Shades of Many Colors

David Brooks has suggested that Trump is the wrong answer to the right question. That question, Brooks believes, is how Americans should deal with upheavals and social shifts like globalization.69 More broadly, the question is how people should react when faced with institutions that appear to be both ill-equipped to cope with contemporary realitie

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We've been accused variously of trying to "appeal to all of [our] bases" and of not taking a definitive stand on hot button issues because we "have no backbone." Perhaps this may be true...perhaps we are guilty as charged. But perhaps it is also true that the world today is too divided by petty, inconsequential "culture war

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“Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against,” the Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten wrote. “He is a demagogue, a popular leader who feeds on the hatred of elites that grows naturally in democratic soil.” A demagogue can become a tyrant, but it’s the people who put him

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Each of the two countries that the election of 2020 exposed is split by two narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on. But the election, forcing a binary choice, temporarily consolidated the narratives on either side of the divide

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Politics Happens Through the Eyes

By Morry Kolman

One of the odd quirks of symbolism that Roland Barthes gives attention to in his book Mythologies is election photography—the pictures that are taken and shared of the people that want to represent us. Writing about the political posters he was seeing around France at the time, he reflected on the f... See more