19 October

Estimates that about 7 million people marched in the No Kings protests yesterday in the US . Well over 70 million people voted for Trump at the last election. 10 times as many as turned out yesterday. It’s theatre. Americans love this sort of ‘grassroots’ stuff. (It’s not grassroots anything, nor is voting for Trump.) It never goes anywhere. Peace and prosperity come when you institutionalise the basics of public life. Employing people (‘public servants’, it’s in the name) to work on the necessary elements of public life, 365 days of every year, so that everybody else can get on with doing other things. American culture, both Left and Right, is hostile to institutions. The country was set up in opposition to them, by Puritans. Why it tries to solve problems by ‘taking it to the streets’, it can’t even imagine any other way to be public.