Free Republic

Joel Kotkin reports from Davos that things are not well with Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. Says he: The growing irrelevance of what Adrian Wooldridge has labelled “the progressive aristocracy” can even be seen in the less than enthusiastic press coverage. Politico describes the contemporary Davos crowd as a “smart set” which “sounds dumb.” Then he sticks in the shiv: The grandees don’t have to travel far to see the results of their “reset” as nearby Germany’s industrial machine collapses, with even its last solar panel plant about to go belly-up. But then there was Javier Milei’s rousing speech in...

Voters deserve far better than the decrepit Democrats and Republicans. With the presidential race now heating up, the US faces a choice of disastrous proportions. It is shaping up to be an unpopularity contest between Donald Trump – an unstable narcissist – and the doddering, likely corrupt Joe Biden. In fact, three-quarters of Americans think Biden is too old to be re-elected and the majority consider him not mentally up to the job. Given that the vast majority do not want either of these foolish, dangerous old men to be in power, why not create an alternative party? This was...

Soccer Moms are giving way to Single Woke Females — the new “SWFs” — as one of the most potent voting blocs in American politics. Unmarried women without children have been moving toward the Democratic Party for several years, but the 2022 midterms may have been their electoral coming-out party, as they proved the chief break on the predicted Republican wave. While married men, women and unmarried men broke for the GOP, CNN exit polls found that 68% of unmarried women voted for Democrats. The Supreme Court’s August decision overturning Roe v. Wade was certainly a special factor in the...

Nothing has revealed the class divide in the U.S. quite like runaway inflation and skyrocketing gas prices. But in addition to the economic impact the staggering incompetence of the Biden administration is having on the working class, there is a political one; it's undeniably driving working class voters even further from the Democrats and toward the GOP. But it's not all good news for conservatives. The recent Amazon vote to unionize could be a precursor to something less appealing to the Right: a nascent rebellion among the vast armies of service workers who for decades have inhabited the lower economic...

Given his consistently poor approval ratings, and growing concern about the polarization that he has exacerbated, Democrats should have little trouble ousting President Trump next year. But instead, with a series of outlandish and often deeply unpopular proposals, they have morphed effectively into the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Democrats could succeed easily if they focused on basic middle class issues, such as health care and reforming the tax system, where popular opinion, including among working class whites, is largely on their side. Infrastructure spending, if they can somehow disassociate it from the usual pork-barreling, could also gain support, particularly...

Where do we go after Trump? This question becomes more pertinent as the soap opera administration seeks its own dramatic demise. Yet before they can seize power from the president and his now subservient party, the Democrats need to agree on what will replace Trumpism. Conventional wisdom implies an endless battle between pragmatic, corporate Clintonites on one side, and Democratic socialists of the Bernie brand. Yet this conflict could resolve itself in a new, innovative approach that could be best described as oligarchal socialism. Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing concentration of wealth and power in a few hands...

Sorry, city sophisticates, but the metropolis of the future may prove far less intensely urban than you hope. For all the focus on trendy downtowns and skyscrapers, the real growth in jobs and population is likely to take place on the periphery. The new urbanism, built around downtown revival and beloved by the celebrated starchitects, will cede pride of place to the "new suburbanism." And not only in the land of free-ranging suburbs, America. In contrast to the powers who fight "sprawl," advocates of the new suburbanism focus on ways to make the periphery work better. It's about bringing business...

Because the old New Orleans is no more, it could resurrect itself as the great new American city of the 21st century. Or as an impoverished tourist trap. Founded by the French in 1718, site of the first U.S. mint in the Western United States, this one-time pride of the South, this one-time queen of the Gulf Coast, had been declining for decades, slowly becoming an antiquated museum. Now New Orleans must decide how to be reborn. Its choices could foretell the future of urbanism. The sheer human tragedy - and the fact that the Gulf Coast is critical to...