On Tuesday, pop star Justin Bieber made national news by announcing that he and model Hailey Baldwin were engaged to be married. But the fact of his engagement didn’t get nearly as much coverage as the words he used in an Instagram post to describe his intentions in marrying Hailey. After gushing about Hailey, he talked about the value [ Read More ]
Prayers from around the world were answered this week with the daring rescue of 12 youth soccer team members, ages 11 to 16, and their coach from a flooded cave in Thailand. But we must not forget that one courageous diver sacrificed his own life to keep them alive. The diver, 38-year-old Saman Gunan, was the [ 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 ]