The Spectator 🇺🇸

The November 9 edition of The Spectator has gone to press, featuring: 💍 @mtracey 💍 @KeenanPeachy 💍 @DouglasKMurray 💍 @curtis_yarvin 💍 @default_friend 💍 @rogerkimball 💍 @geoffrey_cain

An anarchist is not everyone's idea of a dependable friend. John Gardner, it seems, was an exception. A tribute to a man who had little use for authority but plenty of time for friendship. ✍️ Bill Kauffman Article | trib.al/k32ZGqK

The Founding Fathers designed a republic to survive tyrants, demagogues and idiots. They may have underestimated America's talent for producing all three. ✍️ @rogerkimball Article | trib.al/TWHbpvF

Silicon Valley's billionaires have found a friend in Trump. Democrats, meanwhile, are sharpening their knives for AI. The tech industry's political honeymoon may be over. ✍️ Geoffrey Cain Article | trib.al/c4bYTFz

Texas Democrats have spent years dreaming of turning the Lone Star State blue. The latest election has given them plenty to think about – and little to celebrate. ✍️ Neal Pollack Article | trib.al/GieJs5o

Trump has spent years pointing the finger at America's enemies. Perhaps it's time he looked in the mirror. ✍️ @JacobHeilbrunn Article | trib.al/qTvrfqM

The twilight of boomer Republicanism. A changing of the guard – if there’s even a guard left to change. ✍️ Daniel McCarthy Article | trib.al/zep1w40

“It's the corruption, stupid.” Forget the slogans. The midterms were a reckoning over something rather less glamorous: political sleaze. ✍️John Fund Article | trib.al/TTqbeTh

President Trump has long sought to create a political realignment in America. He succeeded on Tuesday night. In declaring that the voters should behave as though he were on the midterms ballot, Trump singlehandedly resurrected the Democratic party which is poised to win both the House and Senate as well as numerous statewide races. The midterms don’t represent a setback for Trump but a crushing rebuke. For all his huffing and puffing about a stolen election in the run-up to the midterms, Trump told the New York Times on Tuesday evening that he accepts the results. “We’ll work with the Democrats, and we’ll, you know, look forward to working with them,” he said. “We’ll probably work something out.” Much like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who faced a similar revolt over corruption and an infirm economy, Trump appears to be a spent force. ✍️ @JacobHeilbrunn Article: spectator.com/article/trump-…

Way back in early May, I predicted in a Spectator cover story that “it looks likely that the Democrats will win both chambers (House and Senate),” as has now come to pass. The major reason I identified was “that a considerable number of his own ordinary voters have come to believe that it’s Trump himself rigging the system now, and only in his own favor.” It’s fair to say the Trump administration completely rejected polls showing the growing danger. They not only didn’t see it as an emerging issue, but the President himself dismissed it. In January, Trump gave the New York Times an Oval Office interview in which he was asked why he was allowing his children to pursue business deals while he was in office. He said he had banned such activity in his first term, “and I got absolutely no credit for it,” although it was “really unfair to them.” He was succeeded by Joe Biden who he asserted was all about “total corruption.” So his second term would be different because, he claimed, “I found that nobody cared” about the issue. The midterm results prove he couldn’t have been more wrong. ✍️ @johnfund Article: spectator.com/article/indeed…

The paradox is that we have no problem in accepting that Providentialism in the past was real, or that selected luminaries in our history had views about hierarchy and inequality that today we find objectionable. Attitudes change with time, though so many of us refuse to adopt the same attitude to slavery. Yet slavery was as normal as Providentialism and hierarchical ideas about human nature. David Eltis, in his recent masterpiece, Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades, one of the best books published last year, and using copious details from newly available digital archives, shows how utterly normal and accepted slavery was, by everyone, and how complicit so many nations were in its trade. ✍️ Peter Watson on the stupidity of demanding an apology for slavery spectator.com/article/the-st…