The One Hundred Years of Carter

It was a moment I had been waiting for, if a bit unsteady . The record set by the second, if 

 

The Ire of the "Wrong" Winner

The predictable, but decreasing gusto of voices decrying the imminent fall of democracy has yet again risen, if with predictable parrotlike repetition, over the weekend's election in Austria. Held five years after the snap election forced by the Ibiza scandal, 

The FPÖ, the "Liberty", or rather "libertarian" party of Austria, has however marked itself against the twicket of far right/populist far, populist, hard or even "new" right through existing throughout the entire post-occupation (ending in 1955, and leaving behind a constitutional scar in neutrality, requiring the permission of victory powers in belatedly entering the European Union 40 years later), posing a challenge which has often been considered, well, "queer" rather than frightening, and a different electorate. In essence, it is a party difficult to grasp in terms of ideology and tenable to do so only in terms class, posing a "third estate" or middle ground to the industrialist, upper-class, conservative ÖVP (the heir to the party which ran the Austrian dictatorship during the 1930s, and hardly ever denounced for it) and the working-class SPD, a faction of the socio-economic centre, simultaneously of liberal and the nationalist, or the Liberal Democrats and UKIP if you will. 

This has changed, of course, through the inexorable and irrevocable process of breaking through, posing now - at an "old" figure of a bare 30 % - the role of the "major" party of Austria. In some regards, it is no more imposing now than in 1999, and in the likely red-cyan coalition which will emerge, perhaps less so. 

The Ire of Power

Among the greater qualities of Frank Herbert's recently re-lauded Dune saga is the question of power, and how it is not a feast of . And apart from the truly disgusting, to most of its non-contemporary viewers, examples the 

Equally true, it must seem now, is the notion that the president of the United States, the informal "leader of the free world", quotation marks to observe the too-obvious contradiction, could not be the firm authority demanded by the office, short of a Palpatinesque performance now wielded against his chances of maintaining that office, and thus - from the far cry of opposition, rather than succumbing in name to a successor - the power flowing from (if not alongside) it, imperium and potestas and auctoritas in all. 

A Sloping Roof

The metaphor of roof, substituted for the more appropriate "ceiling" in a famous clash of minds, usually utilised to herald the limits (or non-limits) for political , saw a swift to the exterior with the humbug excuse offered 

How much, it must now be asked, has this sloping roof cost the Biden campaign, perhaps undeservingly. Notwithstanding, as some have observed, elements in the Democratic party have rallied to legislate away the once and future president's already questioned security detail, 

Day of Liberty - and Death

 

The supposed juxtaposition, or very real in verbal terms, of "liberty" and "democracy", sometimes with "peace" and "co-operation" juxtaposed just as much against a menacing "division" (begging, yet again, the qeustion the frontier between opposition and division lies within this healthy democracy) are seldom taken to the extreme so much, and perhaps so earnestly, as with the flying of lead and passing of steel. I myself wrote, now nearly six years past and near half the lifespan of this publication, of the attempt on the Brazilian "Trump's" life, the lugubrious and since-convicted (following a proud Brazilian tradition, or perhaps - or not - of its judiciary) 

The ANC, trumped

 

The unspoken rule, whilst never acknowledged as an eternal truth, was the ANC would win the next South African election. While that has now been broken, the decisiveness and sudden upset - sudden being questionable for a political season of months, but seen from the cold and relatively peaceful north - has come harder than might have been expected. The reformer, Ramaphosa, so decisive in his rhetoric but pragmatic by his hand, has been bested - if not in raw numbers - by his disgraced predecessor, who has effectively wrestled the KwaZulu out from the reaches of the ANC, and much the Inkatha, in favour of a new political force combining ANC rhetoric and dreams with the verbal radicalism of an ostensibly tamed, and at any rate meek, EFF. 

This has been welcome, in terms of ensuring , for no liberal democracy can endure with a single-party dominance. We know this from Hungary, although the same experts profusely counsel that a return to Republican governance in the United States, say, may mean the end of democracy. 

The Tide of Justitia

 

If it came of pass that a presidential candidate 

This, I would posit, poses no great critique of the seldom cherished American legal system in general. 

As Beriya said (or was it Vyshinsky) that if a man could be found, a crime could be as well, or less beneficially interpreted, invented.