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1 month ago | 
nytimes.com | David Runciman
Long regarded as two versions of the same populist phenomenon, they're now clearly two different stories - each with its own cautionary tale. Credit... Photo illustration by Ricardo Tomás On Aug. 18, 2016, Donald Trump tweeted: "They will soon be calling me MR BREXIT!" This was a surprise, as just a couple of months earlier Trump didn't appear to know what "Brexit" meant. In an interview with Michael Wolff for The HollywoodReporterin June, he needed a lot of prompting. "And Brexit?
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1 month ago | 
flipboard.com | David Runciman
3 days agoA plan to deport people to countries that aren’t their home is cruel, performative politics—whether it works or not. Last May, the United Kingdom’s Home Office posted footage that showed immigration officers going door to door and marching migrants into a waiting van. “BREAKING,” a caption read, …
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1 month ago | 
lrb.co.uk | David Runciman
The Mont Pelerin Society was set up in 1947 with the aim of ensuring that the apparent triumph of freedom over fascism in the Second World War should instead be understood as a defeat. Inspired by its founding father, Friedrich von Hayek, whose rallying call The Road to Serfdom had been published three years earlier, the organisation believed that the price of victory had been too high.
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2 months ago | 
theguardian.com | David Runciman |Andrew McGregor |Esther Opoku-Gyeni |Nicola Alexandrou |Ellie Bury
We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2021: The generational divide is deforming democracy. But there is a solution
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Jan 27, 2025 | 
lrb.co.uk | David Runciman
The speeches American presidents deliver on the day of their inauguration don’t make much of a difference to anything. A handful have given resonant phrases to the language (‘The better angels of our nature’, ‘Nothing to fear but fear itself’) but most are soon folded away and mothballed along with the event as a whole.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | David Runciman
Unusually for a politician, Tony Blair is an authentic writer, in that he authentically sounds like himself. His post-prime-ministerial memoir, A Journey, published in 2010, was long, discursive, eccentric, a bit mystical, but also matey, self-confident, sometimes blunt, occasionally cheesy. It read like he’d written every word of it.
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Sep 21, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | David Runciman
Is Donald Trump really a fascist? It’s a question that has been bubbling away since he first announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015 after a years-long campaign to brand Barack Obama an illegitimate occupant of the White House. Back then his questioning of Obama’s citizenship appeared overtly racist (“When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18 @BarackObama was Barry Soweto”).
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Jun 19, 2024 | 
podcasts.apple.com | David Runciman
For the final episode in the current series, David discusses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), her unforgettable dystopian vision of a future American patriarchy. Where is Gilead? When is Gilead? How did it happen? How can it be stopped? From puritanism and slavery to Iran and Romania, from demography and racism to Playboy and Scrabble, this novel takes the familiar and the known and makes them hauntingly and terrifyingly new.
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Apr 15, 2024 | 
beatlyzer.com | David Runciman |Nicola Alexandrou |Ellie Bury
Four years connected from nan commencement of nan pandemic, nan play whitethorn person subsided but nan lingering effects spell on. Are we suffering from governmental agelong Covid? By David RuncimanHow to perceive to podcasts: everything you request to know
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Mar 30, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | David Runciman
The brief and calamitous premiership of Liz Truss broke all sorts of political records. It was the shortest by far in British history – just 49 days, though oddly in those seven weeks she became the first prime minister since Churchill to serve under two monarchs. Her approval rating before she resigned – 9% – was the worst yet recorded by any modern UK party leader.
