Americans and the Unassimilables

… Politicians and Fourth-of-July orators love to invoke Emma Lazarus’s lines on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your poor, your tired / Your huddled masses, the wretched refuse …. “and to say, as President Trump did a few days ago, that “America is a proud nation of immigrants.” Alas, the […] Read more »

What It Takes to Truly Be ‘One of Us’

The tide of people moving across the world, be they immigrants or refugees, has sparked concern in Australia, Europe and the United States. In particular, the ethnic, linguistic and cultural background of migrants has triggered intense debates over the benefits and the costs of growing diversity and the risk of […] Read more »

How Will Donald Trump Handle Europe’s Populist Right?

Like the advance of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, the spread of conservative populism across Europe stalled at the gates of Vienna last weekend. The failure of Suleiman the Magnificent to capture the city in 1529 proved a turning point that marked the end of Ottoman expansion into […] Read more »

The revolt of the dispossessed

… Turnout, fake news, voter suppression, emails and a hundred other things also mattered. But Donald Trump succeeded in eliciting support from a large minority of Americans, and it’s worth understanding why. … To say this election was just about the economy or culture though is to miss its broader […] 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 »

Trump’s Victory and the Rise of White Populism

It will take weeks or months to fully parse Donald J. Trump’s upset presidential victory, but his campaign was driven, at least in part, by the dramatic rise of a new kind of white populism. … I have spent the past year investigating the rise of that new kind of […] Read more »