Attention to the Unseen

Susan B. Glasser writes: On November 16, 2016, eight days after Trump was elected, Barack Obama flew to Berlin to meet with Merkel; it was the last foreign trip of his Presidency. Obama and Merkel had not started out as good friends, but they had become as close as two public figures could be. Over dinner in the Adlon Hotel, they discussed the shocking events of the previous few months, particularly Great Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union and…

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Nick Cohen writes: For readers bewildered by the indifference of Labour’s leaders to Brexit, let me offer a suggestion: you cannot understand British politics until you grasp that the party has been taken over by men (and the occasional woman) who spent their lives around the fag ends of the 20th-century Marxist-Leninist movement. It’s not that Labour now has a communist programme. Revolutionary socialism is as dead as any idea can be. Rather, Labour has inherited the mental deformations of…

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Fintan O’Toole writes: Vincent Gookin, the 17th-century English colonist in Ireland, wrote ruefully that “the unsettling of a nation is an easy work; the settling of a nation is not”. One way to understand why the Irish question has been so fatal for the Brexit project is to think about two islands and their degrees of unsettlement. For Britain, the Brexiters have done the easy work of unsettling a nation. Both parts of Ireland, meanwhile, have been involved in the…

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The Guardian reports: Theresa May is being urged to give her MPs free rein to vote for a second referendum, with a new group of ministers poised to back another public ballot on Brexit. Cabinet ministers are making fresh pleas for a new approach after the prime minister’s bleakest week in office, which has left her authority seriously damaged and led some Tory MPs to fear it will become impossible for her to govern. Senior figures in the government are…

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George Packer writes: Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical—it goes back many decades—and, in a way, philosophical. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start. I don’t mean the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison. Those abuses are nonpartisan and always with us. So is vote theft of the kind…

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The New York Times reports: When Senate investigators wanted to know why Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, met with the head of a Russian bank under sanctions shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Kushner explained that, as far as he had been told, the bank chief had “a direct line to the Russian president.” It is easy to see how. The bank — Vnesheconombank, or VEB — is owned by the Russian government and overseen directly by Mr. Putin’s…

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