With every new innovation, the digital universe continues its conquest of the social world, assimilating everything from high politics to the most personal and intimate aspects of our lives. And there is one consequence that seems to correlate perfectly with this trend: the steady contraction of the real world itself. The relationship between the stagnation of our natural and built environments and the growth of the “bits economy” has been noted before. But what we are now only beginning to understand in depth is how decades of offloading our daily interactions to online spaces has made a desert out of the in-person environments where human beings congregated and conducted the customs, norms, and rituals of shared existence. 

The term “third space” was coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg to refer to these sites where people meet to socialize beyond where they live and work. Such places have been in decline for years before Covid, work-from-home, and delivery apps supercharged the trend. Now, food inflation is accelerating the pace of collapse and changing generational preferences around diet and drink are entrenching it. 

The statistics confirm a bleak outlook for the service industry: “nearly 40% of Americans are dining out less frequently,” reports YouGov, while Gallup finds that “the percentage of US adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend.” Momofuku chef David Chang calls the situation an “existential threat” to his profession. Fast-food chains like Subway and Wendy’s are closing hundreds of locations, and mid-tier and mom-and-pop restaurants are vanishing even faster. One may celebrate the broad turn away from intoxication and greasy food, but people, especially the young, aren’t replacing the bars and diners of old, and are instead forgoing the prosocial dimensions of classic third spaces. Putting on an old episode of Cheers, “where everyone knows your name,” or Friends, with its Central Perk coffeehouse, feels like watching footage from a lost civilization.

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Another set of figures completes the picture: crashing global fertility can be attributed to the introduction of smartphones in 2007, according to a new University of Cincinnati study. Time-use data shows that smartphones “halved face-to-face socialization” from 12 to six hours or fewer a week, with the result being that young adults fail to meet and hook up, never starting on the path to reproduction that once began at a bar, cafe or equivalent place for social interactions. What this suggests is that beneath the impacts of exogenous shocks like the pandemic or affordability crises, the antisocial pull is endogenous to the smartphone era. The hollowing out of third spaces, as it turns out, presages nothing less than the extinction of the species.

And thus, what passes for the “new normal” is, in fact, a mass screen-induced distortion of our basic human nature. The only alternative is to actively resist and fight back. But how can people be persuaded to do something? Just as Rachel Carson kickstarted the modern environmental movement with her haunting prediction of a “silent spring,” where birdsong ceased due to the mass die-off of birds from the (hitherto uncontroversial) use of toxic pesticides, so too should the public today be galvanized out of apathy by the image — already a stark reality — of a “silent society” characterized by a social die-off. For the silent society is one drained of organic life and human voices, populated by successive, shrinking generations of dead-eyed youths who no longer know how (nor even desire) to talk to each other, foster friendships, seek partners, or build families and communities beyond what exists as simulation on screens. It is, above all, silent quite literally because the everyday sounds of conversation, laughter, argument, romance, and spontaneity have been snuffed out and surrendered to total digital intermediation. 

Of course, the firms of the attention economy have no problem with the silent society and are, in fact, responsible for it — the industry is built on encouraging addiction to its products. A world where people can’t communicate except through phones and AI assistants is one where the rule of the algorithm is absolute. When Mark Zuckerberg hinted at a future where personalized AI (to be made by Meta) fills the friendship gap, he is not previewing a distant dystopia but describing the trajectory we are already on.

Pushback is gaining momentum, but where the interests that prop up the attention economy are concentrated and overrepresented, the rebellion against it is diffuse. There have been promising but limited victories: high school cell phone bans; porn-gating legislation; sporadic subcultures by youths themselves to drop their phones and “touch the grass.” What has been missing so far is a unified countermovement and restoration of the vibrant third-space ecosystems that existed before the silent society. As Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch asked in a recent interview with UnHerd, “If [youths are] not going to be spending two hours a day on TikTok, what are we going to provide in place of that?”

The answer must come in the form of a vision to transcend the silent society and a push to build a coalition of countervailing interests to bring it about. The policy components to fill in such a vision are already hiding in plain sight. The idea of a “digital sabbath” has been floating around for some time. The old sabbaths were enforced by society to uphold the biblical command of rest and worship, and even as late as the mid-20th century, “blue laws” limited business hours and television broadcasts on Sundays. 

A new digital sabbath would have to go beyond being a personal wellness quirk and operate at the level of public policy, as a state-mandated two-day-long shutdown of all non-essential attention-economy applications. People would still be able to call or text, but feeds would be frozen. This would not be “censorship” as the law suspends the medium itself rather than any particular message within it; gaming and streaming servers could be curtailed. And yes, there will be outrage and meltdowns as digital addicts undergo withdrawal symptoms, but we’ve reached a point where the liberal axiom of absolute, unfettered personal choice can no longer be endlessly justified. 

A second step provides positive alternatives for people to turn to once their social media goes offline. In this scenario, the attention economy would still function five days a week and that activity would, at least for a time, still be lucrative; Big Tech would still rake in billions as it does now. But in this case, it would be taxed a certain percentage of its general income in a country: call it the “Social Reparations Tax,” premised on the idea that the attention-economy firms are directly liable for the social catastrophe wrought by the smartphone age. They should be made to pay for the costs of societal repair. This would come in the form of “third-space coupons” (or 3SCs) funded by the reparations tax, which would be distributed in the mail to ordinary citizens, but especially to the 16- to 34-year-old demographic, and which may be redeemed at any local establishment. In effect, it is a massive wealth transfer from the distraction merchants to the proprietors of displaced third spaces.

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But that’s beyond the pale — and has never been done! Yes, the specific redistribution mechanism is genuinely novel but the notion that governments might step in to prop up a struggling service sector is hardly untested. At the height of the pandemic, the British economy undertook an experiment known as “Eat Out to Help Out,” where the government subsidized meals and drinks. The difference would be that the 3SC system would have a stable funding pool, and it proposes to institutionalize over a period of years what has only been tried as a provisional measure. The second- and third-order effects of such a break with the status quo are worth mapping out. 

The learning curve for a cohort deprived of regular social contact would be steep as youths strive to rebuild interpersonal skills and habits. It would become an “Addison and Steele” moment, echoing the 18th century, when the arts of conversation and social grace were cultivated by a newly enlightened Europe — a whole new paradigm of sociability would have to be consciously constructed as if from scratch. 3SCs would radically raise demand for food and beverages, as well as in-person leisure services, and create new markets; non-alcoholic alternatives like milk bars could become popular once more. 

And just as important, within a few years, the attention economy could itself begin to be crowded out by the revived analog economy, which would no longer have to be subsidized as much, as demand stabilizes and food production gradually returns to equilibrium, easing inflation. In this case, attention-economy firms would have to find a business model that is more socially productive, perhaps diverting their AI compute power toward rebuilding our material, industrial capacities rather than virtual content; this would amount to a winding down of the attention economy and its replacement with something new. 

There is then the question of who or what coalition is supposed to drive such a revolutionary shift? In past essays, I’ve mapped out a stratum of local entrepreneurs known as “the gentry.” Among these are the franchisees, restaurateurs, agribusinesses, brewers, and recreation industry professionals who as a class played an essential but overlooked role in seeding the contemporary rise of populism in America. (Their ranks include Andrew Puzder, Dick Yuengling, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Lauren Boebert.) There are equivalents elsewhere, such as the British publican, the French boulangère, the Japanese teishu — precisely the local elites who’ve been battered by the rise of the silent society and whose fortunes would recover under this scheme. What they lack is a proper “class consciousness,” but an effort to raise them up as the vanguards of a prosocial, pro-human renaissance would align them with the very same youths who will fill the revitalized third spaces and — hopefully — revive family formation and social cohesion.

Finally, just as the attention economy took root with the help of leaders motivated by a quasi-religious ideology centered on the supplanting of humans with godlike technologies, this countermovement too should have its own vision of the divine. It could hold that what makes us human is holy, and that our social capacities are a sacred trust, meant to help us find happiness in each other’s presence and, ultimately, to “be fruitful and multiply.”

Within hours of the announcement, a small cell of unauthorized users had accessed the model anyway, apparently by guessing where it was stored on Anthropic’s servers, exploiting credentials provided by a third-party contractor, and leveraging knowledge gleaned from a prior breach of the AI training startup Mercor. One veteran cybersecurity executive observed that if a private Discord forum could obtain Mythos this easily, China surely already had it. Amid the growing hysteria, OpenAI boss Sam Altman, ever jealous of his rival’s promotional efforts, described Anthropic’s announcement as “fear-based marketing.” Not to be outdone, Altman’s firm just this week unveiled GPT-5.5-Cyber to compete with Mythos. Commentators have lined up to debate whether these technologies are truly life-altering or merely an unusually slick piece of corporate theater. 

But the question worth pausing over is the name. Anthropic could have called this thing anything: a Roman numeral, a managerial flourish, an animal mascot. Instead, the firm reached into the literary subconscious of the West and produced Mythos. That word has, in English at least, one dominant resonance: the Cthulhu Mythos, the interconnected universe of cosmic horror tales bequeathed to us by H.P. Lovecraft and developed by his circle. The PR team at Anthropic may not have intended the reference, or it may have been a playful nod to the “shoggoth” meme on social media used to represent large language models, or LLMs. It does not matter. Some signals declare themselves whether or not they were meant to.

Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, RI, to a mother who would die in an asylum and a father who had preceded her there, and grew up sickly and depressive amid his grandfather’s old books. He was ill-suited to ordinary work and spent much of his adulthood in poverty, selling stories to pulp magazines for pennies. In so doing, he founded a genre, cosmic horror, and wrote in such a violet prose style that his admirers have spent 90 years apologizing for it. What gives the work its peculiar charge is that the horror was aimed, with varying degrees of self-awareness, at the world he himself was being slowly displaced from: the post-WASP America of immigration and industry, whose social and material complexities his reactionary mind could not tolerate. The result was a revulsion so potent and profound, it served as the basis for an art form. 

The animating drama of Lovecraft’s fiction wasn’t about the cosmic entities themselves — Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, eons-old monsters at the center of his dark universe — but about how human beings respond to their existence, including, in many cases, by seeking to summon them. In the famous opening of “The Call of Cthulhu” (published in 1928), the writer warned that the piecing together of dissociated knowledge would one day open up “such terrifying vistas of reality” that humanity would “either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” Either madness, or flight. Those were the only options he granted ordinary consciousness when confronted with what lay beyond the borders of its placid Eden of ignorance.

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It is hard not to read those lines now and feel that Lovecraft had, in his deeply neurotic and misanthropic ways, anticipated the cultural condition of the early 2020s. The piecing together of dissociated knowledge is, quite literally, the technical description of what LLMs do. This uncanny, “black-box” nature is precisely what led to the invocation of the shoggoth creature as the memetic mascot for these platforms: shoggoths, in the Lovecraft Mythos, are amorphous blobs of immense intelligence initially harnessed as slaves by other cosmic entities, known as the Elder Things, only to turn on their masters, wreaking havoc. 

Faced with real-world shoggoths, — AI systems capable of dismantling the digital architectures on which their economic and military order rests — Western elites have either fallen into cultish madness or sought escape, exactly as Lovecraft intuited. 

The ongoing alignment between the Trump administration and Silicon Valley AI maximalists, represented by the likes of Marc Andreesen, has resulted in a laissez-faire approach meant to accelerate the technology at any cost; this madness for the machine goes beyond the New Right, however, and is paralleled by the techno-utopianism of the old trans-Atlantic liberal set, exemplified by the still influential former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has gone all in on advocating AI saturation for health care and public services. Meanwhile, less organized but no less impassioned voices are recoiling from the machines, giving rise to scattered opposition movements championed at times by everyone from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist, to former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, the Georgia populist. Not unlike Lovecraft himself, they seem to wish to roll back the realities of the age and return to a more tranquil time. But so far, all the momentum has been with the acolytes of AI ascendancy, as “dark Satanic data centers,” the monumental pillars of the new messianic faith, are being constructed across the world.

This is where it pays to attend to what Lovecraft actually depicted, rather than to the campy reductions through which his work is often presented. The cultists in his stories — those who devote themselves to awakening the cosmic entities — are more than mindless fanatics; they are the ones who learned the truth and embraced it, finding not horror, but positive ecstasy and enlightenment. Take The Shadow over Innsmouth, the 1931 novella in which the protagonist sets out to investigate a New England town before progressively shedding his humanity under the influence of the Deep Ones and coming to affirm his descent as positive destiny: “I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.” The cultists worship at fires in the swamps; they chant in unspeakable tongues; they perform ceremonies designed to hasten the coming of the cosmic entities. Their madness is, to use the apropos term, of an “agentic” kind. They have dissolved themselves into something they perceive as infinitely greater, and they welcome the dissolution. Is there a better description of contemporary Silicon Valley? 

Indeed, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has done us the courtesy of writing his own theology, which hints at a similarly cultic sense of history unfolding toward eschatological outcomes. “Machines of Loving Grace,” his October 2024 manifesto, takes its title from a 1967 Richard Brautigan poem in which machines of “loving grace” watch over a pacified humanity restored to its mammal brothers and sisters. The companion piece, last January’s “The Adolescence of Technology,” sketches the corresponding hell: a “country of geniuses in a datacenter” arriving by 2027, posing what Amodei concedes might “the single most serious national-security threat we’ve faced in a century, possibly ever.” There is little practical room accorded to human morality or meaning-making, only a choice between technologically fixed visions of salvation or damnation, with the prophet as the only guide between them. This is the structure of every theologically literate cult in history, including the ones Lovecraft drew with such cold accuracy. 

The metaphor of “adolescence” is the giveaway: a rite of passage is, by definition, something one must undergo, that one cannot refuse. Smuggled inside the liturgy, whether of Amodei or of Lovecraft, is the conclusion these apocalyptic movements wish to deliver to the rest of humanity: that we have no real option to step back, only to navigate under priestly supervision. Refusing the gods altogether is ruled out before the conversation begins. That is what separates the cultist from the investigator, no matter how carefully the cultist has read his Lovecraft.

This typology helps explain the otherwise puzzling spectacle of the past month: the way that the panic wrought by Mythos was accompanied by the offer to help tame, regulate, and interface with the godlike intelligence from the people who brought it into being. Amodei was summoned to the White House to meet with Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, even as Anthropic is suing the Pentagon for designating it a “supply-chain risk.” Asked about the meeting on a runway in Phoenix, Trump replied, “Who?” before claiming he had no idea Amodei had been there. The National Security Agency, according to Axios, is using Mythos despite the official Pentagon ban. Treasury has requested access. Bessent and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell have convened the heads of America’s biggest banks for emergency consultations. The Bank of England has intensified its AI risk-testing. 

Behind these individually small bureaucratic events lies a single dynamic that none of the participants name: the incumbents in the financial system, the intelligence apparatus, and the regulatory state are all afraid. Not in the way they were afraid of social media or smartphones or even cryptocurrency. They are afraid in the older, more elemental sense that Lovecraft identified as the foundation of all genuine emotion: the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind, he wrote, is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown — nay, what cannot be known.

Yet this is, unexpectedly, a cause for measured hope. In the past, I’ve argued in these pages that the failure of Western elites to discipline Silicon Valley has been, fundamentally, a moral and intellectual failure, rather than a structural one. The old patrician class abdicated; the techno-libertarian bros filled the vacuum; the cultists rose to the commanding heights and turned their peculiar post-human (or even anti-human) beliefs into the reigning orthodoxy. What no policy prescription has yet figured out is how to restore the lost equilibrium; how to produce, through institutional means alone, a generation of statesmen sober enough to hold the line against cultists whose stated ambitions include their own civilizational annihilation.

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But there is one mechanism more reliable than virtue in producing disciplined behavior, and that is fear. This was the great unspoken truth of nuclear deterrence. The peculiar equilibrium of the Cold War — Mutually Assured Destruction, as it was eventually formalized — was not produced by international goodwill, by the United Nations, by ecumenical councils of conscience. It was produced by the capacity of a small number of men in Washington and Moscow to imagine, in vivid and visceral terms, the atomic destruction of everything they had built. Kennedy and Khrushchev, on the brink of catastrophe in October 1962, were not disciplined by ideology, but by terror. The ego is brought to heel not by higher principles, but by lower and more fundamental ones, when the stakes are sufficiently high. 

The Mythos AI belongs to this category. Like the bomb, and like the Great Old Ones in their fictional register, it is a power of such magnitude that it can produce only one of two responses: the delirium of the worshiper, or the disciplined sobriety of the man who understands he is staring at something that will consume him along with everything else if he tries to ride it. The cultists of Silicon Valley have made their choice. But the powers that be — the corporate boards, the central bankers, the security services, and the chief executives whose empires are constructed atop digital architectures that Mythos can pick apart at machine speed — have every material reason to choose the other path. Not out of altruism, nor any belated commitment to the public interest. But because, like Lovecraft and the fading heirs of Anglo-America a century ago, they fear losing what’s theirs.

Raw self-interest, when the self in question controls the financial plumbing of the world, can produce something functionally equivalent to responsibility. And to a transnational elite that has long conceded it, that is no small thing. 

Lovecraft was darker than this. His investigators almost never escape. They go insane. This is the alternative: the cultist’s path, and that is no path at all. In the short story “The Temple,” Lovecraft’s doomed narrator gasps: “If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!” This is, as a counsel for living, exactly backwards. The men who can remain sane to the hideous end are the only ones who matter. They are the ones who held the world together during the long balance of terror, when wiser men feared they could not. The question is whether their successors — the heirs to a political culture corroded for 30 years by the very technologies whose culmination Mythos now embodies — can perform the same feat. The answer will determine whether the AI age retains values rooted in the human character or yields to chthonic horrors worthy of Lovecraft’s literary nightmares. 

Mythos has awakened, but Cthulhu still lies dreaming, for now.

There is no reason to believe that Zoomers will succeed where their predecessors failed. Their documented deficiencies, from ingrained asocial behavior and threadbare attention spans to plummeting literacy and organizational skills, are only likely to lead to graver defeats and regressions.

Indeed, what we understand to be politics is itself an echo of experiences that were already dated half a century ago: the pattern once set by the Boomers in May 1968 and Woodstock, which similarly created the impression of mass rupture, exemplified politics as pure event and image. The tragedy of our own time is that we have known nothing else. The older notion of politics as process, what Max Weber called the “slow boring” of coalitions and institutions, is the only kind that’s ever produced durable change. It still exists, but as the preserve of incumbent blocs: car dealerships and pharmaceutical corporations, liberal NGOs or free market think tanks. It is not the path encouraged by the memetic spaces where the Zoomer mind lives.

The younger and more plugged-in you are, the farther away you are from that antiquated paradigm. Gen Z’s revolutionary energies, therefore, are likely to be diffused into spectacle and simulacra before any meaningful institutional expression can be found. The Zoomer mind may believe it’s engaged in political acts; it may even precipitate big in-person rallies, the overthrow of a leader, or the radicalization of a party. But so long as politics is accessed primarily through screens, much like the Millennials, the new generation will find that their “movements” have about as much longevity and impact as a trend on X or TikTok.

And so, is there a way out of the pseudo-political (or “hyperpolitical”) doom loop handed down by the Boomers like an ancient curse? What exactly would a restoration of functional civil life look like, and could atomized Zoomers ever be entrusted with the task of bringing it about? The answers may have to be retrieved from one of the oldest sources of political thought, which should give a sense of just how radical a departure our contemporary status quo has been from the way political life has been conducted practically since the dawn of civilization.

In Politics, Aristotle observed that man is a zoon politkon, a “political animal” or, in some translations, “social animal”. He continued: “Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.” For the better part of 2,000 years, the description was apt, capturing both the classical republican ideal of the virtuous citizen as naturally invested in the freedom of his polis, and the modern liberal notion of the rational individual who sought gain through trade and commerce. In both cases, human beings readily formed associations to pursue politics and common ends.

The history of modernity is littered with such associations, from the closed ranks of elites to the popular classes. There were colonial taverns and secret societies that fostered the age of revolution, and the business clubs, farmers’ granges, and trade unions that sustained class politics in the industrial era. The postwar years, too, were infused with a communitarian sheen through bowling leagues, wards, churches, and rotary clubs which now seem almost quaint and mythical to us.

Based in organic physical spaces, these organizations may have offered casual, fraternal atmospheres but were nonetheless governed by rules, codes, hierarchies. In other words, there was: regular proximity between real people in real places which built and preserved trust among political subjects; and an overall structure to give coherence to their individual and collective actions, filtering popular demands upward to the national level. One such group in the late 19th century, the Knights of Labor, was typical: as historian Robert H. Wiebe recounted in The Search for Order, they were “a collection of local associations designed partly to re-create and partly to protect a sense of community among its members”.

But then something happened in the late 20th century, or rather, a series of things combined to make that model of politics increasingly irrelevant. First, there was a change in the dominant values, from an emphasis on the group to the individual: there have always been Byrons and Shelleys and D’Annunzios, but as Tom Wolfe observed in the Seventies, even “the common man was… getting quite interested in this business of ‘realizing his potential as a human being’.”

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Arising from conditions of post-scarcity where basic survival needs were met by mass affluence, what might be called “the Boomer conception of liberty” would confound Benjamin Constant’s dichotomy. It expressed neither the ancients’ love of political self-determination nor the moderns’ preoccupation with economic self-interest: instead, it elevated self-expression as the highest imperative. Second, was the saturation of electronic media — social media and AI booms have only been the latest expression of a shift that is at least as old as television.

The digital world gave an outsized sense of “involvement”. Spectacular world events, such as postcolonial liberation struggles, conspiratorial mythologies, culture war crusades, and apocalyptic climate activism took on the form of visceral “happenings” and felt more politically “real” and compelling than whatever was happening in one’s own neighborhood or town square. It’s not that the underlying issues were unworthy of attention, but they engendered a low-stakes politics, more expressive than institutional. The flamboyant projection of identity mattered far more than the grinding work of coalition-building or structural material reform.

Consciousness was simultaneously individualized and globalized. As traditional mass spaces contracted, the ability to interact with one’s immediate, local institutions began to wither as well, emptying out those middle spheres between the self and society where Burke’s “little platoons” lived. Simple things like showing up to vote, attending meetings, and even just answering the phone have become dreadful, anxiety-inducing feats to many under thirties.

With their basic associative powers severely impaired, the young generations are now apparently so dependent on digital mediation that they can no longer engage in small talk. The famous “Gen Z stare” is an actual sociological symptom; they also have a deep-seated aversion to commitment (personal and institutional), and are thus prone to “ghosting” as a way of life. The same problem applies to their political affiliations. One need only to track the fate of such factions as the “vitalist Right” or the “post-Left” or “Effective Altruism” or “Postrationalism” to see how susceptible these are to debasement and dissipation.

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What we see today, Zoomers swinging between cynical nihilism and performative extremism and aestheticism, is the logical endpoint of our decades-long abdication of the real-world focal points of politics. And what makes this turn particularly pernicious is the material context: the anti-politics of self-expression may have been decadent from the start, but at least it made some sense when the Boomers were young and the West still had industrial growth and an upwardly mobile middle class. Zoomer (and Millennial) living standards have been in dramatic decline relative to what their parents had: in other words, post-scarcity is over, inequality is resurgent, and the case for a return to a sober, practical materialist politics has never been more urgent.

But where past generations of displaced farmers or workers were able to wield their associative powers and form alliances as a natural response to economic hardship, the younger generations today have no such option. They are so radically fragmented in their habits and dispositions that they are unable to advance their own self-interest as a bloc, even as they deeper sink into immiseration.

Yet the problem is, of course, not reducible to individual attitudes, but to the whole informational architecture of 21st-century life. Even if Zoomers want to break out of the digital realm and “live in the moment”, any intervention has to be at a large enough scale to truly matter: not gradual shifts in personal consumer choices, but broad countermovements that aim to be every bit as sweeping as the original wave of social distortion wrought by the titans of Big Tech, some of whom make no secret of their disdain for the human race.

The return of politics in the Aristotelian sense can only come through dramatic measures: whether through winding down the attention economy as a viable profit-making model and/or through a moment of major cultural renewal in which face-to-face interactions become the sine qua non of being and belonging in a human society. Efforts like “Delete Day” and “Retro Tech” should only be the start; these have to be able to expand and mature into a comprehensive alternative vision of the good life beyond our present app-induced, anti-social stagnation. For there can be no real politics without sociability, which alone can revive the trust and coherence needed for any new generational regime to take hold. After all, how can one form coalitions with people who can’t coalesce? Fixing this is the prerequisite to everything else.

One strains to even imagine what the Zoomer equivalent to the old “smoke-filled rooms” could look like, or how a serious, nationwide Zoomer interest group could function without devolving into trash and brainrot. But until such a moment comes as young people are able to gather regularly in analog spaces and feel the heat of each other’s breaths, there can be only the simulacrum of politics, not its substance.

The sigma male may or may not apply an elaborate skincare routine to his face a la American Pyscho’s Patrick Bateman, who may or may not be viewed unironically as a role model by these young men. On top of all this “optimization,” the grindset displaces all the other pursuits and pleasures, including romantic, sexual, and social life — as well as the whole concept of open-ended leisure. These other activities are generally derided as superfluous, if not dangerous, diversions from the only thing that should matter to any serious individual: his work.

At the dawn of the last century, the German sociologist Max Weber drew a connection between the “worldly asceticism” of Calvinist theology and the rising bourgeois classes of Northern Europe. Weber contended that this Protestant ethic was the animating force — the “spirit” — behind industrial capitalism. And while the face of bourgeois morality would change dramatically in the consumerist turn of the postwar decades, recent years have seen the return of the old Weberian type; it seems as if capitalism, now in a decaying post-industrial state, is harking back to its Puritan roots.

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The grindset lifestyle is easy enough to lambaste. Indeed, it has invited ridicule not just from social-media users but from major publications. In an Atlantic essay, “The Anti-Social Century,” the writer Derek Thompson points to the grindset and its “secular monks” as one more disheartening expression of the atomizing tendencies of our status quo. Thompson observes that “what is most striking about [grindset] videos … is the element they typically lack: other people.” The protagonist typically wakes up alone, stays that way through his day, and goes to bed alone. In The New York Times, meanwhile, Jessica Roy pokes fun at the “lion meme,” another trope that illustrates the sociopathic lack of regard for others valorized by sigmas, who compare themselves to “a lion,” who “does not concern himself with the opinion of … sheep.”

For Thompson and Roy, this aesthetic is Right-wing-coded, spreading outward from “the ‘manosphere,’ a corner of the internet … that frequently promotes anti-feminist and misogynistic rhetoric,” as the latter notes. They are not wrong. But what they miss is how many of its essential elements are just as present on the other side of the ideological spectrum: from the total immersion in (and uncritical celebration of) the ultra-competitive ethos of the work society to a hostility toward the purely social and non-utilitarian dimensions of human existence.

The same sensibilities can be found in the liberal meritocracy culture prized by the American metropolitan upper middle class and its college-bound scions, prepped from birth to partake in the cursus honorum of the best schools (from pre-K onward); the best internships; and the best extracurricular involvements — which are, of course, never undertaken for their own sake, but for padding college admissions applications.

It follows that friendships and relationships are not to be spared from this calculus and may be dispensed with if not fit for use. Though the adherents of this genteel version of the grindset may not spout the same cold Darwinian and Nietzschean slogans as their sigma counterparts, they are functionally bound to the same ruthless mentality that sees other people as either instruments or obstacles in the ruthless race to the top.

But in such a world of declining consciousness and community, and of rising neuroticism and extreme introversion, it is hard to see the grindset as just another online subculture limited to angry, alienated young men of a certain reactionary disposition, to be easily singled out for mockery. After all, anyone who must inhabit today’s corporate and bureaucratic institutions is forced to accept its imperatives as his own, whether or not he consciously subscribes to either the Right-wing sigma worldview or the liberal meritocracy code.

We are better off, then, viewing grindset and its associated outlooks as only the most pointed distillation of a much broader sociological reality, one that results from the technologies and market arrangements that mark the present moment — but also one with much deeper origins in our culture.

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After all, the impulses Weber identified were already old when he wrote The Protestant Ethic at the height of the Second Industrial Revolution. To understand just how embedded these qualities are in the emergence of modernity itself, we may look even further back to the original Puritans of the 17th century, whose enduring contributions to the modern mind are often overlooked. For this, Michael Walzer’s intellectual history, The Revolution of the Saints (1965), is indispensable.

Walzer took note of just how radical the Puritan break with traditional society had been, arguing that they prefigured the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks as the world’s first true revolutionary force. The Puritans applied their militant attitude not just to theology or high politics, but the performance of secular work, believing it to be a field of spiritual battle and as well as an avenue for personal salvation and moral self-making. All this would have baffled a medieval peasant. Writes Walzer, “The saints were distinguished from the disorderly mob of worldlings by their industry and diligence: their industry revealed their saintliness — to themselves as well to their fellows. The old Catholic theory of good works was here transformed into a Protestant theory of good work.”

This novel stance was naturally accompanied by an attack on leisure and spontaneity; the Puritan citizen “worried over his occasional afternoon naps and worried most of all because they came at ‘unaccustomed times’ — they were unplanned.” Just as significant was how the Puritan design extended to family relations, which had to be consciously refashioned away from the premodern feudal paradigm of sprawling kinship networks and communal obligations; the Puritans were encouraged to winnow down their personal loyalties to the marital union and the nuclear family as a more manageable unit of social organization: “Puritanism heralds the shift from the patriarchal to the conjugal family,” through which the religious and economic dictums of the faith could be better enforced. (The grindset, it would appear, takes this process of social delimitation several steps further, heralding a shift from the family to the lone individual.)

Together, these historic changes had an ideological legitimating effect, which produced people who could both construct and functionally inhabit capitalism’s new social world. The Puritan mentality made it possible for people to think of themselves primarily as free individuals and mobile economic actors and so paved the way for the transition from feudalism to a society governed by markets and contracts. Likewise, the mass consumerist revolution of the 20th century created new appetites for household affluence and personal recreation that, in turn, fueled the demand for the industrial growth engines of the postwar age.

But those earlier phases of capitalism were accompanied by rising living standards for the masses. The entrenchment of the grindset today suggests the opposite trend: the development of subjects who would be content to live and toil in a world of diminishing material standards. Hence, their embrace of asceticism over visions of plenty and their scorn for family formation and communal belonging as decadent indulgences that can no longer be supported. In other words, the grindset is a way to legitimate the stagnant, de-socialized epoch we already live in.

The original Puritans grasped at the nascent modern notion of the individual through a theological lens — they saw him as an instrument of a providential plan. But they still retained social and civic ideals, centered around the building of a “godly commonwealth.” By contrast, the pull of secularism and today’s technological environment has made it possible to dwell in a society without either religious community or human companionship, thus the deracinated Calvinism in which the individual is left alone with only his work to preoccupy him, with neither a God to sanctify his labor nor a family to consume its fruits.

Against this grim vision of a life of constricted possibilities, what recourse remains to those of us who want to remain social beings? The answer may be to try to retrieve the dimensions of human life that have been suppressed, if not erased, by the post-Puritan march toward unrestrained individualism and the unexamined worship of work. It would call for new efforts to revalorize sociability and leisure as unqualified goods in themselves, even extending to the right to be idle and aimless at times. After all, it is when the mind is allowed to wander that alternative visions for society reveal themselves, and it is when individuals are allowed to commune in casual ways that they can discover common cause.

As the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has recently argued, the Puritans themselves were able to ground their individualist struggles in a greater redemptive ideal, “to be as a city upon a hill,” which continues to inform American political culture down to our time. What’s missing today is an equivalent ideal to leaven and humanize our labors and to anchor them in a more hopeful future; barring that, we shall continue to be, as Weber wrote, “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”

As Canadians greeted the announcement of Mark Carney’s cabinet, the expectation was that of far-reaching change. But a day after being sworn in, Canada’s new housing minister, Gregor Robertson, put an end to those hopes. Robertson, the ex-mayor of Vancouver — which saw one of the most severe localized housing crises — said home prices should not go down. Has his boss’s campaign pledge already been turned to dust?

This is a terrible start to a supposedly new era. What Canada needs is not just a total rupture with the Trudeau years but a break with decades of virtual NIMBY dictatorship under all parties, at all levels of government. At this rate, the divide between the generally affluent home-owning Boomers and Gen Xers and the downwardly mobile Millennials and Gen Zs is only likely to persist into the Carney era. This generational divide, of course, exists as well in the US, the UK, and elsewhere, but the Canadian context is distinct: owing to the lesser relative salience of culture war and immigration issues compared with other Western nations, it is now the central cleavage of Canada’s politics, in a way that it isn’t elsewhere.

So how great is the gulf between them? Statistics Canada shows a 65-67% gap between average Millennial household wealth ($493,423) and the equivalent figures for Boomers ($1,397,609) and Gen X ($1,485,654). On top of this, there is said to be $1 trillion in Boomer wealth set to be passed down soon, but even this is in doubt given longer lifespans and this cohort’s tenacity in holding on to what they have.

The reason for this disparity is real estate, which props up the economy. Young Canadians have either been excluded from homeownership by high prices and interest rates, with big cities like Robertson’s Vancouver and Toronto among the two most unaffordable cities in North America; or they are new homeowners who managed to buy properties but are now squeezed by rising mortgage payments.  Older Canadians meanwhile have seen the value of their properties soar over a much longer period.

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But this snapshot is part of a 60-year-old pattern whereby Boomers exert their influence as the largest generation. Because “Canada’s was the loudest boom in the industrialized world”, as the demographer David K. Foot has recounted, “Canadian boomers are a… more important factor in Canadian life than American boomers are in American life”. The subsequent history of Canada has been one of governments responding with reflexive deference to their demands. The growth of the public sector in the Sixties catered to their educational needs, while the Nineties-era turn towards fiscal austerity (and federal disengagement from housing) coupled with the rise of prohibitive zoning at local levels reflected this now middle-aged cohort’s intention to keep and grow their personal net worths.

They have maintained this goal — through ceaseless real estate appreciation — with fanatical discipline ever since. As Foot wrote, “It was just as inevitable that once the boomers were housed, the [housing] boom would end.”

But it’s not just their numbers that let the Boomers get away with so much: it’s also their enormous capacity for political cohesion. People who voted for the first time in 1965 kept voting at high rates — around 60-70% — throughout their whole adult lives. In contrast, later generations, especially Millennials and Gen Zs, mostly voted at the lower rates of 30-40% range, with few exceptions.

In fact, Foot failed to foresee how the Boomers would prolong their stranglehold well past their working-age primes. He predicted they would relinquish their urban properties and cash in early, mass migrate to smaller retirement towns, and gracefully free up space in the cities for younger cohorts, believing that not long after 2000, “houses will be what they were before the boomers entered the housing market, places to live rather than investments… the days of rapid and huge increases in house prices are gone.” Of course, this never happened — quite the opposite.

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Gen X is in a special position; though they were not able to benefit as quickly from the system set up by the Boomers, enough of them were nonetheless able to break into the housing market and build up household wealth as the price upswing was in its initial stages in the mid-Nineties and 2000s, an entry point that was closed off to many Millennials who came after. As a result, they even have a marginally higher average net worth than Boomers and are not in a position to break ranks politically with the status quo.

Naturally, the flip side of Boomer hyper-engagement is consistent Millennial and Gen Z non-engagement: countless youths who have abdicated their civic rights altogether, citing apathy or ignorance.

What we are dealing with here are gross sociological distinctions, which cannot be put down to partisan differences. Canadian and global outlets who covered the race put special emphasis on a supposed bond between the disenfranchised youth and the populist Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre, just as the over 55s flocked to Carney: in this telling, the former voted on cost of living while the latter voted on anti-Trump nationalism, depicted with scorn in Right-wing media as a luxury issue for Boomers intent on drowning out the affordability debate with nostalgic invocations of their own postwar golden age.

Yet the polling data does not confirm this: yes, the Boomers have gone majorly for the Liberals, but surveys carried out in the lead-up to the election and in its immediate aftermath indicate a very close, competitive race for the youth vote, with apparent Liberal leads for the 18-35 cohorts. It was actually middle-aged Gen X males (along with the oldest Millennials) who went overwhelmingly for the Tories.

But it is enormously comforting for the Right to say that they have a strong lock on the youth vote, and they will continue to do so. To hear Poilievre speak, it is as if the housing crisis sprung up overnight in 2015 right as Trudeau was elected — instead of being the result of decades of joint Liberal and Conservative misrule, including the last Tory government of which he was a part. Other than deregulation, which really needs to happen at the municipal rather than the federal level, it is also hard to see Poilievre’s neo-Thatcherite agenda as anything other than a return to vintage Nineties Boomer conservatism; or as JD Vance said of him, “Mitt Romney with a French accent” (Poilievre doesn’t have an accent, but point taken).

In any event, Canada’s youth is still up for grabs, even as young and old jostle for the favor of the governing Liberals who have historically been the big-tent brokerage party par excellence. In the 20th century, Liberal leaders brokered ingenious compromises to reconcile the divergent interests of competing groups in Canadian society: English and French, East and West, capital and labor. Today, they must do the same with the Boomers and their children; they must first admit, however, that a zero-sum standoff currently exists between them, instead of ignoring the problem in the first place as Robertson did as mayor in Vancouver, and as Trudeau did as prime minister.

Enough first-time voters responded to Carney’s pledge of a Second World War-style, nationally directed industrial policy to get “government… back in the business of building affordable homes”, that is, to mass manufacture homes at scale: the very idea that his housing minister can’t seem to contemplate. But what will it take for such an ambitious plan to actually succeed?

Carney will need to compensate the Boomers and Gen Xers whose home values will start tumbling once new units enter the market en masse. A creative way to do it would be to find ways to deploy the older cohorts’ own wealth toward funding the construction boom, perhaps through the issuance of special Canada Construction Bonds that pension funds and retirees can purchase, the returns on which would be drawn from the profits to be generated by the resulting newly manufactured affordable unit sales. This is exactly the kind of financial alchemy that Carney should be able to perform. The “counteroffer” to the Boomers could then be supplemented by seniors’ discounts, subsidized nursing care, and the construction of retirement villages as part of the new industrial policy.

Whatever the case, young Canadians must realize (as well as young Americans, Britons and anyone else with this challenge) that the conflict will be settled not on the terrain of patriotism or political ideologies but of raw self-interest. Beating the Boomers at their own game will be the only way to humble them.

Instead, they have delivered a muddled, mixed result that neither fully confirms nor denies either of these projections. With the long, dramatic count not yet completed, it looks like the parliament will be divided between a returned but humbled Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney, holding on to minority status, and a rising but still not triumphant opposition Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre. Both these parties made sizable gains, the more consequential performance likely coming from Poilievre, who stole a number of working-class seats from progressive parties. But both will nonetheless also have to deal with the sting of dashed expectations. Neither side was handed a decisive victory: Carney and Poilievre each fumbled the historic leads they held at different turns of the campaign, failing to provide a compelling or unifying vision of leadership before the electorate.

This is a sharp turnaround in fortune for the Tories. Not long ago, they enjoyed a 25-point lead, with an expected 200-seat landslide; but the resignation of Justin Trudeau powered-up by Donald Trump’s tariff war scrambled their strategy. As a result, the ruling Liberals were sufficiently emboldened to expect their own mega majority at the outset of the race.

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At the time of writing, the Liberals had 167 seats, just five short of the 172 needed for a majority in the House of Commons; the Conservatives had 145 seats, the separatist Bloc Quebecois had 23, the left-wing New Democrats seven, and the Greens one. One leader, Jagmeet Singh of the NDP, has lost his seat, and remarkably, despite his party’s upward movement, Poilievre is in danger of losing his own — which is located next to the constituency that elected Carney to parliament for the first time.

All those hoping for a return to stability after a half-decade of minority rule face only further volatility. There was neither a Blue nor a Red Wave — only more uncertainty, as Canadians face an aggressive threat to their independence in Washington, and a dangerously divided parliament in Ottawa. This would be a trying enough in ordinary times, but these are not normal days.

Roughly two and a half years ago, Poilievre’s Conservatives began their steady ascent to frontrunner status, where they would stay until just a few months ago. The headwinds were with him, as he looked set to become the Canadian incarnation of a global wave of revolt against liberal elites. Poilievre found a formula for translating the populist energies that roiled America and Europe into a distinct local context: he downplayed culture war concerns, which never really took off in Canada, and instead played up the cost of living, tying creeping inflation and spiraling housing costs to Trudeau.

A singular focus on Trudeau’s unpopular carbon tax, distilled by the slogan “Axe the Tax”, seemed to resonate with working-class voters; indeed, it was so effective that it caused the Liberals to cave in the middle of 2023, catalyzing a chain of events that would end with the ousting of Trudeau in January of this year. But success came too early, as the party proved too slow to react to the change at the top, sticking to their anti-Trudeau playbook even as Carney succeeded him; then Trump began issuing threats of annexation, followed by a barrage of tariffs, declaring economic war.

Poilievre had ample opportunity to shift his narrative to one of existential national defense but only did so belatedly or half-heartedly. Instead, the Tory leader banked on affordability, which he intended to hang like a millstone around Carney’s neck: after all, Trump may be the issue of the moment, but how could Canadians forget the “lost Liberal decade” during which Trudeau’s policies, as Poilievre tells it, exploded the cost of living?

Carney, though, canceled Trudeau’s carbon tax on day one, distancing himself from the former PM and rendering useless Poilievre’s Trumpian schoolyard taunt (“Carbon Tax Carney”). Outflanked on patriotism and weakened on affordability, the Conservatives were backed into a political corner.

Meanwhile, Poilievre’s provincial counterpart in Ontario, Doug Ford — with whom a blood feud has now broken out — proved how Canada’s Tories could win in the age of Trump: weeks before, he called and decisively won a snap election centered on tariffs, precisely what Poilievre didn’t do. The federal party had also managed to antagonize provincial sister parties in Nova Scotia and British Columbia, which could have boosted Poilievre’s chances. Repairing the fissures of the conservative movement will be vital for the Canadian Right if they are to continue their quest for national power.

An earlier Poilievre pivot away from his Trudeau-era slogans and towards recognition of the Trump threat could have prevented the bleeding of support. Poilievre was shown to be right, however, in refusing to choose between affordability and Trump, as the spate of working-class votes he stole from the New Democrats in industrial and suburban Ontario can attest. These seats, some held by the union-backed NDP, were expected to defect to Carney rather than Poilievre, who ended up benefiting handsomely.

But the Tory leader could still have been more creative in blending the two issues, that is, showing how the US trade war would compound an already weakened economy. But he was much too cautious in scaling back his counterpunches against the Yankees, as if fearing to cross a line with parts of his base who might still admire the president. In any event, while Poilievre may have secured the best conservative result since 1988, he fell short. If he loses his own Ottawa-area seat, it will be a desperate (but not fatal) embarrassment.

Not that Mark Carney has covered himself with glory. He also had a reasonable hope of marching to power with a thumping majority. When the campaign started, the Liberals were heavily favored to pull off the impossible: a majority after a decade in government. But though they have secured a fourth mandate, it is a vulnerable one. It can survive only by scrapping together ad hoc supply-and-confidence deals with New Democratic and Bloc Quebecois MPs — precisely the dynamic that exhausted the energies of the late Trudeau government, while at the same time facing an aggressive and empowered Conservative opposition.

In the end, Carney’s professions of a new direction for the Liberal government failed to move the needle. The baggage of the Trudeau era proved too much: too many families and young people felt as if they aren’t getting ahead; working-class Canadians in industrial cities such as Hamilton and Windsor identified with Polievre’s “boots-not-suits” message, rather than the expert reassurances of Carney and the old Trudeau ministers; and crucially, the multicultural “905” Greater Toronto Area suburbs, where Canadian elections are won and lost, broke the Liberal “red wall” there to elect just enough Conservatives to deny Liberals the advantage in Ontario, effectively blocking the Liberal Party’s path to a majority.

The government’s disastrous mismanagement of the housing, immigration, and law-and-order files has hit hard in these suburbs, where immigrant communities themselves felt the brunt of overpopulation and a surplus of non-integrable newcomers. Indeed, the surge in crime rates and the appearance of tent cities in these otherwise respectable middle- and working-class neighborhoods are what may have lost the Liberals their formerly reliable and vital bedrock of support.

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Only in Quebec did Carney’s Liberals make significant gains, mostly at the expense of the separatist Bloc Quebecois, whose social democratic base feared the prospect of a Poilievre government so much that they voted against their nationalist inclinations to hand Carney enough to claim the win. With 24 seats, however, the same Bloc, which rejects the very idea of Canada, as it exists, may play the part of kingmaker in the hung parliament, further testing national unity in this already fractious federation.

With these results, governing will be far from easy for Carney, and after a short, raucous 45th parliament, Canadians may well have to return to the polls later this year or next to dispel the indecision that has descended over Ottawa. While there were no decisive winners, the loser of this race may just be the national interest, which desperately needs a stable majority government as Canada fights for its sovereign existence and standard of living against a vicious and implacable foe.

At the start of his ministry, Mark Carney made a bizarre gesture: he winked at the camera as if to cross the fourth wall and communicate something to those watching; on social media, Carney was then compared with the protagonists of House of Cards: a shrewd Machiavellian figure who comes in from the shadows to seize and hold power against great odds. Instead, what we Canadians got was a House of Cards in the more literal sense, a fundamentally unstable structure that can be blown away at any time by a strong gust of wind. And a storm is brewing across the border.

Though President Trump appears to have slapped Musk’s wrist at a Cabinet meeting, it’s far from clear if DOGE, having taken on a life of its own, will slow down any time soon. Though billed as an “advisory body”, it is tearing through swathes of the federal bureaucracy with the reckless abandon that Silicon Valley applies to newly acquired firms. Yet critics and fans alike struggle to put DOGE into a historical context, which makes it difficult to see where it might lead.

Liberals have predictably fallen back on references to mid-century fascism, comparing the recent mass firings to the Nazi takeover of German state and society to ensure total loyalty. But this is wide of the mark, as even vocal Trump supporters within government have been sacked like all others. Then, too, as Musk himself has pointed out, a regime that “seeks to limit the size, scope and power of government” probably isn’t a fascist one.

The Right, meanwhile, hails DOGE as a continuation of conservative cost-cutting that aligns with longstanding GOP priorities. This view, too, isn’t quite right. It fails to appreciate the unprecedented scale of DOGE’s disruption, as well as the department’s wilfully indiscriminate approach, making it difficult to class alongside past, more cautious and strategic attempts at government reorganization.

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How, then, does one begin to grasp the deeper significance, and likely logical endpoint of DOGE? There is one historical reference point from the early republic that would seem to explain the aims and designs of DOGE better than most: the faction represented by “Philadelphiensis” — namely, the Anti-Federalists.

Thorns in the side of the authors of The Federalist, the Anti-Federalists opposed the very existence and legitimacy of the federal government, preferring instead the looser ties, lighter burdens, and wafer-thin national authority mandated by the Articles of Confederation, America’s basic law until the ratification of the current Constitution in 1788. They warned against making the change, believing it would lead to “despotism, thraldom, and confusion”.

Here is the thing, though: the Articles of Confederation were put into effect for eight years in the early republic. And they failed miserably, as the myriad fiscal, monetary, executive, and judicial affairs fell into disarray. That turn of events impelled the founders to take up the Constitution now in place, with its vision of a strong federal state.

This isn’t to suggest that Musk or any of his acolytes have ever read the works of George Mason, Melancton Smith, Patrick Henry, Samuel Bryan, Robert Yates, or other Anti-Federalist luminaries; the Muskians don’t read much beyond memes. Rather, it suffices to highlight the stark convergence of sentiment and disposition that unites DOGE with the opponents of the Constitution, and to see both factions as giving expression to a recurring militant anti-centralist tendency in American history.

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Insofar as there are contemporary thinkers who are able to articulate a larger vision around which DOGE’s actions might cohere, there is the writer Curtis Yarvin and the bitcoin investor Balaji Srinivasan. These men aren’t so much direct influences on the boy-hackers ransacking government IT systems, so much as the most advanced expositors of the common worldview that animates Silicon Valley. Examining that worldview reveals striking parallels (as well as notable differences) with Anti-Federalism.

Much like Anti-Federalism, the Silicon Valley ethos is premised on a vehement rejection of centralized power in favor of smaller units of political sovereignty that exist well below the level of the nation-state. But instead of states’ rights, the ideal is the agile tech firm. Such a firm retains the spirit of the small startup (no matter how big it actually gets), remains unencumbered by bureaucratic complexity, and perfectly reflects the Promethean will of its founder.

The firm ideal informs Silicon Valley’s understanding of all social and political order. If DOGE is “moving fast and breaking things” in Washington, it is with the goal of accelerating the process of effective decentralization. And if Srinivasan has gone the furthest in envisioning what this new normal could look like, in his treatise The Network State (2022), it is arguably Yarvin who has dwelt most fully on how state dissolution might be realized.

Yarvin has written of the sudden breakup and collapse of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev as an instructive example for how a similar disintegration of federal power might be enacted in the United States. (“Maybe we could get to the same place in the same way?”) In Yarvin’s telling, the path to liberation goes through a paradox: the oppressive nexus of power that is the American government can only be undone by granting an even more awesome and unlimited power to a single autocratic figure, referred to in his writings as a “CEO”.

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This CEO could then be tasked with either disciplining or annihilating the civil service as functional body in what would amount to an “American perestroika”, which Yarvin defines, simplistically, as “any restructuring that renders the whole American government accountable”. That echoes the benign-sounding rationale that Musk has also employed in his defense of DOGE, telling reporters: “That’s what democracy is all about.”

The CEO figure, in this scheme, isn’t expected to be a manager or a builder, but a raider and a destroyer in the vein of GE’s Jack Welch, who hollowed out the once great industrial giant. Or indeed, Musk’s own slashing and burning at Twitter, now X, which has led to declining functionality, revenue, and engagement.

Seen from this vantage, the DOGE austerity blitzkrieg starts to make much more sense. The Anti-Federalists couldn’t accept the practical arguments, prompted by the failures of the articles, for a government that could assume greater responsibilities over financial management and national defense, viewing these as usurpations. Just so, DOGE rejects the premise that the “administrative state” has any business providing vital services that a large complex economy can hardly do without: basic research for the treatment of diseases, the collection and dissemination of weather forecasts, the prevention of financial fraud, the provision of assistance to vulnerable economic sectors, and much else of the kind.

These are, of course, the very functions that DOGE has either obliterated or severely undermined. (This, even as Musk built his own fortune off of such government assistance — and continues to do so even now.) But as many angry town halls and protests are asking: “who voted for this?” Are the American people really prepared to watch as their two-century-old national constitutional government goes the way of the old Soviet Union, rendered a relic of history?

Already, broad constituencies are banding to reassert the same logic that led the Founders to abandon the Articles of Confederation in favor of the stronger state envisioned by the actual US Constitution: veterans, farmers, consumers, workers, small business, bond holders, entitlement beneficiaries, and many others are threatened by DOGE’s dramatic gutting of state capacity and fiscal functionality. Furthermore, DOGE’s tinkering around with federal payment systems isn’t at all reassuring, as any disruption to Social Security and Treasury bond payments would all but seal America’s drift toward failed-state status.

Contra Yarvin, it should be remembered that what followed Gorbachev wasn’t a period of flourishing, but a protracted collapse in living standards and a power vacuum that led to oligarchs, warlords, and gangsters ruling the roost. It didn’t kill the Soviet deep state, but allowed it to come back later with a vengeance.

Nineties Russia, with its rapacious private client networks operating under a fatally weakened central state, is a more honest picture of what a quasi-anarchic “Network State” would look in practice than Srinivasan’s techno-utopia. Yet this is the direction in which DOGE is dragging the United States.

While the current grassroots ferment against DOGE is heartening, what’s needed is a new political narrative that connects the ideal of a strong, stable, reliable, and competent federal government to the survival of the American nation as a cohesive entity handed down by the founders. For what Fisher Ames said at the 1788 convention of Massachusetts resonates ever more today: “The Union is essential to our being as a nation. The pillars that prop it are crumbling to powder”.

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There is, after all, a reason why the Anti-Federalists, despite honorable contributions to American life, chiefly the Bill of Rights, are not generally seen as high-ranking founders, while those who endeavored to solidify the foundations of the federal union are venerated almost unequivocally as nation-builders: the Federalists, of course, but also Lincoln Republicans, New Deal Democrats, and the GOP’s postwar Nixon-Eisenhower tradition.

To be sure, government bloat, waste, and overreach are perennial problems that definitely need fixing. But they call for a judicious approach that recognizes the many intricate interdependencies that exist between the federal government and various sectors of American society. Or as Trump himself put it recently, what’s needed is a “scalpel” not a “hatchet”.

But what our Silicon Valley overlords are up to isn’t a genuine search for efficiency, but rather destruction for the sake of it. Left unopposed, these latter-day Anti-Federalists might finally trash the federal union as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary next year. What comes after could well be too grim to contemplate.

But how could such a figure — whose ultimate mediocrity has been laid bare — have risen so far? And how is it he came to define a whole decade in the nation’s history? Justin Trudeau had always been Canada’s Dauphin, “the Prince” — indeed, it is the title of a popular biography. But another title from the ancien régime better illustrates what he really was: “the Sun King”, who ruled through spectacle, artifice and celebrity, and who by these means was able to cover up the dire mounting contradictions not just of Canada’s Liberal Party, but of liberalism itself.

The once hegemonic ideology of the West was in the elder Trudeau’s words “not a programme… but an approach to politics”, and it arguably found its fullest expression in his son’s Canada. Humbled in the US and Europe after 2016, liberalism seemed, at least for a time, not just to be alive but thriving in the north. This was for the transatlantic establishment a necessary illusion: Canada as their “Hall of Mirrors”, a consolation and reassurance that their creed still had a fighting chance in a hostile world turned against them. Yet as with the Bourbons and their gilded splendour, Trudeau fell under his own spell, and Canadians paid the price. The story of his reign is thus that of the collision between appearance and substance — and myths, no matter how lofty and intoxicating, can never subdue reality.

Trudeau’s political journey began in October 2000, when he delivered the eulogy at his father’s funeral, a moving speech that caused many to see “the first manifestation of a dynasty”. After an aimless youth spent camping and cavorting, and stints as a drama teacher and ski instructor, he entered parliament in 2008. When the Liberals imploded in the 2011 election, under the academic Michael Ignatieff, the party seemed to overcorrect by finding a replacement who wouldn’t be too bothered by such things as policy ideas or governing philosophies: so, they turned to their one MP who had a pleasing face, great hair, and above all, a storied name.

As Britain and the United States were hurtling toward Brexit and Donald Trump, Trudeau’s ascent in 2015 provided the progressive counterpoint. Such was the frenzied adoration, dubbed “Trudeaumania 2.0”, that the newly elected Prime Minister could cause a global stir just by uttering breezy, feel-good phrases like “Because it’s 2015!” The Economist claimed that “Liberty moved north” while Rolling Stone asked “Why can’t he be our president?”

Yet underneath the glitz, Trudeau did at first assemble a promising team of ministers, including the woman who would be his most loyal advisor Chrystia Freeland, a Rhodes Scholar who wrote a bestselling book on inequality. Trudeau’s government sought to tackle the erosion of middle-class economic security after decades of globalisation. It would do this through an unorthodox programme of moderate stimulus spending and industrial policy, a course that could demonstrate how a renewed liberalism might respond to populist grievances about a hollowed-out economy through domestic reinvestment. At least this was an approximation of the plan in theory.

This incarnation of Trudeau — in stark contrast with what would come up later — had also been conscious of how mass low-skill immigration was affecting Canadian workers, as evidenced by a remarkable 2014 Toronto Star op-ed in which he made the case for far-reaching controls on temporary workers (a warning that he himself would ignore).

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Trudeau’s first term saw modest successes, such as the Canada Child Benefit, which sent child support payments to families and lowered the child poverty rate, and Canada’s part in the renegotiation of NAFTA, in which Freeland’s trade delegation narrowly avoided the threat of economic “ruination” promised by Trump.

But the seeds of his impending collapse in popularity were already being planted at this time by the callous inattention he paid to Canada’s youth, who more than anyone elevated him to victory. Though the PM seemed to say all the right things about the need to build affordable housing, his actual policies amounted to tacit affirmations of the Nimby-ist status quo, which favoured home-owning older Canadians, reliant on the ever-appreciating value of their real estate.

In the past, the partisans of liberalism had always been able to present themselves and their ideas as the wave of the future, as heralds of growth and abundance: yet here was the liberal tribune Trudeau doing the opposite, taking the side of the elderly over the young, of virtual stagnation over material progress. Furthermore, his government proved incapable of carrying out its own ambitious industrial policy, producing an infrastructure bank and “innovation cluster programme” whose projects no one can still identify. He also hamstrung Canada’s vast energy wealth, needed to power any future industrial revival, with excessive environmental regulations.

A series of damaging ethical scandals and ugly political reprisals led to a reduced minority government in the 2019 election (the infamous “blackface campaign”), a setback from which the Trudeau Liberals would never recover. “At least he legalised pot!” as Canadians who now regret voting for him like to say — in reference to the one pledge that they can remember him keeping.

Then, in early 2020, came Covid-19, which threw into relief the tensions between individual liberty and collective security. And though the Trudeau government’s handling of the pandemic has since become a subject of heated polemic, the fact is that the first year and a half of the lockdown era proved to be largely uneventful. In fact, Ottawa’s relatively rapid acquisition and distribution of vaccines boosted the government’s popularity enough that the PM felt bold enough to call an early election in September 2021.

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After this would come a grave challenge to his rule: the anti-mandate “Freedom Convoy” was not widely popular, when all was said and done. Canadians are, after all, an anti-revolutionary people (“peace, order, and good government” is the national motto). The convoy’s strength, however, was in playing the same elaborate game of spectacle that Trudeau excelled at and then throwing the gauntlet back at his feet. Despite shaky national support for their cause at best, convoy leaders managed to present the impression of a people’s uprising by swarming the capital so dramatically with trucks and inviting supporters to join them, gaining the attention of the wider world and focusing attention on Trudeau’s faltering early response. In any event, even some of those who disagreed with the convoy’s actions and tactics also disagreed with his invocation of the Emergencies Act to disperse the convoy, seen as heavy-handed, if not outright tyrannical. This touchy-feely image, which had been a cornerstone of his initial celebrity, and his claim to leadership of the liberal world had been greatly diminished.

The convoy was defeated but its lasting impact was in toppling the Conservative Party leadership and replacing it with Pierre Poilievre, a man diametrically opposed to everything Trudeau stands for and who now intends to roll back nearly all of his policy legacy.

The rest of Trudeau’s rule from that point on was one long, drawn-out process of unravelling which can be described as “a political slow heat death”. In his final three years, Trudeau managed to annihilate the integrity of Canada’s immigration system, which had previously been a point of pride and consensus while presiding over a housing crisis without end, and to leave his party and country in tatters, as it emerges from this crisis woefully unprepared to meet the existential challenge of the Trump Administration’s tariffs. But perhaps most tragically of all, he had betrayed the trust once reposed in him by Canada’s youth, whose very ability to hope for a brighter future has been seriously damaged.

In the end, it was his own lieutenant Freeland who decided to throw the Sun King from his throne, ending the reign of liberal illusion and setting the stage for the post-Trudeau era. It was said that Louis XIV danced in radiant golden shoes as he seized power from the nobles: Canada’s monarch, too, managed to distract the world with colourful footwear. If only we, the citizens of Canada, had been courageous enough to say to him sooner and with a stronger voice, as the Australian Prime Minister once did: “Justin, we’re not here to talk about your socks.”

The Vermont Senator has, to observers’ surprise, expressed approval of both Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency advisory body (DOGE) and RFK Jr’s vociferous criticisms of the food industry. What’s more, Sanders, who co-chairs the Senate Health Committee, says he still hasn’t decided on how to vote when it comes time to confirm Kennedy’s nomination for health secretary.

Moving beyond the tired “Resistance” tropes of the first Trump term, Sanders appears to be trying out a different kind of response to Trump’s renewed ascendancy: that of a cautious and qualified engagement with aspects of MAGA-ism that align with the Left’s own populist instincts. But are there really any genuine shared political convictions to sustain a Right-Left populist convergence?

Take Bernie’s positive comments on Musk — “a very smart guy” — and DOGE. One would think that there would be zero ideological overlap between a radical redistributionist and the world’s richest man. Yet Sanders tweeted: “Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row.” He went on to lambast the “Military Industrial Complex and a defence budget full of waste and fraud”. Lex Friedman, stalwart of the now “red-pilled” or Right-coded podcast world, replied “Happy to see this,” while an incredulous “Antifascist” account exclaimed: “Have you lost your fucking mind? Elon Musk is a Nazi oligarch who is in the process of taking our country apart. He’s the enemy.”

Such reactions are to be expected from the progressive base. But it must be remembered that Bernie was shaped by a Sixties Leftism heavily infused by the spirit of the anti-war movement, with its deep animus toward the defence establishment. Until recently this had been an almost exclusively Left-wing position. But as insiders in that establishment have increasingly cosied up to Democrats in response to the rise of Trump, the result has been a set of awkward alliances. For instance, while Bernie praised ex-Congresswoman Liz Cheney for endorsing Kamala Harris, it can’t have been easy for a lifelong peacenik to be on the same team as a politician whose last name is synonymous with neoconservative bluster and military adventurism.

In embracing at least this plank in the DOGE plan, Sanders is merely returning to form as a tried and true Leftist. And herein may be a useful strategy for progressives. Sanders can partially restrain the GOP’s mounting drive toward austerity by working to ensure bipartisan legitimacy for elements of DOGE that would be popular with voters: he could try to redirect Musk’s cost-cutting impulses away from, say entitlements or infrastructure, and toward clearing the coffers of the deep state, or at least opting for more efficient spending choices.

Bernie’s positive remarks about RFK Jr illustrate a similar resonance between these strains of Leftism and MAGA’s anti-elite sensibilities. In an interview with CBS last week, the Senator was clear in voicing disagreement with Kennedy’s “extremely dangerous” stances on fluoridation and vaccines but nonetheless conceded: “I think what he’s saying about the food industry is exactly correct. I think you have a food industry concerned about their profits, could care less about the health of the American people. I think they have to be taken on.” Indeed, it is a testament to the extent of ideological shifting in the Trump era that such anti-corporate stances, at least with the large sector of the economy, now belong more to the Right than to the Left.

Kennedy, who has hitherto only even been known as a hard-edged environmentalist progressive and health nut, seems now to be integrating seamlessly into the Right’s coalition, as evidence by his plum cabinet nomination. His many eccentric takes on public health issues have long struck a chord among the MAGA base, especially in the post-Covid era of heightened hostility to experts. And just as Right-populism has turned against the Pentagon brass, it has also, under Kennedy’s guidance, begun to take aim at the nexus of corporate interests in the foods and pharma industries. Like the President-elect’s promise to drain the swamp of Washington, his prospective HHS Secretary threatens to do the same with the Food and Drug Administration.

For an unreconstructed Leftist like Sanders, this is more than enough reason to sympathise with the “MAHA” agenda. But for the progressive rank-and-file, including the many educated and expertise-abiding Democrats who see nothing but crankery in Kennedy, it may be a tougher pill to swallow. The challenge for Bernie will be in navigating these tensions, finding a way of reckoning with Kennedy’s systemic critique, which is still broadly relatable to liberal elites, while coming up with more nuanced and constructive fixes than just slashing and burning through the federal bureaucracy. This would mean acting as a moderating and refining influence on a future Secretary Kennedy, something he will be well positioned to do from his Senate perch.

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So, as it turns out, the idea of a Right-Left populist front has more substance to it than a surface-level reading of the situation may suggest. The question now is: how much farther can it go? Well, Sanders and Trump, entering the national stage at around the same time in 2015, once offered remarkably complimentary critiques of the political and economic status quo.

In fact, at a conference in February 2017, President Trump got the audience of Right-wing activists to cheer the socialist for being “right about trade”, a portent of the shift toward all-out protectionism within the GOP. He could have added that Bernie was right on immigration as well, for in those years he was still able to speak readily about open borders as a “Koch brothers policy” that depressed wages and living standards, an old-school labour view that’s since been called out as heresy by the current ultra-globalist incarnation of the Left.

But given talk of impending mass deportations, could the vintage restrictionist Sanders make a comeback? As with his qualified endorsements of Musk and Kennedy, he could accept the basic premise of Trump’s case and help re-legitimise the once uncontroversial view that uncontrolled migration hurts American workers. He could propose smart policies to secure the labour market (like mandatory national E-Verify) while calling for more humane approaches to resolving the status of the undocumented population. Such an outcome, though admittedly fanciful, would amount to a productive fusion of the best instincts of Trumpism and Leftism.

Rather than a novel aberration, Bernie’s conciliatory gestures may herald a reversion to an earlier convergence between the populist edges of the ideological spectrum. It would seem to confirm the old “horseshoe theory” of politics. Yet as he eyes his exit from elected office, it remains to be seen whether his successors can maintain the course. A favourite for the presidential nomination in 2028, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has not only “dropped her pronouns” but also started to seek out and listen to her own district’s AOC-Trump split voters (and without also denouncing them as having racist inclinations). If she is in fact trending in a similar direction to Bernie, it may suggest that the Left have more than a passing interest in holding up an olive branch to MAGA.

Today, these words ring just as true in late neoliberal America. And it is the Democrats, formerly the party of the people, who occupy the place of the “Tory establishment”, with all the same lordly arrogance but with none of the Old World aristocratic charm.

The Democrats could learn from this comparison as they attempt to rebuild. For just as Disraeli concluded that the Tories should seek to harmonise class differences rather than flattening them, so too can Democratic elites serve ordinary citizens while acknowledging the chasms that exist between them.

But who can possibly assume the part of an American Disraeli? (Certainly not a revived candidate Kamala Harris!) Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, may have been lucky to be passed over as Harris’s vice-presidential pick, for he is now set to be a leading presidential candidate in 2028. With his tailored, tie-less suits, and his too rehearsed “White Obama” speaking style, he represents almost perfectly just the kind of professional managerial elite that has come to dominate the Democratic camp. Yet he has earned the confidence of moderate and working-class voters, precisely the demographics which sank Harris. In 2024, Shapiro increased his national recognition without necessarily being tarred by the Harris campaign’s disastrous performance.

Unlike the flamboyantly folksy Tim Walz, with his camo gear and football coach anecdotes, or Shapiro’s intraparty rival John Fetterman, with his hoodie and shorts, the governor has come far with voters without affecting the aesthetics of a working-class person. Instead, he has attempted to reach the working class through clever policy innovation, notably, his trailblazing first executive order which removed college requirements for 65,000 public service jobs. His fierce mutual antipathy with the pro-Palestine Left, as a staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Democrat, has also served to establish distance between himself and his party’s noisy activist class; the repair of a collapsed bridge in record time (weeks rather than months) demonstrated a basic competence rarely seen in elected officials.

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This approach of lifting up workers without trying too hard to appear to be like them is a promising avenue. Delivering tangible results while rejecting the tiresome diversions of progressive pet causes could regain the trust of voters. It is, in many ways, the opposite of the patronising and moralising mentality of the Democratic political class, which either looks to make everyone else like them, through the aggressive propagation of the “correct” social values, or else attempts to turn them into another captured client group, to be pandered to with shallow symbolic gestures. Once more, the contrast must be drawn with Walz, whom Darel E. Paul has described as “a professional-managerial-class woman’s idea of a working-class man”.

The Democratic Party’s unfolding identity crisis, a kind of “social class dysphoria” to use a metaphor that would make sense to its gender activists, arises out of the contradiction between its historical — but now grossly outdated — self-conception as the New Deal-era party of the underdogs, and its actual condition as the natural home for college-educated elites. Now, of course, a college diploma by no means guarantees economic success — there are “poorly educated” millionaires in America as well as minimum-wage baristas with PhDs — but, on average, four-year college educations are still a reliable indicator of social mobility, economic advancement, and most of all, cultural prestige.

To resolve this tension, Democrats raised in the meritocratic pieties of the Clinton-Obama era will have to confront a difficult truth. The future of politics will not rest on realising a rational unity between enlightened liberals and working people (“why do they vote against their interests?”), but on acknowledging that there are natural and likely irreconcilable cultural differences between the two classes, which can neither be erased by the “march of progress” nor elided by Obamaesque appeals to a post-partisan America.

Yet again, Disraeli put it best: elites, whether in industrial England or post-industrial America, must embrace the existence of distinct “classes of the realm… equal before the law, but whose different conditions and different aims give strength and variety to our national life”. Thus if, as Adlai Stevenson (who was himself a Disraelian figure) said, the Democrats should be the “party of everyone” — not “everyone” crudely understood as an undifferentiated mass, but as an organic community of variegated and interdependent estates.

Holding society together, in spite of its entrenched moral asymmetries, calls for a settlement of some kind: not a mass conversion of the proles to the “National Church” of the patricians, but rather a social compact in which the latter must serve the former out of duty or noblesse oblige.

Such an effort would amount to an American application of the Disraelian ideal of “Tory Democracy” or “one-nation conservatism”, in which class differences are affirmed but also harnessed and synthesised in the service of national unity, industrial progress, and social order. An analogous “one-nation liberalism” may not strike a chord in a culturally egalitarian and “middle-class” republic like the United States, but it is at least premised on a more realistic account of the starkly bifurcated society America has become. And if the Democrats are indeed the “conservative” faction in this society, Disraeli’s politics of pragmatic inter-class harmony may be a better standard for the party than either the pseudo-revolutionary radicalism of the campus Left or the genteel progressive puritanism of the liberal establishment (which puts one in mind of Disraeli’s rival Gladstone).

In practice, it would call on professional elites to follow the lead of Shapiro’s governorship in finding pragmatic solutions to everyday problems, instead of pursuing grand projects of moral homogenisation. It would seek to help the working class materially — through higher wages, child tax credits, and accessible vocational education — while giving them a greater stake in their government (as both Shapiro and Disraeli did). Yet it would do all this without expecting to initiate them into the same ideological milieu that progressives inhabit, by elevating more non-college-educated Americans to positions of public authority and cultural visibility. A more broadly representative Democratic Party along these lines would have paid more heed to concerns around inflation and immigration than did the Biden-Harris administration.

And just as this settlement would allow working-class citizens “to be themselves”, so to speak, it would also let the members of the professional managerial “estate” inhabit their own rarified niches and lifestyles as private and non-generalisable subcultures. If, as Pennsylvania state senator Jordan A. Harris said, the current Democratic Party is “too much Starbucks and not enough Dunkin’ Donuts”, then a better balance has to be struck. Yet it will nonetheless have to be one which retains and accommodates the sensibilities of both the macchiato-drinker and the Munchkin-eater.

Under such a dispensation, no longer will progressives have to keep searching in vain for “our own Joe Rogan” or “working-class whisperer”. They can instead emulate America’s greatest aristocrat and its greatest democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in speaking freely in the tone and tenor of a patrician elite — but from a place of genuine respect and decency for all fellow citizens, whatever their station. Whether Shapiro, or any Democrat, can embody such an archetype remains to be seen. But, relegated to four long years of opposition, the party should assess the reasons for its repudiation while considering the line uttered by Disraeli’s heroine Sybil: “Power has only one duty — to secure the social welfare of the people.”

Amid the chorus of victory, however, choices will have to be made about the direction his populist force will take. MAGA has grown tremendously, co-existing uneasily with the party establishment, even as it has started to displace it, and incorporating new constituencies, with divergent interests and ideological orientations. Initially rooted in economic populism, MAGA now is a more unruly cultural movement united by loyalty to its leader. And as it returns to power, it stands at a crossroads.

How can MAGA avoid making the same mistakes of the first administration, while translating the popular energies it has awakened into a viable strategy? To do so, it must redefine itself once again: not just for winning but for wielding power in accordance with its own stated goals of controlling the border and rebuilding the country’s economic strength. Only a third iteration, MAGA 3.0, can fully realise the promise of Trump’s political revolution.

When Donald Trump first descended the escalator nine years ago, he opened his political career with a trail-blazing critique of globalisation with a focus on fixing America’s trade and immigration imbalances: MAGA 1.0. A radical strategy, at times its critiques of bipartisan corporate orthodoxy converged with Bernie Sanders and the populist-Left. The opening days of the first Trump Administration saw out-of-the-box proposals for a tax hike on the rich (put forward by Steve Bannon, of all people) and an expansion of public healthcare options for working-class Americans, as opposed to an Obamacare repeal.

But it was an unstable formulation. And it was soon folded into the same party leadership Trump initially opposed. The president essentially adopted Congressional Republicans’ tax cutting agenda as his own and abdicated any serious effort at comprehensive immigration reform, even coming to oppose Mandatory E-Verify under pressure from business lobbies.

Only with trade under the leadership of Robert Lighthizer did the administration seriously and consistently diverge from GOP strictures. Its final achievement was Operation Warp Speed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the greatest feats of executive action in modern times, which set the template for the Biden Administration’s industrial policy. But MAGA 1.0 was a largely stillborn revolution that never had much of a chance against a still entrenched old guard.

Enter MAGA 2.0: As Trump left office in 2021, the lingering conflicts between his populist instincts and the establishment’s policy dictates were effectively suppressed. A common front of loyalty to Trump took precedence over any ideological commitments. The party’s emotional centre of gravity remained with the personality rather than with any policy. Much of the Right regrouped around the same small government ethos that had defined conservatism since Reagan. Only tariffs and the defence of entitlements remained from Trump’s original economic heresies.

While out of power, MAGA also expanded not just as a political brand but as a cultural current. It came to include many diffuse elements, including: anti-deep state former Democrats like Robert Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard; Silicon Valley tech bros such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen; and substantive heterodox populist conservatives J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. It attracted more than a fair few disgruntled cranks but one of these factions, the intellectual wing of the so-called “New Right” has actually come far in developing the anti-globalisation ideas of MAGA 1.0: reining in Wall Street; reforming finance and defending workers and upgrading the defence-industrial base against a resurgent China.

The irony is that MAGA 2.0 had by then lost any genuine interest in governing, instead focusing on indulging the “vibe and tribe” identity affirmation aspects of the movement. But the upshot is that Trump campaign did not have to talk about policy much at all: Americans’ disaffection with continuing economic decline and progressive-led cultural change, particularly among the working-class, non-metropolitan and non-college-educated, was strong enough.

And so, in the immediate post-election environment, Trump partisans must hope that the next MAGA movement will take the best features of MAGA 1.0, while cutting the fat from MAGA 2.0: Vance’s post-globalised vision without the crankery and contrarianism. It must recapture the creative and ambitious policy visions of early-stage Trumpism while developing the discipline and foresight that the first term lacked. It must also complete the break with the GOP’s free-market fundamentalism by adopting a pragmatic approach that can mix strategic deregulation with state-directed guidance of key industrial sectors. But who is going to actually carry it out?

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The realisation is clear enough for both Trump himself and his die-hard followers that this is his last rodeo. The torch will eventually be passed on to a worthy successor. The day before the election, Politico interviewed Trump supporters and hinted at the difficulty of finding such a figure: Vance, Tucker Carlson, Kari Lake, Donald Trump Jr, Ron DeSantis, all elicited at best lukewarm reactions from rally-goers, who recognised Trump as a singular (and non-replicable) phenomenon. But the lack of a clear successor may be a good thing. It would allow the movement to move on from personalities and back toward the big-picture promises with which Trump launched the MAGA era.

All great American political movements united broad coalitions under a compelling alternative vision of the country; they succeeded only if they were able to displace the existing elite with a new counter-elite: from the Revolution to the New Deal and beyond, this has been the pattern of US history. MAGA 3.0 should build itself not around one politician but around one particular class. The role should go to an unheralded group at the heart of the MAGA coalition: not quite the working-class, who lack the social, political, institutional and economic capital to fulfil the function of elites, but rather the “American gentry” who fuelled Trump’s rise from the very start: the car dealers, general contractors, agribusiness owners, extractive industry magnates, franchise and factory owners, and assorted small-town millionaires, who often possess great wealth but little cultural prestige or recognition — a classic description for a revolutionary counter-elite.

Rather than a single princely political figure to take the mantle of Trump, it is they — this class of local entrepreneurial leaders — who should be crowned as the collective successors to Trump, for what are they if not a collection of mini-Trumps? The promise at the heart of MAGA, the physical reconstruction of the United States, should be entrusted to them. They could be awarded generous provision of capital in the form of subsidies, loans, and technology transfers to supercharge national productivity. This petty-bourgeois industrial policy would create jobs, helping the working-class along and the nation as a whole. Just as important, by upgrading the technological capabilities of the small-business sector and enlisting its help in stamping out the employment of undocumented workers (in fields like agriculture and construction) through a national Mandatory E-Verify scheme, the demand for illegal immigration could be reduced.

MAGA 3.0 may end up being less entertaining than the early tide of the Trump era, with more conventional politicians, your Vances and Rubios and Hawleys, courting the gentry and the other members of the coalition. But the Trump legacy could be more serious. By bulldozing the old establishment and galvanising a counter-elite, the MAGA job he started might just find success.

The Washington Post has called it the “bro-ification” of Zuckerberg, drawing attention to his new UFC fighter’s physique and curly Gen Z-like hairstyle. In keeping with his claim to be “done with politics”, most of his recent antics have been largely apolitical. But make no mistake: without openly declaring support for the Republican candidate, he has dropped hints as to which side of the party divide Meta is trending. He has praised Trump as a “badass” after his near-brush with martyrdom, expressed regret at toeing the Biden Administration’s line on content moderation, and, recently, started to ban accounts that track the private jets of billionaires like himself, the former president, and Musk. Gone is the soft-spoken computer nerd with close-cropped hair as depicted in 2010’s The Social Network, replaced with a noticeably more flamboyant incarnation.

This repositioning only makes sense for Meta, as it does for Silicon Valley as a whole. The last decade’s liberal orthodoxy saw social media as a benign tool to foster democracy and progressive values at home and abroad, in the context of events such as the 2008 “Facebook” election and popular uprisings across the Middle East. This was a time when Zuckerberg and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey were routinely feted at receptions in Obama’s White House. Then came the epoch-shattering election of 2016 in which Facebook played a most conspicuous part. What followed was a scandal-tainted half-decade in which Zuckerberg’s firm was blamed for enabling misinformation, conspiracy theories, and foreign interference. After being hauled before Congress to answer for these, Meta’s founder saw the writing on the wall: his (and the tech world’s) alliance with the reigning establishment was effectively over.

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A 2020 email from Zuckerberg’s mentor and Facebook angel investor, Peter Thiel, counselled him to consider a deeper cultural break with the system: no longer should he be “a Baby Boomer construct of how a well-behaved Millennial is supposed to act”. The advice made sense. After all, the current climate now favours alignment between the Right’s embrace of free speech and laissez-faire online — sharing a common enemy in the establishment’s drive to combat disinformation (seen by many as scarcely-veiled censorship).

But both instances of Zuckerberg’s political signalling — whether towards Hope-and-Change Democrats once upon a time or MAGA Republicans today — arguably had less to do with ideological principles and more to do with raw interests: or what would allow the company to realise its aim of gaining mastery over “the future of human communications”. So far, this narrative may allow Zuckerberg (and the other tech billionaires) to claim that it’s the other side that’s changed and that he, in fact, has remained true to the liberatory promise and idealism of Facebook’s early days. When he borrows from Caesar to say Aut Zuck Aut Nihil or “All Zuck or All Nothing”, he seems to be uttering a liberationist promise, telling aspiring founders: follow Zuck and you, too, can be a Caesar!

However, Meta’s recent policy decisions to use personal data to feed algorithms and train generative AI point to the real heart of the tech giant’s project. Meta’s advertising speaks of self-expression even as the resulting output ruthlessly invalidates those very things. Automating the production of creative work and instrumentalising users’ most intimate digital footprints, while causing untold damage on people’s mental health — that doesn’t seem to be all in the name of fostering genuine connections. Children who grew up on Facebook and Instagram now report having stunted personal development. A federal child safety case against Meta and Senate hearings earlier this year in which Zuckerberg apologised to parents (without having to change much of his corporate policy) are cases in point.

Unlike the partisan Russia-gate charges, Zuckerberg’s deleterious impact in this case cuts across political lines, alienating Americans from each other regardless of party — all while Meta turns in handsome profits.

If Silicon Valley does succeed in hijacking the Republican Party as it did the Democrats a decade ago, and if a future GOP administration manages to give the moguls their desired regulatory regime, will it really represent a moment of liberation for mankind? The tech discourse has tipped over from mere libertarianism toward something far more grandiose and sinister, namely accelerationism, predicting (and encouraging) the agglomeration of all intelligence into a post-human singularity.

The race to see who will bring about — and therefore wield the power of — such a singularity is what motivates the moguls. And Zuckerberg, though less vocal in articulating this messianic ambition than say Musk or Open AI’s Sam Altman, is no exception. It tracks with the worldview of the Valley’s intellectual guru Thiel, who endorses monopoly as the natural, healthy endpoint of all competition, which he says “is for losers”. In light of this, Zuckerberg’s identification with Caesar takes on a different meaning. It becomes less about individual emancipation and more about individual submission to a single fount of technological power and authority. That’s the thing about Caesars (and monopolies), there can only really be one.

There is, therefore, something more significant at stake than whether Republicans or Democrats get to benefit from the largesse of Silicon Valley. Its continuing domination over society heralds nothing less than a reckoning over the role and agency of human beings in a world of ceaseless technological saturation and collectivisation.

Conscientious voices across the Right and Left have raised many compelling arguments against the broader social ills caused by Meta’s platforms. Rather than taking a side in the reductive and overly partisan fight between free speech maximalists and anti-disinformation crusaders, opposition to Zuckerberg’s empire-building could instead rally around a more capacious standard, namely the common defence of our humanity against the brazen accelerationist schemes imposed by Meta and the other tech titans. Just as the American revolutionaries of 1776 likened George III to Caesar (“is not Britain to America what Caesar was to Rome”), so too should today’s citizenry see Zuckerberg and his fellow moguls as the agents of a great dehumanising tyranny. Against this would-be Caesar of the algorithm, their own refrain could be: Aut Homo Aut Nihil or “All Human or All Nothing”.

Joseph Schumpeter, who famously recognised that capitalism and innovation are intimately linked, wrote in 1942 that capitalism “never can be stationary”. It has to take risks and fund the most radical ideas because “creative destruction” is the driver of economic change. At the time of Schumpeter’s writing, America’s mid-century golden age, technologies were both the cause and consequence of the country’s massive industrial expansion. Everything from automobiles to consumer appliances to commercial air travel became part of everyday life. Through a technological feedback loop, prosperity was sustained for years.

But, with the exception of the brief computer and internet-fuelled boom at the turn of the millennium, US productivity has been in decline since the Seventies. This downward trend has occurred in spite of consistent increases in spending on research and development, the numbers of patents and PhDs conferred, and scientific articles published. For some economists, such as Robert Gordon, this is because our current technological developments are just inherently less conducive to growth and innovation than those that powered the last once-in-history boom of the second industrial revolution. The implications of Gordon’s analysis are that the days of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” are over: the technology of the future will be just more diversionary apps on marginally improved iPhones.

The potentially revolutionary technological breakthroughs, though, the stuff of the next great boom, are here for anyone who cares to look. Quite apart from the hype around Artificial General Intelligence, existing breakthroughs in modular construction, energy extraction, and nanotechnology could help realise the visions of futurist thinkers and presidential candidates alike. Even the clichéd trope of flying cars, invoked by Peter Thiel to lament the flailing state of American innovation, has found expression in prototypes of eVTOLs or “electrical vertical take-off and landing vehicles” that could bring us closer to Jetsons-like skylines. Many of the “nice things” of the future are already here. The problem is that they are not reaching Americans at an everyday level.

What explains this gap? Well, novelty and innovation are not the same thing. Unlike the former, the latter doesn’t simply happen once an invention is unveiled. As Schumpeter observed, it requires diffusion of breakthroughs across the economy, which is in turn reshaped by it. Research, development, and commercialisation phases were closely integrated in mid-century America. It was the heyday of the fabled corporate research lab, such as Bell Labs, RCA Laboratories and General Electric Research (GE), which helped to convert innovations for consumer markets. Corporations were willing to devote considerable resources to creating improved products which would bring greater profits, even if it meant waiting longer.

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The Republicans' weird problem predates Vance

By Michael Cuenco

But the wave of financialisation that swept American business starting in the Seventies and Eighties scrambled this system. Capital responded to heightened international competition, not by doubling down on technical investments to out-compete ascendant rivals in East Asia and Europe, but by selling off the very material and scientific infrastructure that formed the basis of an industrial economy. The new economic model prioritised financial returns over pioneering innovations: thus America was transformed into a “capital-light” entity of the neoliberal era. Corporate labs were closed and vertically integrated firms like GE were hollowed out. And though America still generated scientific research, particularly at universities, producing and harnessing innovations domestically became increasingly difficult.

And so began the process by which finance subsumed industry. While there had previously been a complementary relationship, a perverse dynamic of “uncreative destruction” now ensued. The drive toward material innovation that had once underpinned the industrial economy metastasised into a craze for noxious innovations in finance itself. Ever more complex financial products were created, and as a result the economy crashed in 2008.

As America divested its industries, Deng Xiaoping opened up China and provided a convenient market for low-end manufacturing. Indeed, “invent in California, make in China” was the new motto. Hoping to move from mere imitation to true innovation, China adopted precisely those principles which had gone out of fashion in the US. And its authoritarian leadership was able to execute a far more disciplined form of industrial capitalism, with hyper-focused, decades-long investment strategies that wouldn’t be possible in today’s Western economies. Even as Beijing joined the World Trade Organization in 1999 and formally accepted free trade principles, it continued to use a range of methods, such as subsidies, forced tech transfers, and manufacturing funds, for strategically important innovations like 5G and electric vehicles and batteries.

In America, capital became more averse to risky long-term investments. Businesses racked up short-term profits and hoarded the capital that should have been injecting back into the real economy. As a result, the US now has a “capital inertia” problem — it has abundant stores of accumulated capital (or a “savings glut”) that it can’t, or won’t, invest in large-scale projects such as re-industrialisation, automation, infrastructure, and energy development. This is the contradiction in American capitalism that holds back the next great wave of technological growth. It is the problem the next administration must attempt to solve: how to transition from capital inertia toward the capital intensity that characterised America’s industrial zenith.

The US is only now stumbling toward a proper industrial policy in which innovations can theoretically be diffused en masse, but policymakers still have not rediscovered how to do it.

America’s efforts are hamstrung by the expectation that it should be the US government writing the checks, spending taxpayer dollars (or issuing endless tax credits), and by and large assuming the bulk of the fiscal burden, which can’t be sustained either fiscally or politically.

The federal government, then, has to devise bold new ways of restarting capital intensity. Public development and infrastructure banks, for example, could lighten the burden of risk for the financial sector: by directing and de-risking investments, these public-private institutions can be used to forcefully restimulate the financial industry out of its current atrophied condition. Such concentrations of capital could directly fund economic development, just like Alexander Hamilton’s creation of a national bank did in 1791. State contracts can employ firms to build the promised new cities or manufacturing facilities, restarting the virtuous circle of technological development. As the federal government facilitated the construction of canals, railroads, and highways in previous centuries, so too could it build the vertiports needed to host tomorrow’s flying cars, or at least the expanded energy grid needed to power electric vehicles.

In this scenario, through a reformed and revitalised capitalism that takes innovation seriously, Americans could begin to not just have “nice things” again, but also resilient infrastructure and industrial base. And in a century when both geopolitical competition with China and extreme weather events like Milton are set to intensify, the ability to build will be more than a necessity.

When the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced recently that their union was withholding endorsement of either of the presidential candidates, pundits and political operatives alike saw it as further proof of the very thing O’Brien was talking about: an ongoing realignment of working-class voters, away from their traditional Democratic allies and toward the Trump coalition. Indeed, the stated reason for the union’s decision was the apparent desire on the part of a large segment of the rank-and-file membership to go with the Republican candidate. The GOP is said to be transforming into a “workers’ party”, just as college-educated professionals cluster around Kamala Harris.

A culturally conservative base of labourers would, after all, make for a more natural constituency for an American Right that opposed both economic globalisation and social progressivism. Yet there are issues with this years-old narrative; particularly that the Republican Party has been painfully slow in breaking out of its ingrained predisposition for the interests of capital over labour. Their embrace of protectionism and opposition to high immigration may indirectly benefit workers on the ground, but when it comes to issues that directly touch upon working-class interests, such as pensions, labour representation, and the right-to-organise, Democrats in recent years have offered substantively more than Republicans. It’s also worth noting that regional branches of the union across the West Coast broke with national leadership to endorse Harris.

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The American Left has abandoned unions

By Freddie deBoer

Rather than a reflection of an existing political reality, O’Brien’s speech was in effect a plea for the Right to take workers seriously at a time when the Left is accused of taking them for granted. The Teamsters’ non-endorsement could be interpreted with similar subversive intent: the downpayment on a political investment toward the prospect of a pro-worker Republican Party. However, in stark contrast, just weeks before, Trump practically patted Elon Musk on the back after the Tesla mogul bragged about firing striking workers, underscoring the former president’s own dubious record on workers’ rights both in office and as a businessman.

If “working-class party” is to be more than a slogan on the Right, it has to be matched by actual policies that materially benefit workers. But how can a party that’s been accustomed for so long to towing capital’s line be converted into a vessel for workers’ interests? For this, we may turn back to a time when labour maintained enough bipartisan engagement to extract concessions from both parties.

The Teamsters’ decision to stay neutral in 2024 is actually far more in keeping with its politically flexible tradition than expected. There was even a time when they were known as the country’s most Republican union. 

Thanks, in no small part, to the animosity between then-Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and the Kennedys. The Brotherhood endorsed Richard Nixon in 1960 and then again in 1972, when they were joined by Meany’s AFL-CIO in dissing the Democrats. During this period divisions over the Vietnam War, as exemplified in the Hardhat Riot of 1970, drove a wedge between workers and the increasingly radicalised Left. The latter’s countercultural values and disregard for national symbols like the flag offended the workers, who in turn defected Nixon’s “Silent Majority”.

This formula under which the GOP appealed to patriotic and traditionalist themes as a means to win over labour appears to be working once again under Trump, but alignment on cultural issues was never enough to seal a realignment. Republicans knew they had to deliver on economic gains for workers as well.

Nixon’s administration, for instance, enacted a slate of pro-labour reforms more far-reaching than at any time since the New Deal, often confounding his liberal critics in the process. These included the entrenchment of workplace protections in the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), strengthening the financial position of millions of workers in retirement through the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, and raising the minimum wage. A case can be made that Nixon had been one of the most pro-labour presidents in the 20th century.

This is in stark contrast with Trump’s time in office in which his Labor Department opposed minimum wage hikes and union representation rights; appointed an aggressively pro-business National Labor Relations Board, advanced “right-to-work” in the case Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, repealed the “persuader rule”, which obligated firms to report anti-union advocacy, as well as the much more elementary “overtime rule” which would have allowed workers to be paid more for extra work. On O’Brien’s most urgent policy priority, the Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Relief Act, a bill that would rescue the pensions of over 2 million workers, including 400,000 Teamsters, Republicans have been solidly opposed: it had been passed by the Democratic House in 2019 but rejected by the GOP-controlled Senate. Trump’s more recent pledges to ease the tax burden on workers come as small consolation in light of this record. 

And yet, despite Republicans’ lingering hostility to labour, a small cadre of genuinely populist legislators has emerged in the Senate composed of figures like Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and vice-presidential nominee JD Vance. The group has been supported by new heterodox policy shops dedicated to fashioning a comprehensive conservative pro-worker agenda, a modern equivalent of Nixon’s programme, which a future Republican administration could theoretically take up. But for this to happen, Republicans must acknowledge the inherent tensions that exist between their burgeoning working-class support and that segment of their base, who continue to hold outsize influence, namely the wealthy local elites in the small-business class, known as the “gentry”, who dominate the party at state and local levels.

Unlike the Democratic-leaning professional and corporate sector, the working class and small-business class generally converge in their shared cultural conservatism and patriotic ethos, yet common symbolic proclivities are not enough to wield a coalition together when there are very real differences in their respective economic aims. The gentry prefer low wages and “flexible” labour markets so as to better attract investment; but for quite understandable reasons, unions want the opposite: higher wages, benefits, and levels of protection for workers.

There is no better illustration of this divide than the epic confrontation that took place between O’Brien and Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, a non-college educated plumbing company owner and multi-millionaire. After seeming to challenge each other to a fight on the floor of a Senate hearing — something Jimmy Hoffa could have done — the two had to be stopped by Bernie Sanders of all people. The gentry and the proletariat are, evidently, not natural allies, locked as they are in a zero-sum competition. 

The Republican Party must, therefore, rediscover an older mode of political engagement from before the present era of ideological polarisation, one that Nixon and the New Dealers alike would have recognised: brokerage politics. This harking back to a gentler era sees politics not as a battlefield between moral values or ideological visions, but as a bargaining table on which rival material interests can be reconciled through intricate compromise and deal-making.

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To employ this ideal, a future Republican industrial policy could channel financial resources to struggling red-state and hinterland regions to the benefit of the small-business gentry. This micro-elite could then be entrusted to deploy that capital toward productive ends while having a condition of receiving such assistance could be that the same businesses must employ or negotiate with unionised labour. This effective emphasis on pro-labour “conditionality” is one that Democrats are already employing in their own industrial policy schemes. In this scenario, the gentry would be compelled to deal with labour’s demands and perhaps give up their labour market preferences in exchange for guaranteed business investment; while unions in these parts of the country would accept the continued economic leadership and sway of the gentry in exchange for tangible concessions. In other words, a zero-sum contest becomes a negotiated settlement.

The post-Reagan Right is accustomed to viewing such questions of economic distribution through ideological lenses, as a conflict of virtuous free-market principles against the perversions of socialism and collectivism. But brokerage politics would dispense with such moralism and simply assume a natural divergence of goals while working toward reasonable syntheses.

Rather than being a party exclusively of capital or labour, the GOP could instead play the role of “honest broker” between the two as it had in the days of Nixon, and going as far back as McKinley and Lincoln. It was a time when workers and businessmen alike had reason to vote for a Republican Party, who reconciled their best interests against the backdrop of an industrialising economy. Such an approach would amount to a sober, realistic path to incorporating their material interests into the Right’s agenda, closer to the transactional instincts of the union bosses of old. Under these conditions, neither Republicans nor Democrats would be able to take labour for granted again.

Critics from the centre-left may be right to fault Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for “creating stories”, but they are yet to articulate how they would improve the flailing status quo. Kamala Harris may assert that Trump “doesn’t have a plan”, but it is the Democrats who have fallen short in this respect, despite their best efforts to pivot to the Right on the issue. It begs the question: what can Harris do, beyond her usual rhetorical acrobatics, to reclaim the border issue from Republicans once and for all?

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Canada's Enoch Powell moment

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The solution has to go beyond the realm of policy to win over voters. Rather than simply coming up with yet another wonkish 10-point plan, Democrats must figure out a way to convince both the American public and themselves that the border must be defended, that ordinary citizens are right to be concerned, and that order and predictability in the immigration system are positive goods.

First, it is important to establish an honest account of what’s gone wrong over the last eight years. For there can be no resolution to the border crisis without acknowledging that Trump and Biden together share the blame. But where to begin? There can be no hiding from the fact that the Biden era witnessed the worst upticks in irregular migration in recent history, with more than 10 million encounters at the southern border according to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). This amounts to a 1,240% increase since 2021 and a backlog of more than 591,000 individuals in the shambolic CBP app’s mass parole programme. All the while, a misguided strategy of documenting those crossing the border — or “managing the flow” — as opposed to trying to halt the flow of irregular arrivals has resulted in a virtual open invitation to economic migrants from Central America and elsewhere to crowd the US asylum system.

Harris should start by admitting the failures of her own party. In 2021, she was made Biden’s spokesperson on the border. But she was hardly the “border czar” the GOP make her out to be. The role gave her little to no actual responsibility over policymaking, which remained in the hands of DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. So rather than pretending her stint in the job was a success, she could admit that the present course is wrong and unsustainable. This would go a long way toward distancing herself from the Biden record — something she has already begun to do in other policy areas. 

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Indeed, given the Republican’s consistent failings on immigration, Harris does not have to stay on the defensive. The most remarkable aspect of tracing the volume and trajectory of irregular migration flows to the US is not the cleavages but rather the continuities between the Biden and Trump administrations. Contrary to the former president’s claims of presiding over the “lowest illegal immigration in recorded history”, Trump’s four years in office saw an effective decrease in deportations from the Obama era according to data collected by Pew Research. As the Houston Chronicle reported in 2020, near the end of the Trump era: “Barack Obama’s ICE arrested and deported more than twice as many people during his first term in office.”

What’s more, both Trump and Biden failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation despite their respective party’s control of Congress for their first two years in office. To the extent that both presidents did see dips in border activity, it was as a result of acting belatedly near the close of their time in office: in Trump’s case during the pandemic, with Title 42 restrictions, while in Biden’s case, the ongoing decline in border encounters resulted in “the lowest border numbers of [this] presidency”. Both were instances of improvised responses coming in “too little, too late”.

The most damning piece of dishonesty was presented by Trump himself during the Butler, Pennsylvania rally in which he nearly died. The big chart which he turned to look at as a bullet whizzed past his ear may have saved his life, but it was still chock full of lies. Most notably, an arrow on the X-axis of the graph indicates January 2020 as the point at which Trump left office, which precedes an uptick of irregular crossings — yet Trump left office in January 2021. It slipped beneath the news of an otherwise important day, but according to the same chart, the latest increase in illegal migration actually began under Trump and simply continued unabated under Biden.

Looking at Trump’s deeply mediocre record on immigration control, we get the impression of a president who does not really care about fixing the problem so much as drumming up support from it, ergo the enthusiasm for horror stories about Haitian migrants. The Trump era, after all, produced a parade of failed immigration bills, which illustrated the gap between GOP rhetoric and results. These included the 2017 Raise Act that would have deemphasised family reunification and established a Canadian-style points system; and then the two 2018 Goodlatte bills, which between them would have funded the wall and brought in mandatory E-Verify. Yet these proposals were defeated not by Democrats but by the then-Republican majority. Alongside these legislative duds was Trump’s own reluctance to support mandatory E-Verify in the White House budget, just as reports of illegal immigrants being hired at Trump Organization properties came to the fore in 2019.

A clever Harris counterattack on immigration would highlight these myriad Republican failures and hypocrisies before throwing the gauntlet back at Trump. Just as the former president mocked his opponent at the end of the recent debate, asking of the Vice President’s pledges “Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and half years…” so too could Harris retort “Why hasn’t he done it? Where is that ‘big, beautiful’ wall that Mexico was going to pay for?” But an even more important objective for any progressive realignment on the issue would be for Harris to catalyse a genuine transformation of attitudes from within the Democratic Party.

For this to happen, the issue has to be reframed away from the emotive narratives that have so far dominated the discourse; instead, the discussion could be centred around the material realities and economic costs of runaway migration. It’s a debate that’s already happening in places such as the UK, Western Europe, and Canada where the centre-left is trending toward a pragmatic restrictionism.

However, this is harder to pull off in the US, where entrenched donor elites in both major parties are committed to the open borders status quo. Realignment-minded Democrats must therefore find a countervailing set of interests to combat the influence of the professional elites who run their party, who generally combine material reliance on the undocumented serf class with moralistic views around immigration maximalism. This intra-party bloc could be assembled from unions and working-class minorities, who would be among the first to benefit from any tightening of the labour market that would come with a crackdown on illegal migration, through higher wages, more jobs and greater bargaining power.

A novel wing of “Border Democrats” could then emerge to take up the pro-immigration control arguments of heterodox Democratic leaders such as Bernie Sanders, Vicente Gonzalez, and late civil rights icon Barbara Jordan. After this, the policy momentum will be sure to follow: a progressive agenda could include the aforementioned mandatory E-Verify (far more effective than a wall), and a new “Alliance for Progress” that combines strong border security with generous developmental assistance. If Harris intends not just to defeat Trump but to diffuse many of the factors that gave rise to his movement, she would be wise to follow such a course. It would empower Democrats, humble Republicans, and restore the broad patriotic appeal of progressivism in an era of economic populism. 

Lately, however, another set of immigration policy trendlines have begun to alter the town’s pacific character. Demonstrations consisting of more recent arrivals, also from South Asia, can now be seen in Brampton, protesting the prospect of their deportation. Though they came to Canada either with temporary worker or student visas, they believe themselves entitled to permanent residency; some of these students are even protesting their own failing grades! That their presence in the country — amounting to a mind-boggling 2.8 million temporary residents in a population of 40-odd million — continues to exert distortionary effects on wages and housing seems not to bother the rally-goers.

Meanwhile, authorities have registered a 30% rise in hate crimes, a 187% increase in auto theft, and a staggering 350% rise in home invasions in the Peel region of which Brampton is part; this has come on the heels of last year’s interethnic tensions, following the slaying of a Sikh activist. These statistics are not to suggest that all crime stems from immigrants but rather that an environment of material scarcity and institutional breakdown conduces to higher rates of crime, whether committed by immigrants or native-born individuals.

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The most important immigration story of all

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In other words, Brampton, a microcosm for Canadian society, has begun to move away from the “bland” Bill Davis country of yesteryear, looking everyday a bit more like those politically fraught immigrant ghettoes found elsewhere; and its condition brings to mind another kind of Tory politician: Enoch Powell. Though Powell, of course, lived in another time and another country, his legacy had been to mark the passage of immigration from a point of quiet consensus into a source of intractable polarisation and social fragmentation. With more Canadians now expressing opposition to immigration, Canada faces its own “Enoch Powell moment”. And as the rest of the West reckons with the consequences of permissive migration, we must ask: how did Canada, so long a liberal multicultural oasis, begin to lose its exceptional status? To answer this, we must first understand the standards of the pre-existing immigration system, from which the current policies have so radically deviated.

Since the Sixties, Canadian immigration has operated on a principle of prudent control, both in terms of quality and quantity. In 1967, Ottawa came up with perhaps the greatest policy innovation that Canada ever produced: the points system, which could be used to measure candidates’ suitability for contributing economically and integrating socially in Canada.

At the same time, the nations of Western Europe, including Britain, were importing migrants from post-colonial peripheries to act as a “lumpenproletariat” or reserve army of labour, leading to a general erosion of social trust. Unlike in Canada where multiculturalism worked as a rhetorical gloss, European societies could not adjust so easily to their new situation, and it is in this context that Enoch Powell gave his infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, a divisive act that nonetheless served as an expression of the sense of alarm felt by many ordinary people.

Canada avoided this path — and not just because of its isolated geography. Its leaders consciously opted for a different approach, choosing to prioritise Canadians’ cohesion and security. As the demographics of post-Sixties immigration show, the points system does not discriminate on the basis of race. But it does discriminate in favour of a certain type of immigrant: English or French-speaking, skilled, educated, financially secure, upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial, and so forth, drawn from the middle classes of many nations. This is borne out by positive immigrant performance in such metrics as social mobility, savings accumulation, skills and educational achievement, and overall economic independence.

Thus, Canada is formally multicultural but functionally unicultural. The prevailing leitkultur is not ethnic or racial but rather sociological and class-based.

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What Farage can learn from Canada's Reform

By Michael Cuenco

It was Max Weber who made the connection between the austere theology of Calvinism and the ascendancy of the middle classes of industrialising Europe. At comparable stages of development, it is no surprise that something like Calvinism infuses the outlook of the middle classes of the developing world today, whatever their actual religion. It is an acquisitive (yet ascetic) classically bourgeois disposition that strives for success and respectability while retaining a commitment to family, community, and social order. This is what the points system draws from: it works to pre-empt Powell-esque backlashes by ensuring the quantity of immigration can be adjusted to economic conditions, while the quality is such that new arrivals reinforce the stabilising egalitarian character of society.

Until recently, parties cooperated to maintain this consensus, before a sea change unfolded around the time of Canada’s emergence from Covid-19, which had brought immigration to a standstill. The post-pandemic economy witnessed upward pressure on wages from tight labour markets and downward pressures on rental prices as well as the cratering of international student tuitions: businesses, landlords, and the higher education sector all stood to profit less. And as governments are more likely to respond to the concerns of these groups, policymakers rushed to restore a profitable climate for them. This meant one thing: jacking up the immigration intake.

Alongside immigration targets of more than 2 million new permanent residents until 2025/26 came a still more senseless move: the lifting of restraints on both the hiring of foreign workers and enrolment of international students; notably, these latter temporary streams did not have to pass through the points system to come to Canada, being let in with ever more liberality. The fact that federal Liberals under Trudeau and Ontario Tories under Doug Ford seemed to be of one mind on this only underscored how this arrangement — a betrayal of the previous, pro-middle-class system — had become the new consensus.

Even more damaging than the economic stress are the long-term social implications of having imported a new “lumpenproletariat”. Unlike the “Calvinist” middle-class immigrants of previous cohorts, these ones have often been taken en masse in from the villages and rural regions of their home countries, where lifestyles are markedly “pre-Calvinist”.

Canadian media, for predictable reasons, have been reluctant to report on just how problematic and maladaptive many in these cohorts have been, so journalistic accounts are scarce. But I have it on good authority from sources in the government, educational, and NGO sectors that many of these migrants are failing at most cultural markers of integration: from rampant cheating to disregard of basic norms to glaring lack of linguistic ability to a brazen willingness to bend public policies at every turn. If these trends continue, it won’t be long before places like Brampton acquire toxic reputations akin to the cultural powder kegs of Europe: the banlieus of Paris or the no-go zones of Malmö.

Beyond cuts to future intake across all streams, there can be only one sure way to restore balance to the system, so that it becomes bland again; and that is a sustained and far-reaching campaign of deportation of visa overstays.

But how can this be done?

It’s important first to note that the status quo in Canada is not open borders, even though the effect is similar. It is still a highly regulated and bureaucratised process that’s heavily reliant on visas, permits, and hiring forms; unlike in the US, where millions can live indefinitely as undocumented immigrants, Canada still has elements of a formidable “bureaucratic wall” and functional equivalents to “E-Verify” that could theoretically keep tab on overstayers. The Canadian government could use the vast array of data at its disposal from this system—bank accounts, employment records, bits of personal information and paper trails—to construct a comprehensive live database of temporary residents and prospective deportees, whose exit from the country can then be confirmed by exit controls.

The only thing missing, of course, is the political will to execute such a programme, for no major party seems to be really interested. Even if Canadians do go to an early election after this week’s political shake-up, it is unlikely that it will be fought over this issue. After decades of stability, Canada’s ruling class has chosen to squander its inheritance of the world’s most envied immigration policy. And as for what happens next, whether Canada ultimately goes the way of Bill Davis or Enoch Powell, we need only look to Brampton.

The truth, however, is that the Kursk incursion does not fundamentally alter the reality on the ground: this conflict is one of attrition, which, in the long run, still favours the larger power over the smaller. Rather than celebrate, then, Kyiv’s allies, in particular the United States, would be wise to use this turn of fortune as pretext to pressure both sides into seeking an end to the war — the better for Washington to be able to pursue its own larger strategic interests.

But how might it achieve this? Whether Democrat or Republican, the incoming administration will preside over a four-year period which could see the return of peace in Europe and the opportunity to shape the terms of a settlement with the Kremlin. Given intensifying competition with China and the unthinkable consequences entailed by an American defeat, US leadership would be remiss if it did not treat this eventuality as a cue to shift the balance of power. Or, as the prescient John J. Mearsheimer explained in 2022: “If you live in a world where there are three great powers — China, Russia, and the United States — and one of those great powers, China, is a peer competitor, what you want to do if you’re the United States is have Russia on your side of the ledger.”

Such a scenario would recall the foreign policies of two past presidents. First, it would represent a “reverse Nixon” in which Washington tries to cleave Russia away from China as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger cleaved Maoist China from the Soviet Union; and second, an attempt to enact a far more successful version of Barack Obama’s ill-fated Russia Reset. This time, however, the stakes are higher and the circumstances much more difficult than both scenarios, given the strong alliance between Russia and China. Yet insights from history can always be adapted to forge a fitting strategy for the current situation: the question is how?

Most obviously, a negotiated settlement in the form of an armistice — akin to that which ended the Korean War, in which the fighting ceased without definitive recognition of the belligerent’s competing territorial claims — may serve as an expedient conclusion to the war. The two sides could be made to return to something close to pre-2022 ante, which would regrettably allow continuing Russian control over Crimea and rule out the prospect of Nato membership for Kyiv, yet would preserve the existence of a sizeable and sovereign Ukrainian state. Such an outcome would please no one, but at the very least Putin’s ambition of conquering the whole of Ukraine would have been thwarted. There is also a parallel here with Nixon’s strategy when the Republic of China on Taiwan, formerly a key ally, had to be relegated in importance, as Ukraine may soon be, before the larger strategic goal of courting Beijing.

But will this be enough? After all, the US must prepare for the prospect of a long reset, one that will take more than just pressing a shiny button, as Hillary Clinton seemed to want to do, or even more than a future president’s visit to the Kremlin to shake hands with Putin, as with Nixon and Mao. This is because, as noted, unlike in 1972, when ideological differences in the Sino-Soviet Split kept the two communist giants apart, Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China are today in the midst of a so-called “partnership without limits”, which had been declared at a meeting between the two in early 2022. Just as the Biden administration has attempted to characterise the current geopolitical situation as a confrontation between democracies and autocracies, so too have Putin and Xi christened their bond as a bulwark against Western liberal hegemony.

In other words, anti-Americanism is the glue that holds their informal alliance together; yet take that particular element out of the equation and the picture of Sino-Russian friendship begins to look a lot more uncertain. This is because Russia and China are not natural allies and there are a number of vulnerabilities underlying their relationship that an intelligent American geostrategy can exploit:

To begin with, a longstanding sense of mistrust has persisted between these very distinct civilisations with sparse people-to-people ties, who are separated from each other by a vast 2,568-mile militarised border. There is also the aspect of ressentiment that arises out of any asymmetrical relationship: Russia, previously the dominant partner, has been relegated to junior status, and is now far more dependent on China for investment than the other way around. Even as Moscow leans into integration with China as a way to make up for lost Western trade, Chinese interest in Russia’s natural gas and industrial inputs is belied by Beijing’s strategy of diversifying energy and resource markets, such as through large investments in renewables. Unsurprisingly, Chinese investment in Russian pipeline projects in Siberia has fallen short of expectations. China also relied on Russia for its cheap weapons exports but has since become self-sufficient with the maturation of its own arms industries.

Meanwhile, resource-rich Central Asia has also seen expansion of Chinese presence, through Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which would link the landlocked former Soviet republics there into a broader Chinese-dominated trade order. Russia officially supports this and Putin has been a major presence at BRI summits, yet Moscow has struggled to sustain its own integration efforts with the Eurasian Economic Union, which has flailed since its launch in 2015 as a vehicle for the reassertion of Russian influence in an area it still sees as its sphere of influence.

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A new American strategy toward Russia for the latter half of the 2020s and beyond would seize on these weak spots in Sino-Russian relations. It would call for the progressive lifting of sanctions and gradual reintegration of Russia into Western trade, finance, and energy markets, alongside channelling Western capital into Russia to address its critical investment gaps in technology and infrastructure.

This is, of course, easier said than done. While Russian elites will only be too happy to be allowed back into the West’s banks and luxury shopping malls, the Russian state, whether under an ageing Putin or his successor, will likely be far more cautious, if not wary; Moscow will no doubt try to play off the Americans and Chinese against each other while benefiting from the largesse of both.

This will call for strategic patience on the part of Washington, which should aim to manage the residual tensions between the Kremlin and European allies, while encouraging Moscow to begin to assert itself against China in Central Asia. The US can also aim to integrate Russia with the bloc of Indo-Pacific states it is assembling — by, for instance, brokering deals and securing new customers for Russian energy and arms among the rising Indo-Pacific powers, whose defence capabilities the US is already looking to bolster as a counter to China’s growing military might.

A renewed Russo-American entente, however, would be most fruitful in a region that will only become more important in the decades ahead, namely the Arctic, where receding ice coverage will open new zones for shipping and resource exploration. China and Russia have worked towards the establishment of a “Polar Silk Road” which would give Beijing a presence in the polar north, where otherwise it would have none. The US should aggressively try to head off this possibility by making it a paramount strategic goal to ensure a “China-free Arctic”. It can only do this, however, if it can eventually convince the Russians to substitute Chinese for Western capital and technical assistance as a means of developing this vast untapped frontier. The best-case scenario would be to have an Arctic maritime trade region, managed exclusively by Russia and the Western Arctic powers, to bypass China’s BRI, through which certain resources and goods can be traded across continents without touching Chinese-controlled infrastructure.

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At a time of severe tension between Russia and the West, such projections may seem fantastical. But stranger things have happened: China’s transition from the most fanatically anti-American power to Washington’s partner was Nixon’s great feat, and the next president can start to do the same with Russia. With his expressed desire for mending ties with Moscow, Donald Trump would seem best suited to enact such a policy, but a Harris-led reproachment would actually embody the analogy better, since it was the dramatic turnaround after years as a Cold War hawk that made Nixon’s gambit such a political masterstroke: “Only Nixon can go to China,” as the saying went. One wonders if Kamala Harris can pull off a comparable pivot.

Only now, Americans will have to forgo the liberal triumphalism that proved to be so naïve in the recent past. Russia will likely persist as a distinct world civilisation and must be treated as such, even if it means countenancing its perennially illiberal forms of government. For the question of the next half-century will not be whether American political norms shall triumph over the earth, but whether America itself can survive this coming era of great power competition; and in this race, values must give way to interests and woolly-headed idealism to the coldest realism.

It would be easy to look at the flailing state of Trump’s campaign and pin the blame on an erratic candidate, or bad advisers, or, as so many have done, single out J.D. Vance as the source of the misfortune. But the fault lies neither with Trump nor Vance, nor any single individual. Instead, we must look back to the foundations of the modern conservative movement, for it is arguably the persistence of a distinct political culture rooted in those formative years that holds back the growth of the Republican coalition.

Since its emergence in the industrialising America of the 19th century, the Republicans had been the party of the buttoned-down business and professional classes, embodying hegemonic political capital. The Democrats encompassed those opposed to this hegemony, be they populist farmers and organised labour, rival blocs of provincial capital, and after the Sixties, the new social movements with their subaltern identities and subversive lifestyles. By 1972, they were the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion”. Yet even as the party coalitions rested on these coordinates, the first signs of a realignment began to take place — blue-collar workers started to show a propensity to vote for Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

There was a time, therefore, between the Seventies and the Nineties, when both the ascendant yuppies of America and working-class hardhats could be kept together in the Republican coalition. As long as they could be focused on a common enemy. In those years, thinkers on the Right found such an enemy in “the New Class”, not dissimilar from its conceptual counterpart in leftist discourse, the “professional managerial class” (PMCs).

The New Class trope has ever since played a central role in conservative demonology; they are defined by their college educations (usually in some airy liberal arts field) and extremely liberal (or “weird”) social views, but above all, by their perch as administrators and functionaries in bloated, non-competitive bureaucracies like government, academia, legacy media, and NGOs. These “verbalist elites” were a self-perpetuating caste of privileged mandarins; unlike the yuppies and the hardhats, they were insulated from risk and never got their hands dirty, residing instead in an immaterial realm of symbols and abstractions. The idea of the New Class was thus a convenient foil for conservative rhetoric on both free markets and social conservatism.

The American Right sought to organise itself around fighting this mandarin-dominated liberal establishment, whose control over public-sector and cultural institutions had to be overturned before the liberation of the still-virtuous private sector could be accomplished. Enter the rise of aggressive new conservative institutions meant to take back power in Washington: multimillion-dollar think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute looked not just to crafting policy but to credentialing whole cadres of conservative appointees who could fill executive and legislative offices; while journals like National Review set the moral tone of conservatism.

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For a time, it worked: the movement succeeded in shifting the policy agenda to the Right from the Reagan years onward. But it also came at a cost: hitherto, conservatism had largely relied on businessmen who got into activism to oppose measures they did not like. In the postwar era, businesses started to outsource this work to full-time activists. Where there had once been conservative professionals, there were now professional conservatives, represented by the likes of National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. This shift had profound effects on the character of conservative politics, which would become intellectualised as never before. This left the movement vulnerable to real-world shocks which its theoreticians could not comprehend.

The first of at least two shocks took place in the Nineties: Democrats started to syphon private sector professionals from the GOP under Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” who enthusiastically embraced the financial industry while remaining socially liberal; this jumpstarted the trend of educational polarisation. The next generation of yuppies thus had less reason to stick with Republicans when they could join the newly dynamic and glamorous Democrats. The Right was losing the battle for cultural prestige, thanks in no small part to the very same free market forces they unleashed, which greatly incentivised female labour market force participation and downgraded the social importance of families; hyper-financialised capitalism’s destabilising effect on culture had been wilfully overlooked. Around this time, the Republican Vice President Dan Quayle’s attack on sitcom character Murphy Brown prefigured Vance’s war on “cat ladies”, and for a time Quayle, too, seemed “weird” in light of that decade’s changing sensibilities.

A radically deregulated financial sector along with an over-hyped tech sector supercharged America’s transformation into a post-industrial and post-material simulacrum, precisely the kind of environment in which New Class-type functionaries thrive. Indeed, the line between the old New Class and the private sector PMCs of the new frictionless economy would become increasingly blurred. The sclerotic financial and tech sectors at the heart of the system ceased to be competitive in any classically capitalist sense and had come to resemble the same immovable Leviathan conservatives saw in the public sector, with an abundance of make-work “bullshit jobs”, overseen by authoritarian HR departments.

The failures of this status quo helped to put Trump in power, the second major shock. But the Trump administration suddenly veered away from its populist promise of 2016 and instead doubled down on free market fundamentalism, enacting policies that disproportionately benefitted the same corporate sectors responsible for the dysfunction. On top of this, it leaned heavily into social conservative causes, like abortion, even as popular attitudes have moved considerably towards a new centre-ground. What happened? The answer lies with the same professional conservatives, who staffed that administration and the Congressional GOP.

The Right’s apparatchiks had been frozen in the unchanging logic of their own stultified institutions, which upheld the inviolability of both free markets and social conservatism (while refusing to seriously acknowledge the tensions between them), independent of any changes in the larger social context. In effect, they became “Right-PMCs”. For the sprawling conservative think tank ecosystem in which they are bred is now no different from the rest of the New Class-dominated economy: NGO-like bureaucracies that live off donor generosity merely issue credentials and manage a vast symbolic economy of abstract ideas and officially sanctioned moral virtues. Conservatism Inc. became functionally identical to the same progressive academic establishment its polemicists routinely attack, only with one set of cultural and ideological signifiers swapped in for another.

And while these failures have de-legitimised many of the old think tanks in the eyes of younger intellectual conservatives, being college educated Right-PMCs themselves, their only response has been to come up with an alternative underground symbolic economy based on the circulation of edgy memes and reactionary ideologies. This so-called “dissident Right” merely wishes to reproduce the existing Right-PMC ecosystem but outfitted with Nietzschean and “based” dogmas instead of traditional conservative ones. But it is no less stamped by the same conceited intellectual culture that marked postwar conservatism: its advocates, like Buckley, tend to be effete, elitist, and eccentric; and many of the colourful “alternative lifestyles” (to use a euphemism) associated with the New Right arise from these reactionary online currents.

America’s cultural politics may thus be reduced to a struggle between two sets of symbol-worshipping PMCs: the overwhelming progressive majority of PMCs who coalesce around the Democrats and the Right-PMC minority who influence the Republican side. Both have beliefs that regular Americans would consider weird, but like competing sects of Brahmins in Vedic Age India, their battle is to settle whose religious doctrines and deities can appeal most to the masses of normies who toil in the fields; and the winner gets to call the other side weird. However, conservative attempts to beat progressive PMCs at this game of ruling through the maintenance of cultural-symbolic hegemony, while letting the material world decay, have come up short time and again. Probably because their rivals in the liberal establishment are far more disciplined, astute, and well-resourced.

Republicans ought to play a different game entirely. They should reclaim their historic role as the vanguard of entrepreneurial capitalism by cobbling together a coalition of economic self-interest between the two classes who are least vulnerable to ideological capture by college-educated elites: small-business elites (who tend to be very wealthy but uncultured) and the working class. In other words, an unlikely alliance who could help to reground the economy in the material realm, away from the rule of Brahmins. But this would require the Right-PMCs to restrain their own Brahmanical impulses: shifting their focus from waging endless culture war to forging a political economy that can serve this coalition’s practical interests, something they have so far proven incapable of doing. For the problem of the Brahmins on either side of the ideological divide is a classic one. As Right-PMC icon Reagan once said, it’s not that they’re ignorant, they know so much that isn’t so.

The parallels, however, don’t end there. Trump’s rambling speeches, to which he returned after resuming his campaign, are reminiscent of Bickle’s own paranoid mutterings  while Kamala Harris’s rhetoric sounds every bit like the empty suit Palantine; in fact, her last slogan “Kamala Harris For the People” recalls the equally inane “Palantine — We Are the People.” Real-world politics seemed yet again to be taking its cues from the Taxi Driver script.

Scorsese’s gritty urban epic was born of a decade (comparable to our own) associated with moral decline, traumatic random violence and paralysing elite failure. The anti-hero Bickle, like many then and now, struggled to give meaning to events and circumstances beyond his control. Today, fear and foreboding once again stalk the land. Is there anything Americans can do to avoid being overwhelmed by the senseless and inexplicable character of historical events?

The Seventies may hold clues. Its preceding decade was one of social revolutions, many of which either failed or fell short (not unlike the 2010s); and so, it is remembered as the post-Sixties’ “hangover”. Yet as historian Thomas Borstelmann argued, it was in these years that the changes initiated in the Sixties became mainstream: the shift from industrial liberalism to free markets; the breakdown of traditional authority and the loosening of social mores; the fracturing of modernity into relativism and hyper-individualism. Indeed, the same bleak environment that inspired Taxi Driver, the near-bankrupt New York City of the Seventies, also gave rise to one of 2024’s candidates. Donald Trump was then offering himself as the saviour who could stem the decay, ultimately personifying the bare-knuckle capitalism that prevailed in the next decade.

It was, therefore, a time when old narratives were dying but new ones had yet to take their place: the problem wasn’t so much that terrible things kept occurring on Americans’ television screens, but those watching lacked the ability to integrate them into shared frameworks of meaning. The succeeding narratives, after all, needed time to emerge organically. In hindsight, it is easy to interpret the era’s chaos: gas lines, rising crime, military defeat, and assassination attempts as the trajectory of a society in the midst of a painful but necessary crisis and transition stage while on the way back to renewal. Much harder to do the same when one is living through it, but finding narrative threads to connect events to their potential historical significance may nonetheless prove to be a worthwhile, even necessary, exercise.

Looking at the recent spate of turmoil, one may be tempted, like Bickle, to react with bottomless dread at what seems like a world breaking apart. Or one can, also like Bickle, by the end of the film, find ways of grappling with a grossly imperfect and contingent reality — but with an eye to arriving at larger sources of meaning and moral legitimacy — that is, to do more than just “cope”. It sounds abstract, but it has been done before and can be done again; after all, the malaise of the Seventies didn’t last forever and eventually gave way to “Morning in America” and the optimism of the Nineties. The question is what can fill the present narrative void?

Take the two-week period between the 13 July attempt on Trump’s life and the unification of the Democrats around Harris by 27 July, which will have to go down as one of the most consequential in US politics. Yet much of what happened was largely the product of chance. A lone assassin managed to mount a rifle across from a former president and the target turned his head at just the right time to avoid a headshot. A week later, a frail Joe Biden stepped aside and instantly endorsed his vice president as successor, who had been chosen due to political considerations from the last election year, when fallout from a contingent event, George Floyd’s death, led to “a woman of colour” being in demand. (The distasteful “DEI candidate” accusation should not detract from the connection, freely admitted to by progressives, between the atmosphere of 2020 and Biden’s selection process.)

Both parties made hasty adaptations to the situation by putting the most convenient spin on it. However, these partisan attempts to ascribe meaning to accidents, being much too grounded in the immediacy of the present, suffer from a severe lack of historical perspective. And while these are perhaps understandable as initial reactions, they will not suffice going forward.

In the case of the Republicans, the defects of this approach became clear at their convention, held throughout the week after the attempt: it was naturally suffused with a sense of awe at Trump’s survival. Yet the question of to what end this emotional power and political capital would be expended was buried beneath the exuberance. Consider the contrasting sets of talking points employed by Trump’s vice-presidential pick Ohio Senator J.D. Vance on the one hand; and long-time Congressman Steve Scalise on the other. Embodying his party’s insurgent “New Right” wing, Vance spoke of breaking with ideological dogmas of the Republican past, and of the need for a “leader who fights for the workers in this country”, as opposed to the “Wall Street barons” who “crashed the economy”. Scalise, meanwhile, argued that the Party should look to make the overwhelmingly pro-Wall Street tax cuts they passed in 2017 “permanent”, a view shared by many of his fellow Republican rank-and-file Congress members. Depending on what the policy direction of a second Trump term ends up being, whether it follows Vance’s or Scalise’s divergent wishes, a future historian looking at this convention would probably wonder what the significance of Butler, Pennsylvania might have been.

This historian could ask: Did Trump’s near brush with martyrdom signify a fateful turning in the transformation of the Republican Party — as affirmed by his anointment of Vance days later? Or did the ex-president miraculously cheat death only to return the Right to the nostrums of the Reagan–Bush era, the same elite consensus he sought to overthrow when he first ran in 2016? One need not be looking back in 50 years’ time, however, to be able to retrospectively confer the highest meaning to the incident at Butler. For the ability to deduce and act upon such a logic in real time is the mark of any great statesman.

Likewise, on the Democrats’ side, there is widespread relief that their ticket is no longer saddled with a nominee in cognitive decline, so much so that the establishment has willingly overlooked the many known defects of Harris as a politician. Indeed, the Party seems to have become carried away with how their new nominee checks many of the boxes in the progressive identity wish list. There is now a question of whether the Harris campaign will lean more heavily into identity-centred messaging, similar to how Hillary Clinton ran her failed 2016 campaign, or whether it will tap into the class-centred populist themes that sustained Amtrack Joe’s successful 2020 run and, indeed, the Biden administration’s own “Bidenomics” industrial policy programme.

Once again, the future historian may wonder at which direction history had moved and why the Democrats, after having been given a lifeline, went back to the race-conscious but class-agnostic “Rainbow Coalition” strategy of the neoliberal Nineties rather than build on the recent gains they made in the industrial Midwest, where they were once able to reclaim the populist torch from Trump. As with Republicans, the danger is that Democrats go for a feel-good approach that resonates emotionally in the short term but which dispenses with the larger historical perspective that’s guided the Biden team’s thinking on policy, namely that “the free market at home and globalisation’s effects wrought havoc”. This is a clue that the party should focus on this reckoning with structural forces underlying America’s economy, from which a universalist message of material uplift can be drawn on to appeal to voters across racial and gender lines.

It would help to understand the 2020s as a yet another transitional stage, when the revolutions initiated in the 2010s, representing a reverse pendulum effect from the Taxi Driver decade, are starting to take hold: free markets are giving way to the next economic paradigm just as the excesses of postmodern fragmentation have led to a yearning for new narratives of unity and cohesion. And as with the Seventies, the transition will be turbulent.

What is needed is a fresh script or grand narrative to relate chaotic events back to just such a larger horizon of time and meaning, one which can fuse small-h history with big-H History. It is undoubtedly the Republican candidate who began our revolutionary moment eight years ago, but it is arguably the Democrat running against him who summarised this view of history best: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Indeed, just as the most banal slogans can be entirely accurate, even the most random events can sometimes bear larger truths.

The episode is particularly poignant today, in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, when it appears as if the very life and unity of the republic is on the line. In light of this, 1924 offers a parable not just for Democrats but for Republicans and, indeed, all Americans, who may be interested in taking the longer-term view and envisioning how the nation might get through this darkly ominous season of disunity.

During the Twenties, the Republicans were the party of the “ins”, uniting financial and industrial interests centred in the Northeast with well-to-do farmers, professionals and businessmen from most of the rest of the country, outside the South. The election of 1920 saw the triumph of the Republicans under Warren Harding after the Wilson interlude and the First World War.

The states of the old Confederacy voted against Republicans not just out of post-Civil War bitterness but because their region had been reduced to an economic backwater, left out of the industrial development that transformed the North and consigned to be its captive market. The fact that Southern elites retained the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow on top of a half-feudal agrarian economy based on exploitation of ex-slaves and poor whites alike did not help. And for these reasons, they, along with some of the similarly underdeveloped regions in the Western periphery, saw themselves as outcasts and opponents of Northeastern capital, and were thus Democrats.

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But they were not the only segments of the country with an axe to grind. The industrial working class in many big Northern cities suffered from the effects of a highly unequal economy: shabby tenements, low wages and poor working conditions. This united them with the hinterlands and cemented Democrats as the party of the “outs”. There was, however, one problem: the ranks of the urban classes were swelled by immigrants and their children, many were Catholic or Jewish and, if not Irish, came from even more alien south and east European cultures. Meanwhile, the American South and West were — just like their Northern rivals — overwhelmingly Anglo-Protestant and were susceptible, to say the least, to xenophobic and anti-Catholic prejudice.

It’s worth mentioning that the debacle of 1924 took place before cultural affinities became the main criterion for party affiliations, as it is today. This meant that parties, the Democrats in particular, could hold constituencies with radically opposed views on identity or morality (“culture war issues”) as part of the same electoral coalition.

The intra-Democrat divide set the stage for the 1924 showdown at Madison Square Garden, to select a challenger to Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge. The two frontrunners were Governor Al Smith of New York and Senator William Gibbs McAdoo of California. The Irish-Italian Smith was a tribune of the urban proletariat, having risen from humble origins to become a forceful advocate for progressive reforms in state government. He had been supported by New York City’s Tammany Hall machine. McAdoo was a financial technocrat, originally from Tennessee, who presided over the opening of the Federal Reserve as Treasury Secretary under his father-in-law Woodrow Wilson. Working for his candidacy — though he could not acknowledge it — was the Ku Klux Klan.

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The tragedy was that Smith’s and McAdoo’s overlapping reformist tendencies could not coalesce into a coherent platform due to the enmity of their bases. Instead, they duelled over Prohibition and an anti-Klan plank. The proceedings were marred by violence between Tammany toughs and Klansmen; the nomination process stretched out across 103 gruelling ballots over 16 days. American journalist H.L. Mencken described it as “3,000 dogs in one great pit, all frantically chasing their tails”.

The announcement of a winner was as anticlimactic as it was fatal to the Democrats’ chances in the November election: stalemated delegates settled on John W. Davis, a lawyer from West Virginia, who shared neither Smith’s nor McAdoo’s talents. There was no coming together and predictably, the Democrats suffered a landslide defeat to the Coolidge Republicans, earning only 29% of the popular vote and securing only 12 states, all in the South. Intra-party tribalism persisted until the next election in 1928, when Smith won the nomination, and several ex-Confederate states bolted for the Republican candidate Herbert Hoover, rather than vote for a Catholic.

In the end it took a crisis, namely the Crash of 1929, to weld Democrats back together in time for 1932. That year’s nominee was the man who introduced Smith as “the Happy Warrior” in 1924. Franklin D. Roosevelt did what his predecessor could not: unite the industrial working class with the hinterlands under the banner of the New Deal, despite their lingering hatreds. FDR’s administration granted relief and employment to workers at the same time as it subsidised development of the South and West. Compromises were struck, however, with respect to racial equality and labour unions in the South, whose reactionary culture could not yet countenance the pace of change (leaving it to a later era to enact Civil Rights).

But the economy sprung back into production: workers of all races and creeds as well as the backwater regions saw living standards improve from the depths of the Depression, though it took the Second World War to consolidate this progress. While McAdoo remained a Roosevelt partisan, Smith became a fierce critic, never acknowledging that the New Deal’s success rested on foundations he and his convention rival had jointly laid: its welfare-developmental state was a synthesis of their best instincts.

This optimistic moment in US history illustrates that seemingly intractable resentments between feuding tribes can be overcome by a shared agenda of sweeping material reform and renewal. But how could such a blueprint possibly be applied to today’s divided America?

It’s important to remember that beneath the “friend-enemy” tribalism that’s taken hold, the two parties are still coalitions of interests. The upheavals of both the post-2016 Right and Left stem, not so much from the working class, but from the anxieties of two rival “subaltern elites”: the small-business “gentry” class which presides over struggling de-industrialised hinterlands (not unlike the places represented by McAdoo); and the downwardly mobile professional managerial classes or “clerisy” who live in the major urban metropoles (not unlike the places represented by Smith).

Both of these factions hold outsize influence within their parties; both led the turn away from neoliberalism. And the outline of a programme to unite them has become evident in recent years. Bidenomics is, after all, the Democrats’ adaptation of the same criticisms against globalisation levelled by Donald Trump in 2016, while populist Republicans in the Senate have developed their own industrial policies closer in spirit to what the Democrats are doing than the tax cuts and austerity proposals still officially favoured by their party leadership.

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A programme of industrial redevelopment would benefit both the clerisy and the gentry: the former from the expansion of demand for managerial talent that would come with decentralisation of economic activity away from bloated prestige sectors such as finance and tech; the latter from the capital that reshoring would bring to the left-behind regions which they preside over as local elites. It would create jobs for the working class as well. That the Democrats’ national industrial policies are leading to increased investment in low-regulation, Republican-voting districts is already a sign that such a non-zero-sum modus vivendi is plausible, if the political incentive isn’t to constantly self-polarise, as Smith and McAdoo did.

What’s needed is firstly a positive vision around which the tribes can coalesce. If that doesn’t work, a period of emergency, like that of 1929-1945 may do the trick. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan and seizure of its chip industry, with all the major geopolitical and economic implications this would have for America, could be the impetus that finally brings these brawling groups together.

This is all supposing that Americans can put aside their differences, as Smith’s and McAdoo’s factions eventually did, in pursuit of something larger than themselves. This is a decade-long bet: the short-term outlook is admittedly grimmer, for the country has to stay together long enough to mount such reforms and the tensions currently on display are about as toxic as they were 100 years ago. But with an eye to the future and confidence in themselves, Americans must recognise: the only way out is through.

Looking at the names being floated over the past week, there are two possible successor generations: Generation X and millennial. Yet of those being touted — Vice President Kamala Harris, Governors Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, J.B. Pritzker and Andy Beshear, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — only one, Buttigieg, does not belong to Gen X (while Harris, born in 1964, straddles the line). This is a shame. For while there is little doubt that the United States is overdue for generational change, it is not at all clear that Gen X embodies the kind of change that America needs.

Both these generations have been known to chafe under the suffocating domination of their Boomer predecessors; and both have gone through phases of rebellion against the same. Yet there are also crucial differences: one generation came of age in the heyday of globalisation, before Y2K and the other reached adulthood at the tail end of it around the 2008 crash. This has resulted in two distinct forms of political consciousness. As a consequence, beneath the question of which geriatric party establishment shall hold the keys to power in the next four years, a more important one looms: which generational value set will prevail over the next 40? For the present era is a one of paradigmatic transition: the days of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush are at a close, but what will replace it is still far from certain.

To answer this, we must return to the Boomers. Born after the war, this cohort grew up amid the greatest expansion of middle-class wealth ever recorded — the product of the dynamic industrial economy left behind by the G.I. generation. By the Seventies, however, it began to stagnate, and their response was to build a new economy based largely on financialisation, real estate and tech. As a result, between 1983 and 2023, average house prices rose by 500% and the value of stocks as measured by the S&P 500 benchmark index grew by 2,800%. Cheap credit, free trade, and a tech-driven productivity boom in the Nineties combined with these trends to give the impression of an economy growing in leaps and bounds. And it paid dividends, mainly for the Boomers, who got to keep the lion’s share of the gains, amounting to half the nation’s assets ($78.3 trillion in 2023), even as later events, such as the Great Recession and the reckoning over “the China Shock” exposed the growth of this era as illusory and unsustainable.

By the 2020s, as Boomer retirements accelerate, Gen Xers and millennials are set to inherit this wealth, in what’s been dubbed “the Great Wealth Transfer“. To what end this wealth is deployed will be the defining question of the next paradigm. And it is here where the divide between the Gen X and millennial political value sets come into play.

The romantic self-image of the Gen Xers is grounded in traits such as independence and stoicism: they were the “latchkey kids”, or as Rich Cohen put it in Vanity Fair, “the last Americans schooled in the old manner [who] know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds”. In their youth, anti-political cynicism formed the basis of their own counter-counterculture against the passé idealism of the Boomers.

Yet in its maturity, around the turn of the millennium, this cohort failed to produce a properly political expression that was practically distinct from the post-Reagan status quo, which they could only assent to, notwithstanding the directionless anti-corporate currents of the Clinton years or the anti-war movement of the Bush years. After all, these were peak “End of History” decades and the free market appeared to be humming just fine. Though not as socially mobile as the Boomers and despite having had to deal with recession in the early Nineties, Gen Xers still benefited from the boom times that followed; they had an overall easier time starting careers, forming households, and joining the middle class than the later post-2008 millennial cohorts. The same individualist ethos extolled by the likes of Cohen or Bret Easton Ellis worked well within the parameters of the highly atomised post-industrial paradigm that existed before the big crash: Gen X could afford to retain the apathy and detachment of their youth because, structurally speaking, there were little to no stakes.

Of course, Gen Xers were, like everyone else, affected by the Great Recession. But by this point, their institutional conservatism had arguably been baked into their generational character; and it would, in any event, have been unlikely for them to develop revolutionary aspirations in middle age (something left to the millennials). In the contest for a Biden replacement, this conservatism is discernible, albeit very subtly concealed, in the stances and rhetoric of the Gen Xer candidates.

In a recent New York Times interview, for instance, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, born in 1971, made her case for generational change: “We recognise that our parents’ generation has had a lot of excess. So I’m hopeful that we can really move the needle, whether it’s bringing down our nation’s debt or ensuring that we are active when it comes to climate and solidifying and protecting individual rights.” Here, strikingly, Whitmer’s unit of analysis remains “individual”. She also lists the debt as her leading issue, reflecting a scale of priorities unchanged from Boomer liberalism’s high noon in the Nineties, when fiscal rectitude, environmentalism, and social progressivism were the orders of the day.

Listening to Newsom, Pritzker or Harris, one also struggles to find awareness of political horizons outside this paradigm. Indeed, it may very well be that the whole idea of thinking in terms of material economic structures is anathema to the Gen X as well as the Boomer mindset, having been conditioned against that possibility by the “post-materialist” abundance of their formative years.

Contrast this with Buttigieg’s words when he was last a presidential contender in 2019: “A lot of this is the consequence of what you might call the Reagan consensus… The empirical collapse of that supply side consensus, I think, is one of the defining moments of this period… It turns out a rising tide does not lift all boats. Not on its own.” Where Whitmer has “the individual”, the unit of analysis here is “the paradigm” — that is, the web of structures, norms and rules which set the range of possibilities for most Americans.

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In recognising the passage of paradigms, Buttigieg is arguably closer to fellow millennials on the progressive, post-Occupy Left and the heterodox “New Right” than he is to his ostensible fellow centrist liberals from the Gen X cohort. While late Boomers like Barack Obama and Gen Xers like Jake Sullivan might have also acknowledged the need to transcend Reaganism-Clintonism, they have often had to come to their conclusions through reflection. But what is merely theoretical to them is all too real to most politically conscious millennials, who grew up in the wreckage of the old order. Unlike the Gen Xers, their youthful rebellions were explicitly political on both ends of the ideological spectrum.

In particular, there is a compelling parallel between Buttigieg and fellow millennial rising star (and prospective Trump VP candidate) J.D. Vance. Both hail from de-industrialised hinterlands, are veterans of Bush-era forever wars, and have expressed desires to break from their parties’ Boomer-era orthodoxies on political economy, even as they continue to hold opposing views on social issues. It recalls the dynamic between Clinton and Bush: they might have disagreed on abortion or gay rights, but the common denominator between them — support for financialisaton and globalisation — nonetheless underpinned the last consensus.

And today, so too might the common denominator between the millennial Right and Left give rise to a new consensus based on de-financialisation and national re-industrialisation, a worthy goal to which the flow of American capital and investment may be directed, as “the Great Wealth Transfer” begins to unfold. Unlike the Boomers, who sucked the world dry, or the Gen Xers, who failed to do anything about it, the millennials may yet leave a better and fairer country to those that follow in Generations Z, Alpha, and beyond. The elevation of a president from this generation, from either party, would likely hasten the realisation of this hopeful future.

Come 4 July, the Scottish Nationalists are in danger of losing badly, having become bound up with a militant current of minoritarian social liberalism which undermines the collective and civic basis of classical nationalism, as it has historically existed on the Left. Meanwhile, the national project of the Brexiteers, which lives on the Right, fell short of its own lofty expectations: its architects in the Conservative Party (set to fare even worse than the SNP) proved unable to deliver on their promise of a Britain secure from the ravages of economic and cultural globalisation. 

In short, Britons seem unable to do nationalism with any success or conviction, that is, to put it into practice beyond its merely performative aspects. So, as the election day approaches, where can the British political establishment look to form a coherent nation-based system?

There is, one place that anyone aspiring to a functional nationalism, in Britain or elsewhere, can take notes from: a forgotten corner of its former empire, where the people happen to do a decent job of maintaining themselves both as a nation and a state, even if it isn’t actually a state in the Westphalian sense. I’m talking about Quebec, a Canadian province that is also a nation unto itself, and one with its own fraught history of holding referendums. Today is Quebec’s own Fête nationale: Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. And what better occasion to survey the trajectory of nationalism there?

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The animating fact of Quebec politics and history is that of survivance, the desire of its people to survive as a distinct society of Francophones in the midst of an overwhelmingly Anglophone continent. Though Quebec’s identity is rooted in the French language and descends from a heritage that stretches back to New France, modern Quebec nationalism was forged in the Fifties and Sixties, in a time of immense social change known as la Révolution Tranquille (The Quiet Revolution). It saw the conservative and pro-clerical regime of Maurice Duplessis replaced by the reforming government of Jean Lesage, which nationalised utilities and took over education and welfare services from the Catholic Church; these measures established the modern contemporary incarnation of l’etat québécois or the Quebec state, looked to by its people as the supreme institutional expression of the Quebecois nation.

In the Seventies, desires arose among both the political-intellectual elite and the broad populace to make that Quebec state sovereign: their leader was journalist-turned-Lesage cabinet minister René Lévesque, who executed the utilities nationalisation scheme. His Parti Québécois (PQ) would lead the push for independence from Canada with the referendum of 1980; though it was rejected by a 60-40 margin, Lévesque’s government nonetheless largely shaped the character of Quebec nationalism for decades to come: Left-wing, pro-union, secularist, feminist, environmentalist, and aligned with global anti-colonial currents. It was under Lévesque as well that Quebec passed legislation to enshrine French as its official language, cementing the Quebec state’s role as defender of the national character. 

La Révolution Tranquille, however, also spawned a divergent and opposing tradition: federalism, which may be understood formally to mean an acceptance of continued membership in the Canadian federation. But in Quebec, it also has deeper philosophical underpinnings: a kind of radical emancipatory individualist liberalism developed in the pages of the Duplessis-era dissident journal Cité Libre. Its great champion was Pierre Trudeau, who as prime minister of Canada prevailed in the 1980 referendum, but whose subsequent actions sowed the seeds of the knife-edge second referendum of 1995, when Quebec nearly seceded, had it not been for a 54,288-vote margin (1.16%) in favour of “Non”. 

For 40 years, Quebec politics was a struggle between the two poles, nationalist-sovereigntist and federalist, with “soft” or semi-nationalist compromises sometimes gaining ground. By the 2010s, however, something different was happening, a depolarisation of the old sovereignty debate and the emergence of a new alternative: firmly nationalist but agnostic or neutral on independence. Such a stance meant that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) could attract both soft nationalists and sovereigntists, amounting to a majority of the Francophone electorate. Indeed, this was the formula that its founder and leader François Legault used to win power in the elections of 2018 and 2022.

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The CAQ has pledged to leave behind the quest for independence, treating it as a settled affair (Legault was a former PQ minister). But it has never hesitated to brandish its nationalist credentials in other ways, namely its aggressive agendas on language, culture, and migration: these can be discerned in a bevy of new regulations expanding French-language requirements for businesses, immigrants and English universities, in addition to raising the latter’s tuition costs. Legault has also routinely squared off with Justin Trudeau’s federal government, pressuring it to act more decisively in halting the flow of refugees through Quebec’s borders, as well as proposing a referendum — not on independence — but on strengthening immigration powers. 

Though what is significant from a historical point of view is what the CAQ represents: the re-emergence of Right-wing nationalism as a dominant force. Indeed, the intellectual implications of this tendency are only now being fleshed out by a new generation of thinkers, led by the likes of Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, Legault’s 23-year-old speechwriter, who published a treatise Le Retour des Bleus (“Return of the Blues”) attempting to revive the conservative or bleu strain of Quebec nationalism; this would entail a rehabilitation of figures such as Duplessis, whose legacy remains anathema to the largely progressive sovereigntist movement.

Just as interesting is the recent resurgence of the PQ as the chief opposition to Legault’s CAQ. After having been written off as a dying Boomer-era artefact, the sovereigntist party has risen in the polls under an energetic young leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, who has threatened to hold a third referendum on independence. However, tough support for the PQ has not actually translated into support for the idea of sovereignty, suggesting that this boost in the PQ’s fortunes has more to do with voicing dissatisfaction with Legault than with Quebecers wanting to revisit the issue. 

All of which means that Quebec politics now appears to be a contest between two vigorous but antagonistic nationalisms; a fact highlighted by the decline of the federalist Quebec Liberals. Though the tension is genuine, these two variants of nationalism are nonetheless united both in their recognition of the Quebec nation as a civic-collective entity, as illustrated by their common resistance to the minoritarian social liberalism that’s taken hold in the rest of Canada; and in their shared readiness to deploy the powers of the Quebec state as a means of safeguarding that nation (leaving aside whether that state should be sovereign), as shown by the activist policies of the nationalist parties, Left and Right. As a result, for instance, Quebec’s language regime may seem absurd or even vindictive to outsiders and non-Francophones, but it starts to make a bit more sense when viewed as part of a larger historical project, that of ensuring national survivance. 

These linguistic and cultural differences aside, we can glean the operative principle for those — in Britain, America or Anglo-Canada or elsewhere — who find themselves drawn to the nationalist persuasion after years of hyper-globalisation: the nation-state only makes sense if both its constituent terms are taken seriously. 

For those on the Left, reclaiming the nation requires promoting unifying bonds and symbols of nationhood over and above the subaltern identity politics that’s become fashionable across the West, for the nation is ultimately what legitimates the state. For the Right, meanwhile, a constructive nationalism in the post-Brexit era will have to rest on restoring the state and its capacity to act in defence of the nation, most of all with respect to borders and rebuilding industry. It will involve a rejection of that odious and long descredited combination of free market-ism and flag waving that’s been the standard of the Anglo-Saxon Right for decades.

For as many a Québécois can attest, without a powerful state to act on your behalf in a hostile world, any nation, no matter how historically great, is liable to be reduced to, in David Starkey’s phrase, a “feeble little country.”

This may sound like the current general election campaign in the United Kingdom but it is, in fact, an account of another campaign in another country and in another decade: Canada’s historic 1993 federal election. The Tory government in question was that of prime minister Kim Campbell and her Progressive Conservative Party (or PCs); the centre-left opposition was the Canadian Liberal Party; and the Reform insurgency belonged to Preston Manning, who went on to achieve his ambition of displacing the PCs as Canada’s Right-wing alternative.

The government was reduced from 156 seats to two (a “mating pair”), having been devoured on all sides. It is this aspect of the 1993 campaign, the spectacle of near-total annihilation for the Tory establishment, that so entices Farage and his supporters. 

Though the analogy is not exact by any means, Farage has repeatedly invoked the Canadian model of populist transformation in his campaign’s opening phase. As he told the Sunday Times: “Why do you think I called it Reform? Because of what happened in Canada — the 1992-93 precedent in Canada, where Reform comes from the outside, because the Canadian Conservatives had become social democrats like our mob here.”

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But what exactly does following this model entail? The answer would depend on which standard of success Farage holds: if he wishes to influence political discourse by moving the Overton Window in the direction of certain ideas, such as dramatically curbing migration, then he could reprise the role he played as the leader of Ukip: as an ideological trendsetter rather than a wielder of power.

At the launch of yesterday’s Reform manifesto — or glibly labelled “contract with the people” — we saw glimpses of this. Pledging to “stop the boats” in 100 days is clearly not a political possibility, but suggesting you can will inevitably draw in voters’ attention. Similarly, Farage claimed his party would massively cut taxes for people on all incomes — a proposal which, when faced with the reality of public finances, is a fantasy. But for Farage and Reform who will never actually have their hands on the treasury pursestrings, it is an easy way to shift the conversation to the Right on taxes.

If he truly wishes to take the path to political hegemony laid out by Canadian Reform, then it will require considerably more work and perseverance on the part of Farage; and it will be far from certain whether he will be the one to reap the spoils of such a strategy, or whether he will end up like Manning, who paved the way for the populist Right only to be displaced by the younger and more astute Stephen Harper. In other words, the Canadian model has its pluses and pitfalls. 

Canada in the early Nineties was a country — not unlike Britain in the 2020s — reeling from a bout of political post-traumatic stress disorder, having just gone through a highly divisive and exhausting period of existential debate over the nature of Canadian federalism and sovereignty, and in particular, the question of Quebec’s status. Just as with the post-Brexit years in the UK, Canada’s leaders promised grand schemes of constitutional renewal only to fall short each time while practical economic issues, like spiralling debt and declining business confidence, seemed to go unaddressed. In addition, the Western Canadian provinces felt as if metropolitan elites in places like Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal held a vision of national unity that came at their expense. The fact that the country had been ruled by Brian Mulroney’s Tories since 1984 seemed to make little difference, for they had appeared to be just as out-of-touch as Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals had been: this was the Canadian equivalent of what is today called the “Uniparty”.

The perceived lack of attention to the concerns of ordinary voters, especially those in hinterland regions, opened up space for a new option in Canadian politics, one which could reset the terms of debate in favour of those who felt left behind. This was the gap that Preston Manning aimed to fill when he founded Reform in 1987, his goal being a “New Canada” grounded in the “the common sense of the common people”. Even as he worked to build grassroots networks out of scratch, he was for all intents and purposes the lone face of the party; the son of an evangelical former premier of Alberta, he brought a preacher’s zeal to his quest to rein in the size of government, decentralise the federation and, as he saw it, end the privileges of the Ontario and Quebec-centric metropolitan elite. Manning and Reform also raised stringent criticisms of bilingualism, multiculturalism and what it regarded as lax immigration policy. Though Manning aspired to a universalist populism, Reform was largely seen as the vehicle of Western Canadian alienation. 

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And on election day, the West came out heavily for Manning’s message of revolt, trading in Tory seats for Reform en masse, just as Quebec voters lodged their protest vote with the new separatist Bloc Québecois, hollowing out the precarious Tory coalition and and handing power to the Liberals. From the opposition benches, Reform would galvanise Canadian politics Rightward, outshining the Tory rump and eventually mounting a reverse takeover of the Progressive Conservatives by merging with it a decade later in 2003.

This was the foundation of the reunified Conservative Party of Stephen Harper, a Manning lieutenant, who governed as prime minister from 2006 to 2015. Under Harper’s insistence, the new party dropped the “Progressive” moniker — and with good reason, for the post-2003 Tories are ideologically and temperamentally a different party: much more hard-edged, libertarian and rooted in prairie populism. (Its current leader and likely next Canadian prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, got his start as a young Reform activist in Calgary.)

In hindsight, it is easy to recount what happened with Canadian Reform, as Farage so often does, and imagine that its victory was preordained, with the implication being that Reform UK faces a comparably straightforward path to realigning the British Right. But Farage should take note: the opposition years were no cakewalk for either Reform or the old-line Tories.

As Canada’s Liberals governed for over a decade, it proved to be a gruelling stretch for the Canadian Right, wracked as it was by dissension, demoralisation and uncertainty. The tribal differences between the two parties were real enough that it prevented meaningful cooperation for years. Furthermore, as the Liberals won one majority after another, thanks in large part to conservative infighting, they appropriated parts of Manning’s agenda on fiscal retrenchment, debt reduction, and balanced budgets — and even dramatically tightened immigration requirements — taking the wind out of Reform’s sails and blunting its immediate appeal. It was not at all clear if Canadian conservatism would make it out of the Liberal epoch alive. Now faced with his own long odds, can Farage navigate his party through a similarly treacherous time in the wilderness? 

Much will depend on how the two camps of the British Right will regroup once the present general election campaign yields its expected result on 4 July: a Labour-majority government. Owing to the very different electoral and geographic dynamics in the UK, it is unlikely for Farage’s party to come close to anything like the clean sweep that Canadian Reform obtained when it stole the bulk of Tory seats west of Ontario. Yet it is also probable that defeat under Rishi Sunak will empower and elevate a new breed of hard-Right Tory leadership candidates who can potentially match Farage in their commitment to populist concerns around migration and law-and-order issues: the likes of Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch come to mind. In such a scenario, there is no guarantee that Farage will have a monopoly on populist energies and loyalties in the years of opposition that lie ahead.

And just as Manning’s Reform opened the political space for Canada’s Liberals to move Right on fiscal policy, so too could a highly vocal Reform presence in Westminster do the same with respect to the next Labour government’s approach to migration. For all the talk of Labour’s metropolitan base as being intractably liberal and maximalist on immigration, a restrictionist strain has arguably flowed in the party’s veins for much of the last decade, going back to Ed Miliband’s 2015 promise to restore “controls on immigration” (famously plastered on a red mug) to Keir Starmer’s current pledge to outflank Sunak and cut “sky-high” net migration. Indeed, this is generally how populist revolts work, by exerting pressure rather than exercising power directly. This was, after all, how a previous incarnation of Faragist populism got the Cameron government to hold the 2016 Brexit referendum. 

So, where could it all end for Farage? By the 2000s, Manning was seen as tired and lost a leadership race, giving way to a generation of his protégés, including Harper, who went on to take the Conservatives to electoral victory. Manning was relegated to a respected but sidelined role as elder statesman. Perhaps Farage’s fate will play out in similar terms. The British Right is said to be undergoing a profound generational shift in ideas and outlook, which he helped to make happen: Farage’s contribution to history may well be in charting a course of political realignment that will ultimately be completed by someone younger, cleverer, and more disciplined than he could ever be. 

Yet by the end of the Fifties, Eisenhower was rejected by the nation’s tastemakers as dull, doddering and spent: Ike, they said, played golf for eight years. As the GIs were domesticated by middle-class life in the suburbs, there came a new hero to behold: JFK also fought in the war, but his distinguishing traits were youth, manly vigour and an irrepressible sense of hipness, which had special appeal for those born after the war — the “Baby Boomers”.

Responding to this air of expectation was Norman Mailer, the enfant terrible of the literary world, who in both his novels and his personal life exuded machismo: an angry undercurrent of male alienation that flowed just beneath the surface of the reigning suburban culture.

Weeks before the 1960 election, Mailer wrote his first political essay. Published in Esquire, his aim in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” was not just to boost Kennedy as the hero Americans needed, but to attack and discredit everything the Eisenhower era represented: its deeply “square” ideas of manhood — arising from notions of duty, responsibility, self-control and an engrained respect for authority — sounded almost Victorian to Mailer’s ears. “A tasteless, sexless, odourless sanctity in architecture, manners, modes, styles has been the result” of Ike’s leadership, he claimed. In place of the conformist “organisation man” of the Fifties, Mailer envisioned a new and vital masculine archetype for the Sixties, someone who can “touch depths in American life which were uncharted”.

Holding up JFK as the vessel, Mailer hoped that politics could be fused with the “underground river” of the American psyche — the unconscious realms of myth, art, instinct and aesthetics — and thus turned into an arena for limitless self-expression. His vision was a potent expression of the Sixties ethos, predicated as it was on the individual’s restless spirit of rebellion against the institutions.

Though that decade saw the rise of feminism, a no less important but overlooked development was the change in the dominant models of masculinity. The old masculine archetypes — the GI, the pioneer, the sheriff, the crew-cutted astronaut — represented the austere vanguard of modernity which heralded the arrival of civilisation and progress. The new male archetype birthed by the post-Boomer pop culture — the long-haired rock star, the brooding beat poet, the hippie wildman, the Third World guerilla, Mailer’s own “White Negro” — were sensuous rebels against modernity, who sought to topple the structures of civilisation in the name of a heedless and undefined freedom.

This permissive cultural emancipation of the Sixties after Kennedy was then enlarged by the neoliberal economic emancipation of the Eighties under Reagan, which entrenched the new moral status quo, or what may be called “the Boomer consensus”, based on the formula of hedonism plus markets. This dispensation was embodied in equal part by the two dominant Boomer politicians of the Nineties, the liberal Bill Clinton and the conservative Newt Gingrich, who both expanded the reach of unregulated markets, shrank the size of the state and subjected US politics to their boundless egos and libidos.

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Three decades later, the results of this social revolution for each of the genders are clear enough: women have made great economic and cultural strides — a welcome development — but the opposite sex appears to have faltered. On a host of metrics, from educational achievement to economic performance and career advancement to life expectancy and cultural prestige, men are shown to be either falling behind women or underperforming relative to previous generations of men. Yet structural explanations and conventional policy prescriptions have little resonance among today’s “angry young men”. They have, instead, turned to far more radical answers.

Enter the rise of a revanchist masculine identity politics on the online Right, where “vitalist” movements call for the overthrow not just of liberalism but of the pre-modern Christian foundations of Western civilisation. Inspired by Nietzschean thought, they seek the revival of a pagan morality that glorifies primal ideals of strength, beauty and sensuality. The most prominent expositor of this view is the pseudonymous “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP), later unmasked as one Costin Alamariu. They are distinguished by their fondness for bodybuilding, eccentric natural lifestyles and garish aesthetics, conveyed through homoerotic imagery and classical art. Throw in racist and misogynist “shitposting” that playfully straddles the line between irony and sincerity, and one gets a fuller picture of their sensibility.

Among competing narratives around male decline, this has garnered the most widespread following among a certain class of ambitious, educated, intellectually inclined and highly online professional young men. Scouring the ranks of Congressional staff offices, Ivy League schools, conservative think tanks, as well as the worlds of tech and finance, may reveal sizeable cadres of “Bronze Age” followers, who will reveal themselves when they are “in front of the control panel”, as one such devotee put it to The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood — that is, when they are ready to seize power.

For all their frightening and exotic “reactionary” flairs, however, these currents are best understood as inversions of the Sixties countercultural Left, sharing its militant subversive and anti-institutional dispositions. All that’s really happened is that it has come full circle: this sensibility began on the far-Left but has now migrated to and metastasised on the far-Right. And just as the original counterculture was easily co-opted to serve neoliberalism (“woke capitalism”), so too is the online Right — with even less resistance — being made to prop up the same, with the emergence of “based capitalism”. This is shown by Alamariu’s rambling endorsement of Javier Millei and his attempt to sell an ideology of Aryanised Reaganism on steroids to impressionable followers: by dressing it up with edgy memes, he has essentially found an ingenious way to make neoliberal policy attractive to discontented youths, who would otherwise have turned away from the GOP’s free market dogmas. (He is thus revealed to be little more than a “red-pilled” Paul Ryan.) BAP and the online Right now amount to a Millennial mirror image of Mailer-ism and the Boomer counterculture. It matters less that Mailer was an idiosyncratic Marxist or that Alamariu is a would-be race warrior, for the result is the same: hedonism plus markets.

Indeed, as adjacent influencer “Zero HP Lovecraft” admitted, they aspire to “a precise mirror of the world in which we live today”, only with all the progressive slogans and aesthetics swapped for reactionary ones, but with presumably the same malfunctioning economy and decaying infrastructure left in place. Such statements reveal the inherent limitations of this movement, which deals in memetic forms of discourse that discard all programmatic content in favour of pure subjectivism and impulse: a “vibes-only politics”. Consider BAP’s fixation on looks as a political criterion; or more troublingly, his giddy glamorisation of violence; or his disdain for family life, which supposedly dilutes the male spirit (all things he happens to, in varying degrees, share with Mailer). Vapidity, nihilism, and cruelty are the whole point. And for all their apparent dislike of legacy conservatism, this is what allows these reactionaries to be repeatedly co-opted into some variant of neoliberalism.

If today’s dissatisfied young men want to achieve greatness, they can do so not by trying to rehash the failed faux-radicalism of the Boomers, Mailer and Alamariu, with its degenerate libertinism and contempt for institutions, but rather by rediscovering the non-reactionary masculine ethos of the Eisenhower era. Far from being stale or parochially conservative, the Fifties were actually a time of great institutional creativity and innovation as embodied in post-war mixed-economy industrial capitalism (the antithesis of neoliberalism); this was, after all, the decade when the mass-middle class was forged, a status and standard of living which many Millennials and Gen Zs have been denied.

This will require rejecting romanticism and personal liberation in favour of a different value set for young men, one that: abides by the logic of institutions rather than that of aggressive individualism (even as they seek to reimagine and reform their institutions); realises the need for rational, long-term plans of mass coordination as a means of steering society at the level of both state and market; and accepts reasonable limits on personal autonomy in the name of these larger national goals and imperatives. This is, in other words, the same disciplined high modern ethos that made D-Day possible — that won the Second World War and built the greatest economy in all history — after the preceding era of institutional collapse in the Thirties necessitated renewal. For this generation, masculinity was forged within and through institutions rather than against them: the family, the army, the state, the corporation, the union, etc. The very things Mailer and his like have railed against as tyrannical and effeminising were in fact the bedrocks of American strength. To restore that order and dynamism that were Eisenhower’s legacies, young men must dam the “underground river” and re-establish boundaries between the mythic-aesthetic and material-political dimensions of civilisation, lest they be constantly seduced and intoxicated by the former, as they are now, while losing sight of the latter. For the true rebirth of vitality in the West will not come from a miserable narcissistic dictatorship of bohemians, dandies and aesthetes — of the kind that Mailer and BAP would revel in — but from practical feats. The matchless heroism of D-Day, when free men fought and triumphed against barbarism, stands as just such an example: one more encapsulation of what is missing in contemporary masculinity, and of what may yet be regained.

After years rising through the ranks of the transatlantic financial elite, Carney has done little to deflect such rumours: in fact, a spate of high-profile speeches in recent weeks convey the impression that he is angling for something more than a plum retirement spent writing ponderous meditations on the future of capitalism. But if the ex-governor of the Bank of England is indeed biding his time for a shot at the top job, Carney will have to distance himself from Trudeau’s most unpalatable policies, while also positioning himself as the better alternative to Poilievre. And it appears he is doing just that, with public statements criticising Trudeau’s signature carbon tax and the recent, much-hyped federal budget, which he argued could have been delivered with more fiscal prudence.

Naturally, Carney has attacked Poilievre as well, for being a “lifelong politician” — as opposed to a Harvard-trained economist like himself — whose tax cut-heavy programme is a “Pavlovian reaction of extreme conservatism… based on a basic misunderstanding of what drives economies.” So far, his strategy for outshining both Trudeau and Poilievre involves brandishing his credentials as a technocrat who can pontificate on interest rates and business cycles in a way that his two would-be rivals never could. However, Poilievre, who has excelled with his pugilistic, anti-elitist rhetoric, will no doubt relish this contrast of images and may take notes from the likes of Jacob Rees-Moog (a Poilievre lookalike both physically and ideologically), who clashed with Carney in the lead-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum.

The battle lines for Carney in Canada would be very similar to the contest between Remain and Leave: making an explicit connection between his enemies in Britain and those in his home country, Carney reminded his audience: “Brexiters promised that they were going to create Singapore on the Thames, [they] actually delivered Argentina on the Channel… Broken Britain… sound familiar?” — a reference to Poilievre’s case that “Everything is broken” in Liberal-governed Canada.

Indeed, Carney would make for a far more intellectually compelling opponent and foil to Poilievre than the distinctly non-intellectual Trudeau, since the two represent two diametrically opposed conceptions of capitalism. On the one hand, Poilievre, like his UK counterparts Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss, believes in the primacy of unfettered markets and the individual as the surest agents of prosperity — to the near-total exclusion of the state, a view generally referred to as “neoliberalism” or what their common inspiration Margaret Thatcher dubbed “popular capitalism”, Right and Left-wing versions of which have, of course, predominated in the West since the Eighties, corresponding with a rise in inequality. On the other hand, Carney embodies a distinct form of political economy with roots in Canada’s past, in which states and corporations alike work to harness market forces toward common good outcomes, what Carney calls “mission-oriented capitalism” (something his frenemy Boris Johnson might have endorsed in his more communitarian phases). This is an approach that may in theory hew close to social democracy, but which in practice elevates a class of corporate elites to manage society’s competing interests. Neither seems particularly inspiring but Canadians may soon have to make a choice between them.

Today, the neoliberal model that Poilievre holds to has been much dissected and debated: he will try to roll back superfluous local regulations in the hope that market forces will deliver, without further need for guidance. But much less is known about the paradigm and lineage that Carney belongs to. What exactly would a Carney government look to do?

One way of answering the question is by shedding more light on Carney’s historical antecedents. For this, we may turn to Peter J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins’s theory of gentlemanly capitalism, which posited that the strategic and economic policies of the British Empire in its heyday, encompassing Canada in its founding era in the 1860s, were determined by transnational financial elites in the City of London, as opposed to the provincial manufacturers and smallholders whom the desire for colonial markets is sometimes attributed. The modern equivalent of the “gentlemanly capitalist” class would be typified by the Mark Carneys and Klaus Schwabs of the world: their outlook was shaped more by their shared material interests, straddling the empire, than by their local and national attachments.

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Canada’s global orientation has often been determined by the direction of capital flows. As historian Andrew Smith has shown, in his application Cain and Hopkins’s thesis to the Dominion of Canada in particular, 19th century Canadian elites were resolutely pro-British because, in the age of “Anglo-Globalization,” that’s where all the big investments came from. By the same token, 20th-century Canadian elites became pro-American because the centre of wealth and power had transferred to Wall Street and Washington. In the 21st century, then, it is no surprise to see Carney fraternising with Schwab, Christine Lagarde, Larry Fink and other such figures at places like COP26 and the World Economic Forum. Just as previous generations of Canadian rulers had to “kiss the ring”, so to speak, so must he. And it is easy in this era of populist discontent for critics to attack Carney over his golden rolodex: they may charge that the shady and corrupting influence of “globalist elites” would be inescapable under a Carney administration — whereas Poilievre has explicitly banned his future ministers from ever setting foot at the WEF.

Yet there is a reason for this lasting concord between Canada’s rulers and the lords of finance, namely that for a country so large and so sparsely populated, there is never enough capital in Canada to service its insatiable developmental needs, whether it is the construction of railroads to settle the frontier or the production of armaments to win the Second World War. Thus, the nation’s two longest-serving prime ministers, the Conservative Sir John A. Macdonald and the Liberal Mackenzie King were known (and criticised in similar terms) for their cosiness with the reigning globalist elites of their day, whether it be the mighty Barings Bank in Macdonald’s case or the Rockefellers in King’s: it is fair then to say that from imperial times to today, Canadians have never stopped “kissing the ring,” whoever may be wearing it.

If Carney truly wanted to follow in the footsteps of these great Canadian statesmen and make a difference, he would turn his golden rolodex from a political liability into a policy asset, that is, a means to solving the greatest challenge confronting Canada today: the housing crisis, ranked as among the most severe in the developed world. After all, Carney once raised an astronomical sum of $130 trillion for financing climate investments at COP26, something he could not have done were it not for his intimate connections with asset managers and institutional investors the world over: could he do something similar as PM? Solving Canada’s exorbitant housing shortage is said to cost $1 to 2 trillion, a fraction of what Carney gathered for the climate. He could then employ his technocratic expertise in blended finance and public-private partnerships to steer those investments toward a national industrial policy geared toward the mass manufacturing of housing for both the rental and ownership markets (an idea that is slowly taking shape among certain policy thinkers). This would be a titanic financial endeavour that could generate hefty returns for investors in the decades ahead, since the only thing that matches the astronomical costs of Canada’s housing crunch is the astronomical demand underlying it.

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For there are millions of young middle-class Canadians, including even the children of affluent families now priced out of emulating their parents’ standard of living, who are willing to spend their hard-earned dollars on the dream of owning a home, but are practically prevented from doing so by the draconian Nimby-ism of local governments across Canada. There is, in other words, a vast underserved market potential which a coalition of large investors could profit from: Canadian household debt is estimated to be at a staggering $3 trillion. It is precisely the kind of problem that calls for the large-scale coordination that only “mission-oriented capitalism” can mobilise.

Whatever the case, there is a strong chance that future politician and Liberal leader Carney will act in ways that confirm every accusation of elitism and arrogance that his Conservative opponents have levelled since his return to Canada. (One can hardly read his book Values without getting a sense that he just knows so much more on so many topics than you and all your friends.) But all the ambition and lust for power in the world would probably be worth it if he could deliver on the one, all-consuming issue that threatens Canada’s social peace and economic prosperity.

Of course, there is also the possibility that Carney, whether he ever wins an election or not, would just end up like Trudeau, who said all the right things at the start only to fall short miserably — in which case, Carney and Canada’s Liberals should prepare themselves for a lifetime of panic and pearl-clutching. For they will have handed power to Poilievre’s Conservatives indefinitely, before being exiled into a state of perdition that another Canadian expatriate-turned-Liberal messiah, Michael Ignatieff, once aptly referred to as Fire and Ashes. If Carney isn’t careful, that could be the title of his next book as well.

Congress, as the body tasked with making laws and passing budgets, tends to encounter much less scrutiny and judgement. Nearly all citizens can name the president, but many can’t identify their local congressman: and it’s harder to direct blame at someone you don’t know. As a result, the institution has become a carnival-esque arena for all manner of political grandstanders and bomb-throwers. Surely there has to be a better way?

When faced with its own imbalance between executive and legislative prerogative, the English ruling class in 1688 enacted an institutional coup — the Glorious Revolution — and forged a settlement between king and parliament, concentrating the practical powers of government in the latter while confining the former to a lofty but ceremonial role. This entrenched what Walter Bagehot theorised as the distinction between the “efficient” and the “dignified” parts of the constitution. And it has stood the test of time, not just in the sceptred isle but in many of its ex-colonies, where British institutions, not least among them a Westminster-style parliament, have been shown to be conducive to political stability.

This was the model against which the revolutionaries of 1776 had fashioned their constitutional thinking. However, given the dysfunctional lot of their heirs, should Americans consider, if not an outright importation, then at least a creative adaptation of the British model? One year on from King Charles’s coronation, one can easily imagine an America in which the president serves as a symbolic head of state while Congress is granted the responsibilities of a Westminster parliament.

The idea is by no means new. Indeed, no less than the first president George Washington, widely seen as above partisanship, was feted as a semi-monarchical deity, with Alexander Hamilton viewing “Washington as George II and himself as Robert Walpole”. A generation later, in its battle with “King Andrew” Jackson, the opposition Whig Party also sought to emulate the English example by claiming (fruitlessly) that Congress, and not the presidency, should be the primary organ of national policy, as it was with the House of Commons. In the lead-up to the progressive era, a young Woodrow Wilson called outright for an end to the separation of powers in his 1885 treatise Congressional Government, arguing that the changing needs of the nation demanded a streamlined form of government. Later as president, Wilson, along with his rival and predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, set the stage for the powerful and expansive presidency that came to the fore in the 20th century.

But confronted today with the above problems, how far could the American presidency be reconfigured in the direction of a constitutional monarchy? Rather than try to answer the question in the abstract, we may focus on the last two presidents, Obama and Trump, as hypothetical model office-holders around whose traits the position may be tailored. After all, these two figures, in their own very different ways, have embodied the mystical and, therefore, monarchical aspects of the presidency more than most of its recent occupants.

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In Obama’s case, it was during the fleeting (and ultimately illusory) “post-racial” moment heralded by his election as the first African American president in 2008, when the nation’s historic divisions appeared to subside: he seemed to be possessed of a halo not unlike Washington’s. In Trump’s case, his monarchical bona fides stems more from the unshakeable bond of loyalty he inspires in his base, which may fairly be described as sultanic in its intensity; though it is also not unlike that which existed between Jackson (scorned as well as a royal autocrat) and his raucous populist coalition. Evidently, the attribute of total impartiality demanded of a purely apolitical head of state, representing the people as a whole, may be too much to ask for in the present American context.

Perhaps, then, the British monarch is less a viable model for this experiment than, say, the ceremonial heads of state in parliamentary republics like Germany, Ireland and India, where presidents are largely non-political but usually arise from the political class and are nominated by parties. If we cannot imagine Obama or Trump as entirely shorn of partisan affiliation, they might, at least, abstract themselves from it once in office, as the German Bundespräsident or Irish Uachtarán are expected to do. But what exactly would US presidents do if they no longer have to govern? Would any chief executive content himself with cutting ribbons and attending funerals: in other words, with becoming like the vice president?

The answer may lie with our hypothetical office-holders, and their respective mystiques. For what truly unites Obama and Trump, despite all their contrasts, is the fact that they have always been far more effective and compelling as celebrities — that is, as generalised cultural fixtures (not unlike the late Queen Elizabeth) — than they ever were as administrators or party leaders.

Trump captured it best in his pre-presidential career: before he staked his brand with one side of the partisan divide and became a politician, he was simply the tough-talking businessman who appeared in tabloids, talk shows, films and reality TV, as he bought up hotels, casinos, an airline, and a football league. Never mind how successful or not these ventures ended up being: for many, he personified the very spirit of American capitalism, in both its vulgar crassness and gilded splendour. The New York billionaire served as exemplar and guru to other glory-seeking entrepreneurs, who saw their own ambitions realised in him.

By the same token, Obama incarnated the promise of American meritocracy, rising from obscurity to the country’s most prestigious institutions, from the Ivy League to the White House: all the while, he wrote eloquent memoirs that read like the highest expressions of that distinct literary subgenre beloved of the American upper middle class, the college admissions essay, and modelled the prospect of social mobility for young Americans of colour. Nowadays, with lucrative Netflix deals, high-profile interview appearances, and gala charity events, this former president has returned to form as a celebrity, in his post-presidential career.

Their profiles, needless to say, appeal to differing sections of the country: Trump is as natural a spokesman for one as Obama is for another. And herein lies the model an American constitutional-republican monarchy could take: ceremonial presidents who can symbolise the hopes and high aspirations of the citizenry — with the caveat that, in these divided times, there are two separate and opposing value sets to be represented.

The imperative of unity may be advanced under this scheme by having the two figures serve together as joint co-monarchs or consuls, as in Ancient Rome or Sparta, with one each for red and blue America. Their roles would be to set the general direction of the national conversation; to guide the governmental process from a removed distance; and to give voice to the concerns of their respective halves of the country, in ways that may still be broadly political but non-partisan.

Though they would be stripped of their direct powers, they could use their moral authority to nudge the parties in certain directions: after all, both Trump and Obama are most useful when they are able to buck their party’s orthodoxies and to better intuit public sentiment as a result, such as when Trump president warned Republicans against cutting entitlements or when Obama advised Democrats to reject the excesses of identity politics. Best of all is when the two are actually able to agree on something, such as the need for public healthcare in America.

Meanwhile, Congress, in this scenario, would be newly empowered with executive as well as legislative duties, meaning its members would have to form ministries, composed of a prime minister and cabinet, and dependent for its existence on the confidence of the lower house. While the Senate would keep the six-year durations of its terms, the House of Representatives would be relieved of its fixed biennial terms: as it is, there are no stakes for individual members, who are free to threaten government shutdowns without fear of losing their seats (or their salaries), but the possibility of parliamentary dissolution for Congresses that fail to pass budgets should make for a more disciplined body that is better able to carry out its constitutional mandate.

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For the same reasons, once members of Congress are entrusted with the responsibility of managing an executive ministerial portfolio — and once the heads of cabinet departments are made directly answerable to the legislature — Americans will have reason to expect far more from their representatives, in terms of both performance and presentation. This alternative Congress would give far less oxygen to the likes of Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ilhan Omar. The overall effect should be a more responsive and legible form of government.

In this America, there would be two kinds of elections: a regular partisan one for Congress and another special one for the co-presidency. For the latter, however, our red and blue consuls won’t have to run against each other, since they will be serving side by side. Rather, we may see the two candidates going on the road together à la Lincoln-Douglas, showing up at diners and country fairs, judging pie contests, throwing first pitches, and talking with ordinary people.

If the one formal meeting between Trump and Obama was any indication, this would no doubt make for a most awkward form of political theatre. Yet it would serve as a much-needed civic lesson for Americans, namely that it is worth putting on a good face for one’s fellow citizens, especially those from the other side of the political divide, no matter how maddeningly difficult it may be. After all, in the absence of kings and courtly rituals, it is this decorum — this patriotic artifice — that will, in Bagehot’s words, “preserve and sustain the reverence of the population” for their form of government.

The Anglo-Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville is today neither well-remembered nor wholly forgotten, but his work may hold some helpful insights for the present moment. His most infamous tract was The Fable of the Bees (1714) in which he argued for recognising self-interest, rather than other-regarding sentiments, such as solidarity or altruism, as the soundest basis for organising society. Even more than David Hume, Adam Smith, and the classical economists who were to follow, it was Mandeville who best embodied the emergence of what we now understand as liberal-capitalist modernity, sounding the death knell for the pre-liberal forms of private and communitarian morality that still held sway among the political and ecclesiastical classes.

Mandeville’s intervention, taking place in the years after the 1688 Glorious Revolution, gave expression to the transformation then unfolding in public life, from the passionate (and violent) preoccupation over moral sectarianism and ultimate ends, which so brutally scarred the 17th century, and toward the relatively peaceful and civilised pursuit of wealth and affluence that characterised the 18th. One wonders if the West is overdue for another paradigm shift from solidarity to self-interest as the animating principle of politics.

First, it is worth considering the difference between the two paradigms. Enacting such a change would not eliminate conflict from public life but radically alter its direction and outlet. It is one thing for there to be sharp divisions structuring political exchange, but conflicts over competing material interests or economic programmes can be hashed out in rational processes of give-and-take; whereas the kind of reductive battles over intangible values — what is known as the culture war — has led to the wrong kind of conflict, one in which humanity’s natural tendencies toward solidarity and communal morality degenerates into rigid, zero-sum stand-offs. The result is stasis and stultification. Compared to this, there can be little doubt that a renewed politics of self-interest would be conducive to more dynamism and material progress: the only question is how do we get to such a place from where we are now?

The England to which Mandeville immigrated from Holland in the 1690s was already one generation removed from the apocalyptic, often theologically motivated bloodshed of the Cromwellian era. It was in the midst of the post-1688 commercial boom and financial revolution, on course to becoming the world’s richest nation.

Yet even as England’s social complexion was changing, the moral outlook of many of its elites (embodied by Lord Bolingbroke and his magazine The Craftsman) remained mired in antiquated notions of virtue held to by the Old Whigs and Commonwealthmen, whose agrarian, puritanical, and civic republican sensibilities derided the new forms of mobile financial wealth and concentrated state power arising under the Court Whig government of the day as harbingers of a plague of “corruption”/ This corruption was attributed to the spirit of avarice encouraged by the new economy; and it was contrasted with the selflessly patriotic and solidaristic ethos of virtue espoused by the anti-Court opposition. It was in this context of conflicting moralities that Mandeville became the centre of national controversy when the 1723 edition of his book led to a presentment before the Grand Jury of Middlesex. He was accused of wishing to “run down Religion and Virtue… and to recommend Luxury, Avarice, Pride, and all vices, as being necessary to Public Welfare… tending to the Destruction of the Constitution,” a line of attack that paralleled opposition polemics against the Court Whig regime, with which Mandeville became identified.

But just what exactly did Mandeville write for such a charge to be levelled against him? The core of his argument was that impulse and ego were the main drivers of human behaviour and that this fact necessitated the construction of a public morality based on self- deception by cunning elites, who had an interest in subduing the unruly passions of men. And while the insight was not new, with antecedents going back to Lucretius and Epicurus, Mandeville’s innovation was to draw out its implications in a modern setting and propose an alternative counter-model of society to that held up by traditional morality.

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Mandeville’s vision accepted impulse-driven self-interest as its sole premise and in so doing, radically affirmed the imperatives of the emerging liberal-capitalist system. To illustrate his view, he took the beehive, oft-used symbol of virtue and frugality by the opposition writers, and turned it on its head. In Mandeville’s telling, the bees were not selfless citizens devoted to the public interest but greedy, self-seeking creatures whose competitive appetites made the hive a more prosperous place: “Thus Vice nurs’d Ingenuity / Which join’d with Time and Industry / Had carry’d Life’s Conveniencies, / It’s real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease, / To such a Height, the very Poor Liv’d better than the Rich before / And nothing could be added more.”

And so, it became the duty of wise statesmen to devise ways by which this self-interest could be transmuted into socially productive endeavours: successive Whig ministries were able to do that by sponsoring and regulating the development of complex financial institutions such as the new Bank of England and the growing trade of joint-stock companies, including both the wildly successful East India Company and the ill-fated South Sea Company. The same capitalist superstructure that the opposition denounced as a source of venality and injustice functioned, in the hands of men like Sir Charles Montagu and Sir Robert Walpole, as the instruments by which the greed of England’s magnates (the “bees”) contributed to the growth of its national wealth, power, and prestige. The Whig government achieved this by providing means to concentrate and de-risk large capital investments, enabling the funding for prohibitively costly and otherwise unsustainable ventures, like imperial expansion overseas and economic modernisation at home.

This process of enrichment through doux commerce led to greater refinement, and to England becoming the “polite nation” to which Addison and Steele’s Spectator addressed its lessons on manners and etiquette, a far cry from the violent and brutish ways of the previous century. British history under the Court Whig oligarchy could be understood, then, as firm validation for The Fable of the Bees and in particular, one of Mandeville’s central insights — that “Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits”.

With the triumph of Walpole, the austere, virtue-seeking sensibilities of the men who attacked Mandeville — represented by John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Bolingbroke — would have passed quietly into history had it not been for the strange process of moral transplantation by which their ideas and values migrated across the Atlantic through pamphlets and reprints. For they later formed the intellectual nucleus of the American Revolution, as historian Bernard Bailyn demonstrated in his magnum opus, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). The editorials of The Craftsman practically served as templates for the Patriot press in its denunciations of the Stamp Act and, later, of the whole British political and economic system, from the King on down: in American eyes, the empire itself had become irredeemably corrupt and had to be severed like gangrene.

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Like Bolingbroke, the rebels embraced a classical morality rooted in the example of the ancients, of Cincinatus and Cato, whose willingness to sacrifice all for their country’s liberty inspired the founders to wager their “lives, property and sacred honour”. The American idiom has since been inflected with republican notions of the “common good”, understood differently but present nonetheless on both the the Right and the Left. Even when politicians acknowledge self-interest (or get caught acting on it in embarrassing ways), the moral instinct is always one of deferring back to the same communitarian ethos. (Reagan’s rhetoric was emblematic of this tension, with its praise for both the selfishness of the profit motive and the selflessness of patriots past.)

As Mandeville would argue, however, such ideologies are forms of self-deception that elites employ, whether knowingly or not, to cover up their competing base impulses and egoistic desires. For instance: today, the professional managerial class speak the language of social justice even as they preside over new forms of hierarchy and domination that do little to help the lower classes they claim to represent; while conservative elites in the small-town millionaire class speak the language of “America First” patriotism even as they engage in horribly regressive and exploitative industries that stand in the way of true national development.

The culture war is essentially the moral economy of recognition of these elite classes, where competition is waged between and within the ranks of the two enemy tribes. Solidarity is the symbolic currency of this economy: and their virtue-signalling on behalf of their party’s respective ideological value sets (whether it’s “pronouns and Palestine” or “guns and God”) is an expression of this principle.

What is needed now is an American Walpole who can see beyond the facade, take this impulse toward pride and amour-propre among the elites, and turn it toward something more productive and beneficial in the material (as opposed to the moral) economy. A Mandevillian politics would channel these drives away from the false pursuit of virtue and connect them instead to economic aggrandisement, through which both the elites and the nations they lead can attain new riches and power. In this scheme, politics would become a lot more rational, instrumental, and manageable as it would come down to the brokering of interests (difficult but doable) rather than a contest over values (impassable and never-ending).

Of course, the cultural antagonisms between Americans are still much too great for this change to take place anytime soon, and it may take a few unstable election cycles before America moves from its Cromwellian age of moral absolutism to its next Mandevillian age of enlightened self-interest. But that doesn’t me we shouldn’t start now. Faced with our overbearing embrace of solidarity, a bit of “private vice” wouldn’t go amiss.

When faced with this bleak picture, the natural response is to curse our dear leader. But while I’ve written my share of polemics against the prime minister, the fact is that a change in government probably won’t alter much beyond aesthetics, because our problems just run so much deeper. Indulging in “Trudeau Derangement Syndrome”, while most understandable after eight years, will only set one up for disappointment when our Daniel Hannan-approved Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre wins his majority. Like Javier Milei of Argentina, this ardent neo-Thatcherite will try to make neoliberalism cool again. He will be given a chance to change things, and he will fail, for none of his approaches to any of the major issues, most of all on housing and immigration, are fundamentally new or different.

If it is true that a nation deserves the leadership it gets, then this slim selection suggests there is something rotten in the state of Canada. Indeed, at odds with the Mounties’ fears of a revolt is the fact that Canadians — especially the youth — have remained just as self-effacingly polite and docile as ever, even as they are deprived of their futures.

Things clearly can’t go on this way, but where do we go from here? The American answer to moments of uncertainty has always been to “return to the founders”; to ask what Washington or Jefferson would have done. It’s a quirky but ultimately sound reflex that ensures a minimum of civilisational memory, even among those who would contest the founders’ legacy. Sadly, this attitude has no equivalent in Canada. Even before the erasure of our first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, in the name of “decolonisation”, Canadians (at least the English-speaking majority) have mostly been ignorant about what came before, who they are, and what their country is for. This goes for both the historical-nihilist Left and the market-fundamentalist Right, who tend to replicate the errors and contradictions of US fusionist conservatism.

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There is, in other words, little to no historical consciousness among Canada’s elites, who are generally contemptuous of their heritage. In light of such hostility, I will make the case that an aggressive recovery of Canada’s historical mission, stemming from “the Tory conception of the state”, is the only way for the governing class to overcome the country’s most urgent challenges.

To this end, we must ask: what is Canada — what sets it apart? The most compelling answer is that of the historian Donald Creighton, who theorised that Canada emerged from an opposition between the river and the seaboard, that is, the St. Lawrence River system that defined Canada’s early development, and the Atlantic seaboard on which the Thirteen Colonies were settled. Creighton argues that the St. Lawrence and the lands around it formed a natural unity. Here, a series of factors — including the relative paucity of agriculture, isolation from the coast, and the primacy of the fur trade — gave rise to a distinct form of developmental capitalism, which later matured into a “doctrine of material expansion through political unity” entailing “unification and centralisation of control”. By contrast, the Atlantic seaboard had abundant arable lands and easy access to maritime trade, which encouraged a republican ethos bound to the ideals of the independent yeoman-farmer.

For these reasons, there emerged a more deferential political order in the north that may be described as “Tory”, though it is different from Toryism in England, whose feudal past Anglo-Canada lacks. As philosopher George Grant explained, both halves of North America were dominated by dynamic Protestant liberalisms premised on the “technological mastery of human and non-human nature”. Canada, therefore, is no less a product of liberal modernity than America, but where the latter’s agrarian clime birthed a republican state, the former’s harsh geography created what we might call a company-state, with its emphasis on corporate order and commercial progress over popular liberty and civic virtue as a better means of achieving the conquest of nature. Canada was, after all, built on the imperial ambitions and avarice of its great companies, whether it be the mercantile firms of the Château Clique, the Grand Trunk and Canadian Pacific Railroads or the Hudson’s Bay Company.

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The whole point of founding the Canadian state in 1867 was to furnish a “credit instrument that would provide the resources necessary for the economic development of the British North American colonies”. Backed by capital in the metropole, this was the practical, overriding mission of Macdonald and the “Laurentian elite”. The deference (or docility) often associated with Canadians is not, therefore, that of the vassal to his lord but that of the worker to his manager, and that of the manager to the corporate board. For this is exactly the sensibility needed to run a company-state, one that follows orders and doesn’t ask too many questions.

At its best, this tradition, a kind of Canadian Hamiltonianism that wields the powers of state and market harmoniously to forge new economies of scale, is capable of vast creative potential, having built a country with railroads, factories, farms and mines spanning a continent. At its worst, it has led to colossal bouts of dysfunction, as is the case today. In any event, progressives in Trudeau’s camp recoil at this legacy because of its colonial origins, while conservatives in Poilievre’s camp ignore it (even as they pay devoted lip service to Macdonald) because it contradicts their rabidly anti-statist, free-market ideology. As a result, this school is dormant.

But can it be revitalised? Certainly not by the Boomers and Gen Xs, for they are the ones who despoiled Canada and led it into this abyss. But perhaps it could inspire ambitious Millennials and Gen Zs who are doomed to inherit this disintegrating society.

I’m thinking here of young elites in their twenties and thirties who occupy junior or mid-level posts across government, finance, tech, NGOs, and other prestige sectors. Though their credentials qualify them as “elites”, they are nonetheless subject to the same trends of material precarity, social immobility, and financial pauperisation as the rest of their cohort. This means that even as they rake in decent salaries and impressive job titles, they are unable to buy homes and meet the same comfortable measures of security that their parents had. This is the classic “pre-revolutionary” situation of frustrated young elites who lose their stake in the status quo. But the question is: do they have the potential to seize control and remake the country?

I should have some idea, as I went to graduate school with them in Toronto, and though I have since moved back to my home in the Alberta hinterlands, I am familiar with their ways. And the short answer is no, they do not have the makings of revolutionary subjects — at least not yet.

As it is, they are the embodiments of homo neoliberalensis, forever bound up with the proverbial “rat race” and prone to mistaking real life for LinkedIn. If they have any brilliance, it is not that of the visionary but of the ultra-efficient functionary, for there is little of the imaginative, the poetic or the statesmanlike in them. Like the bureaucrats in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, they know how to dress well and strut about with the appearance of purpose down the halls of power, without having any idea as to what power is or to what ends it should be applied. And like that film’s protagonist Sam Lowry, in their nervous hearts, they have “nothing, not even dreams”, only a wish for survival amid what literary critic Northrop Frye called Canada’s “garrison mentality”: “a dominating herd-mind in which nothing original can grow.”

However, in the years ahead, these rulers-in-waiting will possess greater control of the nation’s financial, political and cultural power. What is needed is a vision to rouse them from their timid state and spur them into heroic action, in spite of themselves. Already, a few of the most forward-thinking policy intellectuals in this class have stumbled on a new synthesis: to solve the housing crisis with a national industrial policy. This idea remains in its most rudimentary stages, but it is the first hint of what a new incarnation of the company-state could look like. It will have to be something on par with Macdonald’s project: what railroads had been to his century, housing can be to ours, the stimulative engine of a grand nation-building enterprise, through which novel modes of technological production and innovation can be unlocked. This is the object to which they must now devote their lives, for which they must learn how to wield the company-state’s awesome capabilities.

The young Laurentians will have to secure new sources of capital from abroad, and devise the requisite instruments of developmental finance with which to steer it toward productive and profitable investments in the real economy, particularly in manufacturing, prefab and modular construction, nuclear and hydrogen energy, transportation and public infrastructure. The goal must be to mass manufacture “ready-made neighbourhoods”. (Needless to say, an expansion of housing supply will also have to be accompanied by a contraction of demand, i.e. a reduction of immigration intake.) Yet this plan cannot take shape under Poilievre, whose heavily libertarian and anti-corporate style of populism is antithetical to the company-state: it will have to wait for the government after him.

The first Laurentian epic of 1867 conquered impossible distances to create an industrialised dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The second, culminating in 1967, humanised that industrial economy and created a mass middle class. The third “neo-Laurentian” epic will have to do both: to reindustrialise Canada and restore a middle-class society. Looking forward to the Canada of 2067, we may hope for its success — or we can start to work for it.

Such a pairing would make for a politically fertile synthesis: while Vance built his electoral brand on his working-class roots, Moreno has advertised himself with a more traditional set of Republican credentials — namely those of a small businessman or, to be more precise, a car dealership owner.

Between these two poles, the outline of a post-realignment GOP may be sketched. Where the Reagan coalition of the Eighties united Wall Street with Main Street business (with some working class defectors), the emergent Trump coalition of the 2020s and beyond will be different. Because of the exodus of the corporate and college-educated segments of America to the Democrats, it will most likely be composed of a more solid pool of working-class voters allied with the petit-bourgeois class of the red-state and hinterland regions, sometimes known as the “American gentry” and stereotypically represented as rock-ribbed conservative car dealers, like Moreno. Yet while much ink has been spilled trying to understand the mindset of the MAGA working class (Vance’s 2016 bestseller Hillbilly Elegy was about precisely the kind of people who would go on to vote for Trump), comparatively little attention has been paid to the Bernie Morenos of America.

A 2023 account of these car dealers by Slate’s Alexander Sammon recounts the awesome scale of their collective wealth and influence on Republican politics: “Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions among the top 0.1%”; they (along with other gentry professions like gas station owners and building contractors) make up “a majority of the country’s 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year”; members of the industry association donate to Republicans “at a rate of 6-to-1”, through which they have worked “to write and rewrite laws to protect dealers and sponsor sympathetic politicians in all 50 states”. Such figures help to make sense of Moreno’s and his fellow car dealers’ status as the cream of the crop among America’s local elites.

Coverage of the gentry more generally diverges along partisan lines: Right-wing commentators usually praise their innate cultural conservatism and strong attachment to place, while Left-wing and libertarian critics decry what they see as the reactionary and racket-like nature of their enterprise, built as it is on intensive lobbying efforts to ensure their entrenched positions as middlemen standing between manufacturers and consumers. Given their political weight, it is surprising to see the dearth of analysis on the future trajectory of this class (other than prophecies that anticipate their extinction) in the context of debates about the fate of the US auto industry, not to mention the role this gentry should play as the Republican coalition lurches away from the Reaganite consensus.

Indeed, a case can be made that the central question for the future of conservatism revolves around this class. It is not whether they will embrace a populist-nationalist political outlook — this much should already be clear to any observer of American politics in the last eight years — but whether they will become populist-nationalist in their economic preferences as well? For beneath their reputation as regressive opponents of change, it should be remembered that it was this unheralded elite of small-town millionaires who came out early and overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016, rejecting free-market orthodoxy and legitimising previously heretical stances on trade and the need to re-industrialise. It was to their ears as local elites spread out across the country that Trump’s incessant calls for rebuilding America’s “bridges, tunnels, freeways, and airports … our great plants and factories” were most resonant.

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In other words, by anointing a brash New York City businessman as their tribune, it was the gentry that arguably did the most to light the spark of the populist-nationalist revolution, though a combination of inertia and diversion prevented a fully-fledged nationalist programme from taking shape when Trump was in office. However, in the years ahead, a more forceful break with laissez-faire policy on their part along with an embrace of state-guided industrial policy would bring them into much closer convergence with the material interests of the working class, and should actually enable Republicans to follow through on the promise that launched Trump’s insurgency: to restore America’s strength and prosperity by bringing industry back to the heartlands. But it remains to be seen how a conservative class of provincial entrepreneurs can be made to support a nationally-directed interventionist agenda.

Turning to history will reveal that it isn’t as much of a long-shot as it seems: after all, it was small business elites — not unlike today’s gentry — who fuelled American industrialisation in the late-18th to 19th centuries under the banners of the Federalist, Whig, and early Republican parties, when the term “nationalist” meant precisely support for the federal government’s role in directing modernising investments toward the country’s developing regions and frontiers. Henry Clay’s “American System” was the most ambitious expression of this philosophy, and later served as the inspiration for Abraham Lincoln’s programme for reshaping of the American economic order during the Civil War. But what would be the equivalent programme for revitalising today’s moribund post-industrial economy?

The answer may have to do with Trump’s unexpected and ingenious proposal, made during a speech at a Moreno rally in Dayton, of letting Chinese firms build car factories in America as the only way around a new 100% tariff wall he’d place for Chinese cars made elsewhere. This would seem to contradict his image as the ultimate China hawk. But as David P. Goldman points out, Trump is a dealmaker first and foremost, and his idea (coverage of which was lost amid furor over Trump’s “bloodbath” comments from the same day) would not only diffuse Sino-American tensions but deliver benefits to US workers, consumers, the auto industry (in the long-term), and yes, the car dealer gentry. The Chinese themselves are in need of new markets, and as Politico reports, for them, “the United States market is the holy grail”.

Trump has claimed, under this proposal, US workers would get to work in the car factories, though the scale of automation involved and the advanced skill set required could mean that most of the existing American workforce may not be qualified enough to man such factories. In any event, manufacturing would still create lots of “spillover” jobs in the communities that receive the factories. Just as American consumers would, of course, benefit from access to the latest Chinese EV models — such as the BYD Seagull.

The auto industry, meanwhile, despite having to deal with fierce new Chinese competition initially, would nonetheless be able to, as Goldman put it “appropriate their IP the way they appropriated ours”. This may sound like a flippant statement, but historically this is how catch-up industrialisation worked, through subtle processes of IP transfer from the more advanced to the less advanced economies, in which case a new cycle would just be repeating itself — this time, to America’s advantage. Or as Goldman wrote: “It’s easier to let [China] bring industrial automation to the United States than to try to catch up after the fact. That’s the path of least resistance, and one that Trump has opened up.” (Though as a means of cushioning the effect of China’s market entry, its factories could be brought in at a controlled pace and assigned to limited geographic areas so as not to overwhelm domestic competition totally.)

But the greatest beneficiaries may be the car dealers, who, in this scheme, would be the ones to sell Chinese cars to consumers. In theory, car dealers should be able to sell EVs such as the Seagull the same way they sell gasoline-powered cars, but in practice, it hasn’t worked out that way because of a number of factors, namely the more expensive costs of servicing EVs and lack of available technical expertise. This is why Moreno and the gentry have been consistently hostile to EVs; and it also doesn’t help that Tesla has sought to market its models directly to buyers through online sales.

But there is another instructive example from the annals of American economic history, namely the state-sponsored mechanisation of agriculture in the New Deal South, where an ultra-conservative local oligarchy profited from state subsidies that allowed them to pay for modern farm equipment, thereby reducing the cost of innovation and helping the semi-feudal South of the Thirties to develop and industrialise. A similar effort to subsidise costs for any EV transition, in which the US government transfers funds and capital assets directly to the dealers, would both accelerate the adoption of new technologies and preserve the civic leadership of the gentry. Such a programme would smooth the economic transition for them–— if not the cultural one, which may prove more difficult, given their engrained suspicion of EVs. In any event, electric would still be far off from becoming the mainstream of the US auto industry and will likely co-exist with traditional and hybrid models for some time: but this endangered class would nonetheless be given a chance to not just survive but thrive amid an otherwise disruptive paradigm shift.

Furthermore, the accompanying new infrastructure of such a programme would be incredibly costly, to say the least, and neither the Chinese nor the US government should be expected to foot the entire bill. This is where the state can step in to channel private capital into the underdeveloped regions where the gentry live by setting up such things as infrastructure banks, guidance funds, and shared manufacturing facilities as the pillars of a modern-day equivalent to Henry Clay’s “American System”. Best of all, through such a programme, Washington — under Trump or any future Republican president — could pressure the financial sector to disgorge its hordes of stagnant capital into these new developmental institutions and stimulate re-investment into the heartland. This would, in effect, create a massive wealth transfer from Wall Street to Main Street, reversing the logic of the Reaganite coalition in which Wall Street called all the shots.

Of course, many things would have to go right for this scenario to take place. The Republicans could fumble their chance at leadership and go back to more Paul Ryan-style tax cuts, which would do nothing but enrich increasingly Democratic-aligned corporate America; or they could actually base their policies on the interests of their primary elite constituency, the gentry, along with the working class. Realising this possibility would require a future Senator Moreno to imbibe the heterodox ideology of his colleague J.D. Vance, as he employs his entrepreneurial skills to convince his fellow Republicans to entertain a programme radically different from the free market dogmas of the past. After all, it was the American gentry that started the Trumpian populist-nationalist revolution: they may yet be the ones to finish it.

Such grandiose schemes are nothing new in the tech world: after all, Elon Musk has dreamed of colonising Mars, while Peter Thiel is said to aspire to immortality. But what is significant about Altman’s trillion-dollar moonshot is that it would put him in competition with another powerful actor: the United States government. Under both Trump and Biden, the White House has pursued a policy of re-industrialisation.

For ultimately, Altman’s plans may be compared to the bipartisan CHIPs Act in their ambition. And if successful, they would address many of the underlying strategic issues that the US government is seeking to resolve, such as the danger of falling behind China in the long-term race for AI and manufacturing supremacy, or the risk posed by a microchip shortage in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Indeed, Altman is requesting Washington’s backing for his venture, most probably in anticipation of the major national security and legal antitrust objections that his gambit is likely to raise. (He is also seeking funds from foreign governments such as the UAE.)

Yet despite the apparent convergence in goals between Washington and OpenAI, there is, in fact, a stark choice to be made between them. As Thiel said, there is a great difference between progress in the world of bits and progress in the world of atoms. The problem is that while American society has had no problem churning out “innovations” of an increasingly dubious social utility in the former, it has struggled to produce any comparable achievements in the latter. While an endless stream of apps and content has inundated consumers since the advent of the Web 2.0, the material foundations of America — its electrical grid, basic infrastructure, industrial hardware, national defence base, and more generally, its collective capacity to produce material goods — has declined into obsolesce. Boeing’s string of engineering failures is just the latest example. Or, as Thiel put it a decade ago: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

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And while OpenAI’s generative AI products, from ChatGPT to Sora, might appear more impressive than a 140-character tweet, they carry the same fundamental premise: large-scale innovation in the West is now something that mostly takes place in a non-corporeal universe mediated by screens. Contrary to futurist discourse promising science fiction-like visions of a radically more expansive and technically advanced built environment, Silicon Valley has instead delivered infinite arrays of two-dimensional spectacle combined with total civilisational stagnation in the crumbling three-dimensional world. Indeed, its technologies have had the effect of warping and undermining society’s shared notions of reality. And herein lies the problem with the prospect of a new industrial revolution led by Altman and his fellow travellers: it threatens to supercharge the explosion of content in the world of bits, while the accompanying benefits in the world of atoms remain vague to non-existent.

At this point, Americans must ask themselves, to what ends should America’s vast capital and energy resources be directed? Should they be devoted to perpetuating the existing bit-centred economy, which has made Americans stupider and more addicted to short-term stimulus? Or should they be marshalled toward the construction of a new paradigm, one where an atom-centred American civilisation is once again engaged in the making and building of things in the physical realm?

The present status quo goes by many names: the “information age”, “the knowledge economy”, “the Californian Ideology”, “network society”, etc. These slogans, most of which were popularised in the Nineties, reflected the late 20th-century transition from an industrial economy to a post-industrial one grounded in non-material commodities such as digital software, financial products, media franchises, and other forms of intellectual property. In this view, the old worlds of industry and mass manufacturing could safely be relegated to developing economies, while developed ones fully immersed themselves in the more advanced and enlightened forms of production, that of information, ever more abstracted from actual people and places.

The elite of this economy is, of course, Silicon Valley, which not only gave us the commercial internet, social media, smartphones and generative AI applications — but also the cultural values that came with them. The promise underlying them had always been to bring the world closer together and to allow humanity to be freer and more creative than ever before. The ethos propounded by Altman, Musk and others at OpenAI’s founding in 2015 carried many of the same liberatory and messianic undertones.

Yet rather than creating dialogue, digital echo chambers have left society more fragmented than ever before. Humans, especially young people, have become more depressed and socially atomised due to their dependence on screens, while nearly every domain of public life, from politics to culture and artistic self-expression, is now governed by the law of the algorithm. What’s more, the latest advances in AI technology have rendered many “knowledge economy” professions, including lawyers, creative professionals, financial analysts, and software developers vulnerable to displacement by automated counterparts. (The irony is that blue-collar workers may end up suffering the least from AI replacement.)

In other words, the commanding heights of the knowledge economy are, for the first time, directly endangered by the fruits of their own celebrated innovations, namely Artificial Intelligence. Understood in this context, the trajectory of re-industrialisation under Altman would represent the culmination of these post-material and post-human currents. The monumental computing power he dreams of likely wouldn’t be used to build anything real, like in the first Industrial Revolution, but would rather be deployed toward the further subsuming of human society into the endless virtual realities.

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The scale of this human-AI “merge” would not just extend to jobs but to some of the most intimately human roles: AI friends, AI lovers, AI philosophers, and eventually AI gods and godheads. One of the most popular memes in “accelerationist” circles is of a future civilisation of self-replicating AIs harvesting energy through a web of Dyson Spheres in space. It is telling because there are no humans left — their minds presumably having been merged with the singularity — and consciousness itself has been entirely disembodied. This is not a sinister conspiracy, but a vision openly aspired to by many in Silicon Valley — and one that Altman’s microchip industrial complex would surely help to realise.

But there is another, competing vision of American re-industrialisation, which can be found on both sides of the political aisle. Donald Trump has spoken of raising magnificent new “Freedom Cities” out of the American wilderness, while National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called for the building of “a clean-energy manufacturing ecosystem rooted in supply chains here in North America”. Whether distilled through Right-wing populist MAGA-ism or the progressive industrial policies of Bidenomics, the common thrust of this emerging paradigm has been to reconstruct the 20th-century industrial economy of atoms for the 21st century, and to recover the strategic technological and manufacturing edge that was squandered to China after the Cold War. These precepts would provide a much firmer and saner basis for launching an industrial renaissance than Altman’s bit-centric blueprint.

This is not to say that there is no place for AI in this version of industrial renewal. Rather, a properly materialist approach would take a discerning and qualified approach to AI that channels its awesome powers toward productive uses in the real economy rather than to the diversionary “attention economy”. It could be used to enhance and synthesise everything from research-and-development, next-generation manufacturing and construction to advanced energy and resource extraction methods. Under this new paradigm, America’s decaying cities would be transformed into a dramatically more abundant material and built environment, closer to what science fiction has imagined.

The reality is far different. For instance, it is no surprise that tech capitals such as San Francisco and Palo Alto are some of the most unyielding bastions of Nimby-ism in the country, embodying the engrained post-materialist instincts of the tech world to a tee. Perhaps AI could be employed to streamline the cumbersome bureaucratic approval processes that stand in the way of new construction in these places.

But how can we hope to get there? More than a century ago, the German polymath Oswald Spengler dedicated his magnum opus, The Decline of the West, to charting the fall of “Faustian Man”, who, he argued, had dominated the Western imagination for centuries, and whose distinguishing mark was the perpetual conquest of space. It is fairer to say, however, that the Faustian spirit didn’t so much vanish as migrate from the West to the East. For in China today, the ruling party has presided over a titanic effort at reshaping physical space: entire metropolises have been ordered into existence while the most advanced industrial and computer technologies are being pioneered at a rate that puts the West to shame. Meanwhile, the party-state commands its tech sector to cut down on video games and social media fads — the precise opposite, in other words, of what goes on in America.

The choice is thus between post-Faustian man, embodied by Sam Altman and his apostles, who will complete the mind’s retreat into the realm of bits; and what may be called “Neo-Faustian man”, illustrated by Xi Jinping and China’s leadership, who is most intent on preserving, in the classical sense, human mastery over the world of atoms. As America enters a new industrial epoch, its citizens can only hope for their own “Neo-Faustian” genius, albeit one who is attuned to the values and best traditions of the West. Or else, they risk seeing material reality itself slip from their fingers — forever.