Politics

Spending too long online can take its toll, no matter your age. The majority of under 35s grew up squinting at backlit screens with bags below their eyes, poring over forums and AOL Messenger, pornography and Netflix. Yet somehow it’s baby boomers who are the worst victims of the internet: technologically dumb, easily scammed, and often more susceptible to fake news. And it looks as if Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man arrested in connection to the pipe bombs sent to prominent Democrats and left-wing celebrities, is the latest spectacular example of a silver (or in his case, it seems. hairplugged) surfer going off the deep end.

Seven days before the Brexit referendum, the Labour MP Jo Cox was out campaigning for Britain to remain in the European Union, when she was shot, stabbed and murdered by a far-right maniac shouting ‘Britain First’. People were shocked, and shock instantly turned to rage. This is what happens, they said, when you fan the flames of right-wing extremism. Pundits pointed at a provocative UKIP poster that showed a queue of migrants from the developing world and said, in Trumpian capitals, BREAKING POINT. That was a clear incitement to violence, they said. The whole political/media class thought that was that. The staff at Vote Leave (the official, pro-Brexit campaign, who hadn’t put out that poster) were despondent.

Donald Trump, only a few hours ago seen as a master manipulator in the run-up to the midterm elections, has lost the narrative, at least for now. ‘This egregious conduct is abhorrent to everything we hold dear and sacred as Americans,’ he said today. ‘I just want to tell you that in these times we have to unify, we have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.’ When Trump is reduced to issuing such emollient statements, he is decidedly on the backfoot.Tonight Trump is scheduled to attend a rally in Wisconsin. Media scrutiny will be more intense than ever.

Robert Mueller is getting stoned. Not in any corporeal sense, I hasten to note. Rather, his investigation appears to be focusing on any ties that the Trump campaign may have had to the voluble former Nixon operative Roger Stone. Like Michael Cohen, who once proclaimed that he would take a bullet for Donald Trump, Stone is now noisily professing his loyalty to the president. ‘The special counsel pokes into every aspect of my social, family, personal, business and political life, seeking something — anything — he can use to pressure me, to silence me and to try to induce me to testify against my friend Donald Trump,’ Stone declared in a recent video. ‘This I will not do.

I am a little surprised that the English essayist Walter Bagehot is not a more conspicuous part of our intellectual furniture. His was a gently disabused, quietly penetrating sensibility, at once sophisticated and manly. How much wisdom is packed into his warning that ‘History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.’ Then there was his observation, drawn from the same basket of anthropological canniness, that ‘Civilised ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilised circumstances.

‘It will be Stalingrad every day,’ if the Republicans lose the House in November, Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, told me earlier this month at his house in Washington. But, he adds, ‘I think he’s on fire right now. I think the Kavanaugh thing, ironically, will play against the Democrats.’ ‘They’re going to start to turn on each other,’ Bannon says of the Democrats if the Republicans continue to close in the polls. ‘The Clinton Junta has never been held accountable. How do you lose the presidency? She’s never been held accountable for that.’ That, says Bannon, creates the perfect storm for her to run. ‘It’s not that she’s going to run,’ Bannon told me.

As any admirer of stage comedy will vouch, nothing beats a double-act. This immortally funny formula requires little more than one man making a lot of silly anarchic jokes while another, the so-called ‘straight-man’ or ‘stooge’, remains rigidly po-faced. The funny-man’s gag does not have to be that funny, for the real joke – the great laugh, as it were – is triggered by the straight-man’s priggish reaction to it. The more pompous the straight-man, the funnier the joke.

Donald Trump’s dominance of the US political scene shows up in surprising ways, at surprising moments. For instance, in the retort of an exuberant Democratic senatorial candidate striving for headway in a televised debate with his incumbent Republican opponent. ‘He’s dishonest,’ says Congressman Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke, assailing Sen, Ted Cruz. It’s why the president called him Lyin’ Ted, and it’s why the nickname stuck.’ Oh, boy, the Dems are looking to Donald Trump for character references? As I keep saying – and you’ve probably had the same thought – it’s a weird time we live in, getting weirder by the minute.

It has long been fashionable for Americans to claim descent from Rebecca Rolfe (née Pocahontas) the heroical daughter of Chief Powhatan of Virginia. Woodrow Wilson’s wife was one, the actor, Glenn Strange, another. Then people started claiming any family connection whatsoever to Mrs Rolfe’s descendants, as the Bushes now do. Soon the great contagion spread to the point where everyone in the State of Virginia was descended from Mrs Rolfe, and then all the smart-sets from all the other states joined the rush for Native American blood of their own.