Us politics

Believe it or not, I planned to write the gist of this column before Saturday night. However, a caveat. Unlike the newly christened Republican VP pick, J.D. Vance, I don’t directly blame hyperventilating Democratic rhetoric for last weekend’s attempt on Trump’s life. Responsibility rests with the would-be assassin. Nevertheless, the party’s off-the-charts argumentation has rankled me for the past year. From the get-go, Biden has framed his campaign as a defence of ‘our democracy’, echoing Britons’ sacred obligation to lock themselves in their cupboards to save ‘our NHS’. For Democrats, what’s at stake in this election is nothing less than the perpetuation of America’s form of government. Donald Trump’s threat

Last week, Lionel Shriver wrote a characteristically sharp piece about the narcissism of the ageing Joe Biden, egged on by his wife, in standing again for the presidency of the United States. The Roman poet Lucretius (1st century bc) might well have offered a similar opinion, but he would have presented it as an example of a universal and destructive human failing which he described in his magnificent poem On the Nature of the Universe – the dread of death. Romans, Lucretius claimed, feared the whole idea of dying, because they believed that they had an eternal soul which, after death, would be subject to hideous tortures and punishments if they had been

Young people are supposed to drink a ton, have a lot of sex, hang out with their friends at every opportunity and vote for the left. Today’s young don’t live up to the stereotype. According to polls, they are one of the most responsible generations on record. Across the West, the share of young adults who binge-drink or who are sexually active has fallen to a new low. Teenagers spend far less time hanging out with their friends than their parents or grandparents did. They even seem to be defying political expectations – though their recent drift to the right has, in its own way, succeeded just as well in

Joe Biden, President of the United States, may not have any criminal charges on his record, but his son Hunter does. When ancient Greeks discussed whether aretê (‘virtue, moral excellence, goodness, bravery’) could be taught, or not, such examples came into play. Plato discussed the problem in a dialogue in which Socrates raised the question with the famous sophist Protagoras who claimed to be able to teach anything to make people better. Socrates’s example was Pericles: here was a man of supreme aretê, but his two useless sons simply ‘browsed randomly about like cattle, hoping to bump into it’. Protagoras answered as follows. When men, he said, first learned to

There are several frustrating things about American college campuses, just one of which is the sheer volume of column inches they take up. Whenever an American campus has an ‘occupation’ because the students want veto powers over foreign wars, the world media study their actions with great interest. Whenever a group of farmers or truckers complain about the loss of their livelihoods, whatever media attention does arrive comes from people eager to dismiss the protestors as know-nothings who are on to nothing. I told them that while they may know something, the chances are that people older than them know more Still, in recent months Columbia University in New York

A lead article in the sober-sided New York Times is seldom funny. Yet ‘A New Surge in Power Use is Threatening US Climate Goals’ earlier this month cracked me up. Check out this sternly dramatic first paragraph: ‘Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.’ Personally, I’d have headlined that article ‘Well, duh’ – perhaps with the subhead ‘Aw, shucks’. Lo and behold, when you push people to electrify everything in their lives – cars, cookers, heating systems – while bribing them to go all-electric with lavish government subsidies, it turns out they use more electricity. Who