Diary: At CPAC

Antonia Hitchens, 20 March 2025

Trump’s supporters had retrenched during what they call his interregnum; now they were on stage with the national security adviser and the White House deputy chief of staff. The Third Term Project, a...

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Short Cuts: Labour’s Immigration Policy

Daniel Trilling, 20 March 2025

Having ruled out any large-scale redistribution of wealth, Labour should be putting its changes to workers’ rights, including entitlement to protections from ‘day one’, an end to zero-hours contracts...

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Great significance has been attributed to the government of Giorgia Meloni, who became Italy’s prime minister in 2022. For some, it signals the return of fascism in a novel form; for the majority of...

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I am Genghis Khan: Shoring Up SoftBank

Laleh Khalili, 20 March 2025

Masayoshi Son seems compulsively driven to invest larger and larger sums so he can call himself the biggest, most significant, most visionary investor in the world. ‘Bill Gates just started Microsoft...

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The Holy Alliance presented itself as an intimate spiritual union between the souls and consciences of its signatories rather than a conventional treaty between sovereigns. It thereby encouraged contemporaries...

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Trump has provided the CDU with perfect cover to break with the creed of the schwarze Null. Whether the fiscal unleashing comes in the waning days of Scholz’s coalition or has to wait until Friedrich...

Read more about Goodbye Black Zero? Germany without Washington

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

Paul Marshall’s emergence as a media magnate has surprised many. ‘I totally get UnHerd. That’s who Paul is,’ one person I spoke to said. ‘But I can’t see the purpose of [owning] the Spectator...

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Illusions of Containment: Versions of Hamas

Tom Stevenson, 6 February 2025

Hamas had been able to take power in Gaza because Israel had failed to circumscribe Palestinian politics within the Oslo boundaries. But in the event, Hamas was useful to Israel's larger strategy of occupation.

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Feeding Time at the Trough: President $Trump

David Runciman, 6 February 2025

The question Trump’s opponents want answered is whether he can get away with it. Will his coalition hold, will his policies backfire, will his party baulk, will his rivals circle, will his cheerleaders...

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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...

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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...

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Incoming! They Came from Fox News

Eliot Weinberger, 26 December 2024

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...

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Short Cuts: Trusting the Trustees

Thomas Jones, 26 December 2024

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...

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Exquisite Americana: Trump and US Power

Tom Stevenson, 5 December 2024

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...

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A Crisis in Credibility: Labour’s Conundrum

William Davies, 21 November 2024

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...

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The Democrats’ Defeat

Adam Tooze, 21 November 2024

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...

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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...

Read more about Commencing Demagogues and Ending Tyrants: What’s wrong with the electoral college

Prophet of the Past: Blame it on Malthus

Oliver Cussen, 26 September 2024

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,...

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