Washington Monthly

08/25/2025

Published today — the annual Washington Monthly College Guide: The Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars. Check out our alternative set of rankings, based on a different definition of what constitutes excellence in higher education.

A college degree is costly, to both students and taxpayers. Here’s the only list that shows which institutions provide good value to both.

06/02/2025

The July/August issue of the Washington Monthly is here!

Paul Glastris on the need for Democrats to offer "a vision for reviving the American dream that is more convincing than Trump’s, but more robust and understandable than Biden’s" https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/06/01/rules-to-win-by/

Phillip Longman on the merits of regulated competition: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/06/01/the-secret-to-reindustrializing-america-is-not-tax-cuts-and-tariffs-its-regulated-competition/

Barry Lynn argues Democrats must "fully recover America’s original language of liberty." https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/06/01/resurrecting-the-rebel-alliance/

And more! https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/july-august-2025/

To truly end the age of Trump and his loyal oligarchy, Democrats must relearn the language and levers of power.

05/27/2025

Check out Carrie Baker on The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell discussing her Washington Monthly article (https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/25/how-reproductive-freedom-advocates-outsmarted-the-anti-abortion-movement/) about how reproductive freedom advocates have built a network to help people access abortion pills and overcome Dobbs

https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/house-republicans-vote-to-defund-hundreds-of-planned-parenthood-clinics-240345157561

Donald Trump and the Republicans’ budget bill could take reproductive health care access away from more than 1.1 million Planned Parenthood patients. Carrie Baker, professor of Women and Gender Studies at Smith College, joins MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss the consequences Republican Me...

03/21/2025

"J.D. Vance Is the Most Disliked New Vice President in History"

The public isn’t taking to J.D. Vance's obnoxious style, which bodes well for politics in the post-Trump era.

02/26/2025

"New York City is in crisis. Only the financial crisis of 1975, when the 'wonderful town' could not pay its bills, borrow, or avoid default, is comparable. Yes, crime is lower than in the graffiti-tagged 1970s and 1980s, and there is no singular horror befalling the city like the 9/11 attacks, but this is very much an emergency."

Crime, corruption, and congestion are all part of a city where no one knows if the mayor may go to jail or Andrew Cuomo could return.

02/25/2025

"...in just a few short weeks, Trump has turned what was once the indispensable nation into another squabbling player in a chaotic world sure to grow even more dangerous and disorderly without American leadership."

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/02/24/donald-trump-and-the-end-of-american-global-leadership/

01/30/2025

"It is hard to overstate the dangers of the constitutional crisis that Trump is trying to provoke. He is pushing back against Congress’s key levers as a co-equal branch: not only its investigative powers but also its primacy in setting national policy, its authority to structure the offices of administration and to regulate their operation, and its power of the purse"

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/30/trumps-fusillade-of-tyrannical-orders/

01/30/2025

"Trump’s illegal assertion of executive power echoes the attempt 158 years ago by President Andrew Johnson to fire Secretary of War Edward Stanton"

President Trump won't get impeached like Johnson, but his purge of Inspectors General betrays his felony status.

01/29/2025

"If a commander in chief is too fragile, too much of a snowflake to absorb an uncomfortable moment in a public forum, and if a minister requesting kindness to children is cause for discomfort, even contempt, then what we have is a values crisis that transcends policy."

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/28/the-trump-values-crisis/

01/24/2025

"...in his executive order concerning birthright citizenship, he demonstrated his willingness to take autocratic action. Trump assumes the power to decide who can be considered a citizen."

President Trump's flood-the-zone strategy is overwhelming but his setback on birthright citizenship is a good sign.

01/23/2025

"We are barely into the second Trump administration, and we are seeing prominent journalists rewriting history and, in some cases, rationalizing the president’s anti-constitutional tendencies. Here are three unsettling examples."

In Trump's first week, our most venerable media institutions are praising oligarchy and rewriting history.

01/17/2025

"From a regional point of view ... 2024, in many ways, doesn’t look much different from the 2000 election. A quarter century of drama and upheaval—hanging chads, falling towers, forever wars, failing banks, deadly variants—and most of the country’s regional cultures have barely budged their partisan leanings. In most regions, this was Donald Trump’s best election yet, but his ethnonationalist agenda still underperformed George W. Bush’s corporate neo-conservatism"

A quarter century of political, social, and economic upheaval has left little mark on the political behavior of the “American Nations” regions.