Conservatism

Podcast

How the GOP Killed Dissent

Episode 61: Marsha E. Barrett on her new book, Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma: The Fight to Save Moderate Republicanism

October 24, 2024 • by
Ana Navarro is probably best known for her work on the popular daytime talk show, The View. But she also has serious chops as a Republican political strategist. She served on Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s staff—you may recall that Bush was leveled by Donald J. Trump early in the 2016 ...
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How the GOP Killed Dissent
North America

How Moderate Republicans Went Extinct

Reconsidering Nelson Rockefeller and his legacy

September 18, 2024 • by
At the Aspen Ideas Climate Summit in spring 2022—one of those gatherings of the well-informed and the well-to-do so beloved by American politicians—Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, urged Republicans to “take back” their party from Donald Trump. “This country,” the veteran Democratic leader opined, “needs a ...
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How Moderate Republicans Went Extinct
North America

Project 2025 and Its Imaginative Hellscape

Apparently, Marxist elites have even compromised the fighting fiber of our troops

August 28, 2024 • by
Over the summer, I committed myself to reading the entirety of Project 2025, a policy document compiled by the Heritage Foundation, with contributions from many veterans of the Trump administration, which I printed out in four thick three-ring binders. What follows is a review of the vision of governance the ...
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Project 2025 and Its Imaginative Hellscape
North America

The Legacy of the Catholic New Right in Project 2025

The Heritage Foundation returns to its roots

August 26, 2024 • by
For the past four decades, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has published policy proposals ahead of presidential elections. The most recent installment of the “Mandate for Leadership” series, published in 2023, is a 900-page collection of essays written by a host of right-wing thinkers and advised by more ...
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The Legacy of the Catholic New Right in Project 2025
Podcast

Who Do You Love?

Episode 50: A conversation with Neil J. Young about Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right

March 28, 2024 • by
Battling detractors on their left and homophobia to their right, gay Republicans have nevertheless played power politics for over 80 years....

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Who Do You Love?
The Right

Why a Far-Right Activist Slapped President Macron

France’s culture wars are being fanned by a racism that cannot be discussed in public—but that followers of Marine Le Pen understand all the same

June 30, 2021 • by
_____ French President Emmanuel Macron was greeted at a recent press event with a slap in the face. Damien T., the man who delivered the slap, was heard yelling “Montjoie! Saint-Denis!” and “A bas la macronie” the former being a Royalist battle cry, the latter translating as “Down with Macronism!” The reason ...
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Why a Far-Right Activist Slapped President Macron
The Right

Magical Thinking, Machiavellian Politics and the Future of the Christian Right

A visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky shows how deeply rooted distrust in science is now embedded in the culture of white evangelicals

June 30, 2021 • by
_____ Following Liz Cheney’s ouster from the GOP House leadership, there have been murmurings among some Republicans about starting a break-away party committed to upholding traditional conservative policies rather than defending Donald Trump’s false assertion that he, not Joe Biden, is in fact the duly elected President of the United States. ...
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Magical Thinking, Machiavellian Politics and the Future of the Christian Right
The Right

A Tale of Two Democracies

How a movement that claimed to be democratic undermined the rule of law

June 28, 2021 • by
_____ “Democracy,” wrote Charles Tilly, “does not resemble an oilfield or a garden, but a lake. A lake,” he continues, can come into being because a mountain stream feeds into a naturally-existing basin, because someone or something dams up the outlet of a large river, because a glacier melts, because an earthquake ...
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A Tale of Two Democracies
Columnists

The stink of treason clings to the Republican Party

Big profit-seeking corporations can smell it, same as everyone else.

May 5, 2021 • by
_____ My friend and fellow New Havener Tom Krattenmaker has a new piece in USA Today worth amplifying, in my own modest way, but also worth setting in the larger context of ideological shifting taking place in the country. Tom argues that big profit-seeking corporations aren’t “woke.” They just believe the ...
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The stink of treason clings to the Republican Party
History

Why Weimar is an Imperfect Mirror

Its polarized culture reinforced the destructive energy of an increasingly polarized politics

April 8, 2021 • by
"It would be too much to say that the Weimar Republic fell to Nazism because of its bifurcated culture. But the high culture of Weimar was not a supporting pillar of democracy either. Instead, Weimar’s polarized culture reinforced the destructive energy of its increasingly polarized politics. " - Helmut W. ...
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Why Weimar is an Imperfect Mirror
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