While everyone needs a cheer right now, impeachment distracts from the huge political realignments needed to confront successive global crises. That’s why, insofar as we enjoy the spectacle, we will always have that dirty feeling.
US Presidential election
Joe Biden’s inauguration yesterday thus had the feeling of a global event, with all of us vicariously participating. Much of the media, including our state broadcaster, put objectivity to bed and resorted to fawning, like Nicholas Witchell narrating the birth of a Royal baby.
Source Direct: Biden with Me
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
“Powerful forces are converging around a new stability. But just as with Biden’s eventual, narrow victory in the US, achieving it is harder than willing it.”
Analysis: Biden’s ‘Transatlantic Return’ – and what it means for us
“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?
Sometimes you’ve got to pinch yourself. If someone had said 10 years ago that they were writing a political satire about Donald Trump fighting to stay in the White House after his first term in office by shouting about how the election is “a fraud on the American people” and demanding all vote counting must […]
Don’t give in to the politics of cultural despair
“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
“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?
There was a remarkable contrast this morning in two stories standing side by side on the BBC homepage. On the left, US President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows saying “we’re not going to control the pandemic”. On the right, one positive covid-19 case sparking the testing of all 4.7 million people in the […]