WINCHESTER, Va. — Political arguments are rarely gentle or polite anymore, so it was a gift to see two Republicans who passionately disagree about what Donald Trump means for our nation hash out their differences with grace. Their exchange helps explain the mess Trump has made of his campaign. My window into the intra-Republican split […]

PHILADELPHIA — Barack Obama’s mission on behalf of Hillary Clinton on Wednesday night was personal and political. He testified to her virtues as a would-be president in a way only a current president could. He insisted that the administration both of them helped fashion pulled the country from the economic abyss. And he sought to […]

CLEVELAND — The Donald Trump Family Reunion, formerly known as the Republican National Convention, illustrates how a once great political party now sees its main purpose as harnessing the opposition to the devil. There were chuckles and dismissals when Ben Carson, the brilliant neurosurgeon turned right-wing crank, used his convention speech Tuesday night to tie […]

The Republican Party came to life as the bastion of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men.” It was a reformist party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery and to fighting a “Slave Power” its founders saw as undermining free institutions. The new political organization grew out of the old Whigs and reflected […]

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s pledge to make our country great again captures the longing of some of his supporters for a time when our country was less diverse — and when a less open global market created the circumstances for a large, well-paid working class. Trump doesn’t talk about it, but incomes also rose because […]

WASHINGTON — Nick Salvatore, the biographer of Eugene V. Debs, wrote that the popularity of the great American Socialist leader in the early decades of the 20th century “rested upon his ability to articulate and symbolize something of the severe dislocation experienced by all Americans in the transformation to industrial capitalism.” Bernie Sanders’ appeal bears […]

WASHINGTON — Elites are in trouble. High levels of immigration are destabilizing our democracies. Politicians who put their short-term political interests over their countries’ needs reap the whirlwind — for themselves but, more importantly, for their nations. Citizens who live in the economically ailing peripheries of wealthy nations are in revolt against well-off and cosmopolitan […]

WASHINGTON — A political crisis is usually preceded by an intellectual and moral crisis. Dominant ideas that once seemed to hang together lose their hold when they are exposed as contradictory and incoherent. Similarly, moral claims made on behalf of a worldview can, gradually or suddenly, come to be seen as empty. Demoralization comes before […]