When the modern Tea Party movement coalesced in the early days of the Obama presidency, its allusion to the political grievances of the protesters in Boston Harbor a couple of hundred years earlier seemed plausible enough: Its members felt that their taxes were too high and their interests not adequately […] Read more »
What the Alt-Right Really Means
… The alt-right is not a large movement, but the prominence that it is enjoying in the early days of the Trump era may tell us something about the way the country is changing. At least since the end of the Cold War, and certainly since the election of a […] Read more »
What’s the Matter With Kansas? aptly describes the 2016 election — but was written in 2004
Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter With Kansas? ignited something of a firestorm within political science. It was attempting to explain recent trends in American politics, but its analysis wasn’t reflected in much actual data. Yet that book explains the 2016 election far better than it did the election […] Read more »
Trump’s Conventional Cabinet
In many ways President-elect Trump is exactly the guy he was when he was candidate Trump. He remains obsessed with real or perceived slights — using twitter to lash out at those who he dissed or dismissed him. He is infatuated with how the press covers him and yet has […] Read more »
Overcoming ‘End-Point Bias’: Liberals, Fox News and Arctic Sea Ice Trends
“End-point bias” is a well-known psychological tendency to interpret a recent short-term fluctuation as a reversal of a long-term trend. When scientists reported a significant increase in the extent of Arctic sea ice in 2013, a FoxNews.com story evoked end-point bias by contrasting the historically low previous year with the […] Read more »
Who Can Tell the Future of the Democratic Party?
Here’s a question very few people expected to be asking this year: Does the Democratic Party have a future? The defeat of Hillary Clinton has revived with new intensity the conflict between proponents of identity politics — focusing electoral attention on African-Americans, Hispanics, women and the L.G.B.T. community — and […] Read more »