The Senate Detonates
Well, it happened: Mitch McConnell invoked the dreaded nuclear option to overcome a Democratic filibuster of Judge Neil Gorsuch.Whenever longstanding norms are set aside, there is a question of whether...
View ArticleThe Case for Placebo Politics
Last month in these pages, Tyler Cowen coined the term “placebo President” to describe the possibility that Donald Trump would largely fail to achieve the radically populist policy objectives he...
View ArticleLiberals Are Just as Biased as Conservatives, Study Finds
For decades, many social scientists have promoted the view that conservatives are particularly closed-minded—that people on the political Right are more tribal in their thinking patterns, more...
View ArticleThe High-End Tax Break That Needs to Go
The Trump Administration has reportedly gone back to the drawing board to decide how to approach tax reform, scrapping the candidate’s supercharged supply-side campaign platform and mulling a variety...
View ArticleFree Speech and the Nationalist-Globalist Clash
In a saga that will likely be remembered as a key moment in the contest over free speech in the United States, violent left-wing agitators—with the passive support of a spineless university...
View ArticleIs the Comey Firing Proof of a Smoking Gun?
In Politico, Cass Sunstein notes that there are two possible reasons Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. “The first is that in light of the multiple controversies that came to surround Comey, he was...
View ArticleLiberals Won the Culture Wars. What Comes Next?
Liberals are continuing to get the better of conservatives on a range of long-running moral debates, according to a new Gallup survey: Americans continue to express an increasingly liberal outlook on...
View ArticleDemocrats Push Left as Midterm Campaigns Approach
If you thought that Donald Trump’s victory would impel the Democrats to de-emphasize identity politics and social liberalism and pivot even modestly toward the center, think again. At the local level,...
View ArticleAfter Mueller, Trump Critics Worry: Maybe There’s No Scandal
Eli Lake is right: The DOJ’s appointment of widely-respected former prosecutor Robert Mueller to lead the special inquiry into the Trump campaign’s potential collusion with Russia is a reprieve for a...
View ArticleWhy Hasn’t Trump Condemned Erdogan’s Provocation?
It turns out that Turkish President Recep Erdogan was actually looking on as his goons assaulted American protesters in Washington D.C. earlier this week. As we wrote Wednesday, this had already...
View ArticleHow Trump Affected Political Correctness
A major theme—the major theme?—of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency was his relentless assault on socially-enforced standards of speech and opinion that those on the Right tend to refer...
View ArticleThe Placebo Politics of Paris
In his broadside against the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, Jonathan Chait makes an observation that is difficult to dispute, even among Paris skeptics (and regular...
View ArticleWhat Violence Means
Governing magazine places this morning’s attack on Republican congressmen in the context of a series of violent episodes that are shaking our political system with increasing intensity. Wednesday’s...
View ArticleIt’s Time to Retire the Silicon Valley Mythos
Google, like any corporation, has wide latitude to fire its employees for any number of reasons. And Google, like any corporation, is entitled to attach any conditions it wishes to its philanthropic...
View ArticleThe DACA Fight and the End of Politics
“If you want to keep DACA, here’s a thought,” one conservative tweeter noted wryly in response to the torrent of outrage that met President Trump’s decision to scrap the program, “make a proposal that...
View ArticleThe Statistic That Explains the Trump Presidency
A new report from the Public Religion Research Institute contains the following remarkable tidbit: “Fewer than one in three (29%) Democrats today are white Christian, compared to half (50%) one decade...
View ArticleBetsy DeVos Came Out Swinging for Due Process on Campus. Will It Matter?
In an address at George Mason University Law School yesterday, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issued a blistering indictment of the state of campus sexual assault tribunals. In the course of its...
View ArticleThe Overton Window Moves on Healthcare
Leading establishment figures in the Democratic Party are coming around to Bernie Sanders’ proposal—once considered a left-wing moonshot—to create a massive, federally-funded health insurance system....
View ArticleThe Militant Pragmatism of Hillary Clinton
The figure that emerges from Hillary Clinton’s 50-minute sit-down with Ezra Klein to discuss the 2016 election and her vision of politics is at once sympathetic and maddeningly hypocritical.The first...
View ArticleA Run on Liberalism?
The tide of illiberalism that has swept over American academia for the past few years isn’t just about a few rambunctious hecklers or a militant fringe. In fact, skepticism of the idea of free and open...
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