Thursday 22 May 1856, was a sunny, sleepy day in Washington, D.C. As Preston Brooks, the Democratic Representative from South Carolina’s Fourth District, strolled into the Senate chamber, the air felt hot and heavy. The Senate’s business had wound down; …
Donald Trump is not finished yet
A perfect rerun of the political battles of the Trump presidency is being fought in the January 6 House Select Committee hearings. On one side is Trump, guilty of idiocy, egregious lack of judgment, indifference to constitutional norms, and of …
Does Jill Biden think you are a taco?
First Lady of the United States Jill Biden is the outrage cycle’s main character this week, after she compared a coalition of Hispanic voters to breakfast tacos. The offence occurred during an event called, and I am not making this …
Boris Johnson broke Britain
Pity the poor columnist attempting to write The Case for Boris: a blank screen sits before him, the cursor blinking helplessly. There simply is no case for Boris, no justification for any continued role in public life. None of the …
How universities were corrupted
When are we going to do something about the state of our universities? We must surely by now be familiar with the symbols of this unfolding crisis. Philosopher Kathleen Stock, who was harassed by students and staff to such an …
What I saw during Watergate
Fifty years ago this Friday, the police of Washington, DC discovered a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex. When the news first broke, I, like most people, gave it no notice. Within …
Only a monarch can control the elites
It’s a little-known fact that Shakespeare hated Americans. At least, when in Twelfth Night Sir Andrew Aguecheek said “I had as lief be a Brownist as a politician”, he meant the same impertinent little cult that would later set out …
Only a monarch can control the elites
It’s a little-known fact that Shakespeare hated Americans. At least, when in Twelfth Night Sir Andrew Aguecheek said “I had as lief be a Brownist as a politician”, he meant the same impertinent little cult that would later set out …
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, …
The truth about the Buffalo shooting
After the horrific racist mass shooting of 13 people — 11 of them black — in a Buffalo, New York supermarket, it is vital to ask what caused such violence. For some progressives, the answer is already clear: Republicans, notably …
Is Donald Trump Jr running for president?
“Austin Loves President Trump” proclaimed the billboard, alongside a photograph of The Donald’s scowling mug. It was striking for two reasons. First, it wasn’t true: 72% of voters in Travis County, where the liberal capital of Texas is located, cast …
The twilight of identity politics
During the 2016 Democratic primary Hillary Clinton began to enthusiastically deploy identitarian arguments against Bernie Sanders. Her media surrogates derided his supporters as straight white “brocialists”. Bernie Bros were guilty of “mansplaining” anti-capitalism to the nation’s minorities and aspiring young …
Neoliberalism died before Ukraine
The neoliberal order that triumphed on a global scale in the Nineties and 2000s aspired to the free movement of goods, capital, people, and information throughout the world. Unfettered capitalism would release the global economy from arbitrary constraints, and if …
The age of attention politics
A couple of decades ago, I spent a week trying to commute on the London Underground without looking at the adverts in tunnels or on the carriages.
At the time a committed anti-capitalist, I experienced the ever more intrusive presence …
American feminism has turned its back on women
Back in the mid Eighties, a woman named Eleanor Bergstein wrote a movie warning young women what would happen to them if their right to abortion was taken away. “It seemed to me that women in the Eighties no longer …