Margaret and Fiona Moodie have been coming to the Conservative Political Action Conference for a decade. It’s a family thing. Blonde and slender, this mother-daughter pair from Bowie, Maryland, is active in local Republican politics and once even ran for office together. They’re lifelong conservative activists, and CPAC always felt like a reunion with friends—until this year.
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“Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been,” wrote the dour Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran in Anathemas and Admirations, one of his later works. Trump’s fifth week in office gave Cioran’s quote new meaning. Trump did very little of note, at least compared to the flurry of activity and error that defined his first month in office. And yet that—for both Republicans and (especially) for pundits—was the real accomplishment. Читать дальше...
Of the many magic tricks that Get Out pulls off, the most impressive one is how it turns the smiling face of a friendly white person—who’s just here to help, who happily voted for Barack Obama twice—into a rictus grin as terrifying as a Michael Myers mask. Everywhere our hero Chris turns, there is a reassuring white face telling him everything’s going to be OK, that nothing odd is afoot, that he’s overreacting to the increasingly strange and terrible things that are coalescing directly around him. Читать дальше...
Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, has long had a reputation as the Serious Republican. He is an alleged policy wonk who, whether you agree with his politics or not, is knowledgeable and committed to generating innovative policy proposals. In many quarters, this reputation appears to be intact—the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, a reliable barometer of Beltway conventional wisdom, gushed over Ryan’s “very impressive” town hall appearance in January. But Ryan’s reputation has always been a complete fraud. Читать дальше...
The annual Conservative Political Action Conference began in earnest Thursday with a baffling speech by Dan Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union, who denounced the alt-right as “a sinister organization that is trying to worm its way into our ranks.” Since the alt-right is the latest incarnation of white nationalism, Schneider’s censure was welcome, but it was confused by his attempt to make a distinction between a good alt-right and a bad alt-right, a spurious analysis bolstered by bad history. Читать дальше...
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump famously portrayed himself as a populist. His campaign ads took aim at sinister elites governing the United States, and his ability to target the frustrations and fears of Rust Belt communities helped propel him into the presidency. But many of those same positions—especially his criticism of free trade—put him squarely at odds with decades of conservative orthodoxy. The Koch brothers, for their part, refused to support Trump, freezing him out of their donor... Читать дальше...
There’s a strong temptation in politics to compare mass protests in support of Obamacare to the tea party protests of 2009, which nearly derailed health care reform before it passed. Jesse Ferguson thinks the comparison is flawed. Jesse worked on Capitol Hill during the law’s creation and for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. In the wake of Clinton’s defeat, he turned his efforts to saving the law from repeal. But in 2013, he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, which makes the fight an unusually personal one for him. Читать дальше...
Between her family and her day job, Rebecca Lave had a busy enough life before Donald Trump came along. But any remaining free time vanished after his election last year. Lave, an associate geography professor at the University of Indiana, still begins the day by making breakfast for her 11-year-old daughter and sending her off to school. But then she has to pore through a mass of emails from three insomniac Harvard graduate students who likely have been up all night documenting how President... Читать дальше...
