Right and Left: Partisan Writing You Shouldn’t Miss
Right and Left: Partisan Writing You Shouldn’t Miss
The political news cycle is fast, and keeping up can be overwhelming. Trying to find differing perspectives worth your time is even harder. That’s why we have scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that you might not have seen.
Has this series exposed you to new ideas?
From the Right
President Trump retaliated against the Assad government for a chemical attack in Syria that killed more than 80 civilians. CreditFord Williams/U.S. Navy
“In politics, when words and actions don’t mesh, we call that phoniness.”
Resounding what number of independent Trump supporters responded after the president conveyed rockets into Syria, Robert W. Cheerful voices disillusionment in what he sees as a broken crusade guarantee to keep the United States out of remote traps. Exhausted of past organizations' endeavors at "administration change," and distrustful of the proof about who was genuinely behind the concoction assault, Mr. Happy contends that President Trump may sell out the very voters that chose him. Perused more »
“This strike was an appropriate, proportional, and carefully calibrated response for the Assad regime’s repeated use of illegal chemical weapons.”
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Of course, not all commentators on the right were dismayed by President Trump’s actions in Syria. Writing for the Heritage Foundation’s blog, James Phillips applauds the president’s “bold tactical strike,” but he warns against devoting military resources to remove President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. “Regime change,” for Mr. Phillips, “is a bridge too far.” Read more »
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• Noah Rothman in Commentary:
“A president’s ‘foreign-policy doctrine’ is a thing that becomes transcendentally relevant only in hindsight.”
Noah Rothman explains why it’s O.K. that there is no “Trump Doctrine” when it comes to foreign policy. With the president’s intervention in Syria at odds with the “America First” message of his campaign, Mr. Rothman points out that “doctrines develop out of crises” and are inherently “evolutionary.” Read more »
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• Joel Kotkin in Orange County Register:
“California may never secede, or divide into different states, but it has effectively split into entities that could not be more different.”
Outside of the booming economies of places like San Francisco and Silicon Valley, there exists a second, less affluent California that Joel Kotkin describes as a “flyover state within a state.” Here, Mr. Kotkin argues, the progressive policies out of Sacramento only worsen the economic divide between the coastal cities and their interior counterparts. Read more »
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From the Left
• Greg Shupak in Jacobin:
“Fundamentally there are no ‘humanitarian’ wars. There are only wars.”
Efforts to justify American military intervention across the globe with humanitarian reasoning ring hollow to Greg Shupak. Syrians, he argues, are entitled to “self-determination and to sovereignty,” against the “imperialist domination” and “war profiteering” of American interventions. Read more »
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• Mehdi Hasan in The Intercept:
“In the case of support for Donald Trump, the results are in: It isn’t the economy. It’s the racism, stupid.”
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Democrats (and others) sought to explain Hillary Clinton’s surprising loss by highlighting the economic anxiety of President Trump’s voters. While acknowledging that it is good politics to blame economic disparity for voter choices, Mehdi Hasan sees no evidence for this conclusion. Instead, he argues, newly released data from the American National Election Studies supports the view that “the race was about race.” Read more »
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• Ezra Klein in Vox:
“While President Trump publicly worries over the fate of Syrian children, he is also barring them from fleeing to the U.S.”
Ezra Klein explains the hypocrisy and danger of a foreign policy mandated by President Trump’s instinct. “Unmoored from any coherent philosophy of America’s role in the world,” the Trump doctrine may be a mystery to even the president himself. Read more »
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• Robert Kuttner in American Prospect:
“While America’s biggest companies, especially those with reputational concerns, are singing kumbaya with a multicultural rainbow, these same companies are happily taking the tax cuts, the deregulation, and the anti-labor laws.”
It is tempting, Robert Kuttner writes, to see large corporations as a “firewall” serving to protect the country from President Trump’s more illiberal policies. However, while companies in Silicon Valley and beyond may defy the president when it comes to immigration and identitarian issues, on economic policy, “corporate elites are lined up at Trump’s trough.” Read more »
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And Finally: From the Center
• Erica Klarreich In Quanta:
“Voters should choose their elected officials [...] rather than elected officials choosing their voters.”
If there’s one issue that unites voters of any party, it’s the fundamental unfairness of gerrymandering — the partitioning of an electoral map for partisan advantage. So far, the battle against the practice has been stymied at the judicial level. In 2004, the Supreme Court rejected attempts to reign in gerrymandering because of one “unanswerable question”: How much is too much partisanship in a map? Now, a group of mathematicians will attempt to answer this question by using quantitative methods to generate millions of alternative maps and measure the degree of bias in any one district. Read more »
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• Mark Joseph Stern in Slate:
“These are constitutional values, not partisan ones.”
While Slate is a left-leaning publication, we put this article in the “Center” category because of Mark Joseph Stern’s appeal to readers across ideologies. In it, Mr. Stern identifies a question, currently being adjudicated in the courts, that he believes could unite conservatives and liberals under a shared desire to protect constitutional rights: Can merely carrying a handgun justify police search and seizure? Liberals, he writes, should be worried about the erosion of the Second Amendment at the expense of broadening the Fourth. Read more »
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• Polly Mosendz in Bloomberg:
“We set out to profile the lovers, haters, and robots that can be found in the replies to @realDonaldTrump to understand their motivations.”
What do Trump loyalists, Hillary Clinton supporters and automated bots have in common? According to Polly Mosendz, they constitute three of seven types of accounts likely to reply to the president on Twitter. Read more »
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• Emma Green in The Atlantic:
“It’s not a place of perfect agreement or complete consensus. But it is a place where at least we’re all arguing about the same values [...]”
Emma Green interviews Phil Gorski, a professor of sociology and religious studies at Yale, about his new book, “American Covenant.” In it, Mr. Gorski traces a history in which culture wars have undermined the “vital center” of American politics. In order to revive a shared ethos of civic values and responsibilities, Republicans and Democrats, believers and nonbelievers, must come together and re-learn how to talk to one another. Read more »
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