Money, Politics, and Power

This isn’t the first time liberals have faced reverses and needed to reframe their ideas.

Richard Rothstein may be right that Clinton is the best liberals can hope for in our present institutional environment (“Friends of Bill?” TAP, Winter 1995, Number 20), but many who have fallen away from Clinton feel that he failed to test the potential of liberalism and populism, and in so doing contributed decisively to the […]

S ince Franklin Roosevelt, the central liberal credo has been the use of government to benefit ordinary people. That premise is now battered–fiscally, politically, ideologically. In 1994, swing voters rejected both the concept and the party of government. The 1994 midterm election is not yet the epochal realignment that prefigures a new governing coalition and […]

On October 17, The American Prospect cosponsored a conference on campaign finance reform at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Only weeks earlier, reform legislation had died in Congress. Participants in the conference included representatives of public interest organizations and both Democrats and Republicans; the conference received financial support from the Arca, Schumann, and Joyce Foundations, […]

Bill Brewster, junior member of the House Ways and Means Committee, works hard on behalf of the money that elected him. Unfortunately, he is emblematic of a system that skews politics away from the people.

Could either party nominate a full-menu libertarian or populist? Our national political logjam explains why artifice has become endemic.

In the primal act of citizenship, we face the ballot alone, face to face with our own ignorance.