Over the last three months, political journalists have been reporting a trend toward Democrats. The Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade, they have reported, has provided increased motivation for Democrats to turn out and vote. The easing of gas prices from their springtime peak has reduced concern about out-of-control inflation. Biden administration legislative victories have raised Democrats' morale.
The funeral of Queen Elizabeth II and the praise pouring in from almost all quarters for her 70 years of service make a powerful case, even for small-r republican and small-d democratic Americans, for the institution of constitutional monarchy. There is much to be said for having a head of state who is politically neutral, culturally traditional but open to popular innovation, personally embodying the traditional strengths of a nation.
Morale matters more than materiel.
"All political lives, unless they are cut off at midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs." So said the British politician Enoch Powell, whose own once-stellar career ended in spectacular failure.
"A Bailout for Woke Higher Ed" reads the headline on the stringent analysis by the Wall Street Journal's Allysia Finley of the Biden student loan forgiveness program.
It was just a mini headline nationally on primary night this month, but one with some national implications and historic resonance. The city of Detroit, 77% of whose residents are Black, according to the 2020 Census, will not be represented by any Black members in the 118th Congress taking office next January.
When federal agents removed top-secret documents from former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence last week, they carried with them a search warrant citing possible violations of the Espionage Act.
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.
Revisionist powers, nations whose leaders seek to undermine American leadership in the world, seem to be on the march.
America isn't intersectional. That's something the left-wingers who call themselves progressives have been learning, painfully, over the past 18 months.
How inevitable is a third consecutive nomination of Donald Trump? Partisan commentators, when it suits their purposes, tend to assume it is so.
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:
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?
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 .
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, or parking spaces used as outdoor restaurant space, through 60 pages of regulations.
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.
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?
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 describing the political preoccupations of contemporary people, mainly high-education liberals but also low-education populists, as having no practically achievable goals.
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.
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 opposition.
