He’s identified real problems with our system and possesses the political will to pursue real change. Paired with a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, he could genuinely achieve what his predecessors could not and pass major immigration reform during his term. But the sweep of these actions — mobilizing the military, pausing asylum, halting the parole process, trying to end birthright citizenship — will incur far more costs than benefits. The innocent people who are trying to flee danger or persecution in their countries and immigrate to the United States legally out of a sincere motivation to better their lives, who often help our country grow and stimulate our economy, will be caught in the machinery of these changes. All told, these executive actions are a step in the wrong direction.

Our system tends to exacerbate criminal behavior more than rehabilitate it, and the United States uses imprisonment as a punishment far more often than is productive or necessary. When it comes to the January 6 defendants, I fully support consequences for those who broke the law, but I also believe the Justice Department acted improperly in how it handled many cases.  The biggest example of this prosecutorial overreach came in a recent Supreme Court ruling that found the DOJ wrongly charged hundreds of rioters under an obstruction of justice statute that elevated the severity of their cases. This case did not fall along ideological lines; Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority in the 6-3 decision, while Amy Coney Barrett dissented. At the time the ruling came down, roughly 50 defendants had been convicted and sentenced on that obstruction charge alone, and 27 of them were incarcerated.

The president pardoned the vast majority of the convicted rioters of all wrongdoing in a sweeping manner, with an apparent lack of knowledge of or care for the crimes he was excusing and without expressing any remorse for the pivotal role he played on that day.

Pre-Trump American conservatism was dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: limited government, cultural traditionalism, antiabortion politics, fiscal rectitude and free market economics. Now, I’m the first to concede the right often fell short of its ideals, but showing rhetorical fealty to the ideals was the binding firmament of conservatism. Those commitments still get some lip-service, but there’s no denying that on all of these fronts, loyalty to Trump is the more pressing litmus test. This has freed up Trump to move leftward on abortion, entitlements and economic policy generally.

Trump didn’t merely shatter the consensus on the right, he shattered the political consensus generally. Or maybe social media and those other trends were the battering rams and Trump merely benefited from the new landscape.

the bedrock assumptions about how politics “works” and the rules for what a politician can or can’t do, no longer seem operative. We’re all familiar with how his behavior has demonstrated that, but it’s also illuminated that the electorate itself is just different today. The FDR coalition is gone, the white working class is now operationally conservative, and the Latino and Black working classes are now seen as gettable by Republicans. The assumption that they are “natural Democrats” was obliterated in this election. Republicans have figured out how to talk to those constituencies.

Almost every credible analysis of this past election points to several dominant issues: dissatisfaction with the economy generally and anger over inflation particularly, immigration, and the vague but profoundly powerful anti-incumbent sentiment that’s swept the entire democratic world.

“Woke” certainly didn’t cost Democrats the election, but the discursive and emotional conditions of the woke world are an albatross around the neck of liberal elites who heavily influence public perception.

you can’t build a political coalition through emphasizing difference, you can’t staple together certain minority identities while rejecting majority identities and win elections.

Since 1949, job growth under Democratic presidencies has been more than twice as large as that during Republican administrations (2.47% to 1.07%). Excluding public sector jobs, the advantage is even greater (2.55% to 0.97%). Other key averages reveal a similar distinction during this period: Real business investment growth advanced 6.58% under Democratic presidents and 2.98% under their Republican counterparts; real personal income — excluding government transfers — increased 2.66% and real economic growth per capita (net domestic product) advanced 2.6% under Democratic chief executives, but only by 1.41% and 1.28%, respectively, under Republican leaders. Inflation has also been much more modest under Democratic presidents (2.91% compared to 3.28% under their Republican counterparts), with an even more decided advantage when volatile energy and food markets are excluded (2.87% compared to 3.59%).

Of the 11 U.S. recessions we’ve endured over the past 75 years, 10 began in Republican presidential administrations; only Jimmy Carter — embracing Republican-style fiscal, monetary and regulatory policy much more completely than any other recent Democratic president — presided over a “Democratic” recession. The two “double-dip” recessions of 1980 and 1981-82, straddling the late Carter and early Reagan administrations, are almost indistinguishable in their policy origins.

We are reminded consistently by pundits, journalists and scholars that tax cuts represent what may be our most readily available and useful tool for economic stimulus. Flat, or flatter, taxes, we are told, are the only means to the achievement of tax simplicity and tax compliance.

Even on the question of who tends to favor lower or higher taxes, it is easy to be deceived. When income taxes are reduced (at the federal and state level) and the entire tax code is rendered less progressive as a result, two things happen almost automatically: other much more regressive taxes rise to fill the vacuum created by universally demanded (if not readily acknowledged) public services and consumer demand falters as higher taxes begin to fall on those compelled to spend all that they earn. Overall economic activity and prospective revenue growth, in turn, begin to stagnate, triggering a vicious cycle of tax rate increases (among the untouched regressive tax vehicles), just to maintain public services and economic activity.

Republican politicians have stumbled upon a remarkably effective political strategy: preach tax cuts as the be-all and end-all of successful economic policy; ignore the ways in which federal income tax cuts often lead to increased tolls, fees and property, sales, and excise tax increases; relinquish all but rhetorical opposition to the federal deficits created by federal tax cuts; and cap it off by hinting repeatedly that more could be done — allegedly to great effect — by reducing government spending directed at “undeserving” and “unambitious” poor people of color.

Republican political leaders have their cake and eat it too, riding a diffuse anti-tax sentiment to political victory. Actual results in this game don’t often matter, at least as long as their Democratic opponents succeed in staving off the most precipitous decline with safety nets and the preservation of some progressive fiscal policy elements.

Begun quietly with what Republican activist and Wall Street Journal editor Jude Wanniski called the “Two Santa Claus Theory” — under which Republicans could counter the Democratic social spending Santa Claus with their own tax-cutting Kris Kringle — this approach promised political “success” even amid policy failure, for opponents could be pinned with the deficits and damage it produced.

Exploiting normal psychological tendencies to imagine that “more money in my pocket” and “less money in theirs” simply must be good policy, the widespread ignorance of actual public spending and significant intergovernmental fiscal policies (where federal change forces state and local change, or vice versa), and the compelling notion that personal economic opportunity or success must be derived from personal talent and initiative (rather than significant public policy reform), the “Two Santa Claus” strategy has buoyed a Republican Party that has consistently delivered sub-par results.

People subscribe to a set of beliefs because they identify themselves as members of a tribe—the left-wing or right-wing tribe. Thus they support whatever policy their team happens to support at a given moment. As Lewis puts it, “if the right-wing team is currently in favor of tax cuts and opposed to abortion, then those who identify with that team will adopt those positions as a matter of social conformity, not because both are expressions of some underlying principle.”

Issues like abortion, tax policy, immigration, criminal justice, and environmental regulation are mostly unrelated, so believing that (say) abortion is immoral, shouldn’t commit you to believe that (say) taxes are too high. Yet as Lewis points out, people’s opinions on these issues tend to travel together, as it were. Tribalism is a good explanation for why many Americans’ constellation of policy positions often are what they are: people first come to identify with a political party and only later do they come to accept all or most of its policy positions, even when the issues themselves are orthogonal to each other.

to approach the left/right split it might be best to start by wholly abstracting from political practice in order to enter the realm of political theory. In this context, political practice refers to the actions of politicians, social movements, and other political actors in the real world. Political theory, meanwhile, refers to the written or spoken articulation of political doctrines, either by writers (in their treatises) or politicians (in their speeches). Practice refers to what political actors actually do; theory refers to the normative justifications given for what ought to be done.

The main distinction between left and right is that the left advances a politics of egalitarianism, while the right opposes the left and attempts to defend some other value—tradition, for example, or individual freedom, or public order.

whatever its language, form, and following, it makes the assumption that there are unjustified inequalities which those on the right see as sacred or inviolable or natural or inevitable and that these should be reduced or abolished.

Consider some of the political ideologies we now refer to as leftist: socialism, radical feminism, and anti-racism. The three of them share a commitment to eradicating some system of power that is deemed to be unequal and hence unjust—respectively wealth, gender, and racial inequality.

leftists derive more egalitarian policy prescriptions from their view of equality than conservatives do, even if both can agree that all humans are of equal moral worth.

this analysis of the left/right split works best at the level of theory, as an ideal-type representation of both camps. The left claims to fight on behalf of equality, while the right claims to oppose the left and fight on behalf of individual freedom, or of social order, or some other value different from equality. In practice, both sides often fail to live up to their ideals; sometimes they even betray them entirely.

Across both time and space, leftists have sought to promote some strong version of equality, while rightists have sought to defeat the left and defend some other primary value.

Theories are helpful to the extent that they explain certain phenomena, and the left/right political spectrum does explain two of the main political-philosophic camps in modern history: those whose highest value is equality, and those whose highest value is both different from equality and, in their view, at odds with it.