It’s hard to know which scenario is worse: 1) that Donald Trump ignorantly took a call with the president of Taiwan without knowing how badly it would provoke China; 2) that he intentionally took the call to create a provocation with China over a month before even taking office; or 3) that Trump took the call […]
David Atkins
Follow David on Twitter @DavidOAtkins. David Atkins is a Washington Monthly contributing writer, activist, and research professional living in Santa Barbara as well as an elected DNC Member from California. He is president of The Pollux Group, a qualitative research firm.
Posted inFeatured, Political Animal
Dick Cheney Celebrates a World Where Facts Don’t Matter
Without the “media filter,” conservatives can get away with blatant lies.
Posted inPolitical Animal
Job Retraining Won’t Work. We’ll Need Government Jobs, Then a Universal Basic Income
There is a growing consensus among futurists and visionaries of various backgrounds that the challenges of an automated economy will require implementing a universal basic income. These thinkers range from former SEIU president Andy Stern to Robert Reich to a wide range of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Martin Luther King, Jr., advocated for it, as did conservative […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
Republican Voters Know the Electoral College is Rigged–and They Want to Keep it That Way
Partisanship is a powerful drug. It can change minds overnight, and blind supposedly decent people to overt injustice. Nowhere has that become more obvious than the large uptick in support for the Electoral College among Republicans in the wake up Donald Trump’s election. Whereas only 35% of Americans in 2011 said they wanted to keep […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
The White Working Class Deserved a Better Villain to Blame
Post-election debates about class and identity in the Democratic Party have frequently focused on “economic populism” as a tonic to soothe the frustrations of economic anxiety, particularly in the white working class. But it’s rarely clear what that actually means in practice–and that in turn obscures the debates over whether a stronger dose of populism […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
Stop Blaming the Voters
Torched by the surprise election of Donald Trump, the greatest minds of the establishment classes have convened and made their proclamation: it’s not their fault. The voters of America just aren’t moral enough to embrace their message. Of course, it’s not the voters’ fault. The voters did exactly what many of us predicted they would. […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
A Constitutional Amendment to Force Presidents to Divest?
The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has created unprecedented dilemmas and broken a number of norms that put the country into uncharted territory. Not least among these is Trump’s sprawling international businesses that create massive conflicts of interest in almost everything he does. Trump has never been above making a […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
In a Darker Era, We Can’t Survive Without You
The next four years are going to be a dark and dangerous time for the media–especially for media with a progressive viewpoint that holds both the government and the press to account. We’re going to need all the help we can get. The next president has demonstrated a willingness to silence any voices that make […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
The Twisted Pretzel Logic of the “It’s Not Economic Anxiety” Crowd
This Friday I wrote an article at The American Prospect reasserting and proving the importance of economic anxiety to explain the rise of Donald Trump. Similar pieces have also been written, but it hasn’t stopped a new conventional wisdom from developing that the Trump phenomenon is all about prejudice and race. That this Known Fact is usually […]
Posted inPolitical Animal
Another Data Point for High Latino Turnout
Much has been made in the last few days of the high Hispanic/Latino turnout we are seeing from the early vote in several states. That’s as it should be. It would be poetic justice for the demographic group Trump did everything he could to alienate, to be the ones to ensure his defeat in November. […]
