The pandemic dumped jet fuel into the growing counter-disinformation machine while extending its controls into the physical world. That brought the information state into people’s everyday lives. This was something different from the drama of false allegations about Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia that plagued the Trump presidency. Though Russiagate dominated the news cycle, it was essentially a political crime against abstractions like the “rule of law” and the “democratic process.” Normal people who did not devote their time to scrolling newsfeeds could mostly choose to ignore the sordid Trump-Russia drama. Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates removed the “normie” exemption.

The senseless cruelty of preventing people from attending outdoor weddings and visiting sick relatives in their final moments. The images of authorities in New York City placing locks on children’s playgrounds. Authorities in Venice, California, using bulldozers to shovel thirty-seven tons of sand into the city’s iconic skatepark to prevent kids from playing outdoors. Prolonged school closures that isolated children and caused generational learning losses, hurting poor and disadvantaged kids worst of all. The brazen flouting of these restrictions by the upper classes and political elites. At Barack Obama’s 60th birthday party, for instance, where the former president and his hundreds of celebrity guests on Martha’s Vineyard danced with their faces exposed while the army of workers hired for the event were forced to wear masks. The fact that the technique of lockdowns was imported into the United States from the authoritarian surveillance state of China, where the virus originated. The even more galling fact that mere discussion of the virus’ origins was labeled a racist conspiracy by the most venerated institutions of science and journalism.

By imposing excessive and arbitrary policies while attempting to conceal vital information about the pandemic, the state provoked a public backlash. In turn, government officials treated the backlash not as legitimate democratic dissent, but as proof that unregulated misinformation was fueling domestic extremism. They responded by doubling down on the same policies, tightening their information controls, and imposing new methods of digital cancellation like “debanking” that cut off people’s access to their own financial accounts. Official repression and popular revolt fed off each other in a cycle that radicalized both sides and laid bare the realities of mass manipulation and digital dependency in the information state.

***

On February 15, 2020, as people were just learning about Covid, the World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous.” His statement came almost a month before the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared a pandemic. The “infodemic” not only preceded the physical pandemic, it was, in the words of the world’s foremost health authority, “just as dangerous.”

The following month, all the major tech platforms — Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube — released a joint statement pledging that they would be “jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus” while also “elevating authoritative content”.

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“The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise,” wrote Klaus Schwab, head of the Davos-based World Economic Forum (WEF), in a book published at the start of the pandemic that announced its aims in the title, COVID-19: The Great Reset. The global surveillance network Schwab described had a second purpose. Beyond detecting the spread of new viruses, it could monitor the information environment and shape the public’s response to new policies. Yet the category of “authoritative information”, which would supposedly prevent future “infodemics”, was less reliable than its name suggested.  

Members of the public who had eyes to see could not help but notice that whatever the experts vehemently declared about Covid could be reversed a day later. Health authorities like the WHO and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were often acting on incomplete information to rush out policies heavily influenced by political considerations in the name of “science”. Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of Google subsidiary YouTube, said her platform’s publishing policy called for “removing information that is problematic”. Examples of problematic information she named included people advocating vitamin C and turmeric as cures for the coronavirus and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations”. Meanwhile, the WHO frequently changed its recommendations, which meant the meaning of misinformation changed from day to day.

By following its own rule, Google would have been forced, at various times during the pandemic, to ban posts that advocated wearing masks, that characterized the virus as highly contagious, or that suggested that it might have come from a laboratory, since all those went against official stances taken by the WHO. The CDC was similarly inconsistent, changing its policy on masking at least three times in the span of two years. The agency originally discouraged their use before endorsing it, then finally acknowledging that the cloth masks most Americans used could not stop the fine aerosols that spread Covid — a fact that Anthony Fauci had privately acknowledged at the outset of the pandemic in a February 2020 email.

Despite the inconsistencies of the public health authorities, experts from the disinformation field proved flexible enough to enforce every new pronouncement as if they were both moral imperatives and matters of settled science. When Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton suggested that Covid-19 could have escaped from the Chinese virology laboratory in Wuhan at the epicenter of the outbreak, he was swiftly attacked by journalists who all seemed to use strikingly similar language. The Washington Post labeled the idea of a possible lab leak a “conspiracy theory that was already debunked”. A reporter who was then at Politico accused Cotton of “spreading rumors… that were easily debunked within minutes”, while The New York Times chided Cotton for spreading what it called a “conspiracy theory.” Given the apparent consensus, Facebook banned users from discussing the lab leak theory under its misinformation policy. That May, The Washington Post’s top fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, wrote that it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a lab. A year later, Kessler published a new article explaining “How the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory Suddenly Became Credible.” And a short time after that, Facebook quietly reversed its policy, posting a notice that read, “In consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”

In June 2020, the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, sponsored the creation of a nominally independent organization called the Election Integrity Partnership whose mission was to monitor and remove election-related misinformation online in the lead-up to the November election. A consortium of four groups (two universities, a private defense contractor, and a Washington think tank), the EIP’s mandate, according to one of its founders, a former chief security officer for Facebook, Alex Stamos, was to “try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves”. With more than 100 employees scouring social media sites for speech that they deemed misinformation and flagged for suppression or removal by the tech companies, the EIP did the kind of work, according to Stamos, that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations” to do on its own.

Immediately after the election, one of the four groups that made up the EIP, the Stanford Internet Observatory, spun off into a new information-monitoring initiative called the Virality Project. In a seamless transition from elections to public health, the project collaborated with the surgeon general’s office and the CDC while policing social media for what it labeled vaccine and pandemic-related misinformation. One email sent by a Virality Project staffer to multiple social media companies recommended that the platforms take action even against posts that described “stories of true vaccine side effects”, specifically “true posts which could fuel hesitancy”. 

Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.

Without any public deliberation or legislative debate, without any formal amendments to the Constitution, the authority to censor that which was true but deemed harmful had become the law… not quite of the land, but of the society online that was ruled by code. The more arbitrary the health policies became, the better they propped up the authority of the information regulators.

***

At 77, Joe Biden was the oldest major-party candidate to ever run for president, and it showed. Heading into the November 2020 election against Trump, he looked unsteady, even feeble, in his limited and carefully stage-managed public engagements. Biden’s voice would trail off mid-sentence. He would forget what he was talking about or refer to someone who had died as if they were still alive.

Given his frequent verbal gaffes, blank stares, and ghost-white pallor, there were concerns about his health and mental fitness for office. But the powerful fact-checking bureaus in the press dismissed these concerns as Right-wing conspiracy mongering, misinformation, and ageist discrimination. One Homeland Security bulletin leaked to the media detailed an alleged Kremlin plot to manipulate American voters by spreading “unsubstantiated allegations” about Biden’s declining mental health.

With the election only a few months away, Biden’s campaign announced that he would not hold any public campaign rallies due to Covid-19. Biden added, in an offhand comment to reporters, “This is the most unusual campaign I think in modern history.” Not long after that, Biden won a most unusual election.

After losing the election, Trump spent two months challenging the results and stoking the fury of his supporters with a manic “Stop the Steal” campaign that mixed reasonable questions of electoral interference with absurd and wildly irresponsible claims that prodded at the fragile basis of civic peace. The effort culminated on January 6, 2021, when a large pro-Trump demonstration that had assembled in Washington, DC, to challenge the election results splintered off into a riot at the US Capitol building. Ugly scenes of Trump supporters rampaging around the Capitol and fighting with police officers blanketed the news.

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In a symbolic register, the images of protesters dressed like Vikings marauding inside the Capitol building were uniquely threatening to American democracy. But, despite the symbolism, the riots were disorganized and ineffectual. Moreover, January 6 fit into a larger pattern of political violence that had played out over the previous year. The nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which had taken place six months earlier, were orders of magnitude larger and more destructive than the pro-Trump riot. Nineteen people were killed in violence connected to the BLM protests, which spread to more than a hundred cities across the US and caused over $1 billion in damages.

And yet the elite establishment overwhelmingly supported the BLM movement and sympathetically pandered to its demands such as defunding the police. Nancy Pelosi, the powerful Speaker of the House, posed for a photo op kneeling in a brightly colored African kente cloth to show solidarity with the protesters. Public figures who for months had vilified public gatherings as deadly superspreader events suddenly celebrated the sight of tens of thousands of demonstrators crowding in the streets for BLM marches. One petition signed by more than 1,200 health officials declared it incumbent on members of the medical profession to offer “unwavering support” to the protesters. The ruling tech platforms, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, all vocally endorsed and amplified the BLM movement.

In contrast, the response to January 6 was as swift and decisive as any political fallout in recent history. One day after the Capitol melee, Facebook banned the sitting president from posting on its platform. Then Twitter banned Trump permanently, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence”. PayPal and its subsidiary Venmo blocked the accounts of individuals and groups involved in organizing the pro-Trump demonstrations, as well as a Christian crowdfunding site raising money for the protesters. GoFundMe announced that it would remove fundraisers promoting conspiracy theories and “misinformation” about the election. 

To be sure, one could reasonably argue that the threat posed by rioters storming the Capitol and threatening to overturn the election justified the response. That was a political judgment. But the coordinated campaign of digital disconnection reflected a profound transformation in the American system of government. It exposed the outline of a new power structure that operated outside of the formal government by controlling the strategic heights of the information space. A cartel of Silicon Valley tech companies had accomplished in days what Congress failed to do over four years: it shut Trump up and silenced his movement. For a while, at least.

Biden’s inauguration a week later came as a mere formality. The first Trump presidency ended the moment he lost his means of speaking directly to the public, which social media had initially provided, propelling him into the White House, and then unilaterally revoked. The invisible hand of the information regime, once it decided to reveal itself, simply hit mute on the most powerful man in the world. In doing so it revealed an essential rule of power in the digital age: sovereign are they who control the information.

This is an edited extract from The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, by Jacob Siegel (Henry Holt & Company).

Theoretically, the news should have troubled officials in Washington, who often still speak as if they oppose the proliferation of nuclear weapons to rogue states that vow to destroy the US-led international order. So why, then, did the US block the effort led by its allies France and England to censure Iran? For the same underlying reason that has motivated White House policy since October 7: The Biden administration sees Iran as America’s main partner in the Middle East and the lynchpin of US grand strategy.

Washington’s de facto alliance with Iran, which began under the Obama administration and was revived by Biden, is the central fact of US foreign policy today. Iran is the decisive factor in most decisions the US makes in the region, including in relation to Israel. Yet White House officials know that stating this directly would create a public-relations disaster. Alas, most Americans stubbornly reject the idea of aligning their country with the Khomeinist state that has killed more than a thousand of their fellow citizens and continues to attack US soldiers and call for their deaths. Indeed, existing policies such as airlifting billions of dollars in cash to Iran and using taxpayer money to subsidise Iranian proxy forces, including Hezbollah and Hamas, would be decidedly unpopular if the government actually acknowledged them.

To get around this problem, US officials conceal the main axis of their strategy behind a veil of misdirection and innuendo. Is it an irony that America’s ruling party used deliberate deception to advance its project of US-Iranian alliance, as its leaders led a new crusade to prosecute “Disinformation”? No, it is a political strategy following the old maxim that the best defence is a good offence.

It was Obama who first envisioned a strategic “realignment” that would clean up the mess left by the Bush administration’s failed wars in the Middle East. The US occupation of Iraq — rather than empowering peaceful, democratic forces across the region as Bush advertised — had mainly benefitted Iraq’s neighbour, the Shia theocracy of Iran. In the Eighties, under the leadership of the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq fought a war of attrition with Iran in which more than 1 million people were killed, including more than 100,000 civilians. It was the longest conventional war of the 20th century and one of the most brutal, with chemical weapons attacks by Iraq, numerous massacres of civilians, and Iran using children to clear minefields. When it ended, the war left significant divisions between Iraq’s majority Arab Shia population and the ethnically Persian Shia regime of Iran. It was only after American occupation forces disbanded Iraq’s Sunni Baathist government in 2003, triggering a spiral of insurgency and civil war, that policy makers in DC started to see Iran as the key to restoring order in the country.

In addition to former Baathists and Sunni jihadists, the Iraqi insurgency included a large number of Shia militias funded by Iran, some of them operating as direct proxies of the Iranian Quds Force. Given the proper incentives, the Americans reasoned, Iran could muzzle those groups and direct them to stop attacking American soldiers. More broadly, it was thought that Iran could play a crucial role in stabilising Iraqi politics by backing the leaders who Washington selected to run Iraq’s new democratically elected government. “To quickly make a government we allowed Shia exiles and Iranian proxies into the Iraqi government and turned a blind eye to Iran’s control of the Iraqi state,” writes Joe Kent, a former Green Beret who did multiple tours in Iraq before returning to the US and entering conservative politics where he advocates pulling American troops out of the Middle East.

Thus, despite Tehran’s ideological devotion to killing Americans and annihilating Israel, which has never dimmed, the belief in its value as a strategic partner grew within the US foreign policy elite. The moment to realise the idea arrived after Obama won re-election in 2012 and could pursue his most ambitious designs without worrying about voters. The Iran deal, which Obama saw as the centrepiece of his legacy, became the main priority of his second term. By the time the White House, led by its Iran envoy Robert Malley, began public negotiations in 2013 for the nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), US officials had already been making secret entreaties to Tehran for several years.

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Under the auspices of preventing Iran from getting the bomb, the Obama administration set about weakening its former allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The two countries that had been the main pillars of America’s security architecture in the Middle East were now seen as obstacles due to their opposition to the US embrace of Iran. To deal with them, the Obama administration went on the attack. The White House spied on members of Congress who it suspected of coordinating with Israeli officials to oppose the Iran deal, a move that, in 2015, still looked like an unprecedented use of the US intelligence agencies in partisan politics. On another track, the State Department funded Israeli non-profit groups working to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, exceptional generosity was being shown to Iran. Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, repeatedly blocked the FBI from arresting Iranian terrorists in order to protect the JCPOA, according to agency whistle-blowers. In a leaked email between two FBI agents from 2015, one complains: “We are all beside ourselves on asking the field to stand down on a layup arrest, however as it stands right now we all have to sit back and wait until the US and Iran negotiations resolve themselves.”

To stifle criticism at home, the administration used friendly mouthpieces in the press to smear anyone opposed to the pro-Iran realignment as a neocon trying to drag America into another war. In the softer voice that Obama deployed in the rare, carefully selected moments when he articulated his strategy, he insisted that boosting Iran would be good for the whole region, including the Israelis, by forcing everyone to get along. This would produce a new geopolitical “equilibrium” Obama told The New Yorker in 2014, between “Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare”.

Obama’s comments were made in the midst of the Syrian civil war, but some months before active warfare broke out in Yemen between Iran’s Houthi proxy and the Saudis. Nothing that happened, however, neither Assad’s gas attacks in Syria nor Iran’s increasingly aggressive use of its proxy forces, shook his prevailing faith in the new US-made Middle East. If anything, Iranian military expansionism seemed to redouble Obama’s commitment, as came across in his statements from a press conference in December of 2015, where he spoke of allowing “the Iranians to ensure that their equities are respected”. In other words, American power would now defend Iran’s right to proxy armies in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, so long as they operated within the US regional framework, which set limits on the acceptable levels of violence and terrorism.

Volatile contradictions inherent in Obama’s progressive imperial order stoked a backlash against the realignment and presented a technical problem. How should the White House deal with critics who threatened to undermine their plan for transforming the Middle East? The answer Obama chose was to embrace offensive information operations, otherwise known as mass propaganda, as a legitimate tool of domestic politics.

“We created an echo chamber,” Obama’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, admitted in 2016 to the writer David Samuels. Coasting off the cultish enthusiasm for Obama among America’s progressive elites, the White House recruited non-profit groups and friendly press outlets to lend a false air of independent credibility to administration talking points. Still a relatively new technology at the time, social media proved immensely important in achieving this effect. Twitter synchronised the various narrative purveyors in the echo chamber, connecting them to the public and to each other in a feedback loop that translated political agendas into “objective news”.

It is not too dramatic to say that the Iran deal echo chamber inaugurated a new era of American politics driven by party-directed propaganda. It established the informational networks that allowed the Democratic Party to repeat the formula in the future. And indeed, this is precisely what has happened, in a pattern recurring at increasingly frequent intervals ever since: in, to name but a few, the false claims that Russia “hacked” the US election to anoint Donald Trump, that Hunter Biden’s laptop was an act of Russian disinformation, and most recently in relation to Gaza.

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So far so good for the US-Israeli “special relationship”. But then the Israelis went mad, abandoning any winnable military strategy in order to brutalise the Palestinians like Old Testament fanatics. Perhaps this was a manifestation of the same inherent extremism that had placed Israel’s government in the hands of theocratic fascists. What was clear in any event was that Biden, despite his eternal commitment to the Jewish state, would have to uphold America’s honour by punishing Israel and withholding US support from its war crimes. Moreover, Israel was pushing the entire world to the brink of World War Three as its irresistible lobby in Washington tried to drag the US into a war with Iran. And just what did the Israelis think they could accomplish? Everyone knows that killing terrorists only creates more of them and that there is no way to kill an idea. So, to rescue Israel from itself while also extending America’s moral protection to the Palestinians, the White House has worked towards a ceasefire that will free the hostages and create the conditions for a lasting peace. That peace will of course take the form of the long-sought after two-state solution, which will also solve the problem of Hamas, the organisation that can’t be destroyed, by absorbing its surviving members into a government led by the moderate Palestinian authority. The final realisation of this peace process will fulfil the aspirations of Palestinians, deradicalise the remnants of Hamas, and make Israel along with the entire Middle East, safer and more secure.

You have likely heard some or all of these claims since October 7. Many of them are not presented as claims at all but as axiomatic expressions of objective fact. Yet every assertion made in the preceding two paragraphs is either comprehensively false or twisted to misrepresent the US position in the Middle East. Let us take them in turn.

Joe Biden, rather than being Israel’s best friend, is the leader of a global empire that is simultaneously funding Israel, Hamas and the other Iranian proxies with whom Israel is at war. As the leader of the empire, Biden manages (to the best of his mature ability) a portfolio of client states in the Middle East that includes Egypt, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia along with a parallel portfolio reserved for its strategic partner Iran and Iran’s subsidiary “equities” in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon. The US pumps money into both portfolios. It funds Iranian terror proxies such as Hezbollah through cut-outs and targeted sanctions relief that Iran exploits to launch attacks and strengthen its regional power. Recently, the US spent $1 billion building a massive new embassy complex in Beirut. The exorbitantly expensive project makes no logical sense until one appreciates that its purpose is to signal America’s commitment to Iran’s main regional proxy and create a slush fund that can be used to pay Hezbollah. Hamas, too, represents an Iranian “equity” as Tehran has become the main funder and backer of the Palestinian group and helped it to plan and orchestrate the October 7 attack. Though you will never hear a White House official state this directly, the reality is that US policy toward Iran and toward Hamas are inseparable.

Whereas Biden officials reject any efforts to force new leadership on Tehran, they show no qualms about using regime change tactics to unseat the Netanyahu government in Israel. “I really think that most Israelis do not want America to stay out of their business,” the US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, said in February of last year after Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli’s criticised Nides for meddling in Israel’s domestic politics.

Prior to October 7, the US pressured Israel to accept “regional integration” — the term used by Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan — with Iranian proxies like Hezbollah — the idea being that if America just puts everyone on the payroll, friends and foes alike, it can buy quiet. After October 7, the US is still pushing the same approach. Despite Biden’s gushing proclamations of support for Israel, his actual policy has focused on preserving the US-Iranian condominium in the Middle East. That is why on October 8, while Israel was still battling with pockets of Hamas operatives who had infiltrated inside its territory, Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for an immediate ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. It is also why the US is now pressuring Israel to accept integration with Hamas, whose members US officials insist must be included in a new Palestinian government.

The popular notion that Biden championed the Abraham Accords is a farcical inversion of the truth. In reality, Biden was so opposed to Trump’s signature foreign policy legacy that US officials could not even use the term during the first year of his administration. Rather than ignoring the Palestinians, the Biden administration pointedly attempted to recentre them. Whereas the whole premise of the Accords had been that Arab-Israeli peace could advance independent of a political settlement with the Palestinians, Biden reversed this. The much-touted Biden initiative to bring Israel into a new partnership with Saudi Arabia was contingent on the Israelis first accepting a “peace” deal with the Palestinians. The entire thrust of Biden foreign policy has been to undo the significant successes of the Trump era and resurrect Obama’s progressive imperium. Immediately after taking office, Biden lifted sanctions on Iran and took the Houthis, Iran’s proxy force in Yemen, off of the US terrorism watch list. Where Trump had cut funding to the Palestinians because it was being used to fund terrorism, Biden immediately reversed this with an aid package that included $150 million for the UNRWA, the United Nations organisation whose facilities and members are enmeshed with Hamas in Gaza.

Of course, it is legitimate to argue that Biden did not go far enough in his support for the Palestinian cause, but that is not the claim that one hears made. Rather, the charge is that Biden continued Trump’s sin of marginalising the Palestinians and thus provoked their sense of desperation that led to the October 7 attack. But this is flatly contradicted by all available evidence. If being side-lined was the proximate cause of Palestinian terrorism, we would have seen attacks during the Trump years. Instead, Trump’s term brought a period of relative peace in the Middle East, including for Israelis and Palestinians. There were no Israel-Hamas wars under Trump. By contrast, the first Israel-Hamas war of the Biden administration took place months after he entered office, after his many generous overtures toward Iran and the Palestinians, and we are now on the second war of his administration. A great many people of various ideological persuasions are involved in a furious effort to rewrite this history and suggest that there was barely any difference in the foreign policies of the two most recent US administrations. A reasonable person may ask themselves a simple question: Does the world under President Joe Biden appear more or less chaotic and violent than it did under President Donald Trump?

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Israel is not wantonly brutalising the Palestinians as an exercise in cruelty. It is fighting a particularly brutal form of urban warfare against an enemy that had more than a decade to prepare a fortified defence with the financial subsidy and support of the “international community”. The horrific scenes from Gaza resemble the scenes from Mosul where US and Iraqi forces fought a similarly brutal war to liberate the city from Isis. The images of devastation from Mosul, where more than 10,000 civilians were killed in the fighting and half of the city was razed, are not as well-known because the Moslawis are not a global empathy trigger. Recent history shows that, in fact, a terrorist group can be destroyed in a particular time and place, but only at a truly harrowing cost.

When senior Biden administration officials tell reporters that they “have to be honest about the fact that Hamas will remain in Gaza in some form after the war is over”, they are being anything but honest. The purpose of such statements is not to describe reality but to telegraph the supposed inevitability of the end state that their own policies —stopping arms sales to Israel, accusing it of war crimes, demanding that it leave Hamas in Rafah — are intended to achieve. The White House insistence on a two-state solution led by the Palestinian Authority, a proposal almost as unpopular with Palestinians as it is with Israelis, is promoted under the humanitarian auspices of granting a people their “rights”, but simply extends the US imperial strategy of “regional integration”. Historically, this is what great powers do. They divide the world’s lesser countries as spoils. The lesser countries would be wise to bear this in mind.

Rather than escalating toward a Third World War with Iran, the aim of American power projection in the Middle East is to preserve Iran’s ability to act as a hegemonic stabiliser. The flaw in this aim is that Iran possesses no such ability and that its leaders are guided by an ideology that violently rejects the very idea of doing so. Yet that has not dissuaded successive Democratic administrations from trying. And why not, when they will never have to pay for their own failures as long as they have the “herd immunity of the ruling class” to protect them from the consequences of their own failures?

It will be a mystery for future historians to ponder how the leaders of the most powerful country in the history of the world could have so recklessly squandered its power in such obviously wasteful pursuits. The analogy that gets closest, to my mind, comes, not from looking at past US wars and foreign policy mistakes but at the Covid pandemic. Secretly funding the Iranian empire on the premise that it would make the world more peaceful is the equivalent of secretly funding Gain of Function research to engineer super deadly viruses at a Chinese bioweapons laboratory on the premise that it would make Americans safer.

“You got a win. Take the win,” Biden told the Israelis in April immediately after Iran launched more than 300 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at them. In a phone call, Biden explained to Netanyahu that since the attack had stayed within the proper limits, the US would not support Israel attacking Iran in response. One further relevant detail was provided in a Reuters report: The Iranian attack on Israel had received approval from Washington on the condition that it “must be within certain limits”.

Israel is not a passive victim in this scenario. Neither are any of the other US client states in the Middle East and other parts of the world who have accepted American backing on American terms. It is the empire that sets the rules and America has exercised its prerogative to change them. What is beyond question, though, is that when the US refers to the “rules-based international order”, it means an order in which Iran will maintain its pride of place. As Antony Blinken reportedly told Israeli officials about why they should accept a new US ceasefire proposal that would keep Hamas in power, it offers “the possibility for further integration in the region”.

What Gaza was, it is now clear, had been catastrophically misjudged. With few exceptions, Israel’s leaders believed that Hamas was contained, while Washington’s smart set held that increased aid and normalisation would induce Hamas to moderate its positions and play a constructive role in “dialogue”. In 2008, Robert Malley, the lead White House negotiator with Iran for both Obama and Biden, provided what would become the dominant conceptual framework among America’s foreign policy mandarins. “None of them are crazies,” Malley told an interviewer of Hamas and Hezbollah. “They may do things that we consider to belong to a different realm of rationality, but within their own system it’s often very logical.”

Given the chance, Hamas rationally manifested the core tenets of its political vision on Saturday by massacring as many Jews as it could: soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children along with non-Jews, the collateral in its praxis of deliberate extermination. The attack was an extraordinary victory for them and an abject blow to Israel. How did a group thought to be muzzled and incapable manage to gain the strategic initiative against a far more powerful enemy?

Three factors played into Hamas’s success: complacency and unpreparedness inside Israel exacerbated by internal schism; the strengthening of Hamas’s great power-backer Iran; and the rapid unravelling of America’s global leadership, vacillating between reckless provocations and delusional attempts to integrate Iran, while pressuring Israel to embrace its enemies.

Although details of Iran’s role in Saturday’s attack are still being pieced together, there is no question that Tehran is the crucial enabler of the group’s military power. The tactics displayed — neutralising Israel’s early detection capabilities ahead of a combined armed assault — are borrowed from Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), another Gaza-based group, more directly controlled by Iran, also participated in the attack, demonstrating coordination within a broader regional Iranian military complex.

Iran’s power has been ascendant for two decades now, propped up by US policies beginning with the occupation of Iraq and culminating in the new era of US-Iranian alignment along with the release of billions of dollars to Tehran. Meanwhile, the Biden administration pushed Israel to accept new security arrangements. The thinking was that monetary aid could be used to transform belligerents into common protectorates, thereby “integrating” the region, in the term used by US officials, into a new “depressurised” regional order overseen by Washington.

Israel recently entered into such an arrangement with Lebanon and the result was that Hezbollah, which is already fully integrated into the Lebanese state, had more impunity to carry out attacks. Following a series of Hezbollah rocket strikes and manoeuvres across the border into Israel earlier this year, Middle East analyst Tony Badran explained the new dynamic: “The Israeli role is strictly to make concessions in the framework of a US-brokered agreement, at the risk of displeasing its American patron. Hezbollah, meanwhile, knows that the structure of this Kabuki performance prohibits Israel from retaliating, making its provocations more or less risk-free.”

All of which is clearly at odds with the messaging from Washington. President Biden’s rousing speech earlier this week was powerful and much appreciated by many Israelis, but it follows a long period of US policy that has made Israel appear vulnerable to its enemies.

Claims that Hamas was driven by desperation at seeing the Palestinian cause eclipsed by an approaching Saudi-Israel pact seem to ignore that the Palestinian cause, which had indeed been largely marginalised with Trump in office, was receiving more attention from the Biden administration. Rather than banishing the Palestinians, US officials explicitly wrote their claims into the language of the proposed Saudi-Israeli deal, as Tablet explained earlier this week: “The Biden administration had inserted its agenda on the 1967 lines and Jerusalem into the Saudi-Israeli process, and presented it as a Saudi ask that was necessary to provide “legitimacy” — through Palestinian buy-in — to any prospective agreement with Israel.” It was the Biden administration that restarted aid to Hamas despite warnings that the money would be used to fund terrorist attacks on Israel.

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Israel and the rise of a new world order

By David Patrikarakos

Why would the US fund both sides in a conflict? Biden, by all accounts, is sincere in his personal commitments to Israel. The reason they did it is because they actually thought it would work. Only last week, Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, boasted: “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

This is the trap Israel now faces: the country is already at war in what could rapidly spiral into an existential conflict, while its greatest ally, the US, has constructed a new regional order that has aimed to constrain Israel while empowering its enemies.

Any operation to defeat Hamas will have to include a significant ground invasion into Gaza. This will open the Israelis to protracted urban fighting against an enemy that has had ample time to plan for such a scenario and holds at ransom more than a hundred hostages including children.

Yet while Israel possesses both the will and the resources to fight even on two fronts, it must do more than just repel or temporarily silence its enemies. The massacre against its people requires an overwhelming response. Israelis demand no less and the nation’s security depends on re-establishing that the price to pay for attacking Israel is higher than its neighbours are willing to bear.

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What will Israel's invasion of Gaza achieve?

By Edward Luttwak

Modern warfare is ruled by states. Asymmetric war, which appears to violate that rule, ends up proving it because the warfighting capacity of substate groups relies on the protection and patronage of their sponsors. Israel must not only neutralise Hamas but do so while also re-establishing its deterrent with Iran. Moreover, it must do this within the context of a US-brokered strategic framework that has elevated Iran’s role in the region and, if possible, without reigniting hostilities with its neighbouring Arab countries.

This war will not be won by punishing the Palestinians. The only measure of victory will be the degree of peace that is secured for Israelis in their homeland. This may come as the result of prolonged and costly fighting, or from leveraging opportunities to broker terms that provide Israel with a sufficient strategic advantage to ensure its peace.

The longer the fighting goes on, the more Israel will lose the ever-fickle support of the international community; but that may be an acceptable trade-off. More difficult to calculate are the odds that as the fighting drags on, the conflict will widen beyond even the Iranian axis.

In June, the Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld warned that: “In the Middle East, the alarm bells are ringing.” With a number of different factors in the region converging, Van Creveld wrote, they might “combine with each other and give birth to the largest conflagration the region has witnessed in decades”.

There is time still for Hamas’ leadership to surrender itself and spare both Israelis and Palestinians further bloodshed — but one should not hold out hope.

Belief in the value of neutrality was a hard-won product of bourgeoisie political revolutions and religious wars. Having lasted for centuries, it is teetering today under attack from two directions. On one side, a brand of political activism condemns the very idea of remaining neutral as being a cover for subjugation and exploitation. In this view, the passive act of not denying someone banking services is recast as an affirmative endorsement of their entire political outlook. Simultaneously, digital networks are thrusting formerly apolitical institutions into the general arena of public surveillance, where failure to affirm new ideological mantras is seen as an act of treason against the whole system.

Ironically, given its role as a pioneer of thought policing and financial cancellation, the Canadian government website hosts an astute paper on the techno-surveillance model pioneered by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). “Big data and the social credit system: The security consequences” argues that the purpose of the “social governance process” in China is “upholding the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling position: ensuring state security”. This is “not simply about domestic or foreign-security policy. In the PRC, internal and external are also about what is inside and outside of the CCP. The Party is protecting an ideas space not bounded by physical geography.” Security, in this context, is not measured by protecting Chinese citizens from outside attacks but, rather, by the state’s ability to exercise control over ideas, which it sees as essential to maintaining the party’s power.

The process is more decentralised in the US and UK than in China, but functionally the West’s policing of disinformation and illicit ideas, combined with punitive cancellations, achieves the same goal. Once seen as paragons of amoral profit seeking, banks now espouse “values” because they fear that to not do so would place them at risk of being deemed “distasteful” and “out-of-touch”. Those phrases, used by Farage’s bank to condemn him, are euphemisms for anything that threatens the ruling class ideology — something powerful institutions must avoid lest they be evicted from the palace of global technocracy. It is no coincidence that the most technologically advanced countries are also the most aggressive practitioners of de-banking.

Immediately after the January 6 riots in the US, PayPal and its subsidiary Venmo blocked the accounts of individuals and groups involved in organising the pro-Trump demonstrations, as well as a Christian crowdfunding site raising money for the protestors. GoFundMe said that it would remove fundraisers promoting conspiracy theories and “misinformation” about the 2020 election. Two years later, numerous people “prosecuted for low-level felonies and misdemeanours such as trespassing and disorderly conduct” at the Capitol “have been blacklisted by banks and shut out of social media fundraising services,” according to a recent report that cited a dozen such claims. In 2022, Justin Trudeau’s government used debanking to punish truck drivers engaged in mass protests. Canadian financial institutions cut standard payments as well as freezing cryptocurrency accounts used by the protestors. Tellingly, one of the first instances of de-banking targeted WikiLeaks, the organisation founded by Julian Assange, arguably the most powerful critic of the emerging alliance between tech monopolies and the national security state. In 2010, one month after Wikileaks published a trove of leaked State Department diplomatic cables, Paypal froze its account.

Ultimately, the driver of this new social reality is not radical activism but the power of the tech monopolies. Moralistic fervour is burning away centuries of tradition, leaving the digital oligarchs to claim the new territory. The world we are living in is the one they have authored. In the same way that railroads once changed the world by collapsing physical distances, social media has collapsed the spaces that once differentiated private from public, as well as separating institutional spheres of power. Thus financial disconnection can be used as a tactic of warfare against Russia as well as a domestic tool in every country where digital networks predominate.

In the US, the unprecedented coordination between the various sectors of the counter-disinformation complex, which includes the media, intelligence agencies, non-profits, and universities, testifies to the same principle at work. Connected by a lattice of digital networks, they reinforce the same belief system while wielding their power to attack people accused of wrongthink and spreading disinformation. Political censorship and financial disconnection are two sides of the same coin.

Today, organisations such as the World Economic Forum and World Bank are promoting global digital IDs as a progressive cause to help lift “unbanked” people out of poverty. Their solution would herd billions of people into globalised surveillance databases where their every transaction, movement, and sentiment can be monitored and analysed. If the spread of debanking shows that the danger today comes from an interconnected digital web reaching into the foundations of privacy and neutrality, the response of the global elite is to insist we build a bigger bank.

Play it cool, I thought, as I passed the guards on my way to the elevators. Upstairs, a friendly producer explained that Gross recorded from a different location before leaving me alone in the room. My friend and co-author Roy Scranton sat in a third studio, in a different city. Since getting back from Iraq in 2007, I’d been pursued by the kind of cryptic, persistent mood that can sometimes foreshadow a profound insight or a mental breakdown. I was trying to adjust the headphones, which seemed to be getting tighter, when the interview started.

Gross asked which books we took with us overseas and I mentioned Dostoevsky, a few detective novelists, and then the French writer Michel Houellebecq and his novel Atomised, published in America under the title, The Elementary Particles. Appearing in France in 1998, the book caused an immediate sensation and generated a second wave of press in 2001 when the English translation came out. Years later, I read it at night inside a corrugated metal shipping container that had been converted into what the US army calls a containerised housing unit, pronounced “choo”, where I lived on a forward operating base in Southern Iraq for roughly nine months in 2007. It was, I told Gross, “a deliriously misanthropic, very interesting novel about the dead-end of modern existence”.

For Houellebecq, life is made up of a few actual events surrounded by a glacial immensity of mitochondria and other microscopic insects, and the distant spooky action of space. Wherever consciousness and sentiment appear like gnats in the cosmos, they are likely to register in feelings of sadness, desperation, and loss.

A previous generation’s French novelist of ideas, Albert Camus, opened his 1942 book The Stranger with a line meant to illustrate the numbness and alienation at the heart of contemporary man’s existential condition: “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.” Houellebecq might have followed this with a long paragraph narrated like a nature documentary about mother’s corpse undergoing a process of cellular decomposition and how the laws of quantum physics make it impossible to determine the exact moment of her death. At which point, switching back to the protagonist’s point of view, he might consider that having never been loved by his mother, he would never feel true love himself. He would then experience a momentary impulse to weep, stifled yet impossible to ignore, before attempting to masturbate.

“I’d like to believe that the self is an illusion,” says Bruno, the older of the two half-brothers who are the protagonists of Atomised, “but if it is, it’s a pretty painful one.” It is an undignified view of life, often funnier than this passage indicates, but still utterly lacking in the qualities that allow critics to honour certain books as “humane” and “empathetic”. Yet it captured something essential about the experience of living through the end of the 20th century. The romance of Houellebecq’s writing lies in its author’s willingness to go past decency into pornographic wretchedness, where, in his character’s ultimate disappointments, he captures a convincing sentimentality.

He was already well-known when I mentioned him to Gross: both as a writer and as a provocateur who said terrible things about women, defended the patriarchy, sneered at liberalism, made drunken passes at interviewers, and launched glib insults at Muslims. Yet it was still possible in the long-ago world of the second Obama administration to comment on the literary qualities of Houellebecq’s novels without saying anything about their author’s political impact. It even seemed reasonable at the time to assume that he did not have a political impact.

That soon changed. In 2015, Houellebecq published a new novel, Submission, that depicted the Muslim Brotherhood taking power in France and remaking the republic as the centre of a new Islamic world civilisation. The book was released on the same day that jihadists murdered 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and became an instant bestseller. Its author was crowned the defining novelist of his time. A triumph, and yet, in the course of his ascension, Houellebecq has ceased to be regarded principally as a writer and come to be seen instead as a prophet. The author whose work anticipated or channelled the Bali bombings, Brexit, the alt-Right, the Gilet Jaunes, and other characteristic developments of the new millennium was assumed to be acting more as a medium than as a crafter of fiction.

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The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

Yet Houellebecq’s prophetic streak seems to be a direct result of his disinterest in politics. “The idea that political history could play any part in my own life was still disconcerting, and slightly repellent,” says the narrator of Submission. By ignoring politics and focusing instead on the intersection of sex and metaphysics in the seething inner lives of middle-class men, Houellebecq mapped out the ultimate concerns that — precisely because they had been systematically excluded from the politics of modern Western nations — ended up becoming the vectors of violent rebellion and populist revolt. Above all, he saw how despair and sexual resentment would be at the heart of any political challenge to liberal democracy.

Along with politics, Houellebecq has ignored the standard markers of literary seriousness. His books lack subtlety and roundedness. They eschew both social realism and formal inventiveness, while fixedly pursuing the stunted emotional logic of their characters. They are novels of ideas that treat history as a drama in which individuals and civilisations act out the gestalt of their age, at most half-aware of it. The rise and fall of civilisations are driven by what the narrator of Atomised calls “metaphysical mutations”. These are “radical, global transformations, such as the shift from antiquity to Christendom and from Christendom to rational materialism”. Such shifts manifest in the creation of historically representative people and institutions, such as, for instance, the writer Michel Houellebecq in France or National Public Radio in America.

While other writers have explored nihilism through the prism of violence and death, Houellebecq’s unique vision sees it as an infestation of sex and desire. Each of his books — with the exception of his most recent — dramatises a connection between unrestricted sexual freedom, the rationalistic secular worldview, and civilisational suicide.

Facing man’s guilt for killing God, Nietzsche asked: “How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves?” Houellebecq’s answer is that individuals in the throes of deterministic, rationalist materialism become pleasure-maximising objects by dissolving all human bonds. The most desirable reward themselves with orgies while the rest seek consolation in whatever kinds of sex they can get until those dry up, at which point there’s no more reason to live. In the name of freedom and self-realisation, mothers abandon their children (according to legend, this is the very tragedy that spawned the writing career of Houellebecq). Ordinary people who would once have raised families in the state of mild contentment that sustained generations before them instead waste their years pursuing novel sexual techniques that end in the most appalling sterility. The blitzed-out flower child was good marketing material for the generation of 1968, but when the mask is ripped off, the true face of free love is revealed to be the Manson family painting the walls with blood.

The death of God ends up clearing the field for the conquest of the marketplace. Starting with his first novel, 1994’s Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (“extension of the domain of the struggle”, but translated as Whatever), Houellebecq attacked unfettered capitalism: “In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.” Once the early promises of globalisation were crushed, he would later write: “Whole social classes fell through the net and joined the ranks of the unemployed. But the savage sexual competition did not abate as a result — quite the reverse.”

The combined attack on liberal social values and the subjugation of interpersonal relations to market forces led many to label Houellebecq a reactionary. There are various ways to be a political reactionary but all share the belief that we live in a fallen period caused by some terrible human invention and that there was a better time when people lived by the right laws of God or nature, or both.

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The year of the femcel

By Mary Gaitskill

But reactionaries face an unresolvable problem. It is never clear how much of modernity has to be rejected to restore the world to its rightful order. A moderate conservative who starts by wanting to roll back the excesses of sixth-wave gender-ideology feminism finds that, upon inspection, the first wave is equally incompatible with their interpretation of the Bible. The temptation is always to go further in search of the lost innocence — behind the French Revolution lies the invention of fire — and is thus always prone to seeing the world’s complete undoing as the only means to its redemption.

Houellebecq often seems to fall into this trap. In one book, he rails against the dehumanising wages of neoliberalism, then in his next the problem seems to go deeper, back into the heart of the Enlightenment, before finally it is Christianity itself, which, the narrator of Submission, echoing Nietzsche, says is, “at the end of the day, a feminine religion”. The next step would seem to be to look to nature itself and worship in pagan fashion what the poet Wallace Stevens called that “old chaos of the sun”. But Houellebecq is not really a common reactionary, and he despises nature even more intensely than he does hippies. “All in all, nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust — and man’s mission on earth was probably to do just that,” observes Bruno’s younger half-brother Michel.

“We could perhaps attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world — those would be real crimes,” wrote the imprisoned Marquis de Sade in the mid-18th century. For de Sade, according to Camus’s study of him in The Rebel, “nature is sex; his logic leads him to a lawless universe where the only master is the inordinate energy of desire.” The opposite has been true for Houellebecq, who once wrote that: “The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles… And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles.” Unlike de Sade, who exalted in crime as the only true freedom, Houellebecq is too much of a moralist to enjoy being a libertine. If human actions are free, as he once claimed, then he knows this is only because they are meaningless.

Where does that leave Houellebecq? Like the man standing in the back of the line at the brothel who howls about the immorality of it all while waiting for his turn and then weeps when it is over. He comes to see religion as the only workable answer to modernity. But try as he might, he cannot imagine actually believing in the stuff. Religion may be essential to preserving what little grace life is capable of offering, but that is not the same as believing the commandments of God are true. As Micah Meadowcroft noted in an insightful essay on Houellebecq: “The shared preoccupation of author and characters with sex is revealed upon reflection to not be the dreary gratification of a pervert novelist but the heart of the matter. In the absence of a voice speaking loudly to this world of the next in words comprehensible to those who live here, this-world satisfaction re-emerges as the only motive force giving coherence to life.” Nearly destroyed by secularism, only a God can rescue the holy power of sex.

More like a God-haunted nihilist than a believer, Houellebecq talks a great deal about religion but sees it only through abstractions. Thus, for instance, there is nothing made in his work of the fact that the Hebrew Bible already covered much of the same ground when God destroyed humanity with the flood, in what the great Medieval rabbinic scholar Rashi judged to be a punishment for rampant sexual immorality.

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By Jacob Siegel

Rather than worry about the flood, Houellebecq dreams of metaphysical mutations, the only means through which he can imagine the world changing. In the Nineties, when he was writing Atomised, he found Western civilisation so thoroughly exhausted that its salvation could only come through transhumanist genetic technologies. Twenty years later in Submission, still consumed by the sexual apocalypse, he offered the Islamic takeover of France as an ironic solution to Western decadence. In the end, the novel’s protagonist, who has lost all pleasure in sex and thus his will to live, submits to Islam because it promises a harem. Polygamy is as close as he can get to the possibility of having a normal loving family life, which is what he really wants in spite of himself.

More recently, Houellebecq has appeared caught between religious and romantic impulses. In Serotonin, published in 2019, the world is as bleak as ever, yet the author is beginning to believe that there may be something more to the universe than atoms and chance. In the book’s final chapter, its protagonist reflects on, “those surges of love that flow into our chests and take our breath away — those illuminations, those ecstasies, inexplicable if we consider our biological nature”. The 19th-century Romantic movement, which birthed the modern belief in love as an overpowering passion began as a movement of religious reawakening emphasising man’s personal relationship to God. In his own unhurried way, Houellebecq is retracing those steps, starting with the personal tragedy of sexual disappointment and finding its ultimate source in the loss of the sacred.

Only a few months before my appearance on the radio, I met my wife. Now that I have children, I hardly think about the end of the world anymore. Houellebecq, who once imagined that love, even familial love, had been so thoroughly desecrated by modernity that the only escape was to reengineer human nature at the molecular level, was reportedly married for the third time in 2018 at the age of 62. It is not too late for him to put down the books and start a family.

 ***

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

On Wednesday, while pundits were still helping the White House congratulate itself for killing the 71-year-old terrorist leader, China responded to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan by launching a massive, four-day combined arms live fire exercise around the island. While the US broadcasts mixed signals about its commitment to defending Taiwan, Beijing has been absolutely clear that it is willing to go to war, and has now encircled the island in an unprecedented show of force.

The lesson of the past week could not be any clearer. The American ruling class has no sense of what role it is meant to play in world affairs. It acts with reckless senility, provoking rival powers while uncertain of its own aims. To distract from this underlying reality, it fixates on symbolically potent acts like the killing of al-Zawahiri. But for how long can this go on?

None of which is a reason to mourn for al-Zawahiri, if indeed he is really dead. This is at least the fourth report of his death over the last two decades, though the first time it has been announced by a US president. Surely the best time to have killed al-Zawahiri would have been when he came to the United States in 1993 on a Bay Area fundraising tour — the same year of the first al-Qaeda-directed World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people. But better late than never.

Assuming that the reports of his death are real, however, it would be prudent  to take the details with a grain of salt. After all, the initial details about the raid that killed al-Zawahiri’s predecessor, Osama Bin Laden, who had supposedly used his wife as a human shield, were later revealed to be false, the products of a manufactured narrative. The timing of the 2011 Bin Laden raid was no doubt connected to the exigencies of the intelligence business; it had a political dimension as well, taking place in the same year Obama withdrew American troops from Iraq.

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The circumstances around al-Zawahiri’s death raise a different set of questions. It appears that the al-Qaeda leader entered Afghanistan last August shortly after the chaotic US withdrawal and Taliban takeover of the country. He was staying in an upscale area of downtown Kabul, a short distance from where the US once housed its embassy, reportedly in a safe house owned by a senior aide to Sirajuddin Haqqani. This is a significant detail because Sirajuddin, in addition to being the author of a recent op-ed in the New York Times, is the leader of the powerful Haqqani network, an outgrowth of the Haqqani dynastic clan, which has played a key role in Afghan politics for decades and whose patriarch, Jalaluddin, was once fêted by members of Congress as an anti-Soviet mujahideen commander. In addition to holding a place on Washington’s “specially designated global terrorist” list, Sirajuddin is also a member of the new Taliban government, serving as its acting interior minister.

When I arrived in Afghanistan in 2012 as a US Army officer, the Haqqani name was spoken of in grave tones. Operating from their stronghold in Paktia province, on Afghanistan’s treacherous southeastern frontier with Pakistan, the Haqqanis commanded an extended network of tribal loyalists, intelligence operatives, terrorist cells, and paramilitary forces. Under the leadership of Sirajuddin, they were kingmakers in Afghanistan’s fractious political scene and survived the two decades of US occupation by skillfully balancing relationships with al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups, the Pakistani intelligence services and the Taliban. Among soldiers, the Haqqanis were known for their skill at orchestrating complex terrorist attacks inside Afghanistan. In contrast with typical Taliban fighters, who were the country bumpkins of the Pashtun heartland, and whose attacks, while deadly, relied on conventional ambush tactics, the Haqqanis were more sophisticated and more lethal.

One fairly obvious conclusion to draw from the head of al-Qaeda being put up in downtown Kabul is that neither the Taliban nor the Haqqanis were overly concerned about a possible American response. But that is not the conclusion being drawn in Washington. Taking their cues from President Biden’s statement that the killing of al-Zawahiri is “proof that it’s possible to root out terrorism without being at war in Afghanistan”, foreign policy mandarins say the drone strike proves Washington’s “strategy” is working. Its success shows that the U.S. should rely more on “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism capabilities — i.e. those which do not require large numbers of American troops on the ground to be effective — as the central pillar of national security policy.

In an article for the Daily Beast headlined, “Biden Keeps a Promise With His Zawahiri Strike,” David Rothkopf writes:

“The attack was more than just a strike against a longtime member of America’s most-wanted terrorist list. It was both a vindication of Biden’s decision to leave Afghanistan and a demonstration of the effectiveness of Biden’s counterterrorism strategy.”

An NBC news article polishes up a different angle of the official narrative by publicising Biden’s extraordinary scrupulousness and the “surgical” nature of the attack. “The strike was so precise that it killed al-Zawahiri on a balcony without harming family members elsewhere in the house,” the article reports, citing (who else?) an anonymous Biden official. Among the story’s five different authors is Ken Dilanian, whose close relationship with the U.S. security establishment has included routinely submitting past articles to the CIA for review before they were published.

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Beyond simply cheering for the party in power, these narratives promote the idea that drone strikes are an effective strategy for destroying America’s enemies and keeping its citizens safe. “See,” say the foreign policy experts and their validators in the media, “this is how we should have done it all along. We never needed to invade Afghanistan — to say nothing of Iraq — and spend two decades nation-building in order to target al-Qaeda.”

But while they are right about the folly of nation-building, they are delusional if they think that counterterrorism represents anything new and improved in the US policy arsenal. Over-the-horizon capabilities have been a central and growing plank of American power for the past two decades. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that the capabilities now being celebrated for their effectiveness and surgical precision are the very same methods employed last summer, when a different U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed 10 civilians, including seven children. The official narrative about that attack, dubbed “Righteous Strike,” was that it had targeted Islamic State members who were transporting explosives and posed an imminent threat to American troops. That false narrative spread widely before the grim truth came out.

Over-the-horizon capabilities are a fine thing for a nation to have but they are simply a tool, not a strategy for achieving long-term peace. In reality, if counterterrorism worked as advertised, al-Qaeda would have collapsed years ago. “According to recent scholarship based on papers captured from Bin Laden’s hideout, the CIA’s drone campaign that targeted al-Qaeda between 2008 and 2013 devastated the core organisation, which was based in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” wrote Steve Coll in a New Yorker column published after al-Zawahiri’s death.

If it were possible for the US to drone strike its way to a lasting victory in the War on Terror, the war would already be won. But as Coll’s observation implies, the backdrop of the terrorist problem is the states which support them. Counterterrorism is great for generating publicity ops, lucrative contracts for the defence industry, and reliable sinecures for legions of experts. But in two decades of war, it was never able to address the fundamental reality of the Pakistani state’s support for al-Qaeda. Nor could it keep Afghanistan from falling right back into the hands of the Taliban.

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The West is starving Afghanistan

By Cheryl Benard

In the most important conflicts taking place today, in Ukraine and around Taiwan, America’s over-the-horizon tools are of limited use. Even the spectacle of notching new “kills” on the high-profile terrorist scoreboard seems to be losing its lustre. Much of the appeal of counterterrorism at this point, apart from promising to prevent more fruitless two-decade occupations, is that it is a self-perpetuating institution. The counterterrorism lobby is more powerful than ever inside Washington because it offers the appearance of a guiding strategic principle behind American power, where none actually exists.

As US leadership escalates confrontation with two nuclear powers in China and Russia, it cannot even define where its nation’s vital interests are at stake in those arenas. The long exercise in hunting down terrorist groups has been a diversion from the core responsibilities of statecraft: defining one’s relationship to other countries in a way that maximises the security and prosperity of the nation.

Can Pelosi articulate how her trip to Taiwan benefited Americans? In a bare room with no aides, could Biden convincingly explain what the US involvement in Ukraine is meant to accomplish? To avoid catastrophe, America needs leaders who can answer such basic questions, not more drones.

Where it’s warm enough, people sleep in tents or on the streets. Drugs and sex are openly sold and laws are enforced erratically. The result, which I observed during a 2019 trip to Skid Row, was a “hellish concentration of deprivation and disorder”, interspersed with a concentrated complex of non-profit and social service organisations.

What was already hellish was made even worse in recent years by the rapid spread of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid some 50 times more potent than heroin. Driven largely by fentanyl, which is now used to cut virtually every other drug, overdoses set a new record in the US in 2021, killing nearly 108,000 people. Up roughly 15% over 2020’s record death toll, overdoses killed more people last year than guns and cars combined. In San Francisco, an average of 53 people died every month from overdoses last year, many of them “outdoors and on sidewalks in front of buildings”.

Before the fentanyl spike, overdoses had been rising in the US for the past two decades while raising little public alarm. But now, with the scale of deaths being declared an emergency and health epidemic, public officials are embracing supposedly radical new solutions to the problem, the most popular of which is harm reduction.

Harm reduction promises reasonableness. Rather than trying to eradicate drug use, the public-health framework, which has been embraced by the White House and cities across America, works to reduce risks by prioritising the safety of individuals over curing social ills. The point is to “meet people where they are”, according to advocates, not to change them. Its appeal is that it is humane and takes the opposite approach of the failed war on drugs. But that’s only part of the story.

Look through the harm-reduction telescope and you glimpse the grand project of the therapeutic society that animates modern progressivism. At one end the individual is seen in minimalist terms, powerless to control their own desires, a victim of systemic forces far beyond their ability to resist. Look through the other end, and you find a maximalist view of the state in which a vast apparatus of administrators surveil and treat citizen-patients based on vague definitions of “wellness” and “harm”.

Look back in time, and the rise of harm reduction from the work of devoted activists to the official policy of the federal government traces a larger transformation in American politics. It is a project, in short, of the same political forces who want to defund the police, while empowering a surveillance and enforcement regime that punishes people for making sexist Facebook comments.

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The Covid regime has fooled us all

By Jacob Siegel

While harm reduction has been an official policy for decades in a number of European countries, its expansion in the US, where it began as a grassroots movement during the AIDS crisis in the Eighties, is a more recent phenomenon. San Francisco was an early adopter. In 2000, the city’s Health Commission unanimously voted to adopt a harm reduction policy for drug offences. The city effectively decriminalised drug use while at the same time shifting public funding away from enforcement and toward providing clean needles, distributing the drug naloxone, which can reverse opioid overdoses, and offering methadone and other drug treatment plans. In 2020, San Francisco led the country in overdose deaths.

Last year, New York City allowed the opening of two “safe injection sites”, a term for facilities where drug users can consume their wares under the supervision of a mix of medical professionals and former addicts who can intervene and revive them if they overdose. The clinics have intervened in more than 300 potentially fatal overdoses since they opened, according to staffers. Despite the sites being illegal under federal law, city officials have allowed them to operate without interference, setting a precedent for other cities to follow.

New York’s experiment follows the three-decade harm reduction trial in Canada, which includes the establishment in 2003 of the Insite safe injection facility in Vancouver. While advocates point to the number of overdoses averted and reversed at these facilities, it’s possible that the policy led to more overall use, potentially contributing to more overdoses outside the clinics than lives saved within it. In British Columbia overdose deaths were up 151% between 2008 and 2020, with much of the increase coming from Vancouver. In Oregon, another place where hard drugs were decriminalised in 2020, overdose deaths were up 41%, in 2021 from 2020, compared to a 16% increase nationwide.

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Some harm reduction programs such as needle exchanges, fentanyl testing strips, and free testing kits for HIV, appear to have been broadly beneficial. But in the absence of a commitment to the full recovery of individuals, harm reduction morphs into a permanent method of managing chronic drug addiction by expanding the nonprofit-bureaucratic sector. Administrators count lives saved and ODs reversed without registering the broader increase in addiction they help to accommodate. Success is measured not by freeing individuals from addiction so they can live full lives, but by the growth of the treatment bureaucracy.

General Jeff, a black community activist who has lived in Skid Row for a decade described a similar dynamic in the approach to homelessness when I spoke with him a few years ago. “There’s never been a shortage of funding in modern-day Skid Row,” Jeff told me, blasting the area’s nonprofits as “poverty pimps”. “This isn’t really about trying to end homelessness. That’s just a marketing campaign. Just to make people outside of Skid Row feel good.”

“Bureaucracy,” wrote Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism, “transforms collective grievances into personal problems amenable to therapeutic intervention.” Lasch does not pretend that individual moral accountability is sufficient to redress collective grievances or systemic injustices, but nor does he attempt to dismiss it as an anachronism. Morality grounds the sense of dignity and self-worth that provide us with our best internal defence against the unavoidable calamities of fortune. It is not a replacement but a precondition for a meaningful politics of collective action. The transformation observed by Lasch has repurposed the minimalist ”do no harm” ethos as a maximalist licence to redesign society.

“Harm reduction was never just about the drugs or the deaths or the diseases,” wrote Daniel Raymond, a policy and planning leader at the Harm Reduction Coalition, in a March 2020 essay on Harm Reduction in the Time of the Coronavirus. Rather, writes Raymond in the morally inflationary language used by activists staking out a claim to administrative power, harm reduction “is heir to the multiple legacies of the communities and struggles we come from… the hybrid wisdom that emerges from communal survival in the face of threats of being dispossessed, disenfranchised, displaced, disappeared”.

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Because harm can be found anywhere, harm reduction now appears everywhere. The framework is applied to criminal justice, diet and exercise, prostitution, curbing adults’ sexual attraction to minors — otherwise known as paedophilia — and a range of other seemingly unrelated fields. “Harm reduction, as a framework, acknowledges that white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, fatmisia, transmisia, ableism, xenophobia, and myriad other systems of oppression infuse space and structures and are a part of our socialisation,” wrote the authors of an academic journal article on Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics in March.

The essential alchemy of progressivism is performed by converting drug addiction from a vice afflicting individuals, which they have the power to change, into the basis of an identity group with a claim to government services. The collective grievances relating to the social and economic policies that might have pushed hundreds of thousands of people into drug dependency are first privatised through addiction and then bureaucratised so they can be managed by a class of appointed supervisors. In turn, the power of the bureaucracy is redirected from enforcing behavioural norms to overseeing the consequences of their dismantling.

This transformation is consummated with a novel language that marks the new political identity within the lexicon of professional progressivism. “Following the lead of those in harm-reduction and drug-users’ rights groups, I decide to scrub the word addict from my vocabulary,” wrote Sarah Resnick in a piece featured in ​​The Best American Essays 2017 anthology. As alternatives to “addict”, Resnick finds: “person with a substance-misuse disorder”; “person experiencing a drug problem”; “person who uses drugs habitually”; and “person committed to drug use”.

The stiltedness of the language would be a small price to pay if harm reduction policies reduced drug dependency but since it’s not clear that’s the case, the effort turns on trying to alter language and perception. “Don’t be ashamed you are using, be empowered that you are using safely,” declared a poster by the New York City Health Department that recently appeared in the subway system. “Shame is a useless emotion that often keeps ppl from investing in themselves or others. We should be celebrating ppl who are taking the steps in this poster,” tweeted Kassandra Frederique, the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the leading drug policy reform organisations in the US. Frederique’s statement was retweeted by a spokesman for the New York City Department of Health.

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Instead of fostering the behaviour necessary to give someone a genuine sense of self-worth — a project that may well be beyond the power of anyone but the individual and their maker — harm reduction converts the bare physicality of “safety” into the cheap currency of empowerment. The message presumes that addicts would not and should not feel shame for their dependency absent external judgements. It minimises the ravages attendant to drug addiction — such as criminality, homelessness, despair and decay — by framing them as the consequences of “unsafe” practices, without any connection to the spiritual poverty of dependency. In the religious and humanistic view, shame is the voice of the individual’s conscience. Others may seek to shame us, but true shame arises only when the individual has transgressed against their own innate sense of decency. But the conscience has no place in the maximalist world view of the harm reductionists, except as a relic of the retrograde morality that prevents addicts from experiencing empowerment.

At what end is the policy of harm reduction aimed? The war on drug’s promised end point was, obviously, unreachable, but the harm-reduction crusade has no ending at all except the construction of a new system of power, no less punitive than the one it seeks to replace.

Many people seem to have accepted that harm reduction efforts are a temporary life-saving measure — a way of buying time for people caught in a cycle of addiction while moving them gently toward recovery. But it’s by no means clear that people doing harm reduction work all see it this way. Some are explicit about the fact that they see nothing wrong with hard drug use and and view attempts to force people into recovery as puritanical efforts to stamp out pleasure.

Others genuinely want to help drug users and other people in high-risk lifestyles by keeping them alive and guiding them toward lives free from addiction. But even those efforts are bound up in the expansionist project to “treat” an endless and ever expanding litany of harms by means of a bureaucracy in which being exposed to racism and being addicted to drugs are understood as two expressions of the same oppressive system. “Harm reduction is friends; the law is cops,” wrote one devoted adherent to the practice in a 2019 essay about sex work.

In 2022, the White House National Drug Control Strategy devoted a full chapter to harm reduction. Which is to say that, whatever its beginnings, harm reduction is now the self-talk of the state bureaucracy, not only the law but its spirit.

The fact that the unraveling is taking place is one of the few points on which the Right and Left can agree. Both sides take for granted the collapse of the traditional “gender binary” and its replacement by a novel and fluid suite of gender identities. The disagreement is over whether this represents freedom and progress or coercion and decadence.

Many on the Left argue that a teacher should be allowed to counsel children on their sexual identity and introduce them to academic gender theories. They argue that socialising young children to embrace concepts such as gender fluidity and “birthing person” is essential to the student’s civic education and personal development. Their opponents reject these efforts as a political intrusion into the domain of moral and sexual education that should belong to parents.

But the political and cultural debates, which focus on ideology and government policy, ignore the crucial role that technological and economic revolutions are playing in replacing the male-female dyad with a new virtual multiplicity of gender expressions.

In the first decade of the new millennium, amid the talk of terrorism, war, clash of civilisations, and global financial meltdown, there was an accompanying cultural preoccupation with hipsters. For at least a decade, this seemingly trivial youth subculture dedicated to vintage t-shirts, anti-consumerist “indie” consumerism, trucker hats, and a self-referential style, seemed to be a leading concern of America’s chattering class.

“What was the Hipster?” asked N+1, the premier journal of New York’s young intellectual scene in a 2011 symposium and subsequent book that provided a formal historiography for the subculture which, by then, appeared to be in decline.

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In a more thorough analysis than most commentary from the time, N+1’s Mark Greif argued that hipsterism was not merely a set of fashions and aesthetic choices, but the product of an interaction between larger cultural and economic forces. In America’s urban cultural capitals in the early 2000s, Grief wrote: “The indie bohemians (denigrated as slackers) encountered the flannel-clad proto-businessmen and dot-com paper millionaires (denigrated as yuppies), and something unanticipated came of this friction.”

The emblematic hipster trousers, haircuts and bands that were popping up in Williamsburg, Silver Lake and Shoreditch represented a cultural evolution. The old skin suited to a factory-production-based economy and its attendant white-collar professions was being shed, and a new one adapted to the post-industrial knowledge economy was growing. Hipsterism was the cultural manifestation of a stratifying information society in which the caste of the professional class came to express its status through an ornate language of tastes and luxury beliefs.

“The postindustrial economy is indifferent to brawn,” wrote the journalist Hannah Rosin in her 2012 book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. “A service and information economy rewards precisely the opposite qualities,” Rosin continues. “Social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus — are, at a minimum, not predominantly the province of men. In fact, they seem to come more easily to women.”

The new economy thus laid a new material foundation for gender relations.

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From the beginning, the hipster sensibility contained a reaction against the success of the women’s movement. Norman Mailer, author of the 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” and forefather of the modern middle-class hipster genre, was openly hostile to the women’s movement, which he criticised at length in books and public debates for being humourless, sexless, and refusing to grapple with the biological differences between the sexes.

A half century after Mailer’s essay, latter-day hipsters preserved the boyish, performative elements of his reaction against feminism but divorced it from any political content. Instead of Mailer’s philosophical critique, they popularised an amateur pornography aesthetic in photography and music videos and ushered in a campy revival of macho fashions such as mustaches, woodsman beards, and trucker hats. Certainly in America, anyway.

These anti-feminist fashions were, however, only one aspect of a sensibility that was less a platform for modeling a specific masculine ideal than a stage on which conflicting impulses and concerns about gender norms could be acted out and then obsessively analysed. “At the same time that hipsters were dressing like Seventies-model Stanley Kowalskis,” wrote Greif, “they were consuming culture that was considerably more anxious about machismo, heterosexuality, and maturity.” Other hipster looks such as skinny jeans also played against traditional ideas of masculinity.

Hipster artists could be criticised as closet sexists who hid their chauvinistic attitudes in layers of irony. Or they could be written off as dandys, too twee to make anything truly moving or lasting. In either case, hipster was not only a way of describing and critiquing a type of youth fashion, it was pointed to something different in contemporary manhood.

Meanwhile, the rise of hipsters coincided with and accelerated the mainstreaming of postmodern themes in popular discourse. The professional classes, already prone to self-examination, could not help but notice around the turn of the millennium that amid the digital boom, their lives were becoming more curated and self-conscious, increasingly mediated through data and simulations, and suffused with ironic detachment.

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There followed what you might call an irony panic. Every few months a new think piece appeared in a glossy magazine declaring the death of irony or heralding its rebirth. The suspicion of irony and relentless inspection of authenticity focused mostly on male artists, like the musician Beck, the writer Dave Eggers, and the filmmaker Wes Anderson.

It was possible to notice all this at the time without taking any of it seriously. “It’s easy to let this hypothesizing go too far, and you get into trouble when you try to charge hipsters with representing the ‘ethos of our age,’” warns a 2012 essay in The Atlantic. Hipsters were “just kids making their way from young adulthood to the rest of their lives”. Much of the hipster commentary was absurdly overinflated — wasn’t it ridiculous to make so much out of something so frivolous? But the young American intellectuals who saw it as their duty to analyse and interpret and, eventually, treat the culture, really did spend years concerned in all and high seriousness, with hipsters. And part of what drove that persistent fascination, I would suggest, is that the figure of the hipster spoke to fundamental changes in men and women and the relations between them.

There was something unreconciled, if not schizophrenic, in the hipster outlook, which both venerated personal authenticity and assumed unlimited freedom for individuals to construct new identities through their tastes and consumer choices. But in its own ridiculous way, the hipster phenomenon anticipated the burgeoning gender experimentations that would shape the social-media-driven youth subcultures of the 2010s, which, in turn, fed into the current political wars over gender and sex education. The strange political evolution of the past decade has seen the same anxieties about gender and authenticity once present in the ironic and whimsical poses of hipsters harden into articles of the most humourless, irony-resistant political dogmas.

Through a process of cultural evolution that was driven by networked social technologies, the same hipster’s subcultural gender performances of the 2000s were succeeded in the 2010s by a creed of speculative gender absolutism. Rather than demanding to know whether an individual’s self-expression was ironic or authentic, as had previously been the norm, the new style of gender activism presupposed that subjective statements concerning gender not just true but ontologically valid.

In the subcultural firmament that emerged on digital platforms such as Tumblr and spread rapidly through Twitter, the post-structuralism of gender theorists such as Judith Butler which had once been the province of academics and activists, was treated as ground-level truth. Involuted treatises presenting gender as a social construction with no innate characteristics flourished online and yielded an expanding array of virtual identities. The effect of these changes is neatly encapsulated in the ever expanding list of pronouns, such as the one in a curriculum recently adopted by a school district in Illinois, where teachers instruct first graders that they can choose from options that include “she”, “he”, “tree”, “ze”, and “zir”, among other choices.

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Whereas the characteristic attitude in the adult world toward earlier youth subcultures, including hipsters, tended to be a mix of condescension and alarmism, this was reversed over the past decade as the online forums for gender experimentation fed into and were fed by the growing power of social justice activists.

In a progression that is still scarcely believable, post-structuralist theories that were first transmitted from academic theorists and activists to young people exploring their capacity for self-invention, were then adopted as mantras by the most powerful political figures in the United States.

It’s not simply that a phrase such as “birthing person”, used in President Biden’s 2022 budget proposal to refer to pregnant women, would have been unrecognisable to earlier generations. Beyond the change in language, the ideologically sterilised concept of maleness and femaleness it represents is a deliberate step away from biological and theological understandings of what it means to be human, and into a realm of totalling political authority.

Progress marches on and hipsters, once so determined to stay on the cutting edge, now seem positively rooted and organic compared with the era of online trolls and Tumblr identity fundamentalists who replaced them and in turn seeded a new sense of reality. Can anyone imagine a George W. Bush era Supreme Court nominee answering, “I’m not a biologist” when asked whether they can provide a definition for the word “woman”. That is exactly what happened when the question was posed to Biden nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has now been confirmed as America’s newest Supreme Court Justice. It was a trick question of course, but the fact that such a question can be a trick is telling. Countless media commentaries appeared in American publications assuring readers that Jackson is on the side of “the science” showing that defining a woman is righteously complicated.

Parents in Florida and elsewhere are under no obligation to investigate the gendered dimensions of techno-capitalism before deciding whether they are comfortable with their children being taught from handbooks that are designed to sever the connection between sex and biology. Yet, if they are curious about the deeper currents at work and why it is impossible — even if conservatives were to take control over every cultural institution tomorrow — to revert to traditional gender roles that have been wiped away by economic revolutions that most conservatives once embraced, they may find that, against all odds, the hipster offers an illuminating historical example.

A year into the war in Syria, in 2012, President Obama declared that chemical weapons attacks there were a red line that, if crossed, would trigger “enormous consequences”. When the White House concluded “with high confidence” that Bashar al Assad’s forces were responsible for a Sarin attack that killed 1,429 people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Obama was placed in a bind. If he didn’t do something, it would look like a capitulation. But any reprisal risked drawing the US into another Middle Eastern war and jeopardising the nuclear deal with Iran that was the linchpin of Obama’s foreign policy agenda. That was where Moscow came in.

Russia volunteered to oversee the dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons program in a deal that would allow the White House to save face without threatening its pivot towards Iran. It might have seemed like a win-win proposition. But Russia was hardly neutral: Moscow was both a key ally of Iran and of the Assad dynasty, and saw its role in the Syrian war as the way to acquire its long-sought-after naval base on the eastern Mediterranean. “Syria mattered to Russia because it mattered to Iran,” explains Levant analyst Tony Badran. Making Moscow a “peacemaker” meant that, “for all the moralising rhetorical barrages against Russia’s support for the brutal Assad, Putin remained [Obama’s] principal partner in the Syrian arena”.

American rhetoric on Syria was anti-Assad and pro-democracy. It emphasised funding “moderate rebel” groups fighting against the government while protecting humanitarian interests and pushing for a negotiated end to the war. But those goals were incompatible with the other US aim, which was to protect the Iran deal at all costs, a goal which, as Obama put it in 2015, “allows those who are allied with Assad right now — allows the Russians, allows the Iranians to ensure that their equities are respected”.

Normally, wars end when one side gives up or the parties reach a compromise that spares them further losses and satisfies enough of their interests to be worth taking. But whose interests were being served in Syria, where the US, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, and the Gulf Arab states all played a role and had “equities” to protect?

Syria, the bloodiest war of the modern era, provides the perfect example of what can happen when a series of poorly considered but urgent-seeming interventions by outside powers turn a local conflict into an international battleground. Something remarkably similar is now happening in Ukraine. In Syria, it took roughly two years before the local dimensions of the conflict were overrun by flows of foreign fighters, money, and weapons pouring in across its borders. A smaller version has unfolded rapidly in Ukraine.

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In Syria, American strategic incoherence — effectively supporting both sides — made the conflict more transactional and open-ended. Blurring the local stakes invited a greater number of outside countries and substate groups to enter the war and pursue their own interests, creating a seemingly intractable multiparty conflict that was eventually settled through Assad’s Russian-backed campaign of brutal attrition war. It also emboldened Russia, which recognised that by treating Syria as a bargaining chip in its new partnership with Iran, Washington had set the precedent for a new era of great power conflict. Larger countries, it seemed, could carve out their claims from smaller nations with little fear of reprisal from the US led “international community”.

Less than a year after entering Syria, in February 2014, Russia launched its initial invasion into Ukraine targeting Crimea and the Donbas. Encountering little resistance, Russia stepped up its campaign in Syria, where in September 2015 Putin ordered airstrikes to rescue his embattled ally Assad. Of course Putin declared that these were “preventitive” measures, necessary to “destroy militants and terrorists on the territories that they already occupy, not wait for them to come to our house”. The same rhetoric is now used to justify the assault on Ukraine, another preventative war according to Putin, but this time a campaign of “denazification” and “demilitarisation”.

Play the full sequence out from 2013 to the present and Russia’s arrival as a “peacekeeper” in the Syrian war, becomes the first step in a series of expansionist military interventions that led to the invasion of Ukraine last month. The experience in Syria, which intensified after 2015, provided the Russian military with “priceless combat experience”, according to the Chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov. Russia’s repeated attacks on anti-government rebels and Syrian civilians gave its military the chance to test out “more than 320 types of different weapons” Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu bragged last year.

While Ukraine’s relationship with the US is far stronger than American ties to Syrian rebel groups, there are parallels. Washington has been dangling Nato membership in front of Kyiv for more than a decade, despite having no intention of ever bringing Ukraine into the alliance. The coy approach to Nato membership, in which no concrete steps were taken but the offer was never taken off the table, appeared to provide Ukraine’s political leadership with a symbolic chip to play while putting Moscow on the defensive. That strategy has backfired, as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently acknowledged in an interview in which he said that Nato leaders told him directly, “you’re not going to be a Nato member, but publicly, the doors will remain open”. This in-between status had set the stage for Russia’s invasion, Zelenskyy said.

As deals such as the Nord Stream II pipeline — hence Europe’s energy dependency on Moscow — made the limits of the West’s commitments to Ukraine clear, the gamesmanship over Nato helped shift Putin onto the offensive in his pursuit of restoring a “Greater Russia”. In a replay of Syria, the US aggravated a conflict in which it has no immediate security interests by making promises it had no intention of keeping, causing Ukraine to dangerously overestimate the level of support it could count on in the event of a Russian attack. And once again, as the Biden administration tries to revive the Obama nuclear deal with Iran, Washington is using the same diplomatic doublespeak, sanctioning Russia for its role in Ukraine and warning about chemical weapons, while simultaneously offering the Russians sanctions relief to support the new Iran deal.

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Meanwhile, foreign fighters are arriving to support both sides of the conflict. Ukrainian officials put the number of volunteers who had arrived in the country at 20,000 by the second week of March. Russia appears to be following the playbook used by Iran when it imported thousands of fighters from Hezbollah, and other Iranian-backed militias including the Fatemiyoun Army, made up of Shia ethnic Hazaras from Afghanistan, into Syria. Last Sunday, Chechnya’s Putin-loyalist authoritarian leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, posted a message online saying that he was in Ukraine and claiming to have deployed 10,000 Chechens soldiers to join him in the war there. There are additional reports, so far unconfirmed, of Russia hiring as many as 20,000 Syrian soldiers to fight Ukraine.

The numbers on both sides may be exaggerated, but thousands of foreigners pouring into Ukraine is one sign that the process of internationalisation that took years in Syria is happening now in mere weeks. As the conflict globalises it becomes harder to resolve — there are now many parties who feel they have a stake, instead of only two — and more susceptible to unpredictable escalations.

The size and fervour of the online war complicates matters further. Syria may have been the first “very online” war but the phenomenon has gone into overdrive in Ukraine. While twitter users splintered into bitterly opposed factions during the war in Syria, today Western social media is overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine. Some of this consensus is surely a result of the bans and blocks that silence “pro-Russian” accounts or those spreading misinformation; but the structural inducements to social conformity on social media play a role as well. As the emotional drive to support Ukraine automatically filters out “bad” news, it could have the perverse effect of discouraging a settlement. If Ukraine is really crushing the Russian invaders, as the generally optimistic accounts of the war on social media suggest (in contrast to the consensus among military experts), it reduces the incentives to make difficult compromises necessary to end the war.

At the moment it appears that the shared desire to avoid a siege on Kyiv, taking tens of thousands of lives while levelling the city, may create the pressure necessary for both parties find that settlement. But that scenario shouldn’t blind us to the parallels with Syria. The dangerous combination of Russian belligerence and US strategic incoherence is once again on display. But Ukraine carries a far greater risk of existential catastrophe because it involves a nuclear-armed Russia that is now at war, not only with other states but with decentralised digital networks.

The spontaneous boycott against all things Russian, which has included bans on ballet performances, university courses on Dostoevsky, and ordinary Russian civilians ability to use their bank cards, provides an example of a digital network in action. No individual organised the boycott or delivered instructions on what was to be banned. The boycott spread  like other online “cancellation” campaigns, rapidly scaling up through the hyper-connectivity of digital social networks in a self-perpetuating phenomenon. These networks are borderless, leaderless, and operating at speeds far exceeding the capacity of individual actors to calculate their consequences.

“The legacy state is becoming a laser pointer,” the cryptocurrency pioneer Balaji Srinivasan observed. “The centralised entity points, the decentralised actors shoot.” But what if the laser pointer is wielded by a leader with an unsteady hand or an actor unsure of their goals? Could the state accidentally provoke a digital swarm attack that triggers a nuclear war?

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“Prior sanctions regimes took years to get to the place that we got to in just a few days,” Ari Redbord, a former sanctions official in the US Treasury Department told me. He described the level of sanctions placed on Russia as “the nuclear option”. Redbord was only talking about official government measures. The “nuclear” economic strike of state sanctions only accounted for the official measures in what was a far larger economic attack on Russia that also includes the actions taken by dozens of private corporations. Once the first corporations such as Google, Mastercard, and Visa began taking steps to cut off and penalise Russia, it triggered a cascade with no clear goal or end point. Suddenly, companies which didn’t take action against Russia were seen as suspect. So far, little attention has been given to the consequences of the cascade but the global economy may be feeling the repercussions into the next century.

Sanctions have pushed Moscow closer to China while also threatening the dollar’s continued dominance. “We have entered a geopolitical depression that will have massive economic and financial consequences well beyond Ukraine,” says the economist Nouriel Roubini, in an essay pointing to the prospect of stagflationary recession and the increased probability of a hot war between major powers over the next decade.

There is reason to hope that the war in Ukraine will not be as drawn out or catastrophic as Syria. But even if settlement is swiftly reached, the impact of having disconnected the Russian economy from the rest of the globe will have a profound long-term effect on global stability. It would be a good time for great powers to step back from the abyss and recognise the danger of globalising local conflicts. There are only so many chances to learn that lesson in wars with nuclear powers.

“ICU Doctor here: I skied 4 hrs in an N95 + a ski mask on top of it! Did not get hypoxic or hypercapnic!” an anaesthesiologist named Ilad Sharifpour tweeted last month. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) advises that “in general, people do not need to wear masks when outdoors”. But such is the enthusiasm for masking among some people, including medical professionals, that the doctor felt moved to boast about outdoing the CDC guideline while engaging in a solo sport that involves high-speed travel through wide-open spaces.

Last May, in a particularly striking example of the “permanent pandemic” mindset, two American doctors wrote an article arguing that masking should “remain with us, becoming part of our everyday lives even as the Covid-19 pandemic, science willing, subsides”. Yet that emotional attachment to masks is even more pronounced today, amid a backlash to the governors’ move and proposals to lift remaining mask requirements in public schools. The New York Times‘s Covid reporter David Leonhardt — a pro-vaccine, pro-masking moderate liberal — was denounced online by hundreds of people last week simply for pointing out that mask mandates involve tradeoffs.

It seems that for a certain group of pandemic diehards, the fact that the guidance on masking has been so overtly unreliable and politicised has actually made masks more, rather than less, potent as instruments of public policy. In less than two years, the CDC has changed its position on masks at least three times. The agency originally discouraged their use before endorsing it, before finally acknowledging the cloth masks used by most Americans cannot stop the fine aerosols that spread Covid — which is exactly what Dr. Anthony Fauci wrote in a private letter from February 2020.

Given that we now know that these public health decisions are not rooted in The Science, the crucial question remains: Why did tens of millions of people willingly give up their freedoms and embrace the ever-changing dictates of such transparently incompetent and undeserving authorities?

So far, two types of answers seem to hold the most explanatory power. The first focuses on the psychology behind the mass adoption of fear-based emergency measures. The second looks at material rather than psychological factors, using the formula favoured by Lenin: “Who, whom?” In other words, which groups have benefited from the Covid regime, and at whose cost?

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The most compelling account of the “permanent pandemic” mindset, it seems to me, is one that recognises the confluence of these two forces. The Covid regime provided a grand life-or-death psychological drama that enlarged the power of the government and its partners in the tech industry, while enabling the destruction and economic displacement of small businesses that make up the base of the Republican party. Some 20% of small businesses and roughly 41% of black-owned small businesses in the US have been forced to close since the start of the pandemic. In the first year of the pandemic alone, there were an extra 200,000 business closures above historical levels. Hardest-hit, according to the Wall Street Journal, were: “Barber shops, nail salons and other providers of personal services.”

One popular psychological theory of the pandemic is ‘mass formation psychosis’, also known as mass formation hypnosis or, simply, mass formation. Developed by Mattias Desmet, a psychology professor at Ghent University in Belgium, it posits that the response to Covid in countries with strict policies illustrates how people can be brought into a collective trance that makes them easy to manipulate and prone to acting in ways that are contrary to reason and evidence.

Such mass formation can only occur, according to Desmet, when four conditions are met: the society has to be atomised and lacking in social bonds; most people living in it must feel a pervasive sense of meaninglessness about their own lives; they must also feel a free-floating anxiety that is not attached to any particular cause; finally, there must also be high levels of free-floating frustration and aggression that, again, have no specific source.

It’s plausible that these conditions were met in the United States when the pandemic broke out. A survey of 10,000 adult American workers taken between July and August 2019 found that three out of five reported being lonely, a 13% increase from the previous year. The number was even higher for heavy social media users, 73% of whom reported feeling lonely. Then came the pandemic, one year into which Americans reported having fewer close friends. In circumstances like these, Desmet argues, mass media can inculcate a narrative that provides the public with a fixed object for its ambient anxiety, drawing otherwise isolated individuals into a common cause in confronting the supposed menace.

The theory, with its obvious evocations of 20th-century totalitarian movements, was popularised when it was brought up on Joe Rogan’s podcast by Robert Malone, a scientist known for his warnings about the risks of mRNA vaccines. That interview may have been the beginning of the end for Rogan. Something about the mass formation hypothesis clearly struck a nerve with state authorities and information commissars and it was almost immediately censored and scrubbed from Google results. Desmet neither denies the existence of Covid nor attacks vaccines. He merely argues that the response to the pandemic has entailed a series of unscientific overreactions that have whipped the public into a dangerously susceptible state.

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People disposed to strictly rational explanations of large-scale events will find Desmet’s mass psychology unconvincing, but much of what has happened over the past two years defies rational accounting. Why did certain drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin become stigmatised as politically untouchable and subject to gross distortions in the press, with CNN calling ivermectin, a Nobel prize-winning drug that had previously been used to treat over 100 million people across the world for ailments like River Blindness, a “horse dewormer?” These kinds of hyper-polarised rituals resemble past collective frenzies and moral panics.

Yet there are obvious limits to what psychology can account for in the past two years. There’s no psychological phenomenon sufficient to explain why the pandemic has been so beneficial to financial capital or led to the technology industry making a record-setting $1.4 trillion in 2021. As Marketwatch put it in a recent headline: “Big Tech’s pandemic year produces mind-boggling financial results”.

It’s not simply that the rich have gotten richer, though that’s certainly true as America’s billionaires added $2.1 trillion to their net worth during the pandemic. It’s Silicon Valley corporations with close ties to the Democratic party, like Google, that have benefited most.

While the tech companies have few actual employees compared to older productive industries, their largesse now directly subsidises whole sectors of the professional class economy, including journalism. Individual professionals may not have become richer during the pandemic but, unlike hundreds of thousands of American workers who lost their jobs — many of whom worked in the small businesses that were shuttered over the past two years — their employment was mostly secure.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that those professionals would instinctively internalise Covid policies that enriched their tech oligarch patrons as a personal victory and defence of their own status. Few would put it that way, of course. Instead, they accuse protesting truck drivers of being fascists and call for them to be arrested because they recognise that medical mandates provide a ruthlessly efficient — yet morally sanctioned — means for sorting the populations between rulers, who deserve to monopolise power, and subjects, who can follow the rules or be crushed. That seems to be the underlying logic animating Juliette Kayyem, a former homeland security official under Obama who spoke for many in her circles when she recommended the best way to deal with the protests: “Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks.”

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Recently Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, both self-described Leftists, posed a series of questions about the Left’s relationship to Covid policies that had been devastating to the working class and global south. “Why has the mainstream Left ended up supporting practically all Covid measures?” they asked on UnHerd. And how, they wondered. did the Left end up ridiculing the very notion that there might be motivations from the vaccine manufacturers other than “the public good” at play?

The answer, it seems, is fairly clear: the Left did this because the Public Good has become, along with The Science, largely a costume worn by the professional classes who, quite rightly, suspect that they have more in common with a Moderna executive than an anti-vaccine mandate truck driver.

This obvious threat inflation, which should be familiar after September 11, is used by governments and private corporations alike to award themselves more unaccountable power. To work, it relies on the public being cowed by the expertise and authority of institutions that operate in secret. These methods have proved to be highly effective for defending the power of America’s bureaucracies.

The problem with bureaucratised secrecy is what it does to the rest of society. As illusions come to seem real and formal mechanisms of truth-seeking appear blocked off, conspiracies offer themselves as a virtuous alternative. To encourage this in a country that already has a deep, native strain of paranoia and wild truth-seeking is a dangerous gamble.

The elements of fantasy and stagecraft present on January 6, from the costumed pageantry at the storming of the Capitol to the Broadway kitsch at its anniversary commemoration, point to the event’s dual origins in the US security state and the paranoid imagination that is a byproduct of government secrecy run amok.

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“Secrecy is an institution of the administrative state that developed during the great conflicts of the twentieth century. It is distinctive primarily in that it is all but unexamined,” the scholar and American statesman Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote toward the end of his long career in public life, when he turned his attention to the power in the shadows.

Moynihan, a Democratic Senator from New York, was known for his polarising work on race, poverty and the breakdown of the American family. But in his final published book, the liberal Cold Warrior delivered a revisionist account of the US conflict with the Soviet Union. Though he never wavered on the righteousness of the anti-Communist cause, Moynihan argued that the effort had been weakened and warped by the growth of a bureaucratic culture of secrecy. He delivered a measured but devastating attack on the underworld of administrative institutions better known today as “the deep state”.

In Secrecy: The American Experience, published in 1999, Moynihan argued that US policy had been systematically distorted by intelligence agency assessments that exaggerated the economic and military power of the Soviet Union. Because the agencies operated in secret, the exaggerations were not only shielded from scrutiny but had the perverse effect of fuelling their own growth. Over time, this process fundamentally transformed the American political system. “Secrecy is a form of regulation,” Moynihan wrote in the book’s opening line. This new form of regulation supervened democratic procedures and transferred power to bureaucracies operating in the shadows of the elected government.

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Despite his criticisms, Moynihan maintained that secrecy was “at times legitimate and necessary”. But he observed a typology of secrets in which there were two critical distinctions. The first was between secrets applied to foreign affairs in the interest of national security, and those used domestically to regulate the activities of American citizens. The second, related division was between functional and symbolic secrets.

Influenced by the sociologist Edward Shils’s 1956 book The Torment of American Secrecy, Moynihan elaborated a theory of secrets as social agents in bureaucratic societies. In his introduction to Secrecy, the historian Richard Gid Powers describes the contours of that approach: “Drawing on Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, [Moynihan] saw how he could discuss secrecy as a form of regulation (Weber) that could often take a ritualistic form (Durkheim) in order to stigmatize outsiders and critics (as distinguished from the functional secrecy that seeks simply to keep critical information from the enemy).”

As secrecy expands into a basis of governing power, what is human — to fear the unknown — metastasises into a culture of consuming paranoia and conspiracy. Moynihan was not alone in foreseeing this outcome. The American diplomat George Kennan, another stalwart of the Cold War, expressed his own reservations about the normalisation of espionage as an instrument of policy. “We easily become ourselves the sufferers from these methods of deception,” Kennan warned. “For they inculcate in their authors, as well as their intended victims, unlimited cynicism, causing them to lose all realistic understanding of the relationship, in what they are doing, of ends and means.”

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Unlimited cynicism occluding cause and effect for perpetrator as well as victim — who may not be so easy to tell apart — is an apt framework with which to approach the inept fantasy of insurrection that took place on January 6, 2021, in Washington D.C.

For four years, while Donald Trump was President, US intelligence agencies colluded with members of Congress and the media to foment a conspiracy about collusion between Trump and Russia. The claims relied on secret smoking gun evidence that was supposedly in the possession of the proper authorities and would, any day, result in the President and his associates being tried for treason. Of course, this never happened, because what the secrecy concealed was not damning evidence, nor merely the lack of it, but the record showing how Clinton lawyers, ex spies, and current federal agents had, together, manufactured the false collusion narrative. Predictably, the official state-sanctioned conspiracy produced as its mutant offspring the counter-conspiracies of the Right, of which the most notorious was QAnon, a group that would play a leading role in the Capitol riot.

Feeding on the cynicism of his supporters and the brazen interventions of the deep state into the 2020 election — most notably the suppression of reporting on Hunter Biden’s business ties on transparently spurious national security grounds — Trump spent weeks after the vote stoking the fury of his supporters with a manic “stop the steal” campaign that made no distinctions between reasonable questions of electoral interference and ridiculous ones, and showed little concern for the line between protest and mob violence. The day after the riot, the president, realising that he had gone too far, denounced his supporters who had attacked security officers and breached the Capitol building as having “defiled the seat of American democracy”. Not long after, he was back to defending them. At no point did he accept any responsibility for the national humiliation.

While Trump has continued his stop the steal campaign, in terms of both cynicism and impact, it is dwarfed by what his opponents have carried out in the government and press. There is considerable evidence that US security and intelligence agencies had prior knowledge of a planned march on January 6 and were present in some capacity among the groups that breached the Capitol. We know, for instance, that a leader of the Proud Boys, a group that the Wall Street Journal called “key instigators” of the Capitol Riot, spent the past decade as a “prolific” FBI informant.

An investigation by the New York Times based on confidential records and sources found that “federal law enforcement had a far greater visibility into the assault on the Capitol, even as it was taking place, than was previously known”. The Times’ efforts pick up on reporting on the FBI’s role in the riot by the Right-wing news site Revolver, which has focused on Ray Epps, the former president of the Oath Keepers militia movement. Epps, who unlike some 700 other people involved in the riot has never been arrested or charged with a crime, can be seen on video taken at the riot telling people to “go into the Capitol”.

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The FBI has a record of hyping up threats and encouraging terrorists plots that it can then bust to justify its mission. Consider an ongoing case involving the plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. For months the plot was marshalled as evidence of the existential danger posed by Right-wing extremist groups, but those claims have unraveled as it turned out that the FBI had 12 informants inside the organisation accused of planning the crime. The informants “had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception”, reported Buzzfeed. “The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”

And yet these dubious pseudo-events, which never posed any immediate threat to America’s democracy or its security establishment, are compared to the worst attacks in American history. At the January 6 commemoration last week, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi brought out liberal godhead Lin-Manuel Miranda along with the cast of Hamilton to perform a virtual performance. This moment of supreme kitsch was only scarcely more ridiculous than Vice President Kamala Harris, in her commemorative remarks, comparing the largely symbolic riot to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

The purpose of these gross exaggerations is to demand that Americans forfeit their rights in the name of security and convince the public, or some electorally significant fraction of it, that it is wise and just for the US government to prosecute a counterterrorism campaign against Trump supporters. The project uses the full power of the American security establishment as a get-out-the-vote arm for the Democratic party.

Secrecy, like conspiracy, dulls the impact of reality. Long after they have been exposed, the afterlife of secrets continue to debase the currency of truth. It is notable, for instance, that contrary to the inflamed rhetoric from the White House and prominent Democrats, no charges related to insurrection have been brought against any of the more than 700 defendants charged with participating in the Capitol riot. Instead, the government has mostly pursued a strategy of seeking the harshest sentences possible for trespassing. To one side, this is evidence that no insurrection took place; that even the government doesn’t believe the threat it’s selling. But to the other side it has roughly the opposite meaning, signalling that the US government is soft on Right-wing extremism and that power is working behind the scenes to protect the coup-plotters.

It remains necessary to counter lies with truth, but not sufficient. Until the rule of secrecy itself is ended and power in democracies again becomes visible and accountable, the arms race of paranoia and conspiracy will continue. That way lies ruin.

You would expect that kind of statement from a “defund the police” advocate, but Rittenhouse is a former youth police cadet whose support for “Blue Lives Matter” was used to try and paint him as a racist and far-Right extremist. His world-weary cynicism about the FBI, expressed as Carlson nodded along approvingly, signals a major shift in a central axis of American politics.

Distrust of federal law enforcement was, until quite recently, a markedly Left-wing attitude, but it now represents a baseline among Republican voters. In February 2015, a Reuters poll found that almost 84% of Republicans reported a “favorable” view of the FBI. By February 2018, only two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, a different Reuters poll showed 73% of Republicans agreeing that “members of the FBI and Department of Justice are working to delegitimise Trump through politically motivated investigations.” Imagine how those same people feel now, after Special Counsel John Durham’s indictments have exposed the FBI’s role in perpetrating the Trump-Russia dossier fraud.

What does it mean when America’s law-and-order party comes to see law enforcement, along with much of the federal government, as fundamentally illegitimate? The answer is being worked out by a crop of Republicans whose project is to extend the politics of Trumpism beyond Trump. Blake Masters, a close business partner of tech investor Peter Thiel who’s running for a Senate seat in Arizona, has called for “standing up to the bureaucratic national-security state.” In a campaign ad, Masters describes a nation under siege from within, “up against a media that lies to us, schools that teach our kids to hate our country, and corporations that have gotten so big, they think they’re bigger than America.”

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There are clear echoes in that message of Steve Bannon, Trump’s original campaign manager and another Thiel associate, who championed a war against the administrative state on behalf of American workers. Bannon lasted less than a year in the White House, but he now runs one of the most popular podcasts on iTunes, War Room, which has more than 100 million total downloads. In an appearance on the podcast this week, Masters told Bannon: “I consider that you simply don’t negotiate with terrorists. And I believe the Democratic Party, Schumer, Pelosi and Biden are holding us hostage.”

Masters, along with two other Thiel-backed political candidates — Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, who’s running for the Senate in Ohio, and Army Special Forces veteran Joe Kent, a self-described “Trump endorsed America 1st Congressional candidate,” who’s running for a House seat in Washington state — distinguished themselves from other Republicans by offering early and vocal support for Rittenhouse.

It’s easy to see why, since the Rittenhouse trial seemed tailor-made to illustrate the premises of their brand of populist nationalism. A young, working-class, white Trump supporter, Rittenhouse was subjected to a public smear campaign in which President Biden himself impugned him as a white supremacist in a campaign video. Meanwhile, the state prosecution deflected attention away from the evidence supporting Rittenhouse’s self-defence claims and onto his motives by suggesting that he had come to Kenosha looking for trouble — despite the fact that Rittenhouse could be seen on video, shortly before the shooting, offering medical aid to Black Lives Matter protesters.

As the prosecution bumbled its way through the trial and got publicly scolded by the judge, it only further proved the point of those who see an American regime spanning the upper layers of government, media, and business that is not only illegitimate but incompetent, run by emissaries of a “clown world,” as a popular phrase on the Right has it.

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“Think about what this says about our disgusting elite leadership in this country,” Vance said in a video message recorded days before the Rittenhouse verdict. “If we don’t defend this young boy who defended his community when no one else was, it may very well be your baby boy that they come for.” The day Rittenhouse’s acquittal was announced, Masters tweeted: “This case reminded us that our justice system, like every other institution our ancestors built, is under siege, and that the besiegers are very close to victory.”

The rallying cry of the “Rittenhouse Republicans,” which at times approaches the rhetoric of revolution, is that the ruling class has become parasitic on the lives of ordinary Americans. “We despise our government & corporations benefiting from the security & labor of our working class solely for the benefit of elites who have no loyalty to our nation, rather they despise us & are using the wealth they generate to fund our decline,” Kent recently tweeted. Both Masters and Kent say they think Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.

Aside from the specifics and symbolism of the Rittenhouse case, publicly supporting him makes sense in terms of the demographic changes in the makeup of the major political parties. While Wall Street business executives and upper middle class professionals now overwhelmingly back the Democrats, the Republicans have, by default as much as by choice, increasingly courted the working class. Over the past decade, the party’s biggest gains have been among white voters without a college degree, and in the 2020 election, it made some inroads with voters of all races without a college degree.

Trump’s conception of a power struggle with the U.S. “Deep State” saw a contest between the voters’ elected representative and the shadowy forces controlling the levers of government behind the scenes. But for Kent, Masters, Vance, and the other aspiring heirs of Trumpism, the state itself is the enemy. Their efforts, like Trump’s, are directed as much against Republican orthodoxies and the Beltway establishment as against Democratic policies. Gone is the old conservative divide between “good” institutions like the military and the corporate boardroom and “bad” ones like the media and teacher’s unions. “Our military leadership is totally incompetent,” Masters said recently in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan. “Our top generals have turned into woke corporate bozos,” he tweeted, “and our troops deserve better.”

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But where Trump’s approach was visceral and inseparable from his singular personality, his would-be successors are more sober and more ideological. They are also supported by the kind of political infrastructure that was conspicuously lacking in the chaotic and chronically understaffed Trump administration.

Masters, Vance, and Kent are all political newcomers between the ages of 35-41, and all three are backed by funding from Thiel. The Vance and Masters campaigns both received $10 million through super PACs, while Kent got $5,800, the legal limit in his race. Their vision for America, broadly aligned with the post-libertarian ideas Thiel has espoused over the past decade, calls for a secular, nationalist politics of the common good. The greatest threat to the American people, they say, is the unchecked power of the Democrat-dominated administrative state and the transnational corporations operating under its auspices.

The conventional script for beltway Republicans in the pre-Trump era called for limiting the power of government and letting social policy be set by individual choice and market mechanisms. But for the national populists and conservatives of the new post-Trump Right, that laissez faire approach simply cedes power to woke corporations and lobbying interests. The only way to reform the state is to take control of it and replace current ruling class functionaries with a new elite that will serve the interests of working and middle-class Americans.

“The end goal is human flourishing,” Masters recently told the journalist Peter Savodnik. “You want a strong middle class in America. There’s a whole set of values and a whole lifestyle attendant to that. I think that’s a goal, and I think too many conventional, you know, business Republicans they’re agnostic on that. They don’t care what the consequences of their policies are.”

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It now remains to be seen whether Masters and the others can win. In Ohio, Vance is battling it out in a tight primary race against the state treasurer, Josh Mandel, another Trump supporter from the party’s increasingly crowded populist wing. In Arizona, Masters was trailing behind the state’s Attorney General Mark Brnovich 27% to 9% in a recent poll. But Trump, who previously called Brnovich “lackluster” for refusing to order an audit of Arizona’s 2020 election result, only entered the race a few weeks ago, with a scheduled appearance at a fundraiser for Masters. In Washington state, a poll from early November shows Joe Kent leading both the Democrat, Brent Hennrich, and the six-term incumbent Republican, Jaime Herrera Beutler, who broke with her party and voted to impeach Trump, in his House race.

With poll numbers for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at historic lows, the Democrats are looking exceptionally vulnerable going into the 2022 midterm elections. The crucial question for the Rittenhouse Republicans is how far voters want to go in rejecting the current system. So far, the most visible repudiation of the Democrats has come from the Virginia governor’s race, which was won by Glenn Youngkin, a classic C-suite Republican. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the firebrands of the new Right isn’t from Democrats but from the push by the leaders of their own party to restore the Beltway consensus.

Yet there are signs that the old version of bipartisan centrism in DC may be unsustainable. A recent Harvard poll of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 found that 39% overall believe American democracy is in trouble. That’s a significant segment of young voters, but what’s notable is that the disillusionment was far more pronounced on the Right. More than half of young Trump voters think America is a “democracy in trouble”. Nearly a quarter, 22%, believe it has already “failed”.

These groups can’t influence policies at Amazon and the Pentagon, or other undemocratic bodies at America’s commanding heights. But locally they still have the power to refuse orders from the managerial janissaries who carry out the oligarchy’s bidding.

Pretensions of democracy aside, this is the real political landscape in the US, argued the American scholar of statecraft Angelo Codevilla. The oligarchy demands complete submission, the locals refuse, each party grants itself greater licence in what is permitted to defeat the other and the country spirals toward revolutionary violence. Codevilla, who last month died aged 78 near his vineyards in California, termed it a “cold civil war”.

For Codevilla, America’s founding tradition of republican self-government has been replaced by a ruling class of both Democrats and Republicans that is steeped in progressive ideology and hides its power in the operations of a vast administrative Leviathan. These views, as well as Codevilla’s affiliation with the Claremont Institute, considered the intellectual home of Trumpism, earned him a place in what one critic recently called “The Anti-American Right”.

According to America’s liberal intelligentsia, the open collaboration between corporations and state organs monopolised by the Democratic Party is unimportant compared to the fascist threat coming from “anti-American” conservatives. They believe that fear of demographic and cultural change has marginalised these anti-American jingoists, and led to their embrace of strongmen like Donald Trump who promise to restore their honour.

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But that critique, when applied to Codevilla, reduces an historical and structural analysis of power to mere reactionary resentment. It also misinterprets and seriously underplays the radicalism of his ideas. Far from being radicalised by the election of a black president in Barack Obama, or a white restorer in Trump, Codevilla was radicalised by seeing the inner workings of the US government in the 1970s.

It is Codevilla’s background as a classicist, not a culture warrior, that best explains his harsh criticisms of the “War on Terror” policies of a Republican president, George W. Bush. His counsel to Americans who fear the rise of an oligarchic ruling class was not to storm the Capitol or elect a Caesar, but to get out and start something new. He saw an answer to the revolutionary spiral not in violence but federalism achieved through exodus. “Were the deplorables to struggle for the partisan power to oppress the others, they would guarantee dysfunction at best, war at worst,” he wrote in March this year. “That is why it makes most sense for them to assert their own freedom.”

Codevilla was born in 1943 in Voghera, a Northern Italian town near Milan. His father died before his birth. In 1955, he moved to America with his mother, arriving in New Jersey. After a stint in the Foreign Service he made his formal introduction to the American power elite in 1977, when he joined the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In 1978, he helped draft the original foreign intelligence surveillance court law that, after 9/11, provided the pretence of legal authority — in the notorious FISA warrants — for carte blanche spying by the U.S. intelligence agencies. Finished with government work by the mid-1980s, he went on to take a number of university teaching positions and pursued a prolific writing career, over which he published 14 books and countless articles and essays, mostly for conservative publications.

When I had the chance to interview Codevilla in 2017, his generosity left an impression, as did his voice. For someone who came to America as an early adolescent, he had no discernible accent save a highly articulated diction and crisp, mid-Atlantic consonants. It was the voice of someone obviously learned, slightly mischievous, direct and lacking pretension.

It was the same voice in which he wrote, and reflected something of Codevilla’s character and unique background. He was a government insider who internalised the vision of America’s founders and an unsparing critic of the intelligence agencies who failed to make the country safer while hijacking its politics. You could disagree with his conclusions, as many did when he defended first the Tea Party and later the political movement around Donald Trump. But it was clear he was a man who lived partly outside his own time, translating Machiavelli into English and consulting Thucydides to diagnose the causes and effects of a growing administrative state.

Codevilla was best known for his writing on the American ruling class. Indeed, the idea that America is no longer ruled by a collection of individuals selected on their merits — and its popularity on the American Right — is largely Codevilla’s legacy. His 2010 essay on the subject for The American Spectator became a sensation after the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh was moved to read aloud from it to his more than 15 million listeners. The essay became a book and elevated Codevilla’s reputation from respected authority on military and intelligence matters to a general Right-wing eminence of the American political scene.

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Codevilla interpreted what has often been described as “polarisation” as a conflict between two distinct classes, each with competing visions of America. There is a “court” or “ruling” class, made up of highly educated urbanites whose group identity was forged in the American Progressive movement founded over a century ago, and a “country class” of those excluded from the court, who preserve the older assumptions of America’s founders.

The US has always had an upper class. But for most of American history, it was regional and varied. Because these people came from different places with their own local customs and made money in different ways, they were “not predictably of one mind on any given matter”. The internal tensions and disputes that naturally arose among them served as a check on their consolidation of power.

But now those regional elites have been replaced by a monolith. “Today’s ruling class,” Codevilla wrote, “was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits”. From Washington to Silicon Valley, progressive elites share a “social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints”. While the test for entry into this class is moral and aesthetic, it exercises power through offices of the administrative state, whose authority rests on secrecy.

Codevilla’s most original and striking contribution was to argue that secrecy, rather than expertise, is the foundation of ruling class power. As a strategy of rule, it provides the connective tissue between the ruling class’s domestic social engineering projects and the foreign wars it fights without clear goals or prospect of victory. As Codevilla wrote in his 2014 book, To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations:

“The bipartisan ruling class that grew in the Cold War, who imagined themselves and who managed to be regarded as entitled by expertise to conduct America’s business of war and peace, protected its status against a public from which it continued to diverge by translating the commonsense business of war and peace into a private, pseudo-technical language impenetrable to the uninitiated.”

As used by American spy agencies, “secrecy” can mean hiding information or obtaining it surreptitiously. But it might equally refer to the deployment of academic and scientific obscurantism to justify unpopular policies such as the forced masking of school children or the imposition of racial mysticism in school curricula and corporate boardrooms. The logic of such policies is never straightforwardly presented to the public, where it can be refuted on its own terms, because the logic of this or that policy is beside the point. In the end, the secular utopianism of early twentieth century progressive ideology combined with a secrecy-powered security state built to win the cold war and produced a strange offspring: our new America.

Socialised into the belief that they alone have the skill and moral sensitivity required to govern, America’s elites regard their countrymen not as fellow citizens to be reasoned with but as subjects to be ruled, no different in principle from the Afghans and Iraqis designated for liberation.

For Codevilla, such an outcome was always implicit in the premises of the War on Terror. Shortly after the attacks on September 11, at a time when many of his fellow conservatives regarded deference to the national security state as synonymous with patriotism, he offered this counsel in an essay for the Claremont Review of Books:

“Common sense says that victory means living without worry that some foreigners might kill us on behalf of their causes, but also without having to bow to domestic bureaucrats and cops, especially useless ones. It means not changing the tradition by which the government of the United States treats citizens as its masters rather than as potential enemies.”

No one in power took his advice, of course. Arguing that “some foreigners” might want to kill us, and that victory meant stopping this from happening rather than converting them to our way of life, could be easily written off as xenophobic and antiquated. For the next 15 years, the Bush and Obama administrations appealed to the nobility of Islam and dignity of Muslims as US wars killed hundreds of thousands of actual Muslims while achieving no lasting peace for Americans.

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Codevilla was not always right in his five decades of writing about America’s wars and political struggles at home, but he was often uncommonly wise and never lacking in common sense. He understood that while some people live above their means, the members of the American ruling class live above their mistakes.

No senior US military official faced any serious consequences over the war in Vietnam. Five decades later, the same is true of Afghanistan. The generals who oversaw the US defeat and lied to the public about the progress of the war have moved on to jobs in the White House and defence industry. President Biden, to his credit, manoeuvred around the machinations of the security establishment to finally end the war. But he did so in a shambolic way that was careless with allies and pushed America’s strategic adversaries into closer cooperation.

What’s more, Biden shows no interest at all in dismantling the massive and immensely powerful war on terror security apparatus that, left intact, will always find new enemies to justify its existence. In fact, part of Biden’s motivation to get out of Afghanistan was to rely more on “over-the-horizon” capabilities — meaning jets, missiles and drone attacks — to fight our enemies abroad so that he could refocus the surveillance and policing power of the national security state on political enemies at home.

The plan, outlined in June, deems white supremacist and anti-government militia groups the “most persistent and lethal threat” to the US out of all “domestic terrorist” ideologies. To combat this, the National Security Council strategy calls for increased government spying powers combined with efforts at reeducation. It is “the first document,” writes the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “to directly tie US counterterrorism efforts to broader social issues such as systemic racism, police reform and gun control”.

All of this is as Codevilla predicted. Many have criticised US military policy in Afghanistan and the opaque and divisive racial theories being imposed in American schools. Codevilla recognised that they are structurally indivisible, two sides of an American ruling-class ideology that defines itself in opposition to the values and preferences of most American citizens.

This ideology generates endless cycles of failure because it reflects not particular policies but the gross inadequacies of those who have a monopoly on institutional power. It “guarantees,” as Codevilla wrote in 2014, “unending conflict with all nations and strife among ourselves”.

Meanwhile, the members of an al Qaeda cell were plotting.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were believed by many at the time to have awakened America from the post-historical fantasies of the 1990s. “We have been called out of our trivial concerns,” declared an editorial from September 19, 2001 in The Weekly Standard, the influential neoconservative publication known as “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One”. This was a prominent attitude and not confined to the Right. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, in an interview published the day before, declared “the end of the age of irony” and predicted that “things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear”.

Twenty years later, the Taliban’s predictable takeover of Afghanistan is the final crushing defeat of America’s post-9/11 calling as the armed evangelist of global democracy. Instead of spreading the gifts of liberty to the Middle East, the crusading policy of the past two decades collapsed the guardrails of liberal democracy at home, undermined its appeal abroad and wasted America’s strategic power while enriching its ruling class.

Over those same years, the infrastructure of the War on Terror achieved a revolutionary transformation of the global order; albeit one altogether different from the liberalising mission it heralded. From the start, US intelligence agencies argued that the Internet comprised the key terrain of 21^st-century warfare and only by controlling it could they prevent another “intelligence failure” like the one blamed for the al Qaeda attacks in 2001. The unprecedented rise of Google, Facebook and Amazon, as hegemons of the new digital order in which “real life” is what takes place online, is in part the story of the American security establishment outsourcing its surveillance project to private information monopolies. In the process, the emerging digital economy amassed the greatest concentration of wealth in human history, while helping to systematically dismantle the American middle class and with it those institutions like the free press that made liberal democracy possible.

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We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

The Weekly Standard editorial from September 19th continues in the next line: “We have resigned our parts in the casual comedy of everyday existence. We live for the first time since World War II, with a horizon once again.” You couldn’t look at the carnage in downtown New York and the Potomac without seeing that the US had enemies who were both determined and savage. Salafist-jihadism is a millenarian cult, an authentic expression of Islamic fundamentalism and an ultra-modern totalitarian ideology. Formulating an effective response to networked and state-aligned terrorism that matched the severity of the threat without overstating its significance was not an easy task — which is why so many people got it wrong.

But the answer given by people with the President’s ear, to elevate the terrorist attack to mythological significance as the event that restored a lost horizon, set the mould for a naive triumphalism that led directly to Iraq and twenty years of delusion and defeat in Afghanistan.

Not everyone held such views, of course. There was some dissent even within the D.C. Beltway. But the Standard’s Republican version of Wilsonian Neoconservatism, which shared with the Democrats’ liberal interventionism almost everything but its cultural and stylistic tics, was the purest expression of a prevailing attitude in the American political and media classes. In a nation that had grown too comfortable and complacent, global jihadism offered a civilisational challenge. Our Islamist enemy would call forth a new “national greatness” in the American character, wrote the New York Times’ David Brooks.

The authors of this vision were nearly all baby boomers. Their call to forge a new generation’s greatness in battle against “Islamofascism” was a self-conscious attempt to recreate the heroic national destiny they had grown up venerating in the shadow of the Second World War. It was an understandable response to the strength and nobility of their fathers’ generation, but a fatal blueprint for American foreign policy.

This new call to arms was not purely a response to 9/11. One important source text was written in the summer of 1996 while Bill Clinton was in office. Together, the Weekly Standard’s editor William Kristol and fellow influential neoconservative Robert Kagan co-authored an essay in which they developed ideas that would inform George W. Bush’s vision for the world, especially the “freedom agenda” put forth in his second inaugural address. The article lamented the “tepid consensus” that had taken hold after Ronald Reagan left office among conservatives who accepted a diminished role for America in global affairs.

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The theatre of terror

By Simon Cottee

Against what they called “the pinched nationalism” of Patrick Buchanan’s “America First” foreign policy, the authors presented a true “conservatism of the heart”. Under this maudlin title, they enumerated their aims: “To emphasize both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking in American foreign policy.”

Perhaps I was too young to appreciate it at the time — certainly I was too caught up in my own anger and patriotic furore, which involved enlisting in the military in 2002 — but some 20 years later, the overwrought boyishness of these programmes for the making of “great men” makes for painful reading. In the pages of The New Republic, the emotionally precocious Peter Beinart championed a politics of “muscular liberalism”. Beinart’s twee recreation of historical mission was captured in his 2006 book arguing for why “Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.”

So what did we get for all this talk of revived greatness and reborn heroism? We got Bush, the boyish president whose reputation for mangling the English language could never account for his genuine knack for grandiloquent oratory. We got Rumsfeld and Cheney, who were not quite the Strangelovian villains of lore, mostly because they were less cinematic in their foibles and more grubby and desperate. We got a new techno-Calvinist social dispensation and a permanent state of exception that blurs the line between terrorism and disease. We got generations of military generals who have been, with few exceptions, glorified hangers for uniforms overweighted with cheapened medals.

American soldiers who fought with honour know all too well that the heroism of our peers was a private affair, shared between comrades. There was nothing larger in it. No national greatness or unifying purpose. Any contact we had with real heroism only widened the gulf between us and our fellow citizens.

All in all, this quest has been a tragic disappointment. Rather than enlarging the stature of Americans, the effort to manufacture greatness had a miniaturising effect. Everything it touched became not only less heroic but less human. We wanted greatness, but we got simulations.

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How the neocons got away with it

By Razib Khan

Meanwhile, in the same years that the measure of man was being stunted, another type of anti-heroism — this time in a technological form — was coming to rule over the planet. Even before the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, the budding War on Terror had already begun to metastasise into a permanent bureaucracy. Word of the “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) programme was leaked to the New York Times, which reported on the initiative in 2002 while it was still in development.

Headed up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), TIA intended to create a universal data mining system in which every kind of information ever collected on a person would be collated in one database. US authorities could then query and analyse the data — which, properly interpreted, would contain a composite portrait of every individual alive — with algorithms designed to detect patterns identified with criminals and terrorists. For its logo the group chose the eye of providence, that always reassuring image from the one-dollar bill of an eyeball floating at the apex of a pyramid.

Once word got out about TIA, a backlash ensued led by both legislators and civil liberties groups and the programme was shut down. But what we now know — thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013 — is that TIA didn’t end when the Government shut it down; it just took on new names as it spread far outside its origins at DARPA. Within the US government, TIA was a direct forerunner to the National Security Agency’s secret efforts known as PRISM to collect bulk data and spy on Americans’ communications. Just this past April, it was revealed that the US postal office was running a secret programme to monitor Americans’ social media activity for signs of “extremism” that would then be passed on to other federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. As a specific office TIA is gone, but the principle that unconstitutional spying on Americans’ private behaviour is only limited by the possibility of getting caught lives on.

The true heirs to the Government’s efforts at total information control are companies like Google and Facebook whose businesses are based on luring people in with free services in order to extract their user data. In her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes how the “state of exception” created by the Government use of special extra-legal prerogatives in the aftermath of 9/11 “favored Google’s growth and the successful elaboration of its surveillance-based logic of accumulation”. In other words, why would US intelligence agencies run their own collection programmes and have to worry about political scandals and Congressional oversight when they can just allow private companies to cast a legal surveillance net over the entire globe and then tap into the servers on the backend, like they did with PRISM.

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Washington was gripped by fear

By Justin Webb

In 2000, the year the tech bubble burst, there was a burgeoning effort in the US government, led by the Federal Trade Commission, to regulate the Internet and protect users’ privacy. Zuboff details how that came to an abrupt end after 9/11 as, “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism”.

Exactly 20 years after the survey that found “Optimism Reigns, Technology Plays Key Role,” Pew conducted another survey in 2019. Too much has happened to reduce its findings to any one cause, but its headline gives one indication of the direction that change took in the post 9/11 era: “Looking to the Future, Public Sees an America in Decline on Many Fronts: Majorities predict a weaker economy, a growing income divide, a degraded environment and a broken political system.”

The soaring rhetoric employed by the architects of post-9/11 US policy promised to restore a classical grandeur to American democracy that had supposedly been lost in the “end of history” Nineties. Instead, they undermined its foundations and launched the United States into the anti-heroic era of human-bots, social automation and authoritarian technocracy.

What ties the impeachment drama that began the year together with the pandemic, months of political violence and faulty predictions of a Biden blowout, is a system-wide failure of expert knowledge and elite institutional response. “Where were all the experts?” asked New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo in April, at the height of his state’s Covid outbreak. Cuomo blamed more or less every wing of the sprawling structure of elite expertise, pointing the finger for what happened on his watch at “the international health community… the WHO, the NIH, the CDC… the intelligence community… the New York Times… the Wall Street Journal”.

Sure, the governor’s complaint was self-serving given his own disastrous handling of the pandemic, but it wasn’t wrong. Weeks earlier, the Center for Disease Control, after months of declaring face masks ineffective and imploring the public not to wear them — a position echoed by the US Surgeon General, by Biden’s soon-to-be chief medical advisor Dr Anthony Fauci, and by most of the media — abruptly reversed course and endorsed face covering as vital to containing the spread of Covid.

Masks were the most visible representation of this: a year defined by politicised expert opinion detaching itself from reality and undergoing sudden reversals. Mass gatherings went from deadly superspreader events to being practically mandatory as a matter of public moral hygiene, with the rise of the BLM protests in May. Covering up such absurdities required the combined effort of ideological enforcers in the press and on social media, brute intimidation by people with hiring and firing power, and the constant appearance of a new crisis to distract from the last.

The compound effect was a cleavage in which half the country now rejects the legitimacy of America’s nominally non-political institutions. Tucker Carlson, whose relentless criticism of the ruling class has made him the top-rated cable news host in the country, summed up the sentiment in a recent segment on how the “experts have been exposed as frauds”. But this is not only a right-wing or populist phenomenon. From the liberal centre, Yascha Mounk wrote in late December about “losing trust in the institutions”.

The first important lesson from the past year is that this revolt against the experts is not a fringe phenomenon driven by QAnon loons, hysterical anti-vaxxers and other untouchables. It is widespread and its consequences are already profound. On the surface, people are simply rejecting the authority of institutions such as the CDC, which now openly advocates for racial preferences and places political calculations before the public good. But beneath that rejection, there is a cultural shift at the level of animating beliefs.

For millions of people, a disenchantment has broken the spell which upheld their faith in rational, scientific knowledge as the best means to tame the natural chaos of reality and administer the business of society. On top of all the other disenchantments undermining America’s founding myths, this one erodes the foundation on which the entire technocratic regime of modern society rests.

Given the rather obvious importance of public health officials in the midst of a pandemic, why not seek to replace them with a better class of expert, instead of attacking the basis of expertise? The answer to that is in the second lesson of 2020: far from losing status after the repeated errors and deceptions of the past year, America’s institutional elite is more powerful than ever.

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When will my fellow liberals learn?

By Mark Lilla

Perhaps some reputational damage has been inflicted on the experts who warned that the real threat of the coronavirus was overreacting, or worse, racism, and on the elite activists who advanced a deeply unpopular police abolition agenda ahead of national elections, and on the scientific establishment that declared “white supremacy” to be “a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19”.

But those costs are marginal compared to the material and political gains. If you are one of the people or organisations which repeatedly got the coronavirus wrong, abetted wanton political violence and destruction, or once again misread the American electorate, odds are very good that your funding streams, political influence, institutional power and leverage over your fellow Americans are going increase over the next four years of the Biden administration.

The collective fortunes of the experts who failed Andrew Cuomo and the citizens of New York have run in parallel with those of the governor. Cuomo oversaw a fiercely politicised coronavirus response. He made costly mistakes, including his mandate that nursing homes accept discharged Covid-19 patients without testing to determine if they were still contagious, a policy that resulted in thousands of deaths (we don’t know exactly how many because he refuses to release the numbers). And yet, somehow in the midst of a death toll approaching 40,000 he found the time to write a book touting “leadership lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic” and do a victory tour.

He’s laundered his reputation in a way that can only be compared to the Russiagate diehards. The political actors and intelligence operatives claiming a Trump-Putin conspiracy who were exposed as, at best, delusional frauds have faced no consequences. Rather, they’ve been rewarded with campaign contributions, book deals, TV appearances, and other tokens of commercial and cultural prestige. The vast surveillance apparatus that engineered the domestic spying operation has been legitimised as a tool for correcting against unfortunate errors in democracy when the will of the people gets it wrong.

The future is looking bright for the DC foreign policy elite whose combined wisdom produced the Iraq War, abetted the catastrophe in Syria, scoffed at Trump’s efforts at a peace deal in the Middle East, and who now fight tooth and nail to keep US troops stranded in a lost war in Afghanistan.

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Why young Asians are now woke

By Rob Henderson

In the last week of December, that paragon of public expertise, Dr Anthony Fauci, gave an interview to the New York Times in which he admitted to lying to the American public. “Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts” on the necessary threshold of vaccinations before America would achieve herd immunity, according to the Times. His reason for misleading the public? “His gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.”

Sometimes, good leaders deceive the public in moments of crisis to achieve a greater good. But that is not the case here. If you are bragging to the media about it, it was not a noble lie. Fauci’s lie appears to have served no vital purpose related to public health — as if anyone opposed to vaccination would be moved by a 10-point spread in Fauci’s estimates. I don’t envy any leader charged with directing policy in the midst of a plague, but Fauci’s problem is not that he made errors but is so utterly unaware of that fact; that insulated by political celebrity and bureaucratic sinecure, he would choose to conspicuously gloat about his deceptions in the Times. On the same day, the interview appeared, the good doctor received a birthday serenade from Joe and Jill Biden.

The political elites of both parties are ending the year on top. The Democratic leadership defeated the populist threat from Bernie Sanders and now has one of its own, Joe Biden, leading the country. The Republican leadership has its own reasons to be happy about a Biden White House. The GOP got very comfortable adopting the symbolism of Trumpism while blocking White House policies like stimulus spending and ending the war in Afghanistan. With Trump out of office, Republicans can drop the balancing act and go back to satisfying the party’s donor base with cheap labour, austerity policies, foreign military adventures and the distraction of permanent culture war.

Underwriting the growing power of this interconnected media-administrative-political elite is the new American oligarchy led by Silicon Valley. The same tech industry that led a heavy-handed approach to the pandemic, censoring non-expert opinions while amplifying institutions like the World Health Authority, while the WHO at various points opposed wearing masks, criticised travel bans as ineffective, and disputed that the virus is highly contagious — all while lavishing praise on China. The US is down 10 million jobs since the start of the year. One hundred and sixty thousand small businesses have shuttered. Children are going without school and friendship, ordinary people are languishing in isolation and despair. But with government stimulus spending facilitating an immense upward transfer of wealth, the top tier of corporate profits has soared along with the stock market.

“The tactics that helped many corporate titans thrive — laying off thousands of workers, going deep into debt, and grabbing market share from struggling competitors — will shape the recovery for months, if not years,” the Wall Street Journal reported in December. In the past year, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple have added a total of $2 trillion in market value between them.

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Why the rich are revolting

By Ed West

The spillover from that record-setting cash grab will go directly to subsidising the failing elite institutions and expert bodies that are cutting off the oxygen to American society. But the crucial question is why elite institutions that are so error prone, and so untrustworthy, don’t suffer for their repeated failings.

The answer begins with understanding the nature of their power. In a society with a useful class of elites, their legitimating authority would be bound to the national interest and derive from the benefits they produce for the larger society. Likewise, in a functioning technocratic establishment the value of expertise would be a function of how accurately it can assess complex events, explain reality and forecast outcomes. But that is not what we have. For the American ruling class, expertise is a ceremonial costume conferring power through mystifying rituals. The mantra of this cohort, “believe science,” says it all. It’s an incantation in a cheap magic act, one that has nothing to do with science.

If you still think science is above this kind of thing, too important to be compromised by ideology and self-interest, just look at the US military. The military has transformed into an institution in which the highest level of leadership is so estranged from its fundamental purpose — to win wars and secure peace at home — it responds to losing wars by absorbing the logic of defeat into its essential operations. The fact of America’s failure in Afghanistan becomes the reason to stay.

The iron law of the American elite is that as long as everyone fails together, everyone fails upwards. Regime loyalty is the herd immunity of the ruling class, a protection against the consequences of their own failures. This is why the loss in authority that manifests in the “crisis of experts”, while real, doesn’t diminish their power. But it’s also why the regime has to become more ideological and nakedly coercive — for a kingdom of experts without reliable expertise falls back on propaganda and state power.