I try not to spend my days being a doomer or a catastrophist, but in both casual and formal conversations I’ve come to think that there is one very basic point about politics in 2024 that is being broadly underrated — Joe Biden is currently on track to lose the election because he has lost the confidence of some of the swing voters who backed Trump or Gary Johnson in 2016 but then rallied to him in 2020.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden differ in many important ways, but both reject the broad consensus that largely governed economic policy in the decades before Trump’s 2016 election — one that is generally supportive of business and in favour of free enterprise.

On September 12, 2001, 24 hours after the 9/11 attacks, representatives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states convened to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter, which holds that an “armed attack” on one member “shall be considered an attack against them all.”