The presidency of Donald Trump exposed a number of uncomfortable realities for American politics. His emergence into politics using ‘birtherism’ to question President Obama’s legitimacy and his racist attack on Mexicans during his campaign announcement were later supplemented by a whole host of raw racist, xenophobic, sexist, and rude commentary. For most on the American left, President Trump was the dirty roots of American opinion laid bare for everyone to see.

What is the role of a political party? Like any institution, discerning its role and purpose can be difficult. Parties are not singular entities, and they rarely behave as such. Parties also exist, as we all do, along a continuum or life cycle. They spring up, win power, lose power, lose members, win over voters, split into new parties, sit in coalition government, sit in opposition, and crumble into obscurity. No political party is guaranteed to experience all facets of partyhood, yet those with staying power tend to experience the wide breadth of those experiences.

A debate is raging in Denmark over what to do with 19 Danish children held in a camp in Syria (I wrote more about this last week). On one side, are the humanitarian minded center-left and left wing support parties who demand the government bring the either the children alone or the children and their Danish mothers home. On the other side, are the nationalist-conservative parties who contend that the children, though not themselves guilty, are to remain in Syria on account of their parent’s decision making.

[Here's a piece I wrote in May 2019. My thinking has changed a bit around the edges on this piece but my central theme still remains: if progressive policy is what we want, than the Democratic party needs to remain ideologically pluralistic and communicatively moderate. Counterintuitive on it's face but I believe that the current American political climate is ripe for progressive change as long as they don't think of it in those terms.

Can we as writers, researchers, journalists, and those who generally seek to discover and uncover knowledge ever truly be impartial to a topic? This question is particularly topically considering recent online discourse involving LGBTQ and specifically transgender writers and adjacents.