New York Magazine

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has contempt for both Donald Trump (“his appeal operates…at a sub-intellectual level”) and those who’ve voted for him (“the Republican Party turns out to be filled with idiots”). Still, suggested Chait in a Thursday post, Trump and his supporters have unwittingly clarified something important: the Tea Party movement is not and never was truly conservative,…

In a Tuesday post, New York magazine’s Chait suggested that conservatism is driven not by an elite but by its riff-raff. Chait asserted, “Whatever [the] abstract arguments for conservative policy…on the ground, Republican politics boils down to ethno-nationalistic passions ungoverned by reason,” and remarked that Donald Trump’s supporters “have revealed things about the nature of the party that…

On Monday's Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, after New York magazine's Andrew Sullivan slammed Donald Trump's proposal for a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants, host Anderson Cooper grasped at straws to suggest an equivalence with banning Jews because "Jewish extremists" have "committed acts of terrorism against Israeli leaders" as he pushed back against conservative CNN commentator Kayleigh McEnany's…

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait admires Bernie Sanders’s willingness (eagerness?) to raise taxes so as to “finance the kind of social benefits American liberals would prefer.” That’s why Chait is disappointed that Sanders opposes Philadelphia’s proposed three-cents-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened drinks, revenue from which would fund citywide pre-kindergarten and other programs. In a Tuesday…

Republicans may have to do some world-class needle-threading to come up with a presidential nominee who can win in November. New York magazine's Kilgore believes that even if such a candidate exists, it’s not the “hammer-headed movement conservative” Ted Cruz. “Unity candidates are reassuring and have a knack for making you see your own reflection in their soft and soulful eyes,” wrote Kilgore…

There’s a crucial difference between the Loch Ness Monster and any Republican health-care-reform plan worthy of the name: Nessie almost certainly does not exist, but the GOP plan cannot exist. That, essentially, was the message of a Monday blog post by New York magazine’s Chait. “It is impossible to design a health-care plan that is both consistent with conservative ideology and acceptable to…

“I’ve made up my mind -- don’t confuse me with the facts” could be Republicans’ unofficial motto when it comes to Obamacare, suggested New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait in a Tuesday post concerning decreased growth in health-care costs. Chait asserted that “some aspects of the lower health-care-inflation rate can be clearly tied to Obamacare reforms,” though he allowed that “it’s impossible to…

In early 2008, Barack Obama annoyed many liberals when he said that President Reagan (but not President Clinton) had “changed the trajectory of America.” New York magazine’s Chait no doubt will irritate many conservatives by suggesting Obama has done the same over the past seven-plus years. In a piece for the March 21 issue, Chait commented, “Obama hasn’t so much moved from the center to the left…

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.