Policy

The Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights have always been aspirational. When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, it was hardly self-evident that “all men were created equal.”  It took almost a century before the 14^th Amendment promised “equal protection under law,” and another century before could be seen as anything but a cruel hoax.  read more »

Assailed from two sides, American Jewry is having an acute crisis of identity.

Es iz schver tzu zein a yid. (It is hard to be a Jew.)

—Sholem Aleichem  read more »

What are political norms so badly eroded? Why are fair play and following the rules in decline in our society? How do we explain the decline in trust in institutions and the rise of conspiracy theories? What accounts for the electoral success of a charismatic populist like Trump?  read more »

There’s a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones faces off against a guy menacingly brandishing a scimitar. After allowing his enemy to show off some of his moves, Harrison Ford’s Indy character simply pulls out his pistol and shoots him.

That’s how many manufacturing folks feel about the microchip shortage. Instead of trying to maneuver around a problem that threatens to slice and dice them to death, why can’t America just pull out the big ammo – and build our own chip plants? Be done with the problem.  read more »

In explaining his shift away from Maoist economics, Deng Xiao Ping, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, described his market-oriented changes as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Today, American businesses, as well as the media and academic establishments that serve them, increasingly embrace what can best be described as “Chinese capitalism with American characteristics.”  read more »

For many liberal Americans, the European Union is the perfect elite model: a non-elected, highly credentialed bureaucracy that embraces and seeks to enforce the environmental, social and cultural zeitgeist of the urban upper classes. It is, as the establishment Council on Foreign Relations puts it, a “model for regional integration”.  read more »

For most of the last century, Los Angeles loomed as the next great American city, a burgeoning paradise riding the shift of world power west. It seemed posed to leave New York and London in the dust, the engines of growth inexorable. There was the city's dominance of the entertainment and aerospace industries, which incited migration from both the rest of the country and abroad, and all this promise was symbolized by a spread of suburban single-family houses that seemed to embody the ideal American dreamscape.  read more »

My latest column is now online in Governing magazine. It’s a very tough look at northern red state governments and how they have not delivered economic results. I specifically mention Kansas and Indiana.  read more »

California Senator Wiener has taken Governor Newsom’s recent Executive order to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles and hydraulic fracturing one step further with his introduction of SB 467 to obliterate the California economy. The bill is so broad and ambiguous that the results of its passage would lead to a total production ban in California and increase energy costs upon those that can least afford it.  read more »

The national consciousness regresses to the level of the toddler, casting everything in stark terms of good and bad.

We are here to guide public opinion, not to discuss it.
Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, 1804

By the calendar, the American republic is mature, but it’s becoming rapidly ever more infantilized. In everything from schooling to Covid-19 to race and global warming, we seem to be looking for simple, easy answers that a toddler might appreciate but healthy adults know are too pat to be true.  read more »