Yascha Mounk is used to being the most pessimistic person in the room. Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way. His […] Read more »
Low Marks for Major Players in 2016 Election – Including the Winner
For most voters, the 2016 presidential campaign was one to forget. Post-election evaluations of the way that the winning candidate, the parties, the press and the pollsters conducted themselves during the campaign are all far more negative than after any election dating back to 1988. The quadrennial post-election survey by […] Read more »
The End of Identity Liberalism
… A convenient liberal interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the “whitelash” thesis. This is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore […] Read more »
Donald Trump, America’s first independent president
Viewed through any conventional lens, President-elect Donald Trump’s candidacy was improbable from start to finish. Today, two things about his victory seem to be in sharper focus: one, that Trump’s victory might best be understood as the success of the country’s first independent president, and second, that the Trump coalition […] Read more »
Politics & Polls podcast: Asymmetric Politics
Political polarization is the worst it’s been since the Civil War, some experts argue. How did we get here? How have America’s ideologies shifted so much in the past four decades? What forces underlie the growing divide between Republicans and Democrats? And how has social media and varying sources of […] Read more »
Is the Slide Into Tribal Politics Inevitable?
Donald J. Trump’s victory could well push the American party system toward a clash between an overwhelmingly white ethnic party and a cosmopolitan coalition of minority groups and college-educated whites. … Mr. Trump’s campaign may set in motion a process that reorients American politics toward the cosmopolitanism versus nationalism divide […] Read more »