Power

Hard thinking on difficult and uncomfortable questions about how to keep everything from falling apart.

A previous, dark period of American history paired ethnic exclusion through mass deportations and ideological exclusion through political repression.

What the President’s confrontations with Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Colombia suggest about his expansionist vision.

President Donald Trump says McKinley made the United States prosperous through tariffs. Historians say that’s an incomplete understanding of the 25th president.

The attack on it is a violation of the nation’s post–Civil War rebirth.

NYC history suggests that the Left might profitably revive proportional representation as a tool to build its electoral strength.

He’ll run into the same roadblocks as Presidents Taft, Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush, among others.

I covered the 1989 fight over George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense nominee. It feels awfully familiar.

Frances Perkins’ challenged the United States’ restrictive immigration policies as FDR’s Secretary of Labor.

Trump's foreign policy is not as unprecedented as it seems.

The “Groypers,” the furthest-right fringe of Trump’s coalition, want the party to adopt an overtly white nationalist agenda.

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.

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

We have yet to solve the problems that Carter confronted head-on as president.

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.

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.

After the Civil War, Andrew Johnson issued the biggest act of presidential clemency in our history. It angered his party and led to his eventual impeachment.