Columns, pieces and posts
I started the new year with a bang, at a gathering in the Washington home of a European diplomat. I was interested in how Europe was processing America’s political scene, including Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the election outcome. I got an earful. The diplomat was rattled: America is democracy’s beacon, you’re letting the world […]
Here is an attempt to get at some of what’s behind conspiracism, the rising belief in and promotion of political conspiracy theories. In recent years those theories have been heavily associated with QAnon: that a cabal of child sexual abusers running a world-wide trafficking ring has been a major force in opposing Donald Trump ; […]
Congress and the White House are trying to overhaul police practices. By tradition in such efforts the obvious will likely be overlooked, so here is the obvious: Violent crime is rising in almost every major American city, after decades of falling. Police departments are in crisis, battered by charges of abuse, targeted for cuts, many […]
Here is journalism as a true and honest public service: Carol Leonnig’s new book, “Zero Fail,” about the rise and fall of the Secret Service. It is just terrific, to use a phrase from the 1960s, when the service became universally admired. The Washington Post reporter interviewed more than 180 people including current and former […]
What is to become of the Republican Party? It will either break up or hold together. If the latter, it will require time to work through divisions; there will be state fights and losses as the party stumbles through cycle to cycle. But in time one side or general tendency will win and define the […]
It all comes back to the Capitol insurrection. It’s at the heart of the battle that is, four months later, tearing the House GOP apart. Increasingly, Republicans paint 1/6 as a rowdy and raucous event, an arguably understandable but certainly embarrassing one in which hundreds of people illegally marched into the Capitol and, for a […]
Those were two very different speeches Wednesday night, but both were effective and each will have an afterlife. President Biden’s address, with its distancing, masks and half-empty audience, at first didn’t feel like the convening of a great nation’s Congress. It felt insubstantial and goofy, like they were playacting Pandemic Theatre. Mr. Biden turned that […]
We witnessed something good this week. To my mind it was a kind of triumph. America had been through a horrible time: a gruesome murder on a Minneapolis street, seen on tape nationwide and showing an act that could hardly be mistaken for anything but what it was, the cruel extinguishing of a human life. […]
We have been thinking about the Republican Party and how it can come back—worthily, constructively—after the splits and shatterings of recent years. The GOP is relatively strong in the states but holds neither the White House, House nor Senate and in presidential elections struggles to win the popular vote. Entrenched power centers are arrayed against […]
No one likes the Republican Party. Pretty much every power center in America is arrayed against it—the media, the academy, the entertainment culture, what remains of our high culture, the corporate suite, the nonprofit world. The young aren’t drawn to it. The party is split, if not shattered. The opposition has a new presidency, almost […]