A basic story emerges from the hearings. The headline is that Trump’s legal attempts to overturn or otherwise invalidate the results of the 2020 election, culminating in his supporters’ storming of the Capitol on January 6, amounted to an “attempted coup” meant to “overthrow the U.S. government,” in the words of committee chairman Bennie Thompson. 

Chatter about a “coup”, however, is mostly a question of semantics. For all the focus in the hearings on the Trump team’s inane plans to block Biden’s election victory — a draft executive order (never issued) calling on the Department of Justice to seize voting machines, a draft DOJ letter (never sent) alleging election irregularities in Georgia, lawyer John Eastman’s theory that Mike Pence had the Constitutional authority to toss out the results — the actual crime the committee is trying to pin on Trump is “incitement” of a riot, rather than “seditious conspiracy” or some other charge befitting an attempt to overthrow the government. Hence the focus of last Tuesday’s hearing on Trump’s tweets, which, the committee claimed, convinced his extremist supporters that the president wanted them to commit violence in his name. 

But while Trump’s rhetoric was irresponsible, incitement is a difficult crime to prosecute thanks to the First Amendment. Trump never directly ordered anyone to storm the Capitol, so he is likely in the clear, legally if not morally. Indeed, the committee’s purpose is probably less to fish for criminal charges than to put Trump and the events of January 6 back at the centre of the national conversation at a time when the Democrats are facing political headwinds. As the New York Times reported shortly before the hearings started, “Democrats argue the hearings will give them a platform for making a broader case about why they deserve to stay in power.” The article quoted a political consultant who had run focus groups on Democratic “base surge voters” and “swing voters” and found that for both groups, “Jan. 6 is very much salient and highly negative.”

And for everyone else? According to a recent Harvard/Harris poll, while narrow majorities blame Trump for the Capitol riot, narrow majorities also regard the hearings as “partisan” and “biased”, 56% believe the Capitol riot was a “protest that turned violent” (versus 44% who think it was an “armed insurrection”), 63% believe Congress should be investigating other issues rather than focusing on January 6, and 67% believe the hearings are “further dividing the country”. (For what it’s worth, 61% of voters would prefer that Trump not run again in 2024.) Partisan splits on all of these questions are what you’d expect, with most of the margin accounted for by independents. 

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Ideology has poisoned the West

By Jacob Howland

The committee’s main problem is that it is an entirely one-sided affair, which means that it is having trouble convincing anyone who is not already convinced. Normally, a House select panel would include members of the minority party who could ask questions, cross-examine witnesses, and generally challenge the assertions of the majority. This committee does have two Republicans, but both were selected by Nancy Pelosi for their anti-Trump bona fides. The majority of House Republicans boycotted the committee — unwisely — when Pelosi refused to seat two of their nominees on the grounds that both had objected to the certification of the 2020 election (something they have in common with Democratic committee member Jamie Raskin, who objected to certification in 2016.)

Absent any opposition, the committee has been an odd mix of Congressional hearing and partisan political documentary. I mean the second part literally: the committee recruited a television executive, former ABC News President James Goldston, to craft the hearings into a “disciplined, captivating summer series” built around a “taut, colourful narrative with a prosecutor’s precision and a cinematographer’s flair”, according to Axios’s Mike Allen. While the committee has deposed hundreds of witnesses, their testimony has been released only in scripted appearances before the panel, carefully curated video snippets, and leaks to friendly media. No transcripts have been made available to the public, and so the committee releases only the information that appears to bolster its narrative while ignoring the rest, safe in the assumption that criticism will mostly be confined to the Right-wing press.

The flaw in this arrangement was on display over the past two weeks. Take the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows who accompanied the former president and many of his top aides on January 6. Hutchinson’s testimony was undoubtedly damaging to Trump, painting him as furious and out of control on the day of the riot. However, some of her more explosive and widely circulated allegations — for instance, that Trump attempted to grab the wheel of his limo and “lunged” at a Secret Service officer when informed he couldn’t go to the Capitol — were immediately contradicted in the press by the Secret Service agents themselves, who had also been interviewed by the committee. Who is telling the truth? We have no idea — the testimony of the agents has not been made public, and no Republicans were present to cross-examine Hutchinson. All we have is committee member Adam Kinzinger calling one of the Secret Service agents a liar on Twitter.

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Harm reduction has captured the US

By Jacob Siegel

The second big problem, related to the first, is that the period between the election on November 2, 2020 and the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, is impossible to understand in isolation from the events of the previous four years. There are the familiar scandals related to Trump, most notably Russiagate, in which bogus opposition research from the Clinton campaign (much of it sourced from a liberal think tank employee in Washington, D.C.) became the basis for FBI spying, the years-long Mueller probe, and a media-hyped conspiracy theory about Trump-Russia “collusion”. Then there were the racial-justice protests and riots of the summer of 2020, tacitly tolerated and sometimes explicitly endorsed by Democrats, which caused some $1 billion in property damage, at least 25 deaths, and catalysed a nationwide spike in homicides. None of these justify what happened on January 6th, but it is obtuse to ignore the climate of hyper-polarisation and civil unrest in which January 6th occurred — voters likely won’t.

There is also the simple matter of hypocrisy surrounding the 2020 election. The committee has focused relentlessly on Trump’s baseless accusations of voter fraud in an attempt to prove the president was attempting to steal an election he knew he had lost — a theory that recently received some circumstantial support from leaked audio of Steve Bannon. But it has also sought to elide the difference between Trump’s harebrained schemes and other Republican criticisms, which are all folded in under the category of the “Big Lie” and “election denial”.

This is, for the most part, cheap posturing. Relative to other advanced democracies, the United States has fairly chaotic and decentralised elections — a 2019 report from Harvard’s Election Integrity Project ranked US elections alongside those in Mexico and Panama. Candidates of both parties frequently challenge the results of close elections in court and deny the legitimacy of elections when they lose, even if they ultimately concede. Hillary Clinton, for one, famously called Trump an “illegitimate president” and claimed that he had “stolen” the 2016 election from her. In August 2020, she urged that in the event of a close election, “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances.”

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Why young men become shooters

By Park MacDougald

The 2020 election was even more chaotic than usual. Elections that spring had been plagued by irregularities, as well as technical and administrative failures. In February, prior to the pandemic, the Iowa Democratic caucuses suffered a counting meltdown that denied Bernie Sanders a clear-cut victory. A May city council election in Paterson, New Jersey had to be invalidated after it was discovered to be “rife with mail-in vote procedural violations.” In June primary elections, Georgia’s new voting system failed disastrously due to a combination of technical problems and administrative incompetence, prompting Democrats, including Clinton, to allege a state Republican plot to suppress the Democratic vote. Many states were operating under politically contentious new voting rules that had been improvised in response to the pandemic and were, in some cases, later deemed illegal.

No dramatic cases of fraud or administrative disaster occurred on November 2, although there were some minor errors sprinkled across the country. There were also things that were not exactly illegal but which gave at least an impression of impropriety — for instance, the coordination of Facebook, Twitter, major media outlets, and members of the defence and intelligence community in censoring embarrassing but true reporting about Hunter Biden; or the use of over $330 million in grant money from Mark Zuckerberg to fund election administration in heavily Democratic-leaning areas of major swing states.

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The twilight of identity politics

By Park MacDougald

None of this is to say that the 2020 election was “stolen” or that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president. However, it is to say that electoral dirty tricks, media echo chambers, partisan mistrust in the “democratic process”, accusations of illegitimacy and fraud, conspiracy theories, and legal challenges to election results are all the normal stuff of American politics, indulged by members of both parties as the needs of the moment suit. They are all the more likely in an atmosphere as fractious and chaotic as the United States in the fall of 2020, when neither side would trust the other an inch.

What made Trump’s behaviour in the aftermath of the election so remarkable was not that he challenged the legitimacy of the results or sought to pursue his options in court — it was that after exhausting all of his conventional options, he sidelined his competent advisors, elevated cranks, and pursued a doomed but nonetheless destructive bid to hold on to power. If he’s not back in 2024, the January 6 hearings will have had little to do with it.

Sound familiar? Welcome to Russia in 1996, just after the re-election of President Boris Yeltsin, the onetime Soviet apparatchik turned champion of democracy, who then presided over the rapid immiseration of his nation on an epic scale.

It’s a little-understood period, not least because so many Western experts and institutions (many of them still going strong today) were complicit in the human tragedy that came about as a result of Yeltsin’s economic “shock therapy”. An expert class incurious about its own failures is a familiar enough phenomenon, of course, but there are other instructive parallels between Russia in 1996 and the US in 2021. And these parallels could, perhaps, give us a glance into what will become of the apparent corporate-media-political monolith that has ascended to power behind Biden.

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By Justin Webb

There are important differences of course. When somebody in Russia starts panicking about dictatorship, they know a lot more about what it means than your typical American pundit angling for a book deal. And in 1996, many Russian liberals were worried that dictatorship was on the horizon. Yeltsin’s first term had been a failure, with millions thrown into poverty and a precipitous decline in life expectancy. As a result his opponent — one Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Communist Party — looked likely to win the election, which would have been bad news for business, as well as the values and ideals of Russia’s pro-Western liberals.

And so practically the entirety of Russia’s business, media and liberal elite rallied around Yeltsin to support his re-election. Remarkably, this was despite the fact that Yeltsin himself had, only a few years earlier, ordered an attack on Russia’s parliament when it kept blocking his executive orders. Unlike Trump’s fiasco, this incident ended not with a mob in fancy dress storming the building but rather 147 people losing their lives after an assault by tanks and helicopters.

So Yeltsin was pretty unconvincing as a champion of democracy (even if Clinton’s secretary of state praised him for his “superb handling” of the parliament). But the prospect of Zyuganov was regarded as still worse, providing Russia’s “liberal” forces with a “moral clarity”: a conviction that they had to bend and break all rules and norms to prevent him from being elected. Like America’s establishment in 2021, Russia’s elites in 1996 had no time for journalistic objectivity or “both sidesism”. The future of the nation itself was at stake.

There was no social media back then, but television had enormous influence, and the three main channels railed against Zyuganov and his communists. Of those three, one was owned 100% by the state, while the other two were controlled by oligarchs. Boris Berezovsky — later to enjoy some notoriety as a foe of Putin living in exile in England — ran ORT, while a stage director-turned-banker by the name of Vladimir Gusinsky ran NTV. Certainly Zyuganov posed a direct threat to their business interests — but they may also have entertained the notion that they were fighting for liberal democracy, and that this was far bigger than their rivalry.

As a result, Zyuganov had it considerably worse than Trump. Bar the likes of Pravda, he had very few allies in the media. ORT and NTV filled the airwaves with hagiographies of Yeltsin and documentaries on the horrors of communism. The editor of the news magazine Itogi declared, “This is not a game with equal stakes,” adding that he was “willing to be unfair” and “willing to stir up a wild anti-Communist psychosis among the people”. The general director of NTV openly took a job on Yeltsin’s campaign team.

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By Daniel Kalder

Perhaps no American journalist was quite so honest as to take a job directly on Biden’s campaign team, but The Washington Post did retroactively edit an article that cast Kamala Harris in an unflattering light, and the LA Times has launched an ongoing series of fawning coverage of the Vice President. So it might be slightly less irritating if significant parts of the American media did openly declare what they’re up to, instead of trying to disguise it as “journalism”.

But perhaps the most interesting parallel is that Zyuganov was not only denied any kind of favourable media coverage; he was denied access even to the communications infrastructure. When the communists tried to buy advertising on state TV, their money was turned down. At least Twitter and Facebook waited until Trump was on the way out before they switched him off. But they did still eject the actual President of the US from access to social media, whereas the bosses of Russian TV were merely excluding an opposition candidate from the airwaves. The reasoning was similar: both men were too dangerous to be granted access to a channel by which they could communicate directly with their supporters.

Yeltsin, of course, won, and the oligarchs and media barons who had supported him wound up closer to the government, wealthier and more powerful than before, while preserving — for the time being — their own status quo. And if life were a movie, that would have been a great time to roll credits, with the commies defeated and all the rich people getting to keep their money and influence.

But life carried on, and it’s the next act that’s perhaps the most instructive for us. The underlying problems that had made Zyuganov popular in the first place did not go away. Russia’s economic woes deepened. The overt collusion between the media, the oligarchs and Yeltsin — combined with disappointment in an aging President who was increasingly decrepit and erratic — led to further degradation of trust in the media and Russia’s governing institutions; democracy itself was rechristened dermokratiya — “shitocracy”.

And then, four years later, an ex-KGB officer by the name of Vladimir Putin came to power. A more effective authoritarian than Zyuganov, he swiftly chased Berezovsky out of the country and stripped Gusinsky of his TV station. Having been part of the Yeltsin regime himself, he understood what many members of America’s current ruling class appear not to — that any weapon you deploy against a foe can also be turned against you.

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Is Putin loosening his grip on Russia's regions?

By Mary Dejevsky

And so we turn from Russia to the US in 2021. Again, if life were a movie, then the recent inauguration would have been a great moment to roll credits — perhaps as Lady Gaga was singing the national anthem, while a tear trickled down Stephen Colbert’s cheek. But life has already moved on.

A recent poll reveals that trust in traditional media has dropped below 50% for the first time ever, while trust in social media sits at a mighty 27%. Many Americans, like the Russians before them, are adjusting to the default assumption that at best they are not receiving the full picture. At least Russian journalists lacked the comical levels of self-regard of their US counterparts.

Nor are other institutions doing that well on the trust front, even — or perhaps especially — as they all espouse the same package of received ideas. And once the relief that Trump has gone has passed, what will become of Biden? Unlike Yeltsin, he may not disappear for days on alcoholic benders, but it is fair to say that he has not, for much of his very long career, inspired a lot of confidence. As Obama himself is reported to have said: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

Now I don’t think that Biden will flame out to the extent that Yeltsin did, with the result that a sinister Putin-type rough beast shall slouch forward, to be born in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But I do think that this apparent corporate-media-institutional monolith is unlikely to endure — despite the persistent belief among some American political fantasists that each victory is their chance to exercise eternal hegemony over their enemies.

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How hysterical punditry failed America

By Michael Tracey

For instance, when the billionaires behind Twitter and Facebook ejected Trump from Twitter — and, under pressure from the Democrats, began censoring all kinds of opinions of which they disapproved — they crossed a Rubicon. Once the Republicans have stopped rolling around in their own mess, they will realise that large monopolies controlled by people who are closely allied with your opposition and who wield the power to switch you off at will are not a thing to be tolerated. Alexei Navlany agrees, as do Angela Merkel and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, and we can assume that many other leaders around the world sat up and took notice, too. Some kind of rebalancing will happen, and that is not a bad thing.

While we should never underestimate the resilience of Zombie Reaganism, it, too, must eventually lose its grip on the brains of the Republicans, whose leadership is likewise very old, if not quite so old as that of the Democrats. They will realise that the market does not always correct itself, and that something will have to be done. The American context will provide its own tools for change. A new interpretation of the First Amendment, perhaps. Or a redefinition of the public square. Or the application of antitrust law to certain platforms. Or a re-examination of CDA 230 — the legislation that allows tech oligarchs to have their cake and eat it by granting them immunity from liability for what users post on their platforms, while also reserving for them the right to censor or withdraw services from users if they dislike what they post on their platforms.

If that sounds like wishful thinking, then remember that far more radical political evolutions have happened. After all, today’s Democrats may be closely allied with woke tech oligarchs, but they used to be rather friendly with the KKK, an organisation with a history of violence far worse than any of those currently being purged from social media platforms.

Are you a Copium addict? Do you spend your days with Lola at the Cope-acobana?

Cope is one of the supreme memes of 2020. It’s the idea that certain narratives are coping mechanisms that delay a painful collision with the truth. In short, it’s an amazing way to scythe through your opponent’s discourse, to write it off as mere conspiracy. Russiagate? Dems cope. Boris being crap because he’s in Carrie’s pocket? Tory copium so pure it comes from Afghanistan.

Cope is the thinking troll’s gaslighting, and equally on its way to being memed into sheer meaninglessness. Like gaslighting, cope is in the eye of the beholder. Your cope is my rock solid evidence. Yet another meme speaking to the cracks in our basic conceptions of reality.

In 2020, being under the influence of Cope is an accusation that must constantly be swatted away by the Trump loyalists of the online Right. There, in forums, on marathon YouTube chat sessions, a very different US election has been playing out. The various State Senate hearings, only muttered-of vaguely, if at all, on terrestrial TV, are taking centre-stage. They are raked over for the merest details, like latter-day OJ Simpson trials.

It’s a universe with its own stars: men like Colonel Phil Waldron, a former military intelligence officer, who gave detailed evidence at the Arizona hearings on how, statistically, the state’s ballot tallies are wildly improbable. Then there’s the Trump litigator Jackie Pick in Georgia, who showed the hearings video evidence of two women seemingly stuffing ballots in Fulton County. Or the US Postal Service truck driver, Jesse Morgan, from New York, who has testified that he broke the law by transporting ballots across state lines, into Pennsylvania.

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QAnon is indestructible

By Gavin Haynes

The fraud was vast, but the scale of the swing to Trump took Democrat fraudsters by surprise, the narrative goes. In fact, it was such a landslide that the hacked Dominion voting machines algorithm, designed to output perhaps 13% more Biden votes than existed, couldn’t get past it. And that was why the counting stopped, so suddenly, in so many places, in the middle of the night of November 3. The classic illustration of this point being the famous ‘burst pipe’ in Fulton County: once given as the reason counting had to end suddenly, in the weeks since, it has been downgraded to “a urinal overflowing” — a twist of fate that did not impact the count.

This is a world where General Mike Flynn, Trump’s recently-pardoned former National Security Adviser, can state that he is “ten out of ten confident” that there will be a reversal in the electoral college. If any of this turns up good in court, then it’s Watergate-squared. Yet somehow, that great switcheroo always seems one tantalising court case away.

Scott Adams, Dilbert cartoonist and now hardened Trump-stumper, once famously conceived of blue and red America as watching “the same movie through different glasses”. These days, they’re in separate cinemas. These days, Adams gives hour-long vlogs, in which he discourses on Trump’s remaining paths to victory. Gently floating the thought experiment that there has never been a greater means (postal voting), nor a greater motive (defeating 21st century literal-Hitler) to commit massive electoral fraud.

Adams was one of the first people to point to Trump’s talents as a political mesmerist — in a blog he wrote in 2015 that predicted he’d win the Republican nomination “by a landslide”. A month back, in a vlog, he made another prediction: “this year America will have effectively two presidents”. Quite the claim. Yet even as the “safe harbour” date arrives — technically the moment at which the election results are sealed — it doesn’t feel as though his two presidents notion is dead in the water.

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By Michael Tracey

To anyone watching this scenario play out, there’s a grim fascination in seeing history’s biggest irresistible force heading towards its largest immovable object. If a massive systemic plot were to be revealed, the consequences would be so hideous it might prove better never to have known. Yet here we are, on the day the result will be certified, and it feels not as though there is a gradual deflation of expectations underway so much as a ramping-up, as the true believers await an ever-bigger deus ex machina.

Take the YouTuber Academic Agent’s Unpopular Opinions livestream. There, on Tuesday night, you could have heard the semi-popular opinion that “Trump strikes me as a wait till you see the whites of their eyes guy”. The idea being that the new court case just then breaking — Texas suing various Democrat-won states on the grounds that their new post-Covid electoral laws failed to make all states’ votes count equally — is the masterplan finally clicking into action, rather than one more salvo in an ongoing rear-guard action.

Of course, one problem with identifying cope is that the people who make the accusation against you so often do so in bad faith. Take, for instance, the conventional media, who have spent every waking hour desperately, incuriously telling us that this stuff is all, always and everywhere, false.

There may be some merit in some of Giuliani’s many cases, or they may all be meretricious. But courts are precisely the places where we test confusing claims. We’ve only just breached the 37 days it took Al Gore to concede to George W. Bush, yet the cases and hearings seem invisible. Sky, to take but one example, have so far seemed most enthused about the trajectory of Rudi Giuliani’s hair dye.

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Don't dismiss the Trump brigade

By Will Lloyd

Sometimes, you do wonder who’s coping who. A recent piece by David S. Cohen for Rolling Stone, on the Texas lawsuit, spends half its length protesting rather too much about why this one will definitely, 100%, totally-for-sure, fail. Overall, the post-election period has seen a huge acceleration of what you might call The Nigel Lawson Principle.

In 2017, Nigel Lawson was invited on the Today Programme to debate climate change against a scientist. There was an outcry. Lawson, it was argued, had no credentials in this area, yet his view was being treated as though it had equal value. The Beeb ultimately agreed (though Lawson was never speaking “as a scientist”, merely as an eminent person who had done his own reading).

From then on, a kind of precautionary principle took hold. The shepherding hand of the news media would decide not merely what was covered, but which people were “expert”, meaning inside or outside of the agreed epistemological tree of power. The Lawson Principle has meant that, increasingly, without the human equivalent of academic footnotes, you are automatically deprecated.

Silicon Valley has since embraced this principle, hard. Google “Fulton County Voter” and wait for auto-suggest. Out of a dozen answers, the one term it won’t give you is the one that is perhaps the most googled: “voter fraud”. It is happy, however, to point you to “voter suppression” — a speculative story about Republicans potentially under-registering black voters. To even find the source text — the full half-hour Fulton hearing video — on YouTube takes a certain skill, and the tenacity to wade through pages of edited ABC and CNN “debunkings”.

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What if Trump loses the election?

By Justin Webb

It doesn’t help either that the fact-checking industry is increasingly aligned to only one side, as anyone who has encountered the once-great Snopes in modern times will know. Snopes debunked a claim that Biden had lied by publicly accusing the truck driver who killed his wife and child in an auto accident of being drunk. The “definitive fact-checking site” claimed Biden’s unsusbtantiated and very public attack was actually “a mixture” because: “No definitive evidence exists to prove or rule out whether the other driver had been drinking”. Biden had “probably heard it from others in the community”.

Equally, according to the fact-checkers at CNN, the fact that Trump won 18 of the 19 bellwether counties doesn’t matter, because that could be mere statistical fluke. Fair enough. But it also sounds like precisely the kind of eyebrow-raising statistical fluke that would demand a stewards enquiry from a Nate Silver type under other circumstances.

When merely chasing a straight answer becomes a diverting, gamified internet pastime in itself, you should expect the people who bother to seek out the details to become both enchanted with the process, and convinced that something is being hidden from them. As if to illustrate this more fully, last week, YouTube announced that it would begin deleting videos that referred to anyone other than Joe Biden as President-elect after the safe harbour date. A perfect way to ensure the two screens never meet again.

But all movies end. As the window for a reversal closes, what will happen to all those who’ve stuck with the alternative narrative?

In Copeland, the supreme fantasy is that Justice Kavanagh — so wildly shellacked by the Democratic Party in his confirmation hearings — will deliver the majority verdict on the Supreme Court decision, to pronounce Trump the winner.

But if that — somehow — proves impossible, the annoying truth is that the election becomes a mere sub-plot in an ongoing arc. The average cope user can still point to a few headline facts which are indisputably true, yet also wave in the general direction of conspiracy. A makeweight like Biden now has 81 million votes. 12 million more than Obama in his epoch-making pomp. Does that feel logical?

After all, we’ve had four years of Trump Derangement Syndrome, of Russiagate, of porous impeachments, and Carole Cadwalladr retractions. Now, an equal but opposite meltdown is brewing. The only difference is that you will have to go much further out of your way before you encounter it.

I heard similar confidence that Trump will confound the pollsters, just like last time, from every one of his supporters I met in West Virginia. This is a place that fell heavily for his promises to revive American greatness, handing him a higher victory margin than any other state — and his fans remain loyal here at least. Like many others, McCallister used to be a Democrat — she lives in a state that was strongly blue until the turn of this century. But it has the lowest median household income in the country and, like other struggling parts, has been hit hard by changing global dynamics and population decline. Trump’s populist message found fertile terrain in the Mountain State, filled with dense woods, seams of coal and close-knit communities.

“I voted for Donald Trump,” stated Mitch Morgan emphatically, adding that abortion and the economy were his two key issues. “As a Christian and a conservative there was no real choice involved in my decision. I am not happy about him as a person but I like him very much as a politician. He’s brash but it seems to be working.”

The retired railroad worker also used to be a Democrat but after backing Barack Obama in 2008 sought “forgiveness” for his vote. Like many others with whom I spoke, he believes the party of FDR and Bill Clinton has moved sharply Left in recent years. “They used to be for the miners and workers. They did not used to be so radical. They’re a different party today.”

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Where the American Dream goes to die

By Ian Birrell

It was my third visit to this stunning corner of the country. Last time was before the mid-terms two years ago to see if the Democrats had any hope of winning back the white, working-class families that formed the bedrock of a reality television star’s unlikely triumph. There was national interest in an army veteran standing in this area who claimed to have found a way to woo them back by offering “populism with an Appalachian twang”. He lost by 12 points. My return on the eve of this seismic presidential election was to gauge the mood in the reddest slice of this now deeply-red state, a district where almost three in four voters backed Trump, as their Republican hero’s stated mission to drain the swamp seems set to be ended by a former Vice-President and veteran Washington insider.

The quaint town of Lewisburg, proudly displaying a wooden building from “circa 1787” and largely populated by polite Republicans, felt a world away from my previous stop of Portland, Oregon, a famously liberal city on the other side of the country that is struggling to contain near-daily Antifa protests. Yet in their very different ways, both places reflect the divisions that bedevil this country. Although no one mentioned the pandemic unless I raised the issue, many people raised the fissures running through the heart of these disunited states. And the most depressing lesson, for all the flags and banners bearing his name in homes and fields as I drove through West Virginia, was to see again how sharply these have intensified over four years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

To return to Sharon McCallister, raised in the west of the state. She said this was an area of “die-hard” Democrats due to “the gimme”. When I asked her to explain, she replied that “most of them are on welfare and that goes back in their families four or five generations.” Then she told me a story about a close childhood friend. “We grew up together, we went to church together, we even sang in a trio together.” But this friendship ended because of McCallister’s support for the 45th president. “Trump has separated us — she did not like what I stood for now but this is a free country. I feel sad — it’s been a couple of years.”

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By Justin Webb

What tragic commentary on this country that two pensioners could see a lifelong friendship extinguished over a sudden political divergence. But even this sorry story paled after I saw Brittney Taylor walking jauntily down the street and stopped to ask about the election. “Oh, I’m Trump,” she replied with a smile, instantly shattering my expectations of a young, black woman, especially one who comes from California. Then this 34-year-old single mother told me an extraordinary story of how she was working on the Hillary Clinton campaign in Alabama four years ago when she decided to switch sides — a decision that sparked such a huge schism with her parents, her 12 younger siblings and her friends that she upped sticks from Laguna Beach and moved 2,500 miles away.

Bear in mind that Biden has an astonishing 85-point lead among black women voters, just 6% of them saying they might vote for Trump, according to the latest Pew data. But the big issue for Taylor — who describes herself as “pro-life, pro-country and pro-flag” — was seeing close up the Clinton campaign’s approach to abortion. After coming out for Trump, she felt she had no option but to move home since “it was like something out of The Lord of the Flies simply because I changed my political affiliation, with hazing from my family, my friends and my community.” She no longer talks to any of her family. “We started social distancing long before it became fashionable,” she joked. “They think Trump is the devil.”

It cannot bode well for the world’s leading democracy when its president divides friends and families in this way. Taylor admits that “I am not the typical face of a Trump supporter” but likes his brash style and believes his presidency has been a success:

“I really like what he’s been doing so far in making America safe, helping the country grow more prosperous. I have great confidence in his plans for the future. I think he is doing an awesome job so I want to see him continue to drain the swamp. He’s done so much so far.”

She added that while she missed her family, she hoped they would start speaking again after Trump left the White House. “Next week then,” I said. “No, in four years” time,” she fired straight back.

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America's establishment still sneers at the Right

By Gavin Haynes

Talking to other Republican supporters, the same themes familiar to viewers of Fox kept cropping up: teachers indoctrinate children to hate Trump, George Soros subverts the US with his billions, the Democrats have swung so far Left they are going to turn their nation socialist and Kamala Harris is even more dangerous than Biden. “I”m scared,” said Sharon Simmons, 60, who described herself as “Trump trailer trash” since she lives in an isolated mobile home in the mountains. “I can see us turning into Venezuela. I know capitalism has its faults but you’ve got to be free. We’re one of the last free countries in the world. But if Biden wins, this will no longer be America. There will be two ‘S’s in the USA.”

Such stuff sounds strange to anyone from Europe, where mixed economies and universal health coverage is the norm. But both sides see this vote in apocalyptic terms, fearing their democracy will descend into either socialism or totalitarianism depending on their political perspective.

There were, of course, Democratic voters in this red redoubt. Corey Holley, 20, was casting his first vote for a president. “I went for Biden. I’d have liked a different candidate but he’s better than Trump.” His mother Jennifer, 47, a kindergarten teacher, was slightly more enthusiastic. “He’s a solid person, a moral person, who seems to know how a president should behave. It is just a game to Trump and he has diminished the way people around the world see our country.” She also denied charges of classroom propaganda. “I’m too busy teaching them about ABC,” she said.

Biden’s balancing act — in trying to win back voters in these areas while keeping the Left on side with its forceful climate change demands — was evident talking to these folk. Some analysts trace West Virginia’s slide away from the Democrats to Al Gore’s environmental zeal, and Biden conceded he would “transition from the oil industry” in the final presidential debate. Yet this state still has 14,000 people employed in the coal sector and perhaps four times that number reliant on it — among them Timothy Gwinn, 58, who drives trains more than two miles long carrying 31,000 tons of coal into neighbouring Virginia. He endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 but could not even remember the name of the minor party candidate be had just backed as he left the courtroom. “I could not vote for Trump or Biden. I don’t like Trump, and Biden is against fossil fuels.”

Gwinn was resentful at his family’s rising medical costs to fund Obamacare but his big gripe was over the future of his industry, an issue he believes will hurt Biden in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wyoming. He explained that he took home around $100,000 a year from his job, but the alternatives on offer for workers in this region, such as flipping burgers or stacking shelves in a warehouse, would scarcely earn a quarter of his wage. “I”m almost ready to quit but I’m looking out for my fellow workers and I worry about younger generations. If you don’t have the railroad, you don’t have a decent wage and way of life.”

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Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

Here lies the dilemma for Western politicians: how to protect well-paid jobs, pacify voters and confront climate change while adapting economies to a world in which rival countries can undercut costs, businesses must compete globally and capitalism often seems driven by the wrong values. These issues — and the consequent sense of disgruntlement in rust-belt areas exploited skilfully by Trump four years ago — can crop up in the most unexpected corners of the economy, as I heard when I dropped in to see the owner of Frank’s Guns.

“You were surprised to find the owner of a gun shop was a liberal,” said Frank Godby, 81, reminding me that I had expected to find a fire-breathing redneck on my previous visit to his store. Instead he viewed Trump as “an immoral, lying asshole” — and his stance has not softened over the past two years. “I get more disgusted every day with his lies. Then there were his tax returns showing he paid $750 in income tax, which is quite a lot less than I pay.” This son of a coal miner told me he was one of 20 children and that his siblings all shared his viewpoint. “Some of their wives were Republican-leaning but they have been cured after seeing all his lies and his bragging.”

This time Godby, a former private investigator, surprised me by explaining how tough the US gun trade had become in recent years despite sales booming nationally at almost double the pace of last year amid the heightened tensions. “I can sell guns but the big chains get all of them and all the ammo first so small dealers like me can’t get any new stock, new ammunition and new guns.” He said one popular brand of rifle was discounted so cheaply to the likes of Walmart that his giant rival could sell them cheaper than he could buy them, resulting in them undercutting him by $100 on each weapon. “My supplier went bankrupt about a year ago and I’ve not been able to get any ammo for five months. The big guys are crushing us. The system only works if you are a big company.”

He added that most families in this region have multiple guns in their homes and would not hesitate to use them to defend their properties if there was post-election violence. “These people are hunters who can shoot at long range,” he said.

“A lot of people are concerned that Trump will be stupid if he is defeated and stay in office. He’s an agitator and that might lead to violence. The old boys here have guns to protect their properties. No-one cares if people march but they do care if there is burning and looting.”

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Adventures in Trumpland

By Ian Birrell

It is hard to believe that Biden will be able to solve such challenging issues of capitalism or heal societal wounds that provoke serious talk of civil war when they have been festering below the surface of society for decades — especially in such a hideously partisan political climate and money-drenched system. Even the wearing of a mask amid the pandemic has become politicised. Perhaps the best we can hope is that he dampens a few fires if elected. One Trump loyalist tried to argue valiantly that the cause of so much division was hatred felt against a man who stole the establishment’s right to rule, but this felt false given how this egocentric president has revelled in ferocious attacks on his enemies, flirted with far-Right extremism and ruthlessly pandered to his own base.

Yet at least diehard Republicans in this heart of Trumpland can see the desperate need to heal divisions. That same loyalist was passionate about the need to build bridges. Or take Barry Bruce, a local lawyer making his electoral debut at the age of 73 standing for the state legislature. He began by telling me how he is devoutly pro-life, despises Biden and believes his billionaire president has done a selfless job running the country despite some doubts over his boastfulness. Yet the more he talked, the more this man moved away from the template as he revealed his admiration for JFK, his dismay over some of his own party chiefs enriching themselves in office and, above all, his fears for the future.

“The soul of America is at risk,” he concluded. “It’s such a shame this country has become so divided. We don’t have any real dialogue. If we don’t solve these issues, then we are going to be like all those other countries that lost their greatness.”

The first is Sky’s four-part documentary, Hillary, on her life and 2016 run for the presidency. It is a sad affair, with villainous Hillary sitting in a chair, a victim of everyone, especially herself. She is over-dyed and over-tidied, like a woman trying not to make Donald Trump throw up, though she doesn’t know why. She has been shouted at so long she is shriven.

Does camera-ready mean sex-ready? The way American women dress for television cameras is heavy with self-disgust and shame. Why isn’t she wild-haired and in rags, like the brittle intellectual she is? Here I impose my own narrative on how Hillary should look but this story is full of women who internalise their own misogyny and talk about not trusting Hillary Clinton because they don’t trust themselves.

“I’ll try not to move so much,” is her first apologetic line to camera. She is angry too – that an imbecile beat her in a competitive exam without answering any of the questions; without actually entering the examination hall. She is shouting at the interviewer, but I doubt she is aware of it: “People feel, ‘that you are not authentic’. What is this about? When people say I’m not authentic. I’m sorry if I’m not brilliantly charismatic on TV,” – she isn’t sorry, and why should she be? — “But I’m the same person I’ve always been.” She isn’t. How could she be? What woman is the same at 72 as at 22? Why must a woman apologise for seeking power?

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How the Trumps silence their women

By Tanya Gold

She knows the answer. The young Hillary is doughty; and needs must. Girls, she says, “didn’t want to get better grades than their boyfriends”. She ran for the presidency of the student council, lost to a man, and did all the work anyway, because he asked her, and “because I was interested”. I wondered if her marriage was no different.

She describes the entrance exam for Yale law school. She sat down and, “These guys started harassing us. ‘What are you doing here? You don’t belong here. You can’t go to law school’. Or my favourite: ‘If you get into law school and take my place and I get sent to Vietnam and die it’s your fault’.” He thinks she is a witch: a witch with a pen. If she succeeds, he will die.

“In those days,” she says, “you got no points for being emotional. You get no points for trying to fight back or defend yourself. When you train yourself like that and then you fast forward into an age where everybody wants to see what your emotions are and how you respond….” She trails off into — “it’s really a different environment”.

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Rural Cornwall is right to be anxious

By Tanya Gold

She was the first female lawyer at her firm: “When I was going to court as a young lawyer it was a spectacle. These good old boys would say, ‘oh gosh’. It was like the talking dog. ‘She can not only stand on her hind legs she can clap her front paws’.”

A judge said to her: “Miss Rodham you just look so pretty, stand up there and show us how pretty you look today, just turn around.” The judge sounds like Donald Trump; quite a lot of people in this story sound like Donald Trump, because he is on television, which seems to be the American dictionary. But the child who had screamed at her Republican father, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry a Democrat!” had already gone.

Someone shouted, “Hillary, iron my shirt!” to her at a rally; did he speak for All Men?  “If there is anyone left in the auditorium who wants to learn how to iron his own shirt, I’ll talk about that,” she said. He did know how to iron his own shirt. He just didn’t want to and, as a man, he felt a future Secretary of State should do it for him, if she is female. Men are allowed this kind of entitlement is the moral of the story: women are not. We must be likeable, like kittens. We must save men by ruining ourselves.

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The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

She is still intensely female: she blames herself. “I was too quick to be defensive,” she says, “I didn’t play the game well enough”. I would say the game was unplayable; and that she cannot bear that she lost makes me love her.

The second piece of art is a long dream sequence, or a novel: The West Wing with less shouting, and fewer men. It is Rodham: What if Hillary Hadn’t Married Bill? by Curtis Sittenfeld. It is Hillary’s imagined memoir and the reading of it is an urge for possession. Pageant queens are divided into constituent body parts. Female politicians are divided into constituent character defects and foul passions.

Here, without flourish, in the clear, unworldly style of a second-wave feminist don — the archetype Hillary most resembles, a woman whose dark secret is a passion for paperwork — Sittenfeld imagines a Hillary Rodham who never became Hillary Clinton.

“I was,” her Hillary writes, “a hardworking and not beautiful middle-class Midwestern girl with a mean father. I had never believed the world existed for my enjoyment”. This Hillary is endearing: an innocent. Her idea of flirting is to give a man a Reinhold Niebuhr biography.

Bill Clinton, a charismatic with a Don Juan complex, is vain enough to seek a clever mate; he courts her. But in fiction, he is self-aware. He knows he will ruin any woman: the Don Juan is not a lover but a thief. He tells Hillary, “the thing that’s wrong with me is incurable”. I have never heard selfishness framed this like before: as a disability. Is that how he won two elections?

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Is Prince Harry the new Edward VIII?

By Tanya Gold

Fictional Hillary leaves Fictional Bill, who is corrupted by the absence of her love. They become political rivals, and Hillary’s only moral error, quickly learned from, is a failure to embrace intersectionality as quickly as she should.

Rodham is amazingly plausible until the end. It is a novel about a woman who assumes a mask because she knows she will not survive without it; and then she is hated for the mask she is forced to wear. This dynamic is familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the witch trials: if you drown, you are innocent. If you do not drown, you are guilty and can, for variety, be burnt.  She knows it is a lie for they will hate her anyway. It is also a novel about media stupidity – I cringe at the journalists seeking drama before truth – and the electorate’s decadent confusion: does it seek a competent administrator or a narrative to appal them?

Fictional Hillary is not saddled with Bill’s legacy, and she does not benefit from it: “I was not responsible for his behaviour, not even by extension. This absolution was my reward for losing him.” So, the essential conundrum of the real Hillary Rodham Clinton — did she betray feminism with her marriage to become Trump’s “crooked” witch? — is removed. I am glad, because when you bluntly ask the question, you realise how silly it is. This is a better question: Is Hillary qualified to be president, no matter who she is married to? A better question still is: can you define someone by their marriage and call yourself a feminist?

Hillary Rodham Clinton — the synthesis, both married and talented — is a paradigm, which is why it is essential to look beyond her to all women, which is, you will realise if you read about her work, all she ever wanted. What a shame it is that it couldn’t be done; but no surprise.

What, in other words, if the coronavirus is the icing on the voter suppression cake?

We tend to think of presidential elections as battles fought over character and policy, or, in the Trump era, bombast and insults and drama. It’s a performance and the campaign, however horribly unserious it might be, matters. But 2020 might not be about any of this. It might hinge, to an extent that few fully grasp, on a turnout reduced — suppressed — to a level unseen in recent decades.

The commentator Jonathan Chait is among those Left-wing Americans who have noticed and are sounding the alarm:

“It’s not clear,” he says, “If Democrats have fully grasped the gravity of what Trump and his party are attempting to do. The coronavirus poses a threat to elections in general, but a special threat to urban voters, who tend to face more crowded polling stations …… Republicans have calculated that the public-health threat of the virus will suppress the urban vote for them. All they have to do is block any changes to the election system [intended to offset the effects of the virus on voting habits] and allow nature to run its course.”

Voter suppression down the ages has pretty much been a deniable misdemeanour — “we just want to secure the integrity of the ballot for everyone”. Even in the bad old days down the racist south there was some nonsense mouthed about literacy being necessary in order for voters to understand the ballot.  It was about the sacred ballot – they pretended – not about the suppression. But this president has broken with such delicate dissimulation.

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America's elite is plotting revenge

By Justin Webb

The strategy is blunter in the age of the Donald. The President even outlined it live on Fox News, following the Democrats’ series of suggestions to Congress about postal voting during this time of plague: “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Whoops.

The game has been given away. He wants, clearly and openly, to stop groups who vote Democratic from voting.

Mr Trump isn’t entirely opposed to postal voting: he likes it for the military and for older Americans. Two groups who – surprise surprise — back him. But for everyone else he insists that people should show up at the polls. Or not.

Even before the Coronavirus hit, the stage was set in many states for November 3^rd — election day — to be a time to washing the car, tend the garden, gaze at the sky; anything other than voting. That’s because across all those states controlled by Republican Governors and legislatures the suppression efforts have come thick and fast in recent years.

Not all the initiatives to ‘reform’ voting law are deemed many Americans to be particularly offensive. To take a sample: in Oklahoma they are removing people who haven’t voted for eight years from the registers, which feels to many in that state like reasonable tidying. In Florida, they’re stopping convicted felons from voting until they’ve paid money they owe to victims of crime, which, if you are a victim of crime in Florida, probably seems fair enough. In other states you need proper ID, provided by a government agency.

But these measures mount up: in Mississippi the Democrats think fully 8% of the adult population is currently banned from the polls for one reason or other. Most of them will be Democratic party supporters: poorer people who go to jail more; black people living hand to mouth lives, without proper ID linked to a firm address; youngsters caught out by some special rule about registration.

And even if some of the rules are defensible, plenty struggle to pass any kind of honest electoral smell-test. Among the stinkiest is an effort going on at the moment in Texas to stop ‘straight ticket’ voting.  In all recent elections in the state, with one pull of the lever, you have been able to  back the Democrats, all of them, or the Republicans, all of them. Remember the ballots are long in many states so it’s convenient that you can, with one pull, elect your party choice of judges, school district bosses, rat catchers.

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America has always been a circus

By Justin Webb

But, oh dear, mightn’t this lead to a lack of proper thought among electors about the people on the ballot? Well that’s what backers of the change claim, all innocent-faced, as they press for everyone to spend much longer actually voting for each individual candidate.

And the inevitable effect of banning the ‘straight ticket’? Queues. Queues which are already often long, would get longer still. Folk with pressing things to do, poorer people with two jobs, parents due to cook supper, would go home. And they’re generally Democrats. Texas is the biggest state the Republicans can count on in a presidential election: it’s their California, with 38 electoral votes and 7% of the electoral college in 2016. The Republican on the ticket has won every presidential contest since 1976.  But as Hispanic voting grows there are reasons to think Texas might be in play in 2020.

Not if the queues are long, though. Suppression works.

The story so far is a familiar one. It fits into a tradition that dates back to Jim Crow. Civil rights were granted grudgingly and slowly and plenty of black Americans think the battle for proper democratic freedom is still to be properly won. It’s reach is wider than the presidential race, too: comfortable America is none too keen on low-life America getting real power.

It is part of American life. As is the grisly fact that turnout in American presidential elections is low in any case – around 45% of voters don’t make it to the polling station. Lots of Americans don’t need to be suppressed: they’re just lazy or, more often, busy and tired and disillusioned. And Coronavirus will keep even more from the polls — won’t it?

Well in recent days, rather gloriously, the story has changed and changed in a way that cheers those who are confident in the ability of the USA to rise to challenges. You don’t have to be a Democratic party supporter (though it probably helps) to notice and salute what has just happened in still-chilly Wisconsin.

The Democrats tried to get their primary election – and the other polls due at the same time – postponed because of the Coronavirus. Republicans refused. The result was some measure of chaos.

As The New York Times put it, people were forced to choose between their health and their civic duty:

“In Milwaukee, just five of 180 planned polling places are open, leading to hours-long lines of masked and socially distanced voters. This comes as Milwaukee voters — an electorate that includes nearly all of the state’s black population — have lagged well behind suburban counterparts in returning absentee ballots.”

The chairman of the Democratic National Committee  Tom Perez called it “voter suppression on steroids, because it was putting people’s lives in danger”.

But here is the thing.  Americans can be meretricious and fickle and frankly barmy. They can be unthinking about bigger pictures. They can be ignorant about the world. But they are also deeply serious. America has a spine of purpose. People who misunderstand the place concentrate on the froth and the nonsense, the eating competitions and the trashy TV.

But in Wisconsin, faced with what many people saw as a deliberate effort to deprive them of their rights, they queued, in masks, to protect those rights. More than a million votes were cast in person or in postal ballots. Not as many as usual but still a decent number. And enough to make a difference. A judge Mr Trump backed on the Wisconsin Supreme Court was thrown out. It felt to many like a victory for democracy in a state that will be a key battleground in 2020.

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Will Covid bankrupt Donald Trump?

By Justin Webb

Of course, it may well be the case that Donald Trump wins in November because in Wisconsin and other crucial swing states more voters are enthusiastic about him than about the challenger Joe Biden. He managed, in 2016, to bring people to the polls who had not voted often before, if at all. He is not just about suppression; he has given voice to people who felt themselves to be voiceless.

And Mr Biden, while he is regarded with affection by many Democrats, makes few spines tingle.  When the Fox News host Tucker Carlson asks of Mr Biden, “could he find his car in a three tiered parking garage?” many Democrats shift uneasily in their seats.

So there is still a chance it could be a conventional election. But if the Coronavirus calamity carries on, 2020 could turn out to be an election about what American democracy really is. Will people do their duty in spite of the dangers, as large numbers did in Wisconsin?

In their revolution, in their civil war, in their travails of the 20th century, plenty of Americans died for the ideal of America.

Will they do so again this November?

“Live from the Court of the Mad King!” is how the former Bush speechwriter David Frum introduces his tweets on presidential press conferences. Others are less kind. The word ‘deranged’ is used frequently by opponents. Some Americans have moved beyond political distaste. They are simply frightened by what they are witnessing: Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair spoke for many after one recent presidential performance:

This is the first time I am genuinely scared. I must have been in denial before. But that presser changed everything.

— Gabriel Sherman (@gabrielsherman) March 24, 2020

Indeed: the President, with what his own chief scientific advisors seem to regard as a reckless desire to keep the economy safe, appears willing to sign the death warrants of a large number of American citizens. This is not normal. This is — politically speaking and putting it very mildly — an opportunity for the opposition party.

Step forward, Joe Biden. Fill the space. Calm the nerves. Unite those Americans who still accept science: unite them around some basic facts. Do it fast. Do it daily. Build something of substance.

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It's time for an NHS National Service

By Aris Roussinos

That is the challenge. As I say, a low bar to be cleared, by a man or woman of any age.

But he cannot do it. And the nation increasingly has two worries: two lacunae where previously a Reagan, an FDR, even an LBJ would have trod. Hell, Jimmy Carter could have given it a shot. Now, though, a President apparently trying to fight a virus with words faces an opponent who is struggling with an autocue.

Yes, seriously. There is a good deal of nonsense talked about Joe Biden by the more extreme elements of the Republican party. For instance: did he forget the name of Barack Obama when he mentioned him — or tried to — in a recent speech? In fact, Mr Biden has a stammer and seemed to be finding a way of getting round a phrase he was going to find difficult. It was an uncomfortable moment but well short of dementia and, for plenty of Americans, well short of the daily performance of the man actually in the Oval Office.

Fair enough.

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America can't cope with coronavirus

By Justin Webb

But nothing can hide the fact that Joe Biden is struggling and struggling badly. First, he went missing. He did not appear at an hour of need. The famous and hugely repeated Sunday morning political shows would all have had him on at the beginning of the week but he appeared nowhere. #whereisjoe started trending on Twitter. So he announced an address to the nation. “Biden seeks to offer a possible presidency preview,” is how ABC News, ever hopeful, trailed the 15 minute address streamed from his home in Delaware.

It was painful to watch. They had assembled a lectern with a BIDEN sign, as if he were on the campaign trail in Boise. It was ill-lit. At one point he said:

“And uh, in addition to that, in addition to that, we have to make sure that we, uh, are in a position, that we are, we. Let me go to the second thing.”

As he was saying those words he was motioning with a hand — flapping it, apparently to suggest that the teleprompter had broken. It was amateurish. It was, given the ease of the task, jaw dropping that the former Vice President and his team could not have managed better.

But even when he’s responding to questions, Mr Biden often seems at sea. A round of patsy interviews with friendly interviewers yielded little in the way of firmer grip. At one stage in a CNN spot, Mr Biden coughed into his hand. The interviewer had to remind him that was no longer done.

As they say in top level sport: get the basics right.

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Could Joe Biden blow our minds?

By Peter Franklin

What on earth are the Democrats going to do?

First: not panic.

The reasoning here: it is genuinely difficult for the Biden team to break through because their man holds no elected office and thus no obvious platform — and he cannot hold mass rallies because of the risk from the coronavirus, hence the basement teleprompter. He is not even the nominee: Bernie Sanders is still in the race, though he cannot win.

Also: yes, there was a poll suggesting that 60% of Americans backed Mr Trump’s handling of the crisis and yes, that does seem quite a thing. But as the veteran pollster Stan Greenberg pointed out, the “fatalistic chatter” in the wake of the poll was well wide off the mark. In fact, in swing states that Biden must win in November, he is well ahead. He is on course to install his wonky teleprompter in the White House.

Second, though: panic.

The crisis has exposed, for many Democrats, the horrible deficiencies of the contest they have just held. Mr Biden is no Obama. His only genuinely enthusiastic supporters tend to be black voters in the south, many of whom like him because he took instructions — gladly and faithfully — from a black man. But is that enough?

He says he will appoint a woman as his vice presidential pick. But why? Possession of a vagina might have seemed vital in the far-off days when identity politics were a thing and coronavirus mentioned at the end of the news. But now? How about possession of a medical qualification? Or a proven ability to run something. There are women who fit the bill of course, but they made no headway during the campaign. This person needs to be ready to run the country: how odd for a centrist to limit the choice to make a woke point that no longer needs making.

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The toxic self-hatred of white Democrats

By Justin Webb

And Mr Biden himself? He has never in his life run anything. Not a town. Not a state. Not even a collapsing and obscurely leveraged casino chain. And here some panicky Democrats are shifting their gaze to the New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has become the anti-Trump star of the coronavirus outbreak with a constant daily outpouring of executive decisions and an equally high-profile string of barbs aimed at the White House.

Some Democrats are swooning. Could Mr Cuomo not be drafted in at the last minute? “America’s Governor” in the same way Rudy Giuliani became (briefly) “America’s mayor.” His father Mario was the great hope who never actually ran for president. Might history come calling on the Cuomos?

I doubt it. The practicalities are too tricky. But the very fact that the question is being asked is a measure of how uncharted these waters really are.

There is another worry for the Democrats’ panicky brigade. What if the President is just a little bit right? Right enough to harvest a political boost just as the autumn comes?

Frankly it does not seem likely. But this is a president entirely comfortable with spending borrowed money. This is a president entirely at ease with unorthodoxy. A healthcare election might force Trump (finally) to come up with the healthcare reforms he promised before 2016.

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Coronavirus has given Orban his excuse

By Alexander Faludy

And before that? Well, this is a president who in some respects is voicing the worries of millions of Americans for whom the crisis seems still distant.

America is a huge nation. But also — because of its size — a small one. Many Americans live isolated lives, particularly Republicans who inhabit the great rural expanses rather than the big cities. A catastrophe in New York is an event on the news, little more. Put crudely: this pandemic is affecting urban Democrats more than rural Republicans.

America is also — sad to say — a nation in which reported facts are distrusted to an unnerving extent, with consequences that are not always predictable. An example from my life: a good friend was coming to London from San Francisco recently and asked if we might meet.

“Coronavirus?,” I emailed. “Are you really coming?”

His response: “we can have a good discussion about Media Induced Hysteria.”

Here is the point: he is a Democrat. A Left-wing Democrat. And one of the cleverest people I know. I assume he saw the coronavirus reporting on the media he watches and reads, but did not believe it because he knows that the reporters (like him) cannot stand Trump. The media landscape in the US today is Putin-like: flooded with nonsense nobody believes to the extent that even reliable reports are discounted. There is no impartiality. No truth.

Into this world, a strong communicator with a steely focus on healthcare and a bag full of ideas could make quite a splash. Is Joe Biden that person? It may not matter. A disaster might be about to engulf America.

But if disaster is averted, the Democrats could be left with a broken teleprompter in a Delaware basement as the metaphor for this presidential campaign, and the world will be open-mouthed at the mess they have made of finding a treatment for Donald Trump.

Suburbia’s significance in American politics was made obvious by last year’s midterms. The blue wave that saw Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives looked more like a tsunami in the suburbs. Republicans went into 2018 holding 69 suburban districts in the House — they ended the year with just 32.

The suburbs matter because, in contemporary American politics, density matters. Travel from a city centre to the country and as the landscape gets sparser, the politics get steadily redder, no matter what part of America you find yourself in. Will Wilkinson, of the Washington think tank the Niskanen Centre, argues persuasively that density is the factor to consider if you want to understand America’s divided politics: “There are really no red states or blue states. There’s compact blue urban density and sprawling red sparseness.”

And according to Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, population density becomes a stronger predictor of voting behaviour with every election that goes by.

That makes America’s suburbs the country’s decisive ideological battleground, the in-between zones between blue cities and red countryside that will decide the outcome. And if the suburbs matter, then they should be properly understood.

Curtain twitchers, desperate housewives, status anxiety and cul-de-sacs — this is what we think of when we shut our eyes and imagine the suburbs. This picture of stultifying conformity might have started with a grain of truth but has become a gross oversimplification.

A new book — Amanda Kolson Hurley’s Radical Suburbs — argues that the stereotype of American suburbia misses an important part of the story. The post-War history of the suburbs tells of a road and housebuilding boom, cheap government-backed mortgages, and white flight from crowded and dangerous cities. All of that happened, but, as Hurley persuasively argues, there is more to the story of life on the fringes of American cities.

By the same author

Can America escape its dark past?

By Oliver Wiseman

While the suburbs are where millions have chosen to live out the conventional definition of the good life, they have also been the site of a surprising amount of social experimentation — a laboratory for religious sects, political cliques, urban planners and architects who have sought to radically redefine the American dream.

Consider, for example, the neighbourhood of Economy, outside Pittsburgh. Founded in 1824 by a German religious group called the Harmonists, it was intended to be “a city in which God would dwell among men, a city in which perfection in all things was to be attained”. Led by Johann Georg Rapp, the Harmonists were committed to an esoteric strand of Christianity that mixed Lutheranism with weirder ingredients, like the belief that Jesus was a “dual being, male and female at once” and a commitment to celibacy — not a recipe for long-term demographic success.

In the first half of the 20th century, Stelton, New Jersey, was the unlikely site of an Anarchist commune. The town was “bohemian, unorthodox” – and suburban. According to Hurley, “Steltonites didn’t hide their radicalism, raising the red flag on the water tower” after the November Revolution in Germany at the end of the First World War.

By night, the community’s far-Left factions would row furiously in an exhausting sounding participatory democracy. By day, children were taught in an anarchist school and the men and women of Stelton would head into New York for work, just like their bourgeois neighbours. “Upon a train your anarchist is inconspicuously dressed, unless it be that he is rather below the sartorial average of the suburban traveller,” reported the New York Tribune in 1919.

Concord Park, in Trevose, near Philadelphia, looked exactly like other 1950s suburban housing developments. But behind the orthodoxy of its manicured lawns and identikit “little box” houses was a radical mission: to build one of America’s first integrated housing developments.

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By definition, Hurley’s case studies are exceptions — but they don’t prove any sort of rule. Thankfully most Americans don’t want to join a celibate sect or an Anarchist commune. And yet they add up to a warning not to treat suburbia as a homogenous lump; or to dismiss it as a collection of uninteresting places in between. “Heading for the urban fringes to live by nonconformist values is a long American tradition, and one we can learn a great deal from today,” says Hurley.

Those behind the often eccentric attempts to build utopia on the outskirts understood something many miss: that the suburbs are where the American dream takes shape. Anyone who wants a say in the country’s definition of the good life should take the suburbs seriously. That is true of policymakers, politicians, urban planners and architects.

Hurley accuses many of the latter two groups of turning their nose up at the suburbs: “The design elite has alternately patronised or inveighed against suburbia for years, ever since the International Congress of Modern Architecture called the suburb ‘a kind of scum churning against the walls of the city’ in 1933.”

Belgian architect Leon Krier’s dismissiveness is unimprovably snobbish: “The suburb hates itself: it knows that it is neither countryside nor city and wants to conquer the world because it cannot be at peace with itself… The suburb strangles the city by surrounding it and kills the city, tearing out its heart. A suburb can only survive, it cannot live.”

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“What if we embraced that inbetweenness instead of condemning it,” asks Hurley, who wants to “celebrate the possibilities of standing on that threshold.”

After all, the suburbs are where most Americans have decided to call home, with around 60% of the country living in . That is a broad category, as Hurley puts it, including “semi-rural areas where strip malls nibble at farmland and those where tall towers loom over the city line. It encompasses McMansions and mobile homes, airports and light-industrial estates, landfills and parkland.”

As major cities continue to grow more economically powerful – and unaffordable – their commuter belts will only get more important. Policymakers should think again about restrictive zoning regulations that get in the way of building the suburbs Americans deserve.

And, rather than disparage the type of community that most Americans call home, the country’s planners and architects should delve into the suburbs’s surprisingly rich past as inspiration for a better future. After all, as Hurley puts it, suburbia is what we make it.

It’s the Senate, stupid. The Senate is the key to everything. And it’s currently on a knife-edge. The Republicans control it at the moment, but a majority for the Democrats, winnable next year, would transform US politics, no matter who is sitting in the Oval Office. And among those accusing the Democratic party of chaotic, un-strategic thinking are many of its Washington-savvy supporters who understand that while the White House is nice to have, the Senate is essential.

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What an odd body the Senate is. Because only a third of members are up for election in any one poll, it is the result, at any point in history, of three elections held at different times and in diverse political circumstances. And because Senators sit for six years they are not bound by the rules that affect all other American politicians. As a result, this is an institution that – how shall we put this? – does not wear its dignity lightly. The place drips with ‘noblest Roman’ hauteur.

Visit a Senator if you ever can. In outer offices, young staffers keep the outside world at bay. Inner offices reveal West-wing style hard men and hard women doing deals with their counterparts in other offices or with White House staffers or foreign ambassadors.  And then, if you can find it, there is a further room where The Senator sits. The wall will be decorated with photos taken with presidents, popes, Olympic athletes. I remember my friend Mark Kirk, the Illinois Senator and Navy reservist (we’d known each other since London School of Economics days) sitting under a picture of himself in full military dress uniform with President George W Bush pretending to flick fluff off the collar like some playful Jermyn Street tailor.

They have made it, these Senators. They wield power. These hundred men and women have the duty to conduct impeachment trials, to ratify foreign treaties, to confirm presidential appointments, to defeat legislation and to investigate any aspect of American life that they decide needs investigation.

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So here is the challenge for the Democrats next year.

Of the 34 Senate contests in 2020, Republicans are defending 22 seats, while 12 are held by Democrats. They need a net gain of 3 seats to win a Senate majority if the Democrats win the White House (the Vice President has a casting vote) or 4 if Trump wins re-election.

On the downside for Democrats only three Republican held states – Colorado, Arizona, and Maine – look truly winnable, according to the non-partisan and magisterial Cook Political Report. And a Democratic seat in Alabama may well be lost.

But on the upside for Democrats their opponents seem to suffer from Trump induced hubris when it comes to the choice of candidates – if Republican voters again nominate Judge Roy Moore, the accused sexual assaulter allegedly once banned from shopping malls because of his liking for young girls, then Alabama might remain in Democratic hands. There are some other states too where the choice of Republican candidate could have a negative impact.

But, oh dear, this is where the Democrats are letting themselves down. Take two states that the Cook Report does not think are winnable but could be if the Democrats were more serious: Montana and Texas.

Why, oh why, thoughtful Democrats are crying, should we have to have the two men who could win these seats frittering away their time and money on presidential runs that are on the extreme end of quixotic? Remember that in Texas, Beto O’Rourke made Democrats believe winning statewide was possible for the first time in ages when he lost to incumbent Republican Ted Cruz by just 2 points in 2018. But now O’Rouke is running for president — and polling at 2%. He could win Texas; he will not win the White House.

Similarly, in Montana, Governor Steve Bullock could win the state for the Democrats. Indeed, he has proved he can win by being a successful Governor. But he too is running for president. His polling average is described as “a tad over zero”.

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And it gets worse. A man called Tom Steyer – a billionaire – has announced a presidential run for the Democrats and pledged 100 million dollars of his own money in the fight for the nomination. For context: that’s about half what Hillary Clinton raised and spent in her primary campaign in 2016. It’s a big sum even in American politics.

So why not spend it – for crying out loud – on the Senate races the party has to win? Tom Steyer is never in a hundred million years going to get the nomination. He is a 62-year-old white guy who runs a hedge fund.

There is a more profound reason why all this matters. It looks as if the Democrats don’t want to run for the Senate because, in their heart of hearts, they have given up on the institution. It represents what they hate about modern America. It is out of kilter with their view of where the nation should go. So they can summon little enthusiasm for being there.

They have a point. Another of the oddities of the Senate is that two Senators are chosen by each state – the 40 million people of huge diverse California get to choose two but so does tiny Maine and sparsely populated Wyoming where 600,000 people are eligible to vote. A person in Wyoming has 67 times the voting power of one in California.

This is a break on social progress – Democrats would argue – because it gives power to the places where few people live and reduces the power of the populated spaces of America – the places where the massed ranks of woke folk are dreaming their dreams of public transport or gun control or other freakish un-American plots. These are the big cities, such as San Francisco and New York. Everything is happening in them except the accretion of political power.

And in the age of Trump, race once again matters. The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia says that by 2040 just half the country’s population will control 84 of the 100 seats in the Senate.

That is racially explosive – if race is still a political factor as it has been under Trump – because although white people will probably be a minority nationally they will still be a majority in most of these states. So the states where most non-white people live – California being the obvious example – will be heavily populated but few in number and so in most states the white majority will last much longer than it will nationally.

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Of course, the Democrats could still win those states by saying and doing the kind of things that appeal to white people; keep them in the tent. Talk more about class than race. But look at the row going on right now in the House of Representatives between the modern progressive wing of the party led by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the old guard represented by Nancy Pelosi, with accusations of racism flying around even between Left-wing Democrats, and you get the impression that this is not a party about to mount a campaign to charm cowboys in Wyoming.

But that means losing. Losing Wyoming. And in the electoral cycle losing Alabama, losing Montana. Losing the ability to get a majority in the senate and so losing the ability to change America whosoever is president. It’s really as simple as that.

In the longer term, the United States is almost certainly going to face some huge constitutional upheaval – perhaps the creation of more states. But that’s not the issue now. The issue now is winning the Senate. And the Democrats being properly up for the task. At the moment, they are not. Come January 2021, on presidential inauguration day, they will almost certainly regret it.

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And yet the Democrats might just have a means to pull off a decisive victory – a trump card, so to speak.

It’s an appeal to a group of voters that often gets overlooked in our obsession with identity politics: people who rent their homes.

In the New York Times, Emily Badger reminds us that housing tenancy is an important predictor of voting behaviour:

“… in 2016… [renters] favored Hillary Clinton by 28 points (homeowners preferred Donald J. Trump by 11 points).”

She adds that renters “heavily overlap with key Democratic constituencies, including younger adults, African-Americans and Hispanics, and urban residents”. So one might wonder why Democrats would target voters who they can and sometimes do take for granted.

Two reasons: firstly, there is plenty of room to improve voter turnout among renters, which, in 2016 was “about 12 percentage points lower than that of homeowners”; and, secondly, because there are practical things that politicians can do to help renters in return for their support – such as cracking down on abusive landlords and getting more houses built. This would mean much more to excluded, marginalised people than any amount of rhetoric picked up from the woke studies department of an Ivy League university.

According to Emily Badger “several Democratic candidates for president are now approaching renters in a way they’ve seldom been treated before – as a voting bloc”:

“Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, senators from some of the most expensive housing markets in the country, have proposed substantial bills to alleviate the housing crisis. They’re not talking in gauzy terms about homeownership, the rare housing topic that usually gets a nod. They see unsustainable, raw-deal, skyrocketing rents, and they’re not hesitant to sermonize about it.”

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It’s possible that someone in the Democratic firmament has been paying attention to what happened in the 2017 UK general election. It was called by Theresa May in the expectation of greatly increasing the Conservative majority. In the event, the Conservative vote share went up by 5.5%, but Jeremy Corbyn increased the Labour share by 9.6% – not quite enough to win, but more than enough to wipe out the Tory majority and reduce the May government to minority status.

The mainstream commentariat pronounced it a shock result, but Team Corbyn had made their strategy clear all along – they would motivate habitual non-voters to turn out by offering the prospect of real change. And, just like the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum, it worked (though a Conservative campaign of dazzling ineptitude played a significant part in its success).

But who were these newly-motivated Labour voters? Because of a few notable results in university towns like Canterbury, it was assumed that Tory hopes had been shattered by a so-called ‘youthquake’ of the youngest voters. But according to the pollster Matt Singh (writing here for Bloomberg), closer examination reveals a somewhat different cause:

“We’ve since learned from the British Election Study (BES)… that the surge in turnout was not really a youth thing. New analysis of the BES data reveals that the bulk of the increase in turnout, along with the entirety of the swing from the Conservatives to Labour, was attributable to people who rent rather than own their home. The youthquake was in fact a rentquake.”

Is a ‘rentquake’ about to hit American politics too?

There’s a passage in the New York Times article that sums up the frustration of Americans stuck in the rent trap:

“What’s changed is not just the cost of rent itself, said Andrew Criscione, a 30-year-old renter in Boston. Rather, he said, people of his generation increasingly fear that annual rent increases aren’t the product of a bubble soon to burst, but that this is their indefinite reality.”

US Republicans and UK Conservatives alike should be terrified that so many people feel they’ve been permanently excluded from the dream of a property owning democracy – especially given that this bloc now includes workers on salaries that were once sufficient to secure a place on the housing ladder.

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GOP and Tory politicians should be straining every sinew to tackle the root causes of the housing crisis, and to make allies not enemies of ‘generation rent’. They should ignore the whispered lies of the rentier class – which lives off income generated by property – and ask themselves which of the following their older, home-owning core supporters care more about: the housing needs of their own children and grandchildren or the profit margins of professional landlords?

If conservatives stop caring about the transmission of opportunity down the generations, then they will fully deserve the heavy defeats heading their way.

Flyover country voters will be the decisive bloc because of America’s Electoral College. Presidents are not elected by getting more votes than their opponents; they win by getting more votes in the Electoral College than their opponents. Each state is allocated a number of these votes equal to the sum of its Senators and Representatives. By custom, with two tiny exceptions, all of the state’s Electoral College votes are given to the candidate who wins the most votes within that state.

Trump is president because he won record high support among people who live in the middle of the country but outside the major cities. This is a part of America most educated elites never visit, places like Johnstown, Pennsylvania or Marquette, Michigan. Dominated by whites without college degrees, their views and values are quite different from those held by educated Americans who live in large cities or their suburbs.

They are the largest voting bloc in many large Midwestern states, and their support gave Trump the crucial Electoral College votes that made him President, despite getting nearly three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton.

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The recent Democratic sweep of the House of Representatives does not alter this equation. Democrats won the House vote by 8.6% in November. But most of the Democrats’ gains were in placed that won’t shift electoral college votes, places safely blue like California, New Jersey, or Illinois or safely red like Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, or Georgia. In other words, under the Electoral College system, the votes they gained from Republicans are simply wasted.

The 2018 results clearly showed Trump’s path to re-election. Republicans won either the House vote or a contested race for a statewide office in states with 260 Electoral College votes. If he can repeat those showings, he only needs to pick up one flyover country state to be re-elected. Which is exactly why the Democrats’ attitude toward flyover voters is so important.

Flyover voters live in economically downscale areas. They are not sharing in the large economic gains the cities and suburbs generate – in fact, in many cases they are moving backwards because of their continued dependence upon manufacturing or resource extraction.

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They are also patriotic; their dissatisfaction stems from the idea that America is failing to live up to its values by ignoring them. They are not racist or sexist; indeed they regularly vote for women or racial minorities in non-presidential elections. Just this year many Trump flyover voters supported a gay woman, Tammy Baldwin, for senate in Wisconsin. In Michigan, a majority of flyover voters backed a black Republican, John James, for senate; while significant minorities backed two Democratic women, Gretchen Whitmer and Debbie Stabenow, for governor and senator. Unsurprisingly, these voters keenly resent being labelled by urban and media progressives.

Appealing to these voters will require some deft footwork by the Democratic nominee. Greens within the Democratic coalition want to penalise big manufacturers and resource extractors because of their greenhouse gas emissions. Many progressives advance a view of America that is severely critical, if not hostile, to America’s past. A whopping 61% of Democrats see Republicans as racist, bigoted, or sexist. A candidate that expresses these views to win the nomination will have little chance of appealing to flyover country voters.

Immigration is likely to be the toughest issue. Most flyover voters think illegal immigration is hurting America and that high levels of legal immigration are also problematic. They might not be attached to Trump’s wall, but they do think a de facto open border policy is bad. Yet Democratic enthusiasm is running in the opposite direction, with many candidates already saying they want to abolish the agency – Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – that enforces immigration laws.

The President knows this, which is why he has focused so much on immigration policy in the last few months. A Democrat who wants to appeal to flyover voters will need to pull away from the progressive herd and show that they understand flyover’s immigration fears.

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Respect is a corollary to understanding. Nothing hurt Hillary Clinton more with these voters than her comment that many of Trump’s backers were “deplorable”. A Democrat who wants to win back these voters should acknowledge this in their acceptance speech, explicitly rejecting the label deplorables.

That person should also do what Hillary would not, tour and visit towns well outside the Midwest’s major cities – they must show their care about those flyover country voters.

Democrats do not need to win flyover country, they just need to avoid getting wiped out there. Just a few percentage points improvement over Clinton’s horrendous showing, combined with the gains in the suburbs Democrats have made under Trump, will be enough to tip the Electoral College in their favour. If the Democrats nominate someone who can treat flyover voters with understanding and respect, they will almost surely regain the White House in 2020.