issue: Politics

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. 

Marshall for The Hill: The Green New Deal Crashes to Earth

Posted on by Alex Terr

Less than a decade ago, young U.S. progressives started agitating for a Green New Deal to combat climate change and usher in a planned economy more planet-friendly than capitalism.

It was a bold, if implausible, demand for a crash program to rid America of fossil fuels. Animating it were decades of increasingly dire prophesies about how global warming is irreversibly impairing life on Earth.

Lecturing world leaders at a 2019 United Nations climate conference, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg won rapturous applause when she informed her audience, “You have stolen my childhood.”

In the U.S., environmental groups pressured politicians to keep fossil fuels “in the ground” even as advances in fracking technology were unlocking a bonanza of shale oil and gas.

In 2020, first-term Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) stoked a social media frenzy by joining Green New Deal activists in a ‘60s-style sit-in in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office.

President Joe Biden got with the program, portentously calling climate change “an existential crisis” rising above such humdrum public concerns as spiking inflation and uncontrolled immigration.

Today, however, the Green New Deal seems to have fallen to earth, borne down by the inexorable gravity of economic and political reality. Therein lies a cautionary tale for Democrats about the gulf that separates elite and popular opinion on climate change.

Put simply, green activists have failed to convert America’s non-college majority to their cause. Working class voters recognize the problem but it takes a back seat to their everyday economic and social concerns.

Read more in The Hill

Libert for The Well News: The Blueprint for Democratic Renewal Lies in New Jersey and Virginia

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City, while historic, is not the story Democrats should focus on as they look to regain majorities in 2026 and win the presidency in 2028.

Why? Because Mamdani won just 50% of the vote in a reliably blue city — one that has voted Democratic for generations and likely will for generations to come. The real lessons for Democrats can be found in New Jersey and Virginia, where Govs.-elect Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger showed us how Democrats can win, and win big, by reconnecting with voters who have largely felt left behind by the Democratic Party.

At the Progressive Policy Institute, we have been speaking with these same kinds of voters. In a report authored by Claire Ainsley and Deborah Mattinson, PPI found plenty of evidence that the Democratic Party has moved further from the mainstream values of most Americans.

Keep reading in The Well News.

Marshall for The Hill: Wanna Be Radical? Make the Government Work.

Posted on by Max Sherrill

The media is puzzling over voters choosing centrist Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey and democratic socialists in New York City and Seattle.

Take a step back, though, and this election looks a lot like President Trump’s sweep last year: An unsettled electorate still in revolt against the status quo and punishing whoever’s in power.

The voters’ message was less about ideology than institutions. Americans believe their political and governing institutions are broken and want someone who can fix them. They are frustrated with leaders who inflame tribal partisanship rather than forging consensus around tackling pressing national problems. And they think the government has grown too big, costly and stuck in a “can’t do” mentality that puts process over results.

Such attitudes are particularly a problem for Democrats, who present as defenders rather than reformers of failing public institutions. The problem isn’t lack of resources. Former President Joe Biden’s prodigious spending didn’t lower living costs or improve economic prospects for the non-college majority. Voters’ shifts towards Democrats this month, however, indicated that Trump’s tariffs and power grabs aren’t doing the job, either.

When things aren’t working, radical change becomes the pragmatic course for political leaders. But radical change in which direction?

Keep reading in The Hill.

Marshall for The Hill: France’s Right and Left Wing Parties Are Surging. Can It Hold the Center?

Posted on by Max Sherrill
French President Emmanuel Macron took power in 2017, the same year Donald Trump first moved into the White House courtesy of the Electoral College. Both were insurgents but stood on opposite sides of today’s new political barricades.
Macron upended his country’s established ruling parties, conjuring up an entirely new centrist bloc as a bulwark against Marine le Pen’s far-right National Rally. Trump took over the Republican Party, ousting traditional conservatives and turning it into a vehicle for a belligerent MAGA populism.
Both leaders are still in power, but their fates have diverged. Macron is mired in a crisis of collapsing governments and risks becoming a lame duck with two years yet to run in his second and final term. Meanwhile, the National Rally has become France’s most popular party, taking the pole position in the 2027 presidential sweepstakes.
President Trump, triumphantly reelected last year despite his farcical attempt to steal the 2020 election, is riding roughshod over his political opponents — and the rule of law — with the acquiescence of a do-nothing Republican Congress.
Keep reading in The Hill.

Marshall for LabourList: This Week Brought Good News for Democrats and Progressives in the UK and Worldwide

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Demeaned and taunted by President Trump for nine dispiriting months, Democrats finally had a chance on Tuesday to respond with something more than theatrical gestures of resistance. Tapping a rich vein of anti-Trump sentiment, a party famished for wins racked up one after another in America’s odd-year elections.

Suddenly, Democrats seem politically relevant again. The victories, coming in mainly blue states and cities, don’t necessarily presage big gains in next year’s national midterm elections. For that, they’ll need to win on more competitive terrain. Nonetheless, Tuesday’s outcomes confirmed growing public dismay with Trump’s imperious rule, as well as Democrats’ ability to start reclaiming ground he seized in last year’s presidential contest.

This is good news for Labour activists in the UK and around the world, as it shows the fractures in the administration are beginning to take political effect.

Most consequential were the big Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey. Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia’s governor’s race by 15 points, leading a sweep of top state offices that flipped the state back into the blue column. Democrats also added seats in the state legislature, amassing their biggest majority since 1989.

Continue reading in LabourList.

Marshall for The Hill: Reindustrialization Is Just Central Planning, MAGA-Style

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Why is President Trump so intent on inflicting his unpopular tariffs on the U.S. economy? How did America, always a trading nation bordering two oceans, suddenly become the free world’s glowering bastion of protectionism?

The president’s logic is often fuzzy, but for once he and his economic team have a clear answer: They’re on a mission to reindustrialize America. They call it “economic nationalism,” but it’s really just central planning, MAGA-style.

Trump believes free trade agreements and globalization eviscerated U.S. manufacturing, studding the landscape with shuttered factories — “tombstones” as he put it in his bleak 2017 inaugural address.

In fact, U.S. manufacturing output has grown substantially since 1980. What has declined is factory employment and manufacturing’s share of GDP. That tracks the trend of deindustrialization and rising demand for services in all advanced countries, regardless of trade policies.

Nonetheless, the president is ripping up trade agreements and taxing imports from friends and foes alike, in hopes of generating lots more factory jobs. But building walls around our economy won’t change the fact that automation has severed the old relationship between increased industrial production and blue-collar job growth.

Keep reading in The Hill.

Ainsley for The Liberal Patriot: Can Liberal Patriotism Save Britain From the National Populists?

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Under pressure from the national populists and a restless party, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has come out fighting. His landmark speech to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool last week gave his premiership more definition than ever before, firmly in the mold of the modern liberal patriot.

It is political definition that has never been more needed. On the eve of its annual conference, Labour had been rattled by authoritative constituency-level polling showing that its landslide victory just a year ago would be wiped out by right-wing challenger party Reform UK, taking two-thirds of Labour’s MPs with it. 267 Labour MPs, many newly elected, would lose their seats. The British Conservatives would win just 45 constituencies. Reform UK would eat up former Labour and Tory support with 306 gains, putting leader Nigel Farage on course to be the next Prime Minister.

Of course there is no general election imminent, with the next national vote expected in four years, but together with internal rumblings about Starmer’s leadership, it set the backdrop for a bumpy few days at the Labour annual conference after a bumpier first year since Labour returned to power after fourteen years in opposition.

Keep reading in The Liberal Patriot.

Marshall in CNN: How Today’s Democratic Soul-Searching Echoes the Clinton Era

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Will Marshall, who has served as the Progressive Policy Institute’s president since its founding, says so many efforts are competing that none is likely to exert as much concentrated influence as the DLC did in its heyday. (The DLC itself officially closed its doors in 2011 but faded as a force in the party after Clinton left office 10 years earlier.) “If you wanted to show that you were a reform-minded Democrat, a modernizing Democrat, you joined up with the DLC and it was really the only enterprise dedicated to changing the party’s governing agenda,” Marshall said. “Now you have a slew of so-called centrist groups that are out there operating independently, and it’s all very disjointed.”

Marshall, like others I spoke with, sees another big obstacle for today’s efforts — these projects are primarily led by consultants and strategists. The DLC, he notes, was defined mostly by elected officials representing politically swing constituencies. That contrast, Marshall says, will make it harder to move these ideas into the party mainstream.

“We had a large cadre of credible Democratic figures-governors, senators, House members, state leaders-who embraced the mission of the new Democrats because they could feel the ground shaking under their feet,” Marshall said. Winning buy-in from large numbers of elected Democrats will be harder today, he says, “because the party is so shrunken, and the number of competitive seats is so shrunken, that the Democrats left standing are mostly safe.”

Keep reading in CNN.

Marshall for The Hill: Democrats Need Tough Liberals Like Bobby Kennedy

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Bending laws and norms to the breaking point, President Trump is ordering political show trials of critics, stifling free speech, subjecting Spanish-speaking citizens to police state tactics and choking our economy with tariffs.

Trump’s MAGA followers greet his autocratic power grabs with vindictive glee — finally, we’re on top! Everyone else is asking: Where are the Democrats?

The party establishment seems adrift, unwilling to make a clean break with flawed policies like Bidenomics, climate alarmism and tolerance of illegal immigration and social disorder that have thoroughly alienated working class voters.

Democrats need a new breed of leader — liberals tough enough to challenge progressive orthodoxies and move the party back to the  political mainstream.

For inspiration, they could do worse than look back to Sen. Bobby Kennedy’s (D-N.Y.)1968 presidential campaign. Although tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet, Kennedy’s run offers Democrats valuable clues for building a bigger, cross-class coalition.

Keep reading in The Hill.