Politics

Back in 1997, William Strauss and Neil Howe released The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy that articulated a roughly 80-year generational cycle of history based on ‘four turnings’ dating back to the Wars of the Roses starting in 1459, climaxing in 1485. That initial crisis was followed by the Armada Crisis from 1569 to 1588, the Glorious Revolution from 1675 to 1689, the American Revolution from 1773 to 1781, the Civil War from 1860 to 1863, and the Great Depression and World War Two from 1929 to 1944. Fourth Turnings always climax with an existential crisis that either destroys the country or results in its renewal.Based on the 1944 climax, Strauss and Howe predicted the next Fourth Turning would occur sometime around 2005 when a ‘spark will ignite a new mood...

Do you know what the real ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ is? No, not the fauxtraged shrieks of liberals at everything the president does. It’s the tendency Trump has to turn normally sensible conservative journalists into a sort of Praetorian Guard, drawing their swords to defend his every utterance, and endowing comments that would shame a blithering idiot with non-existent purpose and meaning. The esteemed US editor of The Spectator, Mr Gray, has his gladius out. He argues the president spitballing at a press conference that perhaps one could inject disinfectant to the lungs to kill coronavirus, or irradiate the body with (carcinogenic) UV light, was actually 16-dimensional chess and ‘a Trumpian masterpiece’.

Public opinion is rapidly turning against China as intelligence agencies have exposed the full extent of the communist state’s coverup of the novel coronavirus outbreak. US intelligence has determined that China has underreported total cases and deaths, and dragged its feet in telling the rest of the world about the seriousness of the virus. A Trump administration official told The Spectator earlier this month that the US response was delayed by at least a month due to China’s lack of transparency. Americans are angry at China’s deception: a majority of them polled at the end of March and in early April said they agree with President Trump referring to COVID-19 as the ‘Chinese virus’.

It’s been over three years since the FBI first launched its investigation into an alleged conspiracy between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government, and yet we’re still learning just how badly our intelligence agencies bungled Crossfire Hurricane. The president and his allies have been arguing since the probe went public that it was all a ‘witch hunt’ designed to put a stop to or delegitimize his electoral victory. Subsequently released details about the investigation seemed to track with that theory: Inspector General Michael Horowitz, for example, chided the FBI in a December report for failing to fulfill its full obligations when seeking FISA warrants against former Trump campaign official Carter Page. Sens.

Forgive the analogy that follows. Is Bernie Sanders the Barry Goldwater of the left? Has Sanders, to echo the words of George Will on Goldwater, lost two primary campaigns but won the future? What reminds us of Goldwater is the clarity of Sanders’s proposals and the force with which he expressed them. Medicare-for-All, canceling student debt, free college tuition; paid for by soaking the wealthy with new taxes. Sanders made all of this thinkable, because most of his ideas are popular. The Sanders moment arrived at a time of political reorientation that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War years. Polling showed that half of millennials have unfavorable views of capitalism. Seventy percent say they are likely to vote for a socialist candidate.

Can we still say that we live in a liberal age? We live, now, in the age of an epidemic. Calling for a political order that can effectively respond to such a disease is starting to sound a lot like calling for a post-liberal order. In the pages of the Atlantic, Adrian Vermeule has made something of the same point: the order that we have been living under is clearly unequipped to deal with crises of the nature of this epidemic. The common libertarian conservative position that any government action on this is a violation of the rights of the individual, shows the fundamental insanity of libertarianism. My father used to quote Voltaire to me: 'My right to punch you in the nose ends where your nose begins.

President Trump sent out a number of tweets today demanding liberation, but he probably wasn’t thinking of his old fixer Michael Cohen. Cohen, who squealed on Donald Trump before Congress, went to jail for a variety of financial and campaign finance crimes. Thanks to the coronavirus, his own problem is largely fixed. He’s getting an early reprieve from his three-year jail sentence at a medium-security prison in Otisville, New York and headed for home confinement. Another member of Trump’s rogues gallery, Paul Manafort, has asked to be released from Loretto federal prison in Pennsylvania because of the pandemic, but there’s no word yet whether his request will be granted. Unlike Cohen, Manafort remained unflinching.

Ziad Ahmed cares.At least, that’s what he’s trying to convince you of with every fiber of his being in a recent video he posted to TikTok, the Chinese spyware program and social media app. https://twitter.com/ziadtheactivist/status/1248801095322939392?s=20 Ziad chastises his fellow campus progressives for not choosing to bend the knee to Joe Biden, mere days after Bernie Sanders terminated his anti-climactic bid for the presidency of the United States.In and of itself, his is not an uncommon position. Much of the Democratic establishment, from its mouthpieces on MSNBC to its ‘wonks’ at the Center for American Progress, have been making the same argument.

The COVID-19 pandemic came along just as Cold War Two was getting under way between the United States and the People’s Republic of China — the superpowers of our time — with the European Union and a good many other US allies quietly hoping to be non-aligned. Far from propelling Beijing and Washington towards détente in the face of a common enemy, the new plague has only intensified the Cold War. For the first time, China’s campaign of disinformation has been on a Russian level, with wild anti-American conspiracy theories being disseminated by senior Foreign Ministry officials.