Columns, pieces and posts
I don’t see it as everyone does. To me the headline is that for the first time since the election of the most polarizing president in modern memory, the American people yielded a national verdict on his first two years of his governance. And it was not a sweeping rebuke. A record 114 million Americans […]
We’re going to the polls and looking for leaders. What do we want? What a voter told Bret Baier a week ago, live from the campaign trail: someone she can cheer for. She was such an American, half hopeful, half wistful. When people have real leaders, there’s a feeling of security: Somebody reliable is in […]
The attempted bombing of political figures is domestic terrorism meant to disrupt and intimidate. That it came to light less than two weeks before an election whose outcomes may constitute a national rebuke to—or soft boost of—President Trump’s controversial leadership means that passions are high and will stay so. Things are feeling primal, tribal. There’s […]
This may seem small, but I don’t think it is. I know it will seem old-fashioned. It has to do with a great nation’s sense of its own stature on the world stage. In the days after the apparent murder of the Saudi activist and writer Jamal Khashoggi, President Trump was repeatedly pressed about the […]
What did the Kavanaugh controversy tell us about our historical moment? It underscored what we already know, that America is politically and culturally divided and that activists and the two parties don’t just disagree with but dislike and distrust each other. We know also the Supreme Court has come to be seen not only as […]
I have been thinking about trust. All the polls show and have for some time what you already know: America’s trust in its leaders and institutions has been falling for four decades. Trust in the federal government has never been lower. In 1958 Pew Research found 73% trusted the government to do what is right […]
On Memorial Day we think of those who served. Here let’s look at an old story about a military man’s affections. It’s the story of Lo Armistead and Win Hancock—close friends, career officers who’d served side by side in the U.S. Army. Then history took one of its turns and they wound up on opposite […]
‘You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better.” That was Stephen Vincent Benet in 1941, in the Saturday Review of Literature, on the work of Scott Fitzgerald, who had recently died. I thought of it on the death of Tom Wolfe. Not that he was ignored or forgotten, […]
An occasional preoccupation in this space is that young people have no particular loyalty to or affection for free-market capitalism, the economic system that made America a great thing in history and a magnet for the world. There are two reasons. One is that in their short lives they’ve witnessed and experienced only capitalism’s scandals—the […]
It’s over, the conversation has turned and won’t bubble up again till early next year but a final thing should be said about the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. It’s been persuasively argued that the dinner hurt journalism (true) and politics in general (yes). But I think it hurt America. Here, with apologies but to […]