Politics

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.

As the 1990s began, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. argued that America was due for a new era of affirmative government in keeping with the cycle of liberal and conservative periods that runs through our history. Uncannily, Bill Clinton’s election came right on schedule, roughly 90 years after Theodore Roosevelt became president, 60 years after Franklin Roosevelt, […]