Like most people in the front row, Arnade knew he was lucky, but in 2011 he began to realise that the lives of the people at the very back of the classroom weren’t just different; they might as well live in another world altogether.

The start of this realisation was a walk to Hunt’s Point, a hard-up part of the Bronx, a hard-up borough of New York City. Increasingly uninterested in, and disillusioned by, his day job as a bond trader, he went there in spite of—or rather, because of—all the warnings: “I was told it was too dangerous, too poor and that I was too white. I was told ‘nobody goes there for anything other than drugs and prostitutes.’”

What he found there surprised him. Yes, there was desperation, drugs, sex work and addiction. Three years of visiting Hunt’s Point was “three years of seeing just how messy life really is. How filled with pain, injustice, ambiguity, and problems too big for any one policy to address. It was also three years of seeing how resilient people can be, how community can thrive anywhere, even amid pain and poverty. Most of all I ended up finding what is often overlooked in stigmatised neighbourhoods: dignity.”

Arnade’s trips to Hunt’s Point were the start of a much longer journey that would see him leave his Wall Street job, pick up his camera and a notebook and, over several years, drive more than 150,000 miles across America to try to understand life in the back row. It is a journey that ends with Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, a book of photographs and reporting by Arnade that is remarkable for its honesty, humility and empathy.

Some of these vignettes seem from a different time and place entirely to 21st-century America. On the outskirts of Portsmouth, Ohio, Arnade comes across “two dirty kids” in
“a shopping cart filled with cans, children’s toys, and blankets smelling of piss. A man leans against the cart, and the two-year-old girl and three-year-old boy stare at me with blank expressions.” The man, James, tells Arnade that they’ve been homeless for a year and a half and are living in a shed behind the house of an old friend. Arnade asks him if he and his girlfriend use drugs.

“I used to, both of us did.”

“Do you still use?”

“No, I don’t. Well, only Suboxone. I buy it from the street since I don’t have a prescription.”

“Anybody mess with you out here? Police? Social services?”

“A minister comes by to try and help us,” James says. “Otherwise nobody has made much of a fuss.”

One of the things that unites back-row America, whether in the Bronx or Milwaukee, Selma or Reno, is McDonald’s. The fast-food franchise functions as a de facto community centre in parts of the country where there are few alternatives.

McDonald’s, Arnade explains, is a central part of life for those on the margins: “Without a stable home, they needed clean water, a place to charge a phone, a place to get free wi-fi. McDonald’s had all of those, and it also had good cheap food.”

Alternatives are dismissed out of hand: “When I asked why not the nonprofits or the public parks, the answer would be some variation of ‘what is that?’ or ‘They always telling you what to do.’ The nonprofits came with lots of rules and lectures about behaviour, with quiet or not-so-quiet judgment.”

As well as fast food, there is faith. “The tragedy of the streets means few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control,” writes Arnade. “You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is mortal. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know.”

In Bakersfield, California, Arnade heads to a small white wooden church. There is no minister. Instead, the congregation take turns preaching, reading and singing. A mechanic in his overalls preaches for nearly an hour. A recovering meth addict weeps, telling the room: “I have had it rough, but with you, and the Lord, I will keep my head high.” She tells Arnade that she has been off drugs for just one week. Outside, Josh and Jenny smoke and wait for a lift to take them on their long journey home. They have nothing beyond their children and their faith in Jesus Christ, they say.

Dignity is, unavoidably, a political book. Much of Arnade’s reporting is from ground zero for the decline in heavy industry and manufacturing and America’s gruesome opioid epidemic. It is all given heightened relevance by the coincidence of Arande’s reporting with the rise of Donald Trump. But only very rarely is politics allowed to occupy centre-stage. “This book is not a book about ‘how we got Trump,’” insists Arnade, “though learning to see the country differently may help answer questions about the 2016 election. Rather, it’s a book about reconsidering what is valuable, about honouring aspects of life that cannot be measured, and about an attempt to listen and look with humility.”

And for the back-row Americans that Arnade talks to, whether black or white, urban or rural, young or old, the prevailing political stance is indifference.

Arnade goes to Cleveland while the city is hosting the GOP convention at which Trump receives the presidential nomination. In a poor and overwhelmingly black part of town, the only evidence of the political history being made around the corner is the sound of helicopters. The neighbourhood is full of posters from the Revolutionary Communist Party that read “America Was NEVER Great! We Need to OVERTHROW This System”. No one knows who put them up and no one is especially interested in the message. At a junction, two white men wearing “Black Lives Matter” t-shirts—the only white men in the neighbourhood beyond the police, according to Arnade—try to sell “FUCK TRUMP” and “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” shirts to drivers waiting at the traffic lights. Everyone ignores them.

And yet, when Arnade does talk about politics, he does so with insight earned by the mileage he clocked up.

The marginalised poor, pro- or anti-Trump, feel humiliated by a system that emphasises meritocracy without necessarily delivering on that promise, he argues: “People respond to humiliation in different ways, but the most common response is to find a source of pride whether possible, even if that means in places the status quo doesn’t approve of. It means trying to find a community or activity that values them. For those in the back row, that means a place that doesn’t demand credentials.”

No one cares about your past in a crack house or a church. Racial identity is another source of community that requires “no credentials beyond being born”.

It is important not to overstate the case—and Arnade doesn’t. America’s white working class is only part of the Trump story. After all, just a third of voters from households with income of less than the national median of around $50,000 voted for Trump in 2016.

Given the sensitivity with which Arnade has photographed and listened to back-row America, he is inevitably asked what should be done. His first answer is “I don’t know.” That is a reasonable response. Reading Dignity it is obvious that what is needed is something far deeper than a straightforward set of government policies. Which is why Arnade’s only concrete proposal is “We all need to listen to each other more.” It is, as he admits, a “wishy-washy” idea given the serious problems he has documented.

But he is surely right when he says that those in America’s front row have “removed ourselves physically and in spirit, and when we do look back, it is through papers and books filled with data.” The physical and emotional energy Arnade has put into Dignity is a much-needed reminder of the power of listening. And in that, at least, there is some hope.

“Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America”, by Chris Arnade, is published by Sentinel, £25.

All photographs ©Chris Arnade.

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These days the target is China, but the argument is unchanged. In office, Trump has kept his protectionist promises, and the results have been predictably terrible. A recent study of his trade war with China found that the tariffs imposed in 2018 by the US president were costing US companies and consumers $3 billion a month in tax alone (after all, a tariff is just another levy), as well as another $1.4 billion in deadweight losses. Add to that the harder-to-quantify indirect costs involved and you have a needless act of national self-harm.

You might have thought that attacking this failed policy would be a minimum requirement for any serious Democratic primary candidate. Not so, sadly. The only major US political figure who could be said to be a bigger trade sceptic than Trump is Bernie Sanders, one of the favourites in the (crowded and unpredictable) race for the 2020 nomination. The hard-left senator from Vermont recently attacked the president for being too soft in his renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and his campaign manager has described Trump as a “faux Bernie Sanders” on trade. Less radical Democrats have also indulged their party’s protectionists.

Hence the need for a book like Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration and Global Capital, in which Kimberly Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College, Oregon, “defends global economic integration . . . from a perspective that consistently prioritises the needs of American workers”.

“The substantial challenges of middle-class economic stagnation and increasing income inequality require bold, serious policy responses,” writes Clausing, “but they don’t require a retreat from globalisation.”

Let’s leave to one side the irritating need for Clausing to describe her argument as “progressive”. (Is the conservative case for globalisation not rooted in the interests of ordinary Americans too?)  Open is an even-handed, fair-minded and up-to-the-minute primer on some of today’s most important economic debates. In her consideration of who gains and who loses from economic openness, she makes a stout, evidence-led defence of the worldview disparaged as “globalism” by both the Right and the Left.

The point, Clausing argues, is not that the free(ish) movement of goods, services, labour and capital is without costs but that those costs are outweighed by the benefits. And, crucially, where costs exist, the answer to “open” is rarely “closed”. For example, it might be true that high levels of unskilled immigration make the job market tougher for high-school dropouts. But given the unavoidable realities of foreign competition and technological change, the answer to that problem lies in education and skills training, not at the border.

If, more generally, shutting America off from the world is not the answer to the problem of middle-class stagnation, then what is? Here is where Open disappoints. Clausing’s policy laundry list is supposed to add up to “a more equitable globalisation”. But there is little that binds them together. Some are sensible, such as a tax cut for lower-income workers. And who could object to a simplified tax code? Others are platitudinous, like “bringing together stakeholders in a grand bargain to reform the tax system”.

What would be welcome is a dollop of economic freedom for American workers. In a country where a quarter of workers need a state licence to do their job, up from ten per cent in 1970, and where restrictive land-use regulations prevent millions from moving to cities where the most productive and best-paid jobs are, it is reasonable to wonder whether a lack of government intervention is really the problem.

If you want to understand why the American middle class is feeling the squeeze then, instead of Open, I recommend The Captured Economy, in which the authors Steven Teles and Brink Lindsey persuasively argue that the stagnation and inequality that Clausing is rightly worried about are largely caused by state action rather than the invisible hand. As they argue, “by suppressing and misdirecting entrepreneurship and competition”, government intervention “has rendered our economy less innovative and dynamic as well as less fair”.

The case for trade, as laid out in Open, is built on the extraordinary prosperity-boosting power of free exchange between individuals and firms in different countries. What is true across borders is true within them. The sooner policymakers realise that, the sooner Americans’ economic frustrations will start to fade.

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration and Global Capital
By Kimberly Clausing
Harvard, 360pp, £20.95

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All of which should be enjoyed alone, “outside in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked”.

To a certain man of a certain age — me in my late teens, to be specific — there was something heroic about the way Hunter S. Thompson liked to start the day.

But it wasn’t just breakfast. Discovering Thompson’s journalistic feats was a thrill. Decades after it was first committed to print, the hard-drinking, gun-toting “gonzo” journalist’s jagged, violent prose couldn’t fail to excite.

Hell’s Angels (1967) was a gory close-up of America’s most notorious bicycle gang. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) was a novelistic account of a drug-fuelled journey to Las Vegas in search of the American dream. His coverage of the 1972 presidential election for Rolling Stone was published as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. In these books and scores of articles, Thompson brought scenes to life in an instantly recognisable style that was exaggerated, eccentric, breakneck and captivating. His work captured the mood and made him famous.

That celebrity eventually evolved into a mythology that elevated the author of a clutch of very good books to the status of literary   deity. And that change had less to do with the art than it did with the artist. His irascible nature, his ability to consume death-defying quantities of drink and drugs, his props — yellow-lensed aviators and a plastic cigarette-holder — became a persona that grew like a parasite on his work. Eventually it reached a size that the host body could not sustain.

The worst of the myths recited by those who worship at Thompson’s altar is the idea that he was doing anything especially new with “gonzo”, the genre of journalism he is credited with creating and which he once described as “a style of reporting based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism”. It is built on the idea that objectivity is impossible and so telling it like it is means telling it as you see it. Let’s not relitigate that one. But, regardless of its merits, it is not a fresh insight. Writers had put the reader in their shoes before the 1960s. And many did so far more effectively than Thompson, for whom gonzo often meant getting so blitzed on bourbon and barbiturates that he missed the story altogether.

Indeed, contemporaries of Thompson who stopped to think, and sober up, before they sat down at their typewriter — Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Gay Talese, for example — told better stories and got closer to the truth.

In keeping with the gonzo motto, the frenetic political dispatches filed for Rolling Stone that became Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail were described by one aide involved in the ’72 election as the “least accurate, most truthful” account of the race.

Thompson’s looseness with the facts in search of some deeper truth did not just mean exercising creative licence with dialogue, for example, or imagining what might have been running through the minds of his stories’ protagonists, practices common among many of the best non-fiction writers. In Thompson’s case it meant cooking up non-trivial claims.

Thompson, who faxed his copy to Rolling Stone as the printing presses were warming up, leaving no time for editing, wrote in one election dispatch that:

Not much had been written about the Ibogaine Effect as a serious factor in the Presidential Campaign, but toward the end of the Wisconsin primary race — about a week before the vote — word leaked out that some of Muskie’s top advisors had called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with “some kind of strange drug”. . . it had long been whispered that Muskie was into something very heavy, but it was hard to take the talk seriously until I heard about  the appearance of a mysterious Brazilian doctor. That was the key.

Years later, Thompson admitted to making the whole thing up: “I never said he was [taking Ibogaine]. I said there was a rumour in Milwaukee that he was, which was true when I started the rumour in Milwaukee.” Exactly what journalistic or literary purpose is served by inventing a claim that a presidential candidate is taking psychedelics is not immediately obvious.

When Thompson shot himself in the head in 2005, he left behind some captivating work done in a relatively short period of time, a long tail of rather less glittering prose, and a thousand tedious imitators fond of posing with a glass of whisky and a typewriter and convinced that their stream-of-consciousness prose is of interest to anyone other than their psychiatrist.

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America is at war with itself. The dividing lines are clear; the two sides even have their own headwear, with red “Make America Great Again” caps in one corner and pink “pussy hats” in the other. The clash may be less violent than the one Lincoln brought to an end, but for Mark Lilla, author of The Once and Future Liberal, the saviour of the Union’s advice is as relevant today as it was then.

In particular, Lilla hopes that his fellow liberals — a word he is using in the American sense, in which it more or less means those on the centre-Left — are listening. They have failed to offer the country “an image of what our shared way of life might be”, he writes of their most recent and most conspicuous ballot-box failure. “Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan the American Right has offered one. And it is this image — not money, not false advertising, not fearmongering, not racism — that has been the ultimate source of its strength. In the contest for the American imagination, liberals have abdicated.”

Instead, they have taken refuge in the democratic dead-end that is identity politics. What started as an admirable campaign to correct historical wrongs by securing the rights of large groups of Americans had by the 1980s, as Lilla puts it, “given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition that is now cultivated in our colleges and universities”.

Nothing, for Lilla, demonstrates this failing more clearly than a comparison of the two major parties’ websites. Visit the Republican Party’s homepage and you’ll find a page entitled “Principles for American Renewal” with clear statements on 11 important areas. On immigration, for example, it declares: “We need an immigration system that secures our borders, upholds the law, and boosts our economy.” The offline GOP could hardly be said to live up to this online clarity. But at least the intent is there.

Go to democrats.org and no equivalent document is immediately available. Instead, Lilla reports, “You find a list of links titled ‘People’. And each link takes you to a page tailored to appeal to a distinct group and identity: women, Hispanics, ‘ethnic Americans’, the LGBT community, Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders . . . there are 17 such groups, and 17 separate messages. You might think that, by some mistake, you have landed on the website of the Lebanese government — not that of a party with a vision of America’s future.”

Identity politics isn’t just electorally hopeless, it is intellectually stultifying. Indeed, it is an assault on free thought and reason. Argument replaces taboo. Lilla understands this. Of the recent tendency to begin sentences with “speaking as an X”, he writes: “This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter . . . It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever expressed the most outrage at being questioned.”

How did identity politics come to dominate the American Left? Lilla’s explanation is historical. He splits the last hundred years of American political history into two eras: the Roosevelt dispensation and the Reagan dispensation. The former “pictured an America where citizens were involved in a collective enterprise to guard one another against risk, hardship and the denial of fundamental rights”. The latter conjured up “a more individualistic America where families and small communities and businesses would flourish once free from the shackles of the state”. According to Lilla, the obsession with identity emerged because the Left did not fight the key tenets of the Reagan dispensation. Rather, they recast them in left-wing terms. In other words, “Identity is Reaganism for lefties.”

For Lilla, this means that the path back to electoral success involves steering left-wing politics back towards ideas such as citizenship and solidarity, building an inclusive agenda that is less obsessed with dividing society up into distinct groups and more concerned with building common cause across those lines.

It is easy to see the appeal of such an approach to Democrats old enough to remember a time before Reagan. But how persuasive would these ideas be to younger liberals, who have grown up in an age of infinite choice with an emphasis on the individual that is about more than just party politics? It generally makes electoral sense to swim with the tide, not against it.

There is another problem with Lilla’s story: it is built on the assumption that the Left is losing the culture war, when it simply isn’t. Fox News is the exception, not the rule. The peaks of American cultural life are liberal. Centre-left magazines are giants of the publishing world. Their conservative competitors are poorer, scruffier, and far less widely read. More or less every American television programme worth watching is commissioned by, written by, produced by, directed by and stars liberals (or conservatives keeping their mouths shut).

But if public sentiment is moulded overwhelmingly by liberals, why aren’t they winning, as Lincoln says they should be? Perhaps the political and media landscape is just so fractured these days that there is no such thing as a single public sentiment. They are winning in their particular corner of America, but not in others. That, after all, is how a culture war works: two sides not talking to one another. Politics should be about bridging these divides, not widening them. And identity politics only does the latter.

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You’ve doubtless read about the counter-cultural Left, the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock, but are you familiar with, say, the Young Americans for Freedom and their 1969 convention, where an angry young libertarian burned his draft card, starting a brawl with the meeting’s more conservative delegates and opening up a lasting split on the American Right? If you want to understand the US today, these shenanigans are just as important as Pete Seeger protest songs.

The Right’s revolutions and fissions also make for a colourful tale, featuring bold ideas — some good, others abominable — and an irresistible cast of iconoclasts, zealots, scoundrels and heroes. 

That, however, is not how Nancy MacLean, Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke Univeristy, sees it. To read Democracy in Chains is to see what should be an ensemble play put on as a one-man show. That man is James M. Buchanan, the Nobel prize-winning architect of public choice theory. According to MacLean, to recount Buchanan’s career is to tell the “utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance”. 

Given the importance she gives to Buchanan, MacLean starts with a surprising confession: before she started work on Democracy in Chains she hadn’t heard of the famous economist. Should we admire her honesty or be appalled at her ignorance? That an expert on public policy had never heard of one of the 20th century’s most influential theorists of how and why public servants do the things they do is hardly a good start. But when his name kept cropping up in Milton Friedman’s footnotes, MacLean was intrigued. “He seemed to be someone with big ideas,” she writes. Her curiosity takes her to the “unlisted” Buchanan archives at George Mason University, Virginia, where he once taught. We are treated to an account of her trip to the “deserted” clapboard mansion: “There were file cabinets everywhere — even, I soon learned, in a closet under a stairwell.” In the over-excited language of an airport thriller writer, she describes Buchanan’s old study and her discovery there of confidential letters from the Koch brothers, the billionaire backers of Buchanan and numerous right-wing causes and, in the eyes of the Left, the essence of all that is wrong with American politics: “Catching my breath, I pulled up an empty chair and set to work.”

The intrepid MacLean had made it into the belly of the beast. The vast right-wing conspiracy — the evil geniuses corrupting American democracy — had “failed to lock one crucial door: the front door of a house that let an academic archive rat like me, operating on a vague hunch into the mind of the man who started it all”.

Given that it claims to expose a “fifth column assault on American democracy”, Democracy in Chains has excited exactly those whom you’d expect to get excited. MacLean is a good enough writer for her version of events to sound plausible if it confirms what you already believe: everything now makes sense for George Monbiot. MacLean’s screed gives its New York Times reviewer “hope”. The Atlantic, the New Republic and NPR all agree. Oprah — the Midas of US publishing — lists it as one of the summer’s 20 must-reads.

But for this enthusiastic reception, Democracy in Chains would be a book best ignored. Instead, its shamefully sloppy scholarship, deceitful elision and, maybe most importantly, misreading — deliberate or otherwise — of Buchanan and his acolytes’ ideas deserves some attention.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Democracy in Chains is MacLean’s line of intellectual attack. She correctly identifies in Buchanan a suspicion of the excesses of majority rule, before equating a desire for constraints on state power with a wish to put democracy “in chains”. This, of course, is an oddly limited definition of democracy, and one to which liberals, conservatives and libertarians would all object.

All of this is a rather obscure angle from which to approach Buchanan’s thinking. His big idea, explained most famously in The Calculus of Consent, which he co-authored with Gordon Tullock, was that traditional political science mistakenly assumed public servants would act in the public interest. Instead, he argued, public servants are just as likely to act in their self-interest as those in the private sector. As a result, government is especially susceptible to being captured by special interests, and, left to its own devices, the state will grow and grow. 

Through selective quotation and idiosyncratic interpretation, MacLean paints this as — first and foremost — a distaste for democracy. She reduces Buchanan’s intellectual project to little more than a cynical attempt to undermine public confidence in government. She gives no thought to whether or not he is right, doing little more than questioning his motives and pointing out the possible blind spots of rich white men.

In fact, race is the means by which MacLean tries to land her lowest blows on Buchanan, particularly when discussing Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation decision. When, rightly, the court imposed desegregation on the states (a constitutional restriction on the will of the majority that MacLean seems much more relaxed about), the responses of numerous small-state conservatives were dripping with racism. One of the tools the segregationists tried to use to stop the inevitable was school vouchers, which Buchanan and free-marketeers like him supported. Of a report on school vouchers co-authored by Buchanan, MacLean writes, “The economists made their case in the race-neutral, value-free language of their discipline, offering what they depicted as a strictly economic argument — on ‘matters of fact, not values’.”

The implication is that Buchanan’s real motivation was opposition to black and white children being educated side by side. But MacLean offers no evidence whatsoever to suggest this. Probably because there isn’t any.

Why look for an ulterior motive for Buchanan’s support for a policy entirely in keeping with his beliefs? In order to traduce a decent (and dead) man, painting him as a racist mouthpiece for plutocrats. Any inconvenient details that muddle this caricature — such as Buchanan’s support for a 100 per cent inheritance tax — are omitted. This, remember, from a professor of history at a leading university.

What would MacLean make of one her student’s essays if they engaged in the kind of out-of-context quotation she goes in for? Take, for example, this study in academic rigour: she quotes Buchanan’s protégé and leading economist Tyler Cowen as writing: “The weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” It sounds damning and Cowen did indeed write those words in that order. But here is the full sentence: “While the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome, it also would increase the chance of a very bad outcome.” Hardly A+ work.

There is an amusing coda to the story of Democracy in Chains. When more sceptical reviewers pointed out some of MacLean’s mistakes and deceptions, the professor took to social media, rallying the troops to counter what she called a Koch-funded smear campaign.

At which point it is probably worth pointing out that MacLean received $50,000 in taxpayers’ money, via the National Endowment for the Humanities, for her attack on a thinker who laid bare how and why government is as bloated as it is. Who, really, is smearing whom?

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Doing the job well entails frustrating cabinet ministers, shadow cabinet ministers and backbenchers alike. Yet a Speaker must command a respect that runs deeper than the short-lived irritation at his most recent decision. Respect is earned not by kowtowing to one side or the other, but by demonstrating even-handedness, a sense of fairness and a commitment, above all else, to the lower chamber of the mother of parliaments.

John Bercow became Speaker at a moment of crisis for the Commons. After the expenses scandal erupted in 2009, MPs’ standing in the eyes of voters reached new lows, and Michael Martin, who had overseen the corrupt allowances system, was forced out of the chair. In the speech to colleagues that won him the speakership, Bercow said that “a legislature cannot be effective while suffering from public scorn”, promising to “implement an agenda for reform, for renewal, for revitalisation and for the reassertion of the core values of this great institution”.

In some important respects, he has stuck to that pledge. He has ushered in an improved, though still imperfect, system of expenses. He has championed the backbencher and fought to reestablish the Commons as the fulcrum of our politics and strengthen democratic accountability, insisting wherever possible that ministers make statements to the house, rather than at stage-managed photo-ops.   

But Bercow is a Speaker with a fatal flaw: he is unable to distinguish the importance of his office from the importance of its holder. He cannot help but personalise constitutional clashes between the executive and the legislature and is incapable of the light touch that makes for a well-chaired debate. Dip into coverage of Commons proceedings and it is never long before one finds Bercow asking MPs to keep their questions brief and direct in the most long-winded and circuitous manner he can muster.

One of Bercow’s shallower modernising moves was to swap the court dress worn by his predecessors for a conventional suit and tie. He can wear what he wants; his mistake was to think that old-fashioned clothes, rather than his wordy and unfunny put-downs — which belong in a university debating club — are what turn many voters off the Commons. It is telling that Bernard Weatherill, the last Speaker to wear a wig, did so because he thought it helped to distinguish the office from its holder. “I don’t think the Speaker should be the star,” he once said in an interview with the Telegraph. “Parliament should be a forum not a stage.”

Which brings us neatly to Bercow’s recent hat-trick of indiscretions. Let’s take them in ascending order of headlines generated, for one suspects that is how Bercow sees the world. First there is the fact he blocked the Commons from being notified of police investigations into Keith Vaz after receiving donations from the Labour MPs associates. A Speaker elected to restore the reputation of the Commons can hardly do so when more than a whiff of impropriety surrounds his own conduct.   

Next we come to his decision not only to reveal to students in a lecture at Reading University that he voted to Remain in last year’s referendum, but to explain at some length why he did so. He failed to appreciate that the impression of impartiality is as important as impartiality itself.

Topping the attention-grabbing charts is the Speaker’s explanation to the Commons of why he opposed an address to both Houses of Parliament by President Trump. That he managed to make the sensitive question of diplomatic relations between Donald Trump and Theresa May instead a story about John Bercow makes this a quintessentially Bercovian intervention. Leaving to one side the double standard of refusing to invite Trump while taking no issue with welcoming President Xi of China (who is also General-Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party), Bercow’s grandstanding was unnecessary. There is no plan to invite Trump to address both Houses of Parliament. It is apparently not even something the President himself wants to do. Perhaps the Speaker’s eagerness to emphasise his “opposition to racism and sexism” can be explained by his dubious past. At the start of his political life he was a member of the far-right Monday Club where he held the dubious position of Immigration and Repatriation Officer.

Bercow’s Trump speech was met with clapping in the Commons — a breach of convention he has rebuked MPs for in the past. He seems suddenly relaxed about such a breach when he is the subject of that applause. As with much else during Bercow’s time in office, it seems this had less to do with the President with the hair, and more with the Speaker in the chair.

The post Overrated: John Bercow appeared first on Standpoint.

It is now ten years since Nigel Farage was first elected UKIP leader. He may be the UK’s most divisive major political figure, but his decade at the top of the party cannot be described as anything other than a thumping success.

Despite the party’s ineptitude at converting votes into Members of Parliament, UKIP’s electoral record during the Farage era speaks for itself. In the 2005 general election, UKIP, led by the long-forgotten former Conservative MP Roger Knapman, won 605,000 votes (2.2 per cent). Just nine years later, they won the elections for the European Parliament. In the 2015 general election, some 3.9 million voters (12.7 per cent) plumped for Farage’s “people’s army”.

Of course, Farage can claim success in a deeper sense: the UK is on its way out of the EU. Seventeen million people voted to leave the EU on June 23 and while his role in winning a majority of voters around to the idea of leaving is moot, he is more responsible than anyone else for squeezing a referendum promise out of David Cameron in the first place. Without UKIP’s noisy ballot-box insurgency, there would not have been a referendum, and without Farage, things would have been decidedly less noisy.

Farage’s long anti-Brussels campaign was so effective because of his keen nose for the mood in parts of the country not reached by almost any other politicians. Beyond his hard-line Euroscepticism, Farage’s views are malleable and he has been able to fold various grievances into UKIP’s ideological mix. The most important ingredient he added was the anti-immigration sentiment that other parties were reluctant to capitalise on. When interviewed for Brexit Revolt, the book my Standpoint colleague Michael Mosbacher and I wrote about the referendum, he pointed out that immigration did not get a single mention in any of his campaign material before 2004. EU enlargement brought with it Eastern European immigration to Britain on a scale that the Labour government failed to anticipate. He added that he had spent the last ten years trying to make “immigration and EU membership synonymous”. It does not take much as the leader of a Eurosceptic party to make political gains from discontent at increased levels of immigration when the main direct cause of that surge is EU membership. (Farage was helped by the Cameron government, which, with the forceful encouragement of the then Home Secretary Theresa May, made and then repeated a pledge to cap net migration, something it could not have control over as long as the UK remained an EU member state.)

But Farage added a second, less obvious, ingredient to the mix, which has played an underappreciated part in his success: the growing unpopularity of MPs, whose collective reputation has yet to recover from 2009’s Daily Telegraph-led expenses scandal. Over time, this grievance metastasised into a more general complaint about overlapping and difficult to pin down categories of people: the Westminster bubble, the liberal elite, the establishment. Anti-Westminster sentiment is so ingrained in the UKIP offering that it is easy to forget how paradoxical its place there is. Here is a party that exists to campaign for a colossal transfer of power from Brussels to the Palace of Westminster, yet much of UKIP’s success can be explained by the widespread hatred of those who occupy the latter.

It is not just UKIP that has capitalised on an anti-politics mood in the campaign to give Westminster more power. The official Leave campaign, which made an early decision to have as little to do with Farage as was possible, avoided discussion of long abstract words like “parliamentary” and “sovereignty”, instead opting for “take back control” as its official slogan, a catch-all phrase that was deliberately vague on who was taking control back from whom. When, during the referendum campaign, Michael Gove said the country had “had enough of experts”, he was, in his own way, tapping into the same well of discontent as Farage.

If events leading up to June 23 demonstrated how much political ground is to be gained with pot shots at the establishment and the Westminster bubble, events since the vote have proven that what won the war will certainly not win the peace. Populism helped deliver the Brexit vote, but it will not deliver a successful Brexit.

Sadly, there is no annual award for bad ideas or asinine comments in British politics. If there were, then my pick (from a crowded field) for the 2016 gong would be Suzanne Evans for her comments in the aftermath of the High Court’s judgment in R (Miller) v. Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, which reaffirmed the fundamental constitutional principle of parliamentary sovereignty. Needless to say that Evans, a UKIP leadership contender at the time, was not happy with judgment of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd. She suggested that it was about time that judges were “subject to some kind of democratic control”. There are two problems with Evans’s idea. The first and most obvious is the erosion of the judiciary’s vital independence that this would inevitably entail. The second is that there already is a form of democratic control on judges. It is called Parliament, and it is responsible for making the law that judges are there to interpret. If the law as deduced by judges is thought to be in some way defective, the democratic solution is clear: Parliament can pass new legislation.

The half-baked ideas of a candidate for UKIP leader may be insignificant in the grand scheme of British politics, but Evans’s comments typify a strand of argument all too prevalent in post-referendum British politics today. She is part of the “will of the people” brigade. They see themselves as mediums who must be consulted if the views of the electorate need to be ascertained. Farage leads this cohort and he is promising a “100,000-strong” march to the Supreme Court on the day it hears the government’s appeal against the High Court decision. A politician who calls his supporters out onto the streets whenever something doesn’t go his way is not a politician who deserves to be listened to, as the government tackles the many thorny questions that come with the Brexit process.

Unfortunately, the “will of the people” brigade do have one thing going for them: the existence of a Remain rump who really do want to ignore the referendum result. Indeed, the hostile response to the High Court judgment (“Enemies of the People” headlined the Daily Mail the next morning above pictures of the judges involved in the case) can in part be explained by the fact that those bringing the action against the government would rather Britain remained in the EU. They are not alone. The SNP has made clear that its MPs will vote against the triggering of Article 50 come what may because Scotland voted to Remain. The Liberal Democrats see an opportunity to woo new voters as an unambiguously pro-EU party. Some Labour MPs are also tempted by this logic. They are entitled to make whatever argument they like; but they should not be under any illusion as to the ammo they provide Nigel Farage and anybody else who makes political capital by persuading the British public that they are being cheated out of what they voted for.  

The most important dividing line in the politics of Brexit Britain is not between those who campaigned for Leave and those who campaigned for Remain. It is between those who have faith in the strength of British institutions — the legal system, Parliament, the Bank of England, the civil service, the press — and those who see these institutions as nothing more than obstacles to change. The mistake at the heart of the populist group’s thinking is the idea that everything would be so simple if the establishment didn’t get in the way, as though good ideas (and leaving the EU is a good idea) would automatically become reality if it wasn’t for pesky bureaucrats. This is the politics of the pub bore and should not be taken seriously.

Theresa May has three big Brexit questions to answer: What agreement will the UK reach with EU member states? What relationship will we have with the rest of the world once we leave? And what domestic reforms are needed to make the most of our new freedoms? For Brexit to be a success, she must draw on the strength of the institutions around her as she navigates the uncertain waters in which she finds herself.    

The post Trust Westminster On Brexit: It’s All We’ve Got appeared first on Standpoint.

With the candour that makes Politics such a rewarding read, Clegg suspects his zoetrope consists of the following moments: the first leaders’ debate in April, 2010, and the ensuing “Cleggmania”; the Rose Garden press conference with David Cameron; the tuition fees protest; a spoof YouTube video mocking Clegg’s apology for breaking his tuition fee promise; and finally his resignation speech the morning after last year’s general election. In other words, his story, as the public sees it, “is one of fresh promise at the outset, followed by controversy in the middle and electoral defeat at the end”. It is hardly surprising that Clegg’s time in government is seen as such an unmitigated disaster. The democratic verdict on the Liberal Democrat’s five years in government could not be clearer: the party went from 6.8 million votes and 57 seats in 2010 to 2.4 million votes and eight seats in 2015.

The lukewarm reception which Clegg’s book received on publication demonstrated that the public perception of the former Deputy Prime Minister has hardly changed since his resignation. Interviews and reviews dealt with Clegg not as the important political figure he is, but as a subject of psychological fascination. The Guardian’s interviewer pestered Clegg about his admission that on a trip to the supermarket his son once sang the YouTube song that spoofed his father. Why did he sing it? Did your other sons sing it? What about your wife?

The die was cast almost instantly for Clegg. From the bonhomie between him and Cameron in the Rose Garden (they would both grow to regret that chumminess) to the clumsiness with which the British constitution accommodates two governing parties and the awkward space he occupied as Deputy Prime Minister, a job without the clearly defined territory, team of civil servants and pomp of other senior posts, his complete subservience to the Conservatives was established in the public imagination early on. The Times cartoonist Peter Brookes crystallised that image with his repeated depiction of Cleggers the public school fag, polishing shoes and mopping floors for his superiors David Cameron and George Osborne — “Go and warm the lavatory seat for me, Cleggers old chap!”

Clegg undoubtedly lost control of his own story, but it would be wrong to think of his time in government as a failure. Along the way were victories — some small, others more considerable — for Cleggite liberalism. Beyond the decision to enter into coalition, something that gave the country the stability it so badly needed, there are the numerous Liberal Democrat manifesto promises that are popular with voters and were delivered on while in power. For example, the pupil premium — additional funding for schools for every child on a free school meal — was a longstanding Liberal Democrat policy and was put into practice thanks to the coalition.

Unfortunately for Clegg, he could not write Liberal Democrat achievements into the story of the coalition. The Conservatives ruthlessly took credit for the government’s major achievements, while Clegg’s broken promise on tuition fees — even if coalition reforms mean more students from worse-off backgrounds go to university than ever before — as well as his failure to deliver constitutional reforms dear to the hearts of many Liberal Democrats, overshadowed the pledges he kept. One of the policies Cameron would later say he was proudest of, raising the personal allowance of tax to lessen the tax burden on low-income families, was a Liberal Democrat idea. Another, legalising same-sex marriage, was opposed in the Commons by a majority of Conservative MPs, while just four Liberal Democrats voted against.  

Clegg’s significance became clear after he had gone. Last year, with the majority they thought they’d never get, Cameron and Osborne got on with government free of the Liberal Democrats. Their early steps — cuts to tax credits and disability benefit reforms — ended in humiliating climbdowns and the damaging resignation of Iain Duncan Smith as Work and Pensions Secretary. Without their Liberal Democratic colleagues, Cameron and Osborne were too hubristic to govern effectively.

The Liberal Democrats may appear to be a spent force, showing little sign of revival with Tim Farron at the helm, but Britain cannot afford the small-l liberalism Clegg was true to in government to be drowned out by louder voices, now that he is in the wilderness.

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In “Treehouse of Horror VII”, a 1996 episode of The Simpsons, Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, the Republican and Democratic candidates for the presidency that year, are kidnapped by aliens. Two aliens return to earth impeccably disguised as Dole and Clinton. Only Homer — who has also been kidnapped — knows that the supposed candidates are in fact from outer space. He manages to return to earth and, in front of a crowd, reveals the candidate-impersonators’ true identities. The crowd gasps. “It’s true, we are aliens,” says one of them to the crowd.  “But what are you going to do about it? It’s a two-party system. You have to vote for one of us.” The crowd look at one another in dismay before someone says: “Well, I believe I’ll vote for a third-party candidate.” “Go ahead, throw your vote away,” says the other alien, laughing.

On Memorial Day weekend, at the end of May, with US television dominated by the news that Donald Trump had secured enough delegates to become the Republican nominee, and with Hillary Clinton on the brink of becoming the Democratic candidate, 997 Libertarian Party delegates meet in Orlando for their national convention, where they elect their presidential and vice-presidential candidates. 

For three days, a cavernous space at the back of the Rosen Hotel becomes a place where opening a speech with the line “Are there any Von Mises fans in the house?” prompts a raucous response from the audience. It is a place where a middle-aged woman in a fluorescent pink wig can delay the election of a presidential candidate to ask the chairman for a vote on making Dobby, the house elf from Harry Potter, the official mascot of the Libertarian Party. (“Dobby has no master. Dobby is a free elf.”)

The slogans on delegates’ T-shirts give a flavour of the ideological cocktail on offer: “Marijuana user”, “Enjoy Capitalism” (in the style of the Coca-Cola logo), “I’m already against the next war”, “Free to Marry and Free to Carry”. One features Ayn Rand’s face, torso-sized. Another conveys general exasperation: “Don’t Keep Calm!”

Supporters of this eccentric third party readily admit that the mainstream of American politics usually ignores their zany carnival of democracy, to which delegates arrive with no binding primaries telling them who they must vote for, and in which the vice-presidential candidate is elected, rather than appointed by the presidential candidate as in other parties.

But 2016 is different. While the two main-party candidates are not — as far as we know — alien impostors, many voters are frustrated by the choice between what one attendee described as “Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein”. Never before has America had to choose between two major-party candidates for the presidency who provoke so many “strongly unfavourable” responses in the polls. When it comes to revulsion, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are record- breakers. Dismayed and discombobulated by plans A and B, many voters are casting around for a plan C.

Libertarians hope they could be that plan C, picking up enough disgruntled Republicans and Democrats to prise open the duopoly that dominates American politics. This is not just the wishful thinking of party activists. As well as an ideology that they insist has broad enough appeal to pick up both Bernie Sanders supporters left with no one to vote for and disgruntled, socially liberal Republicans, the party has a technical claim to being taken seriously in the year of “Never Trump” and “Never Clinton”.  There are only three candidates for President on the ballot in all 50 states: the Republican, the Democrat and the Libertarian. If media interest is anything to go by, the Libertarian Party matters as it never has before. Fewer than 20 journalists applied for credentials for the Libertarian Party convention in 2012. This year the number is 250. How will a party whose 45-year history has been defined by a steadfast adherence to an inflexible set of core beliefs survive when it steps out of irrelevance and into the limelight?

Late on Sunday afternoon, James Weeks II, a large man with a thick sandy beard, walks onto the convention stage and into that limelight. He is a candidate for the party’s chairmanship. “Let’s have some fun,” he tells the assembled delegates, journalists and television cameras. He plays a song from his phone, placing the microphone on the lectern next to its speakers to fill the room with tinny country rock. He takes his jacket off, raises his hands above his head and claps along to the beat, urging the crowd to do the same. He removes the lanyard holding his convention credentials. He loosens his tie. And then it dawns on everyone: James Weeks II is going to strip.

With every piece of clothing he peels from his chubby body, every lasso-like swing of his tie above his head and every gyration of his waist, not only does it become clear that his candidacy for the chairmanship may not be entirely serious, it also becomes apparent that the Libertarian Party may not be as prepared, or even willing, to disrupt the duopoly as they say they are.

The crowd is split on the advisability of Weeks’s routine, which he says was the result of a dare made by “an important donor to my Sheriff campaign”. Some are disgusted, or at least think it unhelpful. “I do not want the world to think that is what libertarians are,” one exasperated delegate tells me. “I found that so offensive,” says another, “that it was a violation of the non-aggression pact,” citing what for many is the golden rule of libertarianism. (According to the late economist Murray Rothbard, a leading figure of the movement, the rule dictates that “no violence may be employed against a nonaggressor”; he described it as the “fundamental rule from which can be deduced the entire corpus of libertarian theory”. “NAP” badges are a popular accessory in Orlando.) Others whoop at what they see to be an exhilarating exhibition of the freedom they have come to Florida to celebrate and advance. A few even run on stage to fold a dollar bill under a thong that is perilously close to losing its grip on Weeks’s buttocks. I asked Weeks whether he thought his performance was helpful for the party. “It can’t be worse than Gary Johnson,” he replied as he climbed back into his trousers.

Most Americans don’t know who Gary Johnson is. Of those that do, most probably have a vague sense of him as “the pot guy” or, at a push, “the libertarian”. As the Republican Governor of New Mexico, a position he held for two terms from 1995 to 2003, he ran a fiscally conservative administration and argued for marijuana legalisation. He is still the highest-ranked elected official to have done so. He also claims to have vetoed more legislation than his 49 contemporary governors combined. He is in Orlando to ask the Libertarians to make him their candidate for the presidency.

In 2011 he dipped his toe into the race for the Republican candidacy. When he didn’t get very far he sought, and won, the Libertarian nomination. As their candidate, he received just under one per cent of the national vote. His own bar for success was five per cent — a level of support which would give the Libertarians “major party” status, an important regulatory distinction — but his 1.27 million votes was still a record number for the party and more than the sum of the votes for all other minor parties.

For a man who wants to be President of the United States, Gary Johnson apologises a lot — often when he doesn’t have anything to apologise for. Apologetic modesty is his default setting. When answering questions, even easy ones, he is prone to raise his shoulders in a shrug, tilt his head, smile and begin his answer with “Look . . .”, “Listen . . .”, “Well . . .” or some other I’m-being-as-reasonable-as-I-can sort of opening. When he complains about not being included in national polls, a regular gripe of his, he does not rail at being shut out of the system; instead, he says calmly, “Hey, why not include this guy?” At one point in the convention he even says, “I constantly apologise for not being the best advocate when it comes to articulating these things.” His style, however, is a mixed blessing. The bumbling means media appearances can fall flat and he often misses opportunities to make a clear case for libertarianism. But by avoiding the kind of declarative statements that go down well with doctrinaire libertarians — “Taxation is theft!” — he has an appeal to voters susceptible to libertarianism of a more common-sense tinge. Added to Johnson’s mild manner is a lack of polish. During one televised press conference in Orlando, a journalist asks how he feels and he releases a loud “Whooooooop!” When asked if he’s a fringe candidate his response is usually “Oh, yeah, totally fringe.” The last time he ran for president he stripped naked and climbed into a hot tub while a reporter profiling him looked on.

Johnson spent his life before politics running Big J Enterprises, a thousand-man construction company that grew out of his work as a door-to-door handyman in college. He is lean and fit, not just by the standards of a 63-year-old but by any measure. In his spare time he runs ultramarathons and takes part in Ironman races (extended triathlons). He has climbed Everest and hasn’t had a drink in 29 years because alcohol was “stopping me being the best rock climber I could be”. He has spent the last few years as CEO of a medical marijuana company and said in March that he uses the drug “occasionally”.

To the party faithful, Johnson’s name is shorthand for compromise. Many Libertarians are wary — and weary — of self-exiled Republicans using their party as a last-chance saloon. Their 2008 candidate for president, Bob Barr, was once a prominent social conservative whose voting record as a Congressman was given a perfect score by the Christian Coalition, and who, in the 1990s, was a leading figure in the impeachment of Bill Clinton, arguing in Congress that “the flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centred morality are licking at the very foundation of our society.” Barr had gone on something of a political journey to get from there to a sufficiently live-and-let-live approach to feel at home with Libertarians. Yet while “recovering Republicans”, as many describe themselves, make up a significant chunk of Libertarian supporters, there are a good number of members with a left-wing background and, if the Orlando convention is anything to go by, “Republican!” is an insult Libertarians are fond of hurling at each other.

Among delegates I speak to, the spectrum of opinions on Johnson, the Governor turned pot CEO, range from those who just don’t see Johnson as a true Libertarian to those who agree with him when he asks, “If you can’t go straight from A to Z, why not start with B?” 

One week before the convention, Johnson burnishes his mainstream credentials by announcing Bill Weld as his preferred running-mate. Weld, 70, was the Republican Governor of Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997. He is about as Yankee-establishment as they come. He is a Harvard man. He sprinkles his speech with sailing metaphors, and the prefix “My old friend” automatically attaches itself to the names of presidents, senators and every other bigwig he mentions. Asked how his family got their money, he once said, “We don’t get money, we have money.”

Both Johnson and Weld were Republican Governors in “blue” (Democrat)  states, something that adds to their neither-Trump-nor-Hillary appeal. Weld’s political reputation is built on fiscal conservatism. He may have an orthodox manner and fuddy-duddy instincts (he irritates delegates in Orlando by telling them people think voting Libertarian means that unsavoury types will move into the neighbourhood), but his social liberalism is sincere. As Governor he was an advocate for gay rights and appointed Margaret Marshall, the judge who would go on to rule that same-sex couples in the state had the right to marry. He says of the two main parties, “The Ds are off-base economically and the Rs are off- base on social issues.”

In Orlando, Weld struggles to shake off the impression that at heart he is still a Republican. He tells me, somewhat unconvincingly, that he feels at home at the convention, which “really isn’t that different from a Republican convention, and I’ve been to plenty of those”.

“Isn’t one Republican governor enough?” asks Larry Sharpe, another candidate for the vice presidency, during a debate with Weld. Or as Starchild, an “erotic services provider” and delegate from California who is dressed in tight swimming trunks and a see-through raincoat on which he has written “Demand Transparency”, puts it to me, “If you take on too much water from starboard, you keel over further and further, until eventually you’re sunk.”

Johnson’s two main rivals for the candidacy represent two distinct strands of libertarianism. Austin Petersen is barely eligible for the presidency (you need to be 35 and Petersen has yet to turn 40) but, as he is fond of pointing out, youth never stopped the founding fathers getting things done. He studied drama at college and, in the cadence and structure of his speech, treats even the humblest of hustings as if it is the Gettysburg Address. He has spent all of his adult life in the libertarian movement and his candidacy represents a doctrinaire approach favoured by many in Orlando. Where Johnson hesitates, Petersen is unflinching: abolish the Federal Reserve, leave the United Nations.

Seventy-year-old anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee, an unexpected, and for the Johnson camp unpredictable addition to the field, represents a looser coalition defined less by ideological common ground, and more by a vague desire to be the craziest guys in the room. For the party to nominate McAfee would be to elect a Trump of their own, a newcomer to the party with ever-shifting policy positions and a colourful past sure to deter swaths of voters.

In the build-up to the convention, McAfee releases several slick campaign videos that you can imagine going down well with Americans whose view of the world is shaped by conspiracy-theory videos on YouTube. “Exit Politics” slices between images of senior politicians and US soldiers, clips from official government videos — “Hi, my name is Rachel and I’m from the IRS” — and footage of brainwashed citizens marching to work and to war. Behind this is an unsettling, sometimes jarring, techno beat. The message is: “There’s a virus in our system . . . Politics is power. Politics is lies. Politics is force. Politics is dying. Kill politics so it can be reborn. Be a Libertarian.”

His appeal, as one delegate put it to me, is that he “doesn’t just talk libertarianism, he lives it. You should read about all the crazy shit that has happened to him.”  I assume he is referring to McAfee’s Belize years. To cut a long story short, the multi-millionaire built himself a home on an island in Belize in 2008. He lived with seven girlfriends, one of whom tried to shoot him. In 2012 his neighbour was murdered and McAfee was named as a person of interest in the case. He denies any involvement in the killing (not something that is helpful for a presidential candidate to have to clear up). Instead, he claims to have got on the wrong side of the authorities by refusing to offer the kickbacks and protection money they expected from him. McAfee then went on the lam, disguising himself as a poor Guatemalan who sold dolphin carvings, dying his beard, darkening his skin with shoe polish and, as he put it in a blog about his escape, stuffing “a shaved tampon up my right nostril, giving my nose an awkward, disgusting lopsided appearance”. Bizarre, but to a certain type of man of a certain age, heroic. Some of those admirers have made it to Orlando, and wander around their first political convention in T-shirts that read “McAfee. Let Life Live.”

McAfee is a commanding presence as he ambles through the convention hall. He is friendly and — once you get past the documentary film crew following his every move — approachable. Delegates and even journalists are taken under his arm and spoken to in a way that inspires confidence. Supporters ask him for a photograph and he hugs them like old friends.

Saturday night’s presidential debate begins once Libertarian-sympathising country singer Jordan Page has finished a warm-up set that includes a song called “Arm Yourselves.” Broadcast on C-Span, the debate demonstrates the ideological breadth of the party, the limits of Johnson’s appeal to his party’s delegates and, above all, the possible limits of his party’s appeal to America. As well as Johnson, Petersen and McAfee, Dr Mark Allen Feldman — “the anaesthetist who won’t put you to sleep” — and Daryl Perry, from “the libertarian wing of the Libertarian Party”, take part. The questions tackled by the candidates are nothing like those posed to their Republican and Democratic counterparts; most of them have nothing to do with the issues of day or the concerns of undecided voters. Was America right to enter the First World War? What about the Second? Would you abolish the Federal Reserve? Would you close down the Department of Education?

McAfee uses his opening statement to tell the delegates that none of the party’s candidates will make it to the Oval Office. “If I get one more question about what I will do on my first day in office,” he says, “I will lose it up here.”

Daryl Perry is asked what he thinks the legitimate function of government is. “Your question implies there is a legitimate function of government,” he replies. (In the previous evening’s vice-presidential debate, his notional running-mate William Coley is asked a question about which politically achievable reforms to the tax code he would advocate. “I’m not interested in politically achievable goals,” he answers. “We’re Libertarians. Taxation is theft. Cut it all! Keep cutting!”)

Proceedings reach previously uncharted depths of obscurity when the candidates are asked whether they believe the government has the right to issue driving licences. Johnson says he does; after all, he points out, what about blind people? He is the only candidate on stage that thinks any kind of state involvement in deciding who can and cannot drive is a good idea, a position that prompts boos and cries from the crowd: “Bullshit!”, “Go home, statist!” Throughout the debate, Johnson’s answers get nothing more than polite applause. Dr Feldman raps his closing statement — “I’m that no-pain, no-gain Libertarian/That get those petitions signed in the rain Libertarian” — and the crowd goes wild.

In the end, Johnson and Weld win the nominations they came for. After two rounds of voting, a majority of delegates accept that the two former governors are the only hope they have. The convention is less a choice between credible candidates, more a kind of Libertarian inquisition into the party’s only realistic option, a test of the sincerity of Johnson and Weld’s conversion to the cause. Before he is nominated, Weld is forced onstage to prove his loyalty to the cause. “It’s been 14 days since I became a Libertarian,” he tells the delegates, “and I feel better for it. I think I’ve become a better Libertarian every day . . . I pledge to you that I will stay with the Libertarian Party for life. Frankly, it’s a relief not to have to carry the Republican’s anti-choice, anti-marriage, anti-freedom agenda on my back.” The delegates buy it.

With their own party more or less onside, Johnson and Weld can shift  their focus to Clinton and Trump, who, for all their weaknesses, are more formidable propositions than the likes of Starchild and Daryl Perry. The Libertarians have already achieved what Johnson identified as their first goal: inclusion in the polls. National polls have generally only asked respondents about the two major-party candidates. In the five weeks after the Orlando convention, however, Johnson appears in five of seven national polls — and he does well, averaging ten per cent.

Fifteen is the magic number for him. The Commission on Presidential Debates stipulates that candidates must be included in the televised debates if they have ballot access in enough states for it to be mathematically possible for them to win, a hurdle the Libertarians have already cleared, and have the support of 15 per cent of the electorate according to at least five different polling companies. An appearance alongside Trump and Clinton would be as good an opportunity as Libertarians could wish for to broadcast ideals they are confident chime with millions of Americans. Johnson’s lack of visible hunger for power and relaxed candidness would probably come across well alongside Trump’s egotism and Clinton’s wooden style. There are, however, limits to Johnson’s appeal. For disgruntled Republicans, the Libertarian platform contains the same faults they identify in Trump. Those turned off by the Republican candidate’s incoherent isolationism won’t find refuge with Libertarians, for whom isolationism (though they wouldn’t call it that) is a core belief. Equally, Sanders supporters might agree with Johnson on marijuana legalisation, but they will find very little they like in his robust defence of the free market.

Yet these limits apply only to the extent that voters hold a coherent set of beliefs and make a rational choice when they cast their ballot. If this year has taught us anything, it is that politics isn’t linear and that votes move in unpredictable directions. That is not to say that Gary Johnson is on the way to the White House — but he is going somewhere.

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