Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Wednesday

Alex Massie

The Eternal Doomed Quest for a Third American Party

From our UK edition

One of the rules of American political journalism is that every four years there must be an attempt to guage the likelihood of a "serious" third party challenge that will change everything we'd previously thought we'd known about American politics. Happily, this year is no exception. TIME's Alex Altman asks "Can a Well-Heeled Group of Insiders Create a Populist Third Party Sensation?". We all know the answer to that. No, they can't. And won't. But here, just for fun, is what Americans Elect* are planning: What Americans Elect has done is fashion a new twist to the quadrennial quest for a credible third-party contender. Instead of an outside party, it has crafted a parallel nominating process: a nonpartisan online convention.

Alex Massie

Newt: I Told You So

From our UK edition

Jonathan Bernstein is mildly miffed that now that Newt Gingrich's self-inflated bubble is collapsing too few people are remembering those who always said this would happen. I quite agree. (Complete Newt-scepticism collected here.) As I said and still say: Perhaps Republican voters aren't yet willing to "settle" for Mitt Romney but despite the Union-Leader and all the rest of it, the great dog-abuser is still the prohibitive favourite, no matter what the polls say. This remains the case even as the press dwells on his rivals and finds ever more ingenious ways of suggesting Romney must be in some kind of trouble. The race needs a story and at the moment Newt's main role is to provide that story. Fair enough, but not quite what's needed to actually, you know, win.

Alex Massie

Vaclav Havel & a Politics of Doubt

From our UK edition

I've been away and then laid low by some bug, so am late to writing anything about the sad news of Vaclav Havel's death. Pete has already noted his 1990 New Year speech, but I'd also recommend reading David Remnick's profile of Havel, published by the New Yorker in 2003. There's plenty of good stuff there, including this: Havel allowed that he felt "strangely paralyzed, empty inside," fearful that dissent and governing were hardly the same. "At the very deepest core of this feeling there was, ultimately, a sensation of the absurd: what Sisyphus might have felt if one fine day his boulder stopped, rested on the hilltop, and failed to roll back down," he told an audience in Salzburg.

Friday

Alex Massie

Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

From our UK edition

It was only yesterday that I remembered I should read Christopher Hitchens' latest article for Vanity Fair: a touching, mordantly funny, survey of life, Nietzsche, Sidney Hook and death. Though one knew the occasion would not be long delayed, it remains wincingly sad that it must be one of the last things the great fighter ever wrote before his death. As he put it: Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

In Praise of Victor Davis Hanson

From our UK edition

As someone who finds the Cult of Reagan a depressing, even nauseating spectacle, I doff my hat to Victor Davis Hanson for this paragraph published at National Review Online: I hope the present primary race does not keep descending into monotonous boasts of who is the more Reaganesque of the candidates, in which we do the gutsy and often very human Reagan a real disservice by forgetting the things that he sometimes thought he had to do to survive or to govern — or the things he was sometimes just plain naive or wrong about. George Bush’s Alito and Roberts appointments were far more conservative than either Reagan’s O’Connor or Kennedy.

Alex Massie

The Polls Back David Cameron

From our UK edition

Brother Korski is, as always, the voice of urbane reason on all matters european. I have little idea whther David Cameron done brilliant in Brussels lately or whether he's blundered badly. Neither verdict seems satisfactory or sufficiently nuanced. There is this, however: in one respect he has done the rest of europe a favour: had he agreed to a new treaty he would have been forced to hold a referendum in Britain and it is hard to see how any treaty, be it ever so favourable to Britain, could have passed. Cue more diplomatic shenanigans and assorted other awkwardness in Brussels. By standing aside Cameron may have "isolated" Britain but he's made life much easier - though it's stll far from simple - for every other leader in europe.

Alex Massie

Can the Dutch Government Really Be Abandoning Smokers to Their Fate?

From our UK edition

Let us hope they are. A wailing letter to the editors of the Lancet, signed by Stanton Glantz and other anti-tobacco fanatics, complains that the Dutch government "is all but closing down its tobacco control operations". One can only hope this is the case and wish that other governments might follow suit. Apparently: It would be a matter of no little shame to a country that prides itself on a compassionate and inclusive ethos if its government were to abandon smokers to their fate. Every death that ensued would not just be the responsibility of the tobacco industry, which continues to promote its lethal product, but also of every politician in the Dutch Government who chose to look the other way and allow it to happen. Blood in their lungs and on their hands!

Alex Massie

Programming Note | 13 December 2011

From our UK edition

Ahoy Londoners! This Thursday, the good people at the Adam Smith Institute are holding a pre-Christmas cheer-fest at which your blogger will be speaking. It's titled 2012: The End of the World As We Know It?* and the panel comprises Douglas Carswell, Brendan O'Neill, Jamie Whyte and, er, me. It all kicks off at 6.30pm in the Bishop Partridge Hall at the Church House Conference Centre in Westminster. Full details here. Do come along and say hello. It's free and there will be drinks too.

Alex Massie

Test Cricket, Eh? Bloody Hell.

From our UK edition

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh when reading about Australia's latest cricket crisis and, reader, I've no heart of stone. Much more of this and we'll have to wonder if the Aussies really deserve a five test series these days. The present crew are, apparently, "The Lowest of the Low". To which one can only say: not while anyone who played for England in the fiasco of 1988 is alive they ain't. But this is the thing about Test cricket: its habit of sneaking up and whacking your senses when you least expect it. This was a humdrum, low-key Test in tiny, sleepy Hobart (of which more later) designed as a useful warm-up for the Australians before the Indians arrive for the main event of the antipodean summer.

Monday

Alex Massie

Is Scotland a Nordic Country?

From our UK edition

This is a question that meets the classic definition of John Rentoul's famous-to-them-that-ken series of Questions To Which The Answer Is No. That is, the people asking the question think the answer is Yes when in fact it is No. This question, like many of the SNP's other witticisms, is the brainchild of Angus Robertson, the MP for Moray who might be thought Alex Salmond's answer to Karl Rove. Like Rove, Angus sometimes gets carried away and this suggestion that Scotland is some long-lost Nordic appendage is one of those occasions. Not that he's alone in wishing Scotland could be redefined in this fashion. Lesley Riddoch had a piece in the Guardian recently making just this argument.

Alex Massie

Newt Gingrich is Not John Kerry. That’s His Problem.

From our UK edition

In the end your view of the battle for the Republican party's presidential nomination comes down to the degree of confidence you have that Republican voters, especially but not exclusively in the early primary states, remain capable of remembering that the election that matters takes place in November, not the spring. If you doubt they can manage this then you probably think Newt Gingrich is the bona fide front-runner; if you think they can then you're liable to think Newt's resurgence is just another teenage crush that will fade as swiftly as it developed. I'm in the latter camp, for what it's worth. There have been improbable Presidents before (some, including the man himself, might consider the present President such) but few so unlikely as Newt.

Friday

Alex Massie

Sarkozy’s Victory

From our UK edition

This is, according to the Spitfire & Bullshit brigade, a great triumph for David Cameron and, more generally, for euroscepticism. If so, I'd hate to see what defeat looks like. What, precisely, has the Prime Minister vetoed? It seems to me that the Franco-German european mission remains alive and well and, if viewed in these terms, Britain has been defeated. That is, the price of a short-term tactical success may be a longer-term strategic defeat. Of course, the Prime Minister had to avoid a treaty that would, sure as eggs be eggs, be vetoed by the British people via a referendum. In that sense, he prevailed. But this is a pretty narrow victory, especially when set beside the prizes claimed by other governments. The biggest winner of all, it seems to me, is France.

Alex Massie

Annals of French Diplomacy

From our UK edition

This is scarcely the most important part of today's EU shenanigans but, post DSK and all that, one must admire French diplomatic flair when it comes to this sort of thing: The French are very angry – one French diplomat says that Britain is acting "like a man who wants to go to a wife-swapping party without taking his own wife". Correct or not, this is nicely put. One's hard-pressed to imagine an FCO or State Department suit expressing his frustration in quite such colourful terms. The temptation to make sweeping nationalist generalisations on the back of an off-the-cuff remark such as this should, naturally, be resisted.

Alex Massie

This Britain, Alas

From our UK edition

A typically swell post from Chris Dillow: Take four recent developments: - Joey Barton provokes “fury” by saying that suicide is selfish, with some of his critics invoking the weasel work “inappropriate“. - Over 30,000 people complain to the BBC about Jeremy Clarkson’s “shoot the strikers” comment. - Luis Suarez gives Fulham fans the finger, and they faint like Victorian spinsters. - Emma West has to spend Christmas in prison, supposedly for her own safety after she gets death threats for her racist rant. These events all tell us something sad about the British people - that many of us have become illiberal prigs, quick to take offence and to condemn.  It's hard to dispute this.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Difficult Choices Are Never Easy

From our UK edition

So spake the Taioseach, a Mr Enda Kenny of County Mayo, on Sunday night. Difficult choices are never easy. There is something near-fabulous about the phrase. It has certainly prokoked Fintan O'Toole most severely. He's in rasping form this week Savour the phrase. Hold it to the light. Swirl it round the glass. Stick your nose in deep and inhale the rich aromas of full-bodied absurdity. Get the pungent whiff of carmelised cliche and curdled smugness. Imagine the work that went into crafting it, the bleary-eyed, caffeine-soaked speechwriters in their lonely eyrie, in the early hours of Sunday morning, running through the variations: hard choices are seldom soft; nasty things are never pleasant; difficult options tend to be difficult.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Newt: Another 9/11 Would Have Concentrated Minds

From our UK edition

There are many, many, many reasons why Newt Gingrich will not be the 45th President of the United States (assuming, as I do not and actually think pretty unlikely, he wins the GOP nomination) but among them is his habit of saying stuff like this: That's from 2008. Here's my transcription of what he says in this clip: Why have we not been hit since 9/11? Good question. My first answer is I honestly don't know. I would have expected another attack, and I particularly thought, I was very, very worried and I talked to the administration when we had the sniper attacks because the sniper attacks were psychologically so frightening to the average person because of their randomness that I was amazed the bad guys didn't figure out how to send 10 or 12 sniper teams.

Alex Massie

Can A Cheeseburger Exist Outside A Post-Agrarian Society?

From our UK edition

A post arguing that this is a Question To Which the Answer is No has been cropping up on my Facebook feed lately and now I see that Andrew Sullivan has linked to it as well. As Waldo Jaquiath puts it, the cheeseburger was until relatively recently an impractical concoction. Not impossible, perhaps, but one requiring many actors and moving parts: This past summer, revisiting the idea [of making a cheeseburger "from scratch"], I realized yet again that I was insufficiently ambitious. I’d really need to plant and harvest the wheat [for the bun], raise a cow to produce the milk for the butter, raise another cow to slaughter for its rennet to make the cheese, and personally slaughter and process the cow or sheep.

Alex Massie

How To Lose An Argument: Jim Murphy Edition

From our UK edition

Meanwhile, in more examples of sloppy Labour arguments here's a tweet Jim Murphy sent this afternoon: Oh dear. Murphy is usually better than this. I know and everyone else who pays any attention to Scottish politics (this includes Jim Murphy) knows that Alex Salmond has long admired the Republic of Ireland's low corporation taxes; he has almost never bothered talking about personal or consumption taxes. Furthermore, few sensible people think Ireland's boom and bust was fuelled by or made significantly worse by its low rates of corporation tax. To hint otherwise, as Murphy seems to here, is either foolish or dishonest. It is possible to think low business taxes a good thing while also supposing it might be a good idea to avoid the mistakes and excesses that led Ireland to bankruptcy.

Alex Massie

Ed Balls & his Fellow-Travellers at the New York Times

From our UK edition

Ed Balls is a bonny fighter and even his opponents often appear to enjoy being wound-up by the Shadow Chancellor's pleasingly-shameless* approach to opposition. There was a typical piece of Ballsian chicanery during this afternoon's debate on the economy when Balls accused George Osborne of stubbornly sticking to a failed "Plan A" and, to buttress his argument, pointed out that the New York Times agrees that the coalition has failed to get Britain working again. Well, if the New York Times says something it must be true! Or, you know, not. Though the Old Gray Lady is a mighty paper it is not the last word on anything, let alone the British economy.

Alex Massie

The Only Thing You Actually Need to Read About the Riots

From our UK edition

Three cheers for Bagehot for this superb post on the Guardian/LSE's abject justification for inquiry into this summer's riots. Mr Rennie puts it exceedingly well: Now, put me in many contexts, and I am quite the hand-wringing bourgeois liberal. Watching Newsnight yesterday evening, I fear I came over all Judge Dredd. The researcher’s contention, in a nutshell, is that the rioters were not criminals who ran amok for a few days in August, losing their moral compass when they realised their actions would probably be without legal consequences. Instead, we are asked to believe, they are angry young people who hate the police and believe that they were taking revenge on a heartless world.