Growing up in a less polarized era, I often heard the conventional wisdom that the Electoral College “has served us well.” To find counterexamples to its reasonableness, you had to go back to the horse and buggy era, and I don’t remember anyone at the time lamenting that Sam Tilden was robbed of the presidency by “Old Eight-to Seven” Rutherford B. Hayes. Continue reading
My friend and former colleague Bruce Bartlett has done a service by reminding us that after four years of the non-stop catastrophe that was the Trump administration, we should not lull ourselves with the illusion that the 45th president was some aberration that fell out of the sky. Continue reading
For complex historical reasons, federal employees don’t get much love. Continue reading
The Republican Party and its right-wing allies are incapable of governing. They have no policy principles other than a knee-jerk rejection of the policies of the opposing party; indeed, of all this country’s traditional notions of governance. Continue reading
George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.” Continue reading
It has been said that Newt Gingrich is “a dumb person’s idea of a smart person.” Who coined that phrase is a matter of scholarly dispute, but there is broad agreement that the sentiment is applicable. I will go further and say this characteristic of Newt’s is not just a personal foible; it establishes a model for Republican politicians and operatives since his time in Congress. Continue reading
Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” is considered one of the great political novels of the last century, but it is also very puzzling. Why does Rubashov, the loyal old Bolshevik, confess to capital crimes he did not commit? He is not tortured; he knows (as do his interrogators) that the charges are absurd. Continue reading
The election of Donald Trump has triggered as much wonderment abroad as it has in the United States. David Runciman, a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, has written in the London Review of Books a provocative reflection on the nature of democracy in the age of Trump: “Is this how democracy ends?” There is much to praise in his essay, including his heavy qualification that we really don’t know for sure if what we are seeing is the end phase of mature Western democracies since we do not have the appropriate historical precedents to be certain. Continue reading
British expatriate writer Andrew Sullivan recently returned to the public eye with a piece that has aroused considerable comment, some of it reasonably on point, and some bloviatingly incoherent. Continue reading
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. Continue reading
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The congressman from hell is a symptom of our rotten political system
Decades of disdain for politics as a civic calling means we get the politicians we deserve.
Posted on May 20, 2021 by Mike Lofgren
Picture a member of congress and what do you see? He’s a guy (those in question are usually still men, despite Marjorie Taylor Greene) with an ego the size of the Capitol dome itself, but a strangely fragile and insecure one. He’d run down his grandmother to get his mug on camera and tell the world his profound thoughts, but in private he can be strangely hollow and ignorant when the occasion doesn’t call for prefabricated talking points. Imagine Ted Knight without the lovable charm. Continue reading →