Tag: Donald Trump
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The impeachment curse
The final forced impeachment of Donald Trump has ended in the result that should never happen in a show trial. The sacrificial victim of the authorities’ spite was acquitted. Jonathan Turley is a reasoned and moderate legal scholar who writes widely on constitutional issues in the United States of America. He has yet to post […]
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Our barren, deformed political society
And if and when Trump is no longer President, all the ills of political system can no longer be blamed on Trump. For four years now – in America but also through viral spread around the world – all the ills of our deformed, barren political society have been personified in a metonymic myth: Donald […]
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The Time of Troubles to come in America
“There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be thesame here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evilof the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” Aleksander Solzhenitsyn The events of the 2020 USA election confirm Solzhenitsyn’s insight. America stands on the brink of collapsing into an oligarchy. The Newspeakers of democracy […]
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Six asides on the USA 2020 election
This long post contains my reflections on the election in America. There are six reflections: One. The folly of forecasts: my confession Two. The Presidency is determined not by broadcast anchors, but by Constitutional procedure Three. The pending legitimation crisis. Four. Our deformed, barren political society Five. The post-democratic society Six. Heaven is high and […]
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Waiting for the crisis to unveil
Events threaten to overwhelm my mind. The world stands on the brink of a crisis, and I cannot tell whether the world will drown me, or whether a disordered mind is drowning out the world. Everywhere the crisis is held at a point of tension, and so much seems to hang on how events will […]
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Updated 2020 USA Election Prediction: the fall of America’s Brezhnev
In August this year I predicted that Donald Trump would win the 2020 USA election. The final debate has closed, and the laptop from hell has dropped. Early voting has begun. What is my prediction now? Everyone agrees this election is hard to predict; and yet pundits persist in making predictions, and not clarifying the […]
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Obsession and Trump’s derangement of the elites
Byron York’s Obsession: Inside the Washington Establishment’s Never-Ending War on Trump (2020) provides some insight into one of the most poisonous patterns in today’s cultural decay: the derangement of the elites, especially the broadcast performers who pretend to be journalists, by Donald Trump. York’s book describes the long campaign of the Washington establishment – that […]
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My prediction of the 2020 USA Presidential election
Four years ago, in the wake of the American party Conventions, I predicted that Donald Trump would win the 2016 American Presidential election. What do I predict in 2020? In July 2016 this prediction was an outlier. Even in November 2016 it stunned the world of the political elites and the commentariat. It turned out […]
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K.T. McFarland’s Revolution in Tamerlane’s Shadow
Over the last week I have read the K.T. (Kathleen Troia) McFarland’s Revolution: Trump, Washington and ‘We the People’ (2020). I was led to this book by the remarkable case of injustice perpetrated on General Michael Flynn. K.T. McFarland was Michael Flynn’s deputy, Deputy National Security Adviser in the first months of Trump’s presidency, and […]
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How democracies really die
I found on my bookshelf by chance yesterday the 2018 jeremiad by two Harvard University professors (of government and the “science of government” no less!), Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals about our Future. It was a book that created something of a sensation at the time as the ruling […]
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Emmanuel Todd’s Lineages of Modernity
“Never have human groups of such a size been so rich, so old, so educated, so devoid of collective beliefs.” Emmanuel Todd, Lineages of Modernity, p 21 I picked up from the local library Emmanuel Todd’s Lineages of Modernity: a history of humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus. It is a sweeping reconception […]
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The impeachment curse
The third impeachment of an American President in my living memory is now drawing to a close: Nixon in 1973-74, Clinton in 1998-99, and Trump in 2019-20. Nixon used government agents to break into the offices of his political opponents and install bugs to spy on them, and then covered up the crime. Clinton’s rampant […]
The Burning Archive 