Series
The Big Picture
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The Big Picture: Trump’s Attack on Knowledge
On any particular policy, we can always hope President Trump will flip-flop. Expel the Dreamers; save the Dreamers. Maybe he’ll keep the US in the Paris climate accords after all. Threaten Kim Jong-un, but not really blow up the world. One thing we can know for sure: whatever Trump does, it won’t be on the…
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The Big Picture: Unequal America
The US was once widely—and quite uncynically—viewed as a land of prosperity and opportunity. During the expansionary decades of the mid-20th century, it was treated as the world’s test case on the matter of whether capitalism, once properly tamed, could deliver prosperity and opportunity for all. Although no one imagined that the taming of capitalism…
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The Big Picture: Violence and Criminal Justice
On a rainy day in December of 2013, I visited the Heritage Foundation, one of the country’s most prominent conservative think tanks, to talk about how to reform the criminal justice system. I sat at a long oval table with a politically diverse group of researchers, policy makers, and institutional leaders and discussed what we…
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The Big Picture: Rule by Misrule
Posters declaring “No Trump, no KKK, no Fascist USA!” and the like feature in most anti-Trump rallies. Viscerally, it’s clear what the posters mean: no more threats to children of illegal immigrants, no more sympathy for white supremacists … but the placards do not convey that something more is at stake in the leader’s behavior…
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The Big Picture: Evangelical Voters
In the 2016 US presidential election over 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump—more even than for Mitt Romney in 2012 or for John McCain in 2008. Candidate Hillary Clinton had her …
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The Big Picture: School of Trump
Since Trump’s inauguration in January, education policy has not been a priority for the new administration. And, given his views on the matter, including an obsession with promoting alternatives to “government schools,” leaving it on the back burner may truly be a good thing. After nearly a year in office, it’s clear that other issues…
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The Big Picture: Coalthink
If we trust the president, we believe that he is, if nothing else, a businessman. Towers glittering across real estates seem to proclaim the truth of this; but when it comes to coal, both business and sense exit the scene. Mercurial to his core, the diligence with which Mr. Trump maintains his fidelity to coal—the…
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The Big Picture: Trump on Twitter
On its face, Twitter appears to be a quintessentially democratic medium. It promotes individualized expression, helps build social networks, and, until recently, seemed to epitomize the decentralized public sphere long called for by liberal theorists and digital utopians alike. During Donald Trump’s campaign for president, however, it became an engine of authoritarianism. Day after day,…
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The Big Picture: Protest, Violent and Nonviolent
Contemporary protests renew debates about whether or not violence is justified, raising questions about what even counts as violence. The demonstrations planned by right-wing groups for late August in Berkeley, to target the teaching of Marxism in universities, were cancelled by their organizers and then briefly revived by a small group of people who sought…
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The Big Picture: Resource Extraction
Trump has a range of cons going, but one of the most outrageous is this: he is about to fleece his working-class supporters in the Rust Belt, coal country, and the rural Pacific Northwest …
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The Big Picture: The Office of the Presidency
To borrow a phrase from his own reckless comment on North Korea, Donald Trump has debased the office of the Presidency to an extent “like the world has never seen.” His policies are capricious, often cruel, and potentially disastrous. But there is something rotten in the state of Trump that goes beyond even that. He…
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The Big Picture: Defending Society
Why, today, are many of the most antidemocratic voices in the United States not merely protected by Constitutional freedoms but draping themselves in them? Neoliberal political culture, now almost 40 years in the making, did not create neofascists, but it did create the conditions in which they represent themselves as freedom fighters, liberating individuals and…
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The Big Picture: Multiracial Cooperation
During periods when people are beset with economic anxiety, they become more receptive to political messages that deflect attention away from the real and complex sources of their problems. To counter this tendency, it is vitally important that political leaders channel citizens’ frustrations in positive, constructive directions. Unfortunately, in the past year and a half…
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The Big Picture
This public symposium is a collective effort to assess the rise of Trump and the impact of America’s unsettling turn toward authoritarian rule. It’s a call for us to pull back from the deluge of tweets …
