The age of entropy
Americans and other westerners have long been accustomed to thinking that history has a clear direction. Sometimes the direction is…
The vanishing presidency
Joe Biden is beginning to feel like an ex-president after only nine months in office. The last two Democrats to occupy…
The War on Terror is a war of religion
Compare the world 20 years after the 9/11 attacks to the world two decades after Pearl Harbor. World War Two…
Who lost Afghanistan?
America’s longest war draws to a bloody end. As the pullout deadline approaches, the probability of more atrocities like the…
The last war for democracy
Twenty years after 9/11, the War on Terror has come full circle. Everyone expected the Taliban to surge back to…
The Democrats should investigate themselves for insurrection
For nearly a month last summer a violent insurrection claimed control of Capitol Hill — in Seattle, that is, not…
Donald Rumsfeld succeeded at everything — so why did he fail in the end?
What kind of man was Donald Rumsfeld? A successful one, by almost every measure. Ivy League scholar-athlete, captain of Princeton’s…
Is J.D. Vance the right man for the right?
J.D. Vance is the man Republicans have been praying for since the day Donald Trump stormed to the party’s presidential…
Joe Biden’s party is over
Washington, DC The Democratic party is dying. That may be hard to believe since Democrats control both houses of…
The strange death of the Democrats
The Democratic party is dying. That may be hard to believe since Democrats control both houses of Congress and won…
The Republican party has taken over Donald Trump
Forty minutes into Donald Trump’s remarks at CPAC, I’d formed a conclusion. Donald Trump hasn’t just taken over the Republican…
Rush Limbaugh, conservative rebel
‘The cutting edge of societal evolution.’ That was one of Rush Limbaugh’s catchphrases in the 1990s, and it was an…
The death of the Republican right has been greatly exaggerated
As Donald Trump goes on trial in the Senate, the Republican party faces the possibility of a crack-up. Trump will…
What does Trump want now? Revenge — and a second term
The figure of the ex-president is one of the most endearingly republican features of American politics. He who was the…
America’s Yeltsin moment
The end of the Cold War was as great a shock to US politics as it was to the Soviet Union’s. The…
The fight for liberalism
The world has many island nations, and sometimes the United States counts itself among them. We have water on either side of us,…
Can the GOP win by losing Georgia?
Not long ago I attended a gathering of young White House and congressional Republican staffers. Conversation turned, as you might…
The wars go on
America’s longest war has just entered its 20th year. The US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 to overthrow the Taliban…
Joe Biden’s endless wars
In just over a week, the Empire hopes to strike back. Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war…
Will Amy Coney Barrett save America — or wreck it?
Americans hate the Supreme Court. You wouldn’t think so from a look at the polls, which usually show that the…
How democracy dies
What would happen if Americans voted on different days? Suppose Republicans voted on Tuesday and Democrats voted on Wednesday. Would…
The persistent myth of a non-political Supreme Court
The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a terrible blow to Democrats, but there is an important point to…
After Trump, the reckoning
As voters prepare to pass judgment on Donald Trump’s presidency in November, they might want to entertain a few counterfactuals.…
Trump redefines the race
Helplessness and passivity were the defining themes of the Democratic convention last week. The American people are unable to overcome…
Joe Biden's Republican Convention
Joe Biden’s range of emotional expression has narrowed with age – when he wants to convey feeling now, he shouts.…
