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" and "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted."
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, August 09, 2018 A Buckeye’s Lament: What Has Happened to Ohio and the Midwest? By now, you’ve almost certainly seen the photo taken at a Trump political rally in central Ohio, my native state. It has sparked a lot of comment , the substance of which suggests that even for journalists and pundits, it is no longer easy to sustain the firewall between judgments about Donald... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 02, 2018 C’mon, Just Say It! According to an Annenberg survey, only a quarter of Americans can correctly name the three branches of the federal government . Is that sad fact, like the weather, something that just happens, beyond anyone’s control? Or does something make Americans resistant to the most elementary information?... Read more |
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Views Friday, July 13, 2018 How Academic and Media Excuse-Making Normalizes the Abnormal Ever since the 2016 election we all know that economic distress and anxiety out in the Great American Heartland caused white working people to vote for Donald Trump. How do we know that? The media have told us so repeatedly, from corporate NBC to the wonkish FiveThirtyEight . There has been some... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, May 29, 2018 Pity the Right-Winger: He Gets No Respect! One of the signature stereotypes of present-day political controversy is the privileged and coddled Social Justice Warrior, usually resident on a university campus, who lives to take offense at the unfairness of life. Unlike hardworking, uncomplaining, and morally grounded Real Americans, the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, July 11, 2017 The Trump Era: No One Can Stay Above the Fray "Shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion." — T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men (1925) It has been six years since I last saw Capitol Hill and the Republican Party in the rearview mirror. Ever since, I have been relentlessly critical of the GOP because, as nearly as... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, May 03, 2017 ‘I, for One, Welcome Our New Insect Overlords!’ How the Chattering Class Bully-Worships Trump In his review of Bertrand Russell’s Power: A New Social Analysis , George Orwell wrote the following: “Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion… ” Orwell may have exaggerated, but there is some truth in what he said. These days, in Washington as in Hollywood, the... Read more |
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Views Saturday, March 04, 2017 The Deep State 2.0 The prospect of four years of Donald J. Trump’s nonstop rants about imaginary conspiracies against his daughter, wholesale slander against the judicial branch and attacks on the press as enemies of the people has caused some Americans to slip into a comforting form of denial. He will be a blip in... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, January 11, 2017 Maybe This Is How Democracy Ends The election of Donald Trump has triggered as much wonderment abroad as it has in the United States. David Runciman , a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, has written in the London Review of Books a provocative reflection on the nature of democracy in the age of Trump: “ Is this... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, October 19, 2016 Congress Sinks to New Depths We might have thought the Congress of the United States hit rock bottom in 2011, when it nearly drove the country into a sovereign debt default. It was averted in time, but Standard and Poor’s still downgraded America’s debt rating . Or was rock bottom the government shutdown of 2013 ? Or was the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, May 24, 2016 Elites vs. Too Much Democracy: Andrew Sullivan’s Afraid of Popular Self-Government British expatriate writer Andrew Sullivan recently returned to the public eye with a piece that has aroused considerable comment, some of it reasonably on point , and some bloviatingly incoherent . What is all the fuss about? Sullivan, in critiquing the Donald Trump phenomenon and the political... Read more |