ArcaMax

After an election, we make nice. The loser congratulates the victor; everybody shakes hands and promises a smooth transition of power. Spicy campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, such courtesies in service to the God of Stability are made possible by the underlying assumption that, while competing candidates and parties offer different ideas of how...Read more

The world of politics, as well as the globe writ large, was shaken to its neoliberal foundations this week by the surprise victory of Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who did not qualify for debates and was accorded little media coverage, in the campaign for American president. Stein, a 74-year-old physician, will mark a trifecta of history as ...Read more

One of the most persistent challenges faced by Kamala Harris' abbreviated presidential campaign is a vexingly wide gender gap. Men just aren't that into her.

Democrats have deployed several approaches to convince male voters to feel the joy.

Divide and conquer: Harris' policies divvy up guys by race. Her "Opportunity Agenda for Black Men" ...Read more

Democrats centered Vice President Kamala Harris' election campaign around the threat to American democracy posed by former President Donald Trump's possible return to office. The issue may not weigh on voters' minds as heavily as the economy, but it does resonate; polls show that Americans trust Harris more to counter political extremism and ...Read more

Corporations enjoy many of the same rights and protections as individual citizens, the Supreme Court ruled in 2010. Not only may a corporation claim the right of freedom of religion to, for example, refuse to cover birth control under employee insurance, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission found that the First Amendment grants it the ...Read more

I fantasize about a government that tries to act like it is, if not quite by the people, at least for the people and thus internalizes the principle that the people deserve to be treated like fully vested adults rather than idiotic children.

Nothing about what the media calls the "migrant crisis" withstands the slightest scrutiny. This begins ...Read more

Many people who typically vote Republican but dislike former President Donald Trump, and others who typically vote Democratic but dislike Vice President Kamala Harris, are wrestling with a fundamental dilemma of the voter who lives in a duopoly.

A vote is an endorsement. A vote declares to the world: "I approve of this candidate." There is no ...Read more

Mainstream American political leaders regularly argue that the United States adheres to, defends and promotes a "rules-based international order." What's that? It's rarely defined.

The best summary I've been able to find was articulated by John Ikenberry of Princeton University, introduced by the Financial Times in 2023 as "an influential ...Read more

If someone said something I found annoying or offensive, my mother taught me, the appropriate response was to allow them to finish speaking and reply with a calm, considered counterargument. Now you're supposed to talk over them until they shut up.

Or, better yet, cut their mic and show them the door.

Censorship has become a bipartisan norm....Read more

Responding to polls that show that voters are worried and angry about the high cost of housing, both major parties are floating plans to make buying a home more affordable. Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats want to encourage new housing construction and subsidize first-time homebuyers by $25,000, which economists worry would have ...Read more

"Get a job!" That's the cliched response to panhandlers and anyone else who complains of being broke. But what if you can't?

That dilemma is the crux of an evolving silent crisis that threatens to undermine the foundation of the American economic model.

Two-thirds of gross domestic product, most of the economy, is fueled by personal consumer...Read more

The U.S. government wastes approximately $4.5 trillion each year. "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money," Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, an Illinois Republican, famously said, and said often. In this case, you're talking about thousands of billions. (Four and a half trillion dollars is the ...Read more

The United States is one of the most politically polarized countries in the world. Because effective lawmaking requires bipartisanship, and members of Congress are, like their constituents, at their most ideologically divided point in a half-century, cooperation is in increasingly short supply. As a result -- or, more precisely, nonresult -- ...Read more