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The title paraphrases the Bill Clinton 1992 election campaign slogan, aiming to focus the debate on economic performance. The implication was that we are in a post-political period, where ideology is no longer important and where what matters is economic outcomes. This is a view shared by many, and the basis of most elections these days. Let’s not vote on how we may fundamentally change society to be fairer, but on how we may grow the economy so we all get a little bit more despite horrific distribution inequality. The Capitol riots, however, help us refocus. What good is it to have a reasonably good economy when the legal security afforded by democratic institutions may be in peril? How does money help you in a country run by a bully who may, at his whim, direct angry mobs against you with a single tweet? This could destroy your job, your company or even your life. If your safety and security are beholden to the whims of a sociopath and their sycophants, is economic comfort enough?...

In the last few days I have assisted, with dismay, to the rule of law debate in the context of the approval of EU budgets for the coming six years. Hungary and Poland are digging their heels, refusing to approve the budget unless funds release is decoupled from rule of law performance. Their argument is that these are separate issues and should be handled as such. The disagreement really hinges on each party’s understanding of the EU. In fact, the different understandings of what it is, in different member states, pose one of its greatest challenges. Some see the EU as a common market, an economic construct, but others see it as a political union. The answer really is in its founding treaties, which have democracy and the rule of law at their centre, and economic cooperation attached to them. This is the Union Poland and Hungary joined. They may have done it for economic reasons, but they entered a, first and foremost, rule of law, democratic club. Rule of law is not negotiable  Le...

You have to give it to Donald Trump on grounds of originality. His relentless attack on the institutions he presides over, with the apparent objective of dismantling them, based on their alleged corruption, is something democracy seems to not have planned for. Democracies have clear, outlined defence plans for attacks by foreign powers, attacks by their own military or security forces and even attacks by their citizens, known respectively as invasion, coup d’etat and revolution. But they may not have built in protections for attack by their own president and ruling party. This is an eventuality that the Founding Fathers, Jefferson, Washington, Adams or Franklin, could not have conceived of, after such hard fought democratic independence. If the president himself leads a revolution against his own regime, who will command the military to quash it? What is the Secret Service, entrusted with protecting president and presidency, to do when the former attacks the latter? A conundrum indeed...

The other night I rewatched the Philip Kaufman movie adaptation of the seminal Milan Kundera novel, a book you should read, if you haven’t, and, at the very least, a movie you should watch. It makes you appreciate how lucky we are to be born, and live, in the social freedoms Western democracies afford us, secure in the protection of the rule of law. This story is a stark warning to those tempted by the easy solutions peddled by autocratic regimes. Tomas, its protagonist, pays a very heavy personal price for trying to defend his intellectual dignity, for refusing to retract an idea expressed. He sacrifices, by not yielding to the system, first his career and, ultimately, his life. Kundera, who grew and lived in an autocratic regime, describes with brutal realism the humiliating choices his protagonist must make to survive. The suffocating, crushing, relentless pressure he is put under is Kafkian in its overwhelming dimension. Be careful of letting the wolf in, tempted by false promises...

George Orwell’s brilliantly sharp political allegory, Animal Farm, is memorable, amongst many other things, for the sentence in the title of this post. In the dystopian society Orwell depicts, one of the fundamental pillars of democracy, the principle that all citizens are equal in the eyes of the law, falls apart, with ultimately dire consequences. This principle is one of the main differences between democracy and other political systems, such as autocracies or absolute monarchies, where the leaders, and sometimes their courts, are above the law and can act with impunity without concern for the consequences that would rein in their subjects. Donald Trump’s political interference with investigations of his affairs with the support of the US Senate, or the flouting of coronavirus lockdown restrictions by a number of members of the UK government inner circle, just to name a couple, are examples of a ruling class in our modern democracies which is dangerously drifting towards Animal Farm...

I had my early formative years in the XX century, when the US was globally regarded as a bastion of democracy. It was a bit too commercial, Americans a bit naïve, but they could be relied on to stand up for democracy and protect the international rule of law. They had a big hand in developing some of the still somewhat ineffective but aspirational global institutions we enjoy today, such as the UN, the IMF or the WHO. But things have gone badly wrong for US democracy since the turn of the century, first with the War on Terror and the rogue Iraq invasion, led more by Halliburton’s economic interest than by a genuine concern about WMDs, and now with the election of Donald Trump, America’s irreparable loss of credibility due to abandoning long held and trusted international commitments and shocking scenes of police violence we are more used to associating with banana dictatorships and totalitarian regimes. Democracy needs a new champion, and the only candidate at present seems to be Europ...