Dr. Robert Zaller

Politics

Is Humanity a Lost Cause?

Sometimes it takes a deeply conservative intelligence to get to the heart of the matter. Such an intelligence was that of William Butler Yeats, who wrote nearly a century ago that things, not men, were [ Read Article ]
Politics

Donald Doubles Down on His Base

So, what’s a fellow to do these days? Donald Trump was riding high a few months ago. He had what he liked to call a booming economy—booming, that is, for billionaires, with a stock market [ Read Article ]
Music

Of Sacred Spaces and the Right of Protest: The Orchestra’s Tour of Israel

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s just-concluded tour of Germany, Austria, and Israel has been the most controversial in its history. No, visiting Germany, where a resurgent right wing openly invokes the symbols of Nazism, wasn’t the problem. [ Read Article ]
Politics

On Living in a Pariah Nation

America was a curiosity country in the nineteenth century, attracting such figures as Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, and Rudyard Kipling. By the end of the century, it was a world power. Its own elite, [ Read Article ]
Academics

Outsourcing the Future: How America Has Abandoned Its Commitment to Public Education

America’s retreat from its century and a half commitment to public education has now become a rout. There has not been a greater betrayal of our country in my lifetime. There is no more disastrous [ Read Article ]
Academics

When a University Loses Its Soul

More than six decades ago, the sociologist C. Wright Mills warned of a “new universe of management and manipulation” that had entered American life, and that threatened to fundamentally alter its character and undermine its [ Read Article ]
Politics

Will America Have an Election in 2020?

In 2000, Vice President Al Gore conceded a disputed presidential election to George W. Bush after the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended his legal challenge to the Florida vote by the Republican State Secretary who [ Read Article ]

Romancing Barack: Hillary’s Last Fling

Politics

October 11, 2016 0

As I write this, the results of the Super Tuesday primary votes and caucuses have not yet come in, but the result is foregone: the media that anointed Hillary Rodham Clinton the Democratic nominee and [ Read Article ]

Is Donald Trump an “Extinction-Level Event”?

Politics

October 11, 2016 0

Andrew Sullivan, writing in the current issue of New York Magazine, calls the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency “an extinction-level event,” the life-form under threat being American democracy. That’s a pretty severe threat level [ Read Article ]

Politics

How It Happened: The Impossibility and Inevitability of Donald Trump

July 27, 2018 0

Maureen Dowd, The New York Times’ resident editorial wit, wrote recently that Donald Trump slipped into the presidency “through a tear in the space-continuum.” Sure feels that way. But would it were that simple. I [ Read Article ]

Politics

The Country, the Constitution, and the President

January 21, 2020 0

A recently posted comment by a CNN analyst, Stephen Collinson, seemed to me to sum up our current state of affairs: At a time of tribal politics and during a presidency that has evolved into [ Read Article ]

Politics

Going Crazy Over Terrorism

October 13, 2016 0

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I got a phone call from my son. He told me to turn on the TV, and I saw the World Trade Center towers burning. Ash, some of [ Read Article ]