Jon R. Bond (Texas A&M), Richard Fleisher (Fordham) and Nathan A. Ilderton (UCF): Was the Tea Party Responsible for the Republican Victory in the 2010 House Elections? Barack Obama isn’t to blame for the Tea Party’s surge, liberals are — and if they want him to win re-election in 2012, they better listen to Moses and learn how to take initiative. What are the four primary characteristics most associated with those Americans sympathetic to the Tea Party? "Authoritarianism, ontological insecurity (fear of change), libertarianism and nativism," so says a new study. Ayn Rand Vs. America: The celebration of the individual is seeing a resurgence in U.S. politics, but is freedom to earn one's living the same as the freedom to emasculate government? Republicans have finally found a group they want to tax: poor people. Can we fix the economy? Kevin Drum on theories floating around that imply — or are used by others to imply — that we really can't do much of anything to help the economy recover (and more). Is there anything that can be done? A TNR symposium on the economy, with contributions from Peter Diamond, Felix Salmon, Jonathan Cohn, Richard Posner, Jared Bernstein and more. If I were president: We've heard from the media and from experts incessantly — what if we entered a pundit-free zone? As pundits bemoan the broken political system, historians say even as far back as Jefferson and Hamilton, acrimony is just the American way. Far from being a reflection of living patterns created without our conscious control, partisanship and compromise are both deliberate decisions made by political leaders.The ideology of no: New research into how liberals and conservatives think differently. Whenever you read conservatives trying to critique what they think the other side believes, you find them assuming that their opponents must be mirror images of themselves.
