“Trump’s assault on the premises of democracy is not only unique in modern American history but unique in the annals of modern liberal democracy”
Trump’s assault on the premises of democracy is not only unique in modern American...
Tag Archives: Politics
“‘Classified’ still conjures images of top-secret government plots, but, in Trump’s Washington, it’s more often used to describe information that the president would prefer to keep quiet”
Trump has been merciless toward anyone else in government who reveals his administration’s secrets,...
“When underlying conditions are already suffused with politics, doing nothing can itself constitute a political act”
Change, of course, is inherently destabilizing. It upsets an existing state of affairs that...
“Politicization is the last refuge of the scoundrel”
Politicization is the last refuge of the scoundrel. To “politicize” something — hurricanes, intelligence,...
“The existence of multiple moral frameworks with which to view the world is not a sign of confusion; it is a sign of sophistication and strength”
I recognize that there are those people, on the right and on the left,...
The Republican Party “became defined by what was left: its resentments and suspicions, its antagonisms and obsessions, its anger and its differences”
The focal point for much of the post-Bush right’s anger and resentment was the...
“Trump’s innovation is to have mined a deeper vein of cynicism, exhausting the weary tropes of polite political discourse”
…Trump is pivoting constantly. Or perhaps more accurately, the man is so erratic that...
“It remains unclear whether anti-establishment voters, in this election or others, tend to choose the most anti-establishment platform, the most outside-the-system leader or the opposite of whoever is in power”
Few systems in the world are more complex than the one between a person’s...
“Part of what makes the modern use of ‘winning’ so strange is that it’s often used in contexts that are not competitions”
Part of what makes the modern use of “winning” so strange is that it’s...
“The guiding principle in Mr. Trump’s government is to turn the politics of white resentment into the policies of white rage…”
If there is one consistent thread through Mr. Trump’s political career, it is his...