ArcaMax

Is America in a new Gilded Age? That's the contention of Republican political consultant Bruce Mehlman, and in a series of 35 slides, he makes a strong case.

In many ways, problems facing America today resemble those facing what we still call "turn-of-the-century" America, the 1890s to the 1910s. Just as employment shifted from farms to ...Read more

Almost no one disagrees that our two major political parties, the oldest and third-oldest in the world, have become increasingly extreme and estranged over the past decade. It's a startling contrast with the state of political conflict in the dozen or so years after the fall of the Soviet empire.

In 1992, Bill Clinton ran on a moderate ...Read more

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Gill v. Whitford, a case challenging Wisconsin's legislative district lines as an unconstitutional Republican gerrymander. It's attracted attention because many high-minded commentators have blamed partisan gerrymandering for today's highly polarized politics -- and for the fact that ...Read more

For the first time in nearly 20 years, the president seems out of alignment, on policy and political goals, with his party in Congress. This strikes many as an anomalous, even alarming, situation. But if you look back at history, it's more like the norm -- even if Donald Trump isn't.

The current presidential/congressional alignment began in ...Read more

The Founding Fathers didn't expect that serving in Congress would be a lifetime career. And for a century, it mostly wasn't. The first election in which more than half the incumbent members of the House of Representatives were re-elected was in 1898. Since then, the majority of House members have been returned in every election except the one in...Read more

Can President Donald Trump and the Republican-majority Congress make a deal? That's a question raised by the announcement that the Trump administration will end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in six months. DACA, put in place by the Obama administration, provided protection from deportation to immigrants who entered the ...Read more

When a policy has been vigorously followed by venerable institutions for more than a generation without getting any closer to producing the desired results, perhaps there is some problem with the goal.

That thought was prompted by a New York Times story headlined "Even With Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at...Read more

President Donald Trump's Afghanistan speech Monday night was disciplined, measured and sometimes verging on eloquence. It was presidential. Evidently, his vision wasn't impaired when he looked at the eclipse without the proper eyewear earlier in the day.

Like Barack Obama, Trump came to office determined to get out of Afghanistan. "My ...Read more

There's a whiff of Weimar in the air. During the years of the Weimar Republic (1919-33), Germany was threatened by Communist revolutionaries and Nazi uprisings. Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau was assassinated, and violent street fighting was commonplace. Then Adolf Hitler took power in 1933.

America is nowhere near that point. But many surely...Read more

Would a fair society have exactly the same percentage of men and women, of whites and blacks and Latinos and Asians, in every line of work and occupational category? If your answer is yes, and that any divergence from these percentages must necessarily result from oppression, then you qualify for a job at Google.

If not, forget about it.

In ...Read more

Who have been the most successful presidents in the past 80 years? Most successful, that is, in framing issues and advancing their policies, achieving foreign policy success, winning re-election and maintaining high job approval.

My nominees are Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. They had in common many things: winning ...Read more

What is it about Russia -- some vestige of all those Cold War spy films, perhaps -- that makes so many people, on all political sides, behave so irrationally when it's mentioned?

Consider the behavior of the Democrats, who are seeking to prove that Donald Trump and/or his campaign colluded with Russia, with the implication that this collusion ...Read more

Fifty years ago this weekend, a deadly urban riot began in Detroit. It started around 3:30 a.m., when police arrested 85 patrons of a blind pig -- an illegal after-hours bar -- in the midst of an all-black neighborhood that had been all-white 15 or 20 years before.

The statistics are horrifying. Rioting went on for six nights, with some 2,500 ...Read more