Washington Monthly

Conservatives have objected in droves to a remark President Obama made this past week during his visit to Argentina. Addressing a gathering of young adults, Obama said, “In the past there’s been a sharp division…between capitalist and communist or socialist…but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works.” The right’s hostile response, contended The…

Many left-wingers still insist that supporters of Donald Trump are conservatives, but Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins finds Trump backers “far less terrifying” than staunch right-wingers. In a Sunday post, Atkins opined that even though Trump’s base voters tend to be mean and “ignorant,” movement conservatives are “more morally objectionable” because they believe in “economic royalism.”…

These days, one of the biggest meta-debates in politics concerns apportioning blame for the staying power of the Donald Trump circus. How much of Trump’s popularity is attributable to, say, the mainstream media? To conservative talk radio? In a Sunday post, The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman pointed the finger at Republicans and absolved President Obama. Apropos of Trump’s economically…

A famous T-shirt of the early 1990s featured Bart Simpson’s message that he was an underachiever “and proud of it, man!” Such shirts would be fitting garb for the many Republicans who squander their intellects for ideological reasons, implied NYU public-policy professor Mark Kleiman in a Wednesday Washington Monthly blog post. “I doubt that Republican office-holders or voters have, on average,…

Some analysts have pointed out that it’d be risky for Republicans to preemptively block anyone President Obama nominates to succeed Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, but that approach wouldn’t necessarily end when Obama leaves office. Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman believes that if in 2017 a Democrat becomes president but GOPers retain sufficient power in the Senate, they’ll just…

Over the past few days, a great many left-wing commentators have weighed in on Antonin Scalia-related issues, especially Scalia’s judicial legacy and Republicans’ refusal to consider anyone President Obama might nominate to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court. Highlights have included Slate's Dahlia Lithwick remarking that "sometimes it seemed [Scalia] worked overtime to earn your hate. He…

Democrats have long envied Republicans’ message discipline, which presumably means Dems are relishing what Martin Longman calls the “disarray” in the GOP and in its main “official organ,” Fox News. “I don’t think right-wing media is set up to deal with an unorthodox candidate [Donald Trump] who doesn’t consistently hew to the conservative line,” remarked Longman. “I also don’t know how they’d…

If the eventual Republican presidential nominee takes the advice of The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker, he’ll choose Michigan governor Rick Snyder as his running mate, not in spite of what happened to Flint’s water supply, but because of it. “Snyder never gave a damn about the residents of Flint, and still doesn’t,” claimed Tucker in a Saturday post. “The Snyder vision—the Republican vision—is…

Once upon a time, Martin Longman didn’t think Republicans were so bad, but that was before the Tea Party, before the Iraq war, before Fox News became a major force. The Washington Monthly blogger detailed his decades of disillusionment in a Tuesday post. According to Longman, events which eroded his belief that Republicans were “decent people” included the “excesses of the Gingrich Revolution”;…

Five years ago this month, a great many Tea Party Republicans took office in Congress. For some on the left, however, that may not have been the worst political development of January, 2011. This coming Thursday, notes The Washington Monthly's D.R. Tucker, “marks the fifth anniversary of the bitter night…when progressive Americans, and indeed Americans of all political persuasions who value honor…

In the present, liberals vehemently oppose what conservatives stand for (and vice versa, of course). But do liberals believe there was a time when conservatism was somewhat reasonable, or at least not appalling? Martin Longman offered an answer in a Friday post: It was “the reaction to FDR’s New Deal” that crystallized the suspicious, radical conservatism of today. “Conservatism is supposed to…

Ben Carson seems to be joining the likes of Michele Bachmann and Howard Dean on the list of presidential candidates who generated a lot of early buzz but became distant also-rans well before a nominee was chosen. According to Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins, Carson’s campaign also offers yet more proof that conservatives tend to be easy marks for scammers. “The libertarian-conservative…

Starting with the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, several mass shootings have brought about considerable debate regarding restrictions on access to firearms for the mentally ill. D.R. Tucker argued last Sunday that denying guns to “deranged individuals” should have been a special cause for conservatives long before -- specifically, since March 1981, when John Hinckley tried to assassinate…