George Blecher

Constitutional conflicts, foreign policy upheavals and media spats: one frenetic month into the Trump presidency, Americans are still in a state of shock. With the madness set to continue, it’s time for a petrified opposition to start making some noise.

Trump’s win was far from unpredictable: the Clinton campaign failed to take popular resentment seriously. Whether or not Trump follows up on all of his many election promises, more conflict can be expected.

Whatever happens on 8 November, one thing is certain: the large bloc of disaffected voters represented by Donald Trump will not go away. His popularity reveals the fragility and entrenchment of the American democratic system, writes George Blecher.

In the latest of his Battle Dispatches from the electoral front, George Blecher visits the heartlands of the Trump vote in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and in an at times oddly moving piece, begins to get to the heart of The Donald’s appeal.

In his latest dispatch from the frontline of the US election campaign, George Blecher watches as the candidates unearth the dirt in each other’s pasts. Policy he asks, what’s that? Forget it.

Duck and dodge, wheel and deal, lies, lies and precious few facts or statistics. In the second of his Battle Dispatches covering the US elections, George Blecher explains how lying – or what he calls ‘evasive rhetoric’ – has become the campaign’s central issue on both sides.

It’s about to get rough and with all still to play for, in the first of his US election ‘Battle Dispatches’, George Blecher challenges Hillary to come out fighting.

The recent US presidential primaries may have appeared to be a cross between a circus and a caricature of a reality show, but don’t be misled, says George Blecher, the real show has yet to take place. The campaign between the two most unpopular candidates ever to stand for President will be brutal and the result will leave swathes of Americans disenchanted with the democracy of which they were once so proud.

Much as the media like to call Barack Obama a “lame duck President”, he’s begun to look pretty agile of late. So says George Blecher. A portrait of Obama, the most consistent US president in decades, dispatched from inside the land of the free.

George Blecher pinpoints exactly what it is that confuses Americans about the actions of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who, prior to the bombing of the Boston Marathon, may not have been far off from becoming an ideal American. But then becoming completely American always was a fiction.

He pointed a way for American fiction out of the doldrums of postmodernism, writes George Blecher. For a culture troubled by the corrosive commercial media and closed-end systems underpinned by modern technology, David Foster Wallace’s influence remains a force to be reckoned with.

Choreography replaces vision in a leaden US election campaign, writes George Blecher. No amount of media hype can disguise voters’ sense that neither candidate is offering a significant variation on the status quo.

Europe’s leaders need to take a hard look across the Atlantic before they start dismantling the Union, writes George Blecher. Emulating the US would risk forfeiting all the things that make Europe the best of all worlds.

Could Obama have let the US default? Given that the debt ceiling compromise merely postpones the political conflict, providing a stopgap rather than a solution, the unthinkable might not have been so bad an option, conjectures George Blecher.

Genuine knowledge or intellectual bullshit? Reformed bullshitter George Blecher recalls the moment he learned the difference…

Email, text messaging and social networks have revolutionized the way we communicate. Yet as the magic of instantaneity fades, George Blecher begins to miss some good old-fashioned penmanship.