Politics

Politicians across the Western world like to speak fondly of the “middle class” as if it is one large constituency with common interests and aspirations. But, as Karl Marx observed, the middle class has always been divided by sources of wealth and worldview. Today, it is split into two distinct, and often opposing, middle classes.  read more »

This week, WSDOT leadership testified before the House Committee on Transportation in support of House Bill 2688, which removes the goal of congestion relief from the state’s transportation policy goals and replaces the rest. The agency said the bill supports its strategic plan, pictured in the diagram.  read more »

If you don’t know who Tom Steyer is, you should. He’s the guy riding in the internal combustion powered limousine that drops Al Gore off at his speaking engagements.

Mr. Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund manager, who has become the most influential environmentalist in American politics, made his billions from the coal-related projects his firm bankrolled that have and will generate tens of millions of tons of carbon pollution for years, if not decades, to come.  read more »

Adam Smith, the philosophical father of modern capitalism, may have been Scottish, but his ideas have long found their muse in America. Smith’s “voice has been ringing in the world’s ears for sixty years”, wrote one observer in 1838, “but it is only in the United States that he is listened to, reverenced, and followed.”  read more »

Once upon a time, Hollywood and California seemed to be leading the country, for better or worse, with outsized public figures and sometimes compelling, or at least entertaining, ideas.

California politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan achieved national power, establishing the primary strands of conservative thought.  read more »

I was a columnist in the print edition of Governing magazine for about five years. Sadly, the publication closed last year. But the company who owned it has relaunched Governing as an online only publication focused on the intersection of technology and public policy.  read more »

Today, President’s Day, is as good as any to draw some lessons from the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Crowded Field

FIRST, the Democrats do not yet have a candidate with proven national appeal.  read more »

Race, gender and class may be shaping our society, but increasingly generational change drives our politics.

Over time this suggests a major realignment of America’s party system that could create either whole new parties or transform the current, and failing, political duopoly.

One must look just at the results in New Hampshire. Bernie Sanders won by winning roughly half of voters under 30, according to exit polls, almost twice the percentage he gained among the rest of the electorate.  read more »

A decade ago, in the wake of the Great Recession, Lee County, Florida was dubbed “the foreclosure capital of the country” by the national media, the poster child for all that had gone wrong with the American economy.  read more »

The triumph of Brexit opens a new page not just in British history, but in the emerging configuration of the global society. It represents not just a rejection of universal globalism embraced by our political and business elites, including in Britain itself, but potentially the rise of new trans-national blocs held together not just by markets and capital, but culture and common beliefs.  read more »