Gavin Newsom’s new podcast reveals not only a media-savvy politico seeking more exposure to a bigger audience. It also reflects a concerted drive by the onetime self-anointed leader of the #Resistance to reinvent himself as the unique progressive breaking through …
The greying of the Resistance
Progressives are feeling ambivalent about the fact that none other than Sen. Bernie Sanders has emerged as the de facto leader of the resistance against the two-headed monster in the White House.
On the one hand, it’s a marvel to …
Can ‘abundance liberalism’ save the Dems?
The lessons of the Democratic Party’s painful defeat in November turn on whom you ask. Moderates blame the excesses of wokeness. The party’s Left wing faults a tepid centrism that failed to inspire the base. But while most are happy …
Why Andrew Cuomo can’t save New York
A group of 20 or so men are huddled on a street corner in the South Bronx. They are the only signs of life in this desolate urban landscape, save for the heavy BQE traffic that runs above their heads. …
The closing of the Democratic mind
In the days leading up to Trump’s explosion last week against Zelensky, several incidents occurred that, in their expression of blind power, were as consequential as the astounding scene in the Oval Office. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new Secretary …
Democrats are wasting a populist moment
The start of President Trump’s second term has produced the expected shock and awe. From the new détente with Russia to severe, sometimes lawless, budget cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s DOGE, the appetite for disruption far exceeds what was glimpsed …
How lawfare destroyed liberalism
In Henry VI, Part 2, a character named Dick the Butcher utters one of the more famous lines William Shakespeare wrote: “The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” To return to national power and get things …
How Joe Biden wasted his presidency
In his farewell address to the nation on Wednesday, President Biden warned that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy”. He went on to explicitly echo his predecessor …
Is Bernie Sanders going MAGA?
Bernie Sanders has been anything but quiet in the weeks since the Democrats’ defeat on 5 November, issuing stinging criticisms of the party with which he is only functionally affiliated as an independent. But recent days have seen even more …
Covid masked liberal weakness
Donald Trump is back in the White House — and among Democrats, the blame game has already begun. Nancy Pelosi, for instance, has claimed that Joe Biden should have held off supporting Kamala Harris, instead encouraging an open primary. Harris …
Donald Trump’s strange sincerity
The faster American culture spreads, the less foreigners seem to understand it. In October, the Irish novelist Anne Enright shared a few thoughts about the US elections. “[T]hese politics are playing out in some secret part of the American psyche,” …
The Californication of Texas
When I first moved to Texas in 2006, I spent several months living with my in-laws in Georgetown, a quiet town of about 46,000 people located 30 miles north of Austin. There was a giant house in their neighbourhood that …
Why Joe Biden must save himself — and quit
When I first met Joseph Biden as a newly elected Senator in 1974 he was absurdly young and looked younger, but he had already suffered two tragedies: the financial downfall of his father from elegant affluence to poverty, and the …
Women are losing the abortion election
Ever since the Dobbs decision redefined the reproductive rights of American women, the issue of choice has started to resemble a frantic game of ping-pong. In red states, Republican-controlled senates immediately got busy passing abortion bans, sometimes in direct opposition …
Is Iowa the next step to civil war?
In the silence of the Civil War’s Antietam battlefield on a winter day, bucolic hills give way to rows of small, white gravestones in the nearby cemetery. Wandering over the deadliest ground in American history, a melancholy visitor may be …