Catch-up service:
Why I Don’t Believe In Centaurs
On the Sally Rooney Case
The Optimal Margin of Delusion
How Civil Should a Disagreement Be?
Peak Burnham
Podcast: Is AI Really Going To Kill Us All?
Why Is the Left So Bad at Education?
Best read online (click on title). Contains X links.
I am a recovering American politics obsessive. As some of you may recall, that was the main topic of my Marbury blog, a precursor to this newsletter. Over the last ten years I’ve written about US politics much less, partly because I’ve found it too bleak to contemplate, and partly because Trump and Trumpism are resistant to rational analysis. It’s particularly hard to make sense of from this distance; there are no British political commentators I trust to provide insight into MAGA, no matter how confidently they pronounce on Trump’s “base”. I also started to find the amount of attention our media devotes to America slightly ridiculous. If a close election for attorney-general in New York coincided with a revolution in Italy, the BBC would run a live broadcast from Albany - OK I exaggerate, but only somewhat. It seems a little abject.
All that’s to say that I wasn’t going to write about what just happened. The midterms (see, I already feel a bit phoney, saying “midterms”) have already been over-analysed. But as it turns out, I can’t help myself. Good news stories in politics come along so rarely; we should take delight in them while we can.
Rather than gloat over the defeat of certain individuals, I want to focus on the fundamentals. But before I do that - JD VANCE, HAHAHAHA, WHAT A LOSER. Honestly, one of the most satisfying things has been the evisceration of this man’s political hopes. (We’ll get to Trump but he is impervious to embarrassment and on his way out anyway.) I say this as someone who was open-minded enough - or naive enough - to think he might actually evolve into a politician of substance after he secured his dauphin status. Smart people assured me that he was only playing dumb to win the approval of his boss and their supporters. I half-believed them, but there are only so many arrogant, nutty, and nasty things an intelligent man can say before he becomes what he seems to be. Vance forgot the indispensable requirement of electoral politics, which is to be at least somewhat popular. Without the singular, irreproducible charisma of Trump, you can’t get to the top by being arrogant, nutty and nasty.
There were two particularly revealing Vance moments from the last couple of weeks, one just before the election and one right after it. The first one came at a town hall event when he was on stage with Fox TV pundit Jesse Watters. A young lady in the audience stood up and asked a clearly heartfelt question about the high cost of housing, which was making it hard for people like her - Republican voters with conservative values - to start a large family. How did Vance respond? He turned to Watters and made a crass and irrelevant joke about Jon Husted’s ass. As a politician, you hardly need to be a Bill Clinton-level empath to understand that this was not the right moment for bro banter, but Vance has terrible intuitions for ordinary voters, because he got to his current position by being good at appealing to Very Online MAGA elites, especially Trump family members. He hasn’t done his 10,000 hours. Before being selected as VP he had only been a candidate once, and while he won his race in Ohio he did poorly in electoral terms, running well behind other Republicans in the state. Voters have never liked him very much and he doesn’t get them.
The second moment was his response - online, of course - to this week’s GOP thumping. Read it here if you can bear it. It is convoluted and above all, “insidery” - he starts off by talking about data analysis and composition effects, for God’s sake. I don’t know how the GOP is going to react to Tuesday’s results but if they nominate Vance then 2028 will look very similar to 2026 - yes, even if the Democrats pick AOC (though I don’t think they will).
Anyway, back to those fundamentals. Over the last ten years or so, America’s political system has sometimes seemed on the verge of collapse. There have been dire warnings of incipient fascism. This week we received plenty of evidence that American democracy is not about to perish from the earth and that it is, in fact, in pretty good shape. Let’s look at some of it.
