E.J. Dionne Jr.

Washington, D.C.

Columnist covering national politics

Education: Oxford University, D.Phil.; Harvard University, BA

E.J. Dionne Jr. writes about politics in a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post. He is also a government professor at Georgetown University, a visiting professor at Harvard University, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a frequent commentator on politics for National Public Radio and MSNBC. His book “Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country” was published by St. Martin’s Press in February. Before joining The Post in 1990 as a political reporter, Dionne spent 14 years at the New York Times, where he covered politics and r
Latest from E.J. Dionne Jr.

Why we’re still stuck in Trump’s world

There is a madness running through our nation’s public life. It's built into the structure of American politics and the belief system of Republican voters.

March 26, 2023

First, Biden was FDR. Now he’s Clinton. (Spoiler alert: He’s neither.)

Maybe Joe Biden is just Joe Biden, and maybe it’s neither the 1930s nor the 1990s anymore.

March 19, 2023

Why we should all be liberal: The power of an adjective

The adjective “liberal,” Michael Walzer writes in '"The Struggle for a Decent Politics," “determines not who we are but how we are who we are.”

March 12, 2023

‘History months’ celebrate those who were written out of the story

Are Black History Month and Women's History Month signs that history has been “politicized?” Only in the sense that political change affects how we see history.

March 5, 2023

Putin pitches the American right with an ungodly invocation of God

The Russian dictator's recent speech fired some missiles into the U.S. culture wars.

February 25, 2023

Our system doesn’t act even when we agree. That’s killing us.

What kind of country sits by while its young people get shot and killed? The answer lies in a breakdown of our system’s ability to reflect majority opinion.

February 19, 2023

Biden and Democratic governors embrace the new (old) class politics

Biden’s bet — and it’s a wager many successful Democratic governors made last year — is that Democrats can win back blue-collar voters.

February 12, 2023

Biden’s State of the Union case for his quiet revolution

Biden, lover of compromise, consensus-building and comity, is a revolutionary turning the nation away from the economic assumptions of the 1980s.

February 5, 2023

Why Pope Francis stood up for LGBTQ lives

Despite immediate criticism from conservatives, the pope’s latest salvo is likely to be popular in the pews.

January 29, 2023

Will American politics stay stuck? Biden has a plan for that.

Can any party, movement or politician break through the immobility of American politics that leaves us divided roughly equally in election after election?

January 22, 2023