Politics & Economics

Donald Trump at the Republican National Congress

At the Republican National Convention

Andrew O’Hagan

20 July 2024

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 – on the floor, with mad bravery and media savvy beyond the bounds of reason – he prepared for the photo-op.

Read more about The Hard Zone: At the Republican National Convention

Anti-Fascists United

Gabriel Winant

1 August 2024

In​ 1963, June Croll and Eugene Gordon took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Gordon was African American, raised in New Orleans; Croll was Jewish, born in Odessa at the beginning . . .

Two Appalachias

Oliver Whang

1 August 2024

In​ 1917, the United States Coal and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black . . .

Bonapartism, Gaullism, Macronism

David Todd

1 August 2024

‘Citizens, you are dissolved.’ With those words General Joachim Murat dispersed the Council of Five Hundred in November 1799 and ended France’s first experiment with parliamentary democracy. The . . .

Fourteen Years Later

William Davies

26 June 2024

George Osborne​ gets booed at the London Olympics. Suella Braverman cracks gags during her visit to a half-built asylum detention centre in Rwanda. Boris Johnson is illegally presented with a birthday . . .

Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Perry Anderson, 7 February 2019

By comparison with the scale of the upheaval through which Brazil has lived in the last five years, and the gravity of its possible outcome, the histrionics over Brexit in this country and the conniptions over Trump in America are close to much ado about nothing.

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Let Them Drown

Naomi Klein, 2 June 2016

Environmentalism might have looked like a bourgeois playground to Edward Said. The Israeli state has long coated its nation-building project in a green veneer – it was a key part of the Zionist ‘back to the land’ pioneer ethos. And in this context trees, specifically, have been among the most potent weapons of land grabbing and occupation. 

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Where will we live? The Housing Disaster

James Meek, 9 January 2014

The government has stopped short of explicitly declaring war on the poor, but how different would the situation be if it had?

Read more about Where will we live? The Housing Disaster

What I Heard about Iraq: watch and listen

Eliot Weinberger, 3 February 2005

In 1992, a year after the first Gulf War, I heard Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, say that the US had been wise not to invade Baghdad and get ‘bogged down in the problems of trying...

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Moderation or Death: Isaiah Berlin

Christopher Hitchens, 26 November 1998

In​ The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and...

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Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future

Edward Luttwak, 7 April 1994

That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth...

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The Morning After

Edward Said, 21 October 1993

Our peoples are already too bound up with each other in conflict and a shared history of persecution for an American-style pow-wow to heal the wounds and open the way forward. There is still a victim and a victimiser. But there can be solidarity in struggling to end the inequities, and for Israelis in pressuring their government to end the occupation, the expropriation and the settlements. The Palestinians, after all, have very little left to give.

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Maastricht and All That

Wynne Godley, 8 October 1992

A lot of people throughout Europe have suddenly realised that they know hardly anything about the Maastricht Treaty while rightly sensing that it could make a huge difference to their lives....

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John Hume on the end of the Unionist veto in Ulster

John Hume, 2 February 1989

In recent times in Ireland we have been reminded of a lot of anniversaries. Remembering the past is something of an obsession here. The future, discussing it or shaping it, doesn’t seem...

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Macron’s Dance: France and Israel

Jeremy Harding, 4 July 2024

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...

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On RFK Jr

Deborah Friedell, 4 July 2024

‘I have cognitive problems, clearly,’ RFK Jr said under oath twelve years ago, suggesting that the cause was probably a brain-eating parasite. But he didn’t give up hope that he might one day run...

Read more about On RFK Jr

For his part, Saddam Hussein believed that the CIA knew full well his weapons store was empty – which meant he was the subject of yet another conspiracy. Experience had taught him that was usually the...

Read more about Why didn’t you tell me? Meddling in Iraq

Short Cuts: Labour or the SNP?

Rory Scothorne, 20 June 2024

The Scottish independence movement may not have been as transformative as its supporters hoped, but it was, for a time, genuinely exciting. It raised the political stakes, insisting that those who wanted...

Read more about Short Cuts: Labour or the SNP?

Despite its significance, the 1924 government has not been remembered fondly, even by Labour supporters, and its leading figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister,...

Read more about When Labour Was New: Labour’s First Government

Thatcherism degraded the social fabric to the point where the Tory Party was removed from office in 1997 on a wave of discontent. Thatcherism in its second guise – represented finally by Sunak announcing...

Read more about Carnival of Self-Harm: Good Riddance to the Tories

Breaking Point: Militant Constitutionalism

Martin Loughlin, 25 April 2024

Democracies implode when the authoritarian tendencies of the leaders of mainstream political parties are not reined in by constitutional mechanisms that are supposed to impose checks. 

Read more about Breaking Point: Militant Constitutionalism

The slippage between Tata and India speaks not just to Tata’s central place in the development of Indian capitalism but also to the way in which the corporation has variously come to represent progress,...

Read more about What’s Good for India: Good for Tata

Radical Mismatch: Cold War Liberalism

Stephen Holmes, 4 April 2024

Samuel Moyn doesn’t really believe that his four Cold War liberals (Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling and Judith Shklar), much less all those to whom that label might conceivably be applied,...

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Short Cuts: Jeremy Hunt’s Mendacity

James Butler, 21 March 2024

Hunt’s detachment from the catastrophe in local government is symptomatic of an odd doubleness that afflicts British politics, a refusal to acknowledge the yawning gap between the country as it actually...

Read more about Short Cuts: Jeremy Hunt’s Mendacity

China’s sheer size, and the revival of decentralised decision-making since the early post-Mao decades, means that a great deal of economic statecraft occurs at lower levels: provinces, cities, districts,...

Read more about The Mayor Economy: China’s Mayor Economy

There were strong currents of populist ‘anti-globalism’ in the interwar years and plenty of political leaders eager to whip up feeling for nationalist and often nefarious ends. But the 1920s were different...

Read more about We have been here before: Interwar Antagonisms

Cooked Frog: Orbán’s Hungary

David Edgar, 7 March 2024

 ‘Make Hungary Great Again’ is an effective summation of Orbánism; many Hungarians would like back the tracts of territory lost with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire at the end of the First World...

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Using the judiciary to lock up Imran Khan on trivialities, technicalities and a treason charge had only one purpose: to keep him out of the picture.

Read more about Short Cuts: Pakistan’s Electoral Chicanery

Short Cuts: Trump’s Indictments

Aziz Huq, 22 February 2024

Trump’s misdeeds have been amply documented through two impeachment proceedings, extensive congressional investigations, Mueller’s final report and endless news coverage. Perhaps the liberal principle...

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The peculiarities of the British constitution mean that it requires the combined input of the disciplines of law, politics and history – each with its own priorities, sensitivities and hinterlands of...

Read more about Highbrow Mother Goose: Constitutional Dramas

Populists, whether on the right or the left, have not yet got the world they want. The decade that started with the Arab Spring ended with tawdry insurrectionists high on conspiracy theories storming the...

Read more about A Circular Motion: Protest, what is it good for?

Short Cuts: Versions of Denial

Conor Gearty, 25 January 2024

Denial in Israel is a means of keeping supporters abroad on message. We in the Global North need lies so that we can continue to see our support for Israeli action as morally possible.

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