Political scientist: Europe’s Shrinking Center
“It is never clear how seriously one should take elections to the European Parliament,” , given its relatively puny budget and political impotence. Even so, Sunday’s European Parliament vote opened a window onto “the mood of European electorates.” That mood is decisively “disgruntled and polarized,” notes Paul, with centrist parties continuing to lose ground to insurgent populists of various shades. Italy’s right-wing Lega became the country’s largest party in the European Parliament. In France, far-rightist Marine Le Pen’s newly renamed National Rally edged out President Emman✨uel Macron’s coalition. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s newly formed Brexit Party thumped Labour and the Tories. Meanwhile, educated elites gravitated toward green parties, abandoning “the social-democratic parties they conquered in the early years of neoliberalism and globalization.” Paul’s bottom line: Expect “more turmoil ahead.”
Albany vet: The High Price of Legislature’s Trump Mania
The rapid population decline in upstate New York is a “distressing trend,” , but Albany Dems are too busy obsessing over President Trump to do anything about it. Last Tuesday, the Assembly passed a bill allowing New York officials to prosecute individuals despite presidential pardons. The following day, it passed legislation allowing Trump’s state tax returns to be released to Congress investigators. That “all-consuming” focu🐟s on national politics, says Churchill, comes “at the expense of the locals.” With upstate continuing to hemorrhage residents despite a booming national economy, Albany must get serious, “even if it’s more fun to target the New Yorker in the White House.”
Populist: Missouri’s Upstart GOP Rebel
GOP politics are in something of a lull, as the debate over the future of conservatism sparked by the 2016 election stagnates. “Enter into this scene Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley,” . Hawley has taken on many favorite Trumpian targets, especially Silicon Valley tycoons. The difference is that Hawley’s rhetoric “invites other conservatives to join in.” His Big Tech skepticism is especially smart politics, Dougherty thinks, since these firms “act like publishers,” censoring right-wing speech on their servers, without suffering the regulations under which traditional publishers toil. Dougherty concludes: “Hawley staked out new territory for Republican politicians, based 🅠on some of the bleeding-edge conservative thinking on issues of tech and labor policy. For the first time in a long while, I’m excited for what’s coming next.”
Conservative: Bring Back the Old Cory Booker
As Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker was a “relentless advocate” for school choice, . The old Booker saw “the corruption and failure of the Newark school system,” so he created charters and supported vouchers that set his city on the path to success. But now that Booker is running for president, he no longer champions school choice, and “his omission suggests the erosion of the coalition between conservatives and liberals tired of failing schools, which originally helped propel school-choice reform,” writes Malanga. To fit in with the left, Booker is allowing his success ౠin Newark to be forgotten, and he seems to have slipped into the Democrats’ view that school choice “represents a threat, no matter its effectiveness in providing millions of poor kids with better schools.”
Culture critic: Segregation Returns — on the Left
A National Association of Scholars study last month concluded that “a massive number of schools have institutionalized racial segregation” in orientation programs, residential arrangements and graduation ceremonies. , the return of such practices owes to the “do🔯minance of identity politics” championed by the left. While segregation was once looked down upon as a sign of intolerance, liberals now embrace such separation as a “🍰multiculturalist achievement.” By relentlessly dividing students along the lines of collective identity, argues Greenwald, campus progressives will only “harm most those they claim to be helping” by reinforcing social barriers and “undermining the education of generations.”
— Compiled by Ashley Allen and Sohrab Ahmari