What’s striking about this election cycle’s Democratic presidential primary debates is how much they’ve been absolutely dominated by a man who’s been dead for 90 years. That man is Herbert Croly, the intellectual godfather of the progressive movement and the first editor of The New Republic. Croly’s most influential work, The Promise of American Life
A cynic might start to suspect that the current impeachment fervor roiling Capitol Hill is nothing more than a ruse by Washington’s aristocracy to camouflage revelations about their own incompetence, corruption, and abuse of power over the past few decades. Could it be, a cynic might wonder, that all the accusations leveled against President Trump
As far as can be determined, the question of whether the Senate should conduct a trial or dismiss the spurious articles of impeachment as unworthy of trial by vote of the majority, is being addressed as a matter of President Trump’s political convenience. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is doubtless sincere and may be accurate in
As those who follow American politics closely know, winning nominations and elections is all about “building coalitions.” Or at least that’s what is said publicly, and generations of leaders—particularly in the Democratic Party—have gained momentum simply by being able to claim that they are uniquely positioned to build a winning coalition. In 1984 and 1988
Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) was roundly criticized on the Right last week for voting for a joint resolution that many saw as a rebuke of President Trump’s decision to kill Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force. If the toothless concurrent resolution did contain a rebuke, it was not clear from the actual
It’s time to call the Democratic Party what it really is—an organized crime syndicate that’s been robbing taxpayers for years under the pretense of saving the planet, ending homelessness, or whatever else may sound like a good cause while there’s a heist in progress. Democrats have been getting away with it for so long, they
Among the Trump-haters, the scramble is on to rationalize the successful killing of Qassem Soleimani. These include all brands of Trump-dissenters, from the civilized supporters of other approaches to the presidency to those who regard the incumbent with distaste but wish the country well, down through the ranks of the obsessive, the paroxysmally mad, the
The whistleblower, speaking to internal investigators, pulled no punches in his assessment of the government’s mishandling of the war in Afghanistan. “As intelligence makes its way up higher, it gets consolidated and really watered down, it gets politicized,” he explained. “It gets politicized because once policymakers get their hands on it . . . they
The sorry descent of former Vice President Joe Biden into identity politics on the campaign trail signals that the Democratic Party of Tip O'Neill and Bill Clinton is over and done with forever. The pull of group resentments in the party is too strong. Last summer, Biden staked his place in political correctness, and he
On January 7, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wrote her Democratic colleagues to explain her strategy and to respond to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) announcement that he would not negotiate impeachment trial procedures with the House. Instead, McConnell simply plans to use the procedures employed in the Clinton impeachment. Pelosi responded by writing: Sadly,
