From the Right
/Politics
Will Dobbs Help Democrats? Will the Mar-a-Lago Raid Help Republicans?
Are Republicans losing what seemed for months to be their overwhelming advantage in elections to the House of Representatives this November? The answer is unclear.
Optimistic Democrats have been thinking the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision overturning Roe v. Wade will trigger an increase in Democratic ...Read more
The West's Long-Lasting Enemies Cannot Be Cajoled
Revisionist powers, nations whose leaders seek to undermine American leadership in the world, seem to be on the march.
Russia persists with its heavy bombardments in Ukraine. Its army holds on, at least for now, not only in eastern Ukraine but also on the Black Sea coast, shutting off Ukraine from supplies and trade with the rest of the world. ...Read more
Sorry, Progressives, But America Isn't Intersectional!
America isn't intersectional. That's something the left-wingers who call themselves progressives have been learning, painfully, over the past 18 months.
You may well ask, what is intersectionality? It's a label that hasn't caught on with the general public that stands for a set of ideas, concocted by people convinced they know how to eliminate ...Read more
Sure, Ron DeSantis Could Beat Donald Trump in 2024
How inevitable is a third consecutive nomination of Donald Trump? Partisan commentators, when it suits their purposes, tend to assume it is so.
Republicans who remain supporters of the 45th president point to data showing he remains popular among his party's voters. They also recall how loudly heralded attempts to deprive him of his first ...Read more
James Madison, 21st Century Pundit
Could America's Founding Fathers see far, some 234 years, into the future? In declaring independence and fashioning a constitution, they were certainly trying to do so. And, in some cases, they succeeded. Consider this 78-word sentence written by James Madison and published as part of "Federalist 63" on March 1, 1788:
"As the cool and ...Read more
Who's Behind Joe Biden's Leftward Lunge?
What's going on with Joe Biden? Why is a president who ran and was elected as a centrist Democrat supporting one left-wing proposal after another? What has prompted the politician whose sensitivity to public opinion was finely honed for four decades to take one unpopular stand after another?
As a senator from Delaware when it voted like the ...Read more
United States of Diversity: The Founders and Dobbs
DEI -- "diversity, equity and inclusion." University administrators, corporate human resources facilitators and politicians of a liberal stripe all assure us that America is now, suddenly, for the first time in history, a nation of diversity, equity and inclusion .
We are no longer, in this view, a white bread nation where just about everyone ...Read more
Can Government Build Things Again?
Give the New York Times's Ezra Klein credit for identifying a problem with big government institutions. "Our mechanisms of governance have become so risk averse that they are now running tremendous risks because of the problems they cannot, or will not, solve," he tweeted. The subject was San Francisco's attempt to make permanent the parklets, ...Read more
The Secular Right Versus the Woke Left
This month, I've come across two outstanding articles by writers I had not previously known on important trends on the political right and political left.
One is "What Comes After the Religious Right?," a guest essay in the New York Times written by Nate Hochman, an Intercollegiate Studies Institute fellow at National Review. He argues that "...Read more
What Was the Left Thinking?
Whether you're contemplating San Francisco voters' recall of left-wing District Attorney Chesa Boudin or the plight of Democrats nationally as they face voters' dismay at out-of-control inflation, immigration and crime, the question is liable to come to mind: What were they thinking?
Actually, there are some initially plausible answers. We've ...Read more
Politics as the Leisure of the Theory Class
Politics has increasingly become, for many Americans, the leisure of the theory class. That's a phrase from the early 20th century sociologist Thorstein Veblen, which I turned on its head in a recent column. He was condemning the showy consumerism of the contemporary rich for having no economically practical purpose. I, on the other hand, was ...Read more
Primary Results: Trump Repudiated, Republicans Enthused, Democrats Focused On Theoretical Issues
Complete and utter repudiation. That's what a record number of Republican primary voters in Georgia administered to former President Donald Trump this Tuesday. The man he blamed for not contesting his narrow 2020 loss in the state, Gov. Brian Kemp, won renomination with 74% of the vote.
The man he persuaded to get into the race, on the single ...Read more
It's Not Exactly Trump's Republican Party
Is it Donald Trump's Republican Party? You can make the case it is, as partisan Democrats do, from the victories of various candidates endorsed by the former president in Republican primaries. But it's not an airtight case, and Trump's batting average is inflated by the dozens of endorsements he has made of incumbents with no significant primary...Read more