Patrick Allitt

Thursday

17 Nov 2016
Patrick Allitt

Trump’s inside man

Let’s take stock. Donald Trump, until last week, had never done a government job or held an elected office. He ran for president as a kind of anti-politician, ignoring the conventional wisdom about how to win. Amazingly, he won. It was, in its way, an impressive feat, overturning much conventional wisdom. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that, as president, he’s got to be political and must surround himself with politicians. Mike Pence, his vice-president, may turn out to be the most important of the lot. The two men did not previously know one another, but have become friends over the past five months, and recognise each other’s merits. They are a study in opposites. Trump is larger-than-life, tempestuous, never boring; Pence is mild, methodical, steady and a trifle dull.

Trump’s inside man

Wednesday

26 Oct 2016
Patrick Allitt

How the Mormons dumped Trump

Evan McMullin is running for president of the United States. A Mormon from Utah, a former CIA undercover agent, he represents what the Republican Party ought to look like this year but does not. Convinced, like many of his co-religionists, that Donald Trump is a disgrace, he speaks with quiet confidence about restoring dignity and respect to American conservatism. So far he’s on the ballot in just eleven states, and showing most strongly in the Rocky Mountains. He may actually win in the Mormon stronghold of Utah. He’s just forty years old and his running mate, Mindy Finn, a Jewish high-tech entrepreneur and conservative feminist, is only 36. They won’t win the whole thing, of course, but they’re enjoying themselves by telling the truth and deploring Trump and Clinton with equal vigour.

How the Mormons dumped Trump

Saturday

8 Oct 2016
Patrick Allitt

Hillary will beat Trump. But her presidency will be hamstrung just like Obama’s

The more you study history, the more you realise how hopeless it is to try predicting the future. Even sophisticated polling can’t prevent surprises like the two recent whoppers in the UK: the wrong prediction of a razor-thin margin for David Cameron in 2015, followed by the wrong prediction of a Brexit defeat in this summer’s referendum. I’m a history professor. If anyone knows better than to make predictions, it’s me. Nevertheless, I predict that the Democratic Party will win the presidency and the Senate in November, but will continue as minority party in the House of Representatives. Let me explain why. Every fourth year, presidential elections bring out plenty of voters, and winning candidates usually create a wave for fellow party members as they run for other offices.

Hillary will beat Trump. But her presidency will be hamstrung just like Obama’s

Monday

19 Sep 2016
Patrick Allitt

The women who paved the way for Hillary’s bid for the White House

If Hillary Clinton wins she will be the first female president of the United States, taking over from the first black president. But who were her predecessors, paving the way to women’s full participation in national politics? Votes for American women began in the Wyoming Territory in 1869. Wyoming, amid the Rocky Mountains, is remote, cold, and high. Its population was tiny in the 1860s; men outnumbered women six to one. The advocates of female suffrage hoped they could create a little favourable publicity, encouraging more single women to head their way. When Wyoming became a state, in 1890, its women’s right to vote was written into the new state constitution. Meanwhile, in 1872, Victoria Woodhull had become the first woman to run for president, on the Equal Rights ticket.

The women who paved the way for Hillary’s bid for the White House

Thursday

8 Sep 2016
Patrick Allitt

Death of an anti-feminist

Phyllis Schlafly could have been America’s number one feminist. She graduated from good universities, wrote important books on serious topics, was an outspoken orator and political organiser, didn’t let her life be defined by her husband’s career, and stood up to bitter abuse from her opponents. In reality, however, she was America’s leading anti-feminist. Her death this week, at the age of 92, marks the passing of an organisational and publicity genius who did all she could to fight against the spirit of the age. When passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution seemed imminent and inevitable in the mid-1970s, she created a democratic grassroots pressure group, ‘StopERA’, that managed to kill it once and for all.

Death of an anti-feminist

Monday

5 Sep 2016
Patrick Allitt

The Donald Trump phenomenon is nothing new in American politics

It's hard to find someone who doesn't have a strong opinion about Donald Trump. But it's worth lowering the emotional temperature for a moment, taking a step back, and looking at him through the eyes of history. Has there ever been a presidential candidate like Trump? Here I’ll confine myself just to the last twenty-five elections (1916-2012), during which time the Democrats ran eighteen different candidates for president, and the Republicans seventeen. So apart from the soundbites is there anything really different about the Donald? First, Trump has never run for office. The last time a major party ran a candidate who had never entered an election was in 1952 when the Republicans nominated Dwight Eisenhower. A war hero, commander of the D-Day forces in 1944, Eisenhower was so widely admired that both parties wanted him as their candidate.

The Donald Trump phenomenon is nothing new in American politics

Saturday

9 Jul 2016
Patrick Allitt

Is there any hope for the two worst problems in America: racial mistrust and gun crime?

The Dallas shooting brings together two of the worst problems in American politics: racial mistrust and guns. It also shows that both problems are intractable. Most Americans like the idea that if something’s wrong they can fix it. Hard experience suggests otherwise. First, race. The old heritage of slavery, followed by a century of segregation and the continuing reality of widespread racism, often makes the rhetoric of equality and democracy ring hollow. White fear of blacks is common, and has contributed this year to Donald Trump’s success. Second, guns. The Constitution’s Second Amendment gives citizens the right to bear arms. Written in the 1780s to promote an effective militia, it’s now taken to mean that everyone is entitled to own a gun, ostensibly to protect home and family.

Is there any hope for the two worst problems in America: racial mistrust and gun crime?

Thursday

21 Aug 2014
Patrick Allitt

Is America headed for tyranny? It is when the other side’s in charge...

For the last 50 years Americans have been decrying the increase of presidential power whenever the party they oppose is in office.  Republicans hated to see Kennedy and Clinton throwing their weight around, while Democrats deplored the ‘imperial presidency’ of Nixon and Reagan. F.H. Buckley, a Canadian law professor now working in Virginia, explains why presidents have become so powerful. He adds that it’s not just an American problem. Prime ministers in Britain and Canada have also grown more powerful at the expense of their countries’ parliaments, but to a lesser, and less menacing, degree. He argues that American conditions today are very different from those foreseen by the founding fathers when they wrote the constitution in 1787.

Is America headed for tyranny? It is when the other side’s in charge...

Wednesday

5 Mar 2014
Patrick Allitt

How America’s shale gas revolution makes Putin ever weaker

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3" title="Anne Applebaum and Matthew Parris debate the Ukraine-Russia situation"] Listen [/audioplayer]Once or twice every century something good happens to Russia, but then another long night of suffering closes over the great Asian wastes. In 1917, the Russians managed to overthrow their hated Czar and proclaim a democracy. It only lasted a few months before being swept away by a much worse autocracy, which stayed in power until 1991. The sudden prospect of post-Soviet freedom was accompanied by the promise of long-delayed prosperity, as the liberated nation began to develop its vast resources, one of which was natural gas. For a few years, Putin’s Russia dominated the international natural gas market and earned high prices.

How America’s shale gas revolution makes Putin ever weaker

Thursday

6 Feb 2014
Patrick Allitt

America’s right still hates Hillary Clinton. And it still can’t stop her

 Atlanta, Georgia Who thinks Hillary Clinton is the nastiest woman in the world? The American Spectator once called her ‘the Lady Macbeth of Arkansas’ while US News and World Report described her as ‘the overbearing yuppie wife from hell’. But that was back in the nineties. Surely such vitriol is a thing of the past? No. The founders of ‘StopHillaryPAC’ say on their website that they want to ‘save America from the destructive far-left liberal cancer’ that Mrs Clinton represents. Do they wish her actual harm? Well, they plan to ‘STOP Hillary dead in her tracks’ but, you know… just politically. They’re not the only ones. The similarly named group ‘StopHillary2016’ is equally keen to deal out at least a metaphorical death, as is the Republican dirt-grubbing group AmericaRisingPAC.

America’s right still hates Hillary Clinton. And it still can’t stop her

Thursday

24 Jan 2013
Patrick Allitt

Revenge of the Clintons

Republicans turn pale with horror at the idea that Hillary Clinton might be the next president. She is the screeching harridan of their nightmares, made worse by her penchant for centre-left social policies. But they had better face up to the fact that no woman has ever been better placed to take the top job. Sixty-five now, she will be no older in 2016 than Ronald Reagan was when he moved into the White House. In the next week or so, Hillary will stand down as Secretary of State. She tells interviewers that she’s looking forward a break from public life. But nobody who knows anything about her believes it. Before her concussion late last year, she completed a farewell tour constructed to remind everyone that she is the logical next leader of the free world.

Revenge of the Clintons

Saturday

2 Jun 2012
Patrick Allitt

Right thinking

David Frum has spoken for American conservatism for a generation – now he despairs of itDavid Frum has been a major force in American conservatism for more than 20 years. He was a speechwriter in President George W. Bush’s first administration and is said to have coined the phrase ‘axis of evil’. In the last few years, however, he has fallen out with the leading conservative magazine, National Review, the leading conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and the leading conservative TV network, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. He is an active political blogger at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, where he regularly deplores Republican intransigence and bloody-mindedness.Rather than write a self-justifying memoir, the time-honoured response to a public parting of ways, Frum has just published Patriots, a comic novel about dysfunctional Washington.

Saturday

7 Jan 2012

Saturday

31 Dec 2011
Patrick Allitt

Travel Extra: Cruise - Breaking the ice

Alaska is best seen by ship, says Patrick Allitt – just so long as you choose the right seasonFor two thirds of every year Alaska is a nightmare of ice and darkness. For 16 or 17 weeks, by contrast, it’s one of the most beautiful places on earth, and anyone who can find a way to get there should seize the opportunity. John Muir, the pioneering American environmentalist, cautioned young people not to see it too early in their lives because ‘the scenery of Alaska is so much grander than anything else of its kind in the world that, once beheld, all other scenery becomes flat and insipid’.So much of the country is inaccessible by road that the best introduction to Alaska is by ship. All the cruise lines ply Alaskan waters and you can set sail from Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, or even Los Angeles between May and August.

Travel Extra: Cruise - Breaking the ice

Saturday

17 Sep 2011
Patrick Allitt

Preaching to the converted | 17 September 2011

Loudly and eccentrically religious candidates represent the Republicans’ best chance of losing to ObamaAtlanta, GeorgiaThe prelude to the first presidential primaries is always an entertaining phase of the American electoral cycle. Exotic blooms flower for a moment or two, but shrivel almost as quickly when the voters discover what they actually represent. Two of this year’s morning glories are Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Congresswoman, and Rick Perry, the governor of Texas. Both, in addition to being highly photogenic, are serious evangelical Christians, possibly even ‘dominionists’, who seek to consecrate America’s political life to their religious convictions. When Bachmann declared her candidacy this year Rolling Stone described her as ‘a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions’.

Saturday

8 Jan 2011
Patrick Allitt

At war with the Greeks

America’s love of the ancient republics has had military consequences in the presentIf you’re 40 or older and I ask you to think back to the worst moments of your life as a schoolchild, memory will probably take you straight to Latin class. Remember how it was taught by a wizened old beak in a faded gown, who favoured merciless drilling, responded to grammatical errors with a rap of the cane, and squeezed the fun out of even the most heroic Roman tales? Latin has largely disappeared from English schools and I dare say that 19 out of every 20 among you don’t miss it.By contrast, it is thriving on the other side of the Atlantic. Eager young teachers offer Greek and Latin classes in a growing number of schools, public and private.

At war with the Greeks

Saturday

18 Sep 2010
Patrick Allitt

Get ready for Bush III

John Ellis ‘Jeb’ Bush insists he doesn’t want to run for president. Don’t believe a word of itThe next presidential election is 26 months away and already the parties are fretting about it. Barring a disaster, President Obama will be the Democratic candidate, but history is not treating him well. When he took office, the millennial hopes raised by his candidacy bumped into the realities of a long recession and two hard wars. He was just another politician, after all, not a messiah.But if the Democrats have come down to earth with a bump, the Republicans are still trying to shake their post-2008 hangover. John McCain lost badly and won’t be back. His running mate Sarah Palin, the Alaska maverick, is loved by some Republicans but hated by others.

Get ready for Bush III

Saturday

24 Apr 2010
Patrick Allitt

The great American melting pot

Americans are panicking again about immigration and the size of their population. But they shouldn’t, says Patrick Allitt. The US remains the greatest assimilator of new peoplesThe American census takes place every ten years, in the zero year of each decade. I filled out my form last week and anticipate being part of a final tally that will come in at around 310 million. Pundits react to this decennial ritual with a flurry of stories. You can always find a crowd who say the country is badly overpopulated, and a forlorn little bunch who are afraid it’s underpopulated. Both groups offer persuasive reasons for their views, and both predict dire consequences. The debate has been going on for decades. In the 1960s the great fear was explosive growth of the population in response to the baby boom, rising life expectancy and new miracle drugs.

The great American melting pot

Saturday

23 Jan 2010
Patrick Allitt

America the Miserable

Patrick Allitt says that the infuriating but reassuring can-do spirit that once defined the United States is finally dying out. But what will we all do when it’s gone?The first time I went to America, in 1977, I couldn’t believe how cheerful, peppy and purposeful everyone was. The late seventies were bad years by American standards, the Jimmy Carter era of stagflation and malaise, but to someone coming out of Jim Callaghan’s Britain the place seemed almost insanely upbeat. Strangers would greet you enthusiastically, with a ‘How ya doin?’ in New York and a ‘Have you taken Jesus as your personal saviour?’ in small Oklahoma towns, but always with a radiant goodwill. How to Win Friends and Influence People was still a bestseller and everywhere people worked hard, believed in the future, and talked incessantly about progress.

America the Miserable
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