Politics & Economics

Congress ratifying electoral college votes on 7 January 2021 (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

What’s wrong with the electoral college

Colin Kidd

14 October 2024

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 next election will be a triumph in itself, but is not enough.

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

The Debate

Eliot Weinberger

13 September 2024

Poor Don.​ He thought it would be an easy golf-cart ride back to the White House, rolling over the recumbent body of Sleepy Joe. Then the Dems pulled a switcheroo and suddenly he was faced with a middle-of-the-roader . . .

Blame it on Malthus

Oliver Cussen

26 September 2024

For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster . . .

At the 6 January trials

Linda Kinstler

26 September 2024

Acourt summons​ arrived in December, alerting me that I had been selected for ‘special jury service’. An accompanying letter explained that the trial would be held at the court for the District of . . .

Among the Democrats

Christian Lorentzen

30 August 2024

After two hours​ on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, the flight was cancelled and we were deplaned. I had been seated next to a former congresswoman who lost to another incumbent in 2022 as a result . . .

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?

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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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Labour and the Lobbyists

Peter Geoghegan, 15 August 2024

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,’...

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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 –...

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

Diary: Two Appalachias

Oliver Whang, 1 August 2024

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...

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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...

Read more about Short Cuts: Bonapartism, Gaullism, Macronism

We can breathe! Anti-Fascists United

Gabriel Winant, 1 August 2024

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...

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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...

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Fever Dream: Fourteen Years Later

William Davies, 4 July 2024

What is it that is coming to a close? This fourteen-year fever dream of failures, absurdities and outbursts of reaction defies the neat periodisation or symbolisation with which the Thatcher and Blair...

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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...

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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. 

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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...

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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

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