Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books and the author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.
20 min listen
Freddy speaks to journalist and author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, Chris Caldwell, about the human rights movement. Can America’s influence be considered imperial? Is how we think of human rights outdated? And, what does the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2011 intervention in Libya tell us about the state of
For about five years, those longing for a centrist restoration have been declaring that the madness is on its way out and the sensibles are back. Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen: all of them were just temporary horrors. In Poland’s recent election, Donald Tusk was returned to power, with his whole entourage of
45 min listen
This week: Christopher Caldwell writes The Spectator’s cover piece on Italy’s new wave of migrants. This is in light of the situation in Lampedusa which he argues could upend European politics. Chris joins the podcast alongside Amy Kazmin, Rome correspondent at the Financial Times, to debate Europe’s escalating migrant crisis. (01:23) Also this week: In his column, Matthew Parris
When hundreds of mostly African migrants escaped from the transfer centre in Porto Empedocle, Sicily, last weekend and began roaming the town’s bakeries and shops begging for food, the mayor took to social media to explain. There were 2,000 migrants squeezed into a facility meant for 250, he told terrified locals. The conditions were inhumane.
Washington, DC You can measure the health of the American republic, or at least its governing institutions, on a weekday-morning Acela train from Washington to New York. It’s too expensive to use for pleasure ($337 if you plan late and are unlucky), too time-consuming (almost three hours for the 225-mile trip) to permit idling in
Washington, D.C My local polling station is a Christian Brothers high school set amid football fields and parking lots. On Tuesday a woman who lives on our street was arriving to vote just as I was. She had come from a mandatory ‘active-shooter training session’ at her office. Of course, all shooters are ‘active’. Active shooter
The first election day since Donald Trump was elected president a year ago brought a funereal mood to Washington that you could feel on the streets. The swamp, apparently, remains undrained. Elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey and for mayor in New York City cheered the locals a bit, producing the expected victories
American foreign-policy strategists used to promulgate doctrines. Now they dream up slogans. ‘America is back’ is the jingle under which the Biden administration has been conducting — or marketing — its post-Trump, post-Covid diplomacy, much as ‘Go big’ has been its jingle in domestic matters. The problem is, being ‘back’ can mean a number of
The conviction has been spreading among French people in recent days that les Britanniques have just elected Donald Trump. The papers are filled with meditations on British anxieties over lost empire, descriptions of Boris Johnson’s hair and the wildest speculations about what he might do as Prime Minister. Every squib about European overregulation that Johnson
Two weeks ago Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s vice-premier and Labour Minister and the top politician of the Five Star Movement (M5S), appointed a new commissioner for the UN cultural organisation Unesco. He chose the dog–whistling, bum-slapping sex–comedy actor Lino Banfi, star of How to Seduce Your Teacher, Policewoman on the Porno Squad and other films.
Two weeks ago Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s vice-premier and Labour Minister and the top politician of the Five Star Movement (M5S), appointed a new commissioner for the UN cultural organisation Unesco. He chose the dog–whistling, bum-slapping sex–comedy actor Lino Banfi, star of How to Seduce Your Teacher, Policewoman on the Porno Squad and other films.
In Paris in December, I sat with a journalist friend in a café on the Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui and listened to him explain to me why a no-deal Brexit would be a catastrophe for Britain. It had to do with an article his newspaper had published about the Mini. You might think they were typically British
The ‘yellow vest’ protests against President Emmanuel Macron that swept through Paris and other French cities last month have evoked overwhelming sympathy: 77 per cent considered them justified, according to a poll for Le Figaro. Even after Macron offered a budget-busting package of concessions to appease his critics, it was hard to silence the lacerating
The most obnoxious advert on American television this Christmas season features a thirtyish man telling his wife he ‘got us a little something’ at a holiday sale. He leads her out to the colossal driveway of their newly built modernist mansion to show her just what: two brand-new GMC pickup trucks, a boxy, blue one
The first sign that Matteo Salvini was destined to do battle with Emmanuel Macron came in June, a few days after he was named Italy’s interior minister. Salvini, whose party, the League, wants to cut immigration drastically, announced that a German-registered rescue ship carrying 629 aspiring migrants from Africa would not be allowed to dock
Washington DC Washington has been, for the past two weeks, indescribably depressed. When I walked into the deli down the street to buy a bag of cookies, a neighbour who was having coffee with her girlfriends hailed me. ‘Are you as despondent as the rest of us?’ she asked. I told her: ‘No, I’m not.’
Washington The outcome of America’s elections might become clear in the first minutes of vote-counting next Tuesday night. That is because Americans are as moody and fussy about voting as they are about everything else. Their elections depend on who is excited enough to show up at the polls and who is too depressed. Black
If, on the night of Monday September 26, a US presidential election had been held instead of a televised debate, Donald Trump would likely now be America’s president-elect. That morning the reliable on-line poll analyst Nate Silver, sympathetic to Clinton, had tweeted, ‘It’s a dead heat,’ and then, a few minutes later, ‘State firewall breaking
The fit, or fugue, that Hillary Clinton suffered during a 9/11 memorial service in Manhattan on Sunday left mysteries in its wake. One concerns Mrs Clinton’s apparently serious medical problem. Another concerns her opponent Donald Trump, who appears eager to run her campaign for her while she convalesces. When felled, Mrs Clinton was two weeks
The fit, or fugue, that Hillary Clinton suffered during a 9/11 memorial service in Manhattan on Sunday left mysteries in its wake. One concerns Mrs Clinton’s apparently serious medical problem. Another concerns her opponent Donald Trump, who appears eager to run her campaign for her while she convalesces. When felled, Mrs Clinton was two weeks
