Niccolò Machiavelli is viewed in the popular imagination as a sinister figure who dispensed cynical advice to ambitious politicians on how to achieve and exercise power. His reputation among scholars is far higher, particularly for those who value the public realm of life—that is to say, of governing a polity—at least as much as they […]
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Photo: Drew Angerer (Getty Images) It’s beyond clear that Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene does not belong in Congress, as information continues to emerge that some of her favorite past-times are haranguing people and inciting violence. Now Rep. Cori Bush has revealed that she’s had to go as far as moving into a different office […]
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Cori Bush is a renaissance woman. Not only is the Missouri congresswoman the first Black woman to represent the state’s First Congressional District, she’s also a registered nurse, ordained pastor for the people of St. Louis, community organizer, single mother, and the first activist from the Black Lives Matter movement ever elected to the United […]
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Because Obama didn’t do so, the cadre of Bush officials who should have been held to account—including ex-Trump advisor John Bolton and now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—were allowed to continue their untrammeled ascent. Fox News was able to seamlessly offload responsibility for the wars it had once boosted to Democrats including Hillary Clinton. Instead of […]
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I wanted to be president when I was younger, but grew out of it before middle school. Some people never do. If all goes according to plan, we will have a new president come Wednesday afternoon. The conditions are not exactly auspicious. In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, thousands of soldiers have […]
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The invasion of Iraq may well have been the moment when bald-faced lies became the favored tool of Republican governance. If you could get away with lying to go to war, you could get away with anything. It was late in Bush’s tenure that Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” in the pilot episode of […]
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The announcement attracted even more acclaim from gullible political commentators than her father’s epistolary flourish had done. Rubin wrote that Cheney “may have redeemed herself and a segment of the Republican Party,” adding, “In bold terms, she and other Republicans … implicitly chastise members of their party who egged on the mob.” There is, of […]
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You might say that the Quincy Institute, and the ascendant, skeptical attitude toward American power it represents, is living rent-free in FDD’s head. The institute is mentioned at least a dozen times in the document. In an aside, FDD CEO Mark Dubowitz and its senior vice president for research, Jonathan Schanzer, cavil that the institute […]
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Kaleck was raised in West Germany, in a small town near the Dutch border. After getting his law degree in Bonn, he bucked the corporate track and moved to Berlin. It was the late 1980s, a politically turbulent time as the Cold War entered its final throes, and Kaleck’s interests quickly bent toward activism. He […]
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The entrepreneurial spirit, as Schumpeter called it, eclipsed the organization man in the 1980s and 1990s. A regime of economic productivity centered on financial metrics like return on investment, shareholder value, and quarterly earnings made the corporate executive into an errand boy for Wall Street—or sometimes, with the growth of executive stock options and performance […]
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And that’s the magic of public money, the alchemy of public finance. Because then even big, well-directed public investment is—by definition!—not inflationary. The new money, simply spent into existence by our money-issuing federal government, creates the very means of its own absorption. This observation is the key to an economic recovery program that can be […]
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DiIulio wasn’t the only academic in the Bush White House who was appalled by the lack of interest by the president—and by extension, the rest of the White House staff—in the basics of policymaking. Suskind described another example of this grim dynamic in a revealing anecdote, the truth of which I can confirm because I […]
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And then there are Trump’s tax returns. The trove obtained by The New York Times only reveals what Trump told the IRS over the last 20 years, but it does show a variety of dubious accounting techniques to reduce his tax burden. Some of those tactics, such as writing off his personal expenses and potentially […]
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A more comprehensive reform plan would need to be much more searching and much more ambitious. Here are some ideas. First, and most obviously, the choice of an attorney general is crucial. A critical qualification for any nominee should be a demonstrated commitment to de-politicization and to reinforcing the importance of ethical comportment in lawyering […]
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On Saturday, four days after the election, America finally had an answer for who would be their next president — and it wasn’t incumbent Donald J. Trump. The Biden win was a huge relief for many, and the celebrations that broke out in cities across the nation were something else. Others, however, were not pleased, […]
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But Kushner’s desperate search for a legal consigliere was also telling—and pathetic. Despite its posturing, the Trump campaign’s vaunted legal strategy appears to have been a paper tiger. A day after the election, the president was engaged in an absurd game of whack-a-mole, claiming that the vote must continue to be counted in states where […]
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On June 25, a man named Adam Fox, upset that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer had shuttered gyms across the state as part of a pandemic lockdown order, started a livestream on a private Facebook group. “I don’t know, boys, we gotta do something,” he said. “You guys link with me on our other location system, […]
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The Biden campaign’s position is that the next president should fill the current vacancy. “The American people are voting right now, and it should be their decision about who will serve on this most important body for a lifetime,” Harris said in Wednesday’s debate. When Biden says that you’ll know his opinion after the election, […]
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The Biden campaign’s position is that the next president should fill the current vacancy. “The American people are voting right now, and it should be their decision about who will serve on this most important body for a lifetime,” Harris said in Wednesday’s debate. When Biden says that you’ll know his opinion after the election, […]
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The first thing to say about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whether you agreed with her jurisprudence or not, is that she was a mensch, a good person, full of compassion and empathy. Infused with honor and integrity, overflowing with wit and wisdom, she was never afraid to mix things up on behalf of the underdogs in […]
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The Comcast-owned network, which branded itself the home for Democrats and liberal-leaning Americans over a decade ago in the waning years of the Bush administration, has leaned all the way into becoming a home for the amalgamation of natsec liberals, professional class “Resistance” brunchers, and conservatives united in their disgust for how Trump conducts himself. […]
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Fatefully—some might even say tragically—Burrows accepted the offer. As you might expect, the review was a hatchet job, one that would make today’s most dexterous knife-wielders—Patricia Lockwood, say, or Andrea Long Chu—stand up for unbridled applause. Strafing his way from one literary offense to the next, Weingarten lampooned the book’s premise (“you write very badly”) […]
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Photo: Alex Wong (Getty Images) Civil rights icon and 17-term Georgia congressman John Lewis was mourned and honored Thursday at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church Horizon Sanctuary, where three former U.S. presidents and a number of activists, politicians and distinguished leaders came together to say their final farewells to a hero and ever-vigilant opponent of racism […]
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When John Lewis was a teen growing up in segregated Alabama, he would scan the dial of an old radio only to be hypnotized by the pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr. Advertisement On Thursday, Lewis, one of the original Freedom Riders and the youngest speaker at the March on Washington […]
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To prove his point, Yoo laid out one possible maneuver in his article. “Suppose President Donald Trump decided to create a nationwide right to carry guns openly. He could declare that he would not enforce federal firearms laws and that a new ‘Trump permit’ would free any holder of state and local gun-control restrictions,” Yoo […]
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Although Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan also adopted anti-intellectualism as a political strategy, for them it was just a cynical way to cater to widespread distrust of expertise and learning as a brand of elitism. As president, they routinely deferred to experts, scientists, and other intellectuals in developing and implementing their policies. Nixon […]
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