US Politics
A recent advertisement in The Guardian headed ‘Can’t get enough of the US election?’ prompted reflections on our seeming obsession with the current presidential campaign. Myriad readers follow the contest closely, almost compulsively. On the hour, we check the major websites for the latest polls or Trumpian excesses. In a way, the election feels more urgent, galvanising, consequential, and downright entertaining then next year’s federal election.
... (read more)Trump's Australia: How Trumpism changed Australia and the shocking consequences for us of a second term by Bruce Wolpe
Partisans: The conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the 1990s by Nicole Hemmer
The United States is entering an important phase. By this time next year, with most presidential candidates declared, we will know whether the republic is post-Trump and returning to ‘normalcy’ or approaching peak-Trump and moving toward some sort of civil discord. I predict the former. The midterm elections in November 2022 revealed a nation grasping for the centre. The extremes of left and right did poorly. I expect this trend to continue through November 2024. So, for centrists, some New Year reasons to be cheerful.
... (read more)The Long Alliance: The imperfect union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama by Gabriel Debenedetti
A Question of Standing: The history of the CIA by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
August in Kabul: America’s last days in Afghanistan by Andrew Quilty
Diplomatic: A Washington memoir by Joe Hockey with Leo Shanahan
Not long into Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning a character brings out an acoustic guitar and is asked to play a song. He chooses Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Nothin’’, a melancholy ballad pulled from the annals of American folk music. When it was released in 1971, many assumed it represented Van Zandt’s struggle with drug addiction. In fact, as he explained two years before his death, the song was inspired by Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, a novel banned by the Catholic Church in 1955 for representing a Christ figure prone to human fallibilities.
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