Is the new populism about the message or the medium?

None of the candidates, not even the party favorites, are campaigning on behalf of their party; most are campaigning to crash it.

.. It began in 1787, during the debate over the Constitution, a debate waged in ratifying conventions but also, more thrillingly, in the nation’s hundreds of weekly newspapers. Some favored ratification; these became Federalist newspapers. Others, the Anti-Federalist newspapers, opposed it. If it hadn’t been for the all-or-nothing dualism of this choice, the United States might well have a multiparty political culture.

.. Revolutions in communication tend to pull the people away from the élites. (The printing press is the classic example; think of its role in the Reformation. But this happens, to varying degrees, every time the speed and scale of communication makes a leap.) In 1833, refinements in printing technology lowered the cost of a daily newspaper to a penny or two; in the eighteen-forties, newspapers got their news by telegraph; the post office set a special, cheaper rate for newspapers; and, in the eighteen-fifties, newspapers began printing illustrations based on photographs.

.. In 1920, Warren Harding became the last Presidential candidate to send his speeches to voters, on a vinyl album. His successors turned to radio.

.. He led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, facing a third flag, held by Gary Dipiero, a Cruz supporter from Saugus, Massachusetts, who was carrying a “Hillary for Prison” sign. (Dipiero told me that he expects this of a Cruz Presidency: “He’s going to prosecute her and throw her in jail.”)

.. Apart from the bluejeans and the boots, which Reagan liked to wear, too, very little about Ted Cruz is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan. Where Reagan was warm and prided himself on being welcoming, Cruz is cold: he likes to make threats.

.. Some Republican candidates deny press passes to journalists they consider to be part of the “liberal media,” preferring to bypass the press in favor of a direct feed. Trump’s decision to sit out the last debate in Iowa before the caucuses took this one step further, but in the very same direction.

.. The American party system is not only a creation of the press; it is dependent on it. It is currently fashionable, indispensable, even, to malign the press, whether liberal or conservative.

.. But when the press is in the throes of change, so is the party system.

.. With our phones in our hands and our eyes on our phones, each of us is a reporter, each a photographer, unedited and ill judged, chatting, snapping, tweeting, and posting, yikking and yakking. At some point, does each of us become a party of one?

Resetting the Post-Scalia Supreme Court

The voting rights decision was a pet project of Chief Justice Roberts, an opponent of the Voting Rights Act since his days as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration. But Justice Scalia was much more than just a passenger. His behavior during the oral argument gave a public face to the ugliness behind the attack on the foundational civil rights law, which both houses of Congress had reauthorized by overwhelming margins.

.. His frequent parroting of right-wing talking points in recent years may have reflected the contraction of his intellectual universe. In an interview with the writer Jennifer Senior (now a New York Times book critic) in New York magazine in 2013, Justice Scalia said he got most of his news from the car radio and from skimming The Wall Street Journal and the conservative Washington Times. He said he stopped reading The Washington Post because it had become so “shrilly, shrilly liberal” that he “couldn’t handle it anymore.”

.. These insights might help explain why someone as smart as Antonin Scalia seemed so un-self-conscious about his inflammatory rhetoric. He was simply giving voice to those he spent his time with. His world was one that reinforced and never challenged him.

.. About 10 years ago, I attended a gathering of Canadian judges and lawyers at Cambridge University. Justice Scalia gave his stump speech there about how his Constitution was not “living” but “dead,” with legitimate constitutional interpretation limited to the words and original understanding of the document’s authors. He may or may not have known that in Canada, constitutional interpretation starts from the premise that “the Constitution is a living tree.”

.. But I came to realize that Justice Scalia wasn’t playing the inside game. No matter that he never persuaded a majority of his fellow conservatives on the court to sign up for his brand of originalism.

What mattered was his ability to invoke originalism as a mobilizing tool outside the court, in speeches and in dissenting opinions. The message was that courts have no business recognizing “new” rights. (Except, evidently, new rights of which Justice Scalia approved, such as an unconstrained right for corporations to spend money in politics.)

.. Within a matter of months, federal district judges around the country invoked Justice Scalia’s dissent in striking down same-sex marriage bans. The much less polemical dissent in Windsor by Chief Justice Roberts, describing the decision as a narrow one based on principles of federalism, went uncited.

Had Justice Scalia overreached?

Fox News vs. Trump: Setting Free the Golden Goose

The R.N.C. has made clear there will be penalties for not playing nice. It moved a February debate from NBC to CNN after candidates complained about their treatment in a debate on CNBC. Then it disinvited a conservative “partner,” National Review, from that debate after it dedicated an issue to attacks on Mr. Trump. (Mr. Trump also claimed credit for getting ABC to dump New Hampshire’s Union Leader newspaper as a debate partner after it was critical of him.)

.. So Mr. Trump’s war on Fox News isn’t just a media spat. It’s part of a war for control against the power structure of the G.O.P. — whose appeals to cultural anxieties he has hijacked and dialed up to 11 — and thus against Fox as an extension of it. (The bizarro-world possibility of a Fox News at odds with the Republican nominee, should Mr. Trump win, would be one more weird twist in a campaign full of them.)