John R. MacArthur | The Spectator columnists & writers

Will Mélenchon upend the French political establishment?

Paris In his memoirs, Charles de Gaulle famously wrote that he had always possessed ‘a certain idea of France’, a phrase that evoked a mystical past of grandeur and glory, as well as an ‘eminent and exceptional destiny’. In French it is a lovely expression, but it’s doubtful the great man had in mind the angry parents of state-school children revolting against incumbent politicians in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, where on Sunday night there was a kind of mini-insurrection by Nupes, the ungainly coalition of left-wing parties that threatens to upend the French political establishment and deny President Emmanuel Macron majority control of the National Assembly during his second five-year term. The scene at Cocotte, a modest but lively ‘brasserie gastronomique’ on the avenue du Maine, felt like a victory party for the local chapter of Nupes (the acronym for the New Ecological and Social People’s Union).

The descent of New York

New York When Will Smith strode to the stage and slapped Chris Rock, I was surprised by how many of my friends thought the violence had been staged to rescue the Academy Awards from its years-long ratings decline. I instantly recognised it as authentic rage, not because I know anything about Hollywood or Will Smith, but because I witness similar ugliness so frequently on the New York City subway. For me, Smith’s outburst was shockingly familiar – emblematic of a simmering, pre-volcanic atmosphere in the country that no one seems to be examining or attempting to explain. As New York emerges from its third wave of Covid, an exceptionally creepy atmosphere has developed on the streets and in the subways, where at times conditions appear to have fallen somewhere between post-modern anarchy and medieval misery.

Biden isn’t FDR

With Biden sliding to 38 per cent approval in the polls, it’s finally time for everyone to stop calling him 'the new FDR'. That preposterous moniker was always misplaced. Biden’s ambition for 'transforming' the country has never extended beyond removing Donald Trump from the White House, inserting his patronage picks into important jobs and, most importantly, crushing the intra-party insurgency led by Senator Bernie Sanders. He has been spectacularly successful in all three of these goals given his meagre talents. But comparing him to Franklin D Roosevelt — America’s most transformative president since Abraham Lincoln, and a man of immense energy — has always been downright absurdity. Mercifully, the media's Biden-is-FDR hype has come to a screeching halt over the past two weeks.

You can’t keep an American exceptionalist down

Like millions of other Americans I was riveted by the images of chaos and despair at the Kabul airport as US forces finally left Afghanistan, yet another sad result of a forever foreign policy driven by ignorance, overreach and hubris. But as distressed as I was by the sight of desperate Afghans clinging to the exterior of a moving US Air Force cargo jet, what truly horrified me was the flood of belligerent anti-withdrawal nonsense uttered in print and on TV by an American political and media establishment that has apparently learned nothing since the Korean War, when General Douglas MacArthur provoked China’s invasion of North Korea by pushing too close to the Chinese border. On and on, network news, cable talk shows and the editorial and op-ed pages of major newspapers trotted out the discredited villains and useful idiots – all of them fluent in Cold War dogma, humanitarian intervention and the 'War on Terror' -- who in recent years have done so much harm in the world and contributed to the deaths of so many innocent people.

The decline of American journalism

The latest absurdity in American journalism is the forced resignation of the veteran New York Times reporter Donald McNeil Jr for uttering the word ‘nigger’ in front of a group of teenage tourists on a Times-sponsored trip to Peru. It has been justly ridiculed by many sane conservatives and even some courageous liberals. Although the infraction happened more than a year ago, calls for reason have had no practical effect against the demands online and inside the Times that McNeil be fired after the Daily Beast revealed the teenagers’ complaints. McNeil’s own defence is that he used the racial epithet as information with the high school students, not as an insult. This cut no ice with the hanging judges of Times-world.

The Edition

Power jab: the rise of vaccine diplomacy

44 min listen

The Edition

Power jab: the rise of vaccine diplomacy

44 min listen

Americano

Is Donald Trump more left wing than Joe Biden?

25 min listen

Americano

Is Donald Trump more left wing than Joe Biden?

25 min listen

Is Trump more left-wing than Biden?

Just when it seemed that Donald Trump had finally committed political suicide — his notion of injecting disinfectant to cure coronavirus marking only one of his recent reckless absurdities — he says something off the cuff that makes one lament the sight of so much raw political talent going to waste in the cause of solipsistic mania. A leftist anti-Trumper I may be, but I’ve been strangely impressed by the President’s capacity for perfectly credible, progressive--sounding political analysis, especially on the trade issues that sometimes bring together on common ground right-wing nationalists and left-wing defenders of labour rights. That an estimated eight million Obama voters chose Trump in 2016, and more than 200,000 Bernie Sanders supporters voted for him in the three crucial Midwestern states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, testifies to his appeal among a portion of the disaffected working class who cannot simply be written off as racist, right-wing or lunatic.

How Graham Greene earned The Spectator a place in cinematic history

When Graham Greene impulsively took up film reviewing for The Spectator in 1935, he was not yet the renowned literary figure he was to become, and thus, like so many other writers in those parlous economic times, prosaically in need of cash. As it happened, the confluence of interests between a 30-year-old novelist of modest commercial success and Derek Verschoyle, The Spectator’s literary editor from 1932 to 1939, resulted in something extraordinary — for there is nothing prosaic about these reviews. Greene’s opinions about the films he critiqued for the magazine over nearly five years constitute an impromptu cultural history of the 1930s, in addition to being a joy to read. That they led to Greene’s more lucrative occupation as a screenwriter makes his achievement all the more remarkable, since Hollywood in those days was just as indifferent to art and as merciless toward dissenters as it is today.

Americano

Why did Bernie Sanders drop out?

32 min listen

Americano

Why did Bernie Sanders drop out?

32 min listen

The Edition

Could coronavirus hasten the demise of religion?

38 min listen

The Edition

Could coronavirus hasten the demise of religion?

38 min listen

This is an Easter like no other - so what happens to Christianity when Christians can't go to church (1:00)? We also hear reports from the New York frontline (12:20), and discuss just why humour is so important in dark times (19:40).

In this golden age of corruption, it takes much courage to be a whistleblower

Midway through Crisis of Conscience, the massive new compendium about US whistleblowers by the journalist Tom Mueller, I wanted to cry out for help: first in saving the country from the profound and corrosive corruption that is so well chronicled in this volume, and then finding a seasoned editor to cut the book down to readable size and scope. Mueller’s reporting and insight about the unusual breed of civic-minded citizen willing to risk his or her career by exposing government fraud and corporate malfeasance are extraordinarily detailed and vivid. But he does himself and his readers a disservice by overloading this work with lengthy disquisitions about behavioural theory and inflated quotations from the interested parties.

Alfred Dreyfus is being erased all over again

In London to promote a book, I received an invitation to a secret screening of An Officer and a Spy, Roman Polanski’s new film about the Dreyfus affair. I boarded public transportation to a clandestine destination, somewhere in England, to view what recalled for me the samizdat literature once produced in Communist eastern Europe. I looked over my shoulder several times to see if anyone was watching me; if the possibility of exposure wasn’t real, my anxiety certainly was. My emotional reflexes still echo the trip I took to Prague in 1983 to meet dissident writers during which I was followed. But why all the cloak-and-dagger dramatics now? Why can’t I reveal where I went? An Officer and a Spy is untouchable in the Anglo-Saxon world.

A rotten party

New York For leftist anti-Trumpers like me, the Mueller report was initially a godsend, though not for the more obvious reasons. I belong to a rarified group that hates liberal moaning about Russian ‘interference’ in the 2016 election: we ridicule the claim that Vladimir Putin and his henchmen stole the presidency from Hillary Clinton because we know that Clinton herself and neo-liberal Clintonism were the real causes of her demise. I often tell outraged Democrats to calm down and stop watching Russiagate obsessives such as Rachel Maddow on TV. Trump, I insist, won the electoral college thanks to 80,000 or so angry former Democrats in three states — many thrown out of work or otherwise hurt by Nafta and the China trade deal — who voted in desperation for an unhinged landlord in populist clothing.

The hypocrisy of Jeff Bezos

It is tempting to view the blow-up between Amazon’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos and David Pecker, publisher of the tabloid National Enquirer, with the peculiar glee some journalists experience when they cover a natural disaster: it can be exciting, fun even, to sit back and observe the flames. As political earthquakes go, the Bezos-Pecker face-off is spectacular, since Pecker is a long-time ally of Donald Trump and Trump is the sworn enemy of Bezos and the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post. Trump calls him ‘Jeff Bozo’, presumably because the Post has been so aggressive in its coverage of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia and seems determined to bring down his presidency. When the Enquirer published an exposé of Bezos’s affair with TV personality Lauren Sanchez, it seemed reasonable to speculate that Pecker’s scandal sheet had acted on behalf of the White House.

All the rage | 25 October 2018

My father, an avowed liberal, taught me old-school manners: hold the door and give up your seat for ladies; stand up when anyone, male or female, enters the room or approaches you at a social gathering; extend your hand in greeting; listen politely when others speak. My mother issued similar instructions in French, and as a consequence I almost never fail to say bonjour before I address a French merchant or telephone operator. Now 93, she recently admonished me that ‘one shouldn’t make fun of people for being incapable of doing this thing or that thing’. So it’s come as a rude surprise that good manners and polite behaviour seem to have disappeared wholesale from American society. In business life and in social situations — to say nothing of social media — indifference to what once passed for social norms has grown to alarmingly high levels.

There is a greater menace than chasing ‘diversity’ at any cost

While I largely agree with Coleman Hughes that racial quotas are counterproductive (‘The diversity trap’), he misuses Martin Luther King Jr to buttress his argument. King said that he hoped his descendants would ‘be judged…by the content of their character’, not by their standardised test scores. The grim pursuit of purely quantifiable ratings for intelligence and achievement in American schools — by Asians and white Protestants alike — is an even greater scourge these days than the illiberal goal of ‘diversity’ at any cost. Harvard admissions may well be covertly, and unfairly, anti-Asian, but by taking into consideration ‘courage’ and ‘kindness’, they might also be doing the right thing. This letter appeared

The right stuff | 17 May 2018

To some, Tom Wolfe’s death might seem a greater loss for readers on the right wing of American culture and politics, since he viewed himself as a conservative, very much in keeping with his upbringing in the Richmond, Virginia, of the 1930s and 1940s. His gentleman’s manners and soft-spoken demeanour recalled another era — a class-defined and racially segregated world of courtliness and formal collars. Wolfe famously picked on liberal targets throughout his remarkable career: his most savage satires addressed the pretensions of leftish icons from Leonard Bernstein to, most recently, Noam Chomsky. ‘Radical Chic’, his essay about infiltrating Leonard Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers and Upper East Side liberal fashion in the late 1960s, still looms over Manhattan social life all these years later (no New York host or hostess ever wants a Tom Wolfe-type reporter sneaking into their fancy fund-raising party again), and it can still make you laugh out loud, even if you happened to support the Black Panthers.

Analysing the dream

Boxing not so clever

For Horace Hopper, the half-breed protagonist of Willy Vlautin’s bleak new novel, essential truths come slowly, and usually too late to do him any good. Abandoned by his Native American mother and Irish American father, he has exiled himself from the only people who love him, an elderly couple on a sheep ranch in deepest Nevada. His one idea for becoming ‘somebody’ is to transform himself into a world-champion lightweight boxer with a wholly fabricated Mexican identity. ‘Mexican boxers are the toughest... true warriors who never quit,’ he believes. Only well into the novel does it dawn on him that his self-inflicted loneliness is ‘a sort of disease’, not a manly test of character that will redeem his young life.

Divided they stand

New York As the malevolence and incoherence of the Trump administration continue to amaze, Democrats are taking heart from the popular revulsion against the Mad Hatter of Mar-a-Lago. The media class is chattering excitedly about anti-Trump momentum after special Congress elections in conservative Kansas and Georgia resulted in a narrow Republican victory in the former and a run-off in the latter. Last week, Paul Kane of the Washington Post cited this as proof ‘that Democrats have galvanised the anti-Trump activism of the past three months into votes at the ballot box’. Last Monday, the New York Times went even further by publishing a piece on the already crowded field of Democratic presidential challengers for the 2020 election, a group of politicians the paper said were ‘uniformly emboldened by Trump’s perceived vulnerability’.

Yes, Trump is grotesque. But I would never have voted for Hillary

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 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 the headline in the New York Times, ‘Clinton and Trump Pile up the Delegates’, I felt sick at heart. The Times has functioned throughout the campaign as court gazette for the Clintons, but there was no denying the basic accuracy of the story.

Donald Trump is creating a cabinet of grotesques

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 against the Clintons and the Democratic Party was finally coming to fruition. Was Trump really going to win? So horrified was I by the prospect of the White House being occupied by a Mad Hatter dressed in full metal jacket that I momentarily went blind. I weakly replied, 'No, look at Virginia—Hillary's still in the lead.' She did wind up prevailing in that state, as well as in the popular vote, but Trump won what in the end was a referendum.

How Brexit Britain can save Greece

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 thank Wolfgang Schäuble and the Germans,' I told the man. 'Austerity politics and all that.' My new acquaintance pondered what I was saying -- 'Is that so?' he said, or something to that effect -- then quickly changed the subject to the charm of cobblestone and the local nightlife. I didn't ask him how he had voted on Brexit, but I wish I had, for an incendiary political idea was beginning to form in my mind.

New York Notebook | 29 September 2016

The power of the American oligarchs

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 the social order. In Dark Money, Mayer describes a sophisticated right-wing political movement, largely operating through individual proxies and front groups, that seeks a kind of coup d’état, albeit one with libertarian objectives designed to reduce the power of the state as opposed to seizing it. So secretive and centrally organised is this reactionary cabal that it invites comparisons with the Marxist left.

Thanks to Brexit, New Yorkers discovered ‘the inequality thing’

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 around the cult of political pragmatism known as triangulation. 'Yes,' said a misty-eyed associate who also remembered those days fondly. 'We didn't have the inequality thing.... How did we miss it?' Propriety prevents me from identifying the participants, but the clueless arrogance about 'the inequality thing' largely sums up the reaction to Britain's Leave vote in America's capital of high finance and outsized intellectual pretentions.

The Clintons made Trump

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 the headline in the New York Times, ‘Clinton and Trump Pile up the Delegates’, I felt sick at heart. The Times has functioned throughout the campaign as court gazette for the Clintons, but there was no denying the basic accuracy of the story. Rebounding from Bernie Sanders’s stunning upset a week earlier in the Michigan primary — a victory that defied the polls and the Clinton propaganda machine — Clinton had won Florida, Illinois, North Carolina and, most depressingly, Ohio, where Clinton-ism has committed some of its worst ravages in the form of ‘free trade’ deals, bank deregulation and ‘welfare reform’.

Dick at his trickiest

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. He established diplomatic relations with communist China, took the US off the gold standard, negotiated the wind-down of the Vietnam war, and created the Environmental Protection Agency — accomplishments that generally prompt even Nixon-haters to pause before they condemn Tricky Dick to perdition. But now comes Joan Brady with a bracing reminder of what indeed was so hateful, so villainous about Nixon and his political ascent.

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