This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here. The impending return of aggressive right-wing presidentialism under Donald Trump is likely to take on a dangerous double character. On one side, those parts of the administrative state […]
January/February/March 2025
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In Sherman’s Wake
The hidden story of enslaved Georgians who, however briefly, seized freedom during the Union general’s famous march to the sea.
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An Iron Hand Loses Its Grip
Mitch McConnell wielded power deftly for decades, only to see his party and the institution he loved fracture around him.
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Party Animal
Martin Van Buren, father of the Democrats, knew that the Founders were wrong about partisan politics.
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Gray Expectations
Caring for my aging father taught me about the massive holes in America’s safety net for the elderly.
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Secretary of Enablement
Robert McNamara’s subservience to Lyndon Johnson led America to disaster in Vietnam.
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Grunge Grrrls
The year 1992 will always stand out in my mind as the “Year of the Woman.” At the time, I was a reporter at Newsweek based in Washington, D.C., covering the presidential election, and politics was my world. It was the election that followed the cataclysmic Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings, in which Hill, […]
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Hillbilly Legacy
In December 1763, the “Paxton Boys,” a vigilante group of white settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier, killed and scalped six Conestoga Indians living under the colonial government’s protection on a contested tract of land. Two weeks later, the vigilantes rode into neighboring Lancaster and shot, scalped, and dismembered 14 more Conestoga—three elderly men, three women, […]
