WOMEN AT THE HELM

Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes should be the right best-seller fitting Europe's gloom. The Americans for their part are retrieving Mister Rogers from their former innocent TV days, when kids went to school, dads to work and housewives did their hair. Tom Hanks wears the iconic zip-up sweater with brio.  To each his own. Europeans look for metaphysics to dress up their losses. Americans go back to some form of kitchen-cookie tales to still their panic. 

There the Brexit advances but there is no Siegfried in sight. Here the anticipation of four more years of Trump is creating a type of Angst that is out of Mr. Rogers' hands.

Indeed, the West as a whole watches the train of progress and harmony pass by. Chris Patten wrote that the Americans and British were cousins and strangers. Yesterday's British might as well forget the latter and retain the former. As much as Brexit deepened the English Channel, it also enlarged the span of the Atlantic. A bilateral trade deal with the US will be a band-aid, nothing else.

Europe compensates its irrelevance by some form of sexiness. Unfortunately it is becoming hard to rediscover allure or magic when the cruise ships invade St. Marks Place or The Game of Thrones junkies take over Dubrovnik. The same goes for America. Broadway, the former toast of creativity, is overrun by the cabbies of Andrew Lloyd Weber Cats. The hordes wearing MAGA and other caps have replaced the sophisticated theater-goers of better days. This is not an attack against democracy. It is a reaction against capitalism cheating, selling cat food for delicatessen and fooling the common man.

In France, President Macron does not try to cheat or to fool. He might be defeated in the end. In America the Trump/Barnum machine is successfully distracting observation by a variety of tricks which camouflage the dismantling of democracy inside and the murky deals outside. The way this White House & Co. deal with impeachment is brillant by the way, right out of a Bertolt Brecht playbook. 

It looks as if two great women might be at the helm in the EU and the US.  Ursula von der Leyen awaits a formidable  challenge. Nancy Pelosi should be the "Person of the Year" in American politics. The country relies on her. Without her , the Democrats would just be a pathetic flock.