Cicero's Songs

 In some ways, but far from all, I was a mildly precocious kid. For example I began to be a regular reader of The Economist from my early teens, long enough to see long term pictures and trends, but equally long enough to develop a brand loyalty.  From the beginning, I appreciated the conceit of the The Economist : that it was a newspaper, not a magazine, like the lesser titles based in America, such as Time or Newsweek , but more, that its editorial judgement was based on a set of principles that emerged from an almost high table approach to the issues of the day. Structured and academically rigorous, sure, but most of all intelligent.  The Economist was committed to political ideas, a liberal-conservative point of view that was not subject to the whims of fashion. More to the point, both editors and contributors were not merely ivory tower thinkers, they were often financial practitioners and extraordinarily well connected and well informed. Thus the opinions express...

 No one is quite sure which Frenchman in the 1920s suggested that "the United States is the only country that has gone from barbarism to decadence, with out the usual interval of civilization". It may have been a right wing French newspaper, it may have been Georges Clemenceau, though in any event it was treated as more a witty riposte to some US policy than a serious description of the then burgeoning power of the USA. The point was that the election of Warren Harding in 1920 had upended American foreign policy. Instead of joining the League of Nations- a body actually proposed by the Americans under Woodrow Wilson- the United States lapsed into a distant neutrality. The US "return to normalcy", left European, indeed global security without the worlds largest economy, without the pre-eminent power of the US armed forces, so recently the source of the allied victory in the First World War.  With the hindsight of a century, the early 1920s have some significant paral...