From Across The Pond

The world watches us pretty closely most of the time, but it's still a pretty neat trick when you've made the Brits notice just how fucked up our politics really is.

The lead article:

HOW do people learn to accept what they once found unacceptable? In 1927 Frederic Thrasher published a “natural history” of 1,313 gangs in Chicago. Each of them lived by a set of unwritten rules that had come to make sense to gang members but were still repellent to everyone else. So it is with Donald Trump and many of his supporters. By normalising attitudes that, before he came along, were publicly taboo, Mr Trump has taken a knuckle-duster to American political culture.

The recording of him boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy”, long before he was a candidate, was unpleasant enough. More worrying still has been the insistence by many Trump supporters that his behaviour was normal. So too his threat, issued in the second presidential debate, to have Hillary Clinton thrown into jail if he wins. In a more fragile democracy that sort of talk would foreshadow post-election violence. Mercifully, America is not about to riot on November 9th. But the reasons have less to do with the state’s power to enforce the letter of the law than with the unwritten rules that American democracy thrives on. It is these that Mr Trump is trampling over—and which Americans need to defend.

And in light of some of our less than sterling political moments - Swift Boat, Iraq's WMD, Whitewater, Willie Horton, Iran-Contra, The Enemies List, Southern Strategy, Joe McCarthy (the list goes on and on) - the fact that this one stands out in bold relief is depressing.