In addition, Kessler wrote, in the past month, The price of gasoline has fallen 20-cents to a national average of $3.24 a gallon. Headline and core inflation have begun their final descent toward benign, historic levels. Interest rates have fallen about 40 basis points in the past several months. The so-called “misery index” (inflation + […]
Read More
“2024 is the final battle,” Donald Trump has said. “Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country,” he has argued. “Our country,” he has said, “is going to hell.” As he campaigns to reclaim the presidency, Trump has intensified his rhetoric of cataclysm and apocalypse, beyond even […]
Read More
In the spring of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party used tanks and troops to crush a pro-democracy protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Most of the West, across traditional partisan lines, was aghast at the crackdown that killed at least hundreds of student activists. But one prominent American was impressed. “When the students poured into Tiananmen […]
Read More
Former President Donald J. Trump, who has been indicted by federal prosecutors for conspiracy to defraud the United States in connection with a plot to overturn the 2020 election, repeatedly claimed to supporters in Iowa on Saturday that it was President Biden who posed a severe threat to American democracy. While Mr. Trump shattered democratic […]
Read More
Kissinger’s dirty work went far beyond Southeast Asia and South America. Along with Nixon, he backed the brutal effort of the military government of the former West Pakistan to suppress Bengali nationalists in the former East Pakistan, in what is now Bangladesh. A recent study estimated the death toll in that conflict at 269,000 people, […]
Read More
Two Republican county supervisors in Arizona were indicted Wednesday on felony charges related to their attempts to delay the certification of 2022 election results. Kris Mayes, the state attorney general, announced in a statement that Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, two of the three supervisors in Cochise County, face charges of interference with an election […]
Read More
“While there is precedent for third-party candidates in presidential elections,” she wrote, “there is little precedent for an organization backwards-engineering a presidential ticket and agenda.” Asked whether No Labels should be required to register as a political party, she responded: If No Labels fields candidates, it should register as a political party. It has the […]
Read More
I study government bureaucracies. This is not normally a key political issue. Right now, it is, and everyone should be paying attention. Donald Trump, the former president and current candidate, puts it in apocalyptic terms: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.” This is not an empty threat. He has […]
Read More
Do abortion and democracy matter to voters? If you look at the results of New York Times/Siena College polling, the answer often seems to be “not really.” Around 40 percent of voters agreed that Donald J. Trump was “bad” for democracy in our latest poll. Only around a quarter said that issues like democracy and […]
Read More
American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law are the righteous causes of our times, and the nation’s legal profession is obligated to support them. But with the acquiescence of the larger conservative legal movement, these pillars of our system of governance are increasingly in peril. The dangers will only grow should Donald Trump […]
Read More
By the usual measures, last year’s midterm polls were among the most accurate on record. But in harder-to-measure ways, there’s a case those same polls were extraordinarily bad. Poll after poll seemed to tell a clear story before the election: Voters were driven more by the economy, immigration and crime than abortion and democracy, helping […]
Read More
More than at any time since World War II, liberalism is under siege. On the left, some people insist that liberalism is exhausted and dying, and unable to handle the problems posed by entrenched inequalities, corporate power and environmental degradation. On the right, some people think that liberalism is responsible for the collapse of traditional […]
Read More
It makes perfect sense to treat Donald Trump as the most immediate threat to the future of American democracy. He has an ambitious plan to turn the office of the presidency into an instrument of “revenge” against his political enemies and other supposedly undesirable groups. But while we keep our eyes on Trump and his […]
Read More
Donald J. Trump’s claims of election fraud already helped inspire one South American leader, former president Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, to sow doubt about the security of his nation’s elections, leading to a riot in Brazil’s capital this year. Now, 1,500 miles to the south, there is a new Latin American politician warning of voter […]
Read More
Last year, the University of North Carolina Greensboro contracted with rpk Group, the consulting firm that has worked on West Virginia University’s restructuring, to devise an academic program review in the face of declining enrollment and changes in state funding. Their website asserts that “innovation disconnected from the business model is not sustainable.” Reducing education […]
Read More
Over the last few weeks, we’ve gotten a pretty good idea of what Donald Trump would do if given a second chance in the White House. And it is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole to say that it looks an awful lot like a set of proposals meant to give the former president the power and […]
Read More
At an even more basic level, Mr. Trump doesn’t have to promise positive change so much as the chance to stiff-arm the current leadership. Plenty of protest voters may not be looking to punish Mr. Biden for a particular action, or inaction, so much as for their inchoate disenchantment with the way things are. The […]
Read More
U.S. democracy is clearly in crisis. It’s entirely possible that in less than two years dissenters will face the power of a government with an authoritarian bent; if that sounds to you like hyperbole, you aren’t paying attention. But is America beyond the political realm also in crisis? Are the very foundations of society eroding? […]
Read More
It’s easy to become inured to the extremism that has suffused the Republican Party in recent years. Donald Trump, the dominating front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination, spends days in court, in a judicial system he regularly disparages, charged with a long list of offenses and facing several trials. In the House, Republicans recently chose […]
Read More
As the United States seeks to deepen its relationships with African nations and counter the influence of rivals like Russia and China, it confronts a tricky question: How does it respond when countries do things that run afoul of Washington’s stated commitment to democracy and human rights? That tension hung over a major trade conference […]
Read More
In the last presidential election, in 2018, part of the opposition, including Ms. Machado, boycotted the vote. As a member of an opposition political party — Primero Justicia — I, too, decided not to cast a vote. But now, after nearly six more years of authoritarian consolidation, I believe that strategy was a mistake. Asking […]
Read More
A peaceful end to the war in Ukraine. That was the wish behind a post that Simge Krüger made on LinkedIn in March. In response, people began posting their wishes that her husband, father and brother be killed in combat. Seeing that she lived in Germany, they called her a Nazi. “I was just talking […]
Read More
The Jordan campaign for speaker may turn into a liability for Republican members in districts won by Biden in 2020. After Fitzpatrick voted for Jordan, his probable Democratic challenger, Ashley Ehasz, a West Point graduate and combat veteran, declared: Brian Fitzpatrick has campaigned on his supposed commitment to reaching across the aisle and solving problems […]
Read More
One popular answer is Donald Trump who, in this view, is directly responsible for the downward spiral of dysfunction and deviancy that defines today’s Republican Party. It’s his success as a demagogue and showman that set the stage for the worst of the behavior we’ve seen from elected Republicans. The problem, as I’ve already noted, […]
Read More
President Biden delivered remarks from the Oval Office on Thursday on the wars between Israel and Hamas, and Ukraine and Russia. The following is a transcript of his remarks, as recorded by The New York Times. Good evening, my fellow Americans. We’re facing an inflection point in history. One of those moments where the decisions […]
Read More
These questions were gaining salience even before the 2020 election. As Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, explains in her 2018 book, “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity”: The election of Trump is the culmination of a process by which the American electorate has become deeply socially divided along partisan lines. As […]
Read More
No problem in the American system at this moment is as acute and disruptive as the one posed by the Republican Party. Yes, of course, there are any number of structural problems facing American politics. Our system of elections — first-past-the-post voting, the Electoral College, single-member districts and partisan gerrymandering — feeds into and amplifies […]
Read More
The brutal terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas is a tragedy, one that may change the course of the nation and the entire region. Israelis are reeling, in shock over the toll of people killed, wounded and taken hostage, and the world is mourning with them. The militants killed more than 800 Israelis in a […]
Read MoreThere was a time, not that long ago, when the United States presumed to teach the world how it was done. When it held itself up as a model of a stable, predictable democracy. When it sent idealistic young avatars to distant parts of the globe to impart the American way. These days, to many […]
Read More
Last week, President Biden gave a wide-ranging interview to John Harwood of ProPublica that touched on his presidency, the Republican Party and the present state and future status of American democracy. Early in the interview, Harwood asks Biden whether he thinks the threat to democracy is broader than the refusal of Donald Trump and his […]
Read More
But here’s where we come to the Catch-22, because the stability of our system rests on supermajority rules so strong that they stymie all but the broadest attempts to change that system. And who is to say that stability is such a paramount goal? In a dynamic society, which is to say in a human […]
Read More