ArcaMax

Will the demonstrations in Hong Kong come to be seen as the end of a 30-year period, beginning with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, of the American-Chinese economic engagement and entanglement christened "Chimerica" by historian Niall Ferguson?

Quite possibly, and without regard to what happens in Hong Kong. President Donald Trump's on-...Read more

Fact-checking journalists lean left, as Mark Hemingway documented in a canonical Washington Examiner analysis that is just as valid today as when it was published in 2011. But as John F. Kennedy once said, when asked why he wasn't supported by an odoriferous Massachusetts Democrat, "sometimes party loyalty asks too much."

Case in point: the two...Read more

"No candidate received a polling bump as a result of the Detroit debates," writes Morning Consult analyst Anthony Patterson this week. That's a big disappointment for the dozen or more candidates struggling to make the Democrats' 2 percent cutoffs for further debate appearances, as well as for the pundits weary after six or so hours of debates ...Read more

Nationalism has a bad name. For many Americans, mention of the word summons up visions of Hitler and Nazism. Some condemn nationalism as thoughtless bragging that your nation is better than others, which should be discouraged just as second graders are told not to brag, lest they hurt classmates' feelings.

Historical and international ...Read more

Power shifted Wednesday, on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Washington, the dim performance of Robert Mueller, in the hearings House Democrats insisted on, took the last air out of the Collusiongate balloon. The notion that Donald Trump would be hounded out of office has been revealed as the fantasy it always was.

In London, Boris Johnson met ...Read more

The air is thick with lamentations that our two political parties are tearing themselves -- and the nation -- to pieces. The Republican president has picked a Twitter fight with four Democratic freshman congresswomen, and the Democratic speaker has chosen to violate House rules to pick a fight with the president.

Donald Trump's conduct has been...Read more

We are all, to some extent, prisoners of the past. Things that have already happened -- or that we remember as having happened -- constitute the world that we know. Anything else is a product of imagination.

But it can also be a pitfall for politicians, particularly for those seeking national visibility when they're running for president. It's ...Read more

"Partisan gerrymandering is nothing new," writes Chief Justice John Roberts near the beginning of his opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause. "Nor is frustration with it." The question is what, if anything, federal courts ought to do about it. The answer the chief justice and the four other Republican-appointed justices have endorsed, journalists have...Read more

There's something attractive in the party names in the Supreme Court's decision on the relationship between government and religion: American Legion v. American Humanist Association. Both organizations, the veterans group formed after World War I and the secular humanist group founded the year this nation entered World War II, want to tell you ...Read more

"An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America," says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., whose visibility as a spokesperson for this generation has been boosted by political friend and foe, "came of age and never saw American prosperity."

Of course, AOC misspoke. It's ridiculous to say that someone ...Read more

Will Joe Biden inevitably win the Democratic nomination for president? A month ago, many psephologists thought so, as national polls within two weeks of his April 25 announcement showed the former vice president with 41 percent of Democratic primary votes.

Four weeks later, that number has fallen to 32 percent, still formidable in a field of 24...Read more

"I'm amused," Attorney General William Barr told CBS News' Jan Crawford, "by these people who make a living by disclosing classified information, including the names of intelligence operatives, wringing their hands about whether I'm going to be responsible in protecting intelligence sources and methods."

He went on after further questions: "...Read more

Political parties generally go unappreciated, even among those inclined to celebrate representative democracy. The Founding Fathers famously didn't like them yet found themselves forming them, not long after the First Congress assembled.

This suggests something I have come to believe while writing essays on our two long-lived American parties: ...Read more