Over the past few years, journalists and political scientists have begun competing with screenwriters to produce fictions about a second American Civil War. “Could the United States be headed for a national divorce?” asks one recent publication from Chatham House. …
America is showing its age
It is sometimes helpful to remember, when trying to get perspective on the exhausting, high-octane politics of the United States, that it is a very old country. Americans can’t claim the thousands of years of cultural continuity of China or …
The Guardian’s links to the slave trade
The Guardian prides itself on being one of the most Left-leaning and anti-racist news outlets in the English-speaking world. So imagine its embarrassment when, last month, a number of black podcast producers researching the paper’s historic ties to slavery abruptly …
How free should US states be?
Years ago, I visited America’s most dignified factory. A place of noise, dust and heaving trucks. And yet of higher purpose. Granite Industries of Vermont is a principal maker and supplier of headstones for the government.
The factory workers constructed …
The West needs to grow up
The first modern revolution was neither French nor American, but English. Long before Louis XVI went to the Guillotine, or Washington crossed the Delaware, the country which later became renowned for stiff upper lips and proper tea went to war …
George Floyd, establishment martyr
Was violent chaos inevitable in America in the summer of 2020? If it was not inevitable, it had at least been predicted. In a 2017 review of Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, an account of left-wing terrorism in the Seventies, …
Do we need a capitalist civil war?
We Americans like to think of ourselves as a thoroughly modern people — living proof of what, with enough toil and grit, the rest of the free world can one day hope to be. And yet for all our progressivism …
Our age of incivility must end
In the summer of 2020, protestors — and criminals — installed a reign of disorder in many American cities. On the news and on social media, one could see videos of arson in Minneapolis, mass looting in Manhattan and Los …
Ireland’s elites are rewriting the past
When the Irish government published a video to commemorate the centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016, there were a number of glaring absences. The 90-second clip made no mention of its combatants or the bloody crushing of the rebellion …
This is not how civil wars start
I moved recently to a remote part of Northern California, where in a couple weeks an election will decide whether or not allies of the local militia take control of the county government. It’s a fraught situation, in a part …
