Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman who once suggested Jewish space lasers started California wildfires, has become an unlikely barometer for the state of democracy worldwide. While European analysts once focused on American exceptionalism as a force for global stability, they now watch Greene’s latest antics with the same morbid fascination usually reserved for slow-motion…
ActBlue and the Global Democratization of Panic-Donating By Our Correspondent, Still Jet-lagged in Three Time Zones PARIS—If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if an ATM and a guilt trip had a baby, meet ActBlue. The little blue engine that could—and did—hoover up $14 billion for U.S. Democrats since 2004 is no longer a quaint…
Durham, North Carolina – In the grand, slow-motion car-crash we politely call “global politics,” it is often the quiet governors of mid-sized U.S. states who remind the rest of the planet how truly provincial the world’s super-power can be. Enter Roy Cooper: a man whose name sounds like an Oxfordshire estate agent but who, since…
Adelita Grijalva and the Global Art of Being Politically Unfireable By Our Correspondent in the Department of Schadenfreude Studies Tucson, Arizona—If you’ve never heard of Adelita Grijalva, congratulations: you have successfully avoided American local politics, a pastime that ranks somewhere below competitive taxidermy on the international glamour scale. Yet Ms. Grijalva’s recent re-election to the…
**The Man Who Would Be Kingmaker: Ed Davey’s Global Appeal to the Chronically Undecided** In an era where world leaders stumble over their own red lines like drunken tightrope walkers, Sir Ed Davey has emerged as Britain’s answer to the question nobody asked: “What if we had a political leader who looked like your favorite…
Judge Timothy Kelly and the Quiet Art of Global Containment By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Washington, D.C.—If geopolitics were a dinner party, Judge Timothy Kelly would be the soft-spoken guest who quietly confiscates the carving knife while everyone else debates whether the roast is overcooked. Appointed to the U.S….
When Rappler, the Philippine digital news site founded by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, announced yet another court date last week, the global press corps barely flinched. We’ve seen this tango before: government subpoenas, sudden tax cases, the slow bureaucratic garrote—democracy’s version of death by a thousand paper cuts. From Berlin to Buenos Aires, editors simply…
**The Accidental Diplomat: How a Virginia Congresswoman Became the World’s Accidental Weathervane** Abigail Spanberger, the CIA-turned-Congresswoman from Virginia, has become something of an international Rorschach test—everyone sees in her what they desperately want to believe about America’s future. To European diplomats sipping espresso in Brussels cafés, she’s proof that rational Americans still exist somewhere between…
**Minnesota’s Modest Electoral Circus: Why a Quiet Northern State Has the Planet Peeking Over Its Snowbank** From the outside, Minnesota looks like the world’s politest amphitheater: 10,000 lakes, 5.7 million earnest citizens, and a winter so long that even despair puts on a parka and waits in line for hot dish. Yet every four years…
From Kiev to Kyoto, district attorneys are rarely the stuff of diplomatic cables. Yet in the spring of 2024, Fulton County’s Fani Willis has become the unlikely protagonist in a morality play that is being binge-watched from Brussels to Bangkok. While her name still sounds to European ears like a cheerful budget airline, the reverberations…
Cornel West Doesn’t Need Your Permission Slip By our correspondent in the departures lounge of American credibility The last time Cornel West ran for president—2024, in case the years now blur like cheap vodka—he did so without a party, a billionaire, or, apparently, a single pollster who believed in oxygen. He still managed to appear…
**The Eternal Return of Beto O’Rourke: America’s Political Groundhog Day Goes Global** In the grand theater of American politics, where sincerity and performance art have become indistinguishable, Beto O’Rourke has achieved something remarkable: he’s become the political equivalent of that friend who keeps announcing they’re “really leaving this time” at a party, only to be…
