Like many non-Democrats with an interest in both public policy and supernatural religion, I have two favorite 2020 Democratic candidates: Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang.Opinion6 Aug 2024
The drama of Stephen Moore, Donald Trump’s controversial not-yet-nominee for a seat on the Federal Reserve, is a nice microcosm of the larger drama of conservatism in a Trumpian age. In the monetary policy debate that lurks behind the Fed battle, you can see some of the reasons for Trump’s political success. In the Moore appointment itself you can see the limits of Trumpism as an ideological program. And in the reaction to the appointment from Republican politicians you can see why the party ...Opinion6 Aug 2024
One of the central problems in Western politics is the impasse between a governing class that lacks legitimacy, and populist alternatives that are poorly led and unready to govern. This impasse reflects a deep trend of the past few decades — the working-out of meritocracy’s iron logic, in which the most talented young people (or at least the most talented résumé-builders) self-segregate in a small group of metropoles while the hinterland declines.Opinion6 Aug 2024
A first draft of this column was written before flames engulfed the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, before its spire fell in one of the most dreadful live images since Sept. 11, 2001, before a blazing fire went further than any of France’s anticlerical revolutionaries ever dared.Opinion6 Aug 2024
Across the decade that preceded Donald Trump’s election, American politicians of both parties consistently tried to pass big, sweeping immigration bills that would legalize most of the country’s illegal population and increase immigration overall. These bills failed because of populist opposition, at first bipartisan (the resistance of a certain socialist senator from Vermont helped doom the 2007 effort) but increasingly simply conservative, and over time the conservative opposition developed...Opinion6 Aug 2024
Like most places, America has always had potent strains of anti-Semitism — crude and polished, KKK and country club. But unlike many places, we have always had important strains of philo-Semitism as well; there is a long American tradition, with both Protestant and Enlightenment roots, of really liking Judaism and the Jews.Opinion6 Aug 2024
In the window of calm between Michael Cohen’s testimony and the allegedly almost-at-hand delivery of Robert Mueller’s report, it’s worth returning for a moment to the document that established the darkest interpretation of all the Russian weirdness swirling around President Donald Trump: the intelligence dossier created by Christopher Steele, late of MI6, on behalf of Trump’s political opponents, which brought together the reports and rumors that Steele deemed credible about the then-candidat...Opinion6 Aug 2024
The rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, whether its sources are Protestant or secular, has always insisted that the church of Rome is the enemy of what you might call <em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">healthy sexuality</em>. This rhetorical trope has persisted despite radical redefinitions of what healthy sexuality means; one sexual culture overthrows another, but Catholicism remains eternally condemned.Opinion6 Aug 2024
Usually when some sententious centrist talks about ending partisan polarization and just coming up with “solutions” based on “data” or “studies” or “expert consensus,” the appropriate response is to roll your eyes — the way people have been eye-rolling lately at Howard Schultz of Starbucks and his apparently substance-free vision for an independent presidential campaign. Usually where you find polarization, you also find some issue of great moment, some important conflict of interests or valu...Opinion5 Aug 2024
In a sense it’s not surprising that a renewed debate about abortion would begin in New York state, which passed a law last week — since imitated, to more controversy, by Virginia Democrats — ratifying the right to kill human beings <em xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">in utero </em>in the third trimester.Opinion5 Aug 2024
Two years into his presidency Donald Trump has no clear legislative strategy, no policy agenda, no plan for remedying his persistent unpopularity and a path to re-election sufficiently bleak that he’s trying to bait a political naïf, Starbucks billionaire Howard Schultz, into running as a third-party spoiler. Also, he might be impeached.Opinion5 Aug 2024
In a short story published last October, “Sort by Controversial,” Scott Alexander imagines a Silicon Valley company that accidentally comes up with an algorithm to generate what it calls a “Scissor.” The scissor is a statement, an idea or a scenario that’s somehow perfectly calibrated to tear people apart — not just by generating disagreement, but by generating total incredulity that somebody could possibly disagree with your interpretation of the controversy, followed by escalating fury and ...Opinion1 Aug 2024
In this dark time of the year, usually a pretty slow period for politics, I like to write a column cataloging my errors of analysis and prognostication from the previous 365 days (or sometimes further back) of columnizing. This year, though, the pace of news makes that exercise feel a little self-indulgent, so I thought I’d just consider what has changed in the Trump presidency since last February, when I wrote a column describing our demagogic chief executive as “tamed.”Opinion1 Aug 2024
At Mass this Christmas Eve, many Catholics who have spent a year reading headlines about abusive priests, indifferent bishops, predatory cardinals and Vatican corruption will sit and hear the long roll of Jesus’ ancestors with which the Gospel of Matthew begins.Opinion1 Aug 2024
In France, where the extraordinarily unpopular Emmanuel Macron presides over a country roiled by populist protests, a leading politician of Macron’s centrist party was asked in a televised interview what policy mistakes his peers had made: “We were probably too intelligent, too subtle,” he told the interviewer, whose eyebrows danced with disbelief.Opinion25 Jun 2024
Here are some generally agreed-upon facts about religious trends in the United States. Institutional Christianity has weakened drastically since the 1960s. Lots of people who once would have been lukewarm Christmas-and-Easter churchgoers now identify as having “no religion” or being “spiritual but not religious.” The mainline-Protestant establishment is an establishment no more. Religious belief and practice now polarizes our politics in a way they didn’t a few generations back.Opinion26 May 2024
Over the last three years, since Brexit and the Trumpening and the general rise of disreputable forces in Western politics, there has been a steadily boiling elite panic about the power of the paranoid fringe, the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, the pull of fake news and the danger of alternative realities.Opinion20 Jul 2019
There is a scene from the documentary “Apollo 11,” rich with footage from the moon landing that took place 50 years ago this weekend, that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. I wrote about it when I reviewed the movie, and here I am writing about it again.
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