Politics & Economics

For several decades, hard-right views offered the moral urgency and dramatic clarity Reagan craved. He regularly warned that welfare statism would lead the US to fall gradually into communism, like ‘overripe...

Trump has annihilated the idea of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in our hands. We manufacture him: our fingers are just his size. His rambling, vindictive, uninflected shtick...

They vow to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget – five times the combined annual salaries of all federal employees. They vow an end to ‘wokeness’ in all its imagined forms and the return...

The censuring of a few rogue trustees ought to reassure the public that other charities really are doing the good works they claim to be, though the recent flurry of revelations may also foster distrust...

The underlying theme for US foreign policy remains elite consensus. In his use of the machinery of American empire and the ideology of perpetual primacy, Trump shares much with his predecessors. Maximum...

Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer’s platform requires them to inhabit a contradiction. They need to demonstrate what a bold, fiscally ambitious, ‘mission-driven’ government can achieve – yet their...

Being the party of normality has its appeal, but it reinforces precisely the wrong instinct. The polycrisis that is unfolding demands not a return to the status quo but urgent, progressive answers both...

At some point Americans are going to have to confront a painful truth: they can no longer rely on the constitutional machinery devised by the nation’s late 18th-century founders. Muddling through this...

In the guise of natural theology, Malthusian political economy soon became the common sense of a middle class brought up to see the world as fallen and life as a trial: scarcity was ordained by providence,...

All winning presidential candidates, regardless of ideology or policy, have been perceived – rightly or wrongly – as believing what they say. The losers were seen as repeating whatever they thought...

At the trial in March of Michael Sparks, the first rioter to enter the Capitol illegally, the defence attorney argued that his client had merely been following orders: ‘He was there to do what his president...

The Democratic Party is now the party of labour and of capital; the party of debtors and of bankers; the party of anti-monopolists and of Silicon Valley; the party for immigrants and for border security;...

The closer Labour got to power, the closer the business lobby got to Labour. The party conference in Liverpool last October was swarming with lobbyists. ‘This is my first Labour conference in years,’...

The violent culture Trump promoted is now beatifying him as its most famous victim. The iconography of his fist-pump and bloodied face immediately became the image he had waited for all his life, as –...

In July 2020 I drove through Lynch for the first time. Many buildings had been abandoned and boarded up. A rusted chute sloped down from the top of a concrete silo and disappeared into shrubs on the other...

For the left, Macron conjures up memories of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who launched his 1851 coup by papering Paris with posters announcing: ‘I have dissolved [the National Assembly] and I make the...

It was a ‘decade of heroes’, as E.P. Thompson put it. ‘There were Guevaras in every street and in every wood.’ Popular Front coalitions won power in France, Spain and Chile, and sympathisers with...

Macron and his followers are right to think they can ignore events in Gaza so long as they call for a ceasefire and advocate a two-state solution: these gestures cost nothing. Macron can even assert that...