Is the Pope a Marxist?

Charleston, South Carolina

H.L. Mencken, long a hero of mine, wrote: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.’ That surely explains the apparent surge of Americans who have been enquiring into the possibility of emigrating to Britain. I wish them well. I have no wish to leave America myself, but fully understand the motivation causing this surge. It is, of course, because the common people wanted and are receiving Donald Trump good and hard.

Years from now, probably when I am gone, a fortunate historian will describe the Trump era in the detail and with the skill with which Robert Caro is describing the career of Lyndon Baines Johnson. It will make for astonishing reading, but from my lowly perspective – a citizen of the United States who assiduously follows the news – it appears to be an administration that is flailing crazily. Harvard is being persecuted, presumably for the sin of being elitist; the EU will suffer steep tariffs one day, which are semi-abrogated the next, presumably for the heinous sin of having ‘ripped off’ the US, and so it goes on. Ukraine, we are assured, began the war with Russia, a war, we were told, that would be ended in one day by the Great Helmsman who vouchsafed to us that Vladimir Putin is ‘crazy’. By those standards Poland began the second world war, though few would disagree that Hitler, whose playbook Putin is following, was batshit crazy.