Michael Lewis’s protagonists see things that other people miss. In The Big Short, it was the small group of investors who anticipated the financial crisis. In Moneyball, it was a coach at the Oakland Athletics who harnessed the power of statistics to upend the conventional wisdom of baseball scouting. In The Undoing Project, it was […]
If the polls are to be believed, Joe Biden is enjoying something of a honeymoon period. By the standards of modern America’s hyperpartisan politics, his approval rating is reasonably robust, his big-spending economic agenda is fairly popular and his Covid response has won widespread support. But there is an exception to this rosy picture, and […]
When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex broke with the Royal Family, they promised that their “life of public service” would continue. Already, Prince Harry has found a useful role: as a leading indicator of which ideas, trends and fads have become nothing more than the shallow fixations of bien pensant jet-setters. A day after […]
American millennials might disagree about what is wrong with their country, but they all know who to blame: the baby boomers. Through sheer force of numbers, the cohort born between 1945 and 1964 have been the most important voters and consumers for almost half a century. They have set the economic, cultural and political running, […]
One of the many disturbing video clips from Wednesday’s Capitol Hill riot shows an outnumbered police officer retreating up a staircase after realising that he alone would not be able to stop the pro-Trump mob led by a man wearing a QAnon t-shirt. At first, the footage appeared to be evidence of a policing failure: […]
There was a lot to like about the results of last month’s US elections. From a suboptimal menu, the US electorate opted for the best available option: a clear rejection of Donald Trump and an equally unambiguous refutation of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Other CapX contributors and readers will surely disagree, but […]
Many obituaries of the Republican Party have been written in the last four years. According to a typical example, a New York Times editorial written two weeks ago titled “RIP GOP”, the party’s ideology “has been reduced to a slurry of paranoia, white grievance and authoritarian populism. Its governing vision is reactionary, a cross between […]
“The only middle finger available”. That is how National Review editor Rich Lowry preemptively explains a hypothetical shock Donald Trump win next week. “After months and months of statues toppling and riots in American cities and a crime wave and woke virtue-signalling from professional sports leagues and absurd firings and cancellations, the year would end […]
Donald Trump’s presidency may not have been good for the health of the Republic, but it has been a boon to its publishing houses. Over the last four years, America’s bookshops and bestseller lists have been stuffed full of works about the 45th President of the United States. From explosive accounts of White House dysfunction […]
Watching the UK reopening over the summer, it sometimes felt like the Government’s approach was determined by the dictum that “everything not forbidden is compulsory” (or at least subsidised). One minute, Brits were banned from eating in restaurants or going to the office. The next they were given taxpayer-funded meals out and told “go back […]
Two of the more surprising speakers at the Republican National Convention this week were Mark and Patricia McCloskey. You may have seen their photograph online: the preppily-dressed white couple who pointed a pistol and an assault rifle at a crowd of protesters outside their house in St Louis, Missouri, in June. The moment soon became […]
Even in a city of ideological chameleons, Joe Biden’s ability to blend in stands out. The Democratic presidential candidate has spent half a century shifting his views to match the mood of the moment. Tough on crime in the 1990s, he has taken up the mantle of police reform a quarter of a century later. […]
On my short list of coronavirus silver linings is finally getting round to reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs’ classic 1961 account of why some cities and neighbourhoods thrive and others don’t. The book’s provocative thesis was recognised as important from the moment it was published and it quickly became […]
As Twitter users will know, it is never long after logging on that you come across someone who is wrong on the internet. And yet, for all the obvious wrongness out there, it is harder than you might think to find something that is completely wrong about absolutely everything. However, the authors of The Tragedy […]
There aren’t many things capable of uniting hardline climate sceptics and the sort of far-left environmental activists you might find at an Extinction Rebellion rally. However, Planet of the Humans, a new documentary by Jeff Gibbs which targets mainstream environmentalism and the clean energy industry, manages to do exactly that. Released last week to coincide […]
The go-to tool for puncturing outlandish conspiracy theories is Occam’s razor, the principle that the simplest explanation for something is also the most likely to be true. For example, maybe Canadian pop star Avril Lavigne’s departure from her trademark tomboyish look is evidence that she died in 2002 and was replaced by a clone, as […]
Washington, DC, is grinding to a halt. Last week, it was possible to leave your home, see restaurants with customers and streets only slightly emptier than usual, and convince yourself that life as we know it was not about to be put on hold. Not any more. The list of legitimate reasons to go out […]
American public life is not short on warnings of existential threats. Barely a day goes by without the country being told that Trump is dismantling vital institutions, or that Democrats threaten cherished freedoms or that billionaires are robbing the rest of us of the livelihoods we deserve. In this feverish climate, telling a relatively banal […]
In the three-and-a-half years since Donald Trump’s victory, the debate over the cause of that political earthquake has been distilled into one question: economics or culture? The slightly longer version goes something like this: Did Trump ride a wave of discontent from the ‘left-behind’ of recent economic history to the White House, or did he […]
A lot changed in British politics on December 12. One thing that didn’t was the tendency to draw misleading comparisons between Boris Johnson and foreign leaders. The most common, and arguably the silliest, is the idea that Johnson is “the British Trump” — a claim made by the President himself and peddled by Jeremy Corbyn […]
