Politics

Everyone who is everyone – within a certain political and social fragment – has been in Russia this past week. Conservative American conspiracy theorist Candace Owens; Errol Musk, father of Elon; toxic “manosphere” influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate; and Tommy Robinson, the far-right activist. Robinson told the Guardian that he had traveled to Moscow “to see how this country got itself so well on to the straight and narrow and see the beauty of a civilized society here.” In the process, he was walking a well-trodden path of westerners heading to Russia to see exactly what they want to see. Once it was socialists like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who found Stalin’s regime “the very opposite of a dictatorship.

Economist and former New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman has called for a post-Trump “deMAGAfication” of America, and left no mystery about the comparison he was making. “And I’m not going over the top by using a word that’s very similar to the ‘denazification’ that we pursued successfully after World War Two in Germany.” Krugman remained vague about the nature of this “thorough purging,” but said it should include “not just the MAGA ideology, but the whole structure of hugely unequal power, hugely unequal wealth that made this horrific moment possible.” Today’s left – secular, post-Christian, postmodern and postcolonial, untethered from faith, tradition or national feeling – has few moral intuitions other than “Do not be Hitler.

When late arriving ballots in the race for Los Angeles mayor turned dramatically against conservative Spencer Pratt last week, Donald Trump reacted with his usual subtlety. “They’re cheating on the election,” said the President, as it became clear Pratt would be knocked out of the runoff for the  November general election.  Democrats were quick to respond. California Attorney General Rob Bonta dismissed claims of vote fraud as “a figment of the imagination of Trump and others involved in that conspiracy theory.”   Bonta is right there’s no direct evidence that fraud swayed the LA mayor’s race. But California’s notorious tardiness in counting votes has been almost universally ridiculed and has undermined public trust in elections.

By dismantling the Deep State, Donald Trump may inadvertently have undermined his own claim to rule. A chain of unintended consequences is visible in the Supreme Court case Trump vs Slaughter, due to be decided this month. It began with Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter in the early days of his second term. She sued, federal judges backed her and Trump sued back. He asserted the right to fire anyone he wants. Trump’s view is that the president is boss of the whole executive branch – there can no longer be bureaucrats and regulatory boards with special status and guarantees against firing. Americans get to vote for the people who rule them. In that sense, Trump has been trying to make the country more democratic.