We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This Monday, paid subscribers got July’s ET Ask Home.
Paid subscribers also get the premium version of The Election Tricycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on this year’s elections in the United States, United Kingdom, and India.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For Prospect (UK version), I wrote about the existential election and the competing realities being offered to us.
For New Lines, I wrote about July 4 movies and their theme of self-delusion in the face of a looming crisis that will not go away until they are faced.
On a related note, this week on The Election Tricycle, we talked about last week’s disastrous debate and this week’s disastrous Supreme Court decision and also the UK election.
From the Guardian: “Armed with rhetoric about the “deep state”, a conservative-backed group is planning to publicly name and shame career government employees that they consider hostile to Donald Trump. This ‘blacklist’ of civil servants, which will be published online, is intended to advance Trump’s broader goals, which, if elected, include weeding out government employees and replacing them with loyalists.”
From Axios: “The American Civil Liberties Union is already looking at how to challenge a future Trump administration's efforts to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs inside and outside of government, according to a new memo.”
If anyone reading this knows anyone on Slovakia’s national team, please tell them to forgive and be proud of themselves.
Albanian literary giant Ismail Kadare passed away at the age of 88. (Shout out to my friend Paul, a huge Kadare fan, who got me one of his novels in grad school.)
MY VIEWS ON…
…the Tories!
The Tories lost as expected last night in the UK elections. We managed to watch the results on Sky News (thanks to BritBox — who knew it provided this service!) and saw such delights as Keir Starmer delivering his acceptance speech while standing next to a candidate dressed as Elmo.
We also saw the panel discussion, during which we heard what I think will be the beginning (or maybe it’s already begun) of a debate within the Conservative Party over whether the way to get back to power is to try to move further right to win back votes that went to Reform (Nigel Farage, who finally won a seat in parliament on his eighth attempt, is a buffoon, but not uninfluential) or to not do that.
I do not really expect anyone in the Conservative Party to be reading this, but in case you are: Hi! Thanks for reading. It is very rare that the centre right absorbed the far-right or hard right without becoming far-right or hardright (and, in the case of the Netherlands, eventually lost to them, anyway). There are many cases where the reverse has happened: where the centre-right either ended up adopting policies that pulled them from the centre, or where they got into business with rightwing politicians to keep or get power and then found it was those individuals who ended up dictating policy. As a Ukrainian once put it to me: If you put a pickle in with some cucumbers, you now have a bunch of pickles.
And some would argue that we just saw this movie, and that trying to appease Farage the last time brought about Brexit, which a majority of British voters now believe was a mistake. The sequel probably won’t be any good either.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
From Haaretz: “Israel's left-wing parties Labor and Meretz announced they have merged and will now be known as The Democrats.” (Interesting choice of name at this moment in history.)
At New Lines, Lisa Goldman has a moving dispatch on the Nova Music Festival Exhibition.
Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli came out in support of French far-right figure Marine Le Pen.
-ET
"Chancellor of Exchequer Rishi Sunak Spring Statement" by UK Prime Minister is licensed under CC BY 2.0.