Buckle up! | The Spectator

Am I a cuck?

‘You’re a cuck, Tobes, an absolute cuck.’ My friend James Delingpole was furious. ‘Honestly, I thought I could depend on you of all people, but you’ve surrendered, just like every other right-wing commentator I know. I can’t begin to describe how disappointing this is. I would have expected it from some — Dan Hannan, Jonah Goldberg, the editors of the National Review — all bloody cucks, the lot of them. But not you, Tobes. I’m alone in the foxhole.’ This outburst would have been hard to listen to under normal circumstances, but it occurred on air during our weekly podcast on Ricochet. Needless to say, we were discussing the presidential election and James is 100 percent convinced that Donald Trump was the victim of a massive electoral fraud.

Christopher Sandford

Elvis and Nixon, the odd couple

If you were called upon to invent the human antithesis of rock and roll, you couldn’t do better than our nation’s 37th president, Richard Nixon. Habitually clad in a funereally dark suit and dress shoes, even when strolling on the beach, Nixon’s tastes in music ran to the semi-classical strains of Mantovani and the Boston Pops, and a penchant for sitting alone at night brooding to Wagner. I once asked the legendary White House fixer Gordon Liddy what his chief thought, if anything, about pop music. ‘Crap,’ Liddy replied succinctly. In late 1970, the 57-year-old Nixon was at something of a low point. A combination of the continuing war in Vietnam and domestic economic woes proved disastrous for the GOP in that November’s midterm elections.

Tim Wigmore

End game: the blurring line between fantasy sports and the real thing

For millions of fans, the only thing more important than the NFL from September to January is fantasy football. In the US and Canada alone, there are an estimated 59 million fantasy sports players — one-sixth of the entire population. These players spend an average of seven hours a week — almost a full working day — consuming fantasy content, according to Andrew Billings, an expert in fantasy sports at the University of Alabama. The rise of much modern sports — most obviously cricket — is inextricably linked to gambling. So it is with fantasy sports. It’s the numbers, stupid! Then obsessing over stats. With sports gambling illegal in most states until a Supreme Court ruling in 2018 overturned a federal ban, the fantasy world filled the void.

Mary Eberstadt

The family gap

In a speech to the Federalist Society in November, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito reiterated his concern that ‘in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right’. Small wonder that the subject was on his mind. A week earlier, the Court had heard oral arguments in the latest religious-liberty case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. In it, Catholic Social Services — one of some 30 agencies used by the city to place foster children in private homes — claimed religious exemption for its policy of placing kids in traditional mom-and-dad family settings. So far, one might think, so unremarkable: a Catholic agency conforms its good works to Catholic principles. But what about nontraditional couples — like those of the same sex?

Roger Kimball

Are we back in the Obama White House?

Like most Greek stories, the tale of Pandora’s box is fraught with ambiguity. Most of us, when we first encounter the story, learn that it is a fable about the dangers of curiosity, not unlike the story ‘of man’s first disobedience, and the Fruit/ of that Forbidden Tree’. As Eve sneaked the apple, so Pandora took the lid off a box that she was forbidden to peek inside. Bang! Death, illness, famine and all the other miseries of the world escaped to blight man’s life, leaving behind only hope as a sort of consolation prize. But is hope a consolation? Or is it a subtler, more insinuating evil?

Spectator Editorial

Buckle up for Biden and the Blob

With any change of power in Washington, it is routine to ask which policies will endure and which will change. Yet the incoming Biden administration proposes neither new policies nor the revival of old ones. It promises, rather, an existential transformation following the traumatic ordeal of President Donald Trump. What is being brought back, we are told, is the concept of ‘expertise’ itself. Biden’s return to normalcy will be a re-empowerment of America’s bureaucratic class, so rudely ignored and pushed aside during the four-year time of troubles. Nowhere is this narrative more powerful than in foreign policy.

Lara Prendergast

A honeymoon in Berlin

In December 2019, I arrived in Berlin by train. I was just married and on honeymoon. The most precious item in my luggage was my Interrail ticket. My husband and I hoped to visit as much of the Continent as we could in three weeks. We did not know that soon such a trip would be impossible, thanks to the infamous virus from China. We were keen to see what remained of the Berlin Wall. One of the longest still standing parts is on Niederkirchnerstrasse, next to the site of the former headquarters of the SS and the Gestapo, now home to the Topography of Terror, an indoor and outdoor museum dedicated to the Nazi era.

Daniel McCarthy

America’s Yeltsin moment

The end of the Cold War was as great a shock to US politics as it was to the Soviet Union’s. The Soviet regime didn’t survive, of course, and late 2021 will mark 30 years since the USSR dissolved. Mikhail Gorbachev had tried to save the Soviet system through reform. The Communist hardliners who briefly deposed him in the summer of 1991 tried to save it by rolling back reform. Neither sufficed — the regime, and the party and ideology at its heart, had lost their legitimacy irrevocably. The first US presidential election after the collapse of the USSR almost rendered the same verdict on the regime in Washington. The 1992 election saw a populist challenge to President George H.W. Bush from within his own party.

Matt Purple

No to policing the world

What will a Joe Biden foreign policy look like? It’s difficult to say. There is, after all, no Biden Doctrine, no voluminous body of work hashing out the Biden sensibility. Biden might have served as vice president, but he never seemed anywhere near the center of the policymaking apparatus. He was a fixture on the Foreign Relations Committee, but he was never one of the Senate’s bright international thinkers the way his friend John McCain was. So what then? About the best you can say about Biden’s foreign policy positions is that they’ve been scattershot.

biden blinken blob war syria iran ukraine hamas

Andrew Bacevich

Biden, Blinken and the Blob

Regarding America’s role in the world, Joe Biden’s ascent to the presidency offers this bit of prospective good news: the random flailing about of the Trump era will end. No more diplomacy conducted via Twitter. A modicum of consistency and predictability might once more become emblems of American statecraft. Some version of normalcy will be restored. While all this will be welcome, it prompts a fundamental question: will a return to pre-Trump normalcy suffice as a response to the challenges that Biden is about to inherit? After all, the post-Cold War version of normalcy — the policies as pursued by presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — created the conditions that gave rise to Donald Trump in the first place.

Paul Wood

Biden’s Saudi problem

A few weeks ago, the Saudi human rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul was summoned to the offices of the General Directorate of Investigation at the Interior Ministry in Riyadh. Ostensibly, the Saudi secret police — the Mabahith — simply wanted to tell her that her appeal against her conviction for ‘treason and terrorism’ had been turned down. But her brother, Walid told me it was really a warning: Keep quiet, we’re watching you; the Americans may have got you out of prison; we can send you back whenever we want. She has been out of prison since February, serving the rest of her sentence on probation. Though aged 31, her long black hair is now streaked with gray, the outward sign perhaps of what her family say was an attempt to ‘break’ her in prison.

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