Cracks in the Consensus on Israel?

A front-page two-column lead in the New York Times yesterday announced “Trump and Netanyahu put Bipartisan Support [for Israel] at Risk.”  Donald Trump has demanded, and Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed (with only a very partial takeback), to bar two American congresswomen ...

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The Democrats Debate, Again

If you’re at all like me, you have probably had more than your fill by now of commentaries—on air, on-line and print—on the last two rounds of Democratic debates.  And yet, here you are, reading yet another commentary.  Unfortunately, I doubt ...

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A Note from St. Petersburg

Far from home on vacation, I still can’t help thinking about politics in the USA.  And, being in  the great European city that bore his name for nearly 70 years, I thought about some sage political advice from that notorious ...

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Contentious Democrats

There’s been lots of media coverage lately of the sparring between Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  The latest exchanges between the two began when AOC and her three newly-elected comrades on the left—Ilan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib–voted against ...

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The Democrats “Debate”

I put “debate” in scare quotes because what we saw this past week of course weren’t debates in any meaningful sense but forums–opportunities for the many Democratic presidential hopefuls to gain free public exposure.  This is a generally very talented ...

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War with Iran?

One of Donald Trump’s very few merits (maybe his only merit?) is an instinctive aversion to major US military intervention abroad. That aversion of course didn’t prevent him from appointing the country’s premier warmonger as his national security adviser, nor ...

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Impeachment: A Further Thought

In commenting on another website, it occurred to me that my last post on this topic may have overstressed the role of public opinion as an independent variable to which politicians must respond, without noting that politicians can also shape ...

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Democrats and Socialists

The idea of socialism is undergoing something of a revival in the United States today.  In a Galllup poll last year, 57% of Democrats reported that they had a favorable view of socialism, compared to just 47% with a favorable ...

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Impeachment and Max Weber

With the controversy heating up over whether to impeach Donald Trump, I decided to search my bookshelves for my volume of essays by the great German sociologist Max Weber. A century ago, Weber formulated a classic statement of the tension ...

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The Spectre of ’72

We continue to hear a lot of concern that the Democrats could blow their chance for defeating Trump in 2020 by veering too far to the left.  I’ve already expressed my belief that such concerns are overblown, that a fairly ...

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