Subterms
US politicsJohn Hinckley, who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan, to be freed from restrictionsHinckley, who was 25 when he shot and wounded the president in 1981, can be released from all court supervision if he follows rules A More
OpinionCoronavirusThe Guardian view on post-Covid recovery: powered by the state not the marketEditorialThe Thatcherite wing of the Conservative party desires a restoration of ideas whose time has come and gone Mon 9 Aug 2021 14.02 EDTLast modified on Mon 9 Aug 2021 15.35 EDTThe Conservative party hooked British capitalism to the state’s life support system for the past 18 months. So it takes chutzpah to think, as business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng does, of putting the free market at the heart of a post-Covid recovery. Yet lengthening NHS waiting lists, hiking consumer energy bills and welfare cuts when poverty is rising all betray a mindset that regards the re-legitimation of state intervention as threatening a way of life rather than securing it.What the Thatcherite wing of the Conservative party desires is a restoration. For them this is an opportunity to go back to 1979 and use tried-and-tested ways to stabilise prices, crush labour and discipline poorer nations. These rightwingers yearn for higher interest rates, to prioritise financial returns on assets and the use of creditor power to squeeze the global south.Such ideologues are likely, in part, to be disappointed. The US president, Joe Biden, does not see the world their way, saying this April that “trickle-down economics”, associated with Ronald Reagan, didn’t work. The president aims to show that the state can do good, and the early results are promising. His Covid-related aid boost will push the share of Americans in poverty to the lowest level on record. Mr Biden’s treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, professes a “free market” scepticism. She has promoted the social benefits of running the economy “hot” by maximising the use of all available resources. Her inspiration is the economist Arthur Okun, who in 1973 argued that governments increasing employment would foster “a process of ladder climbing” in the job market that would reduce inequality and stimulate productivity growth. Ms Yellen has stuck to this playbook in office.Perhaps the greatest pushback against the return of laissez-faire dominance in economics comes from China. Beijing has surpassed the US in some key technologies. Mr Biden’s economic team is blunt about needing to use the state for more “targeted efforts to try to build domestic industrial strength … when we’re dealing with competitors like China that are not operating on market-based terms”.The state is, clearly, not powerless against global capital. During Covid it paid for millions of workers without breaking a sweat. Contrary to conventional thinking there was no threat from rising deficits to interest rates. Thatcherism was defined by Nigel Lawson as “increasing freedom for markets to work within a framework of firm monetary and fiscal discipline”. This saw the state put in service of business interests rather than mediating between labour and capital. It also left Britain woefully unprepared, and ill-equipped, for the pandemic. A Thatcherite approach will not produce a fairer distribution of growth. It will militate against support during downturns and plans to “level up” the regions. Ministers ought to outline a new role for the state rather than relying on failed ideas about what the market can do.TopicsCoronavirusOpinionConservativesMargaret ThatcherEconomicsJoe BidenUS politicsRonald ReaganeditorialsReuse this content More
Though his long political career did not warrant such a disaster, Walter Mondale, who has died aged 93, gained an unwelcome place in American political history. In 1984, challenging the incumbent president, Ronald Reagan, he won only 13 of the nation’s 538 electoral college votes, the worst defeat ever suffered by a Democratic presidential candidate. Only Alfred Landon had put in a worse performance: his 1936 Republican campaign against Franklin Roosevelt foundered with a mere eight of 531 electoral votes.Reagan’s performance in his televised debates with Mondale had revealed early signs of the former actor’s growing mental confusion, but he romped into his second term with 59% of the popular ballot and 525 electoral votes. Had Mondale not scraped a razor’s edge victory in his home state of Minnesota he would have become the nation’s all-time loser, winning only the three electoral votes of the irrepressibly Democratic District of Columbia.What Mondale did achieve, in addition to his productive years in state politics and the Senate, was to significantly redefine the difficult post of vice-president. His working relationship with President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981 set a pattern that helped his successors find a more meaningful role.As a presidential candidate, Mondale largely engineered his own defeat. Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro was the first female vice-presidential candidate from a major party, but lost credibility when her family finances eventually came under scrutiny. In his acceptance speech to the Democratic nominating convention in San Francisco, Mondale assured its 4,000 startled delegates that: “Mr Reagan will raise taxes and so will I. He won’t tell you: I just did.”To a nation basking in the sunshine politics and tax reductions of Reagan’s first four years, Mondale’s declaration was seen as an appalling blunder. It certainly had its impact on Reagan’s vice-president, already planning his own assault on the White House. Mondale’s gaffe prompted George HW Bush’s infamous sound bite of 1988: “Read my lips: no new taxes.”The plain talking that scuppered Mondale had deep roots. Born in Ceylon, in rural southern Minnesota, he was the son of Theodore, a Methodist minister whose own grandfather, Frederick Mundal, had come from Norway, and Claribel (nee Cowan), a part-time music teacher. Theodore’s annual stipend could not support a family, so Walter Frederick – universally known as Fritz – sought odd jobs to boost the family’s finances. He delivered newspapers, served in a local grocery and worked in a nearby canning factory checking harvested peas for lice.It was on this production line that his lifelong fascination with politics emerged. Jeopardising an already meagre contribution to the family income, he took part in a strike for better working conditions. His friends saw this increasing political involvement as a response to the excessive piety of his upbringing, though his parents imprinted their insistence on straight-dealing and absolute honesty.Mondale became fascinated with his state’s Byzantine politics in his teenage years. Local Democrats had split between rightwing supporters of President Harry Truman and leftwingers backing the maverick Henry Wallace, who intended to run against Truman in 1948. Wallace’s refusal to condemn that February’s Communist coup in Czechoslovakia turned Mondale against him, and he volunteered to undertake political work for the mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey – an association that coloured Mondale’s political life.From Macalester College, St Paul, he went to the University of Minnesota, where he gained a degree in political science (1951). After two years’ army service he qualified for a government-subsidised course, and returned to the university to take a law degree. In 1955 he married Joan Adams, and the following year started in private practice. Since he had little interest in litigation, he immersed himself in Minnesota’s Democratic politics. At the age of 30 he was asked to manage the governor’s re-election campaign and, when Orville Freeman won by a thumping two-thirds majority, Mondale’s career prospects soared. Two years later, when the state’s attorney general unexpectedly retired, Freeman appointed Mondale to fill the post until the next election, making him the youngest person to hold that position in the US.Skulduggery in a local charity fortuitously thrust the new attorney general into the headlines, and this publicity continued as he evolved into a relentless legal activist, particularly on issues of consumer protection. When he faced the voters in November 1960 they confirmed him in office. His rigorous approach to law enforcement made him one of the most influential politicians in Minnesota and later within the wider Democratic party, an influence reinforced by his next re-election campaign.Mondale burst on to the national scene at the Democrats’ 1964 nominating convention through his adept handling of a serious rebellion by southern Democrats opposed to President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights platform. When Johnson then picked Humphrey, by now a senator for Minnesota, as his running mate, Mondale was designated by the state’s governor to complete Humphrey’s Senate term. The choice was vigorously confirmed by the electorate in 1966.The complexities of the Johnson presidency soon coiled round Mondale. Over the years Humphrey had become his political mentor and idol, so the new senator arrived in Washington with a deep sense of loyalty towards his predecessor. Mondale had no problem supporting the administration’s civil rights reforms, but the widening war in Vietnam and its poisonous impact on domestic politics left him squirming.As the chasm expanded in the Democratic party and in the country, Mondale havered. “Tragic and disheartening as this problem is,” he said to one antiwar group, “I still think our policy is better than any of the alternatives.” He later acknowledged that his stance had been the greatest mistake of his political career.Meanwhile, he dodged round the issue by concentrating on civil rights, choosing at one point to guide the administration’s Fair Housing bill through the Senate, though it had twice been rejected by Congress. In what the New York Times described as “a stunning victory for a tiny band of scrappy liberals”, Mondale doggedly forced the legislation on to the statute book. His efforts were recognised by being asked to manage what turned out to be Humphrey’s calamitous 1968 presidential campaign.In the wake of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, that year’s Democratic convention in Chicago was a disaster, featuring nightly television pictures of antiwar rioters being brutally attacked by local police. Humphrey himself was indelibly stained by his support for the war, and the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, continued the southern Democrats’ anti-civil rights revolt by running as a third party candidate. Richard Nixon narrowly won the White House with 301 electoral college votes.Mondale publicly renounced his support for the war and concentrated on domestic issues. After a three-year legislative battle over federal court orders that pupils be transported to distant schools to secure racial balance, he had to give up in the face of a white backlash.The Democrats’ continuing disarray was further demonstrated by their choice of an ultra-liberal, George McGovern, as the party’s 1972 presidential candidate. Mondale declined McGovern’s invitation to join the ticket.He seemed destined to spend the rest of his political life in the Senate until the Watergate scandal forced Nixon’s resignation. President Gerald Ford’s blanket pardon of his patron generated a countrywide revulsion and, in this far more propitious climate, Mondale accepted Carter’s offer of the 1976 vice-presidential slot. They squeezed into office by a mere two per cent of the popular vote, clear warning that they still had to prove themselves.Far more experienced in national politics than the new president, Mondale argued that the vice-president should have a wide-ranging and independent advisory role. To be effective he should receive all intelligence and other significant information sent to the president. Carter agreed and extended the vice-president’s role to become second-in-command of America’s nuclear arsenal. The two also arranged to hold weekly meetings to review administration policies. It might have worked splendidly had Carter been a better president, but his wavering policies and the increasing tensions they created among members of Congress became insuperable. Years later Mondale commented that: “Carter lost confidence in his ability to lead public opinion. He told me once that people no longer listened to what he had to say.” So, for all Mondale’s effort to appease members of Congress, the administration lurched from one crisis to another.The overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the revolutionary regime’s seizure of American embassy staff in Tehran sounded the death knell of Carter’s presidency. It was already in steep decline when a military attempt to rescue the diplomatic hostages went disastrously wrong. Reagan cantered into the White House.Four years later, Mondale’s own bid to remove him was probably doomed from the outset. He hated campaigning on television, which he thought too shallow for serious politics, and was a stiff and unconvincing performer in a medium that Reagan had effortlessly mastered.Mondale was also unlucky. On a trip to Philadelphia his frustrated staff finally persuaded him to highlight local unemployment by chatting onscreen to a young couple. “I understand you lost your job,” Mondale said encouragingly to the wife. “Oh yes,” she responded brightly, “but I got a new one that’s even better.” The chagrined loser lay low for some time before returning to his legal practice in 1987.In 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed him ambassador to Japan – a well-established perquisite for defeated politicians of both parties. When he returned from Tokyo three years later, at the age of 68, he seemed bound for a comfortable retirement.However, in the 2002 election he was dramatically summoned to the party colours. Eleven days before polling Minnesota’s senior senator, Paul Wellstone, his wife, daughter and five campaign staff were killed in a plane crash. Since the Minnesota result could determine control of the Senate, local Democrats persuaded a reluctant Mondale to stand in Wellstone’s place. Incredibly, and to Mondale’s horror, the party hierarchy then turned the family’s memorial service into a campaign rally, a disastrous miscalculation condemned across the state.Mondale lost the election by a two per cent margin – the only time he was ever defeated in Minnesota. It was none of his doing and a sadly bitter note on which to exit from public life. In 2018 Carter and other leading figures joined him to celebrate his 90th birthday.His daughter, Eleanor, died in 2011, and Joan died in 2014. He is survived by his sons, Theodore and William, and four grandchildren. More
Walter F Mondale, the former vice-president and liberal leader who lost to Ronald Reagan in one of the most lopsided presidential elections, has died at the age of 93.A towering figure in the Democratic party who resolutely put humility and honesty before the glitz of mass communication, Mondale’s death marked something of an end of an era in US politics. He was described by a biographer as the last major American politician to resist the allure of television.The death of the former senator, ambassador and Minnesota attorney general was announced in a statement on Monday from his family. No cause was cited.Mondale followed the trail blazed by his political mentor, Hubert H Humphrey, from Minnesota politics to the US Senate and the vice-presidency, serving under Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981.His own try for the White House, in 1984, came at the zenith of Ronald Reagan’s popularity. His candidacy made history, hammering a crack into the nation’s glass ceiling as he chose Geraldine Ferraro, then a US representative from New York, as his running mate – making Mondale the first major-party presidential nominee to put a woman on the ticket.But his insistence on telling voters the truth hurt him badly, notably with his frank declaration that he would raise taxes to counter Reagan’s budget deficit. Reagan, by contrast, led his campaign with one of the great political jingles: “It’s morning again in America.” On election day, Mondale carried only his home state and the District of Columbia. The electoral vote was 525-13 for Reagan – the biggest landslide in the electoral College since Franklin Roosevelt defeated Alf Landon in 1936.“One of my opponents called me a media Luddite. I wasn’t good at it,” Mondale recalled in a 2008 interview with the Guardian looking back on his overwhelming defeat. “Reagan, he was a genius at it. He could walk in front of those cameras and it would come out magic. I would walk in and it would be a root canal.”On Saturday afternoon, Walter Mondale sent this note to his former staffers and campaign alumni, saying: “Together we have accomplished so much and I know you will keep up the good fight. Joe in the White House certainly helps.” pic.twitter.com/PdYk42NXtK— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) April 20, 2021
Affectionately known as Fritz, Mondale was born on 5 January 1928, the son of a Methodist minister and a music teacher. He grew up in several small southern Minnesota towns.Tributes poured in on Monday evening as news of his death emerged. In a statement, Jimmy Carter called him a “dear friend, who I consider the best vice-president on our country’s history”.“Fritz used his political skill and personal integrity to transform the vice presidency into a dynamic, policy-driving force that had never been seen before and still exists today,” the former president said.In a tweet, Barack Obama said Mondale “championed progressive causes and changed the role of VP”.Mondale’s great-grandfather migrated to the US from Norway. The dourness of Norwegian culture stayed with the family – he recalled that in his childhood, kids were spanked for the sin of bragging about themselves.He was only 20 when he served as a congressional district manager for Humphrey’s successful Senate campaign in 1948. Mondale started his career in Washington in 1964, when he was appointed to the Senate to replace Humphrey, who had resigned to become vice-president to Lyndon Johnson. Mondale was elected to a full six-year term with about 54% of the vote in 1966, although Democrats lost the governorship and suffered other election setbacks.In 1972, Mondale won another Senate term with nearly 57% of the vote.His Senate career was marked by advocacy of social issues such as education, housing, migrant workers and child nutrition. Like Humphrey, he was an outspoken supporter of civil rights.Mondale tested the waters for a presidential bid in 1974 but ultimately decided against it. “Basically I found I did not have the overwhelming desire to be president, which is essential for the kind of campaign that is required,” he said in November 1974.In 1976, Carter chose Mondale as No 2 on his ticket and went on to unseat Gerald Ford.As vice-president, Mondale had a close relationship with Carter. He was the first vice-president to occupy an office in the White House, rather than in a building across the street. Mondale traveled extensively on Carter’s behalf and advised him on domestic and foreign affairs.Mondale never backed away from his liberal principles.“I think that the country more than ever needs progressive values,” Mondale said in 1989.After his White House years, Mondale served from 1993-96 as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Japan, fighting for US access to markets ranging from cars to cellular phones.Despite his long and varied career in politics, it will be his epic defeat to Reagan, and his honorable but ultimately disastrous resistance to the small screen, for which he will be remembered. “I think, you know, I’ve never really warmed up to television,” he once said. “In fairness to television, it never really warmed up to me.”In his Guardian interview, Mondale recalled that his campaign staff in the 1984 race had tried hard to drag him into the TV era. They pleaded with him to change his hairstyle and his smile to charm more on camera.“I didn’t like it, and I told them so,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Look, I’m all I’ve got. I can’t be someone I’m not.’” More
Many politicians and diplomats from the 1980s lay claim to a pivotal role in ending the cold war, but the former US secretary of state George Shultz, who has died aged 100, had a better claim than most. And he was not shy in letting people know, as he did at length in his 1,184-page account of his years at the state department, Turmoil and Triumph (1993).
When he became secretary of state in 1982 – a job he was to hold for seven years – relations between the US and the Soviet Union were at a dangerous low. The administration of US president Ronald Reagan was packed with anti-Soviet hardliners. Reagan himself in 1983 dubbed the Soviet Union “the evil empire”.
Shultz seldom let his frustration with anti-Soviet colleagues in the Pentagon, the CIA and elsewhere in the administration show in public. But he let his guard down in a terse response to a reporter who asked whether he was enjoying the job: “I did not come here to be happy.”
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He persevered, opening up a secret channel to the Soviet Union and gradually winning over Reagan, with whom he established a close bond. Relations with the Soviet Union began to improve. Four years after taking office, Shultz was in the room at one of the most extraordinary diplomatic encounters of the 20th century, the 1986 Reykjavik summit at which Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came briefly and tantalisingly close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
When Shultz left office in January 1989, he said Americans were unable or unwilling to recognise that the cold war was over. “But to me it was all over bar the shouting,” he wrote. Ten months later the Berlin Wall came down and in December 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved.
Shultz looked stuffy and conventional, and for the most part he was, but he liked to persuade people he was not as conservative as he appeared. A regular ploy when being interviewed was to direct journalists to a signed photograph of him dancing at a White House dinner with Ginger Rogers. She had written: “Dear George, For a moment I thought I was dancing with Fred. Love, Ginger.”
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Born in New York, George was the son of Margaret (nee Pratt) and Birl Shultz, who in 1922 helped found the New York Institute of Finance to train those working on Wall Street. When he was three the family moved to New Jersey.
He studied economics at Princeton and after graduating in 1942 joined the Marines. Service in the Pacific included the taking of the Palau islands in 1944, when more than 2,000 Americans and 10,000 Japanese were killed.
During a rest and recreation break in Hawaii Captain Shultz met a lieutenant in the army nursing corps, Helena “Obie” O’Brien. They married in 1946 and had five children.
Although an average student at Princeton, he completed a PhD in labour relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949 and stayed on to teach.
Throughout the rest of his life, he combined academia – MIT was followed in 1957 by the University of Chicago, and in 1968 by Stanford University – with long spells in business and in government. He was a Republican, but more pragmatic than ideological. He became one of the ultimate Washington insiders, serving under three presidents – Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan – and worked on various federal task forces at the request of John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He was an informal but influential adviser on foreign policy to George W Bush. More
President Ronald Reagan’s longtime secretary of state, George P Shultz, who spent most of the 1980s trying to improve relations with the Soviet Union and forging a course for peace in the Middle East, has died. He was 100.A titan of American academia, business and diplomacy, Shultz died Saturday at his home on the campus of Stanford University, according to the Hoover Institution, a thinktank where he was a distinguished fellow.Shultz held three major cabinet posts in Republican administrations during a long career of public service. He was labor secretary and treasury secretary under President Richard Nixon before spending more than six years as Reagan’s secretary of state. Shultz was the longest serving secretary of state since the second world war and had been the oldest surviving former cabinet member of any administration.Condoleezza Rice, also a former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution, said in a statement that Shultz “will be remembered in history as a man who made the world a better place”.As the nation’s chief diplomat, Shultz negotiated the first-ever treaty to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s ground-based nuclear arsenals. The 1987 accord was a historic attempt to begin to reverse the nuclear arms race.After the October 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 soldiers, Shultz worked tirelessly to end Lebanon’s brutal civil war in the 1980s. He spent countless hours of shuttle diplomacy between mideast capitals trying to secure the withdrawal of Israeli forces there.The experience led him to believe that stability in the region could only be assured with a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he set about on an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful mission to bring the parties to the negotiating table.Former secretary of state Henry A Kissinger, reflecting in his memoirs on the “highly analytic, calm and unselfish Shultz,” paid Shultz an exceptional compliment in his diary: “If I could choose one American to whom I would entrust the nation’s fate in a crisis, it would be George Shultz.”Over his lifetime, Shultz succeeded in the worlds of academia, public service and corporate America, and was widely respected by his peers from both political parties. He was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the presidential medal of freedom, in 1989.Shultz had largely stayed out of politics since his retirement, but had been an advocate for an increased focus on climate change. He marked his 100th birthday in December by extolling the virtues of trust and bipartisanship in politics and other endeavors in a piece he wrote for the Washington Post.Coming amid the acrimony that followed the November presidential election, Shultz’s call for decency and respect for opposing views struck many as an appeal for the country to shun the political vitriol of the Trump years.“Trust is the coin of the realm,” Shultz wrote. “When trust was in the room, whatever room that was – the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room – good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.” More
Mr Mondale said yesterday that he would rather “lose a campaign about decency than win one about self-interest” in comments which contrasted sharply which the message which President Reagan was seeking to put across while on the stump in Pennsylvania.
At a rally at Millersville University, in Pennsylvania, the president urged voters not to allow the Democrats “to pick the American wallet again.” He said that Mr Mondale would return the US to the days of “torpor, timidity and taxes.”
In an interview with Newsweek magazine, Mr Mondale put on display the kind of caring qualities which have made him a favourite among the leader writers of several of America’s big east coast newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer, which endorsed his candidacy yesterday. Mr Mondale said that his campaign was “betting that the American people are more compassionate and caring than he (Reagan) thinks.”
With the Reagan-Bush ticket widening its lead in several new opinion polls released yesterday, Mr Mondale questioned whether President Reagan was as popular as the polls show. “When I see the energy in these crowds, the enthusiasm and the anger… the Reagan crowd is getting pretty cocky. They’d better watch out. The public is not going to be taken for granted.”
The latest national opinion surveys continue to favour President Reagan. Newsweek’s poll showed the president ahead by 17 points: a USA Today poll showed Mr Reagan’s lead at 23 points (down from 25 points a week earlier), and US News and World Report said that its state-by-state survey shows Mr Reagan ahead in 45 out of the 50 states and the president “on his way to a smashing victory on November 6.”
With his bases in the south and west apparently secured, President Reagan campaigned yesterday in the traditional Democratic strongholds of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He holds only a narrow lead in Pennsylvania, but is well ahead in the traditionally Democratic state of West Virginia where he was seeking to help the Republican Senate candidate, Mr John Raese, fighting an uphill campaign against the sitting governor, Mr Jay Rockerfeller, who is spending more than $10 million of the family fortunes in his battle for a Senate seat.
Despite the enormous popularity of President Reagan’s rehearsed image, these are not qualities which have much appeal to the leader writers on the generally left-of-centre east coast newspapers. The Washington Post said yesterday that it was supporting Mr Mondale’s election “enthusiastically and without apology” in contrast of its lukewarm endorsement of Mr Carter in 1980.
“We think Mr Mondale – who has been maddeningly misread and mistreated by the political trendmakers this year, just as Mr Reagan has been maddeningly indulged and overpraised – is unambiguously the better candidate,” the leading article maintained. It argued that Mr Reagan’s government “has been grossly indifferent to the requirements of racial equality and the needs of the poor.” More
Dear America,
HEY! How you guys doing? Longtime British Americanophile “reaching out” across the Atlantic. I’m here to heart you, USA. I’m like “hope the hurting stops soon” (strong-arm mid-tone emoji).
I guess you’re all making a list of The Worst Things Trump Did, then checking it twice because really, who’d believe it. And I know he’s primarily your monstrous problem. But even Brits are citizens of what we used to call “the free world”. Your president was once the leader of it. And one of the very worst things Trump’s done is to make Ronald Reagan look like an intellectual giant. Simply by comparison, Trump has humanised Reagan and elevated his memory to sainthood.
I’m currently researching the Gipper for a project and honestly, next to Trump he genuinely seems like … not the good guy, exactly? But definitely presidential. “Let’s make America great again” was Reagan’s slogan, of course. It was about “American values”, making America great in the world again. Trump’s slogan initially stood for rebuilding economic power. Now it’s shorthand for “let’s win the culture war I relentlessly inflame and sure, bring on an actual armed civil war if I lose the election”.
Of course, Trump’s humanity is at such undetectable levels he makes literally anyone else look like St Francis of Assisi. Infuriatingly, even deadweight predecessors like the Bush dynasty look competent. But Reagan? Along with millions of others in the 1980s, I was there at marches and demonstrations, noisily railing against hated neoliberal Raygun, his nuclear missiles, his utterly insane space force. Oh how we disdained him, this doddery warmonger, this huckleberry clown of a politician. It never occurred to us that 40 years on we’d be contemplating someone so much more clueless, so very much stupider, than Reagan.
None of my business, dear Americans, I know. You’re absolutely right. It’s not my country, it’s yours. You’re the ones pledging allegiance from sea to shining sea. I should butt out. And yet. All this used to be my business, back in the day when Potus was de facto leader of “the west” and led the forces of laissez-faire capitalism against the Evil Empire of Communism. “Ideology”, we used to call it. Man, we thought Reagan was the devil incarnate 40 years ago. Now the news is basically “Self-Satirising Human Cronut Yesterday On Twitter Said …”
As I write this letter of solidarity, I’m watching the televised presidential debate for election 1980, 40 years ago. Jimmy Carter the bruised defender, looking for a second term. Reagan the interloper, the disrupter, landing blow after blow on Carter – the failing economy, the Tehran hostages, the correct pronunciation of “nuclear”. Reagan was the older man but he sounded younger. What is frankly astonishing is the dignity of the debate itself. Here were political enemies – diametrically opposed on every issue – politely disagreeing, listening, yielding when time ran out. Basic human respect. And you stop and think – how is this normal, being nostalgic for normality itself? More
