The Foolishness of Crowds

There’s a popular fallacy doing the rounds which is particularly insidious. It states that, as long as insurgent types such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders (and any other radicals with sufficient detachment from ‘the Establishment’) keep travelling the country and attracting sufficient numbers of people to gatherings of supporters, they will win. Not only will they win internal party squabbles; they will win power when those parties go to the country, too. In the case of Sanders, this adage has already been discredited. But it persists in other countries, most notably this one, where yet more extreme politicians (of the extreme Left and of the extreme Right) think power is achievable by replicating this method.

A European View of America’s Elections

The election of America’s next president will have vast global effects. This is inevitable, due both to the United States’ pre-eminence and the nature of globalised economics, and means that the current tangle of primaries and caucuses to decide the parties’ nominees is watched with great attention around the world.