Getting out the vote in Bucerías

 

The partner of our son Chris, Kourtney, is a US citizen, a Democrat registered to vote in Baltimore, MD. On 25 September we accompanied her to a restaurant in the plaza of Bucerías (a hot 20-minute walk from our temporary home) where Democrats Abroad meet every Wednesday in September to help voters register and submit their votes.

 

The voting rules vary by state, and (we were told) sometimes by county, and if you don’t punctiliously follow the rules your vote will not count. In Kourtney’s case, she was able to download and print out her ballot. The voting paper was long since Baltimore residents were voting for the President and Vice President (options Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, unaffiliated – the latter Robert Kennedy and his running mate Nicole Shanahan); a Senator; a Congressperson; the mayor of Baltimore; president of the city council; seven judges of the Circuit 8 court; for each office there was a write-in option. There were also votes for or against continuance in office of a further five judges.

 

Kourtney could also vote for or against Question 1, an amendment to the Maryland constitution:

‘The proposed amendment confirms an individual's fundamental right to reproductive

freedom, including but not limited to the ability to make and effectuate decisions to prevent, continue, or end the individual's pregnancy, and provides the State may not, directly or indirectly, deny, burden, or abridge, the right unless justified by a compelling State interest achieved by the least restrictive means.’

 

An additional eight questions (A-H) sought approval of loans for affordable housing; for school buildings and facilities; for community and economic development; for public infrastructure; to establish the Baltimore Department as an agency of the Mayor and City Council; a proposal to permit 4.5 acres of the Inner Harbor Park to be used for the constructions of eating places, housing and parking; and amendment to the Community Reinvestment and Reparations Fund; a petition to reduce the size of the city council.

 

In Baltimore there are no fewer than 56 different ballot types for the presidential election. Baltimore voters need long attention spans and stamina.

 

Democrats Abroad, Bucerías chapter, turned out to be a retired couple, Sue and Mike, registered to vote in Waco, TX. They had moved to Bucerías because they wanted to live by the ocean and could not afford to do so anywhere in the USA that was not overly exposed to hurricanes. By noon, we were the only callers that day. The previous week there had been ‘a few’. Nevertheless, Sue and Mike dutifully waited to encourage every vote they could steer to vote for the Democratic ticket.

 

The restaurant owner helpfully asked one of his waiters to go to the local stationery shop wo buy an envelope (Mike supplied the cash), while Sue gave us directions to the nearest DHL drop-off point. Mike advised Kourtney to send her ballot to the US Consulate in Mexico City, from where Kourtney’s ballot will be sent by diplomatic pouch to Washington and thence to Baltimore. The previous week Democrats Abroad had gathered in Nuevo Vallarta to complete their ballots and then to walk in orderly groups to the local DHL office. To avoid the risk of being filmed handing over ballots in a way that could be accused of fraud, each vote handled only their own ballot and dropped it into a DHL envelope held open by a DHL employee.

Daily life in Bucerías and La Cruz de Huanacaxtle

 

This morning our local taxi driver, Francisco, picked us up for the short trip along the bay to La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, where there is an excellent fish market. We caught up on family news. His two small children go to a primary school which is closed because the air conditioning does not work. This in a town full of air-conditioned apartments for foreign visitors. All ‘teaching’ is now online: teachers set assignments for children to complete on a mobile phone. Francisco’s wife happens not to work so she can care for the children and ensue their do their assignments. But in many families both parents work, so the suspension of school is an economic as well as an economic problem. There seems to be little that the parents can do except resign themselves to the indifference of those who they elect to govern them. Of course, if Francisco’s family was wealthy and the children in a private school, this would not happen.

 

At La Cruz we bought some pez vela (sail fish) and robalo (akin to sea bass). I left a 20-peso tip in a jar marked propinas and as I put it in the jar I realized it was full of water. The man who served us explained that they wash the banknotes. So I am now a money launderer!

Who judges the judges?

 

During a brief stop in Mexico City, we met over dinner a young tax lawyer who took his degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM: the National Autonomous University of Mexico). That word autonomous is significant. The University City covers an area of 730 hectares, a little over 7 kilometres square, and within that area the national government cannot exercise authority, nor can the police or the armed forces enter without the permission of the rector of the university. UNAM’s autonomy has not always been to the liking of Mexico’s presidents, and has not always been scrupulously respected, but de jure the autonomy still stands and de facto it is quite a serious step for a president not to respect it.

 

Since Mexico took its faltering steps in 2000 from the ‘managed democracy,’ or the dictadura blanda (soft dictatorship) as some scholars now term the 70-year rule of the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRI), other ‘organismos autónomos’ (autonomous bodies) have emerged. Examples are the Instituto Nacional Electoral, which organizes and supervises the conduct of elections; the Insituto Nacional de Trasparencia, Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos Personales (National Institute of Transparency, Access to information and Protection of Personal Data); the Instituto de Derechos Humanos y Democracia (Institute of Human Rights and Democracy). It would be an optimist akin to Candide who believes that since 2000 the newer autonomous bodies have waved magic wands to ensure perfectly democratic elections, absolute respects for the rights of the individual citizen, or who thinks that governments now operate with scrupulous transparency. Nevertheless, these bodies have made serious efforts to monitor and regulate the behaviour of government. These efforts have not been popular with the four presidents who have ruled Mexico since 2000, and they have particularly irritated the about-to-be ex-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who has sought ways to limit their power, ignore or abolish them.

 

But over dinner we discussed AMLO’s outgoing contribution to the Mexican constitution, approved by the Senate that very day and overnight by a plurality of the states: the election of all judges in Mexico over the next two years. AMLO and the incoming president Claudia Sheinbaum have justified this reform on the basis that there is corruption and nepotism in the judiciary, and that justice should promote the views and priorities of a majority of the people; that is to say as defined by AMLO and his party, MORENA, the so-called Fourth Transition toward a society, after many decades of rule by what AMLO defines corrupt conservative neoliberal opposition. It is worth noting here that charges of nepotism would ideally require a certain self-awareness on the part of a president who has just engineered the election of his protégé as Mexico’s first female president, and who seems to be grooming his son, Andrés (known as Andy) for president in 2030. Moreover, there are examples in MORENA’s own ranks of curiously familiar relationships: the governor of Guerrero, for example, is the daughter of one the state’s senators.

 

In Mexico City, voters will choose from 1,000 candidates for 150 federal judges and justices of the Supreme Court. Voters may choose up to ten candidates for each of the 150 posts. Thus, the most diligent voters will write in by hand 1,500 names (some candidates can be preferred for more than one post). Incumbent justices may stand for election. One third of new candidates will be selected by each of the three branches of government: i.e. the president, the legislature and the judiciary.  Candidates must be a Mexican citizen, in full exercise of rights, 35 years of age for justices and magistrates, and 30 years of age for judges, have a law degree with five years of seniority, five or ten years of professional practice, good reputation, without criminal conviction, with at least one or two years of residence in the country and without having held a series of state offices or positions.  State judges will be elected by processes to be determined by each state.

 

AMLO has shown a fondness for organizing votes to approve certain proposals. At the beginning of his term, he held a vote to approve the sale of the presidential jet purchased by his predecessor Enrique Peña Nieto. He also called a vote to decide whether his predecessors should be investigated for corruption. In both cases, the turnout was minimal and the majority approving AMLO’s proposals massive. It is at least possible, more likely probable, that few Mexicans will participate in the elections of judges and that those who do vote will be closely aligned with the dominant party, MORENA.

 

The reform has been vigorously opposed by the judiciary, including the incumbent president of the Supreme Court, Norma Lucía Piña Hernández, and by the political parties that oppose MORENA. To pass, the initiative required a two thirds majority in the senate, MORENA needed to persuade one senator from an opposition party to vote in favour or to abstain. In the event, a senator from the state of Puebla was placed under federal investigation for corruption shortly before the vote. He absented himself for ‘health’ reasons and his substitute, his father (nepotism again), stayed away from the vote. The manner in which approval was won does not suggest that judicial elections will be free and fair.

 

The rule of law in Mexico has always been shaky. The new electoral mechanisms seem unlikely to strengthen the rational, honest and just application of the law. The opportunities for political influence, nepotism, and influence of the judiciary by criminal organizations will likely be enormous. One small ray of hope is provided by AMLO’s failure to effect another constitutional change: the abolition of the autonomous organisms. He has run out of time to do so, unless his successor obliges.

Margaret Thatcher and her successors should have read the history of New York

I am continuing with my reading of the hefty history of New York City, and came across something that will seem extremely apposite to my friends in the UK.

 

By the 1780s ‘contamination of Manhattan’s underground streams had fouled nearly every source of drinking water.’ In 1788 citizens of New York petitioned the Common Council to install pipes to bring fresh water to the city (in 1774 an Irish-born engineer had begun installing thirteen miles of bored pine logs to provide water to the city but the Revolutionary War interrupted the project). The Council claimed that it could not afford to invest in water infrastructure.

 

Then came some devastating epidemics and the Council changed its mind: it drafted a proposal to form a municipal waterworks, rejecting a for-profit solution on the grounds that water would be supplied ‘at the expense of the City.’ However, Aaron Burr and two other influential citizens argued for a private water company, a proposal supported by Alexander Hamilton, who would later be killed by Burr in a duel at Weehawken, NJ. Burr drafted a charter of incorporation for the company, which authorized it to build dams, dig wells, divert streams, lay pipes, all clearly necessary to supply fresh water – and all things which it would fail signally to do. However, Burr slipped into the charter a ‘crucial vaguely worded clause [that] also permitted the company to use its surplus capital for any “monied transactions or operations” consistent with the law – including trade, insurance, and, Burr’s real object, a bank.’ Burr and his rich supporters had long wished to form a. bank because the city’s first two banks had made a lot of money and controlled a duopoly.

 

Burr’s new water company, it turned out, had no intention of tying its capital up in anything as unattractive was water works or, still less, modern technology capable of meeting the public’s needs. The company refused to use modern iron pipes, sticking instead with hollowed-out logs. New York needed an estimated thee million gallons a day, but the company’s reservoir held only 132,600. Instead of investing in steam technology, it opted for a horse-powered pump. In 1803 the company president, De Witt Clinton, became mayor of the city and sent a bill to the Common Council ordering that all city money be held by the bank of the water company. Despite a public outcry about the lack of fresh water, the Council renewed the company’s charter in 1808.

 

Since the days of Mrs Thatcher, the dogma of the Conservative Party, which has ruled the UK for most of those years, has been that private enterprise is the only way to deliver public services. In the case of water companies, investors bought the companies, sheltered themselves, and the large amounts of cash they extracted, behind elaborate company structures, failed to invest and charged the users for the pleasure. It turns out that companies that pumped human excrement into rivers, streams, lakes and the sea, could be given a rating of ‘excellent’ provided that they met certain other targets set by the regulator. And this rating justified bonuses for company executives. Now most of our waterways are contaminated (not only by water companies, it is true – farming, industrial pollutions and runoff from highways plays their part). Aaron Burr would have been very happy.

 

Jan and I will be leaving for Mexico on 9 September, returning in mid-October. I’ll send any interesting items I come across in Mexico.

Crooked US elections?

 

My friends in the USA will no doubt be thoroughly tired of unsubstantiated cries of ‘Stop the Steal’ etc. But I read today that Republican representatives on the election board of Fulton County, GA, approved a new rule that would allow them to withhold certification of the presidential election result if they consider that there has been any irregularity. No doubt there will be other similar manoeuvres before November.

 

However, election gerrymandering is nearly as old as the United States itself. I am reading a wonderful, enormous, history of New York City to 1898*. In the spring of 1800 elections were due to choose representatives in New York state’s Assembly, and the congressman who would represent New York City in Washington. The Federalists (led by Alexander Hamilton), who advocated property restrictions to limit the vote to the better type of person and rule by the most successful better type of person (e.g. A. Hamilton), had been accustomed to winning elections. But in 1800 they faced a relatively new group, the Democratic-Republicans, whose leading light was Aaron Burr.

 

Burr, who turned out to be ‘a master of the electioneering arts,’ invented a new concept called ‘fagot voting.’ A property requirement (£20) limited those able to vote and excluded the likes of bakers, potters, ship’s chandlers and the like, but Burr’s scheme expanded the franchise to supporters of his party by making them joint owners of a single piece of property. Burr’s fagots (or bundles) of voters tipped the balance in favour of the Democratic- Republicans. A Columbia College professor won the New York City Congressional seat for the Democratic party, and all thirteen of the state’s Assembly seats. Democrats now had a narrow majority in the Assembly, which was critical for the upcoming presidential election, since the Assembly chose the state’s federal electors. Thus, New York was guaranteed to back Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson against the Federalist incumbent John Adams. Asked by a Federalist how he had pulled off such a result, Burr replied: ‘We have beat you by superior Management.’

 

Nothing daunted, Hamilton wrote to New York governor John Jay to propose that he call a special session of the outgoing state Assembly (with a Federalist majority) which would alter the procedure for choosing Federal electors to guarantee their votes for the Federalist candidate. ‘Jay, whose sense of rectitude wasn’t so easily laid aside, refused.’ The result: Jefferson was elected, and his Vice President was none other than Aaron Burr.

 

If John Jay is the 1800 equivalent of Mike Pence in refusing to rig the vote, there is another parallel in this story, since a bullet also played a part in its dénouement. Hamilton and Burr were bitter enemies. In early 1804 Hamilton made it known that Burr was unfit to rule. Burr challenged him to a duel. On 11 July the two men crossed the Hudson to Weehawken, NJ. Today Weehawken is essentially a large commuter parking lot, with a hotel and some shops. You reach it by ferry from the end of 42^nd Street, but in 1804 in a more bucolic setting the two men stood ten paces apart. Hamilton had declared that he would let Burr shoot first: he did and mortally wounded his foe. Hamilton died the next day in what is now Greenwich Village. Tributes ‘poured in from all over the country.’ Burr, about to be indicted for murder and fearing for his safety, ‘slipped out of town into obloquy everlasting.’

 

I noted with interest that in 1803, Dewitt Clinton, the nephew of seven-times governor of New York George Clinton, was elected governor with a salary of $15,000. By coincidence, this was my own annual salary when I arrived in Washington one hundred and sevety three years later.

 

* Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Oxford University Press, New York 1999 (1,383pp.)

Checks, Balances and Standards of Behaviour: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump

 

Sometime around 2010, I received one of the more unusual requests from an author*. I was visiting her in Dallas and, as I often did, checked into my usual hotel in Turtle Creek and planned to book a ticket for the Saturday performance at the Morton H Myerson Symphony Center. My author’s mother, who was visiting her family, was keen on music and her daughter thought she would enjoy the company of a passing Englishman and a little Beethoven. So, I collected my ‘date’ from home, invited her to dinner at my hotel and then on to the symphony hall.

 

You may already be wondering what this anecdote has to do with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Well, my author’s mother turned out to be a senior, and charming but formidable, official in the Pentagon, responsible for safety in the US Navy. She explained to me that she, and she alone, a civilian, had the authority to order an officer, a captain or admiral, even the Secretary of Defence (at the time Donald Rumsfeld) not to do something that imperilled the safety of a ship and its crew. The only exception to this authority was deployment for the purposes of defence (which obviously had safety implications, but which was, after all, the very purpose of the navy). I asked her if she really had the unquestioned authority to order Donald Rumsfeld – not a man inclined to be told he could not do something – to prevent a particular ship from sailing, for example. She replied that she did indeed have that power and that Rumsfeld would be obliged to comply. We spent a pleasant evening of dinner, conversation and Beethoven (a rather second-rate performance she thought).

 

The point, and relevance of my story, is that here was one of the more unexpected checks and balances built into American public life at all levels, either by the Founding Fathers themselves or by legislation at some level of government or the judiciary. If my dinner companion judged something to be contrary to safety rules, she had the authority and the integrity to prevent it, and those who she instructed to desist recognized that it was their duty to comply. Nobody had a license to do something simply because they wished to.

 

By the time Donald Trump was elected I had spent 40 years living or working in the USA and had got to know, the country pretty well. I told my dejected friends that Trump might be a man of appalling character and utterly unsuitable to be President, but that the many checks and balances of the system would severely constrain what he could do. Well, January 6, 2021 very nearly proved me wrong: as one British friend observed, what stood between Trump and a coup d’état was his incompetence. And, of course, the scruples and backbone of Mike Pence subverted Trump’s plan, for his Vice President phoned every living Vice President to ask them what he should so – they all told him to refuse to comply with Trump’s request to overrule the Electoral College and declare Trump to be re-elected. Subsequently, of course, Trump has gone still further by eliciting from a Supreme Court stacked with hand-picked ideologues an opinion that a President has substantial immunity from prosecution. Thus, a President like Trump, whose guiding principle is that he should be able to do whatever he wishes, can ignore many checks and balances.

 

From my decades of experience of the USA and its peoples, I had come to respect their commitment to free speech, to a commendable commitment to professional standards, duty and doing the right thing (I am thinking especially of friends in the military, the library profession, educators etc), to protections of rights and of democratic institutions (not always perfect, but with the heart in the right place), and to a general courtesy and sense of decent behaviour. I have been profoundly depressed by the assault on these values by Trump and his acolytes/devotees. The country I had come to love is no longer quite what I thought it was.

 

I remember early in my time in the US, when I was still astounded by the number of people who owned guns (although many, many fewer than today) and who (not always the same person but frequently so) regarded government and taxes as infringements on liberty, I was at a party of World Bank and government officials. I met a young woman who worked for the Internal Revenue Service. She had recently been involved in an armed raid on a home in Maryland whose occupant refused to pay taxes and had declared that he’d shoot anybody who tried to collect them. Fortunately, the delinquent tax payer was arrested without anybody being injured. However, his behaviour seemed to me bizarre in the extreme, and I had not (or only rarely) encountered such attitudes until recent years when the addiction to guns and the worship of tax cuts (and a conviction that government is out to get you) obsesses a substantial number of Americans.

 

One of the things that amused me when I met Americans was the widespread belief that we Brits are supremely polite and love queuing. I suspected that this conviction was inspired by watching too much British period drama on PBS. In fact, my fellow Britons are increasingly likely to be positively impolite and aggressive, while in general Americans are by nature more courteous. Much of my travel in the USA was to university and college campuses. If I asked a student for directions I would invariably be addressed as ‘sir’, and faculty members would be hospitable and considerate. One art department, reasoning that an Englishman would be longing for his afternoon tea, even in Tulsa, Oklahoma, ordered in tea and cakes for our meeting.

 

True, political life could be aggressive and very dirty. Even at local level for very lowly elected offices, attack ads were as a rule extremely aggressive, frequently assailing an opponent for voting many times to put up taxes or some other unspeakable transgression. One suspects that the accusation was usually a radical simplification or distortion of the truth, but nevertheless the attacks seemed not to exceed certain accepted limits. Certainly, as far as I recall, the baying mob calling for somebody to be locked up and unfounded accusations of criminality are very recent and well beyond the bounds of decent behaviour.

 

Initially, I found it incredible that Donald Trump could, as a matter of rhetorical practice, use insults, demeaning nicknames and scornful remarks to belittle those who oppose him – and that his devotees could find this in any way acceptable. Unfortunately, many Republicans have followed him in debasing political discourse.

 

Of course, public life was far from squeaky clean. There was always some criminality because government is big money, and where there is big money there is corruption and misconduct. I Iived and paid taxes in Maryland, whose governor from 1969 to 1979 was Marvin Mandel, who in 1977 was convicted of mail fraud and racketeering. He spent 19 months in jail until President Reagan commuted his sentence in 1981. I vividly remember reading a report in the Washington Post that state officials had alleged that when Mandel and his wife left the governor’s mansion in Annapolis they took with them 87 items of furniture and other objects that were the property of Maryland, together with $3,800 in state cash used to buy various things for their personal use. Mandel’s disgrace was not particularly unusual, since Spiro Agnew, his predecessor in Annapolis, and later twice Vice President, eventually pleaded no contest to a charge of corruption while governor in order to escape several other charges.

 

Now Mandel defended himself against the charges of corruption, and eventually they were quashed on appeal (some time after Reagan’s pardon). To the best of my knowledge, he accepted the due process of the US legal system, without claiming that he had been unfairly targeted by his opponents and the entire legal system. Nor did he claim that his opponents themselves were engaged in criminal conduct. And Agnew’s plea implicitly acknowledged his guilt, again without claiming politically-motivated persecution. That is to say, they both accepted due legal process.

 

Trump has, of course, exploited the First amendment in a most shameless way, to criticize the judges and prosecutors of his various trials as well as the Justice Department for being politically motivated, and has sought to intimidate jurors. In the UK these would have been clear contempts of court, but the legal system has resolutely upheld Trump’s protected speech, even when he uses it to undermine the very basis of the legal system. Not even Mandel or Agnew were that contemptible.

 

Indeed, my time in the USA has inspired immense respect for the principled defence of free speech. It is true that, even in the late 1970s some sought to intimidate academics who espoused opinions that others found inconvenient and uncomfortable. I recall outraged citizens denouncing to the media some unfortunate professor as a ‘pointy-headed intellectual.’ I never did discover why intellectuals with whom one disagreed had to have oddly-shaped heads, but in any case, the criticism was purely rhetorical. Nobody actually sought to censor the academic’s opinions.

 

There were, of course, more serious threats to free speech. The American Library Association has long compiled annual lists of books that were censored in libraries. In 2023 4,240 titles were banned from a library somewhere in the USA. And school textbook publishers were well aware that school boards in large conservative states such as Texas would wield their purchasing power to censor textbooks. Even at the college level some of my competitors would, for example, edit anthropology textbooks to emphasize that evolution is a theory (which of course it is and has always been) and perhaps to include a modest coverage of creationist theory (as if it were a theory on the same level as evolution).

 

The attacks on woke are the contemporary political expression of efforts to limit free speech. The governor of Florida, Ron de Santis, who has passed laws enabling politically-motivated parents to object to books in a school library. The librarian is obliged to withdraw the book while a committee considers the objections (failure to do so is a criminal offence). The groups behind this legislation then objected to so many books that the committee process became so lengthy that the books were in practice banned on the opinion of one parent. De Santis has also interfered in the university/college curriculum by appointing ‘anti-woke’ members to the governing boards of state colleges. This is something I might have expected in a religious college, but never in a secular state institution.

 

One of the most appalling aspects of Trump’s rhetoric has been his vile portrayal of immigrants, and of Mexicans in particular, as criminals, rapists and the like. During visits to Mexico I have met many Mexicans who have worked as undocumented labourers in the USA. They returned to Mexico, but often had children born in the USA who are therefore US citizens and remain there. These hard-working, decent people who, it is true, entered and lived in the USA by irregular means, pose no threat to anybody. Several years ago, a friend who I had met in our student days in Cambridge was the Mexican Consul in San Francisco. Over dinner he told me that he had two principal duties. One was to visit Mexican citizens who had been arrested for some reason and to ensure that their rights were protected. But his major activity was to manage a fleet of mobile documentation centres which issued to undocumented Mexican workers (principally in the agricultural sector) a credential that certified that they were Mexican citizens. This did not make them legal, but enabled them to open a bank account, get a driving license and so on. My friend remarked that the US government approved of this arrangement since It also reassured the US authorities that the Mexican workers posed no terrorist threat, since all terrorists were assumed to be Muslims.

 

These workers were not in California in order to engage in criminal activity or to pose a threat to Americans. They were in there because Californian farmers needed them to run their businesses. Their undocumented status expose them to the risk of exploitation, and of deportation which can separate families for years, leaving behind in the USA a spouse and children. At one time I travelled frequently to Alabama, where, like Trump, the state government exploited fear of immigrants for political purposes. The state passed a law requiring public schools to verify the nationality of students’ parents and to report suspected undocumented immigrants to the state authorities. In the days before the law came into effect, the population of trailer parks emptied, and farmers were left with fields unharvested, as their workers fled to another state where they would not be subject to such scrutiny.

 

One time when I was staying in my hotel in Dallas workers of Mexican descent or origin organized a ‘day without Mexicans’ to demonstrate that they are not unneeded intruders, but that without Mexicans much of the economy could not function. My hotel room was invariably cleaned by a Mexican chambermaid, with whom I would chat and share experiences of Mexico and the USA. She decided to work on the day without Mexicans, but it was obvious that without her and her compatriots my room would have been left untidy. In a hotel I used for visits to Houston, there was a clear racial divide in the role assigned to employees: reception desk staff were always white or African American, chambermaids an restaurant workers Mexican.

 

Joe Biden, and now Kamala Harris, are characterising the election in November as a battle for American democracy. Whether or not the election of Donald Trump to a second term would fatally undermine democracy I cannot say. However, the positive-thinking, courteous, democratic America that protects free speech is under assault from social forces, attitudes and trends in American society that, while not entirely new, have been magnified by the undoubted self-promotional skills of a property-turned-media-turned-political entrepreneur. Whatever the outcome, Trump’s intentions are malevolent and he may well inflict great damage on the nation I lived and worked in and of which I am extremely fond. 

*Note: the author was one of three writers of Gateways to Art, a textbook for art appreciation courses, first published by Thames & Hudson in 2012, now in its fourth edition, and quite possibly the biggest seller in the company's 75 year history.