Oliver Wiseman

Eric Adams vs BLM Incoming New York mayor Eric Adams was elected to reverse the city’s violent crime spike. And that is what he set about doing on Thursday when he reaffirmed his plan to bring back a reconstituted version of the plain-clothes police unit disbanded by current mayor Bill de Blasio last year. One person unhappy with the commitment is New York Black Lives Matter co-founder Hawk Newsome. “If they think they are going back to the old ways of policing then we’re going to take to the streets again,” said Newsome after a meeting with the mayor-elect. “There will be riots. There will be fire, and there will be bloodshed.” Newsome’s politics-by-intimidation may have worked last year, but patience has worn thin with these sorts of threats in major American cities.

Go nuclear, Joe Across the Atlantic at COP26 (which, somehow, is still going on), politicians deliver a familiar, Malthusian script. It’s five minutes to midnight, it’s already too late, the stakes couldn’t be higher. You know the deal. And yet, for all the warnings of imminent apocalypse and wrangling over emissions targets, policymakers consistently fail to act as if they actually take their own words seriously. In fact, all this overblown rhetoric obscures solutions that do not require the “great reset” favored by the Davos crowd or the political and economic revolution argued for by cringey, crusty Greta Thunberg fans demonstrating their displeasure through the medium of performance art on the streets of Glasgow.

The tribes of the modern GOP For years, the defining question in the GOP has been where you stood in relation to Donald Trump: an enthusiastic supporter, disgusted NeverTrumper or somewhere between the two. There was, of course, always more to it than this. But Trump loomed so large that it was easy to miss a lot of that detail. A new study from Pew brings some much-welcomed nuance to this story. Titled "Beyond Red vs Blue," they describe the deep divisions between the two party’s coalitions. The study slices the electorate into nine groups that share similar values and policy priorities.

The cooling of the COVID wars Yesterday brought a long overdue return to normalcy as the US reopened its borders to foreign travelers for the first time in twenty months. The travel bans, imposed as an emergency measure at the start of the pandemic, had outlived their public health usefulness. The continuation of the illogical restrictions through most of 2021 was one of a frustrating number of polices where the Biden administration prioritized signaling COVID hawkishness over making a reasonable assessment of the costs and benefits of pandemic restrictions. The stories of reunited families and lives finally unpaused are a reminder of the human cost to so many of our anti-pandemic measures. And there’s more signs of good news on the COVID restrictions front.

The long road to Build Back Better “It’s finally infrastructure week,” said Joe Biden in a speech on Saturday morning to mark the long-awaited passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which includes $550 billion in new spending. Given the timing of the vote, late on Friday night, it was more a case of infrastructure weekend. When Biden heralded the legislative win, he also talked up the prospects of the second, more contentious piece of legislation that has been the subject of months of Hill negotiations. “I feel confident that we will have enough votes to pass the Build Back Better bill,” he said.

For months, Democratic negotiations over Joe Biden’s twin spending bills were stuck in a cycle of infighting that felt it would never end: the unstoppable force of progressive overexcitement up against the immovable object of moderate resistance. That deadlock was finally broken late on Friday night, when the House passed an infrastructure bill worth $550 billion in new spending. The breakthrough came after a head-spinning day on the Hill (a day that progressive congressman Mark Pocan described as a “clusterfuck”).

The turnout tables have turned “When we vote, we win.” So goes a favorite Democratic Party aphorism. I heard it from Amy Klobuchar campaigning for Terry McAuliffe in Northern Virginia last month. And I’ve heard it from countless others, in races across the country, as they urge audiences to register to vote, tell their friends to register to vote and get out there ahead of an election. Behind this slogan is the assumption that high turnout helps Democrats. But Tuesday’s election is the latest evidence that this dynamic is changing, and may have even reversed. In Virginia, turnout was up 26 percent on the last gubernatorial contest and the Republican won. The ten counties with the biggest increase in vote totals were all won by Glenn Youngkin.

Biden’s normalcy problem The problem with promising a return to normalcy is that you can only do it once. That’s one of the lessons from the Virginia governor’s race, where Terry McAuliffe’s emphasis on the dangers of Donald Trump fell flat. In other words, what worked in 2020 hasn’t worked in 2021 and looks unlikely to work in 2022. That’s all true, but it’s also worth remembering that the strategy pursued by McAuliffe didn’t even work especially well last year. Yes, Joe Biden capitalized on dislike of the former president. Trump fatigue delivered Democrats the White House. But the strategy didn’t work further down the ballot. Biden outperformed other Democratic candidates on the ballot. The party lost seats in the House.

The first post-Trump Republican When Glenn Youngkin clinched the Republican primary in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, he was a blast from the past: a throwback to the sort of establishment GOP types that predominated before 2016. By defeating Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe and painting the state red, he has offered a vision of the future, a blueprint for GOP success in the Biden era. It also makes him the first post-Trump Republican. Contrary to the core message of the McAuliffe campaign, Youngkin is not “Trumpkin.” And Virginia’s voters could see that for themselves. The governor-elect’s early-hours victory speech last night was a far cry from the tenor of the MAGA Republicans who have set the running in recent years. But nor was he anti-Trump.

The decline and fall of the New York City GOP It’s a good idea to steer clear of predictions, especially on Election Day. But I’m going to throw caution to the wind and make a bold call: the Democratic candidate will win New York’s mayoral contest. OK, that's not too brave a prediction. When the votes are counted, Eric Adams, the ex-cop who clinched the Democratic nomination with a moderate, tough-on-crime, pro-business message, will triumph by a massive margin. Curtis Sliwa seems like a nice enough chap. With his red beret, history of crime-fighting entrepreneurialism and tiny apartment full of cats, he evokes a more colorful, grittier time in his city’s past.

The hidden cost of Biden’s border complacency Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. That phrase, a truism of negotiations which became a cliché in Britain politics during the UK-EU wrangling over Brexit, should be borne in mind by Democrats confident that Build Back Better is a done deal. Yes, Biden’s flagship legislation will almost certainly pass, but many details remain unresolved. And the tight legislative arithmetic means there is plenty of scope for last-minute trouble. Politically inconvenient turbulence lies ahead for Democrats. Perhaps the most flammable issue still under discussion is immigration.

The culture war’s irregular verbs Irregular verbs abound in US politics. When it comes to social and cultural disagreements, the conjugation goes something like this: I am standing up for my principles, you are waging an irresponsible culture war. “We don’t have time to be wasting on these phony, trumped-up culture wars,” said Barack Obama at a Terry McAuliffe campaign event in Virginia last weekend. “This fake outrage that right-wing media pedals to juice their ratings, and the fact that he’s willing to go along with it instead of talking about serious problems that actually affect serious people? That’s a shame. That’s not what this election’s about. That’s not what you need, Virginia.

The beginning of the end of the filibuster The Democrats’ never-ending struggle to find something that all of the party’s 50 senators can agree on has claimed many victims: Joe Biden’s popularity, a good night’s sleep for those poor reporters who cover the Hill 24/7, Joe Manchin’s ability to walk the corridors of the Capitol unimpeded, Kyrsten Sinema’s freedom to use the bathroom without being heckled. But could Biden’s administrative travails be about to claim a more serious casualty? Listen carefully and beneath the din of reconciliation negotiations, you can hear the foundations of the filibuster crumbling. When the president was asked about the Senate rule in a CNN town hall last week, he said he was “open to fundamentally altering it...

Deal or no deal? When is a deal not deal? When it’s the negotiations over Build Back Better among Capitol Hill Democrats. For days, party leaders have been talking up the progress they have reportedly made. Over the weekend, the administration openly contemplated the possibility of putting a framework agreement in place before the president jets to Europe on Thursday to meet the Pope and thrash out a climate commitment with world leaders in Glasgow. But there is scant evidence to suggest Democrats are anywhere near the white-smoke moment when it becomes clear that Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have secured the votes they need. In fact, most indicators point in the other direction.

Has Warren had the last laugh? She’s got a plan for that! Nevertheless, she persisted! Pick your cringey Elizabeth Warren tagline. The last-ditch inclusion of something resembling a wealth tax in the Democrats’ Build Back Better reconciliation package has some claiming that the Massachusetts law professor-turned-senator who made a similar proposal the centerpiece of her 2020 presidential bid is having the last laugh. Adam Jentleson, a former top congressional aide and Warren campaign alum, told the Washington Post that people are gravitating towards the proposal because “it is extremely good.” A more honest explanation would be that Democrats are desperate to find something — anything —  they can agree on.

For many conservatives in liberal states, 2020 was the year they finally upped sticks. Stringent lockdowns, Democratic commitments to defund the police and a bad-blooded presidential election combined to make a compelling case for relocation. Californians have fled to Texas; Florida has become a year-round home, and not just a seasonal destination, for a flock of north-eastern exiles. In Oregon, conservatives are taking things a step further. Rather than moving themselves to a red state, they want to bring a red state to them by redrawing the borders of neighboring Idaho.