Stuart Lyle Many envisage Donald Trump as a plague that has been visited upon the United States, bringing disorder, chaos, and the pestilence of a magnified pandemic. In this telling, before Trump crashed the Republican Party and swept up all the Party faithful, everything was “normal.” Sure the Republicans were a bit edgy, pushing their partisan…
Gregory Laxer For some time now, a towering irony has tickled my brain, though at root the topic is not at all amusing. This is the paradox that the regions of the United States that are suffering the most devastating effects of the climate crisis appear to be home to the greatest concentrations of those…
Over 80 years ago Sinclar Lewis wrote a book, It Can’t Happen Here. Doremus Jessup, the protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” sees something dark and terrible brewing in American politics — the potential for “a real fascist dictatorship” led by the up-and-coming populist candidate Berzelius Windrip. – Beverly Gage, New…
b. traven The two American political parties, Republicans and Democrats seem officially committed to suicide. Both parties are separating themselves from the mainstream of their fundamental bases. The Republicans have drifted far from their true “conservative” past, and from their moneyed base who always held the primacy of social cohesion over ideology. At the same…
Jacek Popiel Americans live in a perpetual now, and the now of 2016 is looking decidedly grim. A quick summary of our current situation: U.S. finances are shaky, with an exploding national debt, two economic crises since the year 2000, and the next one possibly around the corner. The once superb U.S. economic machine has…
W.J. Astore I watched last night’s Republican debate so you wouldn’t have to. Leaving aside the usual mugging by Donald Trump, the usual jousting over side issues like whether Ted Cruz is a natural born citizen, I thought I’d take an impressionistic approach to the debate. You can read the debate transcript here (if you…
Tom Engelhardt (Courtesy of TomDispatch.com) Here is what’s grimly fascinating in this year’s dystopian carnival of a Republican presidential primary. When it comes to what can be said in America, all bets are off. These days, the concept of “beyond the pale” couldn’t look more wan. All of a sudden, there’s nothing, no matter how…
Matthew Jacobson The present state of national political dysfunction is not something Americans have drifted into by chance, or as a result of pressures in the random currents of political developments. No: It is the result of the debilitating visions and destructive search for power carried on by the leaders of the Modern Republican Party…
Michael Brenner Is Bernie Sanders halfway there? No – not to the nomination, much less the White House. What Sanders has done is to establish himself as a force in the Democratic Party’s selection process. He has done so by demonstrating two qualities that have largely disappeared from America’s political life over the past few…
W.J. Astore Yes, I know Republican candidates for president are currently feeding “red meat” to the base, a base that consists of evangelical Christians who vote in the primaries come hell or high water. But the rhetoric used recently by Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee is more rancid than red meat. And it’s dangerous. Jeb…
The Contrary Perspective 