Mike Lofgren
Mike Lofgren is a former congressional staff member who served on both the House and Senate budget committees. His books include: "The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government" (2016) and "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted" (2013).
Articles by this author
 |
Views Thursday, March 04, 2021 Wait, Don't Tell Me: The Capitol Riot Was Yet Another "Intelligence Failure" In the Senate’s first hearing on the breach of Capitol security by pro-Trump rioters on February 23, it was the consensus of all witnesses that failure to receive appropriate notice of the government’s available intelligence was the main reason for the incident. Former Capitol Police chief Steven A... Read more |
 |
Views Friday, February 12, 2021 The Right Devolves From J.S. Bach to Skinhead Rock The pivotal 1960s saw self-described defenders of traditional culture and mores draw the line against those whom they thought transgressed those standards. This divide kicked off America’s culture wars, with conservatives posing as champions of the old order, and with traditional liberals in a... Read more |
 |
Views Wednesday, February 03, 2021 The Electoral College Is Far Worse Than You Think Growing up in a less polarized era, I often heard the conventional wisdom that the Electoral College “has served us well.” To find counterexamples to its reasonableness, you had to go back to the horse and buggy era, and I don’t remember anyone at the time lamenting that Sam Tilden was robbed of... Read more |
 |
Views Thursday, January 14, 2021 A Layman’s Guide to Spotting Sedition, Treason, and Lunacy in General Now that America and the world have seen what the phrase " concerned citizens " means in the context of political action, it may be necessary to learn how to decode other politically charged phrases in these fraught and fateful times. You have probably heard the following statements on more than... Read more |
 |
Views Tuesday, December 29, 2020 Hey, America, You Want a True Conservative Party? I used to be cautious about making predictions. This is partly because history is a complex, open system and predictions almost always come to grief in some important detail. It is also hard to take seriously the Chris Matthews school of punditry: make a series of wild predictions. Supposedly,... Read more |
 |
Views Wednesday, November 25, 2020 Trump Was No Fluke: George W. Bush Blazed the Trail My friend and former colleague Bruce Bartlett has done a service by reminding us that after four years of the non-stop catastrophe that was the Trump administration, we should not lull ourselves with the illusion that the 45 th president was some aberration that fell out of the sky. His flamboyant... Read more |
 |
Views Tuesday, October 27, 2020 Should Trump Be Held Accountable? A Harvard Academic Says No In today’s hyper-polarized America, one is used to encountering political argumentation that causes either outrage or eyerolling. Mostly, this is the work of partisan operatives, and easily discounted. Occasionally, though, one comes across opinions that are ostensibly above the fray and written by... Read more |
 |
Views Wednesday, October 21, 2020 Damnatio Memoriae: The First Step to Recovery in a Post-Trump America “After Domitian’s death the senate appointed Nerva to rule and it condemned Domitian’s memory (damnatio memoriae)”—Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. III In a previous piece , I proposed ways in which Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden could limit the sabotage and... Read more |
 |
Views Monday, October 12, 2020 A Modest Proposal to Prevent Sabotage by the Trump Regime For complex historical reasons, Federal employees don’t get much love. Republicans already had begun their war on expertise nearly 90 years ago, when they condemned the New Deal for being run by distant bureaucrats. Joseph McCarthy made a career accusing those bureaucrats of being Soviet spies... Read more |
 |
Views Friday, September 25, 2020 Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Peril of America's Aging Elite “The graveyards are full of indispensable men,” Charles de Gaulle is reputed to have said. Despite the mordant wisdom most of us see in that statement, an alarming number of people refuse to follow his implicit advice. Many of us, particularly in America, the land of rugged individualism, see... Read more |