Private-equity barons like to say they “create wealth.” But more frequently they merely redistribute it.

What Clint Eastwood & Rick Santorum Have in Common

How Bad Policies Brought Us a New Gilded Age

Can the federal government finally say no to Big Oil?

How Sargent Shriver Built the Peace Corps

Mitt Romney thinks grumbling about inequality is really about envy. Progressives say that vitriol about the wealth gap is not the voice of envy but instead expresses a concern about distributive justice. But Romney is right—justice and job prospects are not the only motivations behind the placards and chants of the occupy movements. Envy is also an engine, just as it was the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions.

What Newt Learned from Nixon

Thanks to Mitt Romney and such well-known socialist intellectuals as Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, the United States is about to have the big debate on the nature of modern capitalism that should have started back in 2008. The focus will be on whether some kinds of capitalism are bad for the system as a whole.

Should Obama have signed the National Defense Authorization Act?

If the Republicans want to have a genuinely searching debate about the future of their party, they'd send Santorum and Huntsman off for the long fight.

Can Obama overcome post-election disappointment?

The president channels his inner Roosevelts

Two pols who speak their minds

The problems the United States faces are large but not insoluble. Yet sensible solutions can't be enacted. Why? Because an ideological bloc that sees every crisis as an opportunity to reduce the size of government holds enough power in Congress to stop us from doing what needs to be done.

Will the Occupy movement play into the hands of its enemies by living up to the stereotypes they are trying to create? Or will it instead move to a new phase that builds on its success?

The deficit hawks in Congress are ardent promoters of the economic well-being of future generations. And yet, when you look at the cuts, both those proposed and those enacted by these wizards of finance, you have to ask what kind of future they imagine will follow from their slashing frenzy, if not for their own children and grandchildren then for everyone else’s.

How Americans can save themselves from plutocracy

If Congress simply fails to act between now and January 1, 2013, the tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush expire, $1.2 trillion in additional budget cuts go through under the terms of last summer's debt-ceiling deal, and a variety of other tax cuts also go away. Are you still sure that a "failure" by the congressional supercommittee to reach a deal would be such a disaster?

What Perry & Cain Say about Today's GOP

This week's elections around the country were brought to you by the word "overreach," specifically conservative overreach. Given an opportunity in 2010 to build a long-term majority, Republicans instead pursued extreme and partisan measures. On Tuesday, they reaped angry voter rebellions.

Americans are waking up to income disparity

Paul Ryan Decries the Politics of Division

When the Vatican Confounds Conservatives

It starts with food

This is a party that was once innovative in thinking about affirmative uses of government. The GOP instituted the Homestead Act and created land grant colleges, the interstate highway system, student loans, the Pure Food and Drug Act and, yes, a prescription drug benefit under Medicare. What happened?

Does Rick Santorum Understand What Keeps a Household Together?

In which our reporter joins Wall Street's new occupants

Zero and 9.1. Those figures aren’t the won-lost record of the Red Sox during the final week the season. They are the Labor Department’s statistics for the number of jobs created in August, followed by the official unemployment rate for the same month. No wonder President Obama belatedly hastened to propose a major job-creation plan to a joint session of Congress.

It’s hard to imagine a group of people that's more a product of this singularly nutty moment. Every serious GOP candidate is either a Tea Partier or is desperately trying to look like one. The anti-Obama protest movement is now steering the selection of an anti-Obama protest candidate, and the result is an awfully sad crew of presidential wannabes.

Why Elizabeth Warren Makes George Will Nervous

The only popular movements of modern times that made any difference to the United States were the civil-rights campaign and the anti-Vietnam-War demonstrations of the 1960s. Not even the Great Depression produced a popular protest that changed anything. What will Occupy Wall Street accomplish?

The Week that Changed Politics

Why hasn't there been a Tea Party on the left? And can President Barack Obama and the American left develop a functional relationship? That those two questions are not asked very often is a sign of how much of the nation's political energy has been monopolized by the right since Obama took office.

When socialism saves capitalism

The Republican establishment is said to have grave qualms about Gov. Rick Perry. Here's the problem: the GOP establishment squandered its authority by building up the Tea Party's brigades and then fearing them too much to do anything to check their power. Worse for those who think Perry would be a general-election disaster is the growing confidence among conservatives that President Barack Obama will be easy to beat.

Our political system is not accustomed to the kind of battle that is going on now. President Barack Obama has been slow to adjust to it. The voters are understandably mystified and frustrated by it. In the meantime, the economy sits on the edge between stagnation and something worse.

An Interview with Ken Burns

Social Security has been an object of suspicion ever since it began in 1935. Conservative critics warned it would be a stalking horse for socialism, the death of thrift and charity, and a crippling burden on employers. It turned out to be none of these things, and instead became one of the most successful and popular government programs in the nation’s history.

Why so many Americans remain unemployed

What we lost in the decade since 9/11

How workers vanished from our national consciousness

Obama's poll numbers are dropping. Time to mount an offensive

When former President George W. Bush joins President Barack Obama at “Ground Zero” in lower Manhattan on September 11 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, the nation will be reminded, if only for a few hours, that the preservation of democracy requires real sacrifices and the willing embrace of duties, not just the pursuit of private interests and freedoms.

The Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Both Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann frequently decry federal power. Perry has suggested Texas might secede from the union. Bachmann has called President Obama's federalist views "anti-American." Either a bad case of constitutional amnesia has beset Perry-Bachmann or there was a grave failure in their high-school civics courses.

President Obama should not be constrained by what the Tea Party might allow subservient Republican leaders in Congress to do. He should state plainly, eloquently, and in detail what he thinks needs to be happen. Neither history nor the voters will be kind to him if he lets caution and political calculation get in the way.

For President Obama, these are the days of never hearing an encouraging word. Not since his own supporters were losing faith in his presidential campaign in the summer of 2007 has Obama confronted so many bad reviews and such widespread frustration and angry criticism from his own side.

Is Accommodation a winning hand?

From the archives: Defending FDR's National Recovery Administration

The first week of August 2011 will be remembered as a singularly irrational, wasteful, and shameful moment in the political and economic history of the United States. It reflected much of what is wrong with the priorities of our political elites and the obsessions of those who now hold effective veto power over our government.

How persuasively is the church making its case against gay marriage?

Thinking clearly about a slogan & a slur

Up with moderation

The debt 'crisis' distracts from the real problem: unemployment

Time for the GOP to cut the Tea Party loose

An interview with Cardinal George

The debt 'crisis' has kept the government from doing its job

Danger remains in the the debt debate

Four myths about government spending

Our love affair with capital punishment

When the Tea Party comes home to roost

What our Declaration really said

Does moderate Republican Jon Huntsman stand a chance?

Whatever the punditocracy may have made of Mitt Romney's formal announcement of his presidential candidacy last week, we could all give the guy credit for trying to reassure us that not everything in politics has changed.

Why Paul Ryan is losing the argument

When Qaddafi is finally deposed, the world may agree that “all’s well that ends well.” But first, some questions: Why did France & Britain lead the way? Why did the United States join the effort? How humanitarian is this humanitarian intervention? Is Qaddafi’s fitting end being achieved by doubtful means?

While the United States remains utterly frozen in a debate about budget deficits and all the things that government shouldn't do, other countries are marrying public and private resources to make themselves stronger and more competitive.

Unlike the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, this tragedy comes not from the stupidity of man, but from the hand of nature. And unlike hurricanes, which arrive gradually and affect a wide area, tornadoes are localized, sudden, and furious. For that reason, they raise questions of theodicy in an acute way.

The atomization of American society

It's likely you didn't hear much about the controversy over John Boehner's recent commencement speech at Catholic University. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that Boehner's critics were civil and respectful.

Republicans holding the debt ceiling increase hostage to their efforts to eviscerate programs know perfectly well that Congress will not risk a financial crisis. They even acknowledge this.

The U.S. government faces few challenges more important than renewing people’s trust in the honesty and fairness of our financial institutions and economic system.

If you’re a fan of the History Channel, you’ll feel right at home watching Robert Redford’s recreation of Abraham Lincoln’s murder near the beginning of The Conspirator.

We’re still debating whether what we’re doing in Libya can rightly be described as war, though bombs dropped amid an “intervention” are just as deadly. But where’s the debate over whether it’s fair or accurate to assert that Republicans in Congress have not-so-stealthily declared a “war on women”?

Saving Motown worked

Who is Obama? Now we know

As the United States gradually emerges from its worst recession since the 1930s, Washington has again turned its attention to the nation’s debt.

A review of Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary, edited by Steven R. Weisman, and Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers

Why so few conservatives become professors

The idea that "false choices" are distorting our politics is under attack. I want to defend the concept for both substantive and personal reasons.

The GOP candidates might be more formidable if President Obama were less strongly favored. And over time, what Congress does will be shaped by the campaign's direction. Views of 2012 are heavily influenced by the metaphors that prognosticators invoke. Will it be 1984, 1988, or 1992?

The American ruling class is failing us—and itself.

President Obama has finally decided to take his own side in the philosophical struggle that is the true engine of this nation's budget debate. After months of mixed signals about what he was willing to fight for, Obama laid out his purposes and his principles.

What budget cuts can tell us

U.S. democracy is stalled because powerful, unaccountable economic and political elites capable of domination are geared up, while those whom they would dominate are largely gearless.

In no serious country do threats to shut down the government become a routine way of doing business. Yet in our repertoire of dysfunction, we are on the verge of adding shutdown abuse to the abuse of the filibuster in the Senate. The GOP, however, was rewarded for going to the brink.

The Ryan budget reveals the Right's extremism.

Will Obama take on the GOP's irresponsible budget plan?

Did the GOP overplay its hand in the Midwest?

Republicans changed attack strategies in response to Obama's moves after the 2010 election designed to place himself above partisan infighting and to cast him as a nonideological voice trying to talk reason to politicians mired in the past's unproductive bickering.

Why won't Obama stand up to the NRA?

The GOP is using a bogus metaphor to cut programs & bust unions

What Wisconsin can teach Washington

Wisconsin is said to have a large budget deficit, which makes it no different from the federal government, most other states, and probably most municipalities in the United States. What makes Wisconsin different is that Gov. Walker is trying to cut costs by redefining the relationship between the state and public-sector unions.

Richard Nixon espoused what he called "the madman theory." It's a negotiating approach that induces the other side to believe you are capable of dangerously irrational actions and leads it to back down to avoid the wreckage your rage might let loose.

This book proposes a new narrative for understanding the past three decades of our democratic life, a “thirty-year war” in which a long slow struggle through much of the 20th century for greater equality of income and wealth has been reversed.

What can we do to prevent another Tucson?

Why the Wisconsin fight matters

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has chosen the low road.

Consider the political conversation in our nation's capital. You'd never know that it's taking place at a moment when unemployment is at 9 percent, when wages are stagnating, and when the United States faces unprecedented challenges to its economic dominance.

Secularism & Democracy

How should we respond to the Tucson shootings?

After Obama delivers his budget proposal to Congress today, it will be hard to pretend anymore that the president and House Republicans even live in the same political galaxy, let alone have a chance of reaching lots of bipartisan agreements.

When the paper trail disappears

How Obama can define moderation

On January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy began his presidency with a speech at once soaring and solemn. Fifty years on, we have not heard an inaugural address like it. Tethered to its time and place, it still challenges with its ambition to harness realism to idealism, patriotism to service, national interest to universal aspiration.

Health care & the new civility

It wasn't our mental-health laws that enabled Loughner. It was our gun laws.

Are we committing economic suicide?

Gabrielle Giffords & the rhetoric of violence

After a tough 2008 and 2009, Wall Street and big companies made a strong comeback in 2010. By conventional wisdom, that is a harbinger of a broad, strong recovery. But these are strange times, and we may be seeing the economy of the super-rich finally decoupling from the rest of us.

Is the GOP interested in solving real problems?

There is already a standard line of advice to Speaker-to-be John Boehner that goes like this: Democrats overreached in the last Congress by ignoring "the center." Republicans should not to make the same mistake, lest they lose their majority, too. That counsel is wrong.

How are we to square the achievement of so many goals that have long been on progressive wish lists with the resounding defeat suffered by supporters of these measures in November?

The Civil War should be a no-spin zone

Really

Bipartisanship is not the same as political moderation.

The country's desire to reverse its sense of decline was central to Obama's victory. Consider his emphasis on "Hope" and "Change We Can Believe In." Those sentiments were responses to fears of lost supremacy and explain the religious overtones of the Obama crusade.

What does President Barack Obama think of those who fought and bled to pass his bills in Congress (in some cases losing in this year's election for their pains) while also defending him against wild charges from the right wing?

Three defeated Democrats offer their party advice on making Washington work again.

Where is Obama's conciliatory impulse leading the Democratic Party?

The church in the public square

What the success of the Tea Party portends

Did Obama Learn the Wrong Lessons from Carter?

Republicans are risking the nation's security for short-term political gain

In mid-November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops discussed a report detailing an extensive “review and renewal” of its domestic-poverty program, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. The reevaluation came in response to complaints that the CCHD’s grant recipients were involved in efforts that contradict Catholic teaching.

Nancy Pelosi promised a vote if 14 members of Obama's deficit-cutting commission could agree on a plan. If John Boehner and his new GOP majority are as serious about deficit cutting as they say, he should make clear he'll hold such a vote in the next Congress since there will be little time for debate in the lame-duck session.

For liberals, the publication of Bush’s memoirs has largely been an occasion for revisiting the areas in which they rate his presidency a catastrophic failure. It’s hard for liberals to fathom that there are any parts of the Bush legacy we might miss. But there are.

Obama, the bishops & the bomb

The lame-duck session of Congress that kicks off this week will test whether Democrats have spines made of Play-Doh, and whether President Barack Obama has decided to pretend that capitulation is conciliation.

Funny, isn't it? When progressives win, they are told to moderate their hopes. When conservatives win, progressives are told to retreat.

The results of the midterm elections were both emphatic and ambiguous: a strong message was sent, but no one is entirely sure what it is. It’s easier to say what Americans are feeling right now—frustration, impatience, and, increasingly, anger—than to know what policies they expect their elected representatives to adopt.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calmly assessing the political cyclone that routed her Democratic majority and will, at least temporarily, force her to vacate one of the best offices in the city, with its inspirational view of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

The election was a setback for Democrats, not permanent defeat

The 2010 midterms will go down as one of the most fiercely fought campaigns in our political history. What was this strife all about? Yes, there were policies to fight over. But above all, there was a tsunami of money.

Discuss that and other issues at dotCommonweal's open thread on the midterm election results.

The place of passion in politics

"People want to know you're fighting for them when they're hurting," argues Pennsylvania Congressman Patrick Murphy. If enough incumbent Democrats like Murphy survive on Tuesday, they will contain the damage of a difficult night.

What will the nation’s politics look like if, as expected, the Republicans take back the House on November 2? Indiana’s Mike Pence, chairman of the House Republican Conference, issues a warning and a prediction. “There will be no compromise on repealing Obamacare,” he said. “There will be no compromise on stopping Democrats from growing government and raising taxes. And if I haven’t been clear enough yet, let me say again: No compromise.”

Is Joe Sestak leading a Democratic surge?

Secret money is corrupting our democracy.

Let us contemplate the joys of being in the political opposition when unemployment in your state tops 10 percent. 

Christopher Lasch & the American predicament

It's not as bad as you think

The GOP's disturbingly brilliant midterm strategy

Carl Paladino & the politics of anger

How 'Citizens United' is deforming our elections

Can Virginia Democrat Tom Perriello Run on his convictions & win?

Damage & disappointment on the Gulf Coast

With the unemployment rate still hovering near 10 percent, Americans are understandably dissatisfied with the pace of economic recovery and apprehensive about the country’s future. What is perhaps less understandable is the degree of rancor toward President Barack Obama and the federal government as a whole.

More & more Democrats are running on the reforms

Obama's trip to Madison reflected the White House's realization that there is no substitute for a president making a coherent argument, taking on his opponents, and acknowledging his dependence on those who brought him to office.

The emergence of the Northeast as a Democratic firewall has been a long time in the making. The realignment of the South with the GOP, which made the party more conservative, called forth a counter-realignment among Northern moderates. That trend is accelerating.

The outsized influence of the extreme Right

Where are the serious Republicans?

Why isn't anyone talking about Obama's tax cuts?

What charter-school advocates don't want you to know

GOP hopefuls Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina have much in common: Both are wealthy executives-turned-candidates, both want to dismantle "big government," and both want to win at any cost. Their victories would further frustrate the Democrats—and Obama's reelection chances.

A short & unfinished history 

How the Fourteenth Amendment became controversial

Where have all the moderate Republicans gone?

Instead of acknowledging that the government can no longer afford tax breaks for everyone, conservative politicians are calling for deep spending cuts—at precisely the moment when the private sector and states most need the federal government’s support. The politicians solemnly advertise their anxiety for future generations that will have to repay this debt; they seem somewhat less worried about a generation of children whose schools are being gutted by state cutbacks.

In deciding Citizens United, the Supreme Court broke with decades of precedent and said Congress had no right to ban corporate or union spending to influence elections. In order to fix that mistake, three GOP senators will have to step up.

Until Obama's Labor Day speech in Milwaukee and his Cleveland-area statement of principles today, it was not clear how much heart he had in the fight, or whether he'd ever offer a comprehensive argument for the advantage of his party's approach over the other's. Now we know.

The nation's extraordinary prosperity from the end of World War II to the 1970s was in significant part the result of union contracts that, in words the right-wing hated Barack Obama for saying in 2008, "spread the wealth around." A broad middle class with spending power to keep the economy moving created a virtuous cycle of low joblessness and high wages.

By insisting that "it's time to turn the page," the president was talking about more than Iraq. He was also trying to turn the page on a particularly rough period for the Democrats and for his presidency.

The Democrats are in a hole because Obama has not engaged in an extended dialogue about what holds his achievements together, or why his view of government makes more sense than the GOP's attacks on everything Washington might do to improve the nation's lot.

Yesterday's anti-Catholicism & today's Islamophobia

Republicans are in the midst of an insurrection. Democrats are not. This vast gulf between the situations of the two parties—not some grand revolt against "the establishment" or "incumbents"—explains the year's primary results.

The principled case that must be made is that the brand of conservatism seeking power this year is irresponsible, incoherent, and untrue to the best of its own traditions.

How not to settle the gay-marriage question

Liberals may lament the administration’s failure to make progress on immigration and climate-change legislation in this congressional session, but it may be time to shift energies to protecting what has already been passed. 

When I sat down last week at the Capitol with Dodd to talk about his thirty-six years in Congress, he didn't change my attitude toward the longest-winded legislative body in the world. But he reminded me of something missing in our public life: an ebullient joy about what democratic politics can accomplish.

A review of Ill Fares the Land, the late Tony Judt's final book

Dear Republicans, do you really want to endanger your party's greatest political legacy by turning the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution into an excuse for election-year ugliness?

Don't for an instant imagine that the comeback of the nation's rescued car companies, particularly General Motors, will change the way we debate government's role in the economy. When it comes to almost anything the government does, ideology trumps facts, slogans trump reality, and loaded words ("socialism") trump data.

The notion that when we are fighting two wars, we're not supposed to consider raising taxes on wealthy Americans is one sign of a country that's no longer serious.

The minute you say there are racist elements in the Tea Party—reflected in signs at rallies, billboards, and speeches from some of its major figures—the pushback goes from cries of persecution to charges that those who are criticizing divisiveness are themselves the dividers.

Andrew Linzey was among the first to open up the field of “animal theology." This book is neither his best nor his most original work, but it is still worth recommending to anyone unfamiliar with his arguments.

Conservatives have long decried “activist” judges who supposedly “legislated from the bench,” but the Roberts Court is hardly shy about breaking new legal ground.

When bishops speak about health-care policy, Catholics don't have to agree

Barack Obama's campaign promise of change did not include a pledge to transform American conservatism. But one of his presidency's major legacies may be a revolution on the American right in which older, more secular forms of politics displace religious activism.

Democrats should feel a lot better than they do. They enacted major health-care reform, pulled the country out of economic spiral, and are about to pass the biggest reform of Wall Street since the New Deal. The GOP seems to be making itself unelectable. Yet Democrats are petrified—and this was true before the oil spill made matters worse.

Lessons from the BP debacle

Might the USCCB be wrong about the health-care law?

It will take some time before a new array of justices on the Court rethinks the labored departure from precedent made by the majority in Citizens United. Meanwhile, much corporate mischief will have been done.

American couples’ ambitions for personally fulfilling marriages have never been higher nor—given the high rates of divorce—more elusive.

How the Obama administration deals with a challenge even more complicated than it looks will determine the kind of summer the president has and the kind of election the Democrats will face this fall.

It should become the philosophical shot heard 'round the country. In a speech that received far too little attention, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter took aim at conservatives' favorite theory of judging. Souter's verdict: It "has only a tenuous connection to reality."

Behind the jobless recovery

The fact that the answer to that question seems as murky as the water around the exploded oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico suggests that this is an excellent moment to recognize that our arguments pitting capitalism against socialism and the government against the private sector muddle far more than they clarify.

Compromise is not a dirty word in democratic politics, nor is the balancing of conflicting goods foreign to the church’s tradition of casuistic moral reasoning. So why do so many American bishops appear to spurn both in their prolife advocacy? Do they really think the hardest line is always the best one, or the most persuasive?

How the bishops conference gets health-care legislation wrong

Why Washington's conventional wisdom of impending Democratic catastrophe is one of the best things Obama's party has going for it.

A review of John Cassidy's book How Markets Fail

How dirty a word?

Arizonans have plenty to be anxious about, but indulging in a crude nativism won’t stop the flow of undocumented immigrants or prevent violent crime along the border.

This year's elections may exacerbate the difference between our two political parties, but not in the way most people are talking about. Republicans will end the year a more philosophically coherent right-wing party. But the Democrats will, if anything, become more ideologically diverse.

Brace yourself for several months of occasionally biting but essentially meaningless political theater over the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.

Ever heard the one about the guy who hated government until a deregulated Wall Street crashed, an oil spill devastated the Gulf of Mexico, a coal mine collapsed, and some good police work stopped a terrorist attack?

Among elected officials, journalists, and average citizens, intensifying partisan polarization is thought to be one of the dominant political trends of our times. Yet it has proved remarkably controversial among political scientists.

The Democrats’ financial-reform plan doesn't go far enough.

Maybe the next time someone calls Barack Obama a socialist, the president shouldn't issue a denial. He might instead urge his accuser to read the hearing transcript of this week's congressional testimony from the Goldman Sachs guys in their beautiful suits.

The New York Times's worldview is secularist and secularizing, and as such it rivals the Catholic worldview. But what makes the Times unique is that it is not just the nation's self-appointed newspaper of record. It is, to paraphrase Chesterton, an institution with the soul of a church.

Why President Barack Obama's next Supreme Court nominee is so important

HBO looks at New Orleans in 'Treme'

Only after disasters such as the collapse at Upper Big Branch Mine do we remember that regulations exist for a reason. We will eventually learn what went wrong at the mine and whether the safety violations were part of the problem. But then what will we do?

The men and women of the IRS collect the revenue that allows the government to finance our troops who are in harm's way, help our wounded warriors, and do so many of the other things the vast majority of us want our government to accomplish. Yes, if you support our troops, you have to support the work of the Internal Revenue Service.

An interview with filmmaker Woody Allen

Where do Catholics look for hope?

A gay parent on choosing Catholic school for her kids

In praise of Rep. Bart Stupak's courage

If this film, which contrasts kindly abortion-clinic workers with loony prolife activists, is what passes for an evenhanded view of both sides of the abortion debate, prolifers still have a long way to go with the media.

Yes, the fight for health care seemed very much like the Greek myth: Every time the White House found itself on the verge of rolling the health-care stone up the hill, some event -- say, Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts -- would force it to start over with a new strategy.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to use an attack on health-care reform to bring us back to the 1830s. Cuccinelli, to cheers from the Tea Party crowd, went to court this week to overturn the new law, which he says conflicts with a Virginia statute "protecting its citizens from a government-imposed mandate to buy health insurance."

America needs more than populism from the Right

In approving the most sweeping piece of social legislation since the mid-1960s, Democrats proved that they can govern, even under challenging circumstances and in the face of significant internal divisions. The result is a historic victory for President Barack Obama.

There is a pathetic quality to our discussion of deficits and fiscal responsibility because we never face up to how much we need government to do. Our debates are also characterized by a politically convenient amnesia.

A review of the book Why Not Socialism?

In a city where the phrase bipartisan initiative is becoming an oxymoron, the urgency of containing the damage the Supreme Court could do to our electoral system creates an opportunity for a rare convergence of interest and principle.

If we learn nothing else in 2010, can we please finally acknowledge that our partisan divisions are about authentic principles that lead to very different approaches to governing?

Fisher reveals how a Hollywood-born, bestselling Jewish novelist and a skeptical Greek Orthodox director came to a tell a story grounded in papal encyclicals and Catholic social teaching.

It is easy enough to despair over political paralysis and animosity in Washington, and economic uncertainty here and abroad. Yet even when it comes to the often ugly business of secular politics, despair remains a sin.

Why has this middle-of-the-road president inspired such enthusiastic counter-organizing, and called forth such venom? The most popular theory on the left is that Obama's race is a big part of the story, and that we are seeing a reaction among some whites against his multiracial, multicultural political coalition.

If President Barack Obama gets to sign a health-reform bill, as I believe he will, one reason may be Rep. Jay Inslee's difficult experience renovating his kitchen.

Last month’s 5–4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission did not surprise students of this conservative-leaning Court. Still, the Court’s privileging of the “rights” of artificial legal entities over the democratic needs of the American public remains indefensible.

The Problem Of Climate-change Politics

Joe Biden on the Economy & American Power

Who on the national stage today would knowingly blow up his or her political future for the common good, no matter how important the issue? Pushing through health-care reform could be politically perilous for today’s Democrats, but wouldn’t that be better than caving on such an important moral issue?

Why abortion shouldn't derail health-care reform

It turns out there were core contradictions in the promises Barack Obama made to the country in 2008. They caught up with his party on Tuesday in Massachusetts.

Reaching agreement on a health-care bill is harder in theory than it will be in practice. Between now and the day the measure goes to President Obama's desk, there will be many crisis points, much posturing, and dire warnings of impending failure. There are real differences between the the House and Senate bills. The last few votes are always the hardest to get.

Time to turn indignation at what happened on Wall Street into prudent reform.

Not even the most optimistic Democrats think their party can escape losing seats. But with so many states now unexpectedly in play, surprise Democratic victories could offset some Republican gains. On the other side, retirements -- not to mention the moves of a certain president and vice president out of the Senate -- have opened terrain for the Republicans that would normally be blocked.

The Democrats are at each other's throats over health care legislation that should be seen as one of the party's greatest triumphs. They are being held hostage by political narcissists and narrow slivers of their coalition. An increasingly bitter and negative Republican Party may not be able to win the midterm elections, but Democrats definitely can lose them.

The stars may—just—be aligned to squeeze a national health-care bill out of Congress within the next month or two. Both houses have (barely) passed bills, and now they must cobble together a lowest-common-denominator consensus that can survive one more vote in each house. President Barack Obama is almost certain to sign anything they send him.

The U.S. bishops & health-care reform

Here we turn our attention, as we often do, to the uncertainties and dangers facing the nation as a whole.

Will Catholic schools become charter schools?

Wishful thinking in Sacramento

Meeting the nation’s long-term obligations won’t be possible without a stable economy.

That’s the number of people who will starve this year—more than ever before.

If the uninsured can’t count on the do-gooders to help them, where else can they turn?

How mean-spirited will we allow our politics to become?

A review of Jackson Lears's 'Rebirth of a Nation'

Could the issue of abortion derail health-care reform legislation?

Why Obama should have kept the Council on Bioethics

The biggest obstacle to health-care reform is political escapism.

How Obama can win the battle for health-care reform

Obama & the autoworkers

Obama Meets the Catholic Press

Why the death penalty’s complete elimination is a long way off.

Obama, Sotomayor, and the wisdom of John Noonan.

  The surprising incoherence of President Obama’s stem-cell research announcement.

  Why we need new labor laws

  Keeping the "faith" in faith-based initiatives

  What will "choosing our better history" mean under President Barack Obama?

  Can we forgive the Bush administration?

  Cleaning up after the Bush administration

  The unborn need more than prophets.

  The American people have turned to a man with a first-class mind & temperament. He’ll need both.

From the archives: a review of Archbishop Charles Chaput's Render unto Caesar

  What voting is—and isn’t

  Is there a double standard at work?

  With just two months left in the campaign, where do the candidates stand?

  It’s time for the country to get serious about renewable energy.

  A Catholic feminist reflects.

It’s a matter of conscience.

Hard truths about the ’American Way of Life’

  Why did the California Supreme Court follow in the wayward footsteps of Massachusetts?

  A life-long Democrat explains how his party lost his vote.

  Why the House of Representatives was right to say no to warrantless wiretapping

Time to listen to the planet.

  Hope is a theological virtue.

  The second piece in our ’Issues 2008’ series asks what’s become of welfare reform.

  Rethinking religion’s public role

  Why this interminable election cycle may not be all bad—for voters and candidates

  An unjust anomaly in federal prison-sentencing rules is finally corrected.

  What’s at stake in the debate over Attorney General-nominee Michael Mukasey?

Almost nothing the Bush administration does works and almost nothing it says adds up.

  Global warming is an undeniable threat. It’s time for the Bush administration to act like it.

America’s "liberating tradition" isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

How Deval L. Patrick became the first African-American governor of Massachusetts.

Whatever happened to political compromise?

Will the much-needed clean-up of Bush administration policies start on Nov. 7? What’s at stake in the midterm elections?

Candidates are finally talking about climate change on the campaign trail. Why?

In the race for governor in Ohio, it’s the Preacher vs. the Pastor.

  Abortion isn’t the only issue to consider when casting your ballot.

Will the Democrats ever overcome their ’religion problem’?

What does the unlikely pairing of evangelicals and Catholics mean for U.S. politics?

Where is the Catholic vote and what should it look like?

In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush said the unsayable: America is addicted to foreign oil, and we must wean ourselves from it. Coming from an oil man, it was a surprising admission. How serious Bush is remains to be seen. The Editors.

  "Like John Roberts, Judge Samuel Alito appears to be a very decent person, a meticulous legal craftsman, and a man of deep conservative conviction. His all-but-certain elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court promises to fulfill the hopes of the Republican Party’s right wing and the fears of many others, especially abortion-rights advocates." The Editors on the latest Supreme Court nominee.

"Despite threatening disarray on nearly all fronts, President George W. Bush moved quickly and with characteristic political focus to nominate Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to replace Harriet Miers as his choice for the seat on the Supreme Court that will eventually be vacated by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor."

  While the Democratic Party lost interest in Catholic voters, the GOP was eager to snap them up. As Daniel Finn, who teaches economics and theology at St. John’s University, Minnesota, argues, the strategic importance of religious voters “has burgeoned to the point where a presidential campaign scorned the conventional wisdom of courting undecided, middle-of-the-road voters and triumphed instead by turning out its church-going base.” Clearly, church-going voters are useful to politicians. But, Finn asks, are politicians useful to churchgoers?

How did the Democratic Party lose the Catholic vote? As Mark Stricherz explains, it was the brainchild of Democratic strategist Fred Dutton, who, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, hoped to broaden the party’s constituent base but ended up weakening its historic ties with Catholic voters. Dutton’s motives were not anti-Catholic, Stricherz explains: “he simply misjudged the importance of Catholics to the Democratic Party.”

What are the politics we need today? Historian David O’Brien has a few ideas. “Democrats have been able to repackage the Republican message in more attractive dress,” O’Brien argues. Taking on both parties, O’Brien offers a manifesto of the common good: “Democracy requires all of us to take responsibility for our history. Let’s find a party that will help us do that.”

"John Roberts’s performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was lauded as brilliant by his advocates and as evasive by his critics. Perhaps brilliantly evasive is the best way to characterize his vague and incomplete answers to questions about his judicial philosophy. If one of the purposes of the hearings was to inform the American public about the philosophy and moral convictions of a man who might preside over the Court for decades, it failed."

  "With the Republican Party in control of both houses of Congress as well as the White House, it will be a neat trick if Republicans can parlay their own failures of leadership and management in the aftermath of the hurricane into a further justification of the party’s antigovernment, tax-cutting agenda." The Editors on Katrina.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement may not dramatically change the direction of the court, especially on issues like abortion. Since six justices currently support Roe, it is likely that the appointment of two or even three new justices would be required before that decision could be overturned.

Since the Great Depression, the American people-whether rich or poor-have had an ace in their back pocket. You might lose your shirt in the stock market, get frisked in an embezzlement scheme, suffer a medical catastrophe, or be pulled under by a periodic recession, but one thing was certain: the American people were pledged to stand by you in your old age.

With all the rhetoric one hears on Social Security these days, you’d think the whole system was headed for disaster. Truth is, it’s not, explains Charles R. Morris.

President George W. Bush has been criticized for his slow response to the tsunami disaster and for the “stingy” amount of U.S. government aid ($15 million) he was initially willing to offer the victims. The president has since raised that amount to $350 million, but governments of smaller and less wealthy nations have contributed much more proportionally than the United States. Bush is unimpressed by such comparisons and used the relief effort to slyly deprecate what government can do in such situations, extolling the private generosity-and thus the moral superiority-of individual Americans.

"Looking back over the results of the presidential election, pundits now agree that the war over terror, not the war over “moral values,” led to John Kerry’s defeat. Still, that doesn’t mean that values are off the political agenda. As the Democrats look ahead to the congressional elections of 2006, they will again confront one of the more troubling aspects of the “values” divide: the growing marriage gap." Barbara Dafoe Whitehead reports.

"There are two kinds of defeats in electoral politics," explains former Clinton adviser William A. Galston: "Some are expected, even felt to be inevitable (Mondale in 1984). Such losses are sad for the losers, but they do not lead the losing party to reflect on fundamentals. Other defeats are stinging because they are unexpected (Dukakis in 1988)." Kerry’s loss falls into this category. What happened?

A sadness has set in. Throughout my small town in southeastern, Appalachian Ohio, people ask, “How’s it going?” Typically you hear, “Could be better.” Most skulk away after saying this; few need elaboration. Some neighbors can’t bring themselves to tear down their Kerry/Edwards yard signs. There’s even nostalgia for the morning of November 3, when we learned Bush led in our state but that provisional ballots hadn’t been counted. The hope, odd as it seems now, was to become the next Florida. Then the hope died, and it was final. A president who led us into war without planning for the peace and who relished handing money back to the rich was reelected.

"George W. Bush does not deserve a second term as president. His record of miscalculation, error, and deceit with regard to the invasion of Iraq alone should have been enough for voters to return him to Texas. For that to happen, however, Senator John Kerry had to convince the American electorate that he had a clear plan of action for dealing with the problems we face as a nation during a time of terrorism and economic uncertainty. Kerry failed to do that."

Catholics face a curious choice in this year’s presidential election, writes Margaret O’Brien Steinfels. When Bush, a Methodist, is touted as the Catholic candidate and Kerry, a Catholic, is painted as a heretic, Steinfels writes, “you know that the Catholic community has been chopped and blended in the great American food processor.” Still, Catholic values can still inform a citizen’s vote. Steinfels explains how.

With less than a month to go, I’m planning not to vote in this November’s presidential election. I’m not happy about this situation: it’s rare that a day goes by without the difficulty of my decision pressing itself upon me in one way or another. My children, for both of whom this election is the first they’re old enough to vote, find it puzzling, since I constantly encourage them to take their new civic status with all the seriousness they can muster. My wife, who belongs to the anything-but-Bush school (as do most of my colleagues), finds it reprehensible because she thinks that not voting only makes it more likely that our president will be reelected. And the U.S. Catholic bishops and the pope have clearly and repeatedly pressed upon me, as a Catholic, the importance of my civic duty to participate fully in the political life of my country-which certainly means voting. All this I take very seriously: it is my duty to vote, and yet I’m planning not to.

This week, Commonweal asks three Catholic writers to explain their votes for president. Thomas Higgins sides with John Kerry, even though “he wasn’t my first choice to be the nominee of the Democratic Party.” Robert Royal argues that, while his attachment to George W. Bush is hardly overwhelming, “my own enthusiasm in this election, I will confess, is that the Republicans are not Democrats.”

At the dual risk of being a prig and a bore, let me begin with what the scholastics called the via remotionis (crudely: what something is not). I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Republican Party. In the Catholic ghetto where I grew up, I never laid eyes on a known Republican until I was in high school. And while I accept that, alas, man is by nature a political animal, I have always thought that you really have to be some kind of dumb to expect much of, identify with, or invest yourself wholly in any political party, including the Republicans.

Has the Republican Party cornered the religion-rhetoric market? The received wisdom is that voters who go to church regularly side with the GOP. But the conventional wisdom is wrong, argues Amy Sullivan, an editor at the Washington Monthly. “Many Americans, it turns out, are Democrats precisely because of their religious beliefs, not despite them.”

In their open letter to John Kerry, the Editors of Commonweal have some questions for the first Catholic presidential candidate in forty-four years.

Now that his home state has legalized same-sex marriage, John Kerry may forever be branded a “Massachusetts liberal.” But Massachusetts is not quite as liberal as some would have you believe. The Bay State has the lowest divorce rate in the nation, far below states in the Bible Belt. Journalist William Bole reports.

I voted for George W. Bush and I’m heartily sorry now,” says psychologist and former Commonweal columnist Sidney Callahan. Being prolife is about more than abortion.

From the archives (1993): the debate over gays in the military