I have some bad news for Joe Biden: Donald Trump is not, as Biden said recently, an “aberration” from the bipartisan policymaking he remembers nostalgically in Washington. Biden’s “Republican friends,” and even many of his fellow Democrats, are not waiting eagerly for the kind of collegial dealmaking he says he will bring to Washington. Rather both politics and policy have shifted dramatically from a model of deliberation to one in which war is the new normal.

There is something Kafkaesque about the current round of investigating possible FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Justice Department, and National Security Council wrongdoing during the 2016 election, Trump transition, and early presidency.

Byron York offers his thoughts on the state of the 2020 presidential race.

Author, economist, and theologian Mary Hirschfeld of Villanova University talks about her book, Aquinas and the Market, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Hirschfeld looks at the nature of our economic activity as buyers and sellers and whether our pursuit of economic growth and material well-being comes at a cost. She encourages a skeptical stance about the ability of more stuff to produce true happiness and/or satisfaction. The conversation includes a critique of economic theory and the aspect of human satisfaction outside the domain of economists.

Be it the defiling of a statue of Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, slapping leaders during campaigning or influencing votes within polling booths, the unsung but assiduous work of the Indian poll worker may be the central story of the 2019 general elections.

Economist Alice Rivlin died Tuesday at age 88. She was my favorite liberal (in the modern, not classical, sense) economist. She called it the way she saw it and was generally regarded by all sides as independent. That sometimes got her in hot water with her fellow Democrats.

Pro-democracy advocates and activists marked the 30th anniversary of the Tianamen Incident at an international conference in Taipei Saturday, urging the world not to forget the bloody crackdown and keep on working toward the sustainable growth of democracy around the world.

The United States, like most Western nations, no longer has a conservative political party and a liberal party, but rather a city party and a country party.