Roseanne Barr’s tweet, in which she compared Valerie Jarrett, a former adviser to Barack Obama, to an ape, was the final straw for ABC, which cancelled her show. The network must have known it was playing with fire when it commissioned the show: present-day Roseanne had mainly shed all the fun bits where she talked to a scandalised audience about shagging John Goodman (wait, what? Married people have sex?), and she was a proud Trump supporter. It is like hitching a comedy vehicle to a hot-air balloon that’s on fire. One minute, you are casually supporting a giant wall and some protectionism, the next you are in favour of removing children from immigrant parents and losing them.

Barr appeared contrite but not deterred: she was sorry for the jobs on her show that were lost. She saw, in the fullness of time, that calling someone the bastard offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and an ape might be construed as a little racist. But if you think you have hit the hard-stop of her hooligan offence-giving, you would be wrong: she also thinks George Soros is a “Nazi who turned in his fellow Jews to be murdered.” It’s a bizarre charge to make of a man who evaded the Nazis at the age of 13 and has fought fascism ever since, but when your weather cock is resolutely set to “anything a liberal might disagree with”, the side-effects can be unfortunate. Before you know it, you believe Hillary Clinton began a paedophile ring and used children on pizzas in place of pepperoni. Or something … it must be true, because CNN isn’t covering it.

Barr is like the unexpurgated Trump-supporting psyche; a rare, public, Twitter-documented cascade from playful anti-establishmentarianism to full-blown conspiracy-theory-spiked explosions of hatred. You can track that wild swing in the conception of blue-collar politics in the US – from the tough-talking union-supporting 1980s to the hard-right, anti-authority but deeply authoritarian Trump era – through the arc of her humour. The wildest swing of all is that it used to be funny and is now barbarically dumb, like a concussed bull, charging a school bus, then saying “Sorry if some of you parents find me inappropriate”; but then, I would say that, because I’m mainstream.

Her early persona was straight-talking and subversive: in her standup, she talked about how feminism ignored the working-class women it claimed to champion, and she had a point. Proto-Roseanne used to bait schoolteachers, bosses, the fusspots of minor officialdom, and she had a point there, too. But the real distinction of the show was that its characters were allowed to be skint without being ashamed; now, it would be unheard of on a sitcom for a loving, basically sound mother to joke when asked to contribute to a school food drive: “Tell them to drive some of that food over here.” As wages have stagnated, the cultural acceptability of being seen to try to live on a low income has been obliterated.

Instead of attacking that canard, the elision of poverty and fecklessness that has passed without comment from the left and right, Barr has flipped into apparently limitless bigotry. All the passion and trenchancy she once hosed upwards, she now turns on those she considers inferior. It is a thumbnail portrait of what’s happened to the electorate, and raises a petrifying spectre of endlessness: how much that is unsayable does she still want to say? Once liberals are the enemy, where does illiberalism end?

The Italian crisis calls for cross-border unity of the left

So Brexit suddenly has a wingman or, more precisely, Lexit (Brexit for lefties) does: in Italy – or, if you prefer, Quitaly. Its people voted for radical candidates; realists told them it was all contradictory and they said: “Up yours, experts, there’s nothing more sacred than the will of the people.” Neoliberal elites, suspecting that the nominated finance minister, Paolo Savona, had a secret plan to crash them out of the euro, because that’s what he kept saying, freaked out about the value of their investments. The president – an office constitutionally designed to bleed the radiators of the popular vote every now and again, lest they overheat into 20 years of fascism – stepped in to nominate a caretaker, while they decided what kind of election to have next. That president, Sergio Mattarella, is meant to be impartial; that’s the point of him, that and his white bouffant, like wisdom made of hair. And he delivered a stitchup austerity candidate, nicknamed Mr Scissors, spelling fresh doom for the European project.

But can we just pause for a second, and recall the way we used to discuss politics before it became stupid? The Italian crisis is about the euro not the EU. The shared currency, created as it was with a giant void where any plan for political divergence within economic unity should be, is one thing. The EU, which aimed to preserve peace, standardise rights, institutionalise ambitions – most pressingly, given its achievements, around the environment – and insist that, if capital could move freely then people should be able to, is a different thing. We never had any problem understanding that in the Gordon Brown years. If the Italian crisis calls for anything, it’s that the left unites across European borders so that it isn’t obliterated within them by nationalistic fervour. It is not another sign that we should all storm off into splendid isolation.

Is the latest Handmaid’s Tale torturing viewers?



The Handmaid’s Tale, season two, has divided audiences: broadly, between those who can stand to watch women being tortured in new and variously gynaecological ways, and those who can’t. It’s a curious feminist conundrum: you want a graphic dystopia, to explore the logical endpoint of the new misogyny, but you don’t want it so graphic that people who genuinely hate women might get a kick out of it. Personally, I always close my eyes at the sight of anything – all I can tell you is what noises they made. I can barely distinguish between Game of Thrones and It’s a Knockout. Does that help?