Lance Morrow

The Democratic National Committee will regret its decision to bar Fox News from hosting any of its 2020 presidential primary debates.

Today’s media storytelling has perfected a genre of intensely sentimental and spontaneously generated folk tales, especially stories dealing with race and sexuality.

President Trump works with huckster falsehoods—the flashy superlatives of a car salesman. The progressive left works with conceptual falsities. Voters in 2020 will decide which style of lies they prefer.

In his State of the Union address, President Trump appeared presidential for seemingly the first time and dramatically advanced his chances for re-election in 2020.

Today’s progressives place adolescents at the center of their moral imaginations, as if the moods of teenagers were the mirror of their most consequential thoughts. 

A democracy refreshes itself by alternating its political emphases. In this way, the American people remain approximately sane, and prevent themselves from becoming either totalitarian or bored. But a binary system will break up if the two stars fly too far apart—if their mutual gravity cannot hold them in tension.

Social evolutions of the past century have dashed apart old sex roles and notions of self-sacrifice.

A healthy society reserves anger for special occasions. Today taking offense has become a reflex.

President Trump does not yet grasp that his compulsion to create chaos—sometimes an asset—may ultimately prove to be the greatest threat to his presidency.

Woodrow Wilson’s myth remains vexed and unsettled. He persists, in American memory, as a sort of botched paragon—a man who remains almost irritatingly alive and imperfect and somehow touching. The respect that he deserves is complicated—and so is the contempt.

Most of the abuse by Catholic clergy represents collateral damage caused by the sexual upheaval of the 1960s. The damage is continuing—and it isn’t so collateral anymore.

Nearly two years into the Trump administration, plenty of people remain almost crazy with anger, and the country’s political and cultural forces overall remain centrifugal, driving people to extremes. Yet civilizing and mitigating countercurrents are at work beneath the surface.