Yesterday I checked my Twitter feed and learned that Roseanne Barr had finally blown herself up. Up all night tweeting about Soros and Clinton conspiracy theories (including a bizarre exchange with the cool-headed Chelsea Clinton about whether her husband is a member of the Soros family), Barr capped off her literary output with a tweet … More Roseanne Bombs
When did coalitional organizing between feminists and conservative women become impossible? I’m not sure, but as a feminist there is one place and time that I remember vividly: Indianapolis in the spring of 1984. There, led by Mayor William Hudnut, III Republican politician Beulah Coughenour and local movement conservatives, that city became one of the … More Why Can’t Women Bridge the Left-Right Divide?
At Public Seminar we are feminists, so we don’t raise our daughters to be princesses. We are open-minded leftists, so we don’t fawn over the ruling classes, but we don’t long to guillotine them either. And we are anti-racists, so we haven’t declared an end to racism worldwide just because a multi-racial American TV star has married … More Royal Wedding Roundup
My liberal and left-wing friends continue to puzzle over a single, unanswerable question: why do white, working class people vote “against their interests”?Perhaps the reason that this is an unanswerable question is that it is the wrong question. I would like to suggest that they don’t vote against their own interests– or at least, that when voters … More Elections Turn On Policy, Not Public Relations
How do we understand the contemporary conservative pride in political incorrectness? One of the core principles of contemporary conservatism today is that identity — race, gender, sexuality — should neither entitle anyone to rights, nor imprison them in an ideology. Identity, conservatives argue, is something that liberals use to create constituencies around “special rights,” rather … More Understanding Conservative Political Incorrectness
If, at some point, a new diagnosis is announced that describes people who can’t stop purchasing and reading books about the 2016 presidential campaign, I could be one of the first to sign up for treatment. I imagine that while wellness professionals will recommend some combination of meditation and exercise, psychologists will have a behavior … More A Historian Obsessed With the Present
Why are so many Christian conservatives refusing to criticize Donald Trump’s pay to play sex life? The news of a $130,000 settlement made to porn star Stephanie Clifford, a.k.a. Stormy Daniels, via alleged fixer Michael Cohen, is only the latest episode in which conservative religious leaders and the voters they influence seem unperturbed by personal … More For Conservatives, It’s Stormy Weather
What harm does Facebook do? In the last several months, it appears to have done plenty, opening its platform to operatives who were directly or indirectly employed by the Trump campaign. There is always someone new to blame for electing Donald Trump: depending on who you ask, it was Bernie Sanders, “the alt right,” Bernie … More The Facebook Follies
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