Three interesting pieces for a May Sunday

The awful American left, boomeranging culture wars, and the death of Tory England.

The American left is the world’s worst left

I wish I could remember who it was but a Labour party activist on British Twitter (X) recently made the brilliant observation that holding up the American left as an example for the rest of us to follow was like holding up British dentistry. One should not follow worst practice if one wishes to succeed.

American progressives have still not managed to win basic advances the rest of the democratic world takes for granted – most notably universal healthcare.

Soon we will see whether they can manage the essential task of defeating the far right.

I have written before about the disconnect in the thinking of many on the US liberal left.

On the one hand they see Donald Trump as, if not a fascist, then at least a fascistic figure, whose supporters have proved themselves willing to attempt the overthrow of constitutional government,

Fair enough. But on the other hand​, they don’t follow anti-fascist tactics and unite to form the broadest possible popular front from the far-left to moderate conservatives as serious people did in the 1930s.

The New York Times, for instance, bickers endlessly with the Biden White House.

Looking from the outside it is hard to say which side is the more pompous and entitled.

To take a recent example, Semafor’s Ben Smith interviewed Joseph Kahn, the executive editor of the New York Times, who opined

“It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?”

This is hopeless. An averagely precocious child knows that democracy comes first and without democratic freedoms you cannot influence debates on inflation or immigration.

It is also confusing. Either New York Times executives are only pretending to believe that Trump and the Republicans threaten democracy. Or they believe the threat to democracy is real, but they cannot prioritise defending it.

To put it another way, they are either liars or dilettantes.

The interview sparked comment all over American Substack. The best came from Matthew Yglesias.

Let us take the New York Times at its word, he implied, and say that Trump will not overturn US democracy. (I doubt that Khan had thought his position through, but we should be kind to the poor man.)

There is still the question of what Trump would do if he is elected.