Bannon’s departure is unlikely to calm the turmoil in Trump’s White Houseby wpjljron
Saturday, August 19th, 2017.Bannon’s departure is unlikely to calm the turmoil in Trump’s White HousePresident Trump’s most unconventional senior adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, may have left the White House but the political turbulence that has characterized the first seven months of Trump’s presidency doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. The tenure and departure of Bannon, the president’s chief strategist and champion of his nationalist impulses, exposed deep fissures in […]
President Trump’s most unconventional senior adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, may have left the White House but the political turbulence that has characterized the first seven months of Trump’s presidency doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.
March 9, 2021
An exhibit about the presidential election of 1912 featured its four main candidates, from left: Eugene Debs, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.Credit.Mario Tama/Getty Images
There is no rule that says American political parties canât die, and there was a time when it was quite common.
And not just in the 19th century either. The first decades of the 20th century, for example, saw the rise and fall of the Socialist Party, with Eugene V. Debs at its head. The short-lived Progressive Party came to life as a platform for the revived presidential ambitions of Theodore Roosevelt, and the Populist Party swept through much of America in the last years of the 19th century as a vehicle for the interests of farmers and laborers.
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One of the oldest imperatives of American electoral politics is to define your opponents before they can define themselves. So it was not surprising when, in the summer of 1963, Nelson Rockefeller, a centrist Republican governor from New York, launched a preëmptive attack against Barry Goldwater, a right-wing Arizona senator, as both men were preparing to run for the Presidential nomination of the Republican Party. But the nature of Rockefeller’s attack was noteworthy. If the G.O.P. embraced Goldwater, an opponent of civil-rights legislation, Rockefeller suggested that it would be pursuing a “program based on racism and sectionalism.” Such a turn toward the elements that Rockefeller saw as “fantastically short-sighted” would be potentially destructive to a party that had held the White House for eight years, owing to the popularity of Dwight Eisenhower, but had been languishing in the minority in Congress for the better part of three decades. So