Writing about anarchism in the LRB archive by Steve Fraser, Susan Watkins, T.J. Clark, Zoë Heller, Hal Foster, Wes Enzinna and Jessica Olin.
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 home and abroad. To formulate and articulate those, the Democrats need politicians, not algorithms. They need personalities capable of responding to the profound questions facing contemporary America.
Before Labour took power in July, there was a lot of talk about ‘foundations’, and it has continued since. The second chapter of the party’s election manifesto was titled ‘Strong Foundations’ . . .
‘The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.’ The tweet came in the early hours of 7 November 2012, when it seemed likely that the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, who had lost . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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.
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.
The government has stopped short of explicitly declaring war on the poor, but how different would the situation be if it had?
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...
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...
That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth...
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.
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....
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...
Writing about anarchism in the LRB archive by Steve Fraser, Susan Watkins, T.J. Clark, Zoë Heller, Hal Foster, Wes Enzinna and Jessica Olin.
Writing about constitutional crises by Bernard Porter, Ferdinand Mount, Hilary Mantel, Alan Bennett, Blair Worden, Patricia Beer, Stephen Sedley and Sionaidh Douglas-Scott.
David Runciman reflects on Trump, Brexit and threats to democracy, with some help from Alexis de Tocqueville.
Adam Tooze examines an alternative, counterintuitive vision of America, as a power defying gravity.
We hear David's thoughts on why so many people - including podcasts like this one! - keep calling elections wrong.
Worst-case scenarios for democracy - especially since Trump's victory - hark back to how democracy has failed in the past. So do we really risk a return to the 1930s?
We catch up with Gary Gerstle and Helen Thompson about the state of the Trump presidency, from impeachment and cover-ups to Syria and Ukraine.
Economist Ann Pettifor talks to Grace Blakeley about the origins of the Green New Deal, and why we need it.
David, Helen and other Talking Politics regulars gather the morning after the Tory triumph the night before to discuss how they did it and what it means.
James Meek argues that the Robin Hood myth has been turned on its head by the wealthiest and most powerful, so that those who were previously considered 'poor' are now accused of wallowing in luxury.
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...
‘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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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.
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,...
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,...
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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