E. J. Dionne

 

E. J. Dionne
E. J. Dionne, January 2008
Born	Eugene Joseph Dionne, Jr. April 23, 1952 Boston, Massachusetts
Education	Harvard University, Balliol College, Oxford
Occupation	Columnist, author, political analyst, professor

Eugene Joseph "E.J." Dionne, Jr. (/diːˈɒn/; born April 23, 1952) is an American journalist and political commentator, and a long-time op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. He is also a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a University Professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at Georgetown Public Policy Institute, a Senior Research Fellow at Saint Anselm College, and an NPR, MSNBC, and PBS commentator.

Biography

Dionne was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Lucie-Anne (née Galipeau), a librarian and teacher, and Eugene J. Dionne, a dentist, and raised in Fall River, Massachusetts. He is of French-Canadian descent. He attended Portsmouth Abbey School, a Benedictine college preparatory school in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Dionne holds a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University (1973), where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was affiliated with Adams House, and a DPhil in Sociology from Balliol College, Oxford (1982), where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Dionne's published works include the influential 1991 bestseller Why Americans Hate Politics, which argued that several decades of political polarization was alienating a silent centrist majority, as well as They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (1996), Stand up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and Politics of Revenge (2004), Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right (2008), and "Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent(2012).

Dionne is a columnist for Commonweal, a liberal Catholic publication. Before becoming a columnist for the Post in 1993, he worked as a reporter for that paper as well as The New York Times.

Dionne lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Mary Boyle and three children, James, Julia and Margot.

Writings

• Why Americans Hate Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. ISBN 978-0-671-68255-2
• They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. ISBN 978-0-684-80768-3
• Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America (editor). Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1998 ISBN 0-8157-1867-5
• Stand Up, Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. ISBN 978-0-7432-5858-6
• Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. ISBN 0-691-13458-8
• Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. ISBN 1608192016

See also

• Co-commentator on NPR: David Brooks (journalist).

External links

• Washington Post columns
• Brookings Institution page
• Georgetown Faculty web page
• Works by or about E. J. Dionne in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• NPR page
• Truthdig page
• Biography from the Washington Post Writers Group
• "Conversation with History" interview
• Booknotes interview with Dionne on Why Americans Hate Politics, August 25, 1991.