And, meanwhile, American politics has taken my attention again, after I had happily relinquished it for a few weeks. Trump is being impeached for asking the Ukrainian president to, effectively, investigate a political opponent in return for access. Yesterday he doubled down on this on live television, saying that damn right the Ukrainians should investigate and in fact the Chinese should as well — today news broke that he had in fact offered to the Chinese to stay quiet on the appalling situation in Hong Kong (who cares about the Uighurs) to get his trade agreements through.
There seems to me something very important about this moment. It’s the same in Britain, with the will-he won’t-he about Boris and whether he’ll follow the Benn Act. In both countries, if they brazen through it, trample over the rule of law and their respective countries’ norms of governance and accountability with impunity, the damage will be irreversible, I think. Probably it’s already irreversible. But even though, in reality many of the things that these populist types are doing were already done, but undercover or exerted onto weaker countries, the pretence was important and kept an idea of a society and a political system going. I wonder if we are not just seeing a fall of an empire extending back to the conquistadors, but of a civilisation and of a way of understanding the world.