How the Golden State Became the Intellectual Capital of Trump’s GOP
Heresies tend to thrive on the periphery of a regime rather than in the halls of power. Early Christianity came to center itself around the city of Rome, but major challenges to orthodoxy, like the...
View ArticleWhat to Make of Trump’s Debate-Night Threat
“Let’s be clear,” wrote Paul Krugman on Twitter at the conclusion of last night’s vituperative presidential debate, “a candidate for president just promised to put his opponent in jail if he wins....
View ArticleDemocratic Norms Are Collapsing
Writing in the Washington Post, the Nathaniel Persily and Jon Cohen highlight new evidence supporting an increasingly well-documented trend in political science: On a number of dimensions, Americans...
View ArticleTrump’s Brinksmanship Shows Importance of Electoral College
The Twittersphere is engaged in a heated debate about the significance of Trump’s ostentatious refusal to commit to accepting the results of the presidential election, with many liberals (and some...
View ArticleWhy the House Leans Right
In 2012, Democrats held the White House and made gains in the Senate but failed to wrest control of the House of Representatives from the GOP, despite winning a greater share of the popular vote in...
View ArticleOn Campus, It’s Marx vs. Mill
What is a university for? It’s a question that’s been asked with special intensity over the past week as pundits on the right and left have debated the roots of the conservative movement’s intellectual...
View ArticleAmerican Unexceptionalism Comes to the GOP
At a press conference in Strasbourg, France in March of 2009, a reporter asked President Obama if he subscribed “to the school of American exceptionalism that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead...
View ArticleThe Spectacular Institutional Failure of the Democratic Party
Writers and analysts, those of us at TAI very much included, have spent the past several months writing about what seemed like the spectacular institutional failure of the Republican Party, which...
View ArticleTrump Administration Could Shake Up Campus Sex Wars
Donald Trump’s stunning victory on Tuesday night has already sent shockwaves through colleges and universities, islands of cosmopolitan left-wing politics where the President-elect is hated and feared...
View ArticleFour Theses on the Electoral College
The Electoral College, initially designed as a check on popular will and a guardian of elite prerogative in American government, has delivered the presidency to Donald Trump, a populist outsider who...
View ArticleAt UVA, a Microcosm of Liberalism’s Woes
After Donald Trump’s upset victory last Tuesday, University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan sent out a campus-wide email including a quote from the school’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, reminding...
View ArticleWill Trump’s Infrastructure Bill Be a Blue Model Boondoggle?
Donald Trump’s promise to spend hundreds of billions of dollars rebuilding U.S. infrastructure promises to create unusual political dynamics on Capitol Hill. Some Democrats are reportedly eager to...
View Article“Fake News” Is the New “Bregret”
After a majority of British voters stunned the political establishment on both sides of the Atlantic by voting to leave the European Union, the media quickly alighted on a narrative to reassure...
View ArticleSocial Science Neglects Big Questions
The story of the year is that voters across the Western world are rebelling against the judgment of “experts” of all kinds. People with advanced degrees, whether they work at colleges, newspapers, or...
View ArticleWho Threatens Liberal Democracy?
A New York Times write-up of Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa’s work showing a broad-based decline in support for liberal democracy across the Western world has rightly attracted significant attention,...
View ArticleGoldman Sachs Populism
Since Donald Trump dined with fellow business tycoon Mitt Romney on “young garlic soup with thyme and sautéed frog legs” and tapped former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin (just one of the many...
View ArticleThe New Yorker Exposes a Fake News Fraud
A viral Washington Post story breathlessly circulated by media mandarins condemning the influence of “fake news” on the U.S. presidential election turns out to have been… fake news. The New Yorker’s...
View ArticleWhy Democrats Might Be Thankful for the Roberts Court
If Donald Trump really has authoritarian inclinations, as many of his critics suggest (and they can point to a fair number of menacing proclamations and patterns of behavior to support their case),...
View ArticleFake News Hysteria Will Make the Fake News Problem Worse
Jack Shafer of Politico has the best piece yet examining the post-election phenomenon of “fake news” panic—the idea, which spread rapidly among establishment figures in the wake of the election, that...
View ArticleDemocrats Don’t Have the Vocabulary to Oppose Trump’s Labor Secretary
Democrats are sure to have their knives out for any number of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, but Andrew Puzder, the fast-food CEO whom the president-elect has tapped for Labor Secretary, could be a...
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