The theme of the Service of Remembrance in Dunblane Cathedral this morning was Wisdom. In our troubled world, it seems to be in short supply. Yet it is there for those who seek it. Representing the King, the Deputy Lieutenant for Stirling and Falkirk, Lieutenant Colonel Ian McAlister, read the lessons, as he always does, most beautifully. The first lesson was from the Wisdom of Solomon 6: 12-20.
Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
And she is easily discerned by those who love her,
And is found by those who seeks her.
She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her.
One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,
For she will be found sitting at the gate.
I couldn’t help contrasting this with a passage from Salman Rushdie’s The Eleventh Hour (Vintage, 2026) which happened to be reviewed in this month’s British Journal of General Practice.
The present decay of ethical society around the world is a matter of some concern. Words such as “good” or “bad” or “right” and “wrong” are losing their effect, emptying of meaning, and failing, anymore, to shape society. Other words, such as “power”, “weakness”, et cetera, are replacing them. Also, “knowledge” is being replaced by “ignorance”, “memory” is being replaced by “forgetting”, and nothing, no shameful action, however atrocious, remains in the public mind for long. These are days in which “shamelessness” is king.
Orwell might have written something like that.
I confess I was more than a little negative last week in this blog when I implied that the results of a democratic election might be totally random, based on whim, in turn based upon the loudest sound-bites of the people able to spend the most money on a political sales pitch. Yet the results of the US mid-terms appear neither random nor whimsical; there is a pattern. President Trump has been bloodied, even if his name never appeared on the ballot paper. In fact, he specifically asked the electorate to vote as if his name was on the ballot paper; and maybe they did just that. At any rate the Grand Old Party has lost control of both the House, and the Senate. New Democrats are springing up as Governors. Even Kansas, for the first time in nearly a century, has gone blue.
Vice President J. D. Vance thinks it’s all down to the war on Iran. Didn’t the President, prior to his second term, say he wasn’t going to involve the US in any more foreign wars? And then he embarked on a special military operation (to borrow a term from Mr. Putin), which he certainly hadn’t been obliged to enter into; it was indeed discretionary. The unintended consequence of that is that the Strait of Hormuz closed, and the price of oil and gasoline went up. Now oil is not solely used to run automobiles; it is vital, for example, in the production of fertilizer. So the farming lobby are not happy. Presumably at the end of the day the general disgruntlement of the electorate is all about the cost of living. As Bill Clinton said, it’s the economy, stupid.
Then there was the Latino vote. They came out in favour of Trump in 2024, and then ICE started deporting people in a very aggressive way. It didn’t go down well.
I wonder if Trump saw it coming. Before the election he seemed strangely preoccupied with home improvements in the White House, and its environs. Rather than campaign, he withdrew into himself, like Nero with his fiddle, or like King Lear, who just wanted to gossip with Cordelia about the shenanigans of the court, “who’s in, who’s out…” After the defeat – for such it was – his tone was remarkably conciliatory. He congratulated the Democrats for “doing a good job”. And he sounded quite understanding, and forgiving, of the electorate, whom he claimed he had asked to put up with some short-term pain. But will it last?
On the day after the election I listened to Jeremy Vine’s talk show on BBC Radio 2. He interviewed a Democrat, who was cock-a-hoop, and a representative of Republicans overseas, who actually sounded as if he was on the same side as the Democrat. And I immediately thought, the Republicans have dumped the President. They took Trump on when he seemed to be an electorate asset, and now that he seems to be an electoral liability, they are dropping him, like hot coals.
But my sense is that, despite the initial conciliatory tone, he won’t go quietly. The appointment of a hawk, who was instrumental in the formation of ICE, as White House Chief of Staff, is a clue. It is in the President’s nature to “double down”. And despite the Democrats’ majorities in both houses, he still wields enormous power, through Executive Orders, especially in foreign policy. If he feels isolated, the more so because deserted by his own party, he might become as a wounded animal, cornered. Such beasts, under such circumstances, can be at their most ferocious.
Then there is the question of what the Democrats will do, with their new-found powers, exceeding even their own hopes as well as their own expectations. Will they attempt to impeach the President? Will they be intent on settling old scores? Or, putting a lame-duck President to one side, will they “reach across the aisle” and attempt to find a more civilised, interactive and collaborative way of doing business? I suspect now there might be a lull, a kind of truce, even if it’s only a phoney war, before normal service resumes in the New Year. This Presidency still has two years to run. Anything could happen.
David Pratt, a foreign correspondent who writes perceptively in both the Herald and the National, has cautioned against concluding that the results of the mid-terms are a seismic event. He thought a Churchill quotation was apposite. “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” But it seems to me that Winston said something even more apposite. I paraphrase: something along the lines of, “The Americans can always be relied upon to do the right thing, after they have exhausted every other possibility.”
