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Janan Ganesh

Thursday 25th of April 2024

2020 Presidential election It is almost impossible for Mr Trump to disappoint people. They never had hopes to dash. … Many others never believed that he or anyone else could, in that tellingly vague aspiration, make America great again. Their vote was more a howl against perceived national decline than a calculated attempt to arrest it. They are not standing over his shoulder with key performance indicators. That would imply some hope in the first place. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 1, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
2020 Presidential election The problem … is not Mr Biden's failure to kindle passion in people. It is our psychic need for such a person in the first place. His election might reacquaint the US with politics as it should be and has been: a machine for the arbitration of conflicting claims, and not as the basis of one's whole identity. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 16, 2020 © 2019 Kwiple.com
2020 Presidential election Soliciting opinions on the eve of 2020, I find that people who least desire a second term for the US president are the quickest to predict it. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 1, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
2020 Presidential primaries It is said that Ms Warren's ideas would make life harder for finance, a warning that threatens to cost her literally tens of voters. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, October 31, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Affluence Beyond a certain point, it seems, the civic returns on economic growth are nil or even negative. The left's theory is that distribution counts for more than raw scale of wealth or its rate of growth. Too wide a gap between rich and poor tests the tensile strength of their civic bond. There is a darker explanation to entertain, though: that something about prosperity itself frees voters to toy with politics. Call it recreational extremism. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 6, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Afghanistan War This, in the end, is what the big screen's relative neglect of the Afghan war comes down to. The modern incapacity for despair. Most wars connote glory (the second world war) or folly (Iraq),  either of which is a guide to future action. This one was not a teachable moment so much as an extended riddle. It was right to go in and it was hopeless to go in. We have to leave and it is rash to leave. citation Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 9, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
American exceptionalism In most western democracies, the defeated can go on to make a living in business. America is almost unique in being able to keep election-losers in handsome employment within  politics. There is always a television slot, a think-tank sinecure, a tax-exempt political action committee, a speaking gig, a book deal. … Think of the incentive structure here. Why moderate to win office if you can have the same trappings out of it? Fear of unelectability is what keeps political parties from embracing wild ideas. If that fear goes … an important check on extremism falls away. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, Feb. 27, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
The American West The physicality of the west would count for little if it did not also foster a distinct cast of mind. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 16/17, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Authoritarianism While liberal countries tend to be liberal in much the same way, there are flavours of autocracy, and they pair badly. The ethnic chauvinist hates the universal Marxist. The cleric hates the colonel. Two theocracies of different denominations hate each other. “Axis” was a kind word for a group of second world war belligerents — Germany, Italy and Japan — that rarely viewed each other as racial or civilisational equals. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, August 24, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Beliefs The greatest public calamities do not stem from any one belief system, but from fervent belief itself. The Iraq war remains a haunting case in point but the crash of 2008 also fits the pattern. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, August 14, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Change How does a nation make painful reforms when it is still richer, safer and freer than most? … It is precisely because enough people have enough to lose that change is provocative. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 1, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Change The non-doing of stupid things is as precious as any crusade for positive change. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, August 14, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Change [T]he pleasure principle revived, and during the decade we now associate with Eisenhower conformism. Such is the unreliability of nostalgia. Such also, is the process of social change. That is, by the time it shows up in the laws of the land, all the hardest work was done a while ago. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, May 15, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Change The trick for individuals, and for larger entities, is to understand that malaise can be the worse fate. Crises often force change. Tolerable underperformance is, or can be, for keeps. … Cause and effect are hard to establish, but the record keeps throwing up these chronological proximities of crisis and profound innovation. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 1, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Change Voters trust the business of change to those who don't seem excessively keen on it. Janesh Ganesh, Financial Times, August 6, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Children The most adult conversations I have are with the childless. They read more, attend more, travel more and (through lack of mental distraction, I stress, not higher intellect) notice more. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 4, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
China To be in Washington is to sense a nation sliding into open-ended conflict against China with eerily little debate. Politicians who can be counted on to dispute the colour of the sky or the sum of two plus two are of a piece on the necessity of a superpower duel. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 15, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Christianity Donald Trump's leaked remarks to evangelical leaders last month contained a telling choice of possessive pronoun: “I just ask you to go out and make sure all of your people vote.” Another Republican president might have referred to “our people”. This one does not feign membership of the flock. He tables an earthly bargain: it is me, or a Democrat; Brett Kavanaugh, or a liberal justice, on the US Supreme Court. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 5, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Cities If a city is not borderline unlivable, I question its greatness. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, October 7, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Cities People do not move to big cities to meet different kinds of people. They move there to meet like-minded people: the ones they could not find in their ambitionless suburb or waning town. Even in London, the centre of every profession in British life, people slide into work-defined tribes unless they actively fight against it. The one place where you can meet almost anyone becomes the one place where you probably won't. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 2/3, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus It turns out that liberalism does not by definition breed egoism and irresolution. A lot of the easy calumnies against it (“We could never fight a war now”) appear less certain. And if the “horizontal” bond among citizens is a bit stronger than assumed, so is their “vertical” cord with government. Anti-elitism – the spirit of the age, we thought – is broad but it can also be shallow, or at least selective. The speed with which people deferred to the medical and bureaucratic establishment was telling. The crisis has found nothing more wanting than our cynicism. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, May 13, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus [W]hen all this is over, there is likely to be a new social contract. The mystery is whether it will be more Dickensian (in the best sense) or Orwellian (also in the best sense). That is, will it pressure the rich to give more to the commons or will it absolutely oblige them? Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, March 27, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Democracy As a rule of thumb, a democracy is in good health  to the extent that its politics do not matter. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 19, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Democracy If and when US democracy falls, giggling complacency, not moustache-twirling villainy, will be the presiding atmosphere. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 7, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Democracy In the end,  the public's exasperation with democracy is an implied self-criticism. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 9, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Democracy Key to the smooth running of democracy is the indifference of much of the population, much of the time. Voters are crucial as an eye on things, as a righter of the ship of state when it lists. That requires a measure of knowledge. Round-the-clock absorption is something else. It causes politics to take place in too loud a setting, laws to be made in too hot a smithy. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 25, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Democratic Party It is the developing trend of the party, not its record, Among its Washington corps of politicians, fewer and fewer are masters, as Mr [Mitch] McConnell is, of procedural arcana. What knavery it used to have was often learnt in the unions. The tone of the party is now set by younger and more educated activists who treat politics as a matter of first principles, not mechanisms – as a cause, not a craft. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, October 11, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Democrats Even the party’s most progressive field for a generation or two does not contemplate taxes that are European in breadth and depth. Pressed on this point, Democrats invoke the sage that was Willie Sutton. The criminal of yore targeted banks because, he said, with unanswerable logic, “That’s where the money is.” In a country with America’s titanic inequalities, the top 1 per cent is where the money is. It is the obvious percentile to press for revenue. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, Febtruary 26, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Democrats In targeting just the richest [1% for tax increases], Democrats rather imply that a welfare state is only worthwhile insofar as someone else pays for it. It is not an inherent good. It is not a nation's binding agent. In this sense, the Sanders and especially the Warren platform is a tacit concession to the Republican view of the world, with tax as a burden, not what the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes defined as “what we pay for civilised society.” The Democratic appeal is less to Nordic universalism and solidarity than to the noblesse oblige of a remote overclass who will not miss the money. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, Feb. 26, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Democrats What the US left appears to want is social democracy as understood by Robin Hood. It would tax astronomical wealth to fund popular programmes. It would not ask much more of the middle or even the upper middle classes. … This does, however, put them at some odds with the social democrats of Europe, who tax more citizens more heavily. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, Febtruary 26, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Diverse v. cosmopolitan Being diverse is not the same as being cosmopolitan. One is a material fact: this many ethnicities in a place, this many languages spoken, this many religions professed. The other is — what? — a mental state. Defining it is hard but here is my best shot:  knowing about the world, and not much caring. It is a sort of informed indifference. Some people fall down on the first point. However well they mean, their experience is narrow. Others flunk the second test.  Their focus on ethnic or other group identities can be draining and even dehumanising to be around. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 7, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Elites It is hard for even an engaged citizen to visualise the crisis that wasn't, the agonies that might have been. The result is that otherwise smart people fall for the populist fork: elites are held to be omnipotent when things go wrong and irrelevant in normal times. The Crash?  Their fault. The preceding boom? It fell from  a tree. The Iraq war? Elite hubris. Decades  on end of peace? Would have happened any-  way. A pandemic? Dereliction in high office. No pandemic? The natural order of things. This is what happens when your best and most important work is largely invisible. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 29, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Elites The most important social tensions are within the elite — not, as a decade of populism has pretended, between the elite and the people.  The person likeliest to tear down a nation's establishment is a half-member of it. He or she is close enough to have felt its condescension (which must be largely theoretical for a total outsider) and to know its weak points. Donald Trump, disdained as a bridge-and-  tunnel vulgarian for all his material privilege, is the most famous example. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 16, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Elites Of the elite corporate professions — law, finance, consultancy — the first two are vilified as ruthless. But only the third is seen as outright bullshit. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 24, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Energy But it [digital messianism] is also built on a  conceit: tech as the industry of industries; the shaper of events. It is a less tenable conceit than it was a month ago. Tech is relevant in Ukraine; see the propaganda war. But next to the existential role of energy, which keeps Russia solvent, and has the west scrambling for alternative sources, what stands out is the modesty of its bearing on events. Silicon Valley is giving history a nudge here and there, no doubt, but not setting its essential course. That is still the role of people who dig stuff out of the ground for fuel. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, March 25, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Energy  I know of no energy source that equals the desire to get out of somewhere. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 28, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Facts The problem in western democracies is not mass confusion about points of fact. The problem is that, even when apprised of the facts, even when exposed to the most objectively persuasive arguments, millions of voters remain unmoved. In a blurring of the line between politics and sport, they have picked their team, and that is that. … In other words: my president, right or wrong. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, March 7, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Foreign policy For the fourth or fifth time in my life, America is said to be on the verge of something called “isolationism”. The record, by contrast, tells us to expect another show of force in some remote trouble spot or other by mid-decade. Go with the record. … Fusing the worst of the right (aggression) with the worst of the left (righteousness), the itch to intervene is at least cross-partisan. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 7, 2021 [Ganesh was born in 1982] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Foreign relations c An unchallenged US is a divided US. It follows that America's best hope of retaining some cohesion in the coming decades is a mighty China. What is disastrous for its relative power in the world might turn out to be a godsend for its internal cohesion. Decline has its uses. … The US requires two things of an enemy: vast scale (to induce fear) and a different model of government (for a sense of otherness). The absence of the first is why al-Qaeda turned out to be such a fleeting adhesive after the September 11, 2001 atrocities. … As to the second condition, boom-era Japan, a fellow democracy, lacked it and so never crossed from daunting commercial rival to nation-binding enemy. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, 2021/02/16 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Global warming Some readers, I have learned, hate hearing this, but no carbon-saving measure can compare with having fewer children. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 18/19, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Government The atmosphere is ripe for a party of big government to sweep elections in post-pandemic America. But then so it has been before. Looking back at the past century or so, two political facts seem to hold across several rich democracies. One is the ideo- logical supremacy of the left. The other is its electoral underperformance. … We are left with one of the oddest quirks in politics. Voters often choose the party that is less keen on government to oversee its expansion. … Voters trust that parties who enlarge the state reluctantly are likely to do it sensibly. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, April 8, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Identity politics Fifteen years in and around politics have persuaded me of one thing. With exceptions, people's ideological commitments are laughably weak. They infer their beliefs from their tribe, not the other way around. A leader who clearly delineates one group from its rival – through rhetoric, through symbols – can count on credulous adoration. They are providing millions with a sense of belonging that might once have come from religion or ethnicity. Political affiliation becomes what the academic Lilliana Mason calls a “mega-identity”. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, Oct. 24, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Identity politics If there is one thing to be salvaged from Marxist thought – and, really, I must insist on just the one – it is relative indifference to matters of blood. The stress was always on material interest as the motor of history. By rejecting Marx, the US remained free and prosperous, but also defenceless against identity neuroses. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 16, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Immigration Immigration is religion’s last, best prayer in England. Muslims and west African Christians are among those bucking the native trends towards secularisation. … The quandary for conservatives could not be more awkward. Is a nation of non-Christian faith (and where Christian, often non-Anglican) better than a godless one? What in the end matters more, a citizenry that looks and sounds familiar, or one that upholds traditional morals? Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 16, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Impeachment The president's transactional worldview always implied the possibility of his own abandonment. Once he stops being useful to people, by his own logic, they have no reason to stay loyal. He does not offer a relationship much deeper than – what an airing this Latinism is getting – quid pro quo. … Whether to support Mr Trump is becoming a finer and finer calculation for Republicans. And calculation, not fraternity, is all it ever was. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, October 2, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Impeachment What has changed is not the calculus of impeachment, then. What has changed is the Democrats' propensity to calculate. Essentially, the party has stopped overthinking. Rather than second-guess the political consequences of impeachment, their concern is for – do not laugh – the principle. Janan Ganash, Financial Times, September 25, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Impeachment Whether in London or Washington, what liberals are ultimately defending is not any policy but the rule of law: the frame within which a nation paints its politics, not the choice of colours. Protecting the one might entail some sacrifice of the other. Ms Pelosi seems ready to brave the cost. The test is whether she holds to her course if voters revolt. Janan Ganash, Financial Times, September 25, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Income inequality I am “just” upper middle class. But my life is one of late-Roman decadence next to that of the median earner. If you are a corporate lawyer (not even a partner) so is yours.  If you send your children to a private school, or live in the catchment area of an acclaimed state one, so, most likely, is yours. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 9, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Income inequality The inflection point on the economic scale comes much earlier than you think. Something dramatic happens between, say, £30,000 a year and £130,000: a sharper change in the texture of life than occurs between the second number and a million. The first jump affects what you can do. The second tends to affect merely how.  The upper middle class can rent in nice districts of world-class cities. The rich can buy there. The average can do neither. The upper middle class can fly to another continent. The rich can fly business. The average must plan and econo- mise to do either. Having passed through the same universities, the upper middle class and the rich are often of a cultural feather. … How often does either befriend a nongraduate Band 5 NHS nurse? Or marry one? Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, Dec. 9, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Liberalism In which half of the West is liberalism more vulnerable: the US or Europe? Well, the raw individual clout of Trump unites and fuels America’s hard right. What serves the equivalent role in Europe  is a sense of demographic and cultural siege. The difference is that Trump will one day be gone. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 28, 2023 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Liberalism The lesson of this decade so far is that liberalism isn’t tenable without hard power. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 25, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Liberalism The woke left is a threat to liberalism. So is the post-truth right. But each is now well understood. The extent to which liberals themselves are a problem isn't. Because their creed puts such stress on reason, it attracts those who are hopeless at conflict: at the recognition of its frequent necessity, and at the actual waging of it. … Sometimes, at least, set a brute to catch a brute. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, August 16, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Leftists If you are seen as left wing and want to be seen as moderate, it is not enough to behave moderately. You must, in vivid ways, go to the right. You must oversteer to end up somewhere in the middle. Nothing less reassures the electorate or even registers with it. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, August 9, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Math At the root of maths chauvinism is a childlike craving for certainties, or at least probabilities, amid the flux of adult experience. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, October 20, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Math The most important businesses in the world used to be extractive (Shell, ExxonMobil) or industrial (Ford, Mitsubishi).  Now, they are financial (BlackRock, JP Morgan) or digital (Google, Facebook).  Companies that valued maths have given way to companies for whom maths permeates everything: it is the essence of their product. And so they have to hire in that image, which in turn incentivises the generation below to choose their educational path accordingly. The result is a brilliant but narrow over-class, who allow their super-facility in one academic discipline to colour their wider worldview. The very universality of maths encourages them to range with dangerous confidence outside their domain. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, October 20, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Mental health I can’t be the only foreigner in the US who has been chided for not having a therapist by someone who — choosing my words carefully here — seems to be getting uneven results from theirs. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, April 8, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Modernity To outgrow one’s parents is a kind of pre-bereavement before the actual one. It is also the universal tax on upward mobility, levied in all jurisdictions. But the alternative is what? Static communities? Knowing one’s place? It is an odd moral vision, but one with lots of takers on the de-growth left and the alt-right. Neither side can see that modernity creates different connections and duties, which are more touching, not less, for having no basis in blood or ethnic kinship. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 8, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Nation-states In Max Weber's definition – a monopoly on legitimate violence – the US does not have a state at all. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 12, 2021 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Nukes The fact that J Robert Oppenheimer agonised over his part in the creation of the atomic bomb is not interesting. Was he meant to whistle to work? Harry Truman, to whom it fell to use the “gadget”, is the more dramatic figure, precisely because he made what might be the most history-altering executive decision since Pontius Pilate  without much in the way of outward qualms. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 25, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Partisanship Ferocious partisanship has its uses. If nothing else, a divided nation can console itself that no government idea goes unexamined and unopposed. Scrutiny can be all the more exacting for being born of tribal malice rather than Socratic truth-seeking. The US is riven – it has managed to politicise the workaday face-mask – but it avoids the equal and opposite danger of unreflective consensus. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 15, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Partisanship For all its viciousness, partisanship makes for a perverse kind of stability in which electoral outcomes only ever vary within a tight range, even when one candidate is an impeached Twitter addict. The incentive structure this sets up for politicians is too dismal to contemplate, suggesting as it does that one can do literally anything and remain electorally viable for the grandest office on Earth. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 1, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Politics I have aired Ganesh's First Law of Politics before, but allow me a recapitulation. People do not work out their beliefs and then join the corresponding tribe.  They join a tribe and infer their beliefs from it.  The sense of belonging, the group membership, is what hooks people, not the thrill of being right or pursuing a thought on its own terms. Politics has become a team sport, goes the line on this. But even that is too kind. Sports fans are sardonic and irreverent about their own team. It isn’t so central to their identity as to require consistent adherence.   Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 2, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics It is not normal to be enthusiastic about a politician. Choosing between flawed options is the natural state of democracy. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 13, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Politics A rudder, a bedrock, a cornerstone, a north star: people used to find  these things in their personal relationships. In their church, family, factory or town. As modernity scrambled those things, mostly for the good, the need to subsume oneself into a group was going to have to be met some other way. That turned out to be politics. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 2, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Politics One test of a civilised country is whether a citizen can go days at a time without thinking about politics. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 14, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Politics The task of a politician is not to inspire. It is to get a plurality of voters to say “Oh, go on then.” Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 21, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Politics Voters want a leader to have definition, yes, but mostly in the negative. I won't raise the basic rate of income tax. I won't borrow to spend. I won't reopen Brexit. Beyond that, politicians should view policy detail as some football coaches view possession of the ball: a liability, a chance to make a mistake. A “positive vision” is not what clinches elections. It is the absence of a scary one.  Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 21, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Politics We have lost all sense of how weird it is to seek connection with others through politics. And how new. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 2, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Populism The hardest thing to convey about the Trump phenomenon, especially to intellectuals, trained to think in terms of philosophical doctrines, is how secondary the content of it has become. European populism is about something.  American populism is, to an amazing extent, about someone. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 28, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism Back in 2016, some of us had to sit through sermons about the need to “listen” to “legitimate grievances” against “broken capitalism”. Perhaps, at one stage, populism really was a howl for a fairer economy. That stage passed a while ago. It is now a tribalist game. In retrospect, Johnson and Trump should never have been bunched with Putin and Erdoğan under the “strongman” tag. They converge on tactics — rule-breaking, institutional subversion — but the difference in substance is unbridgeable. The eastern demagogues are nationalists.  If the western ones have an -ism, it is nihilism. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, June 20, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism Before it is anything else — divisive, inept, sometimes perceptive and necessary — populism is exhausting. It generates too much noise and scandal in government for all but the most news-hungry citizens to bear for long. … It would be nice to think that Americans were making a Jeffersonian statement about the importance of civic standards when they evicted [Trump] from the White House in 2020. “Enough, already,” was more like it. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 27, 2022 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism Five years since the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump, it is still not understood how much populism boils down to antic rebellion rather than (the initial theory) economic grievance or (much more a leftwing thing) doctrinal belief. This is to some extent a movement of laughing cavaliers. Violence is not their wish, but nor do they recognise it as a plausible and unintended outcome of their doings. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 7, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Populism The global race to vaccinate is having a use beyond the narrowly medical. It is delineating two populisms that my trade likes to group into a Nationalist International. The first kind is serious about the business of government. “Authoritarian” in the roundest sense, it turns the brawn of the state on social ills, real or perceived, not just political rivals. … President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil embodies [the other populism], as do the US Republicans, some of whom took until last week to commend the vaccine to their voters. This is populism as cussed and near anarchic defiance of received opinion. It is ruthless in the pursuit of power but lax to the point of dereliction in its exercise. … Distinguish these … as Old World and New World … or as “heavy” and “light”, but distinguish them. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 27, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Populism I sense that, while many voters really mean it, some are just restless and want to feel their juices bubble. I have known (and stopped knowing) lots of once-temperate people who have been carried off on the giddy ride in recent years. Their dopamine hit seems to come from the drama itself, not the content of the creed. The trouble is that it is no less dangerous for that. … Time to fathom the boredom of the prosperous dissenter. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 22, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Populism In some countries, populists cherish the grandeur and dignity of the state. In the US, they can hardly bring themselves to fund the Internal Revenue Service adequately. Even Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis — the able Trump, by repute — barred public and commercial premises from demanding proof of Covid-19 vaccination. You need not oppose him to see the differ- ence with the conventional authoritarian impulse. Picture a dystopia extrapolated from US populism in 2021. It is not a super state you see. It is a failed one. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 27, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Populism It should now be clear that western populism is not, in the end, about  very much. Don't waste any more time rationalising it as a backlash against inequality, “neoliberalism” and other things that you yourself don't like. If tangible grievances once spurred this movement, they have since given way to tribal feeling as an end in itself. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, June 20, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism  Of course, it is parochially Anglo-American of me to talk of disciplined populism as a novelty. Hungary has known it under Viktor Orbán  and Poland under the Law and Justice Party. Xi Jinping has been practising it on an awesome scale for a decade. The oldest democracies have been able to nurse the hope that, if you are a populist, you must also be too venal and inept to last in office and so the system is self-righting. Liberals elsewhere have learnt the hard way that this is too neat, too Whiggish. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 12, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Populism Put another way, fascism is about winning and doing. Populism is about losing, and cocking a snook at the winners. As a movement, it is at its happiest as a large minority of the electorate:  enough to sustain its own media ecosystem, provide earning opportunities for grifters and perhaps sway the official policy of the day. But not enough to have to govern. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 27, 2022 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism  … this is a movement that lives on spectacle. This is why, among other reasons, it was always daft to compare the likes of Johnson and Trump with the strongmen of the 1930s. What obsessed Mussolini and Franco was control of the governmental machine (with the view to, you know, doing things), not just the circus of politics. Whatever an interwar dictator was upon attaining power, he wasn't the dog that caught the car. He had all too clear a plan for the vehicle. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 27, 2022 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populism This is the liberal nightmare: not that populists abolish democracy to remain in power, but that they perform well enough not to have to. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 23, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Populist leaders Notice how many populist leaders are what might be called relative  outsiders. Privileged by almost all standards, these people feel shut out of what they regard as the true in-crowd. Nigel Farage: a former stockbroker, but also a non-graduate and much-mocked seven-time loser of elections to parliament. Boris Johnson: Etonian and Oxonian but neither posh nor rich. Marine Le Pen: a dynast, but not one who passed through France’s top school for technocrats. And then the ultimate case in point: Donald Trump, an outer-borough arriviste, ridiculed by the smart set for his ghastly taste and paprika tan. Janan Ganesh, Financial Time, August 22, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Populists This, far more than Mr Trump, is the liberal nightmare: a populist agenda in the hands of insiders. As long as it was wild cards and eccentrics who espoused these views – Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor, was a droll example – they were more or less containable. Lacking the guile to navigate Washing- ton's checks and balances, populists would be, as Mr Trump now seems, in office but not in power. The trouble starts when those with institutional knowledge embrace the same programme. Janan Ganesh, Financial Time, July 8, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Power By astronomical margins, would-be migrants would rather move to the US than to China. That hasn't stopped the one losing relative influence to the other over recent decades. Ultimately, if a country grows from 5 per cent of world output to 18 per cent, as China has since 1980, there is a limit to what the soft power of others can do to counteract it. That kind of economic weight buys too much military hardware. It spawns too many bilateral dependants in trade and investment. It demands an answer in material power. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, April 26, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Power  Perhaps a great power’s cultural influence, like an ageing gigolo’s charm, is the last thing to go.  Long after Britain lost its might, there were people in Hong Kong and Zimbabwe moaning about their servants and describing things as “just not cricket” in a way no one in England had done since 1913. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, June 30, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Power By astronomical margins, would-be migrants would rather move to the US than to China. That hasn't stopped the one losing relative influence to the other over recent decades. Ultimately, if a country grows from 5 per cent of world output to 18 per cent, as China has since 1980, there is a limit to what the soft power of others can do to counteract it. That kind of economic weight buys too much military hardware. It spawns too many bilateral dependants in trade and investment. It demands an answer in material power. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, April 26, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Public discourse America's least-trusted institutions — Congress, television news and big business, says Gallup — are remorselessly heard-from. The most trusted are the military (a closed box to most citizens) and small business (too poor to advertise at scale). … The feeling of your pain, the stakeholder-flattery: ingratiation has been the way of public and private elites during the exact era that trust in them has dropped. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Public discourse I lived through the shift in Britain from cold politicians to please-like-me merchants with a studied knack for the demotic. Tell me, has it disarmed the public or increased their mistrust? Have attitudes to business softened or hardened since corporate PR became so vast in scale and simpering in style? In both realms, the best that can be ventured is that things would have been worse without the charm (how telling a word) offensive. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 26, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Race Imagine that you are about to be born, not knowing your race.  Where would you choose to make your life? Where will give you a fair crack, without boxing you in to round-the-clock  consciousness of matters of blood and soil? Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 9, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Racism America's internal schisms are being used against it, and used well, with the soft touch and irony that autocrats are meant to lack. But then there is so much to work with. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, June 3, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Republican Party At some point, the blame for modern Republicanism must pass from the party to an electorate that could cure it at once by levying harsher political costs. Until then, the strictly tactical case for renouncing either Trump or his fabled-ism will remain weak within the party. Moderate Republicans are left to petition their colleagues' consciences and principles instead. It is only necessary to read that sentence to despair of their chances. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, April 27, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Republican Party  If only the Grand Old Party were at stake, the nation could leave them to it. But no democracy can prosper long without two responsible parties. It is of existential import to the US (and to the world it helps to anchor) that Republican moderates prevail.  How tragic, then, that they probably won't. Their first problem is the depth and age of the internal rot. Republicans have to undo decades of flirtation with paranoid elements, not just five years' worth. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 12, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Republican Party One reason the Republican party was so easy for Trump to pick off in the last decade was that it had the mental habits of the corporate C-suite and the Chamber of Commerce. Party grandees assumed that Trump was a rational actor who had a price: flattery, fame, a measure of influence. Pay it, and he’d be their creature. They had little concept of the zeal of his movement, because they had little concept of zeal. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 12. 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Republican Party Republican moderates are up against the structural vagaries of US politics.  The system's counter-majoritarian features allow the party to remain competitive and powerful without appealing far outside its base. … Wyoming’s 600,000 people cancel out California's 40m in the Senate. Nothing here is improper. The constitution was never meant to privilege raw tonnage of votes. But it does mean Republicans do not face the same incentive — moderate or perish — that  keeps parties honest in some other democracies. To get anywhere, reform-minded Republicans must petition their colleagues' consciences, not their interests. Even to write that sentence is to sigh at the hopelessness of the errand. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, Jan. 12, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Rule of law The west was law-governed before it was democratic.  (The universal franchise is about a century old.) And if the rule of law was earlier to arrive, it is also shaping up to be the first to go. It is hard to imagine a western nation ceasing outright to be democratic any time soon, if we understand this to mean that it would no longer have fair elections whose results are enforced. Chaos, though? Entropy? Those are easier destinies to picture, at times by just looking around. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, Augusr 29, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Rural America But the true losers from the romanticisation of rural life are, I suspect, rural-dwellers themselves. Their social problems get lost in the credulous notion of the countryside as the seat of virtue. Their economic decline is obscured by our wonder at the pastoral sublime. They might be poor, this line of thought seems to go, but what ravishing views they have. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, June 15, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Russia There is very little that Russia can do to the US, say, that the US doesn't do to itself. Even the most ingenious outside force can only ignite the kindling that a country leaves lying around. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 30, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Selfie I have the spiritual life of a toaster. The older I get, the less interested I am in the “larger” questions. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, May 29, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Snapshot What Biden offers voters is much of the substance of populism without the attendant noise and danger. And that very restraint might be the result of never having to prove his Everyman bona fides. Joe Biden portrayed by Janan Ganesh © 2021 Kwiple.com
Snapshot There is something feudal about Dickens. The rich man in his castle should be nicer to the poor man at his gate, but each is in his rightful station. Charles Dickens portrayed by Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, March 27, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Snapshot In finance, his [UK prime minister Rishi Sunak's] former line of work, everyone is, almost by definition, open to a deal. And once it is negotiated, it is enforceable through the commercial courts. There couldn't be a worse grounding for politics, where neither condition obtains. Here is a world of entrenched positions (whether tribal or philosophical) and no  third party enforcement mechanism for those pragmatic compromises that do get made. No wonder he treats the right as just another market participant seeking terms. He has spent his political career offering half a loaf to people who want the whole boulangerie. Rishi Sunak portrayed by Janan Ganesh © 2023 Kwiple.com
Snapshot To a great extent, though, and starting with Brexit, he rode the tiger that now devours him. If he has an excuse, it is that Stanford business school, Goldman Sachs and the hedge fund world were the worst possible places in which to learn a central lesson of politics: some people have no price, or at least no price that it is conscionable to pay. Rishi Sunak portrayed by Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 12, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Snapshot He leaves behind no treatise and few epigrams, much less in translated Sanskrit. But he knew a liberal must learn to walk with, if not the devil, then the brute. Harry Truman portrayed by Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 25, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Snapshot In ending American isolation, his predecessor Franklin Roosevelt had the “advantage” of a world war. Truman set himself a harder task: to maintain a forward US posture during peace time. The result, an empire in all but name, has had costs. But the past 18 months have been a sublime education in its uses. Imagine Ukraine right now without a committed US. In another 18, depending how Americans vote, you might not have to. Harry Truman portrayed by Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 25, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Snapshot He means it when he calls himself a dealmaker. The mistake is to assume that he is a tough one. Donald Trump portrayed by Janan Ganesh, October 24, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Snapshot He still has more than two years in which to attract more suspicions of wrongdoing. Counting in Mr Trump's favour is the fact that he never relied on a good name to win votes. Donald Trump portrayed by Janan Ganesh, August 23, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Snapshot His life-long idée fixe – that every exchange creates a winner and a loser – is the germ of economic nationalism. Donald Trump portrayed by Janan Ganesh © 2018 Kwiple.com
Snapshot The kindest interpretation is that Mr Trump has a sort of anti-talent for recruitment. Donald Trump portrayed by Janan Ganesh © 2018 Kwiple.com
Snapshot Nothing in his presidency became him less than his leaving of it. Donald Trump portrayed by Janan Ganesh, January 5, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Snapshot What Mr Trump has in common with Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, is less ideology than a bone-deep aversion to being disliked. Tellingly, their nationalism tends not to appeal to duty and sacrifice as much as a can-do bullishness. It makes them both world-class boosters. And reluctant bearers of bad news. Donald Trump portrayed by Janan Ganesh, March 25, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Social media At some point, the instrument of misinformation becomes less troubling than the underlying receptiveness to it. … … social media users are discussed as if they were passive victims of demonic possession. The implication, that they would be model citizens were it not for the apps, slips by unquestioned. The politics is impeccable. It is safer to challenge a business than the public. But if the point is to fathom the problem, the evasion becomes self-defeating. Janan Ganesh,, Financial Times, July 20, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Social media The crusade against these apps is hardly groundless. But it has become a way of dodging the age and depth of civic rot, and not just in the US. Facebook is easier to confront than the prospect that mature democracies must live with a permanent mass of essentially unreachable citizens. To curse social media is to exonerate society. Janan Ganesh,, Financial Times, July 20, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Socio-economic mobility Pity them or not, according to taste, but be afraid of what the falling can take down with them. Janan Ganesh,  “Beware the downwardly mobile,” Financial Times, March 3, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
State of the union America's economic and civic prospects could hardly be more divergent. The war against cliché stops me reciting the first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities. But Americans really can claim to have “everything before us” and “nothing before us”, to be savouring spring and enduring winter all at once. Their nation has arrived at a sort of affluent dysfunction. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 6, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
State of the union  [A] country needing constant reassurance that it is a nation and not just a market with a flag on it. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 17, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
State of the union Declinism is no longer just a trope of current affairs non-fiction. It is the national mood, and it predates Mr Trump. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 1, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
State of the union There are popular laws, beloved laws and President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan … [which] entails $1.9tn of public spending amid a growing economy, under a president of wrongly but widely impugned legitimacy, after two lavish bills to the same end in 12 months. The debate over the wisdom of such largesse  is everywhere except in the general public. … The pandemic has crystallised a thought for which there was once only scattered evidence. But at some point in this century, the US became a mildly social democratic country, in its attitudes if not the reality of its welfare state. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, 2021/03/02 © 2021 Kwiple.com
State of the union The world is moving on from American hegemony. It is not moving on from the American spectacle. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 1, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Technology Social media’s mutation from Speaker’s Corner to Gin Lane roughly tracks the smartphone’s conquest of BlackBerry. It comes down, I think, to the diffuculty of typing anything of length, and therefore of nuance, on a touch screen. The currency of the internet changed from the paragraph to the sentence, from the blog to the tweet, from the word to the image. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 25, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Tribalism People don't work out what they think and then join the corresponding tribe. They join a tribe and infer from it what they think. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 21, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trumpism For a sense of how person– rather than idea–centered US populism has become, ask yourself: if Trump proposed a truce with China,  or embraced green taxes, or even softened his line on immigration somewhat,  how much of his core support would he lose? Given that he has already championed the Covid-19 vaccines that much of his base mistrusted, without alienating them, I suspect the answer is “less than we  think”. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 28, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Trumpism  No movement that centres on Palm Beach has a tragic view of life and history. Janan Ganedh,, Financial Times, March 31, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Trumpists The most intriguing Donald Trump voters I met there weren't the most extreme. They were upper-middle people in several senses — age, income, education — who had never been able to play the rebel before. What he conferred on these country club and Chamber of Commerce types was the glamour of transgression: a sort of second youth. Again, I don’t say they were misguided. I just report the glee with which they cocked a snook. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, September 30, 2022 [“To cock a snook” is British slang for “to show disrespect for something”]  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Trumpists [W]hile the Republicans would rather win than not, defeat isn’t a disaster. For the grassroots, there is still the feeling of tribal belonging that Trump confers on his flock. It isn’t results-dependent. In fact, as the Alamo showed, and Dunkirk too,  group identities can grow stronger in defeat. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, February 27, 2024 © 2024 Kwiple.com
Ukraine To stand up for Ukraine now, one must be willing to knock the halo off a lot of countries. It means wading against half a century of postcolonial theory about where moral authority lies in the world. It is easy, and right, to implore the likes of France and Germany to do more for Ukraine. It is more transgressive to suggest that poorer nations are being cavalier in their attitude to the global order or selective in their opposition to imperialism. But transgress we must. It is the truest egalitarianism. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, June 3, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Welfare state There is a plausible future in which a more generous welfare state, funded by taxes on those who have been  enriched by a decade's asset inflation, drains some of the anti-capitalist pus from the body politic. There is no plausible future in which another round of unreconstructed supply-side economics does the same. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, March 13, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
the West To regard anything in public life as “inevitable” is to succumb to teleology. Still, with the passing of [Bob] Dole and much of his generation, it is hard to avoid the thought that societies grow rasher and more reckless as their memories of past crises fade. In other words, for the west, whose last existential mess is now a human lifetime ago, there is no avoiding the wages of success. It should expect its politics to wobble and lurch until such time as citizens taste the consequences again. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, December 7, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
 
Work In today’s economy, few workers get to be judged on output that is discrete and identifiably theirs (such as a newspaper column). More often, they are among the many contributors to a rolling and amorphous process: a corporate merger, say, or IT maintenance. One effect is that, in all candour, I have no idea what most of you do. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, October 2, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com