One of the most notable but mostly uncovered political developments in recent years has been how enthusiastically many Religious Right leaders have embraced Russia’s anti-democratic president, former KGB official Vladimir Putin. It seems even more remarkable that the Republican Party’s presidential nominee has been lavishing praise on Putin even as Russia maneuvers to diminish America’s influence in the world. As president, Putin has consolidated his power through attacks on the independent media, the persecution of political opponents, and restrictions on civil society. He has annexed…
After Trump: GOP Elites Haven’t Realized They Can’t Return to the Status Quo
Editor’s note: This is the first of several “After Trump” pieces we will be running about how the candidacy of Donald Trump has irrevocably changed the Republican Party and American conservatism. Three pieces this week intertwine to present a picture of the broader challenges facing the political right at the moment: Matthew Sheffield’s important study of the conservative media, Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column about the Trump campaign, and this New York Times story on the future of reform conservatism. All three touch on the crisis of paralysis facing…
Hosting the Olympics Is Actually Economically Harmful for Cities
The Olympic Games as currently conducted are not economically viable for most cities. The most important reasons include infrastructure costs relating to the venues hosting the events; the monopoly rents that flow to the International Olympic Committee; poor management; corruption; and the specter of unreasonable and unrealizable economic expectations for the host city and nation. Concerns about costs are nothing new. Even Salt Lake City’s $1.9 billion in expenditures in 2002 ($2.5 billion in 2015 dollars), which seem almost quaint by today’s standards, raised concerns among…
Trump Voters Like Crime and Remodeling, Clinton Fans Prefer Strong Women
Earlier this week, I wrote about how conservative political junkies have become trapped in a political echo chamber that marginalizes them. A left-wing echo chamber exists as well (another day and another article). Regular Americans are also split in terms of their political preferences, of course, and it reflects sometimes in weird ways. According to an analysis from the DVR company TiVo, supporters of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have different preferences for entertainment shows as well. Might it be a televised version of the…
Globalism vs. Nationalism May Be the Future of American Politics
First-past-the-post voting like America’s tends inevitably to yield two-party systems, which usually require awkward coalitions. What determines which interest groups coalesce? In 1929 Harold Hotelling, an economist, wrote that a rational voter would choose a candidate whose views showed most “proximity” to his own. In turn, a political party serious about winning should take the positions most likely to convince the voter in the electorate’s ideological middle. Since both parties needed to attract most votes from a broad electorate, this “median-voter theorem” would push them…
Gary Johnson on Race and Poverty: ‘My Head’s Been in the Sand’
Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson has been making a heavy play for left-leaning voters in his second run for the White House. On Wednesday, he turned that effort up a notch when asked about racial issues, a subject that has long been a difficult one for libertarians given their tendency to support almost no role for the federal government in ending private racial discrimination. Asked by a questioner during a televised town hall discussion about his thoughts concerning the “Black Lives Matter movement,” the former…
Weaponized Religion Harms Both Church and State
The benediction to the first night of the Republicans’ convention two weeks ago was unusual. Pastor Mark Burns of South Carolina announced to the delegates “Our enemy is not other Republicans, but is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.” He then prayed that “we together can defeat the liberal Democratic Party” and that Republicans “were the conservative party under God”. Mixing religion and politics is nothing new. Having a pastor proclaim members of an opposing political party are “the enemy” is still a rather overt…
It’s Donald Trump’s Tea Party Now
“I had been predicting a tea party resurgence in 2016 because I thought the climate was right for it, but the only problem was that a guy named Donald Trump came along and basically co-opted the movement,” said Judson Phillips, head of Tea Party Nation. Ken Crow, a tea party activist in Iowa, said the “tea party is in turmoil” over how to feel about Mr. Trump. “The hard-core tea party wanted a strict constitutional guy like a Mike Lee or Ted Cruz — someone…
CNN Says It Will Host Town Hall Discussion for Green Party’s Jill Stein
The televised town hall discussion format has been a staple of CNN for decades. Originally done via phoned in questions from viewers, the news channel has since shifted to live group chats and has been doing many of them during this presidential campaign. After airing several featuring candidates from the Republican and Democratic parties, CNN announced Wednesday that it will also be conducting a town hall with Green Party candidate Jill Stein on Wednesday, August 17 at 9:00 p.m. ET. Undoubtedly, the move comes after…
Are the Olympics Irrelevant Now?
Forty-eight percent of Americans say they plan to watch a “great deal” or “fair amount” of the 2016 Summer Olympics. This is a sharp drop from 59% in 2012 and easily the lowest percentage planning to watch compared with the past four Summer Games. Thirty percent say they plan to watch “not much” of the Olympics, and 21% say “none at all” — the highest percentage saying so since Gallup began asking this question in 2000. These results come from a July 13-17 Gallup poll…
The Conservative Echo Chamber Is Making the Right Intellectually Deaf
One of the more interesting developments since the emergence of the web as a mass medium is the establishment of a conservative media presence. Prior to the internet, there were basically no large-audience right-leaning media operations aside from a few talk radio programs. Since the 1996 establishment of Fox News and the popularization of the web, it has now become possible for a conservatively inclined people to consume all kinds of news and opinion catering to their specific tastes and viewpoints. Many right-leaning people have…