Democracy in America

IN 1982 Dorothy Gilliam was walking down an overgrown path close to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s lovely house on the Potomac River in Virginia, when she glimpsed a flash of white stone. Drawing nearer, Ms Gilliam, then a columnist for the Washington Post, made out an inscription on the moss-grown slab: “In memory of the many faithful coloured servants of the Washington family buried at Mount Vernon from 1760 to 1860. Their unidentified graves surround this spot”.

The memorial had been laid in 1929 by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association (MVLA), a heritage group that owns the estate, and since forgotten.

SLYLY and without warning, on January 2nd Republican congressmen announced as their first major initiative of the new year a scheme so crassly self-interested as to suggest they had learned nothing from the old one. Denizens of a reviled institution, and a party railroaded by Donald Trump’s populist insurgency, the Republicans planned to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE): an independent investigative body designed to root out corruption among them. Less than 24 hours later, after a hail of condemnation, they turned tail; even so their bungling was damning.

UNTIL fairly recently, it was rare to find Americans who were passionate about both medieval history and contemporary politics. Barring the odd Christian conservative, medievalists tended to lean left: a Marxist grad student, say, mucking around in land ownership patterns to show how past inequalities gave birth to present ones, or an environmentalist activist, perhaps, fascinated with vegetable-dyed handspun clothing. But when Americans invoked historical events in politics, they tended to be more recent—the founding of the republic; the struggle against slavery and segregation; victory over Nazi Germany.

This has changed.

THIS year marks the 40th anniversary of Gregg v Georgia, the Supreme Court case that reintroduced the death penalty to America. Capital punishment had been halted in 1972 when five justices determined it to be “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of the bar on “cruel and unusual punishments” in the eighth amendment. But four years later, the court found that new state laws had mended the death penalty’s main defects, and the executioner was called back from retirement. In the first few years following Gregg, only a handful of people were put to death. By 1999, the number of executions reached a peak of 98 before beginning to fall again after the century’s turn.

FOR a new American president to pick an ambassador with no experience in trade, cultural or any other form of diplomacy is not particularly remarkable. These appointments tend to be rewards for loyalty, friendship and financial backing during the campaign. What is most unusual, however, is to appoint someone who is pronouncedly undiplomatic and espouses extremist views on the politics of the country he will be sent to. Yet that is what the president-elect, Donald Trump, did on December 16th by choosing David Friedman, his bankruptcy lawyer and campaign adviser, as America’s next ambassador to Israel.

FIRST reactions to the nomination of Rex Tillerson as Donald Trump’s secretary of state have focused on the specifics of the Texan oilman’s record as head of ExxonMobil, from his closeness to the Russian government to his company’s stance on climate change. Defending his decision, President-elect Trump has pointed to a different, more general side of Mr Tillerson’s record: namely, that he has the brains and negotiating smarts needed to rise to the top of a large and complex multinational corporation.

“A DIPLOMAT that happens to be able to drill oil.” That is how Reince Priebus, Donald Trump’s incoming chief of staff, described Rex Tillerson, the boss of ExxonMobil, who was nominated this week as America’s secretary of state. In fact, Mr Tillerson, 64, is an oil driller through and through, has spent 41 years furthering the ambitions of one of the world’s largest companies, and has often sidelined the American government because he felt ExxonMobil was better able to look after its global affairs itself.