Author: bloggulentgreytripe
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Global leadership opinion: Where will the West turn for its survival?
WALKING DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN craning the Twin Towers in the summer of 2001, capitalism had won, and won big. Mid-70s to the fin de millénaire, democratic nations doubled in number. From Portugal’s Carnation Revolution to Eastern Europe’s assimilation. Liberalism lifted the world, crushing hellscape communism and fascism. Back in Britain that year, a mid-Atlantic drawl was…
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Global leadership opinion: MAGA-ultras’ blue-collar economic nationalism might survive market turmoil, but will it arrest the ‘unscrupulous optimism’ of runaway meritocracies in Britain and Europe?
THE TARIFF BLITZKRIEG has done its random act of violence. Like a B-17 dropping iron bombs over an open sight, one hit the runway, another Mr McGregor’s greenhouse, the rest slugged into the quagmire. But the message has been sent. Technical dashboard politics should give way to nation-state leadership. On the sidelines traditional conservatives remain…
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Global leadership opinion: Searching for virtues in the US administration’s New World Order
WHEN YOU DRIVE INTO CANADA from New York State, USA there is a sense of coming home for the English traveller. Food portions are saner, grass greener, and they say ‘sorry’ nearly as much. Despite the US government’s desire to despoil Canada, I could easily be an American. Half the English spirit is spent coping…
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TRUMP II’s existential politics: ‘MAGA’dom versus the university men and women’
THE TRUMP II administration is on its Gulliver’s Travels, re-sizing US international relations. A return to seignorial power politics. And to borrow from Norman Mailer, will ‘MAGA’dom’ bring the existential experience that ‘university men and women’ cannot? Many feel a generation’s progress is lost, and argue it is Buggins’ Turn carpetbaggers, the beige elite, who…
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An ironic by-blow: the nation-state wriggles out of European modernity
AS THE JOKE GOES, Britain has left the EU, when will it leave the US? Exiting the EU was more than retreating from the Pax Europaea, the post-war settlement of ‘let’s stop fighting and get on’. It was a slipping out the back door from European modernity, without a bye or toodle-pip. François Hollande, in…
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General election(s) year: UK’s social contract up for renewal… but don’t let the utopians spoil it, as we have the solution already
TRUMP HAS OVERPOWERED US politics, irrespective of November’s presidential election result. How? Encounter, recognition, participation. Great Campaigners offer these in bucket-loads. More immediately a Republican presidency is seen as holing-below-the-waterline the Pax Americana. Teasing that the US will no longer guarantee the Western Alliance. This is the Republican’s ‘pumped-social-contract’, boilerplating anti-statist Jack Reacher-style ‘toothbrush and…
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Essays on power and change in Western democracies: Globalisation hits reverse – the end of The Modern Efficiency State (of mind)
THE UK’S INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY is a holy trinity of efficiency, jobs, prosperity. A sugar, salt and fats hit to the national bloodstream. But industry is not a magical answer to communities. And putting to death the manufacturing mirage is Rasputin-like. New manufacturing requires eye-watering complexity, beyond the UK’s capability. Our favourite nemesis, due to its…
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Essays on power and change in Western democracies: Harry and Meghan, shaping the British constitution
HARRY and Meghan’s docuseries is the first fully-formed independent critique from within this normally well-managed monarchy. Its impact is inevitable. Largely as the British constitution is discourse-based, and any new narrative will be felt keenly. That is, the constitution is referent to the long-text of British history. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s rostrum, Netflix,…
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Essays on power and change in Western democracies: UK recovery can draw from Germany’s structural reforms
“THERE is one thing we could still ask of Herr Brandt: what exactly were you doing during those 12 years away from Germany?” Pitched in 1961, the question was timed to intercept future chancellor Willy Brandt’s rising star. The inquisitor, Franz Josef Strauss, conservative leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), had fought in…
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