Politics & Power 484

No one who cares about the condition of our culture can afford to ignore Conscientious Thinking. --Jackson Lears, editor, Raritan

They should be required to share a double bed and commit adultery with each other every night—twice if possible.

A few years ago I wrote something of an irenic essay on the annual, January, March for Life in Washington DC.  I was in the mood, then, for focusing on…

Utah Max Weber never visited the American Southwest, but few theories explain the mass tourism of the region better than his iron cage of disenchantment. The German sociologist saw the…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Coming to grips with what the 2016 election means many things, especially for those of us who are hoping to find in Trump's victory a…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] So at the beginning of the month, when I finally got my election reflections out of my system, I concluded by re-iterating what I said…

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY -- As rumors of rogue electors spike the December air, I offer this piece from 2001, which is included in my Poetry Night at the Ballpark and…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Yes, I know the election was a month ago. What can I say; I needed time to recover from getting everything entirely wrong, didn't I?…

Like many Americans I’ve struggled to put the election of 2016 in proper perspective the last few weeks, only to arrive at an unexpected conclusion: Trump may be America’s first…

Queens, NY The city goes on.  And this phenomenon, of a city continuing even as it is under threat or attacked-- of resiliency in a city-- is surely one of…

Columbus, OH I woke up on Wednesday morning with an Election Day hangover: groggy, head pounding, despondent, a little nauseous. I stumbled out of bed and refreshed the news app…

Although President-Elect Donald Trump may have been insincere, when he insisted that he was only the "messenger" and not the personal cause of his sudden rise to political prominence over…

After the second, town hall-styled presidential debate pundits raved, and perhaps rightly so, about Hilary Clinton’s ability to handle the format. The former first lady received high rankings from observers…

The perils of placeless populism, from The American Conservative.

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] With the exception of one big think piece on our almost-certainly-soon-to-be-POTUS, Hillary Clinton, I've been quiet this presidential election. I think that's because, in the…

Sioux Center, Iowa. In what he represents, Donald Trump is not as unique as either his admirers or his despisers think. How do we explain the Trump phenomenon? When he…

The Future of Freedom Foundation has reprinted "The Empire versus Little America," my speech from what was, in a parallel universe, the epochal 2010 conference that begat the peace group…

  Queens, NY Many of us have, I imagine, indulged over the course of this summer in a certain amount of GOP doomer porn-- reading (and writing, and talking about)…

Only the Anti-Federalists, it seems, could envision Lyndon B. Johnson or George W. Bush.

Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high school basketball star with a spiritual yearning and an outsized libido, may be both John Updike’s most famous and most despised literary character. But…

In 2014, I was in Glasgow for the Scottish referendum. I had spent the day before the referendum out and about in Glasgow and the “Yes” for independence vote was…

When Front Porch Republic came into the world seven years ago, it did so largely on the strength of an intuition.  Everyone was weary of "bigness."  The financial collapse triggered by the…

I've been out of Paris for a week now, and apart from a brief stop there on my way to London to watch the Brexit vote unfold, I will be out…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Tomorrow, with the California Democratic primary, the populist developments that so many have observed in this electoral cycle will definitively change. Either Sanders will prevail…