In today’s episode of Critical Conditions, Claire asked me a provocative question: Is it time for European leaders to meddle openly in American politics? What a delicious proposition! After Trump just idiotically accused them of “civilizational decline,” it would be justice served lukewarm. But it would go against type, I said.
Certainly this would be a much better policy than showing up at the White House and lying through their teeth to heap hypocritical praise on the infantile blowhard huckster who has set up a snake oil shop on once-hallowed ground.
But I fear they would not be anywhere near as successful as Putin interfering effectively. “Criminals are better at crime,” was my logic. Claire did not disagree, but wished they would send over a really compelling speaker to explain to the American people how much damage was being done in their name. Not every interference has to involve hacking electronic voting machines or deploying bot armies from a sweatshop in Vietnam. A speaker in Congress may suffice.
And that’s a mighty fine idea. Now to find such a speaker. Could take a while.
And as for Europe, or more accurately its bristly fringes, I also added a wrinkle to my previous reporting on the podcast (which I’ll detail on AQL). As I’ve said, Britain feels unsettled in a way that’s hard to capture in polling alone. Beneath the surface, something important may be shifting. Brexit, long treated as an unmentionable trauma, is quietly being re-examined. Growth has stalled and bo one has a credible economic idea that does not, eventually, circle back to Europe.
Meanwhile, the old political coalitions appear to be collapsing. Labour has lost much of its traditional working-class base to Reform — the successor to the Brexit Party — while consolidating support among professional, urban voters who loathe Brexit and feel economically and culturally marooned by it. This mirrors, in an eerie way, what we’ve seen in the United States: center-left parties bleeding voters they once assumed were theirs, and gaining voters they never quite know how to speak for. That fragmentation matters because Britain’s first-past-the-post system is poorly designed for an era of four or five parties each hovering around 15–20 percent. It is a recipe for paralysis — or for a radical realignment that no one fully controls.
Claire was more troubled by Trump’s rambling and widely panned speech the other day. She argued that he appears cognitively diminished in ways that are increasingly hard to ignore. His recent speech to the nation was alarming not because it was dishonest — that has long been the baseline — but because it revealed profound difficulty with language itself. Paraphasia, loss of verbal control, and broken syntax are neurological warning signs, the argument goes.
I can’t dispute any of that, but argued that we are not clinicians. Also that Biden was diminished and this was covered up, which is a problem. And that Trump, realistically, always seemed quite strange. Mainly, though, I argued that the Republicans simply cannot be trusted to do the right thing or to act in a patriotic manner. Claire seemed more inclined to believe they will wake up. I said that if the Supreme Court overturns Trump’s plainly illegal tariff war, that might be a sign. One might ask whether the Supreme Court is a political player; one might proposal to sell the asker of such a question a very used car.
That, in the end, is what Critical Conditions is about. Never despair — but refuse to lie to ourselves about where we actually are.
