Attention to the Unseen

Nick Cohen writes: The secret history of modern Britain is made in obscure corners between men and women taken seriously by no one but themselves. A good time to begin it would be in the winter of 2013/14 when the Institute of Economic Affairs, a rightist outfit that won’t reveal where its money comes from, offered a €100,000 prize to whoever could devise a means of leaving the European Union. The reason why politicians are now stumbling towards disaster like…

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Ivan Krastev writes: “In the Balkans the transition is over,” Remzi Lani, an Albanian political analyst, told me some time ago. But unlike in many post-Communist countries, Mr. Lani didn’t mean a transformation from dictatorship to democracy. “We transitioned from repressive to depressive regimes.” He is right. The old Communists and radical ethnic nationalists are largely gone; in their places is stagnation — economic, social and political. The question now is how these depressive regimes fit into a growing geopolitical…

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David Frum writes: The early Democratic presidential contest has been an exercise of lefter-than-thou politics, culminating in the earnest consideration of 70 percent tax rates and wealth confiscation for émigrés. You can understand the temptation: Trump seems weak, perhaps already doomed. Why compromise with the faint of heart? Give the American people a choice, not an echo! This is the logic of factional politics. You want the smallest possible majority, most easily dominated by its most mobilized minority. That’s how…

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Jason Wilson writes: David Neiwert has lived in his Seattle neighbourhood for decades. But it, like the US, has changed beyond recognition around him. Once upon a time, the journalist and author of the book Alt-America explains, “most of the houses were older, but they were cheap. They were places where working-class people who work on these fishing boats out here” – he gestures towards the docks at Salmon Bay – “could live, right? You know, 500 bucks a month….

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Bernard-Henri Lévy, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Elfriede Jelinek, Orhan Pamuk and 25 others write: The idea of Europe is in peril. From all sides there are criticisms, insults and desertions from the cause. “Enough of ‘building Europe’!” is the cry. Let’s reconnect instead with our “national soul”! Let’s rediscover our “lost identity”! This is the agenda shared by the populist forces washing over the continent. Never mind that abstractions such as “soul” and “identity” often exist only in the imagination…

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Michael Kruse writes: Stone met Trump in 1979. The matchmaker was the infamous Roy Cohn, and the context was the fledgling Ronald Reagan presidential bid. Just 27 at the time, six years younger than Trump, Stone was in New York working as the campaign’s regional political director. He needed people to help raise money. Trump was a Jimmy Carter donor but joined Reagan’s finance committee as well. “We hit it off immediately,” Stone recalled. Ever since, off and on, but…

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Jamelle Bouie writes: The wall of Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency has always operated both as a discrete proposal — an actual structure to be built under his leadership — and as a symbol with a clear meaning. Whether praised by its supporters or condemned by its opponents, the wall is a stand-in for the larger promise of broad racial (and religious) exclusion and domination. It’s no surprise, then, that some Americans use “Build the wall” as a racist chant,…

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The Washington Post reports: The United States and Venezuela were locked in a tense international standoff Thursday as the Trump administration kept embassy staff in the country despite an official order to eject them, and Russia demanded that the Americans cease “intervention” in the teetering oil-rich nation. Moscow and Beijing have propped up the socialist South American state for years, investing billions through loans and energy deals and setting up what is now a dramatic global power play over Venezuela’s…

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