The party's over | The Spectator

Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address was nothing less than magnificent

One of the many things that F. Scott Fitzgerald said that sound good but isn’t true is this: 'There are no second acts in American lives.' Consider the life of Donald Trump. Five years ago he was a dubious real estate developer and professional celebrity. Now he is not only president of the United States, but he is, three years into his first term, the most ostentatiously successful president in memory. Donald Trump is a walking refutation of what is perhaps Fitzgerald’s second most quoted line. Possibly Fitzgerald’s first most quoted line is this: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.' That isn’t true, either.

Stephen L. Miller

2020 is a mirror image of 2016

A perfect storm enabled Donald Trump’s ascendance in the 2016 primary race, leading him to capture the Republican nomination and reshape the party in his image. It seems the Democrats and the establishment media are ignorant to the fact that the exact same set of circumstances is occurring again in 2020 — but this time it’s coming from inside the house. It’s no wonder that the same party that spent the better part of the 2016 primary blinded by laughter over Donald Trump’s candidacy cannot see what is happening with the rise of Bernie Sanders. But we do. Sanders’s campaign has been buoyed by a populist message, a faltering and terrified establishment, a rabid, angry base and a paralyzed media that has lost any and all influence on voters.

Amber Duke

Trump steals the Dems’ spotlight at New Hampshire rally

President Donald Trump successfully trolled Democrats once again Monday — hosting a packed rally the night before their New Hampshire primary election and successfully directing attention and energy away from Democratic campaigners desperate to interest voters. The near-overflowing arena at Southern New Hampshire University stood in stark contrast to the sparsely attended campaign trail events put on just around the corner by Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and the rest of the Democratic field. Bernie Sanders may have a rabid online fan base, but how many would camp out all night and day in the frigid February snow for a chance to see their political hero? Warren couldn’t even get hungry diners to glance up from their meals long enough to ask for their vote.

Andrew Cockburn

Democrat blues: the leadership fears and loathes the grassroots

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Today, I’m reflecting on the three years we’ve spent preparing for this moment, the changes we’ve made to make sure we are ready.’ That was Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, on February 3, as Iowa Democrats prepared to state their choices in their state’s now infamous caucuses. Proclaiming that the Democratic party is ‘at its strongest when we empower the grassroots’, he expressed pride in ‘the historic reforms we passed to increase transparency and accessibility, and that the power is where it belongs: with our voters’.

James Delingpole

The Democrats are fracking insane

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. What could be more emblematic of the American Dream than fracking, the miracle technology that has created thousands of real jobs, lowered the cost of living, generated wealth and prosperity, boosted competitiveness and helped make the United States not just energy independent, but a net exporter of natural gas and petroleum products for the first time in decades? And what could be more characteristic of the elitist, small-minded, anti-market, anti-blue-collar, anti-growth, green-obsessed liberal-left than that the Democratic party is hell-bent on banning it?

Dominic Green

Bernie Sanders is The Corbynizer

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Historians of the future, if there are any, will note that though the demieducated youth of the United States shed their belief in God, they still believed in Father Christmas. Uncertain of their futures, and in no hurry to pay off their student loans, the young entrusted their faith and debt jubilee to the Santa Claus of socialism, a little man with fluffy white hair proffering gifts from a big sack of other people’s money. In Victorian England, this traditional figure was known as Jeremy Corbyn, a vegetarian who gave every worker a lump of nationalized coal and scourged the Jews because they would not recognize him as their savior.

Paul Wood

Andy Khawaja: ‘the whistleblower’

It’s after 2 a.m. in Club 38, a nightspot in an old railway shed in Beirut. The DJ is in the cab of a rusty train. Lights sweep across a dense crowd below. My host is Andy Khawaja, a Lebanese-American businessman. We’re sitting at the club’s VIP table and he’s scrolling through photographs on his phone. Here he is with Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser. Here, he’s shaking hands with President Trump in the Oval Office. The men he’s with in the club have shaved heads, bushy beards, tattoos. I wonder if they’re mafia, militia, or mukhabarat (secret police). When I get up and walk to the restroom, a burly minder with a Glock in his waistband follows a step behind. He turns on the tap and hands me a towel.

Matt Purple

Global warning: 2020 Dems are floundering on foreign policy

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. What would a Michael Bloomberg foreign policy look like? A total smoking ban across the Middle East seems imminent, even if it does risk spawning a new generation of pro-hookah jihadists. Fresh sanctions would likely be imposed on enemies of the West, including Iran and salt. Air superiority would be prioritized, especially as it pertains to illegally landing one’s personal helicopter in midtown Manhattan. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. Bloomberg has spent most of his career codifying class snobbery through petty regulations, and, while that’s a potent recipe for being annoying at home, it doesn’t really lend itself to a coherent agenda abroad.

Alex Colville

In coronavirus quarantine

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. I’ve been quarantined, like millions of others in China. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I traveled all the way from Beijing to the third-tier city of Jining in Shandong province, where anyone arriving from another region must be detained for 14 days. There’s no kind way to deliver the news, so a Chinese colleague broke it to me over WeChat in a gentle but firm tone. It felt like being fired or dumped. It could be worse. I’m free to leave my building, but not the walled housing compound surrounding it.

Daniel McCarthy

What the new nationalism means

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. For most of the past 200 years, the left, whether revolutionary or liberal, derived power and popularity from being on the side of freedom. If you resented the economic, social and political privileges enjoyed by hereditary aristocrats and landowners, you were on the left. If you chafed against the restraints imposed on what you could read, write, say, think or do by established churches or majoritarian cultural Christianity, you had reason to support one left-wing movement or another — philosophes and Jacobins in the 18th century, liberals in the 19th century, the American Civil Liberties Union in the 20th.

Taki

What makes Bloomie run?

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In that great movie Citizen Kane, Orson Welles makes it big as a newspaper owner-publisher and then runs for governor of New York. He fails because of hanky-panky with a singer, and we all know the rest. In John O’Hara’s novel Ten North Frederick, the protagonist has aspirations to be president but he, too, falls short. The characters I’ve just mentioned are, of course, fictitious. Mike Bloomberg is not. Nor are his fifty billion big ones. Bloomie recently wrote that unlike Trump he did not inherit a fortune. That he did not. But nor, really, did The Donald. The latter’s father was a comparatively small-time Brooklyn and Queens real-estate developer.

Spectator Editorial

Democracy in danger

The corruption of its democracy is one of America’s oldest yet most surprising habits. Edgar Allan Poe, it is believed, died after the ordeal of ‘cooping’: an informal exercise in getting out the vote, in which an often forcibly inebriated man was marched from booth to booth and made to vote for the same candidate each time. The voters of Massachusetts’s 4th District, compelled by a party machine to endorse Joseph P. Kennedy III, will know the feeling. Indeed, John F. Kennedy’s victory in the 1960 elections is said to have depended on the stuffing of ballots in the Chicago of Mayor Richard J. Daley — and possibly on the intervention in Cook County by the crime boss Sam Giancana. Kennedy went on to win Illinois by 8,000 votes and to take the White House.

James Hankins

Impeachment: the verdict of history

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Spring term, 2170. Professor Hankins assigns an English translation from the 22nd century’s most authoritative historical survey, The Beijing Universal History. This week’s course reading is from Volume VIII: The Far Western Hemisphere — North Central American Province. Chapter 33 The Era of Impeachment, 2020-52 At this time the North Central American province was still independent and under the system of governance known as ‘liberal democracy’, described in Chapter 29.

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