ArcaMax

On my daily walk down a side street, I saw the restaurant with a diagonal cross made of adhesive tape on its sign. Gone was the notice that it would open for takeout; it looked to be closed for good.

Although I'm aware that most restaurants go out of business within a few years or even months, I felt a certain sadness. The owners and staff ...Read more

There's no greater contrast between how countries have treated COVID-19 than that between nations on both sides of what might be called the Asian Iron Curtain. It's a contrast that tells us much about how to handle the virus -- and how events now in the distant past can determine the fates of hundreds of millions of people today.

On one side is...Read more

It's unnerving, and perhaps instructive, that the arrangements elites have been prescribing for dealing with what they call our most dangerous environmental threat -- climate change, formerly known as global warming -- are almost precisely the opposite of the arrangements deployed to deal with the more immediate threat of COVID-19, aka the novel...Read more

Precedent doesn't provide much guidance. There's a deadly coronavirus threatening to circulate through the population. The resulting government orders and social sanctions of self-distancing and self-isolating behavior are unprecedented in living memory.

Operating without guiding precedents casts into doubt many longstanding practices and ...Read more

What just happened? The Democratic presidential nomination race, which gave signs of lasting months, is now basically over.

Sen. Bernie Sanders won North Dakota and lost Washington after carrying a lead on Wednesday. In Michigan and Missouri, where he won 50% and 49%, respectively, against Hillary Clinton in 2016, he carried 36% and 35% against...Read more

Super Tuesday has finally served its intended purpose for the first time since it was invented for the 1988 presidential cycle, 32 years ago.

Those were the days when Democrats controlled practically every Southern legislature and when most Southern whites were, in homage to their Civil War heritage, registered Democrats. Moderate Democratic ...Read more

You hear it said and see it written that Bernie Sanders will be another George McGovern -- that is, a left-wing nominee who lost a presidential election in a landslide.

I'm here to tell you that's wrong. Because the times are different. And because Sen. Sanders is, or ought to be, a scarier candidate and a further departure from historic ...Read more

Bernie Sanders' victories in the inaccurately counted Iowa caucuses, the crisply conducted New Hampshire primary and the Nevada caucuses have made two things clear.

One is that the Vermont senator, elected and reelected to Congress as an independent, is on the high road to become the oldest political party in the world's 35th presidential ...Read more

The 2020 presidential race has got the Democratic Party, the oldest political party in the world, twisted in knots. Its basic character and enduring values -- its political DNA -- which have enabled it to rebound from multiple political disasters, may be producing another disaster this year.

Consider the Democrats' concept of fairness in ...Read more

It's a familiar plotline. An interloper runs for a party's presidential nomination and, with an anti-insider pitch, scores wins and near-wins in the first contests with vote pluralities.

His numerous opponents, fearful of antagonizing his enthusiastic supporters, launch attacks on one another that, predictably, hurt the attacker as well as the ...Read more

Are we watching a great political party commit suicide?

For more than a year, Democratic candidates, up to 26 of them at one point, have been crisscrossing Iowa's 99 counties, seeking votes in Iowa's precinct caucuses.

They were duly held on Monday night. But the Iowa Democratic Party did not release any results until Tuesday, and they were ...Read more

The old becomes the new. It's less than a week from of the Iowa caucuses, and Bernie Sanders, born in September 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor, leads the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls by 4 points in Iowa, 10 points in New Hampshire and 5 points in the biggest delegate prize, the Super Tuesday-voting California.

One hastens ...Read more

We live in history-making times. Not so much because of the impeachment trial going on in the Senate, which will make history only if it routinizes impeachments of impolite presidents when their opposition party gets control of the House, but because of what looks like an ongoing battle for control of the central narrative of American history.

...Read more

Elections are a form of communication. Voting tells politicians, and the press if they're capable of getting the message, what citizens will tolerate and what they won't. The Democrats haven't voted yet, but they've been campaigning for more than a year and have just had their last debate before the Iowa caucuses two weeks from Monday.

That's ...Read more