The landslide victory of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Sunday’s election in Hungary may have disappointed European liberals -- but it drives home an important truth: The limits of the acceptable on the right flank of European politics are moving further to the right.　Orban has often been described as Europe’s black sheep, an outsider challenging European values, setting a bad example for others, and emboldening parties of the far-right fringe in Western Europe. Indeed, French nat

Viewpoints April 11, 2018

The Trump Era began when the future president descended into Trump Tower’s lobby on June 16, 2015, aboard an escalator. He launched his campaign there with a speech in which he promised to build a “great, great wall on our southern border.”　Trump has clung to that idea ever since. On Wednesday he vowed to send the National Guard to the southern border to patrol the area until the wall is built.　Trump also vowed in that 2015 speech that “nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump,” referri

Viewpoints April 9, 2018

Should coffee come with a cancer warning?　As a matter of policy, the answer seems obvious: Of course not. As a matter of law, it’s much more complicated, at least in California. A tentative judicial ruling in Los Angeles County last week suggests that when people go to the local coffee place, their morning ritual is going to be accompanied by a jolt of fear.　It could potentially turn into a fiasco, I think, and it tells us something important about how well-intentioned laws can go badly wrong.　T

Viewpoints April 9, 2018

Explanations of the Donald Trump phenomenon often start with conservatives versus liberals, the rural-urban split, or perhaps race and immigration. Those all play a role, but the accumulation of evidence is validating a hypothesis from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat: A big and very fundamental split in American electoral politics today is between different understandings of sex and gender relations.　I am struck by a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. Millennial women, defined as the

Viewpoints April 9, 2018

The press has been in a lather of late over reports that the Department of Homeland Security had discovered evidence that cellphone tracking tools were being used by “unauthorized” parties in and around Washington. Formally known as International Mobile Subscriber Identity catchers, and often called stingrays, these devices fool your phone’s baseband into believing it is in contact with a cell tower. IMSI catchers can use your phone’s signal to track your movements and contacts. In some cases th

Viewpoints April 8, 2018

Not long ago I attended an informal session in San Francisco on, basically, how to make the world a better place. Most of the attendees were from the Bay Area, and the technology industry. I was struck by how their approaches and perspectives differed from what I am used to, living in Northern Virginia, just outside of Washington.　Many participants announced visions of a better and very different future, such as letting top scientists operate without financial constraints. It was implied that we

Viewpoints April 5, 2018

The prices of industrial metals, oil and other commodities have risen significantly since the Chinese manufacturing recession ended in June 2016. But many have fallen from their highs in January 2018, first in reaction to the risk of higher interest rates and now, more critically, because of trade tensions and the potential for global manufacturing and growth to be slower than expected.　The potential for slower growth due to US and reciprocal tariffs was highlighted by the International Monetary

Viewpoints April 5, 2018

Before Wednesday evening, I’d never seen a single episode of “Roseanne.” But in the interest of cultural commentary, I cranked up my ABC.com app to see what all the fuss -- and the extraordinarily high ratings -- was about. Here’s what I learned.　1) It’s knowing. From the moment Dan Conner (John Goodman) wakes with a start, we’re in a familiar world rarely seen on TV. His face is covered by a plastic mask with a breathing tube. The show assumes the audience recognizes what it is: a CPAP (continu

Viewpoints April 3, 2018

The conventional wisdom in Washington these days says that Secretary of Defense James Mattis is the one man who can save the nation from war. The new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is a hawk’s hawk. And don’t get the foreign policy establishment started on incoming national security adviser, John Bolton. President Donald Trump himself pines for military parades and asserts that torturing terrorists “works.”　Like most conventional wisdom in the Trump era, however, this is all wrong -- for a num

Viewpoints April 3, 2018