“Trumpism will prove rather harder to exorcise from US society. And the Democrats showed little interest in doing so.”
US Politics
Mob violence should be condemned. So should Trump’s role in it. But the deeper question is how such an obviously unfit character not only won in 2016, but almost repeated the trick in 2020.
Source Direct: Anarchy in the USA
Biden doesn’t exactly have a hard act to follow. By many estimations, Trump was the worst American President in history. But what of Biden himself?
Source Direct: Biden Time
“The wildcard in this situation is Trump himself. Will he, as he sometimes threatens, continue to be a force in right-wing politics in the US?”
Analysis: Why Trump’s long goodbye is troubling the US elite
“The tyrant king may have fallen, but his forces have only begun to fight. For now, they remain a sizeable fringe, loudly and occasionally violently imposing themselves on the body politic.”
Séamus McGuigan: As the sun begins to set on the Trump era, what’s next for the American far right?
“Some – generally those who entered 2016 with rather fixed ideas about political reality, and never got over the trauma of those ideas’ defenestration – may look back and struggle to believe that any of it happened at all. Others – the many, many others who have suffered loss, pain and persecution at the hands of the administration – will have no trouble bitterly remembering that it did.”
Sean Bell: After four years of Trump, what have we learned?
“Does Trumpism represent a political project independent from the overarching imperatives of American empire? The answer to this question is ‘no’.”
Analysis: Plastic ‘populist’ – Trumpism failed on its own terms
“We live in the age of the political witch-hunt. A destructive, wild-eyed paranoia is widespread, not just on the social media fringes, but in professional political life.”
David Jamieson: The SNP stokes the Russia witch-hunt at the peril of independence
“The Biden presidency would undoubtedly be the choice of Wall Street. But it would also be the most direct form of rule by Wall Street.”
Analysis: Is Biden-style liberal capitalism the new vogue on the centre left?
“In the spectacle of the first presidential debate, two aged oligarchs battled incoherently over fractured constituencies in a broken economy.”