April 12, 2018
Posting…. (3) The Limits of Labour Party Electoralism and the Requirements of Hegemonic Politics
Across global capitalism as a whole, left-wing forces have become far too accustomed down the years to both impotence and failure. Through the long twentieth century, in country after country and decade after decade, power was invariably something that other political forces possessed and exercised, and that the Left did not. It was power […] read more »
April 12, 2018
Postings… (2) Standard Dilemmas of Centre-Left Politics
On a day-to-day basis, it is hard to break free of a mindset dominated in the UK by the details of the Brexit negotiations or in the United States by the tweeting of an emotionally volatile president. But in both political systems, the normal rhythm of elections fortunately persists – and because it does, […] read more »
April 12, 2018
Postings to Mark the Publication of ‘Flawed Capitalism’ (1) The Four Central theses of Flawed Capitalism
THE FOUR CENTRAL THESES OF FLAWED CAPITALISM To better grasp the nature of our contemporary condition, David Coates’s Flawed Capitalism offers the following four central theses – placing contemporary politics in the space between dominant social and economic settlements and arguing the case for the creation of a new settlement, more progressive and socially […] read more »
January 12, 2018
Beyond the Madness: Donald Trump and the Resetting of America’s Social Contract
The daily circus that is the visible face of contemporary American politics keeps our gaze firmly fixed on the character of the ring-master: but it does so to our long-term cost. Admittedly, it is quite a circus, and one heck of a circus master – certainly a circus and a show of a kind that […] read more »
November 1, 2017
Donald J. Trump and the Slow Arrival of Buyers’ Remorse
(co-authored with Lauren Tarde) You might be forgiven for thinking – given all that has happened since Donald J. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the US presidency in November 2016 – that buyers’ remorse would be rampant in contemporary America. But it is not. It is true that Donald J. Trump started his presidency capturing […] read more »
September 18, 2017
The Anglo-American Centre-Left and the Problem of Agency
(first posted on speri.comment) Re …. The primary problem faced by the Centre-Left in both the US and the UK is not ultimately one of programme. Adequate policy proposals abound. The problem lies rather in the lack of electoral support for such proposals, and in the internal weaknesses of the political parties available for their […] read more »
September 16, 2017
Taking Supper with Trump – The Need for a Very Long Spoon
The Democratic Party leadership in both the House and the Senate spent last week congratulating themselves on the deal they supposedly struck with the President on legislation to protect dreamers,1 and presumably took some pleasure too from the adverse impact of that supposed deal on Trump’s relationship with Congressional Republicans and his base. They should […] read more »
September 1, 2017
Trump and Afghanistan: Old Problems and New Dangers
Keeping track of important policy developments with Donald J. Trump as President is difficult and yet vital. There is so much noise and distraction surrounding everything that the current President does, and such a perplexing mixture of bombast and bigotry in so much of what he says, that the important things going on quietly behind […] read more »
July 10, 2017
Taking Comfort from the Success of Others
With the wisdom of hindsight, it is now clear that the sheer quality of the Obama intellect, and the solid integrity of his character, lulled many of those who twice voted for him into a false sense of security. It was as though we forgot, with too great an ease and for too long a […] read more »
June 11, 2017
American Lessons from a British Election – Progressives, take heart!
The focus of most American commentary on the results of the general election held in the UK last Thursday is likely to be on the potential instability of Theresa May’s now much weakened Conservative Government, and on any impact that instability will have on the UK’s divorce negotiations with the European Union. Much ink is […] read more »
April 16, 2017
Wishing the Democratic Party a Healthy Easter Recess
Watching developments in American politics is rarely enjoyable these days. Indeed many of us periodically stop watching because the wear and tear on our nerve ends is so severe. So, it may be churlish to warn against taking too much pleasure from the Republican failure thus far to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. […] read more »
March 15, 2017
Pulling the Trump Problem into Sharper Focus and Full Vision
We are becoming so acclimatized to government by crisis that it becomes slightly disorienting when one or two days goes by without a new Trump travesty on which to report and ponder. But the last couple of days have been rather quiet on that front. The President seems to cause fewer waves, the more golf […] read more »
February 16, 2017
The Politics of Business, and the Business of Politics, in the World of Donald J. Trump
The Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times,” has a renewed resonance this side of January 20th. As we now all presumably realize, there is never a dull day in American politics with Donald J. Trump in the White House, and there is never likely to be one. Oh, that there was. And […] read more »
January 24, 2017
Unpacking the Inaugural Address of Donald J Trump
The Trump Inaugural Address last Friday was so full of Kellyanne Conway-type “alternative facts”1 that the bulk of the intellectual energy subsequently devoted to it by its progressive critics has been directed towards fact-checking – questioning the new president’s claims on drugs, crime, manufacturing, and the leakage of American wealth abroad.2 And what energy that […] read more »
January 13, 2017
Ten Things to tell Donald Trump
Watching Donald Trump prepare to take office is not a pleasant experience for American liberals. We can already anticipate a plethora of policy-initiatives emerging from the White House with which we will need to do political battle, such that the daily exchanges between Trump supporters and ourselves will increasingly focus on questions of policy design, […] read more »
December 30, 2016
Troubling Omens as We Approach the Presidency of Donald J. Trump
These are early days of course. Nothing has happened yet to directly justify a rush to judgment. But enough happened during the campaign, and enough is happening now in the interregnum between the election and the inauguration, to give genuine cause for concern. These three large concerns at the very least. THE PROSPECT OF BAD […] read more »
December 14, 2016
Reflections on the Obama Presidency: (4) Leaving Bipartisanship Behind
(This is the last of four linked postings. The others are here,i hereii and hereiii) After all, it always takes two to tango, and the Republicans are now refusing to dance. Their ranks are too riddled with birtherism, conspiracy theories and latent racism to permit them to participate in any dance that moves to […] read more »
November 15, 2016
Second Thoughts on the Victory of Donald Trump
(First posted on the blog site of the UK Political Studies Association) You were good enough to let me share with you my first thoughts on the Trump victory, and I am hoping that you might be equally kind a second time. But this time, I want to share thoughts not about those who supported […] read more »
November 10, 2016
First thoughts on the Trump Victory
(First posted on the SPERI blog site, in the UK) There are times when being right is a luxury too far. This is one of those times. It was possible to see Trump coming,i but it was also possible – until about midnight on November 8th – to hope that his coming would be aborted. […] read more »
October 27, 2016
Minimizing the Legacy of Donald J Trump
When Elizabeth Warren was campaigning with Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire last Monday, she expressed a wish that so many of us now share, when she promised Donald Trump that “on November 8th, we nasty women are gonna march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever.”1 […] read more »
September 30, 2016
Treating Donald Trump as Just Another Republican Presidential Nominee
Just because Donald Trump is so unconventional a presidential candidate, it does not automatically follow that we should immediately abandon our conventional criteria for judging his adequacy for the position. On the contrary, the reverse is more likely to be true: that the more unconventional he attempts to be, the more determined should we […] read more »
August 25, 2016
Donald Trump: the Politics of Fear and Violence
American presidential politics is always a contact sport. The stakes are invariably so high that being polite to the opposition is normally difficult, and is often honored only in the breach. The 2012 “there is a village in Kenya that is missing its idiot” bumper sticker offended me at the time for its ongoing birtherism […] read more »
August 1, 2016
Extracting the United States from a Condition of Permanent War
The scale and character of US military action overseas didn’t figured much in the Democratic Party’s internal debate on the choice of a presidential candidate, but with that choice resolved it needs to figure now. Indeed, the question of what constitutes a progressive foreign policy needs to move center-stage – and to do so with […] read more »
July 9, 2016
Tony Blair’s Day of Reckoning
The very long (and indeed very long awaited) report of the Chilcot Inquiry was finally published in London on July 6th. Set up in 2009, its much-delayed arrival allows us one last large-scale public examination of the key event that so profoundly destabilized the modern Middle East – namely the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. It […] read more »
June 9, 2016
History Once as Tragedy, Twice as Farce? American lessons from a British referendum
The United States is not alone in being in campaign mode. The United Kingdom is as well. Not for the British a general election in November, as here. Rather, a June 23rd referendum on whether to remain, or whether to leave, the European Union – the 28 member economic-political union headquartered in Brussels. But though […] read more »
May 18, 2016
Democratic Primaries in the Shadow of Neoliberalism
There is an understandable tendency, when in the thick of a long set of presidential primaries, to treat all of them simply as exercises in the choice between individual candidates, and to make them as much about character as about policy. There is also an understandable tendency to assume that what is at stake in […] read more »
April 13, 2016
Horses for Courses? The Candidates and the Economy.
It may be difficult to believe right now, but eventually the nightmare will be over. The race for the presidency will end, and we will be free of the daily media diet of who is ahead, who is behind, and who might get ahead as others falter. Time and again right now, the bulk of […] read more »
March 19, 2016
The Democrats and the Donald
People of all kinds of political persuasions are rightly horrified by the violence erupting at Trump rallies,1 and by the demagoguery of the candidate himself.2 People of a more progressive predisposition are often equally disturbed by the hold that Donald Trump appears to have on the support of at least sections of the white working […] read more »
January 25, 2016
Common Weaknesses in the Republicans’ Tax Proposals
Though for understandable reasons the leading Republican presidential candidates continually emphasize the things that divide them, we would do well to concentrate rather on the things that do not. The televised-debate format accentuates differences. It did so on tax policy, for example, when last the candidates met – Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio clashing sharply […] read more »
January 1, 2016
Working Class Anger and the Problem of Progressive Politics
The start of a new year – especially the start of an important election year as this one happens to be in the United States – is a good time to reflect on the broad strategic choices facing progressive forces on both sides of the Atlantic. One reflection in particular seems relevant in the US […] read more »
January 1, 2016
How Best to Separate Donald Trump from his Base
If there is anything currently uniting most political commentators in contemporary America, it is surely their on-going fascination with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The common agreement on both sides of the political aisle through most of 2015 appeared to be that his campaign was eventually bound to fail – the reason being some […] read more »
December 9, 2015
Questions that go unanswered as we drift to a State of Permanent War
As the main US media outlets report and amplify each and every outlandish assertion by Donald Trump and his fellow contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, major damage is being done to the underlying quality of the dominant political discourse in the United States. That damage has two main characteristics. By giving so much airtime […] read more »
November 27, 2015
TPP Time in America
Every political system has its own local economic agenda. The UK’s clearly currently includes the Osborne commitment to austerity politics, with its potentially devastating impact on the plight of the low paid in contemporary Britain. Here in the United States, that austerity agenda is enthusiastically advocated by the Republicans who control the US Congress, but […] read more »
September 10, 2015
Getting ready for Trump
There is a growing realization, not to mention a creeping fear, in the upper echelons of the American political establishment that Donald Trump might actually win the Republican Party nomination for President in 2016. There is less fear that, if he does so, he will then go on to win the Presidency itself: Republican […] read more »
September 4, 2015
Taking Donald Trump Seriously
The initial response to Donald Trump’s pursuit of the American presidency, certainly among many more moderate members of the Republican Party, was to wait for his pursuit to implode. It seemed to many seasoned observers of such campaigns that this one was not serious; or that if it was, it was inherently flawed. There was […] read more »
August 26, 2015
Jeremy who? The Bernie Sanders Phenomenon at Home and Abroad
If you watch virtually any major American news channel right now, you could be forgiven for thinking that the only political development worthy of note was the on-going presidential campaign of Donald Trump. But you would be wrong. Key sections of the American press are currently playing Trump’s main calling-card for him by giving excessive […] read more »
August 7, 2015
The Republican Juggernaut Marching Us to War
The over-riding temptation in the wake of the first debate between Republican presidential hopefuls may be to focus on the Trump opening gaffe, or to join the mainstream media in ranking candidate performance and picking winners. But the temptation to focus on the differences on display in Cleveland should be avoided – by progressive commentators […] read more »
June 20, 2015
Trade Deals and the Importance of Political Gridlock
For a political capital renowned for gridlock, there are times when Washington DC looks poised for too much action rather than for too little. This is one such time. Moves seem well underway in the Republican-controlled Senate to fast-track the vote on fast-tracking – maybe as early as this coming Tuesday – a move that […] read more »
May 17, 2015
UK Foreign Policy
Comments at a roundtable discussion on UK foreign policy, held at the University of Hull, May 13 2015. UK foreign policy always strikes me as post-imperial, and weaker/more problematic for still being more ‘imperial’ than ‘post.’ You can see the legacy of empire in the frozen international architecture in which we still operate. The settlements […] read more »
May 14, 2015
Labour’s Historic Defeat: Learning the Right Lessons
If there was any doubt on this matter before the election, there can be none now: those of us making the case for a progressive reconfiguration of advanced capitalisms now start from a position of incredible weakness. The immediate conversation in the UK will no doubt turn on the character of Ed Miliband’s leadership, and […] read more »
May 10, 2015
The U.K. Election: U.S. Lessons
Watching the UK election from Glasgow and not due back in the U.S. until next week, several thoughts seem worth sending home ahead of us. Please remember that this result was entirely unexpected by everyone – including the Conservative political leadership who ended up with a small but working majority. Every major political party here […] read more »
May 4, 2015
Different elections, similar issues: the UK and the US at the polls
As the United Kingdom comes to the end of its very short general election cycle, the United States is gearing up for the start of its next very long one. Yet, for all the differences of electoral timing and length, the main lines of the US debate on domestic policy are ones that a UK […] read more »
May 1, 2015
Judging Presidential Candidates against our criteria rather than theirs (1) Poverty
If the events in Baltimore tell us anything general this week, it is surely that policies are more important than personalities, and that the solutions to our core problems require more than sound-bites. Yet so far, the 2016 presidential campaign has been remarkably short on policies. To date, it remains a campaign full of sound-bites […] read more »
