ArcaMax

Amid news that Donald Trump is about to be indicted by a hyperpartisan prosecutor and of his hysterical responses, and prompted by vagrant reading about the War of 1812 and Woodrow Wilson's violations of civil liberties in World War I, a thought occurred to me. America seems to go crazy every 50 years or so.

Start with the War of 1812, about 50...Read more

As one who has spent pleasant time on Sand Hill Road and the Stanford campus, I'm dismayed by the demands for special treatment coming from the denizens of one of America's most privileged and affluent precincts.

Sand Hill Road, leading up the hills above Stanford, was the home of Silicon Valley's first venture capital firms and of a branch of ...Read more

Big city elections provide clues about trends in national politics, the composition and attitudes of Democratic constituency groups, and voters' responses to emerging matters. Recent examples include the March 2019 primary for mayor of Chicago and the June 2021 Democratic contest in New York City.

The latest example is last week's nonpartisan ...Read more

When the Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page lead story that the Department of Energy had concluded the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a leak from China's Wuhan laboratory, you might have argued it was old news. The FBI had already, it turns out, come to the same conclusion and with a higher degree of confidence (moderate) than the ...Read more

Jimmy Carter, the 39th and the longest-living U.S. president, has chosen to enter hospice care at age 98. This is a good time to try to place his presidency in history. Indeed more years separate us in 2023 from Carter's time in office than separated Carter from Franklin D. Roosevelt's.

That was not all that separated them, either. Carter once ...Read more

How many people believe, really believe, in freedom of speech? Or, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, not just "free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate"?

The answer is not as many as I supposed before reading my Washington Examiner colleague Gabe Kaminsky's series of articles exposing "...Read more

For a president who proclaimed proudly in his annual speech that his policies have made the state of the union good, Joe Biden betrayed a certain insecurity when, just two days before, he caused the Democratic National Committee to change its presidential primary schedule for 2024.

The reasons for Biden's insecurity are obvious. Only 31% of ...Read more

The ordinarily fluent and unperturbed Justice Elena Kagan seemed, judging from the transcript, to be sputtering a bit in the oral argument of the Supreme Court's case challenging the racial quotas and preferences used in admissions by the University of North Carolina.

Questioning the counsel for those suing the university, she said -- and I'm ...Read more

How did it come to pass that public employee unions, which scarcely existed 60 years ago, have come to run public schools and myriad state and local government agencies?

Answers to this question, which few people think about these days, come from Philip K. Howard's latest book, "Not Accountable," accompanied as in his earlier books ("The Rule ...Read more

What are "the major problems this country faces"? Writing in The Atlantic, New York Times columnist David Brooks leads off his list with "inequality, political polarization, social mistrust" before concluding with the inevitable "climate change." Today's "inequality," he notes, is as "savage" as the inequality in the 1890s.

That was a decade in...Read more

America has just exited a biennium of Democratic trifecta -- control by the nation's and the world's oldest political party of the White House and majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives. It is only the third such biennium in the last 40 years, since 1993-95 and 2009-11, the first two years of the Clinton and Obama administrations....Read more

From all those lists of best books of 2022, here's one with the potential to change public policy debate and discourse for the better. It's "The Myth of American Inequality," and the three authors are two Ph.D. economists, former Sen. Phil Gramm and his long-ago Texas A&M colleague Robert Ekelund, and former Bureau of Labor Statistics assistant ...Read more

Where are Americans moving? And where, to make things more specific, have Americans been moving since the sudden onset of COVID lockdowns? Answers to these questions come from the annual Christmastime release of the Census Bureau's estimates of the population of the 50 states and the District of Columbia as of last July.

Comparing those numbers...Read more