Power

Jonathan Gienapp's attack on originalism deserves a serious response.

And is probably still at it. As newly released classified documents confirm activists’ long-held suspicions, the disclosures should also alert us to current dangers.

The worship of military technocrats underwrites American failures abroad.

Reagan’s capacity to inhabit and generate legend stemmed from his own impulse to substitute pleasing fictions for inconvenient facts.

Were the Knights of the Golden Circle responsible for Lincoln’s assassination? No one knows, but far-right secret societies always draw power from speculation.

The U.S. faces the likelihood of a bruising and raucous set of confirmation hearings — a clear break from the cooperative system the founders established.

Theodore Roosevelt started a version of DOGE too, but it failed to achieve much after Congress rejected its recommendations.

Michael Boskin’s volume gives a grim account of the state of federalism today.

The Constitution is absolutely clear on this point, but will that matter?

Grover Cleveland enthusiasts aren’t thrilled that Donald Trump won a nonconsecutive presidential term.

As an individual, Jimmy Carter stood as a rebuke to our venal and heartless political class. As a politician, his private virtues proved to be public vices.

As President, he told us that we needed to shift to solar power. We should have listened to him then.

He tackled segregation in the nation’s public colleges and fraud in student-aid programs, and established the Department of Education.

His unwillingness to take a radical stance forced him to respond to events by imposing austerity and doing little to strengthen labor.

Jimmy Carter is associated with an idealistic “human rights agenda.” In reality, he was paving the way for Ronald Reagan’s aggressive anti-communism.

Common conceptions of Carter are all wrong because they don’t acknowledge a crucial reality: he was a conservative.

The Southern president, who kept his head down following Brown v. Board of Education, would eventually declare that “the time for discrimination is over.”

Nixon was quietly vindicated by the Supreme Court in its Trump v. United States. A half-century later, the Supreme Court made clear that he was right all along.

Socialist legislator Zohran Mamdani is running for New York City mayor against a corrupt, unpopular mayor. Morris Hillquit did the same thing a century ago.

An enemies list isn’t a weapon against ‘the Deep State.’ It was a tool Richard Nixon used to create a deep state of his own.

According to conventional wisdom, the last quarter century of elections has proved that most of the country leans conservative. It all started with a map.

Basic political geography means Democrats might need to ask themselves a broader question as they look to rebound.

Today’s Trumpist radicals are not (small-c) conservatives – but they stand in the continuity of Modern Conservatism’s defining political project.

The New Deal-era creation of “Bill of Rights Day” obscures the real nature and guardrails of American liberty.

Donald Trump’s 2024 win, echoing the Gilded Age, highlights America’s volatile, close elections, partisan divides, and structural barriers shaping politics.

The politician presents a riddle for historians. He was a beloved populist but also a crackpot conspiracist. Were his politics tainted by his strange beliefs?

LGBTQ voters overwhelmingly went for Harris, but the idea that gay voters are always going to be solidly blue is a myth.

The Alien Enemies Act, first approved in the late 1700s, was last used during World War II to identify particular foreign nationals living in the US.

James Graham Wilson makes a compelling case that the under-celebrated example of Paul Nitze is both instructive and worthy of our emulation.

There are uncanny parallels between the elections of 2024 and 1856, with one big exception: in 1856, it was the political left that was on the offensive.