Sublime

The quality of Free America’s leaders steadily deteriorated—falling from Reagan to Gingrich to Ted Cruz, from William F. Buckley to Ann Coulter to Sean Hannity—with no bottom.

His famed Cross of Gold speech in 1896 resonated, and he ran for president several times but couldn’t win. Bryan was an advocate for the previous cycle, the one that had disappeared and was no longer relevant, even if he was still its powerful voice.

But most of all he came to despise the almost universal deceit, half lies and downright falsehood that had vitiated the life of 1939. He realized that it had been a land of hokum and cheat. The political speeches, the advertising slogans, the spit-licking, prostituted preachers, the billboards, the ballyhoo, the kept press, the pussy-footing profes

Each spring, this anti-federalist spirit flourishes in downtown Washington, where Whiskey Rebellion reenactors march beneath the uneasy gaze of George Washington, whose statue still perches atop the county courthouse.

But Barack Obama’s presidency comes at a time when key factors conducive to transactional journalism converge in an explosive way. Obama is the first Democrat elected to the nation’s highest office since the invention of Facebook and Twitter, the first since the Internet became firmly established as a means for journalists and their interests to fr

Yet the weakness of the moderates’ influence, this time on the Democratic side, was quickly revealed. Over the next few months, the news was monopolized by partisans on the left, who tried to redefine their party as champions of expanded and progressive government—with new entitlements for families, a “green new deal” for the world, a debt jubilee

Podhorzer told me this regional variation is “only surprising to the extent you believe that age explains almost everything about voters’ partisanship. But if you understand that the neighborhood you grew up in, the parents you have, the schools you went to, and the general politics that you are introduced into is a big factor, it shouldn’t be surp

If Fukuyama’s words were naive in 1992, then in the decade that followed the financial crisis of 2008 they became positively ridiculous. Indeed, he admitted as much in a book he published on identity in 2018.