him in 2020?
… Exit polls show that Trump carried 85 percent of evangelical voters here in 2016, a touch higher than the national white evangelical average of 81 percent. That in itself wasn’t surprising: For decades evangelicals have been a reliable Republican constituency. More intriguing was that a segment of white evangelicals […] Read more »
America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others.
… There is a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States, inextricably tied to our system of slavery. And while the racial content of that ideology has attenuated over time, the basic framework remains: fear of rival political majorities; of demographic “replacement”; of a government that threatens privilege and […] Read more »
It’s the mainstream anti-immigration rhetoric, not the extreme, that’s shaping American politics
… In an interview on NPR, the administration’s immigration chief, Ken Cuccinelli, offered a reworking of the poem that sits at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public […] Read more »
‘He gets it’: Evangelicals aren’t turned off by Trump’s first term
… Trump enjoyed overwhelming support from white evangelicals in 2016, winning a higher percentage than George W. Bush, John McCain or Mitt Romney. That enthusiasm has scarcely dimmed. Almost 70 percent of white evangelicals approve of Trump’s performance in office, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll. Interviews with […] Read more »