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the insertion of the insurgents into the Democratic Party is allegedly creating anxiety among mainstream Democrats who worry that it provides the hard right with just the angle they need right now to hold onto power.

their goals are ambitious. But are they extreme and dangerous? Not at all, and in fact, the insurgents’ goals are directionally shared by moderates. The questions are how far to go and how best to get from here to there

Ocasio-Cortez ran on, among other things: Medicare for all, free public college and trade school, a job guarantee, ending private prisons and abolishing ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Consider the motivation for these ideas:

The tariffs are the only surviving piece of his agenda of economic nationalism. That may be, but there is another way to understand this: Trump is sticking to it because it is a key feature of his agenda of xenophobic nationalism, which is, at bottom, the only nationalism he really cares about.

This lack of a serious economic rationale makes more sense if you accept that Trump is wedded to an agenda of xenophobic, not economic, nationalism. It’s no accident that the only surviving elements of his nationalism are the immigration and trade crackdowns: Both further his largely fabricated grand narrative that U.S. workers’ struggles are the fault of undocumented immigrants from “shithole countries,” snooty Euro-weenie elites and the Chinese menace.

economic conditions right now make this an excellent time for a bolder-the-better agenda.

First, the Federal Reserve recently announced that its previously planned interest-rate increases were on pause

The key fact is that the U.S. economy started to wobble with the Fed funds rate at 2.5 percent, a level that’s but one-half of its long-term average.

Sanders ran for president not just to win, but also to get his ideas in wide circulation and pull the Democratic Party to the left. And that’s precisely what’s happening. The party is going to nominate a candidate with establishment roots and centrist instincts, but that candidate is adapting his policy agenda to move in Sanders’s direction.

This is true in another crucial sense as well. These moves suggest that the Democratic Party’s thinking on economic issues and policy has been reoriented in a serious and meaningful way, in no small part due to Sanders and his movement.

Josh Bivens, the director of research at the progressive Economic Policy Institute, explained these deeper currents in an email to us:

Ultimately, culture matters more than politics, and when the leader of the free world inflicts cultural damage this severe, he’s doing far more harm than a few judicial appointments can remedy. Conservatives used to understand this reality. In fact, we once made this argument with great clarity and power.

It’s time for conservatives to remember the cultural power of the presidency. It’s time for us to understand that Trump’s persona is — certainly for now — more influential than his policies. Sure, seek lower tax rates and better judges. Sure we praise him when he’s right and critique mistakes. But we must lift our eyes from the strike zone and look at his overall impact. And that means not holding back from speaking the larger, more important truths.

Krauthammer was right. Trump’s conduct yesterday was a “moral disgrace.” He exacerbated divisions that have existed since before the nation’s founding. He gave the vicious and vile alt-right it’s most important public victory. If he keeps it up, his “agenda” will be a footnote to history. Hate, division, and rage will be his true legacy, and that legacy will have far greater consequence than any policy he manages to pass.

Bannon’s ‘epic’ defense of Trump doesn’t extend to all his moves, or all his aides and allies

Bannon did offer forceful praise — and, indeed, an epic defense — of Trump and much of his agenda

he also called Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey the biggest mistake “maybe in modern political history”

President Trump campaigned as one of the world’s greatest dealmakers, but after nine months of struggling to broker agreements, lawmakers in both parties increasingly consider him an untrustworthy, chronically inconsistent and easily distracted negotiator .

The president’s propensity to create diversions and follow tangents has kept him from focusing on his legislative agenda and forced lawmakers who might be natural allies on key policies into the uncomfortable position of having to answer for his behavior and outbursts.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Trump called him one morning that same week, interrupting his workout at the gym to tell him, “Let’s do some bipartisan work on health care!”

The filibuster and the 60-vote threshold to invoke cloture are tried and tested measures in the U.S. Senate intended to "cool off" hot legislation that passes with a simple majority in the U.S. House.

For decades these important rules have become precedent because they encourage what the Senate is historically known for, consensus building and bipartisan compromise.  While at times a source of great frustration for the party in power -- and for me personally -- the filibuster has served our country well because it preserves rights for the minority party and limits the damage done by enacting legislation that creates unintended consequences that is detrimental to all Americans.

The American people did not vote for a radical agenda, one way or the other. To the contrary, the American people voted for consensus. President Biden was elected by just over 40,000 votes in three states; Democrats have a tiny five seat majority in the House; and the Senate is knotted at 50-50. 

he under-fire White House adviser Stephen Miller said in a 2016 radio interview that immigration could see America lose its sovereignty and be “decimated”, echoing racist and white nationalist themes at the heart of a current scandal that has seen growing demands for him to resign.

Miller claimed that Obama-era trade and immigration policies, which had bipartisan support, would “decimate” the US, give amnesty to dangerous immigrants, and end US sovereignty.

Miller’s extreme language in public is under renewed scrutiny following a series of reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that revealed how leaked emails showed the White House aide espousing white nationalist views and injecting that agenda into Breitbart.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. denounced the storming of the Capitol on Wednesday as the violent expression of President Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat, calling it “an assault on the citadel of liberty” and saying the president had stoked the mob with his brazen and false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen.

“a dark moment” in the nation’s history,

“It’s disorder. It’s chaos. It borders on sedition and it must end now.”

The daunting path to renewal.

The indispensable prerequisite for restoration is the defeat of Donald Trump. Only then can we give ordinary Americans the security that undergirds a stable democracy: quality healthcare; economic and racial justice; universal childcare; decent public schools; affordable higher education; internet access; and fair wages.

Further, we need a lasting commitment to combating climate change; protecting the environment; renewing our infrastructure; and crafting an immigration system which reflects our better self

Explore

The recent rise in American anti-Semitism is well documented. I could fill pages with FBI hate-crime statistics, or with a list of violent attacks from the past six years or even the past six months, or with the growing gallery of American public figures saying vile things about Jews. Or I could share stories you probably haven’t heard, such as one about a threatened attack on a Jewish school in Ohio in March 2022—where the would-be perpetrator was the school’s own security guard. But none of that would capture the vague sense of dread one encounters these days in the Jewish community, a dread unprecedented in my lifetime.

What I didn’t expect was the torrent of private stories I received from American Jew

This is the driving theory of most of the progressive policy agenda, most of the time: give people money or a moneylike voucher they can use to buy something they need or even just want.

The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing. But it also misses the opportunity to pull the technologies of the future progressives want into the present they inhabit.

The first problem is explored in “Cost Disease Socialism,” a new paper by the center-right Niskanen Center. “We are in an era of spiraling costs for core social goods — health care, housing, education, child care — which has made proposals to socialize those costs enormously compelling for many on the progressive left,”

Mr. Obama’s clearly deliberate neglect of Washington’s favorite obsession was just the latest sign that the self-styled deficit hawks — better described as deficit scolds — are losing their hold over political discourse.

Why have the deficit scolds lost their grip? I’d suggest four interrelated reasons.

First, they have cried wolf too many times. They’ve spent three years warning of imminent crisi

In a disturbing series of events, conservative organizations have been claiming the mantle of free speech in service of suppressing campus speech they dislike, too.

The most recent case involves professor Olga Perez Stable Cox at Orange Coast College in California. An anonymous student in her human sexuality class secretly recorded Cox discussing her political views. She referred to Donald Trump as a “white supremacist,” his running mate Mike Pence “as one of the most anti-gay humans in this country” and their election as an “act of terrorism.”

Meanwhile, the Orange Coast College Republicans — the group that disseminated the gotcha video — is campaigning for her firing. The group’s president said that expunging commentary such as hers from campus is necessary to ensure the college’s commitment to “diversity, equity and inclusivity.”

Why I Cannot Fall in Line Behind Trump

Republicans who disagree with my stance make the following argument: Mr. Trump, while flawed, is preferable to Hillary Clinton. His cabinet appointments, they say, have been reassuring, and it’s true that several of them are. In addition, the nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court is certain to be more of an originalist than a Clinton appointment would be. On top of that, Republicans are in control of Congress, meaning they are likely to drive much of the agenda, particularly given Mr. Trump’s notable lack of interest in policy. Whatever misgivings anti-Trump conservatives might have had about him, he’ll undo much of the agenda of his liberal predecessor while Mrs. Clinton would have built on it.

For Mr. Trump, nothing is sacred. The truth is malleable, instrumental, subjective. It is all about him. It is always about him.