ArcaMax

As one who shared the hope, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, that representative government, guaranteed liberties and global capitalism laced with some measure of welfare state protections would spread across the globe, I naturally look back over the intervening long generation and ask what went wrong.

In the 1990s, it seemed...Read more

After a flurry of activity -- the president's tariff threats and showdowns with Mexico and Canada, his expressions of interest in Greenland, the policy changes obtained by Secretary of State Marco Rubio's trips to Panama and El Salvador, the release of arrested Americans in Venezuela -- it seemed clear that the focus of Donald Trump's foreign ...Read more

Move fast and break things. That's the original operating philosophy of Facebook founder and Meta mogul Mark Zuckerberg, and it seems to be the operating procedure of President Donald Trump in these first weeks of his second term.

That makes a certain sense. In a largely successful society, unrocked by revolution, institutions come to be in ...Read more

The portrait of Andrew Jackson has returned to the wall of the Oval Office, put up in time to greet President Donald Trump as he entered for the first time as the 47th president.

It's a choice Democrats are poorly positioned to criticize, even though the seventh president owned slaves and ordered the Southeastern Indians west on the Trail of ...Read more

"It is not enough in life that one succeed," the droll economist John Kenneth Galbraith is supposed to have said. "Others must fail."

We're at a moment, in this week before Donald Trump's second inauguration, when the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president is succeeding at just about every enterprise he undertakes, while his political and ...Read more

The times, they are a-changing. The balance of power in the perhaps eternal battle between the experts and the masses has been shifting starkly, even wildly, with the former losing and the latter gaining clout.

That's been most visible in the series of announcements and selfies emanating from the gaudy precincts of Mar-a-Lago. The experts like ...Read more

New Year's Day is a good time to take a long look backward with a cautious eye toward possible futures. My guide here is RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende's 2012 book "The Lost Majority," whose bold thesis was unduly neglected by political scientists spinning tales of a permanent New Deal Democratic majority.

Trende's thesis instead was ...Read more

Maybe the lesson this Christmas season is that even if turnabout is fair play, at some point, enough is enough.

Start with the specious lawsuits brought against President-elect Donald Trump, to the great glee of many of his "Never Trump" and Democratic detractors. Some of them, especially Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's March 2023 ...Read more

Who'd have thunk it? The Assad regime collapses in Syria after 54 years. Russian President Vladimir Putin's hold on power seems undermined by imperial overstretch, and the mullahs of Iran have been unable to defend their skies and their leaders' hotel rooms from Israeli attacks.

Leaders of the two largest nations in the European Union have been...Read more

Why did Marc Andreessen -- inventor of the first internet web browser, and perhaps the prime venture capitalist in Silicon Valley today -- switch from his longstanding support of the Democratic Party and back President-elect Donald Trump this year?

Because, in his view, the Democrats who claim to be the great scourge of "disinformation" are ...Read more

Whatever happened to the Democrats' reputation as the party favoring the working man? Put another way, what happened to the Democrats as the party promising economic redistribution from the rich to the average man?

Those are questions that Democrats are asking after Vice President Kamala Harris' decisive, but not landslide, loss to President-...Read more

Postmortems of the Democratic Party's loss, running well beyond the defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), are starting to come in from some of the party's most perceptive thinkers.

And it was a loss across the board, not just this year. As RealClearPolitics' Sean Trende has argued, 2024's voting patterns were a "...Read more

Did anyone expect, when they heard the candidate's announcement at the base of the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015, that nine years later, he would be elected to a second term with sharp increases in Republican percentages from nonwhite people -- Latinos especially, but also Black and Asian people?

Opponents and commentators blandly call ...Read more