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 …
The conversion of JD Vance
Troy, Ohio
There are countless opportunities for petty embarrassment on the campaign trail. In a small event space in Troy, Ohio, Team J.D. Vance faces a familiar one: empty chairs. In a big venue, a half-full room is forgivable. But …
The death of the conservative elite
The Republican Party, from a certain perspective, is in tatters. It is trapped in a dysfunctional relationship with Donald Trump, who, although he ended his term in disgrace and remains obsessed with relitigating the 2020 election, still commands the loyalty …
Why Hispanics gave up on the Left
For just over a month, America’s first Spanish-language conservative radio station has been trying to win over the country’s most-talked about political demographic: increasingly right-leaning Hispanics. It couldn’t have launched at a better time.
When asked about the inspiration behind …
Have the Republicans gone too far?
How far is too far? From the Access Hollywood tape that many felt sure had sunk Donald Trump’s presidential hopes to the violent crescendo of January 6, this is the existential question Republican politicians have been forced to ask themselves …