In 1994, after 40 years in the wilderness, Republicans swept both houses of Congress, running on Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” in which the GOP promised to hold votes on 10 popular policies in the first 100 days. They won, fulfilled the contract, and went on to control the House for more than a decade. More recently, the country gave...

“The present is getting better. The future, not at all.” So begins a recent New York Times article about a Pew study that shows the public adopting a rather dim outlook. “Even as more Americans say the economy is improving, a clear majority remain fearful about their children’s financial prospects,” it continues. The Pew study isn’t exactly bucking a trend,...

Senator James Lankford (R-OK) sent a letter to the president of ABC News, James Goldston, Monday expressing “serious concern” over an ABC article that labeled the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a nonprofit legal organization dedicated to protecting religious freedom, a “hate group.” “The July article covering Attorney General Sessions’ speech, classified a religious liberty non-profit, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF),...

Trump bans transgender troops President Trump announced that transgender troops would not be allowed to serve in the military on July 26, reversing the Pentagon’s 2016 decision to lift the ban.(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post) President Trump said he will ban transgender people from serving in the military in any capacity, a reversal of the Obama administration decision that would have...

So I just saw Dunkirk. For a review of it as a movie, see Jonathan Leaf’s lovely essay over at SCENES. Leaf says: “This is surely the best Hollywood war movie since Master and Commander. It may be an all-time classic.” And that may well be true. The movie immerses you in the concrete details of war, without punishing the...

The story of health care policy this week, this month and for the last decade (at least) has been a tale of partisan folly. But fear not, this isn’t another earnest pundit’s lament for the vital center to emerge, phoenix-like, to form a governing coalition of moderates in both parties. That’s not my bag. After all, I have always argued...

Josh Barro & Democrats’ ‘Hamburger Problem’: Liberal Judgment Guarantees Political Failure Progressives have a problem: They ladle unto every decision, even the most mundane and trifling one, an unattractive glop of gooey political significance. They can’t resist warning the rest of us that we’re abetting the destruction of the planet every time we, say, tuck into a Quarter Pounder. Josh...

Before I address the text of Donald Trump’s speech yesterday in Poland, it’s worth pulling up two quotes from our two previous presidents. These quotes, I think, encapsulate the difference between the ideas Trump articulated yesterday and the core ideas of many of his liberal critics. First, let’s go with Barack Obama, in a speech to the British Parliament on...

Western values, Judeo-Christian at base but also to some degree influenced by Greco-Roman views on philosophy and politics, are under threat from within by a nihilist “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go” mentality. Donald Trump told Poles fighting a version of that mindset that he was with them — and the American left had a freakout....

It’s a strange day when praising the Warsaw uprising, the Solidarity movement, and Pope John Paul II makes you a neo-Nazi, but that day is, apparently, today, following President Trump’s speech to an assemblage of dignitaries, alongside a cheering crowd, in Poland, on his way to the G20 summit. When it comes to that elevated oratory associated with the dignity...