"We now have two large camps, pitted against each other, who have starkly different conceptions of what their societies are and where they need to head. In a very real sense, these two camps no longer speak the same language. There has been a rupture, and they can find no common ground." By Johnathan Cook.

President Donald Trump has just fulfilled a campaign pledge to tear up the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievement. By Eli Clifton.

Barack Obama’s presidency was supposed to mark a great leap forward for the United States. But, as Omar El Akkad discovered as he travelled across America this year, the election of Donald J. Trump has turned the country against itself.

Two recent books—Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Gordon Lafer’s The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time—seek to explain several puzzling aspects of American politics today. Why do people of modest means who depend on government-funded health care and Social Security or other supplements to their income continue to vote for candidates who promise to privatize or get rid of those very programs? Why do people who are poor vote for politicians who promise to cut corporate taxes? By Diane Ravitch.

The FBI and certain animal rights groups are at war. By Kristin Hugo.

It’s genius season again. From NPR to the New York Times, they’re talking about where people were when they found out they had won the MacArthur Fellowship, our society’s most prestigious honor... By Thomas Frank.

By making a mockery of traditional efforts at reform, the Supreme Court’s ruling shifted our attention to local experiments that appear to be working. By Thomas B. Edsall.