There is not a flicker of the old Republican Party left. No embers of fiscal conservatism, global leadership, or moral decency. Reaganism’s ashes are stone-cold.

Milwaukee showed us a MAGA movement confident of victory. No previous Republican National Convention has known such vindictiveness, paranoia, and hero-worship.

Sporting bandages on their ears, delegates loudly insisted that their candidate, a convicted felon, was innocent, while simultaneously demanding that President Joe Biden be put on trial. They averred, and seemed genuinely to believe, that Biden was responsible for the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. Yet they hit the roof when anyone asked how Biden’s “bullseye” metaphor measured up against Trump’s long list of more overt rhetoric: “knock the crap out of ’em,” “there has to be retribution,” “stand back and stand by,” “we fight like hell,” “free the Jan. 6 hostages,” etc.

I was invited as part of a delegation from the British Tories. I attended the last three conventions, but I could not face this one. Like Mike Pence, I am too heartbroken at the death of the Grand Old Party to turn my full gaze on what has replaced it.

In consequence, I missed Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters tearing into business leaders because “their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock price at the expense of the American worker.” 

I missed Amber Rose, glamour model and author of How to Be a Bad Bitch, who dedicated a recent podcast to bigging up satanism. I missed Paul Manafort (if you’re not indicted, you’re not invited).

I missed the tech billionaire David Sacks claiming that Ukraine had been invaded, not because Russian President Vladimir Putin broke a treaty to attack a state that offered him no threat, but because of Biden: “He provoked — yes, provoked — the Russians to invade Ukraine with talk of NATO expansion.”

And, of course, I missed the elevation of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) who, in full socialist-populist mode, tied the Ukraine war to the defense of welfare, claiming that Biden wants to “throw our grandparents into poverty … so that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht.”

The phrasing here is significant. Straightforward isolationism is a view of the world that I don’t share but can respect. “Putin is a bastard, but wake me up when he invades Seattle” has a certain intellectual integrity. But that is not the position of the presumptive vice president, who parrots Russian propaganda — for example, spreading the absurd lie that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s wife had spent $4.8 million of aid money on buying a rare Bugatti, a claim that originated on a Russian disinformation site and has been comprehensively debunked.

If anyone can be said to personify the change in the party, it is Vance. Accepting the nomination, he repeated the usual Trumpy slogans. NAFTA had “sent countless good jobs to Mexico.” Trade with China had “destroyed even more good American middle-class manufacturing jobs.” These claims are as false, and as verifiably false, as the Zelensky Bugatti nonsense. Employment rose, both after NAFTA in 1994 and after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The few jobs lost, mainly held by immigrants on the minimum wage, were vastly outnumbered by better-paid jobs created. And this job creation happened most in the sectors most affected.

Jobs become obsolete because of technological advances and automation, not trade. In any case, the Trump/Vance claim that China has hollowed out U.S. industry is another easily provable falsehood. Manufacturing has risen in value from $1.5 trillion to $2.5 trillion since China joined the WTO.

Now here’s the thing. Vance knows all this. He is a clever man who understands economics. Every commentator has fallen gleefully on his earlier attacks on Trump’s character. But the nature of those attacks should be teased out a bit. In an interview on NPR in 2016, Vance declared: “I think that I’m going to vote third party because I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

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By “dark place,” he meant thinking that Trump would bring simple solutions to complex problems. “Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”

That critique now applies to MAGA as a whole. The idea that protectionism, isolationism, and welfarism will solve America’s problems is precisely such an opioid as Vance identified. Except that he is the one now prescribing it, in full awareness of what he is doing. Yup: a dark place.

So much for Europe’s swing to the right. In Britain, the Conservatives were not just thrown out, but subjected to the worst beating in the 190 years of their existence, winning 121 seats to Labour’s 411. In France, contrary to expectations, the snap parliamentary elections were won by the extreme Left, who took 188 seats, followed by Emmanuel Macron’s Centrists with 161, pushing Marine Le Pen’s hard-right Rassemblement National into third place with 142.

Were commentators wrong to hail a rightward shift in the aftermath of last month’s European elections? Not necessarily. The factors that generally push voters in a conservative direction are still there: mass migration, inflation, and, not least, a major war in Europe.

In both France and Britain, the headline tallies paint a misleading picture. Although Le Pen came third in terms of seats, she led the popular vote, winning 37% to the Left’s 27% and the Centre’s 22%. France’s two-stage ballot is designed to encourage tactical voting, and even after 80 years, the taint of Vichy still lingers, convincing most centrist voters to back anyone but a Le Pen.

In the U.K., the first-past-the-post voting system produced the most lopsided House of Commons in democratic history. The parties of the Left (Labour and the Greens) got 11.5 million votes between them and 416 MPs. The parties of the Right (the Conservatives plus Reform, the British MAGA party) got 10.9 million votes and 126 MPs. A win for the Left, it is true, but hardly as emphatic as it seems at first glance.

What I think we are seeing, not just in Europe but across the West, is the confluence of three major political shifts. First, yes, there is a general rightward shuffle as voters harden their attitudes in the face of tougher domestic and international circumstances. Second, there is the anti-incumbency mood that has persisted ever since the bills came in for the lockdown.

In country after country, voters seem determined not to recognize the costs of a policy which, in most cases, they themselves demanded. The tax rises, the borrowing, the inflation, the fall in educational standards, the deferred health crises, the hit to productivity — these things were an inescapable consequence of paying people to stay at home for much of 2020 and 2021. But a curious amnesia has descended on voters. Or perhaps it is simply a very human desire to blame their misfortunes on their politicians rather than on themselves for having demanded, in most cases, even stricter prohibitions than they got.

Two leaders were sly enough to call elections at the height of the crisis, when voters still backed harsh restrictions. Canada’s Justin Trudeau and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern were duly reelected. But, once the hangover set in, a very different mood took hold, and few sitting governments were able to convince their electorates that they were now repaying debts accumulated in the months after March 2020. Certainly not the British Tories.

The third factor is the most consequential. Put simply, voters’ attention spans are shrinking. This is the first time Labour has run Britain in the age of smartphones. In the 14 years since that party’s last period of office, people have become more demanding, more short-tempered, and more prone to conspiracy theories. Any government failure is attributed to malice or to some hidden hand. The idea that there might not be enough money rarely gets a look-in.

Obviously this tendency tends to help the political extremes, who offer simple answers. The French Left promises to solve everything by taxing the rich, the French Right by deporting foreigners. But Centrists can also turn it to their advantage. The British Liberal Democrats went from 11 to 72 MPs by campaigning on the single issue of sewage in rivers.

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In vain did candidates from other parties seek to explain that every country in Europe allows for occasional sewage overflows at times of heavy rain, that this happens less in Britain than in most places, that it is gradually being phased out, and that to rebuild the system so that it never happens at all would cost the same as another lockdown. Voters are in no mood for nuance or explanation. “Why can’t you just sort it out?”

What will be the impact on our democratic culture? Our TikTok age makes us simultaneously more demanding of our politicians and less interested in the trade-offs they must make. We run through governments as if scrolling on our screens, never satisfied, always grumpy. This surely won’t end well.

Could President Joe Biden, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed in her dissenting opinion from the Supreme Court, order “the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival”?

The old Scrantonian might claim, in one of his lucid moments, that that Republican feller was a danger to the Constitution and that, as commander in chief, he had a duty to defend American democracy by turning Mar-a-Lago into talcum powder. If he did, would he be immune from prosecution on grounds that he had acted within his core presidential powers?

Chief Justice John Roberts dismissed the suggestion as “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals,” but he did not attempt to explain where Sotomayor’s logic was flawed. As far as I can see, liberal and conservative lawyers agree that, taken at face value, the Supreme Court’s decision would indeed allow for domestic assassinations.

Presidents and former presidents are freer to commit crimes than they were a month ago. The Supreme Court was not stating a precept that was previously implicit. Yes, a case can be made that, in certain circumstances, presidents enjoy qualified immunity. But this ruling extends that principle beyond any possible reading of the Constitution or of precedent. As Quin Hillyer put it in these pages, the decision “is a departure from text, original public meaning, and crucial historical referents.”

I have an almost religious regard for the U.S. Constitution. I never visit my cousins in Philadelphia without making my hajj to the old courthouse and pausing in reverence at the miracle that was enacted there. Of all the arguments for backing Trump, the one I found most valid was that he would appoint judges who ruled on the basis of what the Constitution said rather than of what they wanted it to say.

Now, that argument has collapsed. The idea that presidents have always been free to break the law, that the Founders intended to give them that right, is impossible to stand up.

The United States was created because its progenitors had had enough of the concentration of power in an overmighty executive. They wanted authority divided, dispersed, and democratized. Most of them understood this principle, not as an innovation, but as a restatement of the rights they believed they had been born with as Englishmen.

The idea that kings were above the law had twice been rejected in England. First when Charles I was tried and executed, and second, when James II was declared no longer to be king. James was deemed unfit for office precisely because he had subverted the laws to push his peculiar idea of monarchy. The 1689 Bill of Rights, drawn up after the most stubborn and foolish of kings had been deposed, made the principle explicit:

“The pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal”. Every one of the Founders was intimately aware of England’s Bill of Rights. The idea that they intended to give the American president powers of immunity beyond those enjoyed by a Stuart monarch is too silly for words. On the contrary, the Constitution lays down that the president’s first task is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”  

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are seeing precisely the kind of politicized judgment that conservatives, including me, have always railed against. When the case of Richard Nixon and his tapes came before the Supreme Court, every justice, including the three whom Nixon himself had appointed, ruled against him, reaffirming the principle that no one is above the law. This time, the court split wholly along partisan lines, six conservatives (or 5 1/2 if we count Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s partial assent) versus three liberals.

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Can everyone not see what is wrong with this? The body that is supposed to be the ultimate referee is now divided by team colors. And the team that used to claim that there should be no teams, that the law should be interpreted strictly and literally, has shown itself to be every bit as partial as the other lot.

In order to make life easier for a convicted criminal, the Supreme Court has had to go to extraordinary lengths, preemptively excusing any future mobster who uses his immunity to auction off public offices or settle private scores. And most Republican voters, although they answer differently when the question is put in generic terms, support the ruling as it applies to Trump. God help America.