David Runciman is an honorary professor of politics at Cambridge. His books include Political Hypocrisy: The Mask of Power, from Hobbes to Orwell and Beyond, How Democracy Ends and Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas. He has written more than a hundred pieces for the LRB on subjects including Lance Armstrong, gambling, all three volumes of Charles Moore’s biography of Thatcher, Donald Trump’s election and his defeat. He is the host of the podcast Past Present Future.
Many political scientists were utterly confounded when Trump won the presidency in 2016. A large number had staked their professional reputations on confident predictions that Hillary Clinton would brush him aside. But when the result came in those same political scientists were kicking themselves for not having seen it coming. What happened turned out to fit pretty well with the outcome...
The template for this presidency is reality television. The lead character is playing a part that depends on his own words and actions and yet is entirely contrived. The drama is organised around a series of showdowns and confrontations when everything seems to be on the line and yet nothing is really at stake. Each episode ends with some people staying and others being sent home. This seems to matter enormously at the time and yet it is hard to remember from one week to the next why anyone cared. From one season to the next it is hard even to remember who the main players were, and sometimes the winners are the hardest of all to remember. Yet everyone knows whose show it is. And we can’t stop watching.
Was he sufficiently spooked? As the person at the eye of the storm, he does his level best not to let it get to him. From the outset he remains determined not to get dragged down by the craziness that surrounds his every move. This attitude plays to his strengths: his sangfroid is formidable and his refusal to be baited is admirable. But it is also frustrating – Rhodes feels it and by the end the reader feels it as well. It comes too close to that side of Obama’s personality that ends up with him shrugging his shoulders and walking away.
The evidence for the premise that international sport spreads peace and goodwill has always been fairly thin: every major tournament is dressed up that way but the legacy is more often mothballed stadiums and simmering resentment, as was the case after South Africa 2010 and Brazil 2014. Rarely, though, has a regime so brazenly signalled its indifference to the niceties of international sport, which require at least the pretence that bad behaviour gets put on hold. As the saying goes, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, and this is the currency in which Fifa likes to trade. But Putin isn’t having any of it. He seems to have treated the award of the tournament as a licence to try his luck.
The likeliest way to overturn the referendum result is to wait until one party or other has taken clear ownership of its consequences. For that to happen, Brexit has to happen too. It is possible that at some point a second referendum will be appropriate, once a new status quo has been established, to see whether people would prefer an alternative. Until then, however, conventional electoral politics will have to decide our collective fate. It makes sense to regret that the referendum happened in the first place. But there is nothing to be gained by regretting the result. No one takes responsibility that way.
For the first episode in the new series of History of Ideas – on the great essays and the great essayists – David discusses Montaigne, the man who invented a whole new way of writing and being read.
For the second episode in this season of History of Ideas, David discusses the Scottish philosopher David Hume and explores how eighteenth-century arguments about the national debt can help make sense...
A historian ought to know better, I suppose. But for the last decade – ever since I passed a long queue of anxious depositors outside a branch of Northern Rock in September 2007...
When American politicians are caught having illicit sex – like Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor of New York in 2008 after it was revealed that he was using a call-girl when he went...
Throughout the history of political thought, attempts to imagine, classify and explain possible modes of political life have been characterised by starkly polarised and stylised antinomies. Among...
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