Colin Kidd

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Articles

Commencing Demagogues and Ending Tyrants

Oct 16, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Lawrence Lessig |Matthew A. Seligman |Colin Kidd

‘The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.’ The tweet came in the early hours of 7 November 2012, when it seemed likely that the Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, who had lost the electoral college to Barack Obama, might end up ahead of Obama in the popular vote. In a further message, subsequently deleted, the same tweeter added that Obama had ‘lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election.
The Conservative catastrophe

Jul 2, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Colin Kidd

Recent polling predicts electoral catastrophe for the Conservatives. A Survation poll taken in the first half of June anticipated the party winning only 72 seats out of 650 in the next House of Commons, while an equally dire YouGov survey taken at the end of the second week of June had the Conservatives with a paltry 18 per cent of the vote, a percentage point behind the right-wing populist insurgents of Reform UK.
The strange death of conservatism

May 16, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Colin Kidd

Pundits anticipate an “extinction-level event” for the Tories at the next general election. Conservative politicians are feeling the same vibes: in the past few weeks alone two Tory MPs – Dan Poulter and Natalie Elphicke – have crossed the floor to Labour.
The strange death of conservatism

May 15, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Colin Kidd

Pundits anticipate an “extinction-level event” for the Tories at the next general election. Conservative politicians are feeling the same vibes: in the past few weeks alone two Tory MPs – Dan Poulter and Natalie Elphicke – have crossed the floor to Labour.
When the lights went out

Feb 21, 2024 | newstatesman.com | Colin Kidd

Received wisdom holds that the decisive turning point in late-20th-century British politics was the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1979. It was followed a year and a half later by Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in the American presidential election. These two events marked the rise of the New Right.
Highbrow Mother Goose

Feb 14, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Colin Kidd

Most historians nowadays are suspicious of ‘constitutional history’, in part because they’re uneasy about its associations with the Anglocentric arrogance of what is sometimes called Whig history, a self-satisfied celebration of England’s relatively smooth progress towards liberal outcomes. The historical reaction against Whig triumphalism also exposed the intellectual limitations of constitutional history as a means of apprehending the past.
‘Drown her in the Avon’

Aug 30, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Colin Kidd

Until the last half-century, reconfigurations of the literary and historical canon largely involved the insertion, repudiation or reordering of a cast of dead white males. Since then, there have been efforts to expand disciplinary canons to incorporate more women and greater racial and ethnic diversity. At first glance, the inclusion of Catharine Macaulay’s writings in the influential Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought looks like a straightforward example of this.
Hanged on a Venerable Elm

Jan 25, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Stacy Schiff |Colin Kidd

Viewed on television and from a safe distance, the Trumpite insurrection of 6 January 2021 looked bedraggled and tawdry – not least by contrast with the sedate backdrop of the Capitol. Although construction didn’t begin until 1793, the neoclassical building irresistibly evokes the high-mindedness of the Founding Fathers. How low America seemed to have fallen, from these philosopher-statesmen to Trump and his followers.