About Wolves and Sheep

What’s going to happen to our republic after Donald Trump? Democracy survived an insurrection – but do we risk another? And could it succeed next time? What’s up with the Republican Party? Is their continued loyalty to Trump a highway back to power or a trip around a cul-de-sac? How does Biden’s early legislative success play into prospects for the country’s future? Is the return to stability real or an intermission between disruptive acts? Is partisanship going to define everything we do for the rest of our lives? What’s driving all this? Why is it happening now? Will things ever get better?

These questions preoccupy a worried and edgy electorate, and at Wolves and Sheep we try to make sense of them from a different perspective than you’ll find in mainstream punditry. So much political analysis is shaped in the echo chambers of Washington and New York, and while it may be conventional it frequently lacks wisdom. Just think about how many times you’ve heard well-regarded analysts proclaim with certainty that something was impossible, only to see it materialize a few months later. There’s a good reason for this. In order to navigate the complexities of the political process you need context to help make sense of it all, and the middle of the political storm is the worst place to find it.

So much political analysis relies on a journalistic frame of reference centering on idiosyncratic personalities and events. This approach can explain a lot during periods of political stability when deviations from orthodoxy are rare. At Wolves and Sheep, we don’t believe we’re living in such a time, and we suspect you feel the same way. So we apply a different frame of reference that treats individuals, events, even entire elections as elements of an interrelated system, and try to understand them in the context of other periods of severe political and social dislocation, like the 1960s, 1930s and 1860s, which resonate with today’s disruptive politics. These were periods when the political system experienced tremendous stress but ultimately proved resilient. They were eras – like ours – that played out along the fault lines of political party decline, decay and renewal, and they can help us understand events in a way that Beltway commentators may not be able to see.

Welcome to Wolves and Sheep — and buckle up. We live in interesting times.