David Runciman's Blog

From the archive: Votes for children! Why we should lower the voting age to six – podcast

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2021: The generational divide is deforming democracy. But there is a solution

By David Runciman. Read by Andrew McGregor

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Is Donald Trump a fascist?

The US presidential election is neck and neck. But only one candidate has been compared to Adolf Hitler. Is it an exaggeration or based in fact?

Is Donald Trump really a fascist? It’s a question that has been bubbling away since he first announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015 after a years-long campaign to brand Barack Obama an illegitimate occupant of the White House. Back then his questioning of Obama’s citizenship appeared overtly racist (“When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18 @BarackObama was Barry Soweto”). So were his comments about Mexican immigrants at his campaign launch: “They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Trump’s early indications that he would not accept the results of any election he did not win made him sound like an anti-democrat. And he told Hillary Clinton in their first presidential debate that if he became president, she would end up in jail, which is where he seemed to think his political opponents belonged. It was plenty. But was it fascism?

Before 2016, the closest the US had ever come to electing a fascist as president was in a work of fiction. Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, published in 2004, imagines an alternative history for the country in which Charles Lindbergh – real-life aviation hero and Nazi sympathiser – has defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election on a promise to keep the US out of the second world war. In Roth’s telling, Lindbergh then initiates non-aggression pacts with Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan before embarking on a domestic programme of forced Jewish assimilation. Only when the popular radio host Walter Winchell announces he will stand against Lindbergh for the presidency and is shot dead at a campaign rally does the country come to its senses and drive Lindbergh out.

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Rage, waste and corruption: how Covid changed politics – podcast

Four years on from the start of the pandemic, the drama may have subsided but the lingering effects go on. Are we suffering from political long Covid? By David Runciman

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‘She still carries an aura of spectacular failure’: why hasn’t Liz Truss gone away?

Her 49 days in power ended in catastrophe, yet the shortest serving prime minister in British history is back, launching a new conservative movement with global ambitions. You just can’t keep a bad politician down …

The brief and calamitous premiership of Liz Truss broke all sorts of political records. It was the shortest by far in British history – just 49 days, though oddly in those seven weeks she became the first prime minister since Churchill to serve under two monarchs. Her approval rating before she resigned – 9% – was the worst yet recorded by any modern UK party leader. The botched emergency budget she introduced with her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, saw the pound fall to its lowest ever level against the dollar ($1.03). But perhaps the most salient fact about Truss’s time in office is that when it ended, she became the youngest ex-PM since William Pitt the Younger at the start of the 19th century. She was 47 when she quit Downing Street. Half a political lifetime still lay ahead of her if she could find some way to fill it.

Truss is now 48, the same age as John Profumo when his seemingly glittering career ended in scandal and disgrace in 1963. Profumo was also relatively young in political terms. Yet he knew there was no way back after he had not only destroyed his own reputation but likely wrecked the electoral prospects of the Conservative party. He chose to leave the Commons immediately and went to work at Toynbee Hall, a charitable institution in the East End of London, where 40 years of fundraising earned him a CBE. Kwarteng has likewise decided to step down as an MP, though it seems likely he will spend his time in the City of London rather than the East End. But stepping back from the fray is not the Liz Truss way.

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How Covid changed politics | David Runciman

Four years on from the start of the pandemic, the drama may have subsided but the lingering effects go on. Are we suffering from political long Covid?

Like many people, I have had Covid and I have had long Covid. They are very different experiences. I first caught the disease at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, when its effects were relatively unknown. It was unnerving and highly unpredictable. I did not get particularly sick, but I probably gave the virus to my father, who did. Back then, Covid appeared to be the great divider – the old were far more at risk than the young, and those with pre-existing vulnerabilities most at risk of all – and the great equaliser. Almost everyone experienced the shock and the fear of discovering a novel killer among us. We soon acquired a shared language and a sense of common purpose: to get through this together – whatever this turned out to be.

I developed long Covid last year, six months after I had caught glandular fever. The fresh bout of the Covid virus made the effects of the glandular fever far worse: more debilitating and much harder to shake. Some mornings it was a struggle to get out of bed, never mind leave the house. It was as though Covid latched on to what was already wrong with me and gave it extra teeth. The experience was unpredictable in a very different way from the drama of getting sick in 2020: not a cosmic lottery, but a drawn-out bout of low-level, private misery. Good days were followed by bad days for no obvious reason, hopes of having recovered were snuffed out just when it seemed like the worst was past. Long Covid is less isolating than being locked down, but it is also a lonelier business than getting ill at the peak of the pandemic was, if only because other people have moved on.

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What makes Elon Musk tick? I spent months following the same people as him to find out who fuels his curious worldview

Tucker Carlson, Greta Thunberg, Covid sceptics, military historians, the royal family … What would my time immersed in the Twitter/X owner’s feed reveal about the richest man in the world?

What’s it like to be Elon Musk? On almost every level it is impossible to imagine – he’s just too much. Musk is the hands-on head of three mega-companies, one (Tesla) wildly successful, one (SpaceX) madly aspirational, one (Twitter/X) a shambles. He has plenty of other businesses on the side, including The Boring Company (which makes hi-tech tunnels), Neuralink (which makes brain-computer interfaces), and his current pet favourite xAI (mission: “To understand the true nature of the universe”). He is the on-again, off-again richest human being on the planet, his personal net worth sometimes fluctuating by more than $10bn a day as the highly volatile Tesla share price lurches up and down. He is the father of 11 children – one of whom died as an infant, and from one of whom he is currently estranged – with three different women, which to his own mind at least seems to make him some kind of family man. He has 155 million followers on Twitter/X (we’ll call it Twitter from now on for simplicity’s sake), which is more than anyone else. Only a very few people – Barack Obama (132 million), Justin Bieber (111 million) – can have any idea of what that is like.

However, unlike Obama, who follows 550,000 accounts on Twitter, Musk follows only 415. That anyone can copy (or at least they could, before the platform recently changed its code so you can now only see a small handful of users’ followers rather than the full list). So that’s what I did, spending this past summer following the exact same accounts Musk follows and no one else, to see what the world looks like from inside his personal Twitter bubble. I wanted to be a fly on the wall in the room with the people who are shaping the thoughts of one of the most influential, and unpredictable, individuals on the planet. I should add that I’ve never followed anyone else on Twitter before – I’ve never even had a Twitter account – so it was all new to me. What can I say? It’s pretty mind-blowing.

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What makes Elon Musk tick?; Marina Hyde on the Russell Brand allegations – podcast

Marina Hyde appeals for us all to do the right thing by the victims of Russell Brand’s misogyny (1m23s); and writer and professor David Runciman reveals what happened when he followed all the same Twitter accounts as Elon Musk to try to get inside his head (11m9s).

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Weekend podcast: what makes Elon Musk tick? Plus Marina Hyde on the Russell Brand allegations

Marina Hyde appeals for us all to do the right thing by the victims of Russell Brand’s misogyny (1m23s); and writer and professor David Runciman reveals what happened when he followed all the same Twitter accounts as Elon Musk to try to get inside his head (11m9s).

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Weekend podcast: David Runciman attempts to get inside the mind of Elon Musk, and Marina Hyde on the Russell Brand allegations

Marina Hyde appeals for us all to do the right thing by the victims of Russell Brand’s misogyny (1m23s); and writer and professor David Runciman reveals what happened when he followed all the same Twitter accounts as Elon Musk to try to get inside his head (11m9s).

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The end of work: which jobs will survive the AI revolution?

Smart machines are meant to work for us, but there are already signs that we will end up working for them. What will the workplace of the future look like, and will your role still exist?

At the 2021 Australian and US Open tennis championships, all the line judges were replaced by machines. This was, in many ways, inevitable. Not only are these machines far more accurate than any human at calling balls in or out, but they can also be programmed to make their calls in a human-like voice, so as not to disorient the players. It is a little eerie, the disembodied shriek of “Out!” coming from nowhere on the court (at the Australian Open the machines are programmed to speak with an Australian accent). But it is far less irritating than the delays required by challenging incorrect calls, and far more reliable. It takes very little getting used to.

In the slew of reports published in the 2010s looking to identify which jobs were most at risk of being automated out of existence, sports officials usually ranked very high up the list (the best known of these studies, by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne in 2017, put a 98% probability on sports officiating being phased out by computers within 20 years). Here, after all, is a human enterprise where the single most important qualification is an ability to get the answer right. In or out? Ball or strike? Fair or foul? These are decisions that need to be underpinned by accurate intelligence. The technology does not even have to be state-of-the-art to produce far better answers than humans can. Hawk-Eye systems have been outperforming human eyesight for nearly 20 years. They were first officially adopted for tennis line calls in 2006, to check cricket umpire decisions in 2009 and, more recently, to rule on football offsides.

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