By Joe Lowndes (March 21, 2020) Tucker Carlson is being cheered by some liberals for calling out NC Sen. Richard Burr for insider trading. Burr should be investigated for this, to be sure. But this is consistent with Carlson’s right-wing nationalism more generally – just as it was Pat Buchanan’s before him. However, it will ..
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By Chris Crass-Joe Lowndes (November 12, 2019)   Chris Crass: I’m grateful that the first time I heard of “OK, Boomer” and was responded to with “OK, Boomer”, I was having a friendly and beautiful debate with a 13 year old member of the Democratic Socialists of America, about socialist electoral strategy.  I said “Yes, ..
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By Joe Lowndes (September 12, 2019) It’s really interesting how this Franzen essay has either been affirmed as a kind of honest reckoning, or vilified as a kind of a privileged defeatism, by so many people I know and respect politically. I don’t love the piece, but I think Franzen is getting at something productively ..
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By Joe Lowndes (October 31, 2018) I’m unsure whether the question of whether Trump has the Constitutional authority to revoke birthright citizenship is the right one. Almost all legal scholars from left to right appear to agree that he doesn’t. But it also seems like whistling past the graveyard to say that this is merely ..
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By Joe Lowndes (October 10, 2018) The Trump administration went from denying climate change to predicting a 7 degree fahrenheit increase over the next century. People have pointed this out as a contradiction, but there is good reason for them to now endorse this second position. It makes much more sense for the proto-fascism of ..
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By Joe Lowndes (February 26, 2018) I have not posted much on Russiagate out of my own ambivalence. On one hand, I am wary of the liberal investment in both fantasies of deliverance and nightmares of foreign control, as well as the uncritical trust placed in the FBI and CIA. But on the other hand, ..
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By Joe Lowndes (August 12, 2017) People are rightly outraged by Trump’s equivocation in condemning “the violence on many sides.” But his comments in no way differ from those of many prominent liberals, like Peter Beinart in The Atlantic last week, who have continually depicted antifascists as thugs and criminals. Be ready: when the shock ..
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By Joe Lowndes (August 3, 2017) Over the last week the White House appeared to be in a kind of free fall, marked by palace intrigue, organizational chaos, and of course, the rise and fall of the Mooch. In contrast this commedia dell-arte however, we now get two proposals that advance a clear domestic agenda: ..
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By Joe Lowndes (May 11, 2017) The Comey firing puts the left in a bind. On the one hand, he was the head of the most powerfully repressive institution within the US. The chief enemy of all struggles for liberation, the damage it has done to people, organizations, and movements over the last century is ..
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By Joe Lowndes (January 29, 2017) As Steve Bannon’s central role in the White house becomes increasingly clear, we are struck by panic about who he is and how to understand his power. I increasingly think the source of it is to be found neither in his Huntingtonian worldview nor his self-described Leninist orientation toward ..
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By Joe Lowndes (January 26, 2017) Unable to sleep last night, I thought at least how relieved I was not to be teaching introduction to US politics and government again this quarter. I would have no idea how to do so. Institutions are always undergoing slow transformations, and everything – the presidency, congress, the bureaucracy, ..
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