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The Two Sides of Hate  

Omar Mateen’s horrific mass murder last week in Orlando and Donald Trump’s vicious campaign for president both signal an alarming return of sadism in American life.









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In Defense of Civility  

The danger of Trump is that he is completely removing the norms of public discourse—the same norms that have served to hold in check those unwilling to see their society transformed by greater equality and liberty.





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Who Owns the GOP?  

Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is a magisterial portrait of the right-wing billionaires who have “weaponized” conservative philanthropy and pulled the GOP ever further right. Yet Mayer’s account fails to explain something just as alarming: the far-right surge from the grassroots.



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Donald Trump, Pirate King  

Unlike his chief rival Ted Cruz, Donald Trump dismisses the high-church liturgy of American politics in favor of blunt tribalism. In Trump’s America, no one is looking out for you.



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Scarlet Letter Politics  

Those who stand to suffer most from Trump’s attack on Bill Clinton’s sexual history are neither he nor Hillary, but the women linked to him. Their private lives are once again going to be tabloid fodder.



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Bernie Is Not the New Obama—And That’s a Good Thing  

Bernie Sanders’ surge in recent national polls has brought inevitable comparisons to an insurgent candidate whose enthusiastic young supporters took Hillary Clinton by surprise eight years ago. But Sanders’s campaign is of a very different kind than Obama’s, with deeper potential and a different measure of success.



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Trumping History  

The Trump phenomenon is best understood as an amalgam of three different, largely pathological strains in American history and culture.