issue: Politics

Marshall for The Hill: Both Trump and Progressives Are Foggy on Iran

Posted on by Alex Terr

The fog of war seems to have enveloped President Trump and his minions. After two weeks of armed conflict with Iran, they have yet to offer a lucid and realistic explanation of America’s war aims.

The White House’s failure to dispatch top officials to last Sunday’s talk shows to drum up public support for the war was telling. Apparently, none could be trusted to speak for a president who himself lurches incoherently from one rationale to another.

Meanwhile, political battle lines have hardened at home. Republican lawmakers rubber stamp whatever Trump wants, while Democrats demand a halt to hostilities, pending a vote on a war powers resolution.

With American forces engaged in combat, this isn’t the best moment for a polarizing domestic fight over constitutional prerogatives. But Democrats are right to insist that the president bring his case for war before Congress for hearings, questions and debate.

Read more in The Hill

Marshall for The Hill: The Midterms Aren’t Enough — Democrats Must Campaign for the White House

Posted on by Alex Terr

George Washington’s tenacity in winning our war of independence (with French help), after losing many battles, forms the dramatic arc of Ken Burn’s gripping documentary, “The American Revolution.”

Looking ahead to this year’s midterm elections, Democrats should take the long view like Washington. As important as it is to win the House and possibly the Senate in November, it’s even more crucial for Democrats to take back the White House in 2028.

Taking control of the House would give heretofore impotent Democrats some ability to check President Trump’s flagrant abuses of presidential power. They could freeze funding for his outlandish decrees and probe his brazen politicization of federal law enforcement agencies and meddling in state elections.

The party out of power usually makes gains in midterm elections, and Democrats need only flip three seats to control the House. They are also riding a tailwind from Trump’s unpopular policies. By large margins, the public disapproves of his handling the economy, inflation and his signature issue, immigration.

Yet Trump’s fall doesn’t signal Democrats’ rise. Voters still trust Republicans more to address most of their top concerns. That’s why even a House and Senate sweep wouldn’t stop today’s realignment of U.S. politics along educational lines. It’s given Republicans a structural advantage because their base — non-college voters — constitute a supermajority (nearly 60 percent) and are spread more evenly across the country.

Read more in The Hill

Ainsley for Fabian Society: The Democrats’ recent success across the Atlantic show that a dogged focus on affordability can defeat the right

Posted on by Max Sherrill

November’s US elections were Donald Trump’s first real electoral test since he swept to victory for the second time a year ago, and they produced plenty of results for the Republicans to be concerned about. The Democratic party did about as well as it could hope for, especially so given the party is without a central figure who could lead the opposition to Trump and crystallise to voters what the Democrats stand for.

The dynamic Zohran Mamdani attracted most of the attention this side of the Atlantic with his stunning win to become the new mayor of New York City, gaining plaudits from prominent Labour politicians including his London counterpart Sadiq Khan and members of the parliamentary Labour party. Mamdani’s campaign has been admired for its ground and social media mobilisation, especially when centre-left parties seem to be behind the populist right when it comes to commanding online attention.

The elections of two new Democrat governors in Virginia and New Jersey, however, may tell us more about what is happening in America than winning the mayoralty in a state that hasn’t voted Republican for 40 years. Abigail Spanberger took back the Virginia governorship from the Republicans, winning by 15 points, and Rep. Mikie Sherrill won by 13 points in New Jersey. At the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris won Virginia by just 5 points and New Jersey by 6 points. She won New York City by nearly 40 points.

Keep reading in Fabian Society’s Bottom Line.

Marshall in Politico: ‘Comeback Kid’ no more: Dems aren’t protecting the Clintons from Epstein scrutiny

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

Will Marshall, another Clinton cohort, concurred. “It would have been nice to see Dems not take part in an obvious attempt to pressure a former Democratic president to come to a MAGA show trial,” said Marshall, the founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank that served as a policy incubator during the Clinton years.

[…]

Marshall, the PPI founder, said the new cohort of Democrats steering the party to the left are asking the wrong questions.

“If you’re a Democrat today, you have to be asking yourself why we’re in the minority, why do we lack the tools to stop Trump from criminalizing our political differences? And the answer is the party is shrinking,” he said. “The dilemma isn’t how to keep moving left. It’s how to get back the voters Clinton won twice in the ‘90s.”

[…]

Kahlenberg in The Chronicle for Higher Education: Does American Studies Have a Credibility Problem?

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

In a new report from the Progressive Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, titled “The Distortion of American Studies,” Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin accuse the field of having “embraced a worldview as slanted as Donald Trump’s.”

They arrived at this conclusion by analyzing several recent years’ worth of the journal American Quarterly, an official publication of the American Studies Association (ASA) and the leading journal in its field. Their thesis is simple, and blunt: “Instead of providing a rich and varied collection of positive, critical, and mixed accounts of America’s history, literature, and culture, American Quarterly paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait.”

Kahlenberg and Lin substantiate this claim quantitatively. Of the 96 essays in their sample, 77 are critical of the United States; 19 are neutral; 0 are positive. They do not object to a critical posture per se. “When writing about slavery,” for example, “it is entirely appropriate that the article be highly critical of the United States.” But they are interested in the gestalt. A field that is disproportionately concerned with American sins at the expense of American virtues will not be able to tell us much about the world — about, for instance, why so many people want to come to the United States.

[…]

Read more in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Manno for Washington Monthly: The Shrinking Space Between Home and Work

Posted on by Alex Terr

Americans often divide life into two settings: home and work. But life frequently involves the third-place informal gathering spots such as diners and coffee shops, bowling alleys and barbershops, church basements and library meeting rooms.

These third places, a term popularized by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place, are crucibles of friendship, apprenticeships in citizenship, and the everyday practice of pluralism. It’s in keeping with the long American tradition of volunteer associations, acknowledged by observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert Putnam (of Bowling Alone fame). Sadly, we use them less; now, we need them most. Our New Year’s resolution for 2026 should include a simple but demanding commitment: to reinvigorate third places in our communities—and their presence in our own lives.

Read more in Washington Monthly. 

Marshall for The Hill: Trump Appeases Putin While Invading US Cities

Posted on by Alex Terr

Ukrainians are freezing and dying in the dark this winter as Russian missiles and drones relentlessly pound their power plants and other civilian targets. You’d expect Americans, who fought for eight long years to win their independence from another colonial power, would side instinctively with Ukraine.

And they do. Most — now including a majority of Republicans — favor sending more U.S. military assistance to Kyiv. Yet President Trump seems less moved than peeved by Ukraine’s stubborn resistance to Russia’s savage war of conquest and refuses its defenders weapons they desperately need to even the odds.

It seems the president values his unrequited man-crush on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin more than the trivial matter of Ukrainians’ freedom. This week, Trump made a mockery of his own “Board of Peace” for Gaza by inviting the Kremlin warlord to join.

Perhaps to impress his bellicose pal, Trump has turned to war. He’s attacked Venezuela. He threatened to bomb Iran again if it doesn’t stop killing protesters. And in a fit of pique over not winning a Nobel Peace Prize, he vowed to seize Greenland by force before backing off in a bizarre speech to world leaders Wednesday in Davos.

Read more in The Hill.

Kahlenberg in The Wall Street Journal: American-Studies Journal Articles Biased Against U.S., Analysis Says

Posted on by Alex Terr

A report by a left-of-center think tank being released Thursday reviewed three years of articles in the discipline’s flagship journal and characterized the scholarship as distorted, one-sided and “unrelentingly negative.”

“The analysis by the nonprofit Progressive Policy Institute reviewed 96 papers in American Quarterly published from 2022 through 2024. The authors determined 80% were critical of America, 20% were neutral and none was positive. American Quarterly is the flagship journal of the American-studies field.

“American Quarterly essentially erases virtually anything positive about the American experience,” the report says. “Instead of providing a rich and varied collection of positive, critical, and mixed accounts of America’s history, literature, and culture, American Quarterly paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait.” […]

The Progressive Policy Institute, which launched the project, is a public-policy think tank founded by centrist Democrats in 1989. It houses the American Identity Project, which tries to help schools and colleges promote a common American identity.

Richard Kahlenberg, an education analyst who has advocated against racial and legacy preferences in college admissions, leads the project. David Brooks, an author and columnist, and William Galston, an opinion columnist at The Wall Street Journal, whose opinion pages operate independently from the news department, are members of the American Identity Project’s advisory group.

“There is nothing wrong with being critical of America; I’m critical of America,” said Kahlenberg, who co-wrote the report. “But the ultimate goal of American studies is to pursue the truth about America, the good and the bad.”

Read more in The Wall Street Journal. 

Kahlenberg and Lin for The Wall Street Journal: American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject

Posted on by Alex Terr

The 250th anniversary of America’s founding provides an opportunity to reflect on—and fight over—the country’s extraordinary story. Unfortunately, many of the serious scholars who study America—its history, literature and culture—fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale.

On the one hand, America’s is a story of greatness: The U.S. is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet. Its founders created what is now the world’s longest-lasting liberal democratic constitution. The Declaration of Independence put forth revolutionary ideas about human freedom and equality that ushered in a new era for the world. At the same time, the American experience is complicated. Our history includes the mistreatment of Native Americans, slavery and Jim Crow, and high levels of economic inequality that persist to this day.

Yet we found only one part of this narrative presented in most of almost 100 articles we examined from over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, it’s widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies.

The journal’s scholarship paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S. We found that 80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive. Of the 96 articles we examined, our research identified 77 as critical, focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia. Some articles went to absurd lengths to identify sins. One essay posited that thermodynamics—the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature—is “an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.”

We were generous in tagging articles as neutral. Virtually every one of these 19 articles raised at least one critique (racism, sexism and the like), but they also typically described the ways in which members of marginalized communities were able to resist. Implicit in the articles is the sense that there may be a kernel of something good in a society that enables individuals to rise above oppression.

Read more in The Wall Street Journal. 

New PPI Report Finds Premier Academic Journal Offers a Narrow, Ideological View of America

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released a new report warning that American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, presents an overwhelmingly critical and unbalanced view of American society, failing to reflect the nation’s full historical and cultural complexity. As cultural and historical debates intensify, the report finds that a leading academic journal is shaping the understanding of America’s story through a consistently negative and ideologically narrow lens.

The report, titled “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” evaluates 96 articles published between 2022 and 2024. It finds that 80% of the journal’s content was critical of America, 20% neutral, and not a single article offered a positive portrayal of the American experience.

“In the same way Donald Trump whitewashes America’s flaws, this journal effectively erases its virtues,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, Director of PPI’s American Identity Project and co-author of the report. “Academic inquiry should be honest and wide-ranging, not ideologically blinkered. When one of the field’s most influential publications excludes virtually any acknowledgment of American progress or ideals, it does a disservice to students, educators, and the country itself.”

Authored by Kahlenberg and PPI Policy Research Fellow Lief Lin, the report warns that this imbalance in scholarship risks undermining civic cohesion, fueling public mistrust in higher education, and distorting curricula across universities and K–12 classrooms. While rigorous critique is essential to understanding America’s past and present, the authors argue that academic institutions must also highlight the values, ideas, and movements that have driven American progress.

Key findings from the report include:

  • Of the 96 essays reviewed, 77 were coded as “critical,” 19 as “neutral,” and zero as “positive.”
  • The most common critiques involved racism, imperialism, and classism, while discussions of American innovation, democratic development, or cultural influence were notably absent.
  • Even “neutral” articles often described America as oppressive before highlighting individual resistance or critique.
  • The journal frequently used inaccessible jargon, limiting broader engagement and reinforcing ideological gatekeeping in the academy.
  • The worldview promoted by American Quarterly is already influencing curricula at elite institutions and seeping into K–12 instruction through works like the 1619 Project.

Rather than calling for government intervention, the report urges reform from within the academy. It highlights the importance of a balanced and pluralistic approach to scholarship, one that embraces honest debate, intellectual rigor, and a full accounting of America’s failures and triumphs.

“A fair and complete American studies curriculum should reflect the civil rights movement as much as slavery, democratic ideals as well as political failings, and cultural exports alongside cultural critiques,” said Kahlenberg. “That full picture matters, not just for intellectual integrity, but for sustaining the democratic project itself.”

Read and download the report here.

Founded in 1989, PPI is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @ppi.

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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org

The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s

Posted on by Alex Terr

INTRODUCTION

The American story is extraordinary. The United States is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet and the number one destination of immigrants from across the world. Its founders created what is now the globe’s longest-lasting liberal democratic constitution. At the same time, the American experience contains numerous dark chapters: the conquest and decimation of Native American populations; the enslavement of Black people, followed by decades of Jim Crow; and the internment of Japanese Americans. America’s rates of gun violence and incarceration, and its level of economic inequality, are among the highest in the developed world today.

President Donald Trump has notoriously sought to erase the negative components of American history. The Washington Post found, for example, that since Trump’s inauguration, the National Park Service has “softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past. Some were edited to remove references to slavery. On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened.” Trump’s one-sided approach should be, and has been, widely denounced. His critics are right to ask: How can he tell only half the story?

While Trump is a politician who often engages in demagoguery, one would expect serious scholars who study America — its history, literature, and culture — would provide a much more balanced and nuanced approach. To assess that hypothesis, we examined almost 100 articles over a three-year period in American Quarterly, the flagship journal of the American Studies Association. Published by Johns Hopkins University, American Quarterly is considered the country’s premier journal of American studies, the publication in which the nation’s top scholars vie to have their work appear. Disappointingly, we find that the scholarship in the journal, as a whole, engages in the same sort of distortion as Trump does, only in reverse. If Trump erases the negative chapters in American history and takes a boastful stand about America today under his leadership, American Quarterly essentially erases virtually anything positive about the American experience. Instead of providing a rich and varied collection of positive, critical, and mixed accounts of America’s history, literature, and culture, American Quarterly paints a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait.

In this report, we begin with background on the history and purpose of American studies and outline some ideas about the types of questions and observations a fair-minded account of American studies might entail. In the second section, we outline our methodology for coding articles in American Quarterly as positive, critical, or neutral. In the third section, we present our findings about the mix of stories found in the journal. We also outline the varying prevalence of different types of critiques of America; recount the critical key words that appear most frequently; and discuss the type of prose that is found in American Quarterly’s pages. In the fourth section, we outline areas for future research; and in the fifth section, we conclude with suggestions for internal reforms to fend off the threat of government interference. The paper also includes an appendix of abstracts of the articles we reviewed (where available) and representative quotations from those articles.

Read the full report.

Marshall for The Hill: Republicans Are Still Clueless on Health Care

Posted on by Max Sherrill

No issue seems to befuddle Republicans more than health care. Last week, they failed for the umpteenth time to produce a convincing plan to make health coverage more affordable for working Americans.

The Republican-controlled Senate blocked a Democratic bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for health insurance beefed up during the pandemic to help working families pay their premiums. The Republican alternative also failed to get enough votes to avoid a filibuster.

House Republicans this week likewise rejected bipartisan proposals to scale back and better target the premium subsidies. Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) cobbled together a modest grab bag of proposals that bore scant resemblance to Senate Republicans’ bill.

Keep reading in The Hill.

Marshall in Politico EU: Europe’s center is barely holding — and Trump plans to blow it apart

Posted on by Alex Terr

[…]

“What [Europeans are] getting from Trump is the strategy of maximum polarization that hollows out the center,” said Will Marshall from the Progressive Policy Institute, the centrist American think tank that backed Bill Clinton in the 1990s. “The old established parties of left and right that dominated the post war era have gotten weaker,” he said. “The nationalist or populist right’s revolt is against them.”

[…]

“The fundamental failure that is common to the whole [centrist] transatlantic community is on immigration,” said Marshall from the Progressive Policy Institute. “All of the far-right movements have made it their top issue.”

Read more in Politico EU.