At the conclusion of an September 26–29 “Breaking Through Power” conference in Washington, D.C., Michael Payne asked the event’s sponsor, Ralph Nader, about prospects for building a progressive movement. The brief interview was edited for length and clarity. You can also read Payne’s full dispatch from the conference here.   There was a lot of […]

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Among the recent WikiLeak document dumps is an email from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta to White House Counsel Neil Eggleston, urging a presidential pardon for Governor Don Siegelman—a former Democratic governor of Alabama now closing in on the end of a 78-month sentence for bribery, conspiracy, fraud, and obstruction of justice charges. In the […]

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“The Alt-Right has been declared the winner. The Alt-Right is more deeply connected to Trumpian populism than the ‘conservative movement,’” Richard Spencer tweeted as the election results rolled in on November 8. “We’re the establishment now.” The loosely organized, yet newly emboldened, white nationalist coalition Spencer lays claim to as president and director of the […]

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I was curious, so I did a bit of research on theories about why great civilizations fall. Some scholars point to the danger of overextended militaries, others on overwhelmed bureaucracies. Sometimes the key factor is declines in public health, often caused by agricultural crises. Political corruption is another contender, as are inflated currencies, technological inferiority, […]

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This January marks my 20th anniversary writing about the American right wing as a historian and a journalist. Wearing my historian’s hat, I’ve documented lunatic John Birch Society members convinced that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”; underground militias stockpiling guns against imminent Communist invasion, threatening death to congressmen […]

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