The Tory Implosion Offers a Warning for Both Parties in America
The only way to defuse populism is for traditional parties to show an interest in and aptitude for the issues voters want addressed. And for all the talk about making the economy work again, voters here couldn’t be clearer that it is identity (and therefore immigration) that they’re focused on.
Kamala Harris’s election memoir shows just how deluded the Democrats still are Nesrine Malik
The answer to the question “what went wrong” isn’t “we didn’t have enough time” to establish Harris. It was that Harris, even now, with all the time to reflect and be honest with herself, is a politician who invests too much in presentation, and entirely exculpates herself of failures because she was dealt a bad political hand. What can you say besides, “to be this age and still not know yourself”.
But the shift in public opinion is not from right to left, or from anti-government to pro-government, it’s from risk to caution, from disorder to consolidation. There is a deep current of bourgeois culture running through American suburbia. It is not right wing, but it is conservative: a distrust of those far away; a belief in convention and respectability; and a strong reaction against anything that threatens to undermine the stability of the established order. Democrats have done well in suburbia recently because they have run the kind of candidates who seem like the safer choice socially moderate, pragmatic and fiscally hawkish. They, or any party, will run astray if they threaten the mood of chastened sobriety that has swept over the subdivisions.
Kamala Harris explains why it wasn’t her fault
Even the book’s title, referring to how long Harris was the Democratic presidential nominee, is an implied excuse; many Democrats have talked themselves into believing that the race was too short and if it had gone on longer, she would have pulled ahead. That’s not borne out by the data, as Donald Trump gained ground from late August to Election Day and, once again, most polling was underestimating his support.
(Also note: The Pew Research Center determined that even if every eligible voter had gone to the polls, Trump still would have won.)
What Buhari did to Nigeria will take decades to undo. The damage was not only large. It was total. By some estimates, the country lost about half its GDP in real terms. Prices ran away from earnings, and life became unaffordable. Jobs disappeared. Poverty and misery multiplied at scale. But the worst thing he did was psychological. The best way to describe it is the triumph of despair. Buhari killed hope. He put the economy in a state where people stopped believing that their lives could be better. Investments stopped. Education crumbled, along with the hopes of building up human capital. Young people planned only to leave. The sanctity of life became meaningless. Kidnapping human beings for money rose to a level not seen since the Slave Trade.
How do you solve a problem like Buhari?
Every blue moon or so, Buhari’s team will happen upon major pieces of success, often by pure happenstance, benevolent accidents which flatter his perceived abilities. But Everyday Buhari is the real Buhari, the one who has no idea what he is doing, so does nothing and hopes we are satisfied that at least, he is the one doing the nothing.
The Education of a Libertarian
I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. That’s probably why, in the past, libertarians have made little progress in the political sphere. Thus, I advocate focusing energy elsewhere, onto peaceful projects that some consider utopian.
‘Watch Me,’ Biden Said. But Hearing Him in Hur Interview Is More Revealing.
The answer to the manosphere’s dark turn is rooted in embracing men with sincere affection, shunning the zero-sum calculus of the gender wars and offering a vision of masculine virtue that inspires men to heroic acts of compassion rather than vicious acts of aggression.
In MAGA excess there now exists an opportunity. But it’s an opportunity for civil society far more than it is for a political party.
A Revolt Is Brewing in Britain, With Farage Leading the Way
But what it possesses is arguably the most valuable currency in modern politics: clarity. And clarity is infectious. Reform doesn’t need a majority to win the moment. It only needs to shatter the illusion that the old order still holds. Every council seat gained and every razor-thin upset chips away at the fading myth that Britain’s future still lies somewhere between red and blue. The left is quick to paint Reform as the disease. But that’s a misdiagnosis. Reform is the fever. The real sickness is a political class so cut off from everyday life that it now treats public frustration as a threat and disagreement as dangerous.
Opinion | The Speech In Which Putin Told Us Who He Was
Ecclestone, approving of Trump’s attempts to eliminate the “woke c–p”across US federal agencies, deAnes wokery as “people trying to make themselves look like what they’re not”. Portraying the re-election as a turning of the tide in this sense, he says: “He wants people to be honest and up front. He doesn’t want them to keep hiding behind something or saying things that aren’t honest. If he has got something to say, he says it. If it happens to upset somebody, that’s how it goes.” That sounds very much like a certain “Mr E”? “Yeah. You call it as it is.”
Because the uncompromising moral stand is more appealing if you are not personally counting on Medicaid expansion to make a concrete difference in your life
Trump Is Planning for a Landslide Win
In the scenario they were imagining, not only would Trump take back the White House in an electoral wipeout—a Republican carrying the popular vote for just the second time in nine tries—but he would obliterate entire downballot garrisons of the Democratic Party, forcing the American left to fundamentally recalibrate its approach to immigration, economics, policing, and the many cultural positions that have antagonized the working class.
Polls showed Harris had problems — but media and Dems didn’t want to face them
“The Republican Party is now a multi-ethnic, multi-racial coalition of hard-working Americans who love their country.”
Meet Allan Lichtman, the professor who predicted the president (and the last 9)
Forget the polls, forget the pundits.
Polls six months, five months, even closer to the election have zero predictive value.
Forget all of the pundits who have said Biden’s too old. Democrat’s only chance to win is with Biden running for re-election. One of my keys is incumbency, he obviously wins that. Another key is party contest, he’s not been contested. That’s two keys off the top that Biden wins. That means six keys out of the remaining 11 would have to fall to predict his defeat.
Historian who predicted 9 of the last 10 election results says Democrats shouldn’t drop Joe Biden
“Debate performances can be overcome,” he said. “At the first sign of adversity the spineless Democrats want to throw under the bus, their own incumbent president. My goodness.”
My Unsettling Interview With Steve Bannon
He says this mass thing called media, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said of the noosphere, is going to so overwhelm evolutionary biology that it will be everything. And Trump understands that. That’s why he watches TV.
He understands that to get anything done, you have to make the people understand. And so therefore, constantly, we’re in a battle of narrative. Unrestricted narrative warfare. Everything is narrative. And in that regard, you have to make sure you forget about the noise and focus on the signal.
Joe Biden and the Struggle for America’s Soul
Say what you will about Biden, but he has generally put human dignity at the center of his political vision. He treats people with charity and respect.
The contest between Biden and Trumpism is less Democrat versus Republican or liberal versus conservative than it is between an essentially moral vision and an essentially amoral one, a contest between decency and its opposit
Charlie Munger Compares Bitcoin to Child Trafficking, Likes Central Banks
The 98-year-old billionaire said that watching numerous “reputable” people support crypto both pains and depresses him, and that they’ve made a “huge mistake” by associating with such “scumball promotions.”
Why Street Protests Don’t Work
What we’ve witnessed in recent years is the popularization of street marches without a plan for what happens next and how to keep protesters engaged and integrated in the political process. It’s just the latest manifestation of the dangerous illusion that it is possible to have democracy without political parties—and that street protests based more on social media than sustained political organizing is the way to change society.
Enough With the Bellyaching Over CNN’s Trump Town Hall
Such poses might look good on Twitter, where arguments are made 280 characters at a time, and where those who damn CNN are guaranteed a hundred retweets. But the job of journalism is to confront the world and its actors as they are, not shrink away from them in fright because covering them might benefit them.
Forget Harry and William. I’m Pro-Charles.
We live in a golden age of male political endurance. It is a trait the 74-year-old Charles richly embodies: not merely longevity, but rather a kind of stubborn resilience that slowly heals political wounds and obscures personal shortcomings with the passage of time.
In America, we are surrounded by men who have defied the political actuarial tables and weathered hard years of ridicule to claim great power late in their lives. Chief among them are Joe Biden and Donald Trump, two old men who have been prematurely buried many times over by people who took them less seriously than they deserved.
How McConnell is trying to front-run Trump ahead of 2024.
But McConnell, true to form, is not letting emotion or his low view of Trump get in the way of the task at hand. The Senate GOP leader doesn’t talk about Trump in public, and does so little in private.
Is Trump Inevitable? Some in the GOP Are Starting To Wonder.
The conventions of political speculation, sadly, don’t allow much space between sure thing and roadkill).
Trumpism is dead, long live populism!
Here’s the thing about DeSantis: he does populism properly. He does it far more thoughtfully than Trump ever did. Many American voters knew Trump was a blunt instrument. But they were willing to wield him because they really wanted to make a point against the ancient regime of technocracy, paternalism and illiberalism. Voters made a pact with that buffoon in order to make it clear that they wanted political change, that they were sick and tired of being looked down upon by the Democratic establishment in particular as a problematic blob in constant need of correction and cancellation.
Twitter Is the Elon Musk Show Now
In government, there are numerous terms for rule-by-guy, most of which bring to mind repression, suffering, and cultishness — “I alone can fix it,” etc. But it’s a common enough way to run companies, which tend to be internally authoritarian. Plenty of businesses are clear and direct extensions of their founders’ or executives’ desires, whims, and flaws, although few operate at such a massive scale or under such a well-known figure.
Queen Elizabeth Embodied the Myth of the Good Monarch
Yet it is the measure of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-reigning queen ever, that she will be remembered less for any of that than for playing her part so well, with such dignity and for so long.
How the Elite Captured Identity Politics
Chief among them being ‘deference politics’: the moral authority and political astuteness ascribed to marginalised individuals found in rooms where power congregates. In its crudest form, deference politics demands that we solemnly listen to the marginalised and centre their concerns. For Táíwò, this is ‘supercharge[d] moral cowardice’, an ‘abdication of responsibility’ on the part of those too unwilling, too ridden with an almost psychosexual need for penance, to think and act for themselves.
INSIDE THE NEW RIGHT, WHERE PETER THIEL IS PLACING HIS BIGGEST BETS
They share a the basic worldview: that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning—as Blake Masters recently put it, a “dystopian hell-world.”
Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar and Right
And, my dear fellow Republicans, he’s all your fault.
Evangelicals have given up trying to elect one of their own. What they’re looking for is a bodyguard, someone to shield them from mounting (and real) threats to their freedom of speech and worship. Trump fits that role nicely, better in fact than many church-going Republicans. For eight years, there was a born-again in the White House. How’d that work out for Christians, here and in Iraq?.
How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable
At the height of his influence, Mr. Carlson exists in a carefully constructed bubble of his own — a retreat, and a bunker.
