The Commons

As President-elect Joe Biden has been announcing members of his new team, he has been equally prone to pass on the message to the rest of the world that “America is back”.  While some degree of international re-engagement is a good thing, let us hope that the new administration understands that simply reconstructing the old […]

In a discussion with the journalist Toby Young on the Quillette podcast earlier this year, the Conservative politician Daniel Hannan suggested that the influence of the late philosopher Sir Roger Scruton (1944–2020) “is only going to grow with each passing year.” Yet the sum of Scruton’s legacy may not only be that he affected the […]

While Joe Biden will be the 46th President of the United States and Donald Trump will join the small club of incumbents who could not get re-elected, it’s fair to say that Biden’s triumph was not so overwhelming that it even begins to settle the question of which party will dominate the 2020s. Biden will […]

As large swaths of the country prepare to re-enter COVID-19 lockdowns—my current city of Denver, for instance, banned all indoor dining just last week—it is worth pausing to again lament the ham-fisted, blunderbuss nature of most of these virus-fighting measures. As many presciently pointed out at an early stage of the outbreak, mass, society-wide lockdowns are, at […]

Not many talking points survived November’s narratological cull. The assumption that high turnout would crush Republicans down ballot turned out to be false, with both parties seeing a groundswell of government-dividing, record-shattering support. The assurance that, this time, the pollsters knew what they were doing went from confident to quaint in the blink of an […]

While the unemployment rate had fallen to 6.9 percent in October, the employment-population ratio was 3.7 percentage points lower than in February. 6.7 million workers were no longer looking for work and 3.6 million workers were unemployed for 27 weeks or more. Congress is considering a stimulus and recovery package, that hopefully should include support […]

The CARES Act, intended to address the economic devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, offers especially generous tax treatment for charitable contributions in 2020, to encourage giving in a time of such extraordinary need. Households can deduct contributions up to 100% of their income for the year, potentially eliminating their tax liability entirely. “Donor-advised funds” […]

The 1990s called. They want Judy Shelton’s bankrupt ideology back.

Ever since the concept of a national industrial policy was proposed in the 1970s, it has received scorn from most neo-classical economists, with those advocating it treated as the economic equivalent of chiropractors. But recently the idea is getting a new life, largely because of the growing awareness of the economic, technology and national security […]

My friend Ryan Williams, Claremont Institute president, had an important tweet thread shortly before the election. With conversations already escalating about where we on the Right—especially the “new Right“—now go from here, Ryan’s thread takes on a special importance. I am reproducing his tweets here, and will then add a bit of my own commentary.

In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump’s share of the white vote shrank while his share of the nonwhite vote increased.  In Congressional and Senate elections, many Republican candidates benefited from increased support from nonwhite voters, particularly Latinos.  And the Republicans continued to pick up high-school-educated working class voters while losing more educated voters to […]

As the pundits, campaigns, and lawyers continue to unpack this election, there are a few things we know for certain. First, the pollsters and mainstream media in this country do not speak for the majority of America. Not even close. Second, identity politics is an elite fetish without resonance or meaning to most people in […]