New York Magazine

If you’re a conservative brainiac, contends New York magazine’s Chait, something’s been nagging at you, especially since Donald Trump started riding high in the polls: the realization that so many of your fellow right-wingers are dumb. “The conservative movement’s tightening grip over the Republican Party has coincided with its elevation of leaders incapable of explaining their policies cogently…

If New York magazine blogger Chait had expressed metaphorically his argument about the relationship between racism and the conservative movement, it might have gone something like this: Conservatism is a perfectly presentable, structurally sound wooden house, but a lot of conservatives are termites. In a Thursday post, Chait himself wrote, “While conservatism has [a] perfectly non-racist basis…

Democrats have long envied Republicans’ message discipline, which presumably means Dems are relishing what Martin Longman calls the “disarray” in the GOP and in its main “official organ,” Fox News. “I don’t think right-wing media is set up to deal with an unorthodox candidate [Donald Trump] who doesn’t consistently hew to the conservative line,” remarked Longman. “I also don’t know how they’d…

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, New York magazine's Frank Rich asserted that GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio is "quite far to the right" and has a "very truculent neocon foreign policy" as he and host O'Donnell discussed whether the Florida Senator has the best chance of the "establishment" Republican candidates of being nominated.

Left-leaning pundits worth their salt know that Donald Trump isn’t a movement conservative, but many of them believe nonetheless that his candidacy is, in some social/cultural/emotional sense, a fundamentally righty phenomenon. That said, Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas, whose lefty credentials are hardly in question, argued in a Friday post that while Trump “happened to land on…

Commenting Friday on National Review’s anti-Donald Trump editorial and symposium, The New Republic’s Jeet Heer and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait agreed that conservatives are responsible for Trump’s Republican frontrunner status, but differed on which unpleasant right-wing trait, “white identity politics” or anti-intellectualism, was the prime mover.

On Monday's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, host O'Donnell and Frank Rich of New York magazine talked up the possibility that GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz is not really a natural-born U.S. citizen and therefore not eligible to serve as President. Rich, a former New York Times columnist, praised GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump as "brilliant" for pushing the issue…

In a Wednesday post, New York magazine's Chait sought to debunk the belief that Marco Rubio is a moderate. As for why some might see him that way, Chait suggested a few reasons, among them that Rubio, unlike fellow Republican presidential contenders Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, “avoids statements that make him appear ostentatiously deranged.” Chait argued that while Rubio’s focus on positioning…

If you could sum up 2015 in one word, what would it be? In early December, Dictionary.com revealed its top pick. Based off of “language evolution and user interest,” the online lexicon dubbed identity the 2015 word of the year. You can probably understand why it’s become the liberal word of choice to attach to gender. Recent events have caused the reference website to update its content in order…

New York magazine’s Chait thinks that in a sense, conservatism and Communism aren’t such strange bedfellows when it comes to economic matters. In a Sunday post, Chait categorized “American conservatism” and Marxism as “rigid dogma,” whereas liberalism, he argued, focuses on “data.” Chait contended that “liberals would abandon, say, new environmental regulations if evidence persuaded them the…

The current election campaign pits the forces of backlash (“the old and angry”) against the forces of frontlash (“the new and different”), and November’s vote will be “a referendum on the existence and civic participation of Americans who are not white men,” contended Traister in a Wednesday piece for New York magazine. Traister posited that “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton…represent an altered…

When it comes to global warming, Esquire’s Charles Pierce implies, it’s now conservative Republicans and a few hidebound Democrats versus pretty much everyone and everything else, including the world’s non-human animals and its plant life. Meanwhile, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait opined that the Paris climate deal was “probably the [Obama] administration’s most important accomplishment."

Robin Williams’s first album was called Reality…What a Concept. More than one lefty blogger implied that Unreality…What a Concept would have been a fitting title for Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate.

The New York magazine writer-at-large and former New York Times columnist and theater critic says Jeb's problems included not only Dubya’s war in Iraq and pre-9/11 “national-security failures” but also the supposedly unsavory, extreme-right types that 41 and 43 attracted to the GOP, thereby contributing to its ruin.