Godforsaken | The Spectator

Pompeo’s principles

‘Come in.’ Burly, brisk and maskless, Mike Pompeo indicates a chair before the marble fireplace. ‘It’s all right if we’re six feet — or two meters — apart.’ We are meeting at the State Department the day after Pompeo’s return from Qatar, where US negotiators have opened discussions with the Taliban and other Afghan factions on an end to the war in Afghanistan. It’s also the day before the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain. Cheerful and perhaps a little tired, Pompeo exudes forceful confidence: a man who knows what needs to be done. As Secretary of State since 2018, Pompeo has been the strategist who has translated Trump’s generalities into the specifics of policy.

Daniel McCarthy

How democracy dies

What would happen if Americans voted on different days? Suppose Republicans voted on Tuesday and Democrats voted on Wednesday. Would this be better than everyone voting on the same day? Would it be more fair and less confusing? Like hell it would! One reasonable complaint Republicans had about the 2000 presidential elections — famously decided, in the end, at the Supreme Court — was that some television networks called the State of Florida for Al Gore before polls had closed in the westernmost Florida Panhandle, which lay in the Central Time Zone, an hour behind the rest of the state in the Eastern Time Zone. Declaring a winner prematurely amounted to telling Panhandle voters not to bother casting their ballots.

Spectator Editorial

The danger this time

Unlike other magazines, The Spectator doesn’t feel compelled to tell people how to vote. We try not to endorse candidates in elections. Our writers adopt different positions and our readers are, on the whole, adults who can think for themselves. But The Spectator would like to make one appeal in this tumultuous year: for America to keep faith in democracy. No matter which candidate emerges triumphant, America looks certain to face a real crisis of democratic legitimacy after November 3. Donald Trump deserves some blame for this turn of events. While Trump has not been one-tenth of the tyrant his enemies accuse him of being, he has toyed with the idea of not accepting the results and even riffed wildly about sabotaging mail-in voting or moving the date of the election.

Damian Thompson

Godforsaken: religion is vanishing from American politics

The United States has always been the world’s leading religious marketplace. Even before independence, the American colonies were more fervently Protestant than any country in Europe. The Pilgrim Fathers turned Massachusetts into a witch-hunting Calvinist theocracy, and no sooner had Puritan power begun to wane than New England was seized by a ‘Great Awakening’ in which vast crowds declared their faith in Jesus with hysterical enthusiasm. But it was the Founding Fathers’ decision to deregulate religion completely that really set America apart from the Old World. In successive ‘awakenings’ lasting well into the 20th century, thousands of sects sprang up, some barely Christian but all of them 100 percent American.

Rod Liddle

Britain clambers aboard the BLM bandwagon

Middlesbrough, United Kingdom Gareth Southgate, the unctuous, horse-faced manager of the England soccer team, insisted that his players take the knee before their game against Denmark in the Nations League last month. They were at it before the match against Iceland, too, and the Icelanders joined in, bless them, despite the fact that there is only one black person in all of Iceland and he probably ended up there by mistake. It was important, Southgate ventured, to show support for Black Lives Matter. And so down they all went, as Portland burned and the looters, bullies, thugs and professional agitators ran amok across the US.

Paul Wood

The hostages’ president

President Trump has tweeted that, among other things he’s best at, he is ‘the greatest hostage negotiator in the history of the United States’. He was supposedly quoting his special envoy for hostages, but then there was no record of the envoy ever voicing this precise opinion, so it was really just the usual Trump boasting. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Trump really does seem to care about hostages. He certainly likes the Oval Office photo ops with Americans he’s helped to free, bathing in their gratitude and nodding along to the stream of compliments that such visits guarantee. He seems willing to do a deal with almost anyone, even ‘shithole countries’.

Roger Kimball

The Democratic art of magical thinking

I should clear up one thing straight away. I do not believe that Joe Biden is guilty of magical thinking. Magical thinking, though specious, is a form of thinking. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Joe Biden is not guilty of thinking of any kind, ergo, Joe Biden is not guilty of magical thinking. Quod erat demonstrandum. But Biden’s supporters? Well, that is another matter altogether. There you see a wild efflorescence of magical thinking. What is magical thinking? It is the irrational belief, rampant among primitive peoples and those exposed to too many woke college seminars, that our thoughts influence or ‘constitute’ reality.

Christopher Sandford

Bad Kshama: meet Seattle’s worst socialist

Seattle In Max Frisch’s 1953 absurdist play The Fire Raisers, a well-off family in an unnamed town invites a man they suspect of being an arsonist to sleep in their home. A second such guest then appears, and before long the family’s attic is piled high with drums of gasoline. The man of the house gradually realizes that he has two active pyromaniacs under his roof, but believes that by displaying kindness, he will make his house immune to them. In the last scene of the play, the original arsonist asks for a box of matches and, again wishing to appear generous, his host gives him one. You can guess the rest. Somehow I’m put in mind of Frisch’s morality tale when examining the unresisted rise of the 46-year-old Seattle socialist politician Kshama Sawant.

Features