I like to apply free market analysis to American politics. Within established laws, politicians compete for votes and are rewarded for maximizing voters' preferences. As in economics, there are sometimes market failures, but mostly the system seems to be self-regulating.
New York City's notoriously incompetent election officials have not finished tabulating the votes in the June 22 Democratic primary, with its novel ranked choice voting system. But the first choices of voters -- minus some 124,000 absentees -- nevertheless reveal some important things about the differences between different segments of the Democratic coalition in America's largest city.
Give Charles Murray, longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, credit for courage. Again and again, despite outrageously unfair attacks, he has returned to the public arena and persisted in telling unwelcome truths. In his meticulous prose, with charts and tables so elegant as to betray an aesthetic bent, he makes his points with precision and clarity.
This week, the Senate unanimously passed a bill declaring Juneteenth a national holiday, commemorating June 19, 1865, when a Union general informed the last enslaved people in Texas that, thanks to the 13th Amendment, they were free. This was the denouement of a long process, begun more than four score years before and cruelly delayed for many decades.
Letting adolescents have their way." That's one way to describe two public policies, advocated vociferously by woke liberals, opposed surely by most. One primarily affects young men, the other primarily young women.
"A lot of people have egg on their face" for dismissing the COVID-19 lab leak theory, tweeted ABC News ' Jonathan Karl this week. "Some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them."
This week's Democratic primary election for Philadelphia district attorney could presage outcomes in the 2022 and 2024 elections, but not in the way the winner would like.
Five years ago next month, British voters, in the largest turnout ever, voted to leave the European Union by a 52% to 48% margin. It was an unexpected result, and a harbinger of Donald Trump's even more unexpected election as president five months later.
On the surface, Joe Biden seems to be doing pretty well. But underneath, there are signs of problems, areas where partisan overstretch threatens the underpinnings of what some are hailing as the new order of things.
The COVID-delayed results of the 2020 census are finally in, with totals for the 50 states and the District of Columbia at nearly one-third of a billion -- 331,449,281 -- and with surprises having to do with the short run and what French historians call the "longue duree."
How will future historians explain this? From 2001 to 2014, majorities of Americans, including supermajorities of blacks and non-Hispanic whites, told Gallup pollsters that "race relations" were either very or somewhat good.
It wasn't even close. The final count was 1,798 against and 738 for, 71% to 29%.
The big lie works -- until it doesn't.
"This is not politics," President Joe Biden said last week. "Reinstate the mandate if you let it down." Give him credit for consistency: When Gov. Greg Abbott ended Texas' mask mandate last month, Biden called it "Neanderthal thinking."
The acrid atmosphere last week at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage, Alaska, with its vivid murals of the 18th-century British seafarer James Cook's discoveries throughout the Pacific, sounds very much like the acrid atmosphere almost exactly 60 years ago in the Beaux-Arts American and Soviet embassies in Vienna: grim, at least for the United States.
How to explain Joe Biden's ideological transformation over the years? Perhaps it's the same as the explanation of why the chameleon's complexion changes when he moves from desert to forest: adaptation to local terrain.
"BIDEN," say the young demonstrators' T-shirts, imitating his campaign logo, "PLEASE LET US IN!" The picture ran in The New York Times, but one wonders whether whoever paid for the tees got his money's worth, for President Joe Biden's administration seems determined to let in as many immigrants as want to come.
When public policies have produced disastrous results, and when alternative policies have resulted in immediate, seemingly miraculous improvement, why would anyone want to go back to the earlier policies? Is there any reason to suppose that this time will be different?
The last decade has seen a boom in voter turnout -- for both parties. Between the 2012 and 2020 presidential elections, total voter turnout rose 23%, with Democratic turnout up 23% and Republican turnout up 22%.
You expect a certain number of stumbles from a new administration. President Joe Biden's incoming team professed dismay at having to create a coronavirus vaccine distribution program "from scratch," due to its predecessor's handling of the situation, and this week, Biden complained that "we didn't have" a vaccine when he "came into office." He promised to deliver over 1 million a day.
