| E. J. Dionne | |
| Birth Name: | Eugene Joseph Dionne Jr. |
| Birth Place: | Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Author, columnist |
| Subject: | Religion, history, politics, left-wing politics |
| Spouse: | Mary Boyle |
| Children: | 3 |
| Education: | Harvard University (BA) Balliol College, Oxford (DPhil) |
Eugene Joseph Dionne Jr. is an American journalist, political commentator, and long-time op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. He is also a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at the McCourt School of Public Policy of Georgetown University, and an NPR, MSNBC, and PBS commentator.
Dionne was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Fall River, Massachusetts. He is the son of the late Lucienne (née Galipeau), a librarian and teacher, and Eugène J. Dionne, a dentist.[1] [2] He is of French-Canadian descent.[3] He attended Portsmouth Abbey School (then known as Portsmouth Priory), a Benedictine college preparatory school in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
Dionne graduated in 1973 with a B.A., summa cum laude, in social studies from Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was affiliated with Adams House. He also earned a DPhil in sociology in 1982 from Balliol College, Oxford, 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. It was characterized as radical centrist by Time.[4] Later books include 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), Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (2012), and One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate and the Not-Yet Deported (2017), coauthored with Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann. His most recent book is Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country (2020).
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. He has joined the left-liberal The National Memo news-politics website.
Dionne lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Mary Boyle; they have three children: James, Julia, and Margot.[5]