John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper’s Magazine.
We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 10: John R. MacArthur on why spoiling his ballot paper was a better option than voting for Donald Trump – or Hillary Clinton New York ‘Does this mean we have to vote for Hillary?’ asked my wife. It was early morning
Around 10:30 on election night, I found myself denying the consequences of a political reality I’ve been hurling at indifferent liberals for more than twenty years. With the crucial swing states of Florida and North Carolina falling to Donald Trump, the Europe One radio host interviewing me wanted to know whether the furious working-class revolt
The cheerful, nattily dressed Englishman checking out at my hotel in Mykonos as I was checking in with my daughter looked shocked as he scrutinised his bill: ‘What’s the VAT? Twenty-four percent? How can that be?’ I instantly violated my pledge to my daughter not to embarrass her by talking politics on vacation. ‘You can
The first presidential debate was a disappointment. Half an hour into the big Trump-Clinton show on Long Island, many among the audience must have asked themselves why they weren’t watching The Real Housewives of Orange County instead. The strangest exchange concerned how to defeat Isis. Donald Trump said, ‘They’re beating us at our own game
Talk about plutocracy and oligarchy has become commonplace in America, as the billionaire class grows ever richer and seemingly more arrogant. But do today’s super-rich constitute a threat to American democracy? Jane Mayer thinks they do, particularly when their money is employed by fanatics like Charles and David Koch and other like-minded tycoons to upend
A few days before the vote on Brexit, a crowd of Democratic Party grandees gathered in one of Manhattan’s toniest venues. Old friends and allies happily greeted one another, and as liquor unlocked emotions, one of them turned nostalgic about his stint in the Clinton Administration — a happier time, when the party was unified
New York ‘Does this mean we have to vote for Hillary?’ asked my wife. It was early morning 16 March, and the queen consort of the Democratic party had seemingly sewn up the presidential nomination — a coronation promised years ago by her king but thus far denied by unruly subjects. As I scanned
In the more than 40 years since Richard Nixon resigned as president — disgraced as much by his inveterate lying as by his actual crimes related to Watergate — history has been relatively kind to him. Compared with Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Nixon in retrospect can seem statesmanlike, thoughtful and liberal-minded.
It is something of a mystery why the Bodley Head has decided to publish Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in Britain more than 40 years after the initial appearance in the US of this classic work — but better late than never. Caro’s remarkable portrait of New York City’s master planner Robert Moses merits publication
Like many journalists, I’m a bit of a know-it-all — when information is touted as ‘new’, especially in government reports, it sometimes brings out in me the opposite of sincere curiosity so essential to my trade. Thus when my French publisher asked me to write a preface to Senator Dianne Feinstein’s report on the CIA’s
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_24_April_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”John Rick MacArthur and Freddy Gray discuss Clinton vs Bush” startat=929] Listen [/audioplayer]America is much less threatened by right-wing extremists than by the oligarchic rule of the two major political parties. The mainstream right, however, is wedded to the absurd notion that the Democrats are a party of the ‘left’ that is in
Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era are well-worn subjects for both professional and amateur historians, so it’s pertinent to ask why Doris Kearns Goodwin devoted so many words —and her considerable reputation — to the writing of The Bully Pulpit. Kearns’s thesis seems clear enough: at the close of the 19th century, mythically egalitarian America
In recent months I’ve read at least ten articles about French malaise — all of it apparently due to some mysterious Gallic trait that makes the world’s luckiest people unable to make the best of things. Granted, unemployment is over 10 per cent, the Germans are again running Europe, and François Hollande’s ‘socialist’ government is
One hundred pages into his absorbing new memoir, written entirely in the third person, Salman Rushdie declares that ‘Friendship had always been of great importance to him,’ since so much of his life had been spent separated, physically and emotionally, from his own family. ‘Friends,’ writes Rushdie, ‘were the family one chose.’ The conceit of
Just after 8.50 on Tuesday morning, 26 November 1963, Lyndon Baines Johnson sat down behind the desk in the Oval Office for the first time as President, four days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. According to Robert Caro, the new chief executive of the United States, now the most powerful person in the
Soon after his historic victory over John McCain, Barack Obama was ushered into a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) located deep inside the Federal building in Chicago to receive his first top-secret intelligence briefing as President-elect. According to Bob Woodward, the Watergate icon and Washington journalism grandee, the space was designed to prevent eavesdropping and
In the late days of the Bush administration, it was fashionable among liberals to call George W. Bush the ‘worst’ president since the founding of the republic and to suggest that under his leadership America experienced its own version of the Dark Ages. In the late days of the Bush administration, it was fashionable among
‘With time,’ writes David Remnick, ‘political campaigns tend to be viewed through the triumphalist prism of the winner.’ Never more so, perhaps, than in Remnick’s idolatrous new biography of Barack Obama, which presents the First Black President’s ascension to the White House as nothing less than a glorious saga. Deeply read — if not rooted
