Blaming China and threatening reprisals is not going to save any lives. It won’t open up the country any sooner. It won’t create a single job. But it might just get Trump re-elected--at least he thinks so.
Right-wing conservative movements are driven by a psychological complex of threat and hostility to heterodox opinion that makes them difficult to stop once they've developed.
The idea of truth reached by reason and evidence is under grave threat. Historians must find ways to publicly defend their methods for the good of history and society.
A historian of European dictatorship argues that Joe Biden must recognize that not just the election but the health of democracy is at stake and challenge the administration's efforts to operate above the law.
Politico reporter Dan Goldberg's new book details how thirteen black men overcame prejudice and indifference to integrate the Navy's officer corps in 1944.
Americans may wonder whether the nation can afford to maintain a small, parasitic stratum of society in splendor during economic collapse and pandemic.
Like suffrage protesters a century ago, nurses demonstrating at the White House to demand adequate protection for frontline medical workers can win by taking on the President on the grounds of spectacle and social media to shape public opinion.
The Lincoln Project's recent "Mourning in America" ad seeks to connect Donald Trump to deep misery in America. The history of political advertising suggests it's likely to work.
Liberal centrism has come up short in the COVID-19 crisis. Decades of cold war demonization of social democracy have made it disturbingly likely that an American fascism will fill the void.
An oral historian of medical care in the South observes that the current crisis shows weaknesses in the fabric of society that would have long been obvious to policymakers if they were more inclined to listen to ordinary people.
In a country with segments of people who deny science, act on revelation, see regular events as either conspiratorial or supernatural, COVID-19 offers a platform for misinformation and agitation.
In a crisis, unity and cooperation have been the positive sides of consumer politics. But they have always fought against price gouging, suspicion and stereotyping.
It is time to start demanding a successor to the National Youth Administration to meet the educational and economic needs of students--and to ask who in Washington will carry the torch that Eleanor Roosevelt raised during the Depression decade as the champion of low income youth.
The exact distribution of power in American federalism is debatable. But any federal arrangement demands consistency so that states and the federal government can cooperate in an emergency. That seems beyond the Trump administration.
Ron Steinman covered the notorious "Five O'Clock Follies" press conferences held by American military leadership in Saigon, and warns against comparing them to the Trump administration's daily Coronavirus briefings.
