Power

His wardrobe -- and the millions he spent on it -- tell you everything you need to know about power, 1980s-style.

Legislatures regularly interfere with local affairs. The reasons, according to research, will surprise you.

Citizens pledge their allegiance to a nation that reciprocates with a pledge of allegiance to them. What does that look like?

Mueller and his team are facing a president who seems willing to take down the entire democratic apparatus to save his own skin.

How the contest between capitalism and communism shaped world politics—and defines today’s inequalities.

Embracing the swamp won't sink Trump immediately. But it will sink him eventually.

The new Slate Academy finds the seeds of our present politics in the period after the Civil War.

The bullshit, the truth… and Trump.

We may not like it, but when it comes to U.S. politics, polarization may very well be part of the solution.

He fought to remake the center—not yield to it.

It's not as new as it seems.

Donald Trump writes the latest chapter in a long history.

Although Karl Marx never saw the U.S., he thought long and hard about how it fit into his theory, especially during the Civil War.

Hoover was a brilliant manager, a wizard of logistics, and an effective humanitarian. Why do we remember him as a failure?

What the political crisis in post-revolutionary America has to teach us about our own time.

From propaganda posters to Facebook ads, 80-plus years of Russian meddling.

Does the trope obscure more than it illuminates about the 2016 election?

Not yet—but it has precious few supporters on either the left or the right.

They're the hunters, not the hunted.

Trump challenges the press. Nixon changed it.

What was Arthur Schlesinger’s “vital center”?

Restricting the press backfires politically.

How America's founding era sheds light on the NFL controversy.

And why it was so hard to see it coming.

A CIA operative informed headquarters that before he was shot, the Cuban revolutionary "never lost his composure."

Lyndon Johnson wanted sweeping new gun control laws. Instead he got crumbs.

The ardent but flawed movement against World War I.

Nazi Germany has closer ties to America and its history of institutionalized racism than some may think.

The Second Amendment does not stand in the way of better gun laws; the NRA does.

How profit motives have driven two centuries of American gun laws.