American oligarchy | The Spectator

Introducing Wokeyleaks

A regular column by an anonymous whistleblower operating deep within heart of the Social Justice Movement that is the entertainment industry. To protect their identity, they will go under the code-name ‘They/Them’. Wokeyleaks will also function as a confidential news leak organization for any other sources who wish to divulge classified information (and hilarious anecdotes) about woke culture without fear of getting canceled. My disillusionment with the Social Justice ‘left’ was less a road to Damascus moment and more death by a thousand cucks. It was when a friend told me that ‘people are concerned about your use of POC hand emojis on Instagram’. Apparently, it’s ‘the equivalent of blackface’ (it’s really not).

Matt Labash and Chris Buskirk

Is Trumpism toxic?

Matt Labash Chris, thanks for stepping with me inside the squared circle, the Octagon or whatever they call the place where the kids like to fight these days. (The Capitol Rotunda?) Ordinarily, in one of these types of dialogues, this is the part where we’d exchange pleasantries, make throat-clearing small talk, and tell each other how much we admire each other’s work. But let’s skip it, because I’m feeling a bit vexed. Can’t quite put my finger on why. Oh yes, I just flipped on ‘MSDNC’ and opened my Failing New York Times, and now I remember: because I’ve been watching my country set ablaze, and Donald Trump and his faithful Trumpsters are holding the flamethrower.

Spectator Editorial

Trump’s legacy

How important is any one human being? In War and Peace, Tolstoy discusses the significance of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Corsican artilleryman-turned-emperor might have brought all of Europe to its knees, but to Tolstoy the great man was a mere cork bobbing on the ocean of history. So it is with Donald Trump as he exits the American political stage, five and a half messy, sordid years after his arrival. The Trump era may be the most memorable period of American history since the 1960s. Certainly, he has inspired more newspaper column inches than any man in living memory. But how important was the man himself? This might at first seem an asinine question. The evidence for this president’s special place in American and even world history seems compelling.

Niall Ferguson

The tech supremacy: Silicon Valley can no longer conceal its power

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,’ George Orwell famously observed. He was talking not about everyday life but about politics, where it is ‘quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously’. For years before the 2020 election, nearly all American conservatives were in favor of standing up to Big Tech — but most were also against changing the laws and regulations enough to make such a stand effective. And yet the threat from Silicon Valley was literally in front of our noses, day and night: on our cell phones, our tablets and our laptops. Writing in the London Spectator more than three years ago, I warned of a coming collision between Donald Trump and Silicon Valley.

Bridget Phetasy

Well, whatever, never mind

I’ve been thinking a lot about the lyrics so indelibly burned into my brain from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, the song that made Kurt Cobain famous and Nirvana a global phenomenon. Even the Nevermind album’s cover image, the naked baby chasing the dollar on a string underwater, was prescient. If any-one predicted our reality-show president, our escalating stupidity and our race to rock bottom, and had the understanding that we could amuse ourselves to death, it was Kurt.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

When migrants come, their culture does too

The challenge of integrating immigrants from the non-western world is not new to Europe. But a large influx of new migrants over the last decade, and a significant increase in harassment and sexual assault against women across multiple European countries, make it one that Europe can no longer avoid addressing. This story has its origins in the decades of economic recovery after World War Two, when many European countries faced a growing worker shortage for industry work. ‘Guest worker’ programs were created, notably in Germany, on the assumption that such workers would return home. But many workers preferred to stay in Europe and pursued family reunification. Jobs and welfare entitlements made Germany preferable to Turkey, France preferable to Algeria.

W James-Antle-Iii

Manchin of the moment

Joe Manchin could be the most powerful man in the Senate. The senior senator from West Virginia is the last Democrat hanging onto federal office in a state that twice voted for Donald Trump by 40 points, but he doesn’t always toe the party line. Of the ‘defund the police’ movement that gained traction on the Left over the summer, Manchin says, ‘Defund my butt.’ If you were unsure about federal funding of his posterior, he went on to elaborate: ‘We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.’ Manchin described a Democratic proposal to continue trying to impeach Trump after the 45th president leaves office as ‘so ill-advised’. Yet he did not vote to acquit Trump in his Senate trial last year.

Dominic Green

Oligarchy in America

The fog of the Trump wars is lifting, the road from COVID-19 rising before us, the outlines of the 21st-century American system emerging. Like the bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the change has happened ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ The age of the democratic republic is over, the age of the American oligarchy beginning. Oligarchy is the ‘rule of the oligos’, the few: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a self-sustaining elite. It sounds quaint, classical even, as though it couldn’t happen here because it already happened there. But it has, in fact, already happened here. Augustus Caesar, who made himself Rome’s first emperor in 27 BC, would recognize the symptoms of our American novelties.

Christopher Howse

Capital punishment

I was distracted from the argument of the second report by Peter Navarro into the 2020 election, which someone had demanded I read, by it suddenly bursting into capital letters: ‘Prong One dramatically INCREASED the amount of absentee and mail-in ballots... Prong Two dramatically DECREASED the level of scrutiny... This pincer movement resulted in a FLOOD of illegal ballots.’ So it went on: ‘to dramatically INCREASE’, ‘to dramatically DECREASE’, ‘illegal ballots able to FLOOD’, ‘INCREASE the flood’. It was like trying to listen to an interview on television while a photo-bombing cat kept whizzing past on a skateboard. I had an idea I had seen something like this before.

Mary Kate Skehan

Go figure

When I worked in a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan rather than on my couch in Pennsylvania, I used to go skating in Bryant Park on clear winter mornings, for the fresh air and light exercise. A troupe of figure skaters claimed the center of the ice in the pre-tourist hours, commanding everyone’s admiration: they used the tight space to execute tidy jumps and corkscrew spirals without crashing into graceless pedestrians-on-ice like me. Now COVID-related restrictions have left me with buckets of free time where commutes and happy hours used to be, and I’m looking to learn a new hobby.

Roger Kimball

Kamala Harris’s Orwellian future

Do you suppose that Kamala Harris is a student of Jane Austen? The contingency, as Jeeves was wont to observe, is remote. Yet there is at least one passage from Pride and Prejudice that I’d wager Harris would appreciate. Towards the end of the novel, after she has accepted Mr Darcy’s proposal of marriage, Elizabeth confides the news to her sister Jane. Knowing how cordially Elizabeth had disliked Mr Darcy in days past, Jane is appalled. ‘Oh, Lizzy! it cannot be. I know how much you dislike him.’ ‘You know nothing of the matter. That is all to be forgot. Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself.

Paul Wood

Retreat or defeat: can Biden extricate the US from Afghanistan?

Will America’s long and painful entanglement in Afghanistan end with helicopters lifting off from the roof of the US embassy and marines smashing rifle butts down on the fingers of locals desperately trying to climb aboard? A collapse of the government in Kabul is not the most likely outcome in Afghanistan, but it’s not impossible either. The Taliban have steadily gained ground in the year since President Trump made a deal with them to withdraw American troops first from the battlefield, then from the country. Under Trump’s deal, the last soldier is supposed to go home by May 1, finally bringing American’s longest war to a close.

Andrew Stuttaford

Fascist means, green ends

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2021 World edition. Subscribe here. In ‘What is Fascism?’ (1944), George Orwell complained that the word ‘fascist’ had been applied to so many groups, (including conservatives, socialists, communists and Catholics), beliefs and even species (dogs!) that it had been reduced to something close to meaninglessness. And yet, he observed: ‘Fascism is...a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it?... To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any color, are willing to make.

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