Anthony Barnett

The great Trump bubble is bursting. A frightful revenge may be the consequence. But an irreversible collapse of the MAGA movement is underway, registered on his – neither true nor social – site, Truth Social.

After nailing his colours to the mast at the Labour Conference, Andy Burnham has ended the political theatre of reality-denial, grounding politics in the issues of livelihood, argues Anthony Barnett

I’m really pleased that, after years of persistent effort, Josie Appleton, director of the Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life, has finally got serious mainstream media coverage. She fights valiantly against what seem like minor injustices.

I feel an intense sense of foreboding within the enjoyably familiar as I stroll in New York.

By violently polarising opinion, Donald Trump’s team aims to exploit public support for deporting undocumented ‘criminals’ and control of immigration.

Last year, Keir Starmer told the Guardian that he does not dream.

Since my student days, I have never joined a political party. But I am now one of the 800,000 who have signed up to explore the possibilities of ‘Your Party’.

England is not famous for being the birthplace of modern representative democracy. For the good reason that it isn’t.

There are few people more ‘now’ than Lea Ypi, author of the deservedly worldwide bestseller Free: Coming of Age at the End of History. It’s a brilliant account of her growing up in Albania and experiencing, aged 11, the abrupt replacement of its autarkic communism with market ‘freedom’.

On 5 November 2026, John Berger will be 100. Technically, he died nine years ago. But an explosion of his writing is being published and republished around the world, including for the first time in Armenian, the 50th language his work will have been translated into.

A lecture by Paul Gilroy led me to read At the Mind’s Limits by Jean Amery. It includes an account of how he was captured and tortured by the Gestapo before being sent to a concentration camp. Amery insists that “torture was the essence of National Socialism”. Many states have tortured people, he writes, but a Nazi had “to torture, destroy, in order to be great” and “achieve his full identity”.

The best response is for us to embrace swift, full-scale regime change: a transition from a clapped-out monarchical democracy and hyper-centralised state to a contemporary constitutional democracy of decentralised power.

Nothing Peter Mandelson does shocks me, in the sense of it being a surprise. There is much worse that will remain covered up. But that so much detail should come out! Enough to put a stake through the heart of any scheme of recovery is an unexpected delight.

Since Brexit, England has been sucked into worse and worse parochialism. Real interest in the world seems to be falling away.

Graham Platner has won the Democratic primary to run for the US Senate in Maine. When he started, he said: “I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps and the Army. I’m not afraid to name an enemy. And the enemy is the oligarchy.”

When his Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, told CNN that the UScan take Greenland, because the “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” are that it is controlled by strength, force, and power, he was not just wrong, he exposed a complete absence of any values or beliefs. Such hollowness isn’t popular and won’t triumph.

Under the ‘cover’ of the Persian assault, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel has invaded Lebanon and, as I write, has just carried out massive bombing raids across that small and beautiful country.

I used the much recommended Chinese Large Language Model Kimi K2 to search for prime ministers talking about a written constitution. It told me that in 2008 “Gordon Brown said ‘I personally believe that the time has come for us to do what many other democracies have done and write down the rules governing our political system’”.

I went to Brussels for the 10th anniversary of Brexit. But before that I was in Makerfield to help get out the vote on polling day. I’m not a member of a political party. But I feared a far-right victory. And I wasn’t going to sit in the south lamenting something I might have helped prevent.

openDemocracy found its purpose in the need to make sense of the world after the collapse of the twin towers. Revisit our reportage from the time.