It’s no secret that Hillary Clinton grew up a Republican. In ninth grade, she read Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. In 1964, at the age of 17, she was, as she wrote in Living History, a “Goldwater girl” who campaigned for the GOP candidate. But then things changed. Or did they? In her latest iteration as a defender of African Americans, Clinton has taken to criticizing Bernie Sanders for being a “one-issue candidate.” Because he focuses on, you know, the economy. Not unlike another presidential candidate of recent memory. Here’s what Clinton said about Sanders over the weekend: Not everything is about an economic theory, right? Sanders, you see, wants to reduce all social and political issues to the economy. But there […]

Reading the liberal gushing over Scalia, the insistence that we give him his due, the kvelling over his friendship with Ginsburg, the somnambulant acceptance of the Republicans’ fuckery and the Court’s place in our elections, our politics, our lives—I’ve never felt more that Louis Hartz got it basically right: Surely, then, it is a remarkable force: this fixed, dogmatic liberalism of a liberal way of life. It is the secret root from which have sprung many of the most puzzling of American cultural phenomena. Take the unusual power of the Supreme Court and the cult of constitution worship on which it rests. Federal factors apart, judicial review as it has worked in America would be inconceivable without the national acceptance […]

After Clinton’s stunning loss in New Hampshire tonight, the campaign is getting a facelift: Now, after a drubbing so serious as to call into question every aspect of her campaign from her data operation to her message, the wounded front-runner and her allies are actively preparing to retool their campaign, according to Clinton allies. Staffing and strategy will be reassessed. The message, which so spectacularly failed in New Hampshire where she was trailing by 21 points when she appeared before her supporters to concede to Sanders, is also going to be reworked – with race at the center of it. Clinton is set to campaign with the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, unarmed African-Americans who died in incidents […]

Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire Democratic primary tonight. Edith Wharton described it best: The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. Some fascinating tidbits about the Democratic primary voters from the New York Times exit poll: 72% of the voters said that the candidates’ issues were more important to them than the candidates’ leadership or personal qualities; only 25% of the voters said that the latter was more important to them. This confirms what Jedediah Purdy argued in this excellent piece contrasting the Sanders’s candidacy with Obama’s candidacy. Obama’s […]

According to the latest polls out of New Hampshire, Sanders is currently leading among all Democratic women voters there, and not just among women millennial voters. In Iowa, Clinton beat Sanders among women by 11 points; now she is losing to him in New Hampshire among women by 8 points. I thought this young woman quoted in The Washington Post, who’ll be voting for the first time in this election, explained well why women more generally are turning to Sanders: While many older women’s rights advocates see the election of Clinton as the next logical step in a broader movement, some younger activists have expressed resentment at the notion that they should feel obligated to vote for Clinton simply because she’s a woman. […]

I would have thought—after the surprises of the 2008 campaign and now this primary campaign—that media folks and academics would have acquired a degree of circumspection, if not humility, about their claims to know who is or is not electable. What these recent campaigns have shown is that the electorate can upend our expectations and that the opinions of voters are not static. Those opinions can change in response to the changing dynamics of an electoral campaign—you know, what we used to call “politics.” Not only did the voters in 2008 cast their ballot for a black man—something many right-thinking people were sure was not possible in the United States (remember the Bradley Effect?)—but now, to an increasing and unanticipated degree, they are casting their ballots for […]

On Tuesday night, Alexandra Schwartz, a critic at The New Yorker, posted a piece criticizing the young supporters of Bernie Sanders. Ordinarily, I’d be mildly irritated by an article titled “Should Millennials Get Over Bernie Sanders?” In this instance, I’m grateful. It clarifies the dividing line between Sanders’s supporters in the electorate and the liberal journalists who can’t abide them. First, some context. Exit polls from Iowa, according to Vox, show that “Sanders absolutely dominated young adult voters, in a way that even Barack Obama couldn’t in 2008.” Eighty-four percent of voters under 30, and 58% of voters between 30 and 44, cast their ballots for Sanders. More generally, as countless articles have noted, younger voters are shifting left, embracing ancient taboos like socialism and other […]

Veteran Democratic Party strategist (and former Clinton 2008 adviser) Peter Daou: One of the prerequisites of Washington insiderism is disdain for Hillary Clinton. Hating Hillary is an industry among the political class and media elites… There’s much talk of populism in 2016, of establishment versus outsiders, of Trump and Bernie. But what’s more populist than a candidate beloved by the people and reviled by political tastemakers and media elites? Yes, Hillary is the true outsider, and yes, that statement torpedoes conventional wisdom. It definitely torpedoes something. Here is the number of Clinton’s endorsements*: Cabinet officials: 28 Governors: 42 Senators: 47 House Representatives: 192 Members of the DNC: 113 By way of contrast, here is the number of Sanders’s endorsements*: Cabinet officials: 1 Governors: 1 Senators: 1 House Representatives: 3 Members of the […]

…You aren’t alone! This was the utopian conclusion to visionary Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1922 poem “All Meetinged Out.” It’s early morning; I greet the dawn with a dream: “Oh, how about just one more meeting regarding the eradication of all meetings!” Lenin was not a fan of the experimental Mayakovsky (Stalin, on the other hand, would later write that “Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.”) Even so, Lenin valued “All Meetinged Out” for its anti-bureaucratic sentiment.

At an Iowa town hall event tonight, Hillary Clinton was asked which president most inspired her. She answered Lincoln: “And I don’t know what our country might have been like had he not been murdered, but I bet that it might have been a little less rancor, a little more forgiving and tolerant than might possibly have brought people back together more quickly,” Clinton continued. “But instead, you know, we had Reconstruction, we had the reigns of segregation and Jim Crow. We had people in the South feeling totally discouraged and defiant. So, I really do believe he could have very well put us on a different path.” That comment is straight-up Dunning School, and it naturally set off a lot […]

Maybe this is a generational thing, but this is what the Clintons will always mean to me: Sister Souljah, Ricky Ray Rector, welfare reform, and the crime bill. And beyond—really, behind—all that, the desperate affirmation to win over white voters by declaring: We are not the Party of Jesse Jackson, We are not the Rainbow Coalition. People don’t seem to remember just how much the Clintons’ national ascendancy was premised upon the repudiation of black voters and black interests—a move that was both inspired and applauded by a small but influential group of Beltway journalists and party strategists, who believed this was the only path to taking back the White House from the Republicans—but for me, it’s vivid as yesterday. Maybe it’s because […]

I have a long piece up at The Chronicle Review on public intellectuals. It’s an adaptation of the keynote address I gave last fall at the Society of US Intellectual History. Here are some excerpts… What is a public intellectual? As an archetype, the public intellectual is a conflicted being, torn in two competing directions. On the one hand, he’s supposed to be called by some combination of the two vocations Max Weber set out in his lectures in Munich: that of the scholar and that of the statesman. Neither academic nor activist but both, the public intellectual is a monkish figure of austere purpose and unadorned truth. Think Noam Chomsky. On the other hand, the public intellectual is supposed to […]

In my last post, I talked about the liberal pundits who see black voters as “Hillary’s Firewall.” Even if Sanders wins in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, which have large white populations, the pundits say he’ll find his support plummeting in a state like South Carolina, where black voters are firm Clinton supporters. I pointed out that in 2008, Clinton saw that firewall in South Carolina quickly melt after Obama’s victory in Iowa and his strong second-place finish in New Hampshire. I also pointed out that South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, who is African American and one of the top Democrats in the House, was cautioning against the notion that black voters were solidly behind Clinton this time around. Turns out, he was right. […]

First they came for the Revolution and I did not speak out because I was not a Revolution. Then they came for the Parliamentary Socialism and I did not speak out because I was not a Parliamentary Socialism. Then they came for the Third Party and I did not speak out because I was not a Third Party. Then they came for the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party and I did not speak out because I was not a Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party. Then they came for the Green Lantern and I did not speak out because I was not a Green Lantern. Then they came for me but that was cool because I’m a Democrat.

I came to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s work late in life. I had known about her for years; she was a good friend of my friend Karen Orren, the UCLA political scientist, who was constantly urging me to read Wood’s work. But I only finally did that two years ago, at the suggestion of, I think it was, Paul Heideman​. I read her The Origins of Capitalism. It was one of those Aha! moments. Wood was an extraordinarily rigorous and imaginative thinker, someone who breathed life into Marxist political theory and made it speak—not to just to me but to many others—at multiple levels: historical, theoretical, political. She ranged fearlessly across the canon, from the ancient Greeks to contemporary social theory, undaunted by […]

Glenn Greenwald speaks to and rebuts a rhetorical move that’s become common across the political spectrum: when it’s pointed out that US and European foreign policy makes some contribution toward radicalizing Muslim populations, including the turn to terrorism, the response is that anyone who makes such a claim is: a) denying the agency and autonomy of terrorists; b) overlooking the role of religion as an independent variable, which some want to see as completely unrelated to any other variable. You see this response increasingly among certain parts of the left, and Glenn shows why it’s wrong. I would add two points to Glenn’s analysis. First, with regard to the agency/autonomy claim, it surprises me that leftists would repeat an argument […]

From Clarence Thomas’s dissent in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003): The joint opinion also places a substantial amount of weight on the fact that “in 1996 and 2000, more than half of the top 50 soft-money donors gave substantial sums to both major national parties,” and suggests that this fact “leav[es] room for no other conclusion but that these donors were seeking influence, or avoiding retaliation, rather than promoting any particular ideology.”Ante, at 38 (emphasis in original). But that is not necessarily the case. The two major parties are not perfect ideological opposites, and supporters or opponents of certain policies or ideas might find substantial overlap between the two parties. If donors feel that both major parties are in general agreement […]

Sanford Ungar, an author and former president of Goucher College (might he also be the historian whose articles on the FBI or the CIA I read for my dissertation many moons ago?), has an oped in the Washington Post, criticizing the recent efforts to remove Wilson’s name from Princeton, take Jackson off the $20 bill, and so on. There isn’t anything new in the piece (Wilson was complicated, Jackson did some good things, etc.) But this last paragraph caught my eye: What is at stake, in the end, is an understanding of our own history. We certainly must confront the reality that many of our greatest public figures did not always live up to American ideals. But wiping out the names, Soviet-style, […]

34,000 people from across the world went to Spain to fight Franco. 177,000 people from across the world went to Spain to defend him. Since Burke, the counterrevolution has always been a continental affair (“No citizen of Europe could be altogether an exile in any part of it“). The notion that internationalism is an inherently or exclusively left-wing value is not quite right.

Everyone’s worried about Donald Trump. As they should be. They should also worry about his friends across the aisle. Division of Labor Monday, which saw Trump reveal his plan to stop all Muslims from coming into the United States, also announced this convergence between right and left. Newt Gingrich: Nine percent of Pakistanis agree with ISIS, according to one poll. That’s a huge number. We need to put all the burden of proof on people coming from those countries to show that they are not a danger to us. Michael Tomasky: It [Obama’s statement] says to Muslim Americans that the rights you have as Americans have to be earned, fought for. And you know, that’s OK…But I do know that if other Americans had some […]