American politics

Thursday

Nate and Thomas Hochman

How to not argue at the dinner table

Family dinners, like almost every area of American life, have become a subject of fierce politicization recently. In the years following Trump’s election in 2016, readers of elite progressive outlets were treated to a long parade of thinkpieces urging Americans, in the words of a 2019 Atlantic essay from Ibram X. Kendi, “to liberate our relatives from their abusive relationship with Trump’s alternative reality.” “This Thanksgiving, It’s Time to Take on Your Conservative Relatives,” declared a headline in the Nation. Molly Jong-Fast called on readers to “Deprogram your relatives this Thanksgiving.” A 2017 GQ article was perhaps bluntest of all: “It’s Your Civic Duty to Ruin Thanksgiving by Bringing Up Trump.

family

Thursday

Oliver Wiseman

Why David Mamet went right

How did David Mamet spend the pandemic? The answer, as anyone familiar with the prolific, brilliant playwright and screenwriter would probably have guessed, is that he wrote. “I’ve been writing a lot of essays lately,” Mamet, seventy-four, says when we meet at his Santa Monica home on a cool January evening. “Because, you know, I don’t want to go and sit on a park bench. I’m a writer.” A collection of essays written during the tumultuous plague years is published this month by Broadside, an imprint of HarperCollins. Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch is combative, challenging, witty, and, as the title suggests, its prevailing mood is as dark as the “terrible” period in which it was written.

Mamet
democratic
Bill Kauffman

A eulogy for the Democrats of yore

In my days as a budding political scientist — nipped, fortunately for the discipline, in the bud — I learned that party identification is frequently due to non-ideological, and to outsiders irrational, factors. I’m sure this is less true today, as corporate and social media herd us into Team Red and Team Blue cattle pens, but this knowledge offers comfort every biennium, when primary elections roll around and I wonder why the hell I remain a registered Democrat. The die was cast, I suppose, when as a tyke I discovered in my grandparents’ attic a “Peace, Preparedness, Prosperity” button promoting Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 reelection. (How was I to know that smug bastard lied?

Thursday

Bill Kauffman

Blues for Jimmy Duncan

Were Pulitzer Prize-winning “author” John F. Kennedy — I mean Ted Sorensen — to write Profiles in Courage today, taking his subjects from the contemporary political world, his pickings would be mighty slim. I suppose he might produce one of those comically brief novelty books, à la Steve Miller’s Higher Poetics or Hot Stuff by Mamie Eisenhower. For my part, I can’t think of a sharper modern political profile in courage than that cut by Tennessee Republican John J.“Jimmy” Duncan, Jr., who represented Knoxville in the US House of Representatives for thirty years before his retirement in 2019. Jimmy — full disclosure: I am a friend and admirer — was one of the six brave and prescient House Republicans who resisted intense lobbying by George W.

duncan

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

The pillars of Trumpworld are crumbling

Things are getting quite hairy at the White House. Apparently, senior adviser Stephen Miller reckoned that he needed to perform a cover-up before he went on national television this past Sunday. He seems to have sprayed on hair-in-a-canister to camouflage his glabrous head. Like many of the moves this administration has made, Miller’s gambit only drew more attention to what he wished to conceal. The Washington Post observed, ‘it emanated from Miller’s head like a physical manifestation of his personality — a follicle’d inferiority complex that was suddenly in charge of creating the nation’s policies.’ Since then, the White House has run into a fresh spate of bad news. Former Lt. Gen.

trumpworld

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump’s polls slump is yuge

With the drop in his poll ratings to around 35 percent, Donald Trump faces a fresh peril. A further erosion in his numbers would threaten his ability to maintain his hold on a Republican Congress that he desperately needs to ward off the threat of impeachment. His old fighters from the primary campaign such as Corey Lewandowski have been urging him to cut loose as he did this past weekend at the annual meeting of CPAC. Their credo is ‘let Trump be Trump.’ But that would likely be a recipe for disaster. Trump’s popularity is sagging because he has been visibly floundering in recent weeks, from his mismanagement of his side Rob Porter, who was accused of beating several wives, to serial national security clearances for a variety of other aides.