When Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa in 1994, he faced a dilemma. The leaders of the now fallen apartheid regime had presided over a system that routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed many of its black citizens, and an entire generation of white politicians faced trial and imprisonment for clear and outrageous human rights violations. Mandela had more reason than most to thirst for retribution, having endured nearly three decades of imprisonment, but wisely recognised that healing his nation’s […]

Trump has lost. Joe Biden has won. America’s democracy appears to have narrowly dodged a bullet, but although few elections in US history have caused such an outpouring of joy, in the cold light of day Americans will have to face up to what remains a disturbingly bleak picture. Politically, the nation remains gravely divided. 73-million Americans took stock of the last four years, saw the racism, corruption, nepotism and extraordinary incompetence, and still cast their ballot for Donald Trump. […]

The appointment of judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States represents a stunning coda to Donald Trump’s four years of shredding American political norms and institutions. Barrett’s lack of experience and extremist views, coupled with the extraordinary timing of her confirmation, make this the most controversial Supreme Court appointment in American history. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wasted no time in discarding the dying wish of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that her replacement not be appointed […]

Back in the 1980’s, New York mafia boss John Gotti earned the nickname ‘the Teflon Don’ because no matter what the law threw at him, nothing ever seemed to stick. Yet while Gotti seemed invulnerable for years, his biography is of a man they couldn’t get – until they did. Gotti’s crimes finally caught up with him, and the Teflon Don died alone in jail. America’s teflon president has shown a similar ability to defy political gravity. As candidate, Trump’s […]

Recent actions by the Trump administration have seen much invocation of Godwin’s law, the adage that any political discussion will eventually devolve into a comparison to Hitler and the Nazis. The idea that America’s president is a fascist was initially met with derision, and although resistance to that idea has perhaps softened as we’ve witnessed Trump in action, the Nazi analogy still mostly fails to stick. It might be time to put that aside. This week, a whistle-blower filed a […]

In any other era, the release of a report detailing direct connections between presidential campaign officials and Russian intelligence would be the news event of the decade. The story of a Republican campaign chairman liaising directly with a Russian intelligence officer in order to sway an election would form a central part of any president’s legacy, in the same way that Clinton and Lewinsky or Nixon and Watergate are inextricably linked. In the Trump era, it may prove to be […]

The prospects for freedom have not always looked so grim. Democratic change swept across the world from the mid-1970’s to around 2000. From Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America, authoritarians and dictators fell and were replaced by nascent democracies, in what political scientist Samuel Huntingdon called ‘the third wave’ of modern global democratisation. What a contrast to the picture today. Since the Arab Spring provided a brief moment of hope, the cause of freedom has been steadily set back […]