ArcaMax

Some of my commentary about politics is presented in the form of "advice" to the ruling classes. Please understand: I don't really expect those in the ruling class to take my advice. My advice is not really directed toward them. It is a theoretical exercise.

I am really speaking to you, the people. My goal is to set a standard of behavior and...Read more

After my mother died on Feb. 7, I gathered her valuables and photo albums and drove home to New York. But there wasn't enough room in the car for everything I wanted to keep.

There were tchotchkes such as a silly white ceramic saltshaker and pepper shaker in the shape of Arab kings. They weren't my taste, but they had been there my entire life,...Read more

It's the end of the world as we know it, and the banks and airlines feel fine because even in the midst of economic collapse, CEOs can sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that the American taxpayer will bail them out. Again.

All they have to do is wait a respectable six to 12 months after the wire transfer clears to start giving ...Read more

You Democrats ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

You spent the last four years criticizing President Donald Trump in no small part for his mental state, and rightly so. The Founding Fathers included an impeachment provision in the Constitution in large part as a contingency to remove a president exactly like him, whose temperament and ...Read more

You've heard it so often that you may well believe it's true: President Donald Trump's second term would be a disaster, for the Democratic Party, for the United States, for democracy itself. "The reelection of Donald Trump," warns Nancy Pelosi, "would do irreparable damage to the United States."

But would it really?

Exceptions are a normal ...Read more

Watching panicky corporate-owned Democrats twist on the devil's fork of Bernie Sanders' "political revolution" is almost as much fun as it must have been for my mom and her fellow villagers to watch Vichy collaborators and Nazi sympathizers being executed by the resistance at the end of World War II. (That, Chris Matthews, is how you do a Nazi-...Read more

Bernie Sanders is currently the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. He and everyone else knows exactly how the Republicans will attack him if and when he becomes the nominee: old-fashioned redbaiting.

China became communist in name only during the 1980s; the Soviet Union shut its doors in 1991; the Cold War is dead; and 64%...Read more

My mom died last week. Her obituary is online. It is, as obits should be, about her. Too many women's lives are contextualized around their roles as wives and mothers. So I kept myself, and our relationship, in the background.

Now for a personal remembrance.

Like all mothers and sons, we argued. A recurring conflict concerned religion. When my...Read more

"Many Democrats fear that Trump may be laying an impeachment trap," Stephen Collins wrote for CNN last May. "It's possible that the wider political divides get, the more Trump benefits. The spectacle would help him charge up the political base he needs to turn out in droves in 2020 with claims their 2016 votes were being stolen by political ...Read more

On Jan. 19, The New York Times oddly co-endorsed Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for the Democratic presidential nomination. Two days later, a poll on the key New Hampshire primary showed Warren down 4 points. Bernie Sanders' surge continued. What happened?

To the extent that they ever did, the editorial boards at corporate-owned media...Read more

Let's say you owned a house and needed extra cash to make ends meet, so you decided to rent two of your bedrooms. Would you agree to lease those rooms to two people under the condition that you could only run a credit check on and meet one of them? Would you allow an anonymous rando to move into your second room, no questions asked, not even ...Read more

Russia -- OK, not the actual Russian government but a private troll farm company located in Russia -- bought $100,000 worth of political ads on Facebook designed to change the outcome of the 2016 election. Except that only a small fraction of those ads were political. Also except that the small fraction was divvied up between pro-Hillary ...Read more

War, many people believe, often results from cultural differences and misunderstandings. President Donald Trump's assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani has Americans considering the possibility that we may soon add Iran to our list of unwinnable wars in the Middle East. As that calculus unfolds, no one questions the assumption that there are ...Read more