American Politics Archives - The Minnesota Sun

Commentary: The Legacy of California’s Political Impact on America

August 29, 2024 American Greatness

California has finally arrived. A female former California attorney general and U.S. senator is at the top of the Democrat presidential ticket. This is the culmination of generations of California politicians who have heavily influenced American politics and culture and are now, once again, on the verge of taking the top political office in the Free World.

“California is having a moment,” said Don Sipple, a California political strategist. To be more accurate, on a nationwide political basis, California has been having a lot of moments for decades.

Commentary: Democrats’ Favorite Strategy Caused Their Current Chaos

July 23, 2024 Minnesota Sun Staff

The last few weeks sharply remind us of the old adage – “Man Plans, and God Laughs.” In less than 30 days, the American political world has been upended by a series of shocking events most people are still trying to fully comprehend. From a remarkably disastrous debate for President Joe Biden against former president Donald Trump, to the attempted assassination of Trump a short 16 days later, then two days after that the start of a well-organized and produced Republican convention with an injured but unbowed Trump, to the withdrawal of Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, it’s safe to say none of us knows what happens next.

One thing we do know – the divisive and hateful rhetoric employed by the left against Trump and his supporters is what has fed both the unraveling of the Democratic Party and the awakening of Americans to the reality of the lies and manipulation we’ve endured since Biden took office.

Commentary: The Hysterical Style in American Politics

January 19, 2024 Minnesota Sun Staff

The post-Joe McCarthy era and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater once prompted liberal political scientist Richard Hofstadter to chronicle a supposedly long-standing right-wing “paranoid style” of conspiracy-fed extremism.

But far more common, especially in the 21st century, has been a left-wing, hysterical style of inventing scandals and manipulating perceived tensions for political advantage.

Commentary: The Inherently Destructive Uniparty Agenda

January 11, 2024 Minnesota Sun Staff

It’s easy enough to blame Democrats for everything, but as a rapidly increasing percentage of American voters have realized, Republicans share the blame. These politicians are controlled by their donors, and in America today, the big donors are in agreement regardless of which party or which candidate gets their money.

This, then, is what has become dubbed America’s uniparty. And while wealthy elites have always exercised disproportionate influence in American politics, and, for that matter, the politics of virtually every nation that has ever existed, what is happening in 21st century America is unique.

Commentary: The Rise of the Single Woke (and Young, Democratic) Female

January 18, 2023January 17, 2023 RealClearWire

Soccer Moms are giving way to Single Woke Females – the new “SWFs” – as one of the most potent voting blocs in American politics.

Unmarried women without children have been moving toward the Democratic Party for several years, but the 2022 midterms may have been their electoral coming-out party as they proved the chief break on the predicted Republican wave. While married men and women as well as unmarried men broke for the GOP, CNN exit polls found that 68% of unmarried women voted for Democrats.

Disgraced Crypto Ex-CEO Was Plotting to Spend Nearly $1 Billion Boosting Dems, Reshaping American Politics: Report

November 24, 2022November 23, 2022 Minnesota Sun Staff

Sam Bankman-Fried, former CEO of now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, had planned to become the biggest donor to the Democratic Party in 2024, a cycle in which he might have spent as much as $1 billion, according to investigative journalist Theodore Schleifer, writing for Puck News Wednesday.

The erstwhile billionaire filed in April, 2022, to incorporate an umbrella organization known as The Center for the Future in Delaware, according to Schleifer, citing corporate database Open Corporates. The organization intended to tackle a variety of hot-button issues ranging from pandemic preparedness to democracy reform, the foundation of which was the first salvo in a 50-year influence campaign designed to fundamentally transform American politics, Schleifer alleges, citing sources who spoke with Bankman-Fried’s aides.

Commentary: A New Age of American Politics

November 23, 2022November 22, 2022 Minnesota Sun Staff

After sifting through the rubble from election night, and having done some soul searching on my basic knowledge of politics, I’ve come to a few conclusions: American politics has entered a new age. All that has gone before—polls, historical trends, message, issues, candidate quality, traditional get-out-the-vote efforts, candidate debates, voter persuasion—means almost nothing and is extremely insignificant.

The thing—the only thing—that truly matters now is a “ballots out, ballots in” machine.

Commentary: The Only Culture War That Truly Matters

January 16, 2022 Admin

The term “culture war” has been a staple of American politics and public debates for decades, the latest iterations framed by the likes of abortion, marriage equality, and climate change. However, such issues don’t motivate voters as much as people on the extremes tend to believe.

You saw it in Virginia’s recent election, with exit polls showing that 34% of voters say the economy/jobs is the most important issue facing the state. Education is the second-most important issue, and with it the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic that closed schools — contrary to the wishes of many parents. Critical race theory was important insofar as it related to education and the say that parents should have regarding what’s taught in local schools.

Poll: Majorities of Republicans and Democrats Say the U.S. Is ‘in a State of Decay’

January 8, 2022January 7, 2022 Minnesota Sun Staff

More than three-quarters of likely voters believe the United States is “in a state of decay,” according to a new poll by the Trafalgar Group for Convention of States Action, a grassroots organization aimed at convening a convention to amend the U.S. Constitution.

The poll, conducted in December, asked a single question: “Do you believe American society and culture is in a state of decay or a state of decay?” Just over 76 percent of respondents answered “state of decay,” while 9.8 percent answered “state of progress.” Another 13.4 percent said they were unsure.

Commentary: The Ridiculous Fantasy of a National Divorce

January 6, 2022 Admin

Every now and then an absurd idea enters the discourse and picks up a sort of memetic traction in spite of itself. The latest such idea is that of a “national divorce” in which Blue America and Red America decide they’ve had enough of each other and call it quits. It popped up most recently when U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) broached the idea on Twitter, but the idea has been entertained by liberal figures as well, most recently the comedienne Sarah Silverman.

The impetus for this proposal from conservatives and liberals alike is the recognition that division in our country has gone beyond disagreement and good-natured rivalry to outright hatred. Indeed, far from being united by crisis as we were at crucial points in the past, we are now at a point of schadenfreude—liberals reveling in suffering and disaster when it happens to conservatives, and vice versa.

Commentary: Democrats Repeat the Mistakes of 2016

September 29, 2021September 28, 2021 Minnesota Sun Staff

As we get to the midpoint between the last presidential election and next year’s midterms, all political sides are expending extraordinary effort to ignore the 900-pound gorilla in the formerly smoke-filled room of American politics. This, of course, is Donald Trump.

The Democrats are still outwardly pretending Trump has gone and that his support has evaporated. They also pretend they can hobble him with vexatious litigation and, if necessary, destroy him again by raising the Trump-hate media smear campaign back to ear-splitting levels.

Commentary: The Liz Cheney Meltdown, and What It Means

July 24, 2021July 23, 2021 Minnesota Sun Staff

Bye, Liz.

The abject implosion of a politician once thought to possess national prospects — though not due to her talent but rather her name and connections — might have been overshadowed by the alarming performance just a few hours later by our near-invalid president. But Liz Cheney’s bizarre performance on the U.S. Capitol steps Wednesday was nonetheless notable.

If you haven’t followed the lead-up to Wednesday’s meltdown, it involved the sham 9/11 Commission–style inquiry being built to examine the Capitol riot of Jan. 6. That inquiry, to be chaired by partisan hack Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson on behalf of Nancy Pelosi, is obviously not built to fully examine what happened that day; it’s built to assign blame to the Republican Party for what Pelosi and the rest of the Democrat Party is determined to present as a casus belli against half of the American people.

Pelosi’s Jan. 6 commission is a big deal, because she has turned the Capitol into an armed camp behind razor wire for most of the past six months and change over the dubious assertion that the protesters who descended on the building and briefly disrupted the vote to certify a presidential election that still reeks of irregularity and worse presented an “insurrection” and a “grave threat to democracy” to trump (pun not intended, but whatever) anything else since the Civil War.

Commentary: Incommensurability in 2021 American Politics

July 21, 2021July 20, 2021 Minnesota Sun Staff

The ubiquitous term “paradigm” and the concept of “paradigm shifts,” were popularized by the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. He used them to characterize, roughly, a scientific theory’s fundamental elements and the changes in fundamental elements that occur with scientific revolutions and changes in theory.