Earlier this summer, I participated in the “5 Leadership Questions” podcast. Usually podcast interviews are pretty easy. I’m a guest on at least several radio shows or podcasts per week, and I usually don’t spend much time preparing for them. But this invitation was different, largely because they wanted to ask me questions about leadership. [ Read More ]
Friends, please join me at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, July 24 for a Facebook Live event hosted by The Gospel Coalition. I will give three 10-minute talks, followed by three 10-minute Q&A sessions with Facebook viewers. Envisioning Christianity & Politics for a Secular Age Building a Whole-Life Pro-Life Ethic Cultivating a Christian Hope for American [ Read More ]
Monday night President Trump will nominate a candidate to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. As reported, one of the finalists is Appellate Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett. If she is nominated, Democratic politicians and power-brokers will launch a scorched-earth campaign against her candidacy. At the [ Read More ]
President Trump is expected to announce his nominee Monday to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy. This nomination will be among the most significant actions of the Trump presidency and is generating an enormous amount of discussion and debate. On the left, the rhetoric is heated [ Read More ]
Last year, I composed a brief survey, asking my website readers to suggest which types of content they are most interested in reading at my website. I gained valuable insights from the survey, foremost of which is the fact that most of my readers want me to provide an evangelical evaluation of emerging social movements [ Read More ]
The past decade in American politics and public life has felt like the combination of a war, a carnival, and a Hollywood movie. We’ve experienced not only the injustices pointed out by populists, such as the corruption of Wall Street bankers whose irresponsibility crashed our economy and devastated innumerable ordinary citizens, and the overbearing, self-serving, [ Read More ]
If economic frustration is the shared experience that catalyzes populist movements, and if questions of identity form the underlying concern, then questions of rule provide the context for why questions about identity are so powerful. In response to the question, “Who should rule?” populism provides a clear answer: “The people.” On the face of it, [ Read More ]
Despite the attention given to economic frustrations, today’s American populism is as much or more about culture and identity. Populist wrath toward corporate and political power-brokers often stems from cultural disorientation, dislocation, and tension. And for some populists, it stems from prejudice toward people who are ethnically or culturally different. Whereas economic frustrations highlight the [ Read More ]
It should be unsurprising that economic considerations play a significant role in today’s American populism. Historically, populist movements world-wide have arisen most frequently as a response to economic frustrations. Consider the “populare” politicians of ancient Rome. As historian Barry Strauss notes, the populares were a series of Roman politicians—such as Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius, Gracchus, Saturninus, [ Read More ]
Populism, as we noted, is not an ideology. Over the past decade, America’s emerging populism has paired itself in various ways with progressivism, conservatism, socialism, and nationalism, and yet it cannot be reduced to any one of these ideologies. Given that the majority of this website’s readers identify as some type of “conservative” on the [ Read More ]