Mori Dinauer

This week, Republicans have had to face reality. A Democrat handily wins a special election in a reliably Republican district in New York. In Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, approval ratings for newly elected Republican governors are plummeting. The president’s approval rating is creeping back up. Commentators often attribute these trends to the wrong foreces. […]

Given the ideological chasm that has developed in American politics between people who pay attention to such things, it’s worthwhile, in my view, to take careful note of how liberals criticize other liberals, and conservatives other conservatives. Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, this is how Ramesh Ponnuru criticizes two recent books that allege […]

I think it’s a good rule of thumb to never use public opinion data as evidence that your conception of American politics is the correct one, if only because it’s far too tempting and easy to cherry-pick results. This new Kaiser Family Foundation poll [PDF], for instance, has excellent data about how Americans feel about […]

With Haley Barbour officially out of the presidential race, a pair of libertarian candidates in, and what appears to be a slow winnowing process underway for the Republican nomination, it’s worth asking how a long-shot candidate would actually claim the prize. Jonathan Bernstein games out a possible scenario, and it seems to rely less on […]

Amateurs can read individual minds. Pros can read the minds of a country with 300-plus million inhabitants: These supremely accomplished blowhards offend some but also arouse intense loyalty in others. Their followers enjoy the brassiness of it all. They live vicariously through their hero’s assertiveness. They delight in hearing those obnoxious things that others are […]

Last week, Gallup released a poll asking Americans whether various institutions of social authority, especially those that form the government, wield too much power, and the consensus was, virtually, “they all do.” Conor Friedersdorf sees this as evidence of a coherent political worldview, one that he himself shares, and he even goes through each institution […]

What more is there to say about about the topic of the week, Paul Ryan‘s “Path to Prosperity?” Its novelty, as it were, is a complete fiction. Anybody who has paid the slightest bit of attention to American politics over the last century knows that Republicans are opposed to funding a welfare state. Anybody paying […]

Richard Florida has a post in The Atlantic that sees the number of people who self-identify as conservative state by state as evidence that “America is an increasingly conservative nation, by ideology and by political affiliation.” Let’s leave aside the obvious point that Americans telling us they are “conservative” is essentially meaningless in terms of […]

As I’ve written before, to call public furor thus started “astroturf” or phony misses the point; people can try to make an idea catch fire, but it only does so if it genuinely meets the emotional or political needs of a mass; and the need to pretend that the only reason anyone is against public […]

Conor Friedersdorf calls on the right to police their media outlets and call out slander and lies, but rightfully notes that critics fail to realize how fundamental a shift this would be for conservatives: I’d love to see more folks in the conservative movement adopt Rubin’s attitude. But they won’t. One reason is that it’s […]