American politics Archives

Executive Disorder

by William G. Howell, Terry M. Moe,

From Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency, which will be published this month by Princeton University Press. For nearly a century, presidents were presidents, regardless of party.…

Art of Living

by Jon Lee Anderson,

From his introduction to a new edition of Fear and Loathing in America, by Hunter S. Thompson, which was published this spring by Simon & Schuster. In 1971, when I…

The First Punch

by Matthew Karp,

How does History move? A generation ago, in the Nineties, it seemed to have forgotten how: perhaps, as Elijah mocked the prophets of Baal, History was on a journey, or…

Fighting Words

by Jackson Lears, Karen Parker Lears,

From their introduction to Raritan on War, an anthology of writing from the journal Raritan, which will be published next month by Rutgers University Press. War challenges the limits of…

Revenge Plot

by Lauren Oyler,

The GOP’s identity crisis

Conventional Wisdom

by Luke Mitchell,

From “Grand Old Inquisitor,” which appeared in the November 2004 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174-year archive—is available at harpers.org/archive. When I left the…

Power Lines

by Matthew Karp,

“The American political scene,” wrote Perry Anderson in 2013, “is conventionally depicted in high colour.” According to conventional—that is, liberal—observers in the Bush and Obama years, America “cartwheeled from brutish…