Opinion

Let’s not mince words. Hillary Clinton was a disastrous candidate.

The election season has brought endless surprises and there seems no end in sight. Yet despite the discovery of new troves of email perhaps the biggest surprise still remains the rise of Donald Trump. Even if he loses, it’s worth asking how Trump got as far as he did. One overlooked answer lies in the emotional culture that he resurrected—a culture based on shame and honor, which flourished in the nineteenth century, receded to the margins of public life in the twentieth, but which is having an unlikely resurgence this year. And though few today would call Trump honorable, his emotional style clearly resonates with older notions of honor which still can be found in the South, some rural, western, and working-class communities, and in the nation’s military and quasi-military institutions--such as Trump’s alma mater, the New York Military Academy.

[This is a reprint of a story Robert Reich published in January of 2016.]

In the approach to Election Day, it becomes increasingly obvious that America has been situated on a fault line for a long, long time. Donald Trump was the earthquake. Whoever wins, the country has been damaged by that earthquake — perhaps irrevocably. We have told ourselves again and again that it can’t happen here; that despite our polarization, our democracy is strong and resilient; that the extremism that has afflicted other countries won’t afflict ours because we are fundamentally decent, and civility will ultimately prevail. Now we know differently. It can happen here. It has happened here. We are not who we thought we were. We have a lot of reckoning to do. I seriously doubt we can do it.

For the average working American, voting on a Tuesday can be a major inconvenience to the routine business week. In a TED Talk about Election Day, Jacob Soboroff features interview clips of prominent politicians who are incapable of explaining why the American people vote on Tuesdays. Rick Santorum, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich, and John Kerry – all of them had trouble answering this question. Fortunately, a quick review of America’s agrarian roots provides the answer to this mystifying question.

When I grow up, I want to be Charlie Pierce, who covers politics for Esquire magazine and has toiled in our scrivener’s trade, as far as I can tell, since the late ’70s.

Like all traumatic events eventually do, the U.S. presidential campaign will end. Polling places will close, votes will be tabulated and a new electoral map will be drawn up that shows how our 45th president-elect got elected. Unfortunately, the stink of this campaign season will stick around much, much longer. The vitriol has been too corrosive.…

Sometimes it is better to be wrong, and this election is definitely one of those times. More than a year ago, I posted a column that inquired whether Donald Trump is "a real live fire-breathing fascist." Based on what we had seen from him and his campaign even by then - his appeals to racial and…

Millions of voters believe putting Donald Trump in the White House will lift them out of the economic hell they have endured for decades, working more and getting nowhere except deeper in debt. They could not be more wrong.

Those who do not read their history are doomed to repeat it. As former Supreme Court Justice David Souter lamented a few years ago, our nation suffers from civic ignorance. Worse, few know about even recent presidential history. As Souter pointed out, Thomas Jefferson himself warned that “an ignorant people can never remain a free people."

The historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a still widely read 1964 essay for Harper’s Magazine outlining what he called the “paranoid style” in American politics. Marked by “a sense of heated exaggeration”, suspicion, and wild fears of political conspiracy, it was, he argued, a common part of American political life. It dated back to the rise of the antislavery movement before the Civil War, and every so often, it resurfaced at times of national crisis.

Niccolò Machiavelli, the great sixteenth-century Florentine diplomat, is synonymous with ruthless, immoral, self-serving behavior. Despite his bad rap, Machiavelli was actually an honorable and upright if somewhat bawdy and abrasive guy, and while he did habitually cheat on his wife as many Florentine men did at the time (not that it makes it right!), he was a loving father, loyal friend, and brutally honest observer of the human condition. He commented on everything he saw — the cruelty, brutality, lies, and deceit, as well as the bravery and brilliance — and wasn’t afraid to tell it like it is.