For nearly 30 years, the Republican Party has increasingly resembled a religion, with Ronald Reagan is its deity. … I learned that election returns show Americans don’t want what Reaganism’s high priests are preaching. More crucially, I learned that everything I thought I knew about Reagan was wrong—that Reaganism misrepresents […] Read more »
Beyond opposing Trump, Democrats keep searching for a message
The loss in last week’s special congressional election in Georgia produced predictable hand-wringing and finger-pointing inside the Democratic Party. It also raised anew a question that has troubled the party through a period in which they have lost ground political. Simply put: Do Democrats have a message? Right now, the […] Read more »
Trump’s core voters could suffer most under GOP health bill, but they may not punish him for it
The Senate health-care bill has sharpened the central political question surrounding the 2017 Republican agenda: Will the voters who made Donald Trump president rebel? Like the House health-care bill, the Senate version would roll back Obamacare’s expansion of insurance coverage under Medicaid. While cutting Obamacare’s taxes on the rich, it […] Read more »
The End of the Left and the Right as We Knew Them
By now it has become quite clear that conservative parties in Europe and the United States have been gaining strength from white voters who have been mobilized around issues related to nationalism — resistance to open borders and to third-world immigration. In the United States, this development has been exacerbated […] Read more »
The ‘wave’ of right-wing populist sentiment is a myth
Last year’s Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump and electoral gains by right-wing populist parties in countries as diverse as Hungary, Switzerland and Denmark seem to demonstrate that right-wing populist sentiment is on the rise in affluent democracies. But in Europe, at least, that’s simply not the case. In […] Read more »
Is North Carolina the Future of American Politics?
… Welcome to North Carolina circa 2017, where all the passions and pathologies of American politics writ large are played out writ small — and with even more intensity. Ever since 2010, when Republicans seized control of the General Assembly for the first time in a century, and especially since […] Read more »