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The Atlantic | July-August 2017 ALTHOUGH I was as dumbfounded on Election Day as the next D.C. bubble-dweller, I did feel that I had one scrap of insight into the working-class anger that helped power Donald Trump’s improbable victory. Last year, I got a taste of what many Americans are coping with in a globalized…
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National Affairs | Summer 2017 IN THE months before the 2016 presidential election, many advocates of gay rights and many advocates of religious liberty were convinced that an undesirable election result could present an existential threat to their ways of life. And in the days following election night, many activists for gay rights feared that…
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New York Daily News | May 14, 2017 FOR a period of hours after firing FBI Director James Comey, the Trump administration insisted that it was only following a recommendation from the Justice Department. The claim was unconvincing, but it lent a veneer of respectability to an action that gave every appearance of impeding an…
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The Atlantic | March 2017 WHATEVER his intellectual and political gifts, Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, was a cunning and dangerous criminal. For him, issuing illegal orders was literally just another day at the office. One such day, in July of 1971 (nearly a year before the Watergate break-in), found him…
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The New York Times | October 22, 2016 ALTHOUGH this year’s presidential race has not been a season of gentle ironies, there’s one to be found in the revelation of what are alleged to be Hillary Clinton’s closed-door speeches. After all the fuss about the bombshells they might contain, they show a warmer and more…
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The Atlantic | July/August 2016 IT’S 2020, four years from now. The campaign is under way to succeed the president, who is retiring after a single wretched term. Voters are angrier than ever—at politicians, at compromisers, at the establishment. Congress and the White House seem incapable of working together on anything, even when their interests align. With…
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The Atlantic | November 2015 THE presidency, it’s often said, is a job for which everyone arrives unprepared. But just how unprepared is unprepared enough? Political handicappers weigh presidential candidates’ partisanship, ideology, money, endorsements, consultants, and, of course, experience. Yet they too rarely consider an element of growing importance to voters: freshness. Increasingly, American voters view…
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Politico | June 30, 2015 I AM a gay marriage advocate. So why do I spend so much of my time arguing about polygamy? Opposing the legalization of plural marriage should not be my burden, because gay marriage and polygamy are opposites, not equivalents. By allowing high-status men to hoard wives at the expense of lower-status men,…
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The Atlantic | March 2015 IT often befalls presidents to be most criticized in office for what later turn out to have been their particular strengths. Disparaged at the time as simplemindedness, timidity, and slickness, Ronald Reagan’s firmness, George H. W. Bush’s caution, and Bill Clinton’s adaptability look in hindsight like features, not bugs. (Unfortunately, George W.…
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The Atlantic | December 2014 THIS summer, a friend called in a state of unhappy perplexity. At age 47, after years of struggling to find security in academia, he had received tenure. Instead of feeling satisfied, however, he felt trapped. He fantasized about escape. His reaction had taken him by surprise. It made no sense. Was…