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Tag: republicans

Columns

The Great Data Sale
March 30, 2017
You can tell Representative Mike Capuano represents Boston, my hometown, because he talks like someone who carries around with him a deep and abiding hatred of Comcast. “I have a simple question,” my congressman began, in Wednesday’s floor debate in the House over digital ...

New Praetorianism
February 17, 2017
There is a fundamental synergy between Democratic chauvinist exceptionalism, GOP clash-of-civilizations dogma, and Trump’s grotesque strongman antics. The Democrats may prefer a reboot of Cold War apocalypticism; Trump, for his part, looks eager to tear up global treaties, ...

Is Trump a Populist?
February 15, 2017
People relate “rightwing populism” to the excoriation of immigrants, demonization of the poor, and railing about high finance on the campaign trail. That criticism never amounts to any actual policies when the candidate is in office. What’s left is simply xenophobia and ...

Originalism Is Dumb
February 01, 2017
Donald Trump has nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. If confirmed, Gorsuch will replace Antonin Scalia, whose death a year ago has left a vacancy that Republicans refused to allow Barack Obama to fill. In the minds of conservatives, Gorsuch is a worthy heir to ...

Round-up of Recriminations
November 10, 2016
Recriminations will abound in the days to come. The finger-pointing won’t stop for months, years, maybe decades. After all, it’s not every day global empires collapse from within, tweet by inexorable tweet. Given the scale of the disaster, we should expect the arguments to ...

The Election That Mattered
October 06, 2016
David Daley makes the case in his new book RATF**KED that if you don’t understand what happened in 2010, you don’t understand something fundamental about why American politics is the way it is today. "It's the biggest political heist in modern times," he says.

The Media Con Job
August 25, 2016
A curious outbreak of truth-telling seems to be seizing our right-wing media. In this most deranging campaign season of our postmodern political lives, the specter of Donald Trump—billionaire tribune of the forgotten white working class—has sent some of our most notable ...

Treacherous Waters
July 28, 2016
All right, then—America’s own major-party-anointed oligarch has officially urged Russian cyberspies to hack State Department communications. And his underlying political rationale is enough to give M.C. Escher a throbbing migraine: Hillary Clinton is guilty of grave, if ...

How the Other Half Protests
July 28, 2016
I’ve been lurking in a restaurant in the center of the city, the luxurious kind, with a staff in custom uniforms. They ask you who you are when they take you to your table. When the server comes, he calls you by your name. I paid fifteen dollars for an appetizer salad there. ...

Straight Out of Centrist Casting
March 10, 2016
Say what you will about this demented presidential election cycle—it has, at a minimum, forced the myths of Beltway centrism out into gloriously open view. The meme that has lately captured the responsible commentariat is not that the rise of Donald Trump represents the ...

Field of Dreams
February 03, 2016
 Because the Iowa caucuses are a perversely puny and undemocratic spectacle, heroic exertions are required to endow them with long-term narrative meaning. Worry not, though: Our media-political complex exists largely to billow the semblance of significance into the decaying ...

Media Abets Trump’s Shock-Jock Statesmanship
December 09, 2015
It’s not that Trump’s announcement wasn’t newsworthy, shocking, and terrifying—it was all those things, in spades. Rather, the tenor of the coverage made it seem, as it usually does in Trump’s case, that Trump’s Hitleresque scheme struck the astonished American ...