…it is actually more likely that Trump will pursue pragmatic, centrist policies. For starters, Trump is a businessman who relishes the “art of the deal”, so he is by definition more of a pragmatist than a blinkered ideologue. His choice to run as a populist was tactical, and does not necessarily reflect deep-seated beliefs. Read […]
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of […]
Trump is part of a broad populist upsurge running through the Western world. It can be seen in countries of widely varying circumstances, from prosperous Sweden to crisis-ridden Greece. In most, populism remains an opposition movement, although one that is growing in strength; in others, such as Hungary, it is now the reigning ideology. But […]
Brexit was the warm-up. With the election of Donald Trump, the populist tide sweeping developed economies has now overtaken the world’s most powerful democracy. What exactly that means for the rest of the world depends upon just how serious the real estate developer and reality TV star was about his campaign pledges. Those ranged from […]
Donald Trump is going to be the next president of the United States. The billionaire businessman who never before held elected office shocked America and the world, defeating Hillary Clinton in an extraordinary rebuke to the nation’s political class after an ugly and divisive race that will go down as the most stunning upset in […]
The year I moved away, George W. Bush stood beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner on an aircraft carrier and declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq. Facebook hadn’t yet been turned into a company. The iPhone did not exist. I left before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, before Detroit went bankrupt. I missed […]
In the sixteen months since he declared his candidacy, Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign has elicited comparisons to those of George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, to the hallucinatory paranoia of Joseph McCarthy, to the fascist preoccupations of Charles Lindbergh, and to lesser lights of American demagoguery like Father Coughlin and the Know-Nothings of the nineteenth century. […]
To understand her foreign policy, it is important to understand the evolution of American strategy since the fall of the Soviet Union. Clinton is a creature of the beliefs, values and illusions that dominated American policy from 1991 until 2008. By understanding that world, we can understand Clinton’s core beliefs and then consider the extent […]
As Anders Fogh Rasmussen puts it, America is bordered by “two friendly neighbours and fish.” As a result of this geographic position, Rasmussen argues, Americans have the luxury of alternating between what you might call Trumpian and Clintonian views of the wider world. Read Here – Defense One
In the narrative of this election, Donald Trump is the “politically incorrect” one in the race. He says what “people are thinking” and isn’t afraid of the reaction. For the most part this is nonsense. Trump’s political incorrectness is just a cover for run-of-the-mill prejudice. If people don’t blame Mexico for “sending rapists” over the […]
looking beyond borders 