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Can Mike Pence win in 2024?

The vice presidency, as even the most remedial student of American politics will tell you, is not the most exciting gig in the world. Our first veep, John Adams, famously hated it so much that he called it ‘the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived’. It’s a sleepy position, one that doesn’t typically involve, say, surviving a mob that believes you’re conspiring to steal the election away from your own ticket. Yet this is the fate that’s befallen Michael Richard Pence. Prior to January 6, Pence had been wraithlike even by vice-presidential standards, overshadowed by one of the most inescapable presidents in American history. The attack on the Capitol fixed the attention of the world upon him. Would he carry out his constitutional duties?

Charles Murray

Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2021 World edition. The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return. Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us.

Spectator Editorial

America isn’t back. Global grandstanding is

'America is back at the table,’ Joe Biden wants us to know. ‘Diplomacy is back.’ After four years of Donald Trump, the new President seems rather too desperate to tell the world that the United States is on their side. It all sounds very positive, but what has Biden’s return to the global table actually achieved? What, if anything, is he likely to achieve over the next four years? Last month’s G7 summit in Cornwall, England, was full of grand talk of international cooperation, defending democratic values, confronting China and more.

Bridget Phetasy

A matter of life and death

The ice on my right breast is a painful reminder of the limbo I currently find myself in: the anxiety-provoking space between a biopsy and the results. The time when you try to think positively — as if your magical thinking could change the results, the nature of whatever cells the needle procured. I’m simultaneously telling myself ‘worry is praying to the wrong God’ and repeating the word ‘benign’ over and over and over again. But the knot in my stomach is wondering if I’m about to enter a nightmare. You do your best to stay present but work falls through the cracks. You explain it away by apologizing and vaguely mentioning that you have some ‘health stuff’ you’re dealing with: nothing serious, just annoying.

Jesse Singal

What the media gets wrong on gender reassignment

Two things can be true at the same time. First, the Republican-backed state laws banning medical gender-transition treatment for youth — one has already passed in Arkansas — are a very bad idea. Second, there is a serious dearth of solid evidence in this area of medicine — and some reasons to be genuinely concerned about these treatments. If you’re a consumer of mainstream American media, you’ve likely received a heaping dose of the first message. But the second, if you’ve encountered it at all, has probably been presented to you as a deeply unscientific, bigoted talking point. This is a problem. It’s impossible to unpack what’s going on here without summarizing the recent history of youth medical transition.

Phoebe Greenwood

Will the right save Julian Assange?

In late 2018, Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture, was contacted by lawyers representing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, asking him to intervene on their client’s behalf. ‘I was like, “No. Not this guy. Isn’t this the rapist hacker guy?”’ Melzer recalls. He ignored the email. Three months later, the lawyers contacted him again, this time warning that Assange’s extradition to the US — where he faces 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents — could be imminent.

Andrew Stuttaford

The return of the UFOs

By the time you read this, Uncle Sam’s latest ‘definitive’ report on UFOs (it’s not the first) will have been made widely available, with the exception of a classified annex (there’s always room for a sequel). If the leaks are to be believed, we will have learned that there’s a lot more out there that we don’t know. Some of the material may well be impossible to explain, but inexplicable is not a synonym for extraterrestrial. Could we instead be catching glimpses of something the Russians or the Chinese have dreamt up? E.T., though, will neither be ruled in, nor, crucially, ruled out. For their part, ufologists will take what they can get.

Amber Duke

The DeSantis doctrine

The term ‘Florida man’ usually comes loaded with negative connotations, but not if you’re talking about Ron DeSantis. The first-term Republican governor’s approval ratings have reached 64 percent; a recent poll had him at 55 percent, still high for an unabashed conservative in a swing state. Enterprising apparel companies are already selling ‘DeSantis 2024’ gear — and a Trafalgar poll of likely contenders (excluding Trump) shows DeSantis leading the pack with 35 percent support among Republican voters. The Florida governor also bested Trump in a straw poll conducted during June's Western Conservative Summit in Denver. DeSantis’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has earned him adoration from the right.

Laura Dodsworth

When do vaccine incentives become coercive?

The vaccine programs launched this year appear to offer a Happy Ending to the Horrible Story of the COVID-19 Pandemic. But I am cautious. Not because I am ‘antivax’, but because lasting ‘ever afters’ are never written in the language of emotional manipulation and coercive control. Herd immunity, when enough people have either recovered from COVID or been vaccinated, will end the pandemic. The pressure to get there has given us a vaccination drive with an unprecedentedly strong behavioral psychology and emergency response approach. A panoply of persuasions has been deployed to encourage the hesitant, the slow and the complacent. From dating app bonuses to donuts, lotteries to laminated vaccination cards — when do incentives become coercive?

Mary Kate Skehan

How to fight with your family

Like many families, mine is home to a diverse array of political orientations, ranging on an ideological spectrum from Calvin Coolidge to somewhere around Attila the Hun. In 2021, this means arguments can get quite heated. Should the government subsidize young families? Should tech companies be regulated? Should America reconsider its support for Israel? Should you, personally, get the vaccine? The first half-year of the Biden administration has already given even broadly right-of-center communities plenty to in-fight about. My left-leaning friends who have also spent more time with their families during the pandemic report a similar phenomenon: their good boomer liberal parents are skeptical about critical race theory, for instance, or are suddenly nervous about the national debt.

Paul Wood

What happens when your currency collapses?

I’m a millionaire. A million in crisp, new bills is stacked up on the table in front of me. Unfortunately, it’s Lebanese lira and cost me about $75 a week ago. It’s already worth only $65, and by the time you read this, it will be worth even less. The Lebanese currency has lost more than 90 percent of its value over the past 18 months and is continuing its steady decline. It would be foolish to keep more than a few days’ spending money on hand, so everyone has a moneychanger. Mine is Mohammed, who pops round on his moped with ever-fatter stacks of notes with ever more zeros on them. The currency grows physically as it shrinks in value. He passes over a wad of cash and says, smiling: ‘Our leaders are stupid and corrupt.

Sohrab Ahmari

Is New York coming back?

New York Well, at least P.J. Clarke’s survived the lockdown ordeal. Founded as a ‘saloon’ by an Irish migrant in the late 19th century, the restaurant-bar is a Manhattan dining icon — and a defiant one at that: it’s housed in a modest two-story building, nestled among the skyscrapers of Midtown East, a relic of an older, redbrick Gotham, refusing to give way to the titans of law and finance who occupy the commanding heights of glass and steel nearby. Reality is a little more complicated than that, of course. These days, P.J. Clarke’s is owned by a consortium of financiers, and before the lockdowns, its patrons very much included the finance bros dressed in their standard-issue uniforms (button-down, slacks, Patagonia vest).

Roger Kimball

A party and a half

The future of the GOP is the same as the future of the Democratic party. That is because the parties are not two things, but (to compare low things with high) somewhat akin to that union described in the Catholic creed: ex patre filioque procedit: ‘it proceeds from the father and the son’, one substance, two faces (well, three, really, but we can leave that to one side). As I have had occasion to observe elsewhere, the current political disposition of the United States is not a two-party system. It is at most a one-and-a-half party system. There is a regime party, which basically calls the shots. And there is a junior, adjunct party that has different branding but sells mostly the same goods under different labels.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Why the West is best

‘Western civilization would be a good idea,’ joked Mahatma Gandhi, one of its most successful pupils. We are accustomed to hearing what is wrong with Western civilization: racism, sexism, colonialism and (gasp) capitalism. The world would be a kind of utopia, we are told, if only we could purge these sins from our societies. But if Western civilization is evil, what is the alternative? Four other -isms vie for our attention. The first is socialism. Its proponents include some old-fashioned Marxists, faithful to the old egalitarian nostrums, but most are pseudo- or neo-Marxists. The ‘woke’ activists fundamentally oppose capitalism and are aggressively committed to intersectionality, but they are vague on the alternatives. We can assume that they will not end in utopia.

Dominic Green

Time to end the MAGA madness

The Republicans need to separate the MAGA from the message. The Democrats are already doing this. While congressional Republicans pander to MAGA, which is now a racket for conspiracy theorists and the con artists who exploit them, the Biden administration is lifting Trump’s policies and stealing the Republicans’ thunder. Trump’s ‘America First’ has become Biden’s ‘Made in America’. The Democrats now offer almost everything that Trump promised — and sometimes more. At home, infrastructure spending, rebuilding the industrial base and reshoring essential supply chains; plus subsidies for the wallet-sapping disaster that is Obamacare.

Daniel McCarthy

Is J.D. Vance the right man for the right?

J.D. Vance is the man Republicans have been praying for since the day Donald Trump stormed to the party’s presidential nomination five years ago. He has a lot of the traits conservatives liked about Trump: Vance, too, is a political outsider with proven appeal to an audience beyond politics, thanks to his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Like Trump, Vance offers himself as an avatar for the people who have been discarded by globalization and demonized by a left-wing media and education establishment. And he is as radical as Trump — maybe more so — in his willingness to reject the merely liberal side of American conservatism. Trump defied elite orthodoxy on trade and immigration. Vance adds proposals to curb the tech companies and tax Ivy League endowments. But if J.D.

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