Image source: Reagan Presidential Library One day before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, Richard Hofstadter was in London, delivering a lecture that a year later would appear in Harper’s as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” At 47 years of age, Hofstadter was an American brand. He held an […]

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  Image Credit: Edel Rodriguez  President Barack Obama has promised one of the most sweeping criminal justice reforms in recent years and has built a strong bipartisan coalition to support it. However, while the Constitution gives him the direct authority to immediately reverse glaring injustices—through the use of the power of pardon and clemency—Obama has been extraordinarily […]

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  Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore Somewhere in the annals of the world’s folklore—perhaps somewhere in the collected Brothers Grimm—there must exist some allegorical tale that lays bare the folly of what happened yesterday in Salt Lake City. There, Mitt Romney inhabited the voice of probity, caution, trustworthiness, and integrity in order to warn the unwashed […]

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Photo Credit: Shane Armas Korpisto In recent years, many a Western journalist has descended upon the Lebanese capital of Beirut to captivate audiences with tales of the magically multisectarian life in the city, with its seemingly irreconcilable elements: Hezbollah and nightclubs, hijabs and billboard lingerie ads. In 2010, The New York Times travel section discovered that, “[i]n […]

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  Image Credit: Edel Rodriguez  The grumpy old man with the disheveled hair has revealed himself a veritable political juggernaut. In Iowa, Bernie Sanders fought Hillary Clinton to a near tie. In New Hampshire, he rolled to a 22-point victory. It is an extraordinary vindication of an argument liberal Democrats like me have been making since the 1980s, when […]

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