Allies in Unexpected Places

George Soros, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, what do they have in common?  They are multibillionaires, who in varying degrees, are on the liberal or progressive side of the political spectrum, a place where one doesn’t normally find billionaires.

Read more

Untethered

The author was an English professor for over 40 years. What follows is an excerpt from an essay he wrote after his retirement. An essay (to quote a phrase from a longtime reader of Goodheart’s work whose correspondence helped inspire it)“in the spirit of one no longer bound by job or profession or any other tethers (except the inevitable one of mortality), someone sailing under his own wind wherever it might take him.” 

Read more

Trump’s War Against the Media

Trump knows that his real enemy is the media—less so the weak Democratic Party.  We should not underrate his intelligence in this respect. In other words, his war is against fact and truth.  If he wins the war (he needs only to win his constituency, a minority in the country and a majority in the swing states), his administration is secure.

Read more

Putin and Fellow Travelers

In a previous article here, I took on what I called “Trumpism on the Left” with a focus on Stephen Cohen’s defense of the Trump-Putin bromance in The Nation magazine.  A friend of mine suggested that the title of the article should have been “The Strange Case of Stephen Cohen,” implying perhaps that “Trumpism on the Left” was an unjustified generalization from a single example.  Cohen, as I noted fleetingly, is not alone in his affinity for Putin and by extension Trump.  What my piece lacked was the context of other advocates of the two leaders, which I try to provide in what follows.

Read more

Misdirected Fire

In the wake of the Hillary Clinton’s shocking defeat in the presidential election, two Democratic operatives, Stanley B. Greenberg and Anna Greenberg, turn their attention to President Obama and ask the question “Was Obama Bad for the Democrats” (NY Times, Op Ed, December 23).  Their answer is a qualified yes.  Before I bear down on the Greenbergs for their insinuation that the Democrats went down to defeat on the presidential and congressional levels because of Obama, let me lay out their argument with editorial interruption.

Read more

Post-Election Reflections

The role of identity politics in Trump’s victory and Clinton’s defeat:  Identity politics, the invention of the multicultural left, has been taken over by Trump and his hard right supporters. 

Read more

Trump and the Media

“Let Trump be Trump his aides has always insisted.  And let his convention serve as an unapologetic tribute to his singular, erratic, untamed persona.  ‘I want,’ the candidate has often said, ‘to be myself.’” (“In Trump’s Voice, It’s a New Nixon,” Michael Barbaro and Alexander Burns NY Times, July 19.)  But who is that myself?  If one looks to his political identity in the views that he has expressed over the years, one is baffled by their contradictions, incoherence and vacuous expression, unless, that is, one sees them as symptoms of a mental condition.

Read more

What Is Sanders Waiting For?

Sanders entered the Democratic primaries as an outsider presumably with an understanding of the rules.  When they worked for him, he didn’t complain; when they didn’t work for him, he cried foul (the system, he claimed was rigged). 

Read more

The Politics of Anger

Mario Cuomo’s often quoted adage, “you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose,” neglects to say that the poetry more often than not is bad poetry.  Campaign speeches are cliché ridden, repetitious, rarely inspired by genuine conviction and filled with promises that the speakers know can’t be kept.  It is an insult to poetry to associate it with the banality of campaigning.  The election of 2016 so far is singularly devoid of the semblance of poetry.

Read more