Hackett Fischer, a professor of History at Brandeis University, notes that “with many important exceptions, the tone of much American historical writing turned deeply negative during the early 21st century. It remained so as these words were written, in 2021.” He complains of demands for political correctness on campus and laments a public discourse in which “we have seen a growing disregard for truth, and a cultivated carelessness of fact and evidence”. He argues that “ancient ideas of open inquiry and empirical truth have gained a new importance, in part because of hostile assaults upon them from many directions.”

African Founders has been years in the making. “My substantive work on this project had its beginning in 1955,” writes Hackett Fischer, 86, in the book’s acknowledgments. But, with the history wars raging, it arrives in the nick of time.

To set the scene, briefly, the 1619 Project aims to “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative.” Since it was launched, 1619 has been rebutted and debunked by American historians of comparable or even higher standing than Hackett Fischer (a very select group). Among those who have pointed out its many distortions, lies and inaccuracies is Gordon S. Wood, perhaps America’s greatest living historian, who has said he was surprised the project “could be so wrong in so many ways”. When another esteemed historian, Leslie M. Harris, expressed her reservations about one of 1619’s core claims — that the American Revolution was fought in large part to preserve slavery in North America — to a New York Times fact-checker, she was ignored.

Since publication, The New York Times has stealthily edited contentious passages while Hannah-Jones seems to spend most of her time arguing on Twitter, accusing her critics of being old white dudes who Just Don’t Get It. In one swiftly deleted tweet, she appeared to revel in the idea that the violent eruptions of the summer of 2020 be called “the 1619 riots”. None of these problems with the 1619 Project as a work have dampened its impact on American public life.

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This is the fraught landscape into which African Founders arrives. A few asides in the introduction notwithstanding, Hackett Fischer’s rebuttal to the vogue for deeply pessimistic history is quieter and less direct than that of many of his colleagues. But that makes it all the more persuasive. African Founders is a devastating counter-example: a thorough, compelling work free from the didacticism of both 1619 and conservative attempts to set the record straight, such as the 1776 commission launched by Donald Trump in 2020.

African Founders is a successor to Hackett Fischer’s most lauded work, Albion’s Seed. Published in 1989, it described how settlers from different parts of the British Isles imported a range of enduring “folkways” — culture, religion, language, ethics and so on — to different parts of what would become the United States: East Anglican puritans in New England, southern gentry in Virginia, Quakers from Wales and the Midlands in Pennsylvania, and Scots-Irish border folk in Appalachia. (The enthusiasm of the descendants of that final group for Donald Trump caused many pundits to dust off their copies of Albion’s Seed after 2016.)  Taking the same regional approach, African Founders charts the migrations, cultures and political and social contributions of slaves, freed slaves and their descendants throughout America.

It is hard to overstate the scope of this 900-page work. Open it at random and you will find subheadings such as “How African School Children In Philadelphia taught Benjamin Franklin A Lesson About Race” and “Diversity of African Traditions Among Afro-Texan Cowhands”. Breaking up the demographic, social and political big picture are stories of many African Americans whose tireless work didn’t just win freedom for themselves but helped to expand the very notion of American liberty.

Many of the most pre-eminent such heroes came from Chesapeake Virginia and Maryland, foremost among them Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Hackett Fischer argues that this was no coincidence. The prominence of men from the region in the founding of the United States — George Washington and Thomas Jefferson being the two most obvious examples — left a lasting impression on a later generation of slaves-turned-leaders: “These former Chesapeake built on a regional tradition of leadership, and reached beyond it in creative ways. They learned from its strengths, corrected its weaknesses, and invented other new ways of leading from their own heritage and experience.”

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Hackett Fischer spotlights less well-known figures too. Juan Rodriguez, for example, was an enterprising “black mulatto” who became the first documented non-native settler on Manhattan: he liked the look of the island and blagged his way off a Dutch merchant ship in 1613. Rodriguez fought for his freedom, fended off an attempted enslavement, married an Indian wife, became a successful trader and a translator and go-between for the Dutch and American Indians. Several scholars have called him “Manhattan’s first merchant”.

In New England, the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatly, named for the ship on which she was brought to Boston in 1761, confounded racist expectations and won praise for verse that Hackett Fischer calls “a large-spirited celebration of a common spirit in all people everywhere”. As well as the racism she encountered in her own time, Wheatly would later be criticised by black nationalists, who weren’t especially keen on her short poem “On being Brought from Africa to America”: “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land/Taught my benighted soul to understand”. Hackett Fischer notes the irony in the similarities between the black nationalist critiques and the contemporary racist criticism, including from Thomas Jefferson.

Hackett Fischer is clear that none of this should detract from the cruelty of slavery or the racist violence that followed. His book is full of terrifying detail of the lives of slaves across America, including detailed accounts of how those experiences varied over time and geography. But he understands that lingering on the horrors of slavery only get you so far in understanding America’s past.

The story told by Hackett Fischer stands in stark contrast to the demotivating, almost paralysing lesson of the 1619 Project: slavery not as America’s original sin but something hardwired into its DNA, a past that cannot be escaped. It is a dispiritingly static view of the country. Rather than displaying a curiosity at the paradox that has animated so much American history — “How is it,” asked Dr Johnson in 1775, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” — the 1619 approach dogmatically sweeps aside everything other than the existence of slavery as minor details in the story of the United States.

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African Founders, by contrast, demonstrates that there doesn’t need to be a trade-off between “centring” the experience and stories of black Americans and an appreciation of the gift of American liberty. Indeed, the takeaway from Hackett Fischer’s work is that the latter cannot be achieved without the former.

“What if we told a story that centred slavery and Black Americans and, well, no one read it,” writes Nikole Hannah-Jones in the introduction to The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, remembering her fretting on the eve of The New York Times magazine special edition. She needn’t have worried. It was an overnight sensation. Indeed, measured by impact on the public conversation, rather than merit, the 1619 Project is a more successful contemporary work of opinion journalism or pop history than any other in recent history.

African Founders, by contrast, feels like a book out of time. Inconveniently heavy and equivocal in the age of skinny provocations. Moderate in an era of extremes. But closer to the truth than the divisive works that hog the limelight.

Voters in what is perhaps America’s most liberal city will today vote on whether or not to recall Boudin. The polls suggest he will lose. Boudin’s 2019 victory was heralded as part of a national moment: a major milestone for a movement of progressive prosecutors promising a radical new approach to law and order. Now, his possible downfall is also part of a bigger story: the Left-wing poster boy who boasted about emptying jails, not prosecuting “quality-of-life” crimes, and “reimagining” criminal justice has become the face of the backlash against a lax approach in the midst of a crime wave.

It’s not hard to understand why the recall race has attracted outsized attention. Whether it’s the open air drug markets of the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood or the brazen shoplifting that has caused many retail chains to simply shut up shop in the city, anarchic scenes from San Francisco have captured the popular imagination of a public increasingly concerned about crime. From the mass resignations in his DA office to the tragic cases of former offenders committing violent, sometimes lethal, crimes after being released on his watch, there’s no shortage of evidence for the case against Boudin.

If the recall race has been an opportunity for the radical prosecutor to restate his progressive principles, he hasn’t exactly seized it. Instead, he has attempted a half-hearted and unconvincing pivot to a tougher (or at least slightly less lawless) approach and resorted to partisan name-calling, attempting to smear the recall campaign as a Republican plot. Not something that you want to be in a city where just 7% of voters are registered Republican. “It’s really problematic that we are having a very Trumpian conversation in San Francisco,” Boudin said recently.

But this is a blue-on-blue fight, with liberal San Franciscans exasperated with the incompetence and extremism of a prosecutor for whom their safety doesn’t always seem like the top priority. As recall campaigner Andrea Shorter told me last year: “The inconvenient truth for Boudin is that it’s not just a small group of conservatives that are out to recall Democratic politicians… We are interested in and support criminal justice reform. We understand its implications in terms of racial justice. I myself am African-American and also LGBTQ. I have supported criminal justice reform for nearly three decades, but not at the expense of public safety.”

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Boudin would certainly be a major scalp for those worried about safety in American cities — and his ousting would send a powerful national message about the politics of crime in an election year. But if it is possible to underplay the significance of the recall race, it’s also possible to let the parable of San Francisco obscure the bigger picture.

Other high-profile progressive prosecutors are in office across America’s major cities: George Gascon in Los Angeles, Kim Foxx in Chicago, and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia are all prosecutors who, until recently, were happy to be described as part of the same movement as Boudin. At a city, state and federal level, a self-defeating, permissive approach to the interconnected problems of crime, homelessness and addiction dominates.

In the story many Democrats tell themselves, the party’s soft-on-crime mistakes are in the past. The U-turn from defund to refund the police has long since been completed. We get it now, they say to the voters and themselves, albeit a little later than we should have done. New York, for instance, has a tough-on-crime former cop running the show. Joe Biden has increased police funding. But in reality, the malpractice continues.

Take New York as an example: even as Eric Adams won the mayoralty with a promise to get a grip on the city’s burgeoning crime problem, the same election also saw the ascent of Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney who takes a very different approach. On his first day in office, Bragg issued a memo asking colleagues to avoid jail time for perpetrators of all but the most serious crimes. He later backtracked, but the instincts and priorities of the man in charge of prosecuting crimes in Manhattan were plain to see. Also in Eric Adams’s supposedly tough-on-crime New York, subway advertisements normalise the use of some of the deadliest and most addictive substances you can put in your body and empower their users. The city’s “Let’s Talk Fentanyl” campaign tells addicts: “Don’t be ashamed you are using, be empowered that you are using safely.”

Meanwhile, there is no sign of New York’s violent crime surge slowing. Shootings and homicides surged during the pandemic and, five months into the Eric Adams era, are still rising. Shootings in the city in the first quarter of 2022 were up on the same period last year. Nationwide, 2020 saw the largest year-on-year increase in homicides ever recorded. And the numbers are still going up.

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In Philadelphia, the story is especially grim. Homicide and shootings are at the highest rates on record, surpassing even the numbers from bad old days in the City of Brotherly Love. In a city of just 1.5 million, 559 people were murdered last year. And yet the city’s progressive prosecutor, Krasner, won re-election with two-thirds of the vote in both the Democratic primary and the general election. Even as public anxiety about crime rises, Krasner is sticking to his progressive guns: he recently established a unit dedicated to de-prosecuting crimes for offenders aged 18 to 25. By prioritising “rehabilitative programming”, the scheme effectively treats a violent criminal in his mid-twenties like a juvenile offender.

Elsewhere, the predictable damage of reckless post-George Floyd experiments is plain to see. In 2020, Oregon voted to decriminalise all drugs. The next year, overdose rates rose by 700%. To take a more prosaic example from neighbouring Washington: after the state passed a law dramatically limiting the ability of police from pursuing a car, drivers have taken to simply driving away from routine traffic stops.

More recently, after the Uvalde and Buffalo shootings, the Democrats have been understandably eager to talk about gun control. But they are more defensive when it comes to other, more everyday instances of gun violence. Krasner, for example, has called prosecutions for illegal gun possession “not only ineffective but unjust and racially discriminatory” while pointing the finger at the NRA and calling for tougher gun laws after another lethal in Philadelphia at the weekend. The cognitive dissonance is staggering. A more effective public safety agenda might bridge this absurd gap and unite the Democrats’ convictions on gun laws with the violence in America’s cities.

In the meantime, defeat for Boudin would be yet another chastening moment for progressive prosecutors and the Democrats more generally. But how many wake-up calls does the party need? In an America where violent crime is on the rise and fentanyl overdoses are now the leading cause of death among 18 to 45-year-olds, the Democrats are still a long way from completing the law-and-order U-turn that is required if they are to start making the streets of America’s cities any safer. Whether or not Boudin loses, liberal America is still firmly wedded to a mindset on crime, policing, criminal justice, drug addiction and homelessness that is failing — and for which may more Americans will pay for with their lives.

There are countless opportunities for petty embarrassment on the campaign trail. In a small event space in Troy, Ohio, Team J.D. Vance faces a familiar one: empty chairs. In a big venue, a half-full room is forgivable. But if the Hillbilly Elegy author turned Ohio Senate candidate cannot fill a dozen or so seats at this mid-afternoon stop of his “No BS tour”, what hope does he have come polling day?

To the relief of his staffers, people eventually trickle in. When the headcount ticks past some unspecified face-saving threshold, Vance strides through the door. The 37-year-old is bearded and broad, dressed in jeans, shirt and jacket. He is, by the standards of a high-profile Senate candidate, notably unpolished when it comes to glad-handing on his way to the front. After some throat-clearing jokes about the cost of Easter chocolate (“Inflation is real, ladies and gentlemen”), Vance launches into the stump speech that he hopes will carry him to victory in one of the most closely watched and aggressively contested primaries this cycle, and then, come November, win a spot in the Senate.

Ever since he announced his candidacy last year, Vance has adopted a pugnacious, sometimes trivial, tone online. This has been jarring to see from the author of an affecting memoir about growing up the son of a heroin addict among poor Scots-Irish Appalachian transplants in southeastern Ohio, who then defied the odds to join the Marines and graduate from Yale Law School. To take an especially witless example from his Twitter feed: “Let Trump back on. We need Alec Baldwin tweets,” he joked shortly after the actor accidentally shot and killed a woman on set in January.

Vance has received plenty of attention — and opprobrium — since he announced his Senate bid last summer. Not because of his change in tone, but because he has, in the years since Hillbilly Elegy was published, moved from being a conservative critic of Donald Trump to an avowedly pro-Trump stance. This conversion risked leaving him stranded: loathed by the establishment into which he was welcomed six years ago; mistrusted by GOP primary voters bombarded by his rivals with reminders of his past criticisms of the former president.

He has made this leap with a sobering, dark message: a substantive but bleak account of power in America that is light on partisan, issue-of-the-moment cheap shots. The man making his pitch to Ohio voters in Troy is a far cry from the very online culture warrior of his social media threads. “I want us to be a country again where a normal person can support a family of five on a single middle-class wage,” he says without much zeal, before telling a story of industrial decline, off-shored jobs and energy policy failure that, he says, means “we now depend on people who don’t like us very much to make stuff that we need.”

Then he gets to the part of the message with bite: “Our idiot leaders decided to do that to us. And I hate to use that term but sometimes it’s important to be direct about what’s going on… Our leaders have played a very dangerous and, I think, very ugly game with the American people. They’ve decided that they’re going to divide us against each other and distract us with constant appeals to race, to sex, to gender, to everything other than what I really think matters in this country.”

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Vance’s political conversion is usually presented in personal terms — from anti to pro-Trump. Aware of the liability that his past Trump comments undoubtedly are in this race, Vance tends to respond to suspicion from Trump supporters by emphasising his approval of the man and his administration. “The only thing they have against me is, you know, ‘J.D. is Never Trump’,” he had told voters at a campaign stop earlier in the day in Miamisburg before expressing his regret at “stupid things” he had said in the past.

But the Trump focus disguises a deeper transformation. Woven through Hillbilly Elegy, which was published in 2016, is an orthodox conservatism that places the blame for the endemic social problems from which its author escaped at his community’s own doorstep: its habit of worklessness and shirking of responsibility, among other cultural defects. “We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese,” writes Vance. “These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance — the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.”

Vance the candidate isn’t so shy about pointing the finger. Announcing his Senate run last year, he told supporters that the success of his book meant that he had met some of the “very wealthy” and “very powerful people” who “call the shots in business and in government”. Exposure to these elites, Vance said, had taught him that “you have leaders in this country in government and in business who don’t think they owe anything to the country that made them who they are”.

When I spoke to Vance after he had finished talking to voters in Troy, he identified “three big issues: trade, immigration and foreign policy”, where the GOP needed to learn from the populist revolution that Trump led. “I think most Republican insiders, consultants, and leaders world love to go back to a 2004-style Bush Republican Party. I don’t think our voters have any interest in that at all,” he said. “The question really to me, and in some ways the question in this race — and it’s a ten-year conversation — is whether the instincts of our voters, which are much more closely aligned with Trump, find their way into actual Republican politicians.”

***

It isn’t just Vance’s high-profile conversion that has made the Ohio senate primary so closely watched. The race has become a proxy battle for the future of the American Right. Not Trump versus anti-Trump, or the establishment versus the populists, but competing visions of post-Trump Republican politics. His two main opponents are perfectly absurd modern Republican archetypes.

Josh Mandel, 42, still looks like the schoolboy who wanted to be a politician when he grows up that he very obviously was. His internet antics make Vance’s social media use look reserved: Mandel fell foul of Twitter’s policy on “hateful conduct” for asking in a poll which “illegals” would commit more crime, “Muslim terrorists” or “Mexican gangbangers”. His Senate campaign has married outlandishly hardline cultural conservatism and Trumpist razzmatazz with the substantive foreign and economic policy of the Republican old guard. He is the candidate for Trumpism as an aesthetic choice, not a policy platform.

Vance’s other big threat is Mike Gibbons, a septuagenarian investment banker who has splashed his own cash on the race, and preaches a libertarian, trust-me-I’m-a-successful-businessman brand of Republican politics. Vance may have national fame, but Mandel and Gibbons have proven to be tougher primary opponents than they might seem. Gibbons has deep pockets and Mandel has high name recognition among primary voters in the state. “Bestselling author isn’t what it used to be,” quips one strategist involved in the race.

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Compared to the alternatives, Vance stands for a return to the substantive populism with which Trump launched his assault on the Republican Party. Yet in many ways, the story of the Trump presidency was of a truce between the populists and the establishment on a range of issues: whether it be taxes, regulation, the judiciary or foreign policy, Trump gave the establishment concrete wins, often to the dismay of those in the vanguard of the insurgency.

Vance would be happy to tear the GOP peace treaty up. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s preferred strategy of running on nothing more than the dangers of the radical Left in this year’s midterms is anathema to a candidate offering a wide-ranging diagnosis of America’s problems. Only one sitting US Senator, Josh Hawley of Missouri, has endorsed him. “Most of the people serving in the senate have been in the same system for 30 or 40 years,” Vance tells me. “And I just think there’s this massive discrepancy between where voters are and where most senators are, but it’s going to close and it’s going to close pretty quickly.”

Vance is the most high-profile of a group of Republican candidates who have the backing of tech billionaire Peter Thiel. In their esoteric mix of nationalism and libertarianism, the PayPal co-founder’s own politics can be hard to pin down. A prominent Trump supporter in 2016, he was less enthusiastic about his re-election bid. But, as with Vance, at the heart of Thiel’s worldview is a profound critique of an elite he sees as decadent, unpatriotic and incompetent. He soon became Vance’s biggest backer, aiding his bid to the tune of $10 million in donations to the super PAC Protect Ohio Values.

Luke Thompson, the executive director of Protect Ohio Values, says that it’s possible to overstate how far Vance has travelled politically. “He used to think the people in charge were stupid or misinformed, now he thinks that a lot of them are actively evil,” he tells me. Explaining his change of mind on the former president in Miamisburg, Vance told voters that “Trump revealed a corruption in this country that I think I was naive to”.

Those who turned to Vance as their go-to Trump-voter whisperer have not taken his political conversion well. One-time fellow anti-Trumpers have dismissed him as a “pathetic loser poser jerk” and lamented his “silly yet detestable moral collapse”. If anything, by missing the sincerity of Vance’s conversion, these attacks underestimate the threat he poses.

But how surprising is his political journey really? Hillbilly Elegy’s success was part of a brief moment either side of the 2016 election when at least a small section of bien pensant America was chastened by Trump’s rise and the dangerously wide gap between different parts of American society that it revealed. But the moment for mutual understanding, which Vance in many ways personified, would soon pass. Everyone picked a side and dug in. Including Vance.

“I’ve learned that the very traits that enabled my survival during childhood inhibit my success as an adult. I see conflict and I run away or prepare for battle,” Vance writes in his memoir. He has certainly done the latter since entering politics. And, contrary to accusations of grift, Vance’s Senate bid was a risky move. “Do you realise how good he had it?” says one friend. “If he loses, it’s over. His reputation is gone. And he knew that when he launched.”

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For months, it seemed like it might not pay off. Vance had failed to rise to the top of a crowded field. Not that he was anything other than bullish when I asked him about his chances. “If our numbers are correct, I’m gonna win and the only reason I would lose is the perception that I may attack Trump.” When we spoke, three weeks before polling day, the big question was whether the former president would endorse any one in race or stay neutral. “Trump and I get along well,” he told me. “We’re getting to the point where if he is going to get involved, it probably has to be soon. But I’m not going to guess on it.”

He wouldn’t need to. Four days later, Trump announced his endorsement of Vance. “Like some others, J.D. may have said some not so great things about me in the past,” said Trump. “But he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades. He is our best chance for victory in what could be a very tough race.” With the endorsement came cash — Thiel poured millions more into the election bid — and the sense that the gamble had paid off.

In a TV ad amplifying Trump’s endorsement, the narrator introduces Vance as “marine, author of Hillbilly Elegy, president Trump’s endorsed America first conservative.” The journey was complete. The candidate looks into the camera and says: “Trump fought back and so have I.”

In backing Vance, Trump has taken a risk of his own: choosing a side in a contentious, close and high-profile primary. A week after his endorsement, a group of Ohio conservatives wrote to the former president asking him to reconsider. “Unlike the other candidates in this race, J.D. Vance has not developed relationships with Republican voters and grassroots leaders that are crucial to win,” read the apparatchiks’ letter. “This endorsement of J.D. Vance is a betrayal to not only your Ohio supporters but Trump supporters across our great nation!”

On Saturday, Trump and Vance appeared at a rally near Columbus. It was Trump’s rise that turned Vance into a star in 2016. Six years on, their fortunes are intertwined once again, with Vance hoping that the Trump endorsement gets him over the line, and Trump betting that a Vance victory demonstrates his enduring power among the Republican electorate. “I want to pick somebody who is going to win,” Trump said introducing Vance on stage. “And this man is going to win.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn have only been members of Congress for a little over a year, but in that short time they have earned themselves reputations as hateful bogeymen for Democrats, embarrassing annoyances, if not worse, to many Republican colleagues and renegade heroes to others in the GOP base. As the midterms near, they are also test cases for the appeal of their extreme style of politics. Might these black holes of political attention collapse on themselves?

Far-Right and far-out, Greene’s latest high-profile indiscretion was to appear at a white supremacist conference hosted by Nick Fuentes. A straightforwardly racist, anti-semitic Holocaust denier, Fuentes introduced Greene by asking the crowd to give “a round of applause to Russia”. The appearance — notwithstanding Greene’s subsequent insistence that it was an innocent mistake and that she had no idea who Nick Fuentes was — lacked the darkly eccentric draw of some of her previous outlandish statements, such as the one about Rothschild-owned space lasers causing Californian wildfires. Greene has been stripped of her committee assignments by the Democratic-led House. She has not, however, been formally censured by her own party, and is proudly endorsed by Donald Trump.

By contrast, Cawthorn’s problem isn’t kooky or noxious views — not that he doesn’t hold them. A few weeks ago, he had called Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a thug” and the Ukrainian government “evil”. But his antics have tended to antagonise fellow Republicans in a way that Greene’s have not. More recently, he embarrassed his colleagues (and amused the rest of us) during a podcast appearance in which he claimed to have encountered rampant cocaine use and orgy invitations among the Washington establishment. Tellingly, it was his characterisation of Washington as a depraved Gomorrah that provoked the sharper reaction from House Leader Kevin McCarthy and other senior Republicans.

But does any of this come at an electoral cost? Or will this pair of outrage-hunting political influencers get re-elected in spite of their fringe beliefs?

For partisan-minded Democrats, justice can only be served by one of their own. And so gullible donors fill the coffers of Democratic would-be opponents of the Greenes and Cawthorns who stand approximately zero chance of winning in their heavily Republican districts. One example of these well-funded knights in shining armour is a black veteran in a cowboy hat. Marcus Flowers wants to “hold Marjorie Taylor Greene accountable” in the south-western corner of Georgia she represents and has raised more than $4.5 million to do so: an absurdly high figure for a House seat which FiveThirtyEight estimates has a 45-point Republican lean. Greene herself has raised similarly silly amounts, exploiting her national anti-hero status to rake in $7.5 million since the last election.

If Greene is to be defeated, it will be in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District Republican primary on 24 May. Here, those lining up to do the deed are less appealing to the terminally online liberals wasting their money on Democrats like Flowers. A donor interested solely in making sure Greene is not re-elected would give not to Flowers, but to Jennifer Strahan. She is the most serious challenger — but, according to the most recent campaign finance disclosure, has just $60,332 in cash to take that opportunity.

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As was clear in a recent interview, Strahan, a business owner, is no less conservative than Greene, although her promise of dutiful, low-key representation of her voters in Washington contrasts with Greene’s national celebrity.“Representative Greene does not own conservatism,” Strahan tells me. “A lot of people in our district share similar beliefs, but they also want someone who is fighting for the people…. [Greene] is not usually in the district. She is off fundraising and doing other things that you’d expect to see in a typical politician.”

“The one thing I want to restore to this position is that it is about service, not being a social media celebrity,” she says. A noble goal, but one that, as the fundraising figures suggest, might be misaligned with the incentive systems of 21st-century American politics.

As for Cawthorn, his notoriety has cost him endorsements that matter in North Carolina’s 11th District, a mostly rural western part of the state that includes rural Blue Ridge mountain communities as well as affluent (and Democratic-voting) Asheville. Thom Tillis, a Senator from North Carolina, has endorsed one of Cawthorn’s challengers, a state senator called Chuck Edwards who, like Strahan in Georgia, promises low-key dependability rather than attention-seeking. Yet Cawthorn’s toughest challenger could prove to be Michele Woodhouse, a former district chair who is running as an avowedly “America First” alternative. She describes herself as a former Cawthorn backer exasperated by his reckless style.

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Cawthorn’s bigger problem may not be his national infamy, but his lack of political nous. Last year, he toyed with switching seats and seeking election in North Carolina’s newly drawn 13th District, rather than the 11th. When a court ordered the district’s borders be redrawn, Cawthorn changed his mind — more the actions of a career politician than a man-of-the-people outsider.

His amateurishness was also on display as he handled the fallout of his “coke and orgies” claims last week, apologising to colleagues, offering unhelpful clarifications and blaming the liberal media for the whole thing. But Cawthorn still has one big thing going for him: the support of Donald Trump. He will speak alongside the former president at a rally in North Carolina this weekend.

By neat coincidence, the week that started with Cawthorn’s claims about Washington debauchery ended with the return of a familiar face to the political fray: Sarah Palin, who more than a decade ago helped to reignite the culture wars in which the likes of Cawthorn and Greene now do ferocious daily battle. “America is at a tipping point,” she said in a statement announcing a bid for a vacant Alaskan congressional seat. “I knew I had to step up and join the fight.”

Elected office was always incidental to Palin’s celebrity. She was Governor of Alaska for just two and a half years. After her vice-presidential bid made her a conservative star and a global punchline — not that she ever seemed to mind the jokes — the administration of Alaskan government didn’t seem quite so exciting. She resigned in 2009, not even seeing out her first term, let alone seeking re-election.

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As many have observed, Palin’s rise was an important waypoint on the journey that brought America to the Trump era, and tribute acts like Greene and Cawthorn. By today’s standards, the “going rogue” brand pushed by the no-nonsense hockey mom from Walisa seems positively wholesome. And to revisit the outrage it generated feels a bit like watching those clips of Fifties prudes panicked about the damage Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips might be doing to teenage girls’ minds.

If Palin was a politician for the reality-TV era, Cawthorn and Greene are built for the Instagram age: political influencers who thrive in a fractured media landscape by delivering a more potent, concentrated product to a segmented audience. But as well as being a trial of that offering’s wider electoral appeal, this year’s midterms could also be a test of whether Cawthorn or Greene need a House seat to remain in the political fray. One suspects that space will be made for either of them in the conservative-entertainment world if they find themselves out of a job.

Palin, for instance, had fame, fortune and influence after 2008 without having to worry about the voters. Of course, a former member of Congress might not have the draw of a former vice-presidential candidate, but Cawthorn and Greene are evidence that notoriety matters more than seniority. The challenge, whether in Congress or not, is to stay relevant. Palin managed it without elected office. For a while. But now here she is, once again seeking the votes of her fellow Alaskans. Rather than serving as a model, perhaps that should be a warning to those fringe Republicans flirting with the electoral defeat in pursuit of political stardom.

It’s easy to see why the images of the debris, a very pandemic-era combination of online shopping and urban lawlessness, received heavy play on local news and spread far and wide across the web. So bad was the litter problem — caused by systematic robbery, with criminal groups pilfering packages, ripping them open and running off with the most valuable goods — that a cargo train had derailed just a few days before Newsom’s late-January visit. And so here was the state governor, in jeans and a t-shirt (and a cloth mask outdoors) in a litter-picking photo-op: an irresistible visual to add to the thick dossier on Democratic misrule in California.

But the bluntness of Newsom’s reaction — as well as comparing his own state to a third-world country, he explicitly blamed organised criminals — was a revealing sign of this safely Democratic state’s changed political landscape.

Put simply, such statements might have been a political headache for a California Democrat only 18 months earlier. With the country in the throes of its post-George Floyd “reckoning” — dominated by a mood of hypersensitivity around anything relating to crime, policing, race and any combination of the three — references to the third world, as well as daring to be seen to be tough on crime, might not have gone down well. But Newsom received only fringe pushback.

In California’s two biggest cities, the signs of progressive retreat are everywhere. The extent of that retreat, and the question of exactly what comes after years of Leftwards shift, will define the political future of America’s most populous state.

In the past two years, London Breed, the Mayor of San Francisco, has performed a dramatic about-turn on crime and policing. In 2020, the city chief cut $120 million from the budget of the San Francisco police department. Yet a year later, she asked for emergency extra funding for the police and announced a crackdown on crime in the Tenderloin, the city’s most lawless neighborhood which operates as an open-air drug market. It was time, said Breed, to end the “bullshit”. Now she is doing battle with the city’s progressive forces to deliver on what, anywhere other than San Francisco, would be considered a reasonably common-sense clampdown given the scale of the city’s drug overdose and crime problems.

And she is far from alone. The campaign to recall Chesa Boudin, the city’s progressive prosecutor whose short time in office has been a disaster, was started by a group of local activists and quickly developed serious momentum. Campaigners secured enough signatures to force a citywide vote, which is scheduled for June, and look increasingly likely to triumph. A mid-February survey found that 68% of San Francisco voters planned to vote Boudin out of office. (That in a city where just 6.7% are registered Republicans.)

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Campaigners in another recall push in the city found success last month when voters ousted three members of San Francisco’s school board. 70% of voters opted to ditch officials who seemed more interested in what to rename the city’s schools than figuring out how to reopen safely during the pandemic. (Among the names they hoped to erase from the San Francisco schools: George Washington, sitting Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and author Robert Louis Stevenson.) As part of her tack towards the center, Breed has supported the recall campaign.

A few hundred miles to the south, a group of Angelenos have taken inspiration from the anti-Boudin campaign and hope to oust LA’s head prosecutor. The move to recall George Gascón is in its early stages, with campaigners recently given the all-clear to start collecting signatures. But things don’t look good for Gascón, who is cut from a similar, hyperprogessive cloth to Boudin. Like Boudin, he has overseen a lethal slide towards lawlessness. And, like Boudin, he faces a furious internal revolt from his prosecutors. In a recently published internal survey by Los Angeles Association for Deputy District Attorneys, nine in ten prosecutors supported the recall effort. “Over a year ago, Gascón began a massive social experiment by redirecting prosecutorial resources away from enforcing the law while simultaneously ignoring large portions of the legal code,” said its vice-president Eric Siddall. “The result is an emboldened criminal element that knows the DA will not hold criminals accountable. This experiment needs to end.”

Even before a single vote has been counted, the anti-Gascón campaign has already changed policy in the city. In an effort to fend off the backlash, he has reversed two of his landmark policies: a ban on trying juveniles as adults and on seeking life without parole.

Meanwhile, in the crowded race to replace Eric Garcetti as the mayor of Los Angeles — Joe Biden has appointed him as the US ambassador to India — the mood is unmistakably moderate. Homelessness, crime and the cost of living dominate the debate. Karen Bass, a former congresswoman and the pick of the city’s Democratic machine, has swerved Rightwards, with a policy platform that features clearing homeless encampments as a prominent promise. This has dismayed the city’s progressives, who complain that she is “pandering to affluent Westside and Valley voters at the expense of black, Latinx and working-class ones”, as two Black Lives Matter activists put it in a recent column. (Needless to say, LA’s working-class voters, whatever their race, are by no means as on board with a far-Left approach to criminal justice as the authors claim.)

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Meanwhile, Rick Caruso, a billionaire former Republican, has thrown his hat into the ring. Caruso, a shopping mall developer, is a big beast in LA civic life: he is a trustee at the University of Southern California and has been a member of the city’s Police Commission. In a statement confirming his switch from Independent to Democrat, he said that he “won’t be a typical Democrat… I’ll be a pro-centrist, pro-jobs, pro-public safety Democrat.” Caruso has backed the Gascón recall campaign. (Bass has not.)

The counterrevolution in California’s cities may seem fairly mild by national standards: a shift in tone among the same class of Democratic politicians. But the backlash on America’s left coast demonstrates the outer limits of tolerance for radical progressivism in American politics. As the novelist Wallace Stegner noted, California is like “America, only more so”.

When it comes to experiments in far-Left urban politics in recent years, that has undoubtedly been the case. Now the question is whether Californian Democrats have learned anything but the most shallow lessons from the last few years. It is one thing to acknowledge that “Defund the Police” is political kryptonite and nudge public safety spending back up. It is another to face up to the grave problems facing your city.

Voters are watching closely as the likes of Breed, or whoever is chosen to replace Garcetti, try to clean things up. A nod to the centre might be enough to spare short-term political disaster. But it will likely take more than that to actually solve the problems that have voters so frustrated.

The first two orders were aimed at the classroom. One promised “to ensure excellence” in schools by taking steps to “end the use of inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory, and to raise academic standards”. The other affirmed that whether or not a child should wear a mask to school was up to parents, not schools. Youngkin knows what was clear to anyone watching the Virginia gubernatorial race: that his focus on the question of who is in control of the state’s classrooms — whether they are open or not, and what is being taught when they are — was what delivered a Republican win in a state that voted for Joe Biden by 10 percentage points just a year earlier.

While many Virginians with school-age children were angered by long-term school closures during the pandemic, the promotion of a divisive “antiracist” pedagogy and the abandonment of the meritocratic pursuit of academic excellence, Youngkin’s opponent, Terry McAuliffe, sided with the teachers’ unions. Youngkin called his campaign events “parents matter” rallies, while McAuliffe chose Randi Weingarten — the union head honcho and public enemy number one for parents of children who, in many cases, missed more than a year’s worth of in-person schooling — as a headline speaker for his election-eve rally. In one debate, he uttered a self-incriminating mantra: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” He never recovered.

Much of the debate that followed the Virginia result centered on whether it was school closures or the pedagogy for which Critical Race Theory has become a shorthand were the bigger factor. Some on the Left leapt on the fact that the anti-CRT campaigner Christopher Rufo is explicit about his intent to weaponise CRT against Democrats. An analysis of the Virginia results by Michael Hartney, a political scientist at Boston College, found that Youngkin did better in areas where school closures had been more extensive.

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But this post-mortem fails to understand just how tangled the issues are. The anti-CRT backlash was a product of remote learning: parents saw what their children were learning and, in many cases, were not impressed. Anger at a progressive reckoning was understandably intensified by the timing: renaming schools, paying thousands of dollars for a Zoom lecture from Ibram X. Kendi and abolishing standardised testing at a time when classrooms were closed, grades were slipping and the poorest students with the least support were being hit the hardest. Taken together, these questions boil down to control: who decides what happens in America’s schools?

Needless to say, classroom issues are not limited to Virginia. And for many Republicans, Youngkin struck on a winning issue ahead of the midterms later this year. Party strategists hope they can win back a cohort of college-educated suburban voters they lost during the Trump years. Some panicked Democrats also appear to realize this: since November, parts of the party have dropped their previous passivity towards the teachers’ unions. But whether or not Democrats learn the right lessons from 2021, parents of school-age children have been identified as a crucial slice of the electorate. They are worried and frustrated. And they have mobilised. They have joined campaign groups, attended school-board meetings and run for office. And they are set to decide races across America.

Writing in The Atlantic recently, one parent explained how a broader disillusion with the Democratic Party was triggered by pandemic schooling: “until recently… [I was] a loyal, Left-leaning Democrat, and I had been my entire adult life. I was the kind of partisan who registered voters before midterm elections and went to protests. I hated Donald Trump so much that I struggled to be civil to relatives on the other side of the aisle. But because of what my family has gone through during the pandemic, I can’t muster the same enthusiasm. I feel adrift from my tribe and, to a certain degree, disgusted with both parties.”

Another parent, a progressive who lives in Northern Virginia, an affluent, heavily Democratic part of the country, explained to me his disgust at the support for closures from his political allies. “I’m a Left-winger and the people who were the most pro-closure were all on the Left,” he said. “Everything they were pushing for was antithetical to liberalism. School closures were hurting the most at-risk kids: people whose parents aren’t a lawyer like me… The hypocrisy of these people was incredible. They claimed to care so much about underprivileged people and yet were ready to throw them under the bus.”

He says he knows many lifetime Democrats who voted for Youngkin because they wanted schools to return to normal for their children.

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If candidates and political consultants are plotting ways to win over the parent vote, education activists hope that the pandemic will prove to be a decisive moment for American schooling. “Covid didn’t break the public school system. It was already broken,” says Corey DeAngelis, the national director of research at School Choice Now. “But, for almost two years now, it has shone a spotlight on the main problem with K-12 education across America, which is a massive, long-existing power imbalance between the public school teachers’ union monopoly and families.”

Parents are voting with their feet. Enrolment in New York City’s public school system has dropped by 5% since the start of the pandemic. Homeschooling increased by 50% in Virginia in the 2020-21 school year. Nationwide, more than half a million American children have left public education since the start of the pandemic. The school-choice movement is flourishing. Public support is at an all-time high while 18 states have expanded school-choice measures. The number of states with an education saving account programme, which DeAngelis calls the “gold standard” for school choice and which allows parents to receive public funds for education if they withdraw their children from the public system, doubled from five to ten last year.

The question is whether anger over education at the moment will trigger a long-lasting change in education politics in America, or whether business as usual returns once anger over school closures subsides. I suspect it will do the former, just as the effects of the pandemic school closures will likely do lasting damage to the mental health and educational outcomes of America’s children.

Organisations started by parents to pressure their school systems offer a counterweight to teachers’ unions now have an institutional momentum of their own. Choice-enhancing policy changes will not be repealed overnight. Parents stuck dealing with at-home learning for more than a year will not easily forget who was revealed to have a veto power over their children’s education.

Perhaps above all else, the spread of anti-racist dogma in public education — and the prioritisation of progressive genuflecting over academic excellence — will mobilise all but the most progressive of parents.

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Of the many hasty symbolic changes made during the racial reckoning of 2020, the one I keep returning to is the decision by KIPP, the country’s largest network of charter schools, to retire their national slogan, which, until the summer of 2020, was “Work hard. Be nice.” It isn’t just impossibly inoffensive, but it strikes me as a pretty good motto: who wouldn’t want their kids to live by those words? But according to KIPP, the four-word mantra needed to go because it “supports the illusion of meritocracy”  and because “working hard and being nice is not going to dismantle systemic racism”.

After the pandemic passes, that toxic ideology will remain. It seems so anathema to human nature that a counter-revolution feels inevitable. In fact — as Virginia is demonstrating — it is already underway. And it is parents who are its foot-soldiers.

But even those who disapprove of BBB’s fate must surely see that this is America’s political system functioning as it is supposed to function. Biden’s legislation can’t even get the support of half of the Senate — and so it won’t become law. This is standard Washington fare. It is politics as it always has been.

However, to listen to Democrats in the days since Manchin delivered his fatal blow is to be left with a very different impression. According to their version of events, the senator’s decision is tantamount to a crisis for American democracy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that “our entire democracy is on the line”; to fix this, she wants to “crack down” on the “very privileged, very entitled and very protected” Senate. Chuck Schumer, notionally in charge of Senate Democrats, responded to Manchin’s decision with a promise that the upper chamber will vote on a bill that would overhaul US voting laws as soon as it is back from a Christmas recess.

Even before Manchin doomed Biden’s agenda, calls for changes to the rules governing America’s system of government — some small, others profound — had grown louder as the prospects of Build Back Better faded. Last week, Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices. “The current court,” she argued, “threatens the democratic foundations of our nation.”

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In Democratic-supporting parts of the media, the tone is no less alarmist. Jennifer Rubin, the West Wing’s favourite columnist, argued in the Washington Post that the failure of Build Back Better puts “democracy itself in a precarious position”. She emphasised: “the Democrats’ hopes for 2022 and the fate of our democracy depend on the President’s ability to reconstruct an agenda he can actually deliver.”

In one sense, she’s right. Their legislative disappointment is a chance for Democrats to face a banal, if frustrating, reality: that Biden was not elected with a mandate for transformative legislation, that the party has only the loosest grip on the legislative branch, and that America simply isn’t crying out for the progressive reforms that most of the party favours.

But facing unpleasant facts isn’t fun. Hence why Democrats appear to be slipping further into their own delusions, processing Manchin’s obstinance as a crisis that imperils not just their own electoral fortunes but the future of the republic. And hence why what should be a moderating moment looks likely to have a radicalising effect: their own legislative impotence persuading a party already comfortable with an apocalyptic register to dial up the doom and gloom to eleven.

Such a response can, of course, be understood on an emotional level: you’re more likely to complain about the quality of the refereeing when you’re losing. But it is also worth appreciating on a political level. The Democrats’ 2020 victory was built on the unpopularity of Donald Trump. Without that, it is far from clear they can put together a coalition of voters broad enough to hold on to both chambers of Congress and the White House. And so, with a legislative agenda foundering, it’s time to return to something they can all agree on: the wickedness of the other side.

None of this is to say there aren’t threats to American democracy from the Trumpist Right. The last President spent the months between the election and Biden’s inauguration doing everything he could to stay in power. Any sensible reforms to the rules governing Washington would safeguard against something similar happening again.

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But that danger to America’s electoral system only makes the Democrats’ focus on the largely unrelated question of voting rights — and their overblown rhetoric of voter suppression and “Jim Crow 2.0” — more baffling, and less excusable. Instead of tailoring their pro-democracy agenda to the dangers that surround post-election certification, the party is ploughing ahead with a bill that would federalise voting rules in response to some mostly inane changes at a state level.

Elsewhere, Democrats want to overturn the rules that govern the Senate and, if Warren is anything to go by, take the extraordinary step of rebalancing the Supreme Court simply because progressives aren’t satisfied by its current composition. As the centre-left commentator Matthew Yglesias has observed, Democrats certainly aren’t acting as though they believe that the future of democracy is in peril. If they did, they’d surely shelve party-political concerns and build as broad a coalition as possible to combat the Trumpist threat.

The dark irony of the Democrats’ predicament is that they could end up being right for the wrong reasons. There’s a chance, after all, that the failure of Build Back Better really is bad news for American democracy — but only because it radicalises their own side.

A universe in which Biden and other Democratic lawmakers listen to Manchin’s complaints about the legislation, attempt to understand the concerns of the voters he represents (without whom the Senate would be in Republican hands), and steer themselves back towards the centre feels a long way away. Biden, for his part, has taken a tough line all along: according to the Washington Post, the White House rejected an offer from Manchin that included the vast majority of the bill’s provisions.

Now the West Virginian has walked away, they appear to be pursuing a vindictive, scorched-earth strategy. Faced with Manchin’s exasperation, Democrats cry foul, accusing him of being a corrupt coal boss and choosing to ignore the obvious fact that the legislation would have been very unpopular in his home state. Again, the clear, normal, predictable explanation is spurned in favour of a more alarmist narrative.

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Biden himself is certainly capable of overblown rhetoric about the future of American democracy. But so far he has mostly resisted calls from Democrats to go nuclear and change the rules that govern Washington to favour his own party. That refusal grows harder by the day.

Many in his party are rightly concerned that their country is stuck in a downward spiral, but they cannot see their own part in the process. Increasingly, both sides view anything other than victory for themselves as illegitimate. A party that responds to its own perfectly normal legislative woes by doubling down on an all-out battle to rewrite the rules of the system in its favour is not serious about ending that descent into anarchy. And so, the more impotent the Democrats feel, the more dangerous they become.

So it is that Pete Buttigieg — mayor of South Bend, Indiana, turned surprisingly competitive, first openly gay presidential candidate, turned transportation secretary — finds himself a popular answer to Washington’s favourite guessing game.

But is Buttigieg 2024 really the answer?

If you squint, you can just about see the outlines of a case for President Pete. Viewed from his most flattering angle, Buttigieg might look like the perfect candidate to save the hopelessly out-of-touch Democrats. Hailing from a rust-belt city in a red state, he can construct a better claim to broad appeal than Harris, for example, who has never won an election outside California. His 2020 presidential pitch was more sympathetic to Trump voters than his rivals’; to liberal astonishment, he is even capable of appearing on Fox News. Indeed, Buttigieg’s appeal to “heartland values” has caused some on the Left to accuse him of deploying racially coded language.

But far from providing an answer to the Democrats’ succession quandary, the chatter surrounding Buttigieg only reveals the seriousness of the party’s talent crisis: the Democrats’ line up of top-tier politicians looks hopelessly thin. Yet this personnel problem — and the promotion of Buttigieg as the solution — points to a more profound shortcoming: the Democratic Party’s increasing inability to appeal to blue-collar voters.

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First, let’s be clear about the problem. Educational polarisation — the process by which Democrats have been losing non-college-educated voters and gaining college-educated ones — is starting to look like a very bad electoral trade for Democrats. For years, the party has been haemorrhaging support among working-class whites. According to Pew, white voters without a college degree accounted for a quarter of Joe Biden’s support in 2020. In 1992, nearly 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters were whites without a college degree.

A coalition of college-educated whites and non-white working class voters was supposed to more than make up for those losses. As the political scientist Ruy Teixeira has noted, this was always a questionable bargain for Democrats, with losses among white working-class voters outpacing the racial diversification of the electorate that the party has been banking on. But it now threatens to be a truly disastrous deal.

Why? Because the long-promised rainbow coalition is proving elusive. And the firewall of non-white non-college-educated voters that Democrats have relied on is crumbling. Since 2012, the Democrats have lost 18 points off their margin among non-white working-class voters. A recent Wall Street Journal poll put the parties on level pegging among latino voters. This all adds up to a significant blue-collar problem for Democrats. And if they fail to solve it, they face electoral disaster.

In this context, Buttigieg, the son of an English professor and a linguist, is a strange candidate to be the man who can reconnect his party to their traditional voting bloc. A bookish meritocrat who calls South Bend home because that is where his father had tenure at Notre Dame, Buttigieg is best understood as an elite credentialist who did all the things an ambitious early millennial was supposed to do: Harvard, a Rhodes scholarship, a stint working on John Kerry’s presidential campaign, a lucrative job as a consultant at McKinsey. All of this before 29, at which point he was elected mayor of his hometown.

While Buttigieg certainly eschews the Squad-style radicalism that is electoral kryptonite outside the bluest neighborhoods, the self-styled moderate is nonetheless an enthusiastic apostle of woke capitalism. He may not be the activist on the street who wants to defund the police. But he’s the suit in the boardroom insisting that everyone sign up for their DEI training.

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For all his stated empathy for the Trump voter, Buttigieg oozes technocracy. In truth, he is made by and for the elite. As should be obvious by now, the idea that, armed with the right policy programmes, politicians can respond to the populist challenge by addressing “economic anxiety” misreads the moment. His is a trade-off free politics, all managerialism, no clear communication of the simple but essential message: I am on your side.

No wonder his brief moment as a contender in the Democratic primary was built on support among college-educated whites. He struggled with non-white voters, but also white, non-college-educated voters. In other words, he is uniquely ill-equipped to solve the Democrats’ two biggest demographic headaches.

To underscore just how bad an option Buttigieg would be, we need only contrast his Rhodes scholar slickness with a rising star in another midwestern state. Lucas Kunce isn’t a big beast; the 39-year-old former marine is running for the Democratic nomination in a US Senate race in Missouri, a red state. But he’s a curious species. He describes himself, first and foremost, as a populist.

Watch a recent TV ad for Kunce. It is strikingly different in tone to most Democratic politicians’ pitches, with the sort of soundtrack that makes you think you’re being sold a truck. He attacks Missouri Republicans for “stripping Missouri for parts, selling land to China and bowing down to Chinese state TV”; he promises to be a “warrior who will fight” for Missourians.

Or compare Buttigieg to Eric Adams, the Mayor-Elect of New York. The black working-class former cop won the keys to Gracie Mansion with an uncompromising pledge to crack down on law and order and resuscitate the New York economy after Covid. Adams is an ebullient, party-animal vegan. But in his own oddball way, he is authentic.

He stormed to victory in a crowded Democratic primary with huge margins among New York’s minority middle and working-class voters. On the pandemic, he sides with those for whom remote work isn’t an option, rather than a neurotic laptop class sheltering in place two years after the first lockdowns. And, unlike Buttigieg, Adams is unencumbered by the progressive speech manners — “faculty lounge bullshit,” as James Carville calls it — that have come to dominate the Democratic elite.

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In their own ways, Kunce and Adams communicate something very simple: I am with you. On election night, Adams told New Yorkers: “I am you. The life I lived is the life many are living right now. We are the same.” Buttigieg cannot tell blue-collar Americans that — an unavoidable fact which will ultimately be his undoing.

The Democrats’ biggest problem isn’t a flyover-state problem, or a white-voter problem. It’s a class problem. Ordinary Americans look at the party in power and see politicians who talk a language they don’t recognise. If Democrats think Buttigieg is the answer, they don’t even understand the question.

But America’s lethal addiction crisis is far from over. In fact, it’s worse than ever. According to data published by the Centers for Disease Control published this week, more than 100,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in the 12 months between April 2020 an April 2021. It is the first time the figure has reached six figures over a year-long period and represents a 28% jump on the previous 12 months.

As I have reported before for UnHerd, the pandemic quickly undid what limited progress had been made in the fight against opioids before 2020. Lockdowns left recovering addicts alone and starved of the human contact that is so central to staying sober. Relapses spiked, and with them deaths. “Isolation is the opposite of what you need for recovery,” one pastor in West Virginia told me.

But the pandemic is only one dimension of what amounts to a serious public health emergency. And the prescription pills peddled by Big Pharma that most people think of when they hear the words “opioid crisis” aren’t the biggest problem. Today’s battle is against two synthetic drugs: one that kills with terrifying ease, another that creates zombified and desperate addicts almost overnight. These have transformed America’s drug landscape, and rendered obsolete a lot of conventional wisdom about drug use, addiction and the proper policy responses. They are not the drugs fondly remembered by ex-hippie Boomers.

“I don’t know any longtime fentanyl users,” one addict-turned-counselor tells the journalist Sam Quinones in The Least Of Us, his new book on America’s metastasising addiction crisis and the two drugs at its heart. “They all die.”

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Today, fentanyl is responsible for the majority of drug deaths in America. In tiny doses it gives users a high that resembles the blissed-out pain relief delivered by heroin or prescription pills. But it is far stronger and more deadly. In anything other than those microscopic quantities, it will kill you. The other drug central to the latest phase of the addiction crisis is methamphetamine, in particular a kind cooked up using a method known as P2P, which uses phenyl-2-propanone.

This new meth isn’t like the old meth. “I wouldn’t even call it meth anymore,” an addict-turned-councillor tells Quinones. Some gangs refer to it as “weirdo dope”. One user, Kirsten, explains that it was not the party drug that used to cause her to chat endlessly and crave companionship. After using the new meth, she “had trouble talking, unless it was to herself. She heard voices.” She struggled to eat and rarely left her home: “Her once-pretty smile faded along with the enamel on her teeth, which turned black and abscessed. Her head jerked uncontrollably. She gave her son to her family to keep him safe. By 2016, she was seeing angels and demons… She began barking like a dog in public.”

Users across America were all experiencing the same thing: paranoia, hallucinations, isolation, uncontrollable limbs, memory loss and garbled speech. Together, fentanyl and meth, Quinones writes, now form “an unmercifully addictive, mind-twisting, and deadly concoction that no one demanded”. That point is crucial. No one asked for this. These designer drugs were not devised with a particular set of consumer tastes in mind.

As The Least Of Us makes clear, they are first and foremost, supply-side innovations. The supply chain found a way of making drugs that were easier to produce than their naturally occurring equivalents; far more addictive, far cheaper. The results have been immensely lucrative — and devastating.

Fentanyl was initially imported with the click of a button from unregulated Chinese producers. After a government clampdown, that then switched to Mexico and domestic production, where the raw ingredients for the rudimentary production process were imported instead of the finished product.

The story with P2P meth is a little more complicated. For years, producers had preferred the method of production that extracted ephedrine, an ingredient used in over-the-counter drugs. Meth was churned out on an industrial scale in Mexico this way, and on a smaller scale in the US, where ephedrine could be found in drugs such as Sudafed. But a clampdown on that substance on both sides of the border led to a different, messier technique. The advantage of the so-called P2P method is that the ingredients are easier to come by: a list of legal and widely available chemicals. The disadvantage is that the methamphetamine it produced is — to simplify a little — a lot dirtier, filled with all sorts of noxious stuff. But the producers didn’t care: it was cheap and easy and meant they could deliver addicts a highly addictive fix with minimal fuss. Again, supply-side issues, not consumer tastes, explained the change.

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These are drugs for the age of the gig economy. You don’t need capital, you don’t land, you don’t need armed guards. You just need an internet connection and, for fentanyl, a magic bullet blender (the brand of choice, apparently). As Quinones writes, the gadget “fit snugly with fentanyl’s disruptive allure, which was this: that with minuscule investment of learning and money, anyone — even someone in boxers in his mother’s basement, without education nor connection to mafia or trackers — could now making a killing. And beginning in about 2015, they did.”

In spite of this brave new world of synthetic drugs, we are stuck in the shadow of the Sixties and Seventies and the idea that drug use is “a form of adventure, particularly for a young man who had intellect and a thrill-seeking soul”. But that culture was formed in an era when the drugs were a far cry from the “highly potent marijuana, corrosive methamphetamine, and powerful narcotic pain pills in unprecedented supply”.

The big argument in The Least Of Us is that drugs explain the drugs crisis. That may sound fatuous, but it’s important. Yes, demand matters, but pontificating about the root causes of American unhappiness — post-industrial decline, family breakdown, listlessness and so on — misses the point. The lethal addiction crisis is, first and foremost, about receptors in our brain and the horrifying availability of chemicals that attack them with overwhelming force.

We are dealing with a chemical assault: a woeful mismatch between 21st-century compounds and our stone-age brains. In other words, it’s the drugs, stupid. Put simply, this is a fight for what it means to be human. As Quinones puts it: “Our brains are wondrous, mystifying, complex organs. From them have sprung awesome creations, innovations, inventions. Drugs dim those gorgeous lights to gray obedience. Our brain on drugs resembles the regime that imprisons its great writers, artists, and scientists.”

By messing with the pleasure circuits we have evolved in order to eat, have sex, socialise in a group and pass on our genes to the next generation — things that have kept us alive and helped us thrive for millennia — drugs diminish what makes us human, and kill all sense of community. (Understand this and you understand how the pandemic has made the problem so much worse.)

Our blindness to the potency of modern drugs also means we have ignored the spillover effects of addiction. The proliferation of homeless encampments in American communities of all sizes, Quinones argues, is first and foremost a consequence of the new meth: “Homelessness is different now — more prolific, more stationary, less transient,” he writes. “Much of it now is rooted in the voluminous supplies of meth that Mexican traffickers’ switch to the P2P method made possible.” In light of this insight, the focus on “housing-first” approaches to homelessness miss the point.

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Ultimately, the twin meth and fentanyl assault on America scrambles conventional debates about drug legalisation and decriminalisation in unpredictable ways. An addiction crisis largely started by over-prescribing addictive pain pills before has become a story of deadly illegal synthetic drugs made with ever-changing combinations of widely available substances. The question of what the law proscribes feels besides the point. On the one hand, Oxycontin and the other addictive painkillers pushed by pharmaceutical companies starting in the Nineties undercuts the legalisers’ claim that a regulated market saves people from abuse. On the other, the restrictionists will never be able to keep up with the labs, who will always be one step ahead in the hunt for cheap, easy-to-manufacture addictive chemical compounds.

First and foremost, the problem is one of supply: the challenge is to find ways to prevent the aggressive marketing, and dramatic increase in supply, of highly addictive, very dangerous drugs — legal or illegal. Here, the emergence of Big Weed and its campaign to sell high doses of THC as part of a healthy lifestyle is surely an ominous development.

For his part, Quinones says his instincts are with the liberals, but is cautious about the consequences. In particular, he believes in the need for continued criminalisation “not as a reason to send someone to prison” but as “leverage we can use to pry users from the dope that will consume them otherwise”. It is not good enough, he argues persuasively, to wait for someone to “hit rock bottom” and seek help. Today, people “are living in tents, screaming at unseen demons, raped, pimped, beaten, unshowered and unfed”.surely  If that’s not rock bottom, what is? When it comes to fentanyl, the answer is death. Coercion must be part of the solution.

The Least Of Us is a bleak wake-up call, but Quinones ends on an upbeat note. Perhaps, he argues, the misery of the drug wave sweeping America will do what other crises haven’t done and bring about much needed community reconstruction.

I’m less optimistic. Not because America’s communities, from small Appalachian towns to big coastal cities, lack resilience. But because of the mismatch between our stone-age brains and terrifyingly addictive drugs. Even as the latest overdose numbers make headlines, America is yet to properly come to terms with the seriousness of what it is up against. However, despite all the bleak headlines and grim statistics, I’m left with the horrible feeling that the country hasn’t quite hit rock bottom.

And nowhere does this sort of reconfiguration stand a better chance of success than in Atlanta, where an organised and well-funded group of residents is pushing for Buckhead, the city’s wealthiest neighbourhood, to break away from the de facto capital of the South and form a municipality of its own. But while ‘Buckxit’ may be a local campaign to create a city of just 80,000 residents, it also goes to the heart of the challenges facing cities — and the Democrats who run them — across America.

In Buckhead, as in so many places across the country, calls for secession are being driven by one factor: crime. “We feel like we’re living in a war zone,” says Bill White, who is running the campaign. White says the problem has driven many Buckhead residents out of town. “They’re not leaving because of the potholes,” he tells me. “It’s crime, crime, crime.”

Atlanta is one of the many major American cities that has seen violent crime spike in recent years. Between 2019 and 2020, the city’s murder rate rose by 62%. The problem has worsened further this year; as of June, the city’s homicide rate was up by another 58%, while in the first half of 2021, shootings rose by 40%. Meanwhile, the number of arrests has nearly halved. The city’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, once a rising star in the Democratic Party who was even talked about as a possible Vice-Presidential pick for Joe Biden, has been chastened by the crime explosion on her watch and is not seeking re-election.

Were Buckhead to go its own way, it would take with it a fifth of Atlanta’s current population and threaten to do real damage to the city’s finances. According to one estimate, Atlanta would lose 38% of its tax revenue were it to gain city status. David Sjoquist, Professor of Economics at Georgia State University and an expert of public finances, predicts grave fiscal consequences from Buckxit, as well as a tangle of lawsuits over a move that is without precedent; no neighbourhood in Georgia has ever broken off to form its own city. “Atlanta would be much worse off,” he tells me.

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Buckxit, then, has the potential to be fiscally ruinous for a major American city. And Atlanta’s political and business elite are firmly opposed. Bottoms argues that Buckxit would not solve the city’s problems: “Even if an impermeable wall were built around this proposed new city, it would not address the Covid crime wave that Atlanta, the state and the rest of the nation are experiencing,” read one recent statement. “That is why the measure is opposed by many residents and the business community. A better use of this energy would be to work together to address the challenges facing our city, not divide Atlanta.” Every candidate in the crowded field to replace Bottoms agrees.

White, unsurprisingly, paints a rosier picture of a world after Buckxit — both for Buckhead residents and the rest of Atlanta. Much like a Brexiteer shrugging off “Project Fear”, he is dismissive of a political system that he says has become a “cesspool of corruption”. Under a plan put forward by Buckxit campaigners, an independent Buckhead would more than triple police numbers in the area, from 80 to 250, and ensure Buckhead City police were better paid than any other cops in the state. (Atlanta’s police force saw 200 officers retire last year.)

As for the rest of the city, White argues that a safer more prosperous Buckhead is in the interests of the metro area more generally, and would bring more jobs to the city. “If we get this right, we can be a wonderful example,” he says.

But White’s cheery win-win predictions are hard to square with the fiscal reality of a city losing such a huge part of its tax base. And, ultimately, White is open about the fact that he is first and foremost interested in the fate of his community, not the rest of the city. “You know,” White adds, “we’re not doing this to be an example for anybody. We’re doing it because we’re fighting for our lives.”

There are signs that White’s message is resonating. The campaign has so far raised a million dollars and an Atlanta Constitution-Journal/University of Georgia poll recently found that 54% of Buckhead voters support cityhood. Surveys commissioned by the campaign for cityhood also find a stronger majority in favour.

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The man driving the Buckxit train is a colourful newcomer to the Atlanta scene with an unusual political story and a talent for fundraising. Until recently, White, 53, was a fixture on the New York Democratic scene. In 2016, he and his husband Brian Eure were devoted Hillary Clinton supporters, raising money for the Democratic candidate and hosting a $39,500-a-head fundraising dinner in their Chelsea townhouse with Barack Obama as the guest of honour. But since then, White, who relocated from New York to Atlanta three years ago, has been on a journey from Manhattan liberal to MAGA enthusiast.

He admits his flip-flopping has led to accusations of him being “a political whore”. He and his husband have been some of Donald Trump’s most vocal gay supporters and are close to the Trump family. They were reportedly at the White House on election night, and White spent the ensuing weeks lending his voice to the outgoing President’s efforts to overturn the result. (White has subsequently denounced the January 6 Capitol Riot and seems focused on the Buckhead campaign, but his political leanings hardly help his claim that the cityhood effort transcends party politics.)

Notwithstanding White’s politics, “Buckxit” maps awkwardly onto conventional political divides. The upmarket enclave may be the most Republican part of Atlanta, but that’s not saying much. In fact, swings in white affluent Atlanta suburbs such as Buckhead were crucial to Biden’s narrow win in Georgia last year; according to Atlanta Constituion-Journal analysis of the election results, 60% of Buckhead voters opted for Biden in 2020, and 51% backed Hillary Clinton in 2016. “We have people from the Left, from the middle, from the Right,” says White. “We have Biden people, Trump people, people who hate Trump, people who hate Biden. We have environmentalists, we have everyone.”

Buckxit’s critics also point to Atlanta’s racial politics — though this time as a cause for concern. Atlanta as a whole is 51% black, while 82% of Buckhead residents are white. Jim Durnett, CEO of the Buckhead Coalition, a group opposed to cityhood, argues that while he “[doesn’t] believe race is motivating the movement to create a new Buckhead City”, the “racial implications” of Buckxit will be obvious. “Drawing on Atlanta’s rich history of the civil rights movement, we are clearly best when we come together during times of challenge, not when we separate.”

White, however, has little interest in engaging with the possibility that his campaign drives a wedge between Atlanta’s white and black neighbourhoods. Race, he says, is the “go-to narrative” to cancel your idea. “What are your solutions as opposed to saying, ‘This is racist’?” he asks of his campaign’s critics.

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The mechanics of securing popular support for Buckxit are reasonably straightforward. A bill needs to be passed in Georgia’s general assembly and state senate. Both are Republican-held and legislators will presumably be eager to stick it to the opposing party’s city stronghold. Votes on those bills will take place early next year and, if they pass, Buckhead residents will get a say on cityhood in November 2023. White claims that by spring 2023, a mayor and city council could be up and running, spending taxpayers’ money. A slew of complicated rows about settling debts with Atlanta and securing contracts to secure utilities from the city would follow.

But regardless of whether Buckxit becomes a reality, the campaign for cityhood should at the very least be a warning shot across the bows of Atlanta and other American cities, where comparable neighbourhoods might be tempted to try something similar. The success of a modern metropolis depends on persistent vigilance against the threat of crime, public disorder and economic decline. In a year of plague, shutdowns, protests, riots and a violent crime spike, too often political posturing has been prioritised over making sure cities work for all their residents.

For White, though, Buckxit is more than a warning. “The divorce should be something that both sides strive to make smooth, because it’s definitely happening,” he says. “At the moment, barring a lightning bolt or the second coming of Jesus Christ, the writing’s on the wall.”

Old Dominion has been getting steadily bluer for years. It’s been twelve years since a Republican has won a state-wide race here. Joe Biden romped home by ten points last November while Trump’s 44% vote share in 2020 was the worst performance by a Republican presidential candidate in the state since 1968. Virginia was starting to look like it might be out of the Republican Party’s reach. And that is what makes its upcoming off-cycle gubernatorial election such a perilous electoral test: an upset loss next month would be taken as an ominous sign of things to come. It would bring back memories of 2009, when a Republican win in Virginia brought Democrats down to earth with a thud after Obama’s election and presaged carnage in the following year’s midterms.

This year’s bad-blooded, expensive, fiercely fought contest between Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin has all the hallmarks of a tight race: polls give McAuliffe a lead in the low single digits. Virginians are faced with two candidates cut from the same cloth. Both are members of the Washington elite. Both are residents of large suburban mansions in up-market McLean, just across the Potomac from DC.

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In many ways, McAuliffe seems closer to a parody of a Democratic insider than the real thing. He first made a name for himself in the famously salubrious world of Clinton fundraising. In 1996, he drummed up $275 million for the Clintons. In 1999, the New York Times described him as Bill’s “closest and most loyal Washington friend”. Al Gore has described him as “the greatest fundraiser in the history of the universe”.

McAuliffe, now worth tens of millions of dollars, wasn’t shy about what was in it for him. In an interview for that Times article, he boasted that “I met all of my business contacts through politics” and said that there was “no question” that his business associates dealt with him in part because of his close ties to the President.

Once he was safely ensconced in Washington’s self-enriching, self-regarding and self-sustaining network of political professionals, a status confirmed by a stint as chair of the Democratic National Committee, McAuliffe sought elected office. After a failed run for Virginia Governor in 2009, he succeeded in 2013. Virginia prohibits consecutive terms for its Governor. Hence McAuliffe’s four-year break before this year’s run.

The once and future Governor looked exactly as at home as you would expect on a recent weekend campaign stop in Fairfax County, northern Virginia, a wealthy part of the state McAuliffe must have squeezed tens of millions out of in campaign contributions over the years. These DC suburbs have turned from red to blue and are supposed to form a bulwark against the Republicans, who fare much better in the State’s rural south and west.

As McAuliffe’s party has gone upmarket socioeconomically, it has shifted leftwards ideologically. In a garden full of khaki-clad suburbanites who all seem to know him as “Terry”, the crowd dutifully outdoor masking on a sunny early-autumn afternoon, McAuliffe nodded along as a warm-up speaker explains that “climate change is a women’s rights issue”.

But that leftwards drift is proving a problem on the ground in Virginia. One member of the crowd, Deetzie Bayliss, is running as a Virginia House of Delegates in a heavily Republican area. She tells me that the “D” next to her name is a turn-off for too many independents. “You seem like you’d do a good job,” she says one voter told her recently, “but I see that letter and I think of Nancy Pelosi, so I’m afraid I can’t vote for you”.

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When it is McAuliffe’s turn to speak, he trots out his accomplishments in his first term as Governor but is at his most enthusiastic when he reminds the audience that his opponent belongs to the same party as Donald Trump.

“You all know I am running against a Trump wannabe,” said McAuliffe, to polite boos, before painting a dystopian picture of Virginia under Republican rule. McAuliffe likes to refer to his opponent as Glenn Trumpkin and whenever they meet to debate, accuses him of being a “mini-Trump”.

In both demeanour and platform, however, Glenn Youngkin is a far cry from the former President. He is softly spoken where Trump is brash, and seems determined to avoid controversy rather than seek it out like a homing missile. Youngkin does describe himself as an outsider; he declares in his Twitter bio that he is “not a politician”. But while it is true that he has never held elected office before, the claim nonetheless stretches credulity.

Until recently, Youngkin was the CEO of The Carlyle Group. He spent 25 years at the DC-based private equity firm, and has the nine-digit net worth and fleece vest collection to prove it. His attacks on “Washington” are more than a little undermined by his ascent to the top of the business world in the city that shares its name with that term of abuse. Like his opponent, then, he is a throwback to a previous era in his party’s development — in his case, a more buttoned-up, establishment brand of conservatism (albeit with an added sprinkling of populism).

If McAuliffe’s challenge is to defy the President’s plummeting ratings and gin up the Democratic coalition with it-could-happen-here alarmism about the consequences of a GOP win, Youngkin’s task is equally tricky: he must somehow keep happy diehard Trumpists and win over enough moderate suburbanites turned off by the party’s rightwards turn but still concerned by the Democrats’ increasingly assertive progressivism.

That may sound impossible, but several developments have suddenly made it seem feasible. The most important is the growing disenchantment towards Biden felt by many Democrats and independents. No wonder McAuliffe has publicly despaired at the possibility that his party might fail to pass their infrastructure package or their Build Back Better legislation before election day on November 2.

Education has also loomed large in the race, offering Youngkin a policy area where rural conservatives and moderates in the suburbs might be able to find common cause. Thanks in part to over-mighty teaching unions, Northern Virginia’s schools were slow to reopen during the pandemic, with some only recently returning to full-time in-person instruction. Virginia has also been a flashpoint for the fight over how history and racism are taught in America’s classrooms, with bitter fights at school board meetings in Loudoun County making national headlines. Youngkin has promised to ban critical race theory in classrooms if he is elected. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” said McAuliffe in a disastrously blunt moment recently. Needless to say, it has featured heavily in Youngkin television ads ever since.

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But even with these tailwinds, Youngkin must still keep together a bitterly divided Republican family if he is to even contemplate victory in a state that leans Democrat. Signs of the tensions in that coalition were on display at a debate watch party in Northern Virginia earlier this month. The crowd of Youngkin fans who piled into an Alexandria sports bar were a mix of boomer suburbanites and younger, more raucous and more MAGA-friendly clusters.

In one exchange over vaccine mandates, McAuliffe accused Youngkin of siding with the anti-vaxxers. A corner of the room whooped in approval at the idea: “Hell yeah!” Others seemed a lot less impressed, indignant about the accusation and perplexed by the evidently unvaccinated guests. Later in the evening, a chant of “America First” broke out to the bemusement of the more sedate members of the crowd. “He’s nothing like Trump,” mutters one such supporter to me at another moment, shaking her head at the screen when McAuliffe trots out his well-rehearsed mini-Trump accusation.

Indeed, Youngkin’s balancing act has not always been a pretty sight, especially when it comes to dancing around Trump’s stolen-election crankery. During the primary, he did his best to dodge direct questions about whether Biden was the legitimately elected president, instead making much of his plans for “election integrity”, an unconvincing fudge and a euphemistic nod to Trumpian conspiracy theories. Once he had seen off his Republican rivals, he was suddenly a lot clearer about last year’s result, though even recently equivocated about whether he would have voted to certify the election results were he in Congress. He later confirmed that he would.

Perhaps that is why while Trump has endorsed Youngkin, the two have notably not appeared side by side on the campaign trail. Biden, meanwhile, hit the campaign trail back in July, before his presidency entered the rocky patch from which it is yet to emerge. McAuliffe, however, appears to be in no hurry to invite him back.

Neither Biden nor Trump are currently in Virginia — but the election has nonetheless devolved into a referendum on the most prominent Democrat and Republican in the country. Democrats are hoping that the excess of a former President is enough to distract from the shortcomings of his successor. But, as this close race suggests, they cannot rely on their favourite bogeyman forever.

But while Gorsuch and his colleagues applied protections against discrimination on the basis of “race, colour, religion, sex or national origin”, he also made clear that the legislation in question was designed to protect “individuals not groups”. According to the ruling, a scheme that “promotes equality at the group level” would fall foul of the law if it involved discrimination at the individual level.

And so, even as Bostock was heralded as a major moment for LGBT rights, Gorsuch’s opinion set off alarm bells in progressive circles. In particular, many wondered whether his understanding of discrimination spelt trouble for the system of race-based college admissions that has been in place since the civil rights era. Did the last great liberal judicial victory contain clues about the next great liberal defeat? Is “affirmative action” doomed?

These questions may soon be answered. The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to hear Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, a case brought by a group of Asian-Americans who claim they were illegally discriminated against as part of the university’s pursuit of a diverse student body. Lower courts have found in favour of Harvard, but many suspect the conservative majority on the Supreme Court may see things differently.

The past pronouncements of Chief Justice John Roberts, without whom a defence of affirmative action has little chance of survival, suggest sympathy with the students’ arguments. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” was his blunt summation in a 2006 case concerning high school integration efforts.

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The lawsuit against Harvard doesn’t just accuse the university of discriminating against Asian-Americans but doing so systematically by marking them down on personality scores that rate traits such likability, “positive personality”, courage and kindness. Analysis of admissions data by the Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, an expert witness in the case, found that an otherwise identical Asian-American male with a 25% chance of admission would have a 32% chance of admission if he were white, a 77% chance if he were Latino and a 95% chance if he were black.

Suspiciously, the very smartest Asian American students tended to score higher for their personalities. The plaintiffs argue that this amounts to a soft quota system and compare its enforcement to the way in which Harvard used “character and fitness” criteria to, with a nod and a wink, cap the number of Jewish students on campus in the 1920s and 30s.

For now, the court has bought itself time by asking the Biden administration for its view of the case. Nonetheless, the stage is set for an almighty battle over one of the most contentious policies to emerge from the civil rights era.

Indeed, whenever the Supreme Court has dealt with affirmative action, its judgments tend to be reflected in the racial politics of the time. In the 1960s, affirmative action was presented as part of a package of emergency measures necessary in the immediate aftermath of Jim Crow and legal segregation. By 1978, the court moved away from explicit desegregation. In Bakke, it found that racial quotas were unconstitutional but that the pursuit of “diversity” for its educational benefits was legal, and that race might be considered a “plus factor” in the admissions process. (It is this vague goal of diversity that explains the scoring system under fire in the Harvard case.)

But this 20th-century liberal fudge is getting harder to sustain. The backdrop to any affirmative action case being heard by the Supreme Court in the near future will be the increasingly strident anti-racist creed preached on college campuses, supported by the Democratic Party and subscribed to by the media and business elite.

Ironically, it is the assertiveness of today’s racial politics that may make the defence of affirmative action more difficult. In other words, the problem for the American Left is that they have said the quiet part out loud. Rather than hiding behind the fig leaf of the pursuit of the educational benefits of diversity, or arguing for time-limited, case-specific policies, many progressives are happy to call a quota a quota and see the fight against racism as a never-ending all-encompassing struggle.

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Take Ibram X Kendi, today’s prophet of anti-racism. He is explicit about prioritising group iniquities over discrimination against individuals. In fact, his whole approach is about tinkering with outputs rather than striving to treat people equally. “The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity,” he writes in How To Be Antiracist. “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.”

To Kendi, equity is measured in terms of outcome, and has only been achieved “when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing”. By Kendi’s logic, not only is a system of explicit racial quotas not racist; it’s the only truly antiracist approach.

The Biden administration doesn’t express things in such hardline terms. But it nonetheless claims to be putting “equity”, and not equality, at the heart of everything it does. In an early executive order Biden defined equity as “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment”. That may sound innocuous enough, but in reality it has so far meant numerous straightforwardly discriminatory policies.

And many of these measures have already run into legal roadblocks. In Wisconsin, a judge has halted a Department of Agriculture programme that allocates loan forgiveness on the basis of race. In Texas, a judge has ruled against a measure in the Covid relief bill that explicitly prioritised restaurant-owners of certain racial backgrounds.

The infrastructure bill that passed the Senate last week was also infused with the logic of equity. For example, in the bidding for contracts to install solar power or reconfigure the roads in American cities, the government will prioritise minority and female-owned businesses. Legal challenges will surely follow.

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Perhaps a compromise can emerge. One option would be for an affirmative action approach focused on giving a leg up to Americans that really need it. Rather than engineering a cosmetic and subjective kind of diversity that keeps consciences clean and money flowing into the endowment pot, America’s elite colleges could positively discriminate in a more explicit but socially useful way. Richard Kahlenberg, an expert witness in the Harvard case, argues for socio-economic preference in college admissions, which would drop the offensive charade of personality assessments and target working-class blacks, hispanics and whites. It’d be a less dishonest, less divisive and almost certainly a more beneficial approach.

Meanwhile, if the Biden administration wants to target extra support at the neediest farmers, it need not pander to “equity” with openly discriminatory policies. Instead, it could simply… target the neediest farmers. Doing so would be fairer policy and better politics.

In the meantime, whether in the Harvard case or elsewhere, a legal and political collision seems inevitable. There has always been a tension between the more expansive policies born in the civil rights era, foremost among them affirmative action, and the kind of colour-blind creed consistent with the constitution and preached by Martin Luther King and others. But today’s combative and ascendant anti-racism is stretching that tension past its limit. It is a powerful dogma — but it could soon meet its match in the Supreme Court.

But DeSantis’s victory lap has been rudely interrupted. Thanks to the Delta variant, the Sunshine State is now the epicentre of the pandemic in the US. In the last week, Florida has broken its records for the number of daily cases and hospitalisations. Last month, it was responsible for one in five of the country’s new cases, despite being home to 6% of Americans.

But as cases rise, DeSantis is steadfast in his refusal to impose the sorts of rules that have been reintroduced in other parts of the country. He has opposed a new indoor mask mandate and resisted vaccine passports. “In Florida, there will be no lockdowns,” DeSantis said recently. “There will be no school closures. There will be no restrictions and no mask mandates.”

Predictably, such stubbornness has cemented his status as a liberal hate figure. Pundits who have been waiting to say “I told you so” for months are making up for lost time. The ever-hyperbolic Washington Post columnist Jenifer Rubin, for example, thinks that by resisting further lockdowns, the likes of DeSantis have “formed a sort of death cult that elevates ‘owning the libs’ over the prevention of needless death”. In the New York Times, Paul Krugman argues that “at every stage of the pandemic DeSantis has effectively acted as an ally of the coronavirus”.

But there are also signs that the current surge is hurting DeSantis’s reputation beyond the opinion pages of America’s prestige media. Many assumed that DeSantis would cruise to re-election in 2022, but a poll published this week shows him trailing (albeit narrowly) Representative Charlie Crist, a one-time Republican who served as governor from 2007 to 2011 now running for his old job as a Democrat.

“For as long as we have to contend with the pandemic, then Ron DeSantis lives or dies politically based on how Covid-19 is impacting Florida,” says Fernand Amandi, a Democratic strategist based in Miami. Florida pollster Brad Coker agrees DeSantis is taking a huge gamble “By sticking to his guns and being consistent, he is seen as a strong executive,” he says. “But he’s also gambling that Covid will not be a much of a factor by the end of the summer”, giving him a clean run at 2022 and potentially 2024.

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DeSantis, it’s worth noting, has been here before. After locking down early on, his was one of the first states to reopen — much to the horror of many commentators. He focused state resources on surging hospital capacity, protecting care homes and PPE supply. He has held firm ever since, resisting pressure to reintroduce rules.

The lethal spikes never arrived with quite the force that so many public health experts predicted. In terms of deaths from Covid-19, Florida’s performance has been middling by US standards. But it has largely avoided the costly social distancing restrictions implemented in other parts of the country. Employment fell by 4.6% in Florida last year, compared with 10.4% in New York and 8% in California. Between the start of November and the end of February, case rates in the three states were roughly the same, only businesses in Florida were open at full capacity.

Since the pandemic started, DeSantis’s greatest asset has been liberal overstatement. His decision to reopen earned him the nickname “DeathSantis”, while photographs of busy beaches (made to look busier thanks to long-lens foreshortening) were presented as evidence of the height of “Florida man” stupidity.

No doubt he hopes his opponents’ previous hyperbole will soften the political impact of the current Delta wave. Moreover, DeSantis firmly believes that restrictions and mask mandates are harder to justify when vaccines have been widely available for months — something which was the stated view of the White House and the CDC until a few weeks ago.

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There is, however, another shadow looming over DeSantis’s political future: the man to whom he owes his rapid rise: Donald Trump. Without the then President’s endorsement, his underdog 2018 gubernatorial bid would likely have failed. That race — and one television advertisement in particular — established DeSantis as a kind of Trump wannabe.

In the 30-second viral video, DeSantis’s wife Casey tells viewers: “Everyone knows my husband Ron was endorsed by President Trump, but he’s also an amazing dad.” DeSantis is then shown teaching his children to build a wall, reading to them from Trump’s memoir The Art of the Deal, and reciting “Make America Great Again”. Mrs DeSantis then says: “People say Ron’s all Trump. But he’s so much more.”

Needless to say the joke was lost on many. But while the Florida governor is capable of nauseating sycophancy towards the 45th president, the relationship between DeSantis and Trump is more complicated than it first seems.

In a world of mini-Trumps, there are comparatively few stylistic similarities between DeSantis and the former President. Yes, there’s the boxy tailoring and the Trumpian pinch of index finger and thumb while he speaks. But DeSantis offers a very different sort of pugilistic conservatism. Trump is a booming heavyweight slugger. DeSantis is a nasal and nimble counterpuncher. Where the former president is off-the-cuff, unapologetic and unfiltered, DeSantis is lawyerly, careful, strategic, even defensive.

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Republican strategist Luke Thompson attributes the idea of DeSantis as Trump to “wishful thinking, pig ignorance or wilful dishonesty”. It is important, he argues, to distinguish between DeSantis the governor and DeSantis the media phenomenon. Prior to the pandemic, DeSantis was governing in the mould of his moderate GOP Floridian predecessors, Jeb Bush and Rick Scott. He was focused on education and on broadening out his appeal to beyond the core Republican vote.

Amandi describes DeSantis as “a canny interpreter of the political environment without the Trump histrionics, which makes him formidable.” Adding to his strengths, says Amandi, is a “nimbleness in cherry picking issues that makes him palatable to moderates. That shows real political tact.”

Then there’s the role of the media. DeSantis emerged as a leading national figure during the pandemic in part because liberal outlets needed a red state counterpoint to Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor whose early pandemic press conferences — part-public health briefings, part-motivational speeches — earned gushing praise.

But that script didn’t quite play out as Cuomo and his media cheerleaders hoped. With the pandemic raging, Cuomo was busy writing a self-laudatory memoir, which earned Cuomo a $4m advance while his advisers were busy trying to cover up deaths in his state’s care homes. Then came the accusations of sexual harassment, corroborated by a report into the New York Governor’s conduct published this week.

“As Cuomo has looked more and more like the absolute monster that he is and exposed the American media as the highly tendentious lickspittle idiots that they are, DeSantis’s standing with Republican primary voters has improved drastically,” says Thompson. “Every unfair attack, every ludicrous effort in character assassination has really bonded the GOP voting bloc to DeSantis and raised his profile.”

Compared with Cuomo, DeSantis’s reputation is relatively untainted. But will his stock continue to rise?

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DeSantis has firmed up his conservative bona fides with a series of laws on hot-button Republican issues. He has passed a (possibly unconstitutional) bill aimed at banning critical race theory from being taught in schools. Though he has refused to explicitly endorse Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, he is one of a number of Republican governors to indulge those claims by introducing a slew of election safeguards. In doing so, he is prioritising popularity among Republicans nationwide over broadening his appeal in Florida.

Nor must we forget that while Florida may be the home of the last Republican president, sulking in his Palm Beach palace, it’s also a veritable graveyard of overhyped GOP contenders. Former Governor Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, the state’s Cuban-American senior senator, were Donald Trump’s highest profile victims in the 2016 primary.

But perhaps it’s not so surprising that Republicans from Florida often have their eyes on higher office. After all, Florida is a 21-million-person rebuttal to some of the core assumptions of the contemporary American Left. It is a growing, multiracial, economically vibrant state. And it is only getting redder.

Democrats are eager to paint the modern GOP as a rump party supported by a shrinking demographics in America’s declining backwaters. “I won in the places that are optimistic, diverse, moving forward,” boasted Hillary Clinton after her 2016 defeat. Florida is a brash, cacophonous repudiation of that Democratic assumption. In other words, Florida is a feel-good story for the GOP. And by making himself synonymous with that story, DeSantis can certainly mount a credible 2024 bid.

But the big, orange elephant in the room is the former president, who continues to tease that he will run again. That puts DeSantis and Trump on a collision course. An early skirmish came last month, when the governor asked that the former president postpone a rally in the state scheduled for shortly after the collapse of an apartment building in Surfside. Trump went ahead with a raucous rally. DeSantis, meanwhile, cut a more sombre figure, appearing alongside President Biden in a visit to the site of the catastrophe.

It was proof, if we needed it, that DeSantis is conscious of the need to balance the support of Trump’s base with the risk of alienating other voters. How ironic, then, that whether or not he can keep this balancing act up probably depends not on Florida’s Covid-19 numbers, but on the decisions of the famously capricious and impulsive man to whom he owes his political career.

But before “neoconservative” became a byword for the utopian, interventionist, nation-building foreign policy that was fatally discredited by the Iraq war, it described an entirely reasonable generation of American intellectuals who became disenchanted with the liberal domestic policies and the cultural changes of the Sixties. And their thinking, unlikely though it may seem, bears uncanny similarities with post-liberalism today. In fact, whether the post-liberals realise it or not, this group of writers, editors and thinkers from both the Left and the Right — Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Burnham, Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, among others — are the closest thing they have to intellectual predecessors.

Consider a few parallels. First, neoconservatism and post-liberalism both emerged as critiques of their era’s dominant liberal ideology in politics, culture and economics. Indeed, many neoconservatives started political life on the Left. In his 1979 essay “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed — Perhaps the Only — ‘Neoconservative’”, Kristol, a former Trotskyist, wrote that the neoconservatives were “provoked by disillusionment with contemporary liberalism”.

Similarly, the sociologist Nathan Glazer’s neoconservatism took form after observing the intolerance of campus radicals. A left-liberal at Berkeley, he became concerned in the mid-Sixties about threats to free speech and free expression on campus. By the end of the decade, he had fallen out not just with the activist Left but mainstream liberals too. Writing in The Atlantic at the time, he delivered a prophetic warning:

“The students who sat in, threw out the deans, and fought with the police have, after all, been taught by American academics such as C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, and many, many others. All these explained how the world operated, and we failed to answer effectively. Or we had forgotten the answers. We have to start remembering and start answering.”

Glazer’s rightwards journey was typical. Peter Steinfels, a critic of the neoconservatives whose book on the movement provoked Kristol into writing his “Confessions” essay, explained that the neocons actually “set out to defend liberalism from the radicals’ attack”. But as they did, they were faced with a question: “Why had a liberal society produced a wave of political criticism which they perceived (in many cases quite accurately) as so illiberal and destructive? Having begun as defenders of liberalism, they too ended, to some degree as critics of it.”

Not all of today’s post-liberals started life on the Left, but their critique of liberalism often follows a similar path. It looks at the ways in which liberalism has failed, and asks how it birthed an illiberal strain on both the Left and the Right. Its exponents, as a result, often end up with a more profound critique of liberalism that they went looking for.

Pabst, for what it’s worth, argues that “genuine post-liberalism draws on the best liberal traditions but corrects liberal errors and excesses”. The same could be said of traditional neoconservatism. Daniel Bell described himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture”. Kristol claimed that neoconservatives were “not libertarian in the sense, say, that Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Von Hayek are” and had no problem with “a state that takes a degree of responsibility for helping to shape the preferences that the people exercise in a free market.” Kristol did, however, go on to embrace Ronald Reagan’s free-market economic agenda, much to the dismay of Moynihan, a New York Democrat who confirmed his break with the liberal Left and confirmed his neoconservative credentials when he accepted a job in the Nixon administration; he later wrote how he watched his neoconservative friends siding with Reagan “with a combination of incredulity, horror and complicity”.

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But even the most market-friendly neoconservatives had their concerns with capitalism, viewing it merely as a means to an end. Kristol described the neoconservatives’ relationship with business as “loose and uneasy, though not necessarily unfriendly” and argued that economic growth was important “not out of any enthusiasm for the material goods of this world, but because they see economic growth as indispensable for social and political stability”.

There is a similar range of economic views among today’s post-liberals: some are on the Left, some are on the Right. Pabst’s Left-leaning flavour of post-liberalism emphasises “economic justice”, “social solidarity” and “ecological balance”. Right-leaning post-liberals argue that excessive economic freedom has shifted resources and power away from communities and families. What both sides share, then, is a suspicion of top-down central planning of the socialist Left and the reflexive libertarianism of many on the free-market Right.

Neoconservatism and post-liberalism are also both moods or instincts, rather than fully-formed programmes for government. Kristol called the former a “persuasion” rather than a movement. The latter is similarly disorganised, representing a loose collection of beliefs and a shared impulse as opposed to a group that meets up, agrees a manifesto or seeks office.

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Both also have a complicated relationship with populism, on the one hand seeing the rise of populist movements as a symptom of liberalism’s failures, and on the other embracing some of populism’s critiques of the status quo. Responding to the criticism that there was “a populist temper to the neoconservative impulse”, Kristol acknowledged that “any ideology that gives politics a priority over economics is bound to have a populist hue”. It was the job of neoconservatism, he wrote, “to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong”.

Though many post-liberals will balk at the populist label, I suspect they have assigned themselves a similar role. If they are serious about a political project that takes on what the American historian and author of The New Class War Michael Lind calls a technocratic neoliberal elite, it’s hard to see how post-liberalism won’t have the same “populist temper” as neoconservatism.

Another important parallel is their shared respect for the institutions that sit between the state and the individual. As UnHerd‘s Peter Franklin wrote in 2019, he was drawn to post-liberalism’s “respect for human dignity” that “distinguishes [it] from populism”, is “incompatible with collectivist ideas that instrumentalise the individual in service to some group identity; and also at odds with atomistic individualism”.

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Such a claim would no doubt leave Kristol and co. nodding vigorously. Writing 50 years earlier, Kristol described family and religion as “indispensable pillars of a decent society” and confessed that neoconservatives “have a special fondness for all of those intermediate institutions of a liberal society which reconcile the need for community for the desire for liberty”.

These neoconservative/post-liberal parallels are more than just a niche, extremely wonky parlour game. They are an antidote to an amnesia that infects a lot of post-liberal writing. Franklin, for example, calls post-liberalism “a genuinely new kind of politics” that “is tantalisingly close to breaking through”. But the many echoes of neoconservatism refute these claims of novelty and suggest that the post-liberals are the inheritors of a richer intellectual than many of them seem to realise.

Given that “neoconservative” is little more than an insult these days, I suspect most post-liberals will resist this comparison. But that would be a mistake. Half a century ago, some of the West’s sharpest minds assembled an incisive critique of post-war liberalism. Today, post-liberals are trying to do the same thing to post-Cold War neoliberalism. They would be foolish not to learn from those in whose footsteps they are following.

The past pandemic year has brought with it a wave of viral metaphors to describe various social problems: economic inequality and racial injustice are clumsily referred to as America’s “other pandemics”, while police violence is frequently characterised as an “epidemic”. In many cases, such language is overwrought and overblown.

But when it comes to the lethal problem of America’s opioid addiction, “epidemic” is no misnomer. According to the Center for Disease Control, almost half a million Americans have died of opioid overdoses since the late Nineties, making this the deadliest drug crisis in the country’s history. By the end of the last decade, overdoses were America’s leading cause of accidental death — and nowhere is this more clear than in Huntington.

Yet the relationship between the pandemic and the opioid epidemic is more than merely analogous. In a tragic demonstration of the inescapable trade-offs of fighting a plague, Covid-19 and the steps taken to slow its spread have undone much of the hard-earned progress in the fight against opioid addiction. According to preliminary CDC data, more than 90,000 Americans died of drug overdose — the vast majority because of opioids — in the 12 months leading to November 2020: a 30% increase on the previous 12 months, and the highest annual overdose figure ever.

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While opioids have wrought national devastation, overdose rates were higher in West Virginia than anywhere else in the country last year. Huntington and surrounding Cabell County had the highest rate in the state, with 163 deaths per 100,000 people — the overwhelming majority of them from Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 100 times stronger than morphine, which can be lethal in doses as small as two milligrams. In Cabell County, Covid-19 and drug overdoses claimed roughly the same number of lives last year.

Pastor Steven Little doesn’t need to see the numbers to understand the magnitude of Huntington’s spike last year. As a volunteer on the city’s Quick Response Team, his weekly schedule reflects the fluctuations of drug abuse in the area. QRT was founded in 2017 and aims to provide follow-up visits to anyone who calls the emergency services for a drug overdose within 72 hours. The busier the team, Little explains, the worse things are.

Comprising a paramedic, a recovery coach, an off-duty police officer and faith leaders such as Little, QRT aims to deliver both long-term solutions, by encouraging treatment, and short-term emergency measures, by offering everyone they meet a dose of Narcan — the emergency treatment for an opioid overdose — and training in how it is administered.

Little, who has been sober for 11 years after an opioid addiction he developed as a teenager in neighbouring Kentucky, says he thinks of the community’s response to the opioid epidemic — a patchwork of addiction clinics, churches, local government and hospitals — as “like a net”: “The more strings we have, the stronger the net and the fewer people fall through the gaps.” And so the effects of the pandemic were soon obvious. “We’ve removed the social structures and support system around addicts because of the pandemic,” he says when I meet him at his church’s low-key location, a converted shop space in downtown Huntington. “Isolation is the opposite of what you need for recovery.”

The Huntington Addiction Wellness Center, a recovery centre a few blocks away, is another string in that netting. Charles Ward, HAWC’s assistant director and a recovering addict who has been clean from heroin and methamphetamine for more than three years, says that “the worst thing an addict can do is be alone in his head, something that the pandemic forced us to do.” Ward says he has “lost a lot of people this year. I can name five or six friends that I’ve lost”.

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It took “four or five months,” says Katie Keeney, a colleague of Ward’s at HAWC, until the effects of the pandemic on addiction in Huntington started to be felt: “That’s when we started seeing everyone falling off. Fellowship is a huge part of recovery, and everyone was stuck at home or on camera.” It wasn’t just recently recovered addicts, says Keeney, but “old-timers, people with years and years of sobriety. And we’re still seeing the residual effects of the pandemic.”

Outside another recovery centre, Sara (not her real name) takes a drag on a cigarette and explains to me how things unraveled during the pandemic. Furloughed from work, she lost the routine around which she had built her recovery from addiction. “By the end of the year, I wasn’t just back where I started,” she says. “But worse.”

Little says that not only is the isolation of quarantine a pandemic a problem, but we’ve given “people stuck in the madness a bunch of money”, referring to the federal stimulus checks given to Americans during the pandemic. He recounts the story of a a mother of six who “got all this money and blew it and overdosed and died… That’s not a knock on the stimulus, people need that.”

Everyone I speak to in Huntington agrees that remote support is no substitute for the face-to-face help offered before the pandemic, which was suspended for crucial weeks. If there’s any silver lining, Little says that it’s that “the pandemic has highlighted the great need for the structures and support systems to fight the epidemic”.

Arguably, however, the most troubling aspect of the opioid epidemic is not how much progress has been lost thanks to the pandemic, but how little had been made in the first place. Prior to 2020, overdose deaths from opioids peaked in 2017. But this crunch point had been a long time coming. Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, were worried about bad publicity surrounding addiction to their blockbuster painkiller within a few years of the drug’s launch in 1996. In other words, the opioid crisis was two decades old before the numbers even started to move in the right direction. And while overdose deaths declined after 2017, the falls were modest; the data also points to an uptick in overdoses in late 2019, suggesting that the pandemic cannot fully explain the failure to make continued progress.

Huntington’s latest step in the fight against opioid addiction is a lawsuit against the three biggest drug distributors in America — McKesson, Amerisource Begern and Cardinal Health — which it alleges “wholly ignored their legal obligations” by “shipping massive quantities of drugs to distributors, pharmacies, and dispensaries without performing any checks — with devastating consequences for America”.

The trial, which is ongoing in a courtroom in Charleston, the state capital, has the potential to be a major turning point, and not just locally. In the overwhelming majority of lawsuits relating to opioid addiction, companies have managed to reach out of court settlements. And so Huntington and Cabell County’s decision to go to trial is a rare courtroom test of the claim that the pharmaceutical firms who flooded neighbourhoods with addictive painkillers are liable for the damage done both by those pills and by their knock on effects, including the spread of illegal opioids like heroin and fentanyl.

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Whatever its outcome, the trial has helped provide a fuller picture of the crisis. According to Craig McCann, a data consultant called as witness, 110 million doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone were shipped to Cabell County and Huntington between 2006 and 2014. Thomas McGuire, a Harvard University economist who testified in the trial last month, estimated that the harm by prescription opioids to Cabell County was worth $3.3 billion. The city and county are seeking $2 billion to help fight addiction.

And these aren’t the only stark metrics by which the epidemic can be measured. According to the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Services, five in every 100 babies born in West Virginia in 2017 suffered from Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, a condition newborns suffer after the sudden discontinuation of exposure to substances used by their mothers that can have lasting consequences.

Meanwhile, the firms on trial argue that they are not responsible for the lethal cocktail of poor physical health and socioeconomic decline that made residents in this corner of West Virginia so susceptible to opioid addiction. They also point the finger at the doctors — some nefarious, others naive — who were prescribing the painkillers so readily, and the US Drug Enforcement Agency, who were slow to identify the problem.

Of course, the temptation of opiates is nothing new. As Patrick Radden Keefe recounts in his recent book about the Sackler family behind Purdue, Empire of Pain, the history of opiates is terrifyingly cyclical. Morphine was prescribed with great enthusiasm after the American Civil War. But relieving the pain of battlefield wounds came at a high price with an estimated one in four Americans addicted to the drug by the end of the 19th century. Around the same time, the German pharmaceutical firm Bayer marketed a new opiate, heroin, as a less addictive substitute to morphine. In fact, it was far more powerful than morphine and just as addictive.

Almost a century later, the Sackler family would make similar claims about Oxycontin, but again the link between opiates’ pain-killing abilities and habit-forming tendencies proved seemingly inescapable. Indeed, back in Huntington, the pandemic’s impact on overdoses is merely a reminder that the opioid epidemic hasn’t made an unwelcome return; it never ended.

According to the shallow concerns of America’s political cycle, “left behind” America had its moment half a decade ago. Trump’s 2016 win brought fresh attention to the problems of white working-class Appalachia; the rust belt was suddenly central to politics and as Hillbilly Elegy flew off the shelves, every pundit imposed their own priors on to the story of decline.

Eventually, however, that story became old news. America’s elites moved on to other issues, racial equity foremost among them. But Huntington, and places like it, are still there. And still struggling against the same epidemic they have been fighting for almost a quarter of a century.

In each of these cases, the perpetrator had been recently released by police, either on parole or because of a failure to bring charges. Police had already detained the man suspected of murdering Williams twice this year after domestic violence incidents. The man who killed Abe and Platt had been arrested for 73 felonies and 32 misdemeanours in San Francisco alone.

Such avoidable tragedies keep happening in San Francisco, a city where petty crime rates have exploded, where an already chronic homelessness problem has become even worse, where there were twice as many drug overdose deaths as Covid-19 fatalities last year and where America’s largest and oldest Chinese-American community is battling a spike in violent hate crimes. Anger is growing, and its target is the chief prosecutor notionally responsible for putting criminals away, but who a growing number of San Franciscans say cannot be trusted to keep their city safe. 

Chesa Boudin was elected District Attorney in November 2019 to much fanfare. Never mind that he had never prosecuted a case before; his unabashedly progressive platform — which promised to end cash bail, reduce the size of the city’s prison population, “reimagine” criminal justice and stop enforcing so-called “quality-of-life” crimes such as prostitution — garnered international praise. According to the Guardian, his victory was a “welcome shift from the ‘tough on crime’ norms to bold positions that veer radically to the left”. The Nation described Boudin’s election as confirmation that “political revolutions are possible”. In a video message at his swearing in ceremony last January, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Boudin that “the hope you reflect is a great beacon to many”.

Not even 18 months into the job, Boudin has inspired more despair than hope — so much so that he now faces a recall petition from San Franciscans unhappy with his radical approach to criminal justice. And if he has become a “beacon”, it is as a cautionary tale of what happens when voguish ideas of radical reform are put into action.

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Boudin, to his credit, has only done what he promised to do. Two days into the job, he fired seven top prosecutors, replacing them with lawyers who had previously worked as public defenders. Within a few months, he had released almost 40% of the city’s prison population. The pandemic further provided Boudin with a public health rationale for his programme of decarceration. The consequences speak for themselves: homicides are up, as are burglaries and carjackings. Arson attacks have also increased by almost 50%.

And yet prosecutions are down. Between January 2020, when he took office, and March this year, Boudin has tried just 23 cases. During an equivalent time period, his (already quite liberal) predecessor brought more than ten times as many cases to trial. In 2020, prosecutors in neighbouring Alameda county dismissed only 11% of felonies brought to them by the police. In San Francisco, that figure stood at 40%.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that San Franciscans have started to turn on Boudin. Of the 131 arrests made for domestic violence felonies in the last three months of 2020, Boudin dismissed 113, prompting anger from campaigners and volunteers at the city’s women’s shelters. Meanwhile, police in the Tenderloin district, ground zero for the city’s homelessness and drug abuse crises, are outspoken in their frustration at Boudin’s refusal to prosecute the dealers behind the surge in fentanyl overdose deaths in the city.

The growing sense of disorder in San Francisco has forced some to take matters into their own hands. Leanna Louie is a lifelong San Franciscan and, like most people in the city, a lifelong Democrat. Disturbed by a rise in anti-Asian attacks, which she attributes to the racially charged language deployed by Donald Trump during the pandemic, she has spent nearly every evening of the past year patrolling San Francisco’s Chinatown with a group of other volunteers. Exasperated with Boudin’s apparent inability to put away the kind of violent criminals she spends her evenings protecting shop-owners and elderly Chinese-American residents from, she is also now campaigning for his recall.

Boudin’s social media is full of concern over the rise in crime targeted at Asians, but Louie says it is very hard for her or the victims to take him seriously. “These attacks are happening over and over again because he releases criminals,” she says. “It’s so insulting to hear him claim he cares about us. If you care about us, why don’t you join us on patrol?”

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Andrea Shorter, also part of the recall campaign, says that “the inconvenient truth for Boudin is that it’s not just a small group of conservatives that are out to recall Democratic politicians… We are interested in and support criminal justice reform. We understand its implications in terms of racial justice. I myself am African-American and also LGBTQ. I have supported criminal justice reform for nearly three decades, but not at the expense of public safety.”

Yet San Francisco’s lax attitude to crime does not start and end with Chesa Boudin. Proposition 47, a 2014 ballot measure that reclassified a range of felonies — including theft of anything worth less than $950 and most drug possession and drug use offences — as “misdemeanours”, is also part of the problem; shoplifting is now so rife in the city that Walgreens, a national pharmacy chain, has closed 17 locations in San Francisco. Meanwhile, like other liberal city leaders, San Francisco’s mayor London Breed has pulled $120 million from the city’s law enforcement budget to reinvest elsewhere.

But even if Boudin is only one in a cast of characters responsible for the decay of San Francisco, the 40-year-old perfectly personifies the hypocrisies of American progressivism behind that decline. Read any of the fawning profiles in America’s liberal press and the first thing you’ll learn is his first-hand experience of America’s judicial system. He is often described as “the son of jailed radicals” or the son of “imprisoned leftists” and frequently touts his parents as the inspiration for his decarceration agenda.

This is a heavily spun version of the truth. Boudin’s mother and father were members of the Weather Underground, a far-left terrorist organisation that spent the 1970s bombing banks and government buildings (including the US Capitol). They went on to form a splinter group called the May 19th Communist Organisation and, in 1981, took part in the armed robbery of a bank truck in Nyack, New York.

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They botched the heist and the Boudins’ accomplices shot and killed a security guard and two policemen. Chesa’s parents were convicted of felony murder. In their trial, the defendents said the stolen $1.5m was “expropriation” needed to fund the creation of a black nation-state in the American south. For the progressive goals of the Boudins (both of whom are white), Officer Waverly Brown, the first African-American police officer in Nyack, paid with his life.

It would, of course, be unfair to tar Boudin with his parents’ extremism. But he shows no embarrassment over his lineage. “My parents were all dedicated to fighting US imperialism around the world,” the radical princeling told the New York Times in 2002. “I’m dedicated to the same thing.” In his cringeworthy memoir about his travels in Latin America — during which he worked as a translator in the Hugo Chavez’s Presidential Palace as a translator author of  pro-regime pamphlets aimed at a gullible US audience — he condescends the poor and shows a painful lack of self-awareness. “Why weren’t they as eager as I to criticise imperialism,” he asks of working-class South Americans.

Boudin has never renounced any part of his past: his parents, in his eyes, are brave radicals and blameless victims of America’s industrial-prison complex. His radicalism is of a piece with theirs. And just as he appears impervious to the consequences of his parents’ actions, he seems blind to the results of the experiment he is running in San Francisco.

The failure of that radical experiment — and the desperation of the San Franciscans who want to put a stop to it — is, in many ways, a parable of the American Left: the ultra-liberal metropolis being mugged by reality. The Boudin recall effort is a test of the limits of San Francisco’s commitment to radical ideas. Campaigners must gather more than 51,000 signatures to trigger a recall election. Indeed, if its residents do manage to do so, it would be a chastening moment for progressives across the country who have spent the last year calling for more of the sort of radicalism embodied in San Francisco’s DA. 

And if they don’t, it will suggest liberal America is oblivious to the consequences of “reimagining” policing and criminal justice: a spike in violence and disorder that ultimately hits the country’s most vulnerable the hardest. 

Suburbia’s significance in American politics was made obvious by last year’s midterms. The blue wave that saw Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives looked more like a tsunami in the suburbs. Republicans went into 2018 holding 69 suburban districts in the House — they ended the year with just 32.

The suburbs matter because, in contemporary American politics, density matters. Travel from a city centre to the country and as the landscape gets sparser, the politics get steadily redder, no matter what part of America you find yourself in. Will Wilkinson, of the Washington think tank the Niskanen Centre, argues persuasively that density is the factor to consider if you want to understand America’s divided politics: “There are really no red states or blue states. There’s compact blue urban density and sprawling red sparseness.”

And according to Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden, population density becomes a stronger predictor of voting behaviour with every election that goes by.

That makes America’s suburbs the country’s decisive ideological battleground, the in-between zones between blue cities and red countryside that will decide the outcome. And if the suburbs matter, then they should be properly understood.

Curtain twitchers, desperate housewives, status anxiety and cul-de-sacs — this is what we think of when we shut our eyes and imagine the suburbs. This picture of stultifying conformity might have started with a grain of truth but has become a gross oversimplification.

A new book — Amanda Kolson Hurley’s Radical Suburbs — argues that the stereotype of American suburbia misses an important part of the story. The post-War history of the suburbs tells of a road and housebuilding boom, cheap government-backed mortgages, and white flight from crowded and dangerous cities. All of that happened, but, as Hurley persuasively argues, there is more to the story of life on the fringes of American cities.

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While the suburbs are where millions have chosen to live out the conventional definition of the good life, they have also been the site of a surprising amount of social experimentation — a laboratory for religious sects, political cliques, urban planners and architects who have sought to radically redefine the American dream.

Consider, for example, the neighbourhood of Economy, outside Pittsburgh. Founded in 1824 by a German religious group called the Harmonists, it was intended to be “a city in which God would dwell among men, a city in which perfection in all things was to be attained”. Led by Johann Georg Rapp, the Harmonists were committed to an esoteric strand of Christianity that mixed Lutheranism with weirder ingredients, like the belief that Jesus was a “dual being, male and female at once” and a commitment to celibacy — not a recipe for long-term demographic success.

In the first half of the 20th century, Stelton, New Jersey, was the unlikely site of an Anarchist commune. The town was “bohemian, unorthodox” – and suburban. According to Hurley, “Steltonites didn’t hide their radicalism, raising the red flag on the water tower” after the November Revolution in Germany at the end of the First World War.

By night, the community’s far-Left factions would row furiously in an exhausting sounding participatory democracy. By day, children were taught in an anarchist school and the men and women of Stelton would head into New York for work, just like their bourgeois neighbours. “Upon a train your anarchist is inconspicuously dressed, unless it be that he is rather below the sartorial average of the suburban traveller,” reported the New York Tribune in 1919.

Concord Park, in Trevose, near Philadelphia, looked exactly like other 1950s suburban housing developments. But behind the orthodoxy of its manicured lawns and identikit “little box” houses was a radical mission: to build one of America’s first integrated housing developments.

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By definition, Hurley’s case studies are exceptions — but they don’t prove any sort of rule. Thankfully most Americans don’t want to join a celibate sect or an Anarchist commune. And yet they add up to a warning not to treat suburbia as a homogenous lump; or to dismiss it as a collection of uninteresting places in between. “Heading for the urban fringes to live by nonconformist values is a long American tradition, and one we can learn a great deal from today,” says Hurley.

Those behind the often eccentric attempts to build utopia on the outskirts understood something many miss: that the suburbs are where the American dream takes shape. Anyone who wants a say in the country’s definition of the good life should take the suburbs seriously. That is true of policymakers, politicians, urban planners and architects.

Hurley accuses many of the latter two groups of turning their nose up at the suburbs: “The design elite has alternately patronised or inveighed against suburbia for years, ever since the International Congress of Modern Architecture called the suburb ‘a kind of scum churning against the walls of the city’ in 1933.”

Belgian architect Leon Krier’s dismissiveness is unimprovably snobbish: “The suburb hates itself: it knows that it is neither countryside nor city and wants to conquer the world because it cannot be at peace with itself… The suburb strangles the city by surrounding it and kills the city, tearing out its heart. A suburb can only survive, it cannot live.”

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“What if we embraced that inbetweenness instead of condemning it,” asks Hurley, who wants to “celebrate the possibilities of standing on that threshold.”

After all, the suburbs are where most Americans have decided to call home, with around 60% of the country living in . That is a broad category, as Hurley puts it, including “semi-rural areas where strip malls nibble at farmland and those where tall towers loom over the city line. It encompasses McMansions and mobile homes, airports and light-industrial estates, landfills and parkland.”

As major cities continue to grow more economically powerful – and unaffordable – their commuter belts will only get more important. Policymakers should think again about restrictive zoning regulations that get in the way of building the suburbs Americans deserve.

And, rather than disparage the type of community that most Americans call home, the country’s planners and architects should delve into the suburbs’s surprisingly rich past as inspiration for a better future. After all, as Hurley puts it, suburbia is what we make it.

The statue in the centre of the square is fenced off and signs warn: “City personnel only” Stroll closer and you’ll notice “THIS STATUE SAYS THAT BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER”, scrawled in chalk on the ground. “WHITE LIVES MATTER TOO!” is the faded response angrily written directly beneath. The past is alive in Charlottesville.

Hate fulled riots filled this space two years ago. Plans to remove the statue of Robert E Lee, General of the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War, had caused an angry coming together of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Clan and assorted other racists and anti-Semites. The Unite the Right gathering shocked the world, left one woman dead and created in Charlottesville one of the ugliest confrontations in recent American history.

The white nationalist who rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters has since been sentenced to life for first-degree murder. But subsequent acts of far-Right terrorism have shown the Charlottesville attack to be part of a disturbing trend. Last month alone, a shooter in El Paso, Texas, shared a white supremacist manifesto online before killing 22 people while an attack that killed three people and injured 13 in Gilroy, California, is being investigated as a terrorism incident.

 Meanwhile, across the South, monuments to the Confederacy and its heroes have come tumbling down — yet Charlottesville’s Lee is still standing.

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If the violent attacks pose important questions about how America should best deal with the threat of far-Right terrorism, the debate over the statue is part of a parallel discussion: can the nation come to terms with the contradictions of its past in a way that can heal, rather than aggravate, the divides of the present? In Charlottesville that battle is being fought on multiple fronts. 

How the states who seceded from the Union in defence of slavery a century and a half ago remember that chapter in their history has always been difficult. Things became more fraught in the summer of 2015, when Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white nationalist fond of posing with the Confederate flag and at the graves of Civil War generals, murdered nine African-Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Since then, more than 30 cities have removed Confederate memorials.

Charlottesville’s councillors voted to follow suit in February 2017 — a move that sparked the far-Right protest, but also faced stiff opposition in the courts. According to a 1904 Virginia state law, local governments are allowed to build war monuments but are forbidden from removing, damaging or defacing them. The city’s legal argument is built on the claim that, because the statues had more to do with contemporary politics than any war at the time they were built, then they are not war memorials. It’s a battle destined for the state’s supreme court. 

In the meantime, city authorities continue an awkward dance, erecting fencing and even shrouding the statues in black tarpaulin before a court ordered its removal.

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Wes Bellamy, a Charlottesville city councillor, was involved in the campaign to remove the statues from early on. For him, the logic is simple enough. “The statues,” he tells me, “represent a racist ideology.” They depict men who fought a war in defence of slavery, were “vehemently opposed the equal rights of African Americans”, and owned slaves. “When those statues were put up, there were two Ku Klux Clan rallies that took place to celebrate. Those statues don’t represent the city that we’re trying to be at all,” he says. “They represent a domestic terrorist group who were traitors, who were inherently racist and who do not need to be celebrated in the middle of our city.”  

Statues are meant to be hard to move, says historian Edward L. Ayers, author of The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, who was one of the experts on a recent commission to help the nearby city of Richmond decide what to do with its own Civil War statues.

But attitudes are changing. While the tiki-torch wielding far-right protestors who descended on Charlottesville inevitably grabbed the headlines, Professor Ayers thinks the reality among the mainstream majority is more encouraging. Debates like the one over Charlottesville’s memorials “can create the impression that people are dug in”, he says, but in reality things are less divided. “I’ve had many conversations about this around the country and I’ve seen people be broadly understanding of what the statues mean to other people. I’ve also seen people understand what the statues are not,” he tells me.

Opponents of removing the statues claim that doing so would mean erasing history, but Professor Ayers sees it differently. The statues, he says, “are called history, but they are a version of history; they were part of a process of revising history… The statues are not history, but representations of history.”

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The representation of history being pushed in 1924, when Charlottesville’s statue of Lee went up, was the idea of the Civil War as a noble, if unsuccessful, defence of states’ rights and an honourable disagreement about the meaning of the US constitution. At the statue’s unveiling, Lee was remembered as a man who embodied “the moral greatness of the Old South”. Slavery was steadily being written out of the story.

The politics of the time cannot be disentangled from this lost cause revisionism. Far from shedding light on the past, the monuments were designed to hide important parts of it. The same year that the Lee statue was erected, Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act, which criminalised interracial marriage and required that every child in Virginia be identified as “white” or “coloured” on their birth certificate. Two years later, the state passed legislation to enforce racial segregation at all public events in Virginia.

As Mitch Landreiu, a Democratic politician and then mayor of New Orleans, explained his decision to remove Confederate statues in the city in 2017:

“These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitised Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.”

The decision to remove statues, in New Orleans and elsewhere, has not been without opposition, but the Virginia law opposing the removal of war monuments means that it has been the site of a more protracted debate than other southern states.

For Professor Ayers, the difference between the way in which the monuments went up and how they are coming down is important:

“This is democracy. This is a political process. The statues were put up basically without political process because of the disenfranchisement of the African-American community. Now there’s new voices, and we would expect there to be more of a conversation, and that’s not a bad thing.”

The fact that that conversation was hijacked by the far-right should not detract from America’s determination to continue having the conversation, he argues.  

“History is made in every form, and it’s going to have to be confronted in every form,” says Ayers. “From the viewpoint of a historian, watching people wrestle with the complexity of the past is not the worst thing.”

Another historic figure has also been targeted. As with Lee and Jackson, how the city remembers him is of more than just local importance. This time, however, the man in question is not a general who prosecuted a treasonous war against the United States, but Charlottesville’s most famous son, the founder of the University of Virginia, a founding father, the third President of the United States and the author of the Declaration of Independence.

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 Thomas Jefferson was all these things, but he was also a slave owner. His home, Monticello, sits on a hill overlooking Charlottesville. It was there that he kept as many as 130 men, women and children in bondage at any given time. He had five children with Sally Hemings, a slave. He freed only five slaves in his will on his death — the rest were sent to the auction block. Suffice to say, it is difficult to construct the case that Jefferson — the author of the words “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” — was an especially reluctant or grudging slaveholder.

This is why, in an extraordinary move, the city of Charlottesville council has voted to no longer celebrate Jefferson’s birthday, as it has done every year for decades. Instead, it will now mark Liberation and Freedom Day on March 3, the day Union forces arrived in Charlottesville in 1865.

Bellamy, who voted for the move, thinks it “goes hand in hand” with the campaign to remove the Confederate statues. “Thomas Jefferson was a white supremacist,” he tells me. “When he wrote the Declaration of Independence, it wasn’t for people who look like me, I was considered three fifths of a man,” says Bellamy, who is African-American. “And I think that not celebrating his birthday is one step closer to where we need to be in terms of like respecting everyone. You don’t have to like everyone but you do have to respect everyone.”

I ask Bellamy what hope there is for any kind of unity in America if the country cannot agree on memorialising the author of the Declaration of Independence.

“Unity? When has our country been unified? This is the 400th year since the first group of enslaved Africans came here. The idea that we’re happy when we’re unified I think is a fallacy. We’re happy when we’re entertained. But when it comes to treating people fairly and with respect and with equity and equality, there’s always been division… I don’t buy into the whole unified thing. I think we need to be talking about respect.”

There are many dividing lines in American politics — class, race, religion, geography and ideology — but  an under-appreciated distinction is between those who acknowledge the complexity of the country’s past and those who tell a one-sided morality tale.

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By Eric Kaufmann

As time has gone on, Americans have been presented with a fuller picture of Thomas Jefferson, and commemorate his contribution in spite of his undeniable shortcomings. Confederate generals, by contrast, have been memorialised not in spite of, but for waging a war in defence of slavery. Questioning some states’ reverence for the latter means updating and broadening the ideals America should try to live up to. Ditching any commemoration of the former means doing away with those ideals altogether. 

Here, those who think America’s past sins mean the slate must be wiped clean offer an unlikely mirror image to Donald Trump’s empty patriotism. The President is keen to insist he loves his country. When he tries to explain why, you start to wonder. His speech at the ostentatious “Salute to America” parade he threw himself to celebrate the 4th of July, for example, was revealing in its hollow tribute to little more than the scale of America’s greatness — the biggest and the best. There was “Go team!” spirit and respect for the “noble might” of “America’s warriors”, but little in the way of the values that have energised the country in the past and might energise it again in the future.

“They guard our birthright with vigilance and fierce devotion to the flag and to our great country,” he said of the military.

“Now we must go forward as a nation with that same unity of purpose. As long as we stay true to our cause, as long as we remember our great history, as long as we never ever stop fighting for a better future, then there will be nothing that America cannot do.”  

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It was an unexceptional account of what makes his country great; it could have come from the leader of more or less any nation at more or less any time in history. Similarly, those for whom America’s past is only something worth apologising for would strip the country of the tools it needs for self-improvement.

For some, Charlottesville’s slippery slope from Lee to Jefferson highlights the risk that, once you start questioning who should be remembered, it’s far from clear where you stop. The fear is that this cancel culture will come for everyone eventually. But just as it is unreasonable to hold historic figures to 21st-century standards, it is unrealistic to see history as set in stone. Those who rightly fear the consequences of a culture war over the past will not get very far by shutting down debate. Rather they need to fight for a better conversation.

Martin Luther King understood the promise and paradox of Jefferson’s legacy. In 1962, on the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln, he said of the work of Jefferson and Lincoln:

“If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power and how malignant their evil.”

There has not been a shortage of reminders of the ways in which the America has fallen short of its founding ideals lately. There is, and always has been, hypocrisy in America’s commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But as it reckons with its past, it is worth remembering that — from independence through the civil war and the civil rights movement to the present day — that charge of hypocrisy has been a prompt for perpetual improvement, not an obstacle to it.

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By Matthew Parris and Freddie Sayers

At the inaugural National Conservatism conference, the latest high-profile attempt to add intellectual heft to Trump shaped conservatism, not a single mention was made of the row over the President’s tweets. For two and a half days, pro-Trump thinkers and politicos – including Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, Fox News provocateur Tucker Carlson and White House National Security Adviser John Bolton – went about trying to build a new conservative coalition. For two-and-a-half days, they ignored the headlines.   

In one sense, this was unsurprising. The event’s organisers want to resuscitate nationalism as a mainstream political force and, in doing so, redefine modern conservatism. Attendees didn’t want to talk about a Twitter storm, they wanted to talk big ideas and the sweep of history. Trump’s outburst was an inconvenient intrusion on that. But the silence was nonetheless revealing. 

The conference’s organisers were at pains to make clear what the nationalist awakening is, and what it is not. It is not white nationalism. It is not ‘blood and soil’. Several alt-Right figures had been denied accreditation for the conference. On the opening night, co-convener David Brog pointed to the door and asked that anyone who defined what it means to be American in racial terms leave. “Your views are not welcome here,” he said. 

This was a far-cry from the rough and tumble of a Trump rally; it was a bookish crowd of bespectacled and besuited conservative thinkers quoting Burke and Xenophon. And, unsurprisingly, everyone except for bow-tied waiters going about their business, remained in their seats after Brog’s request. But not mentioning the news undermined the hosts’ objectives.

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Those objectives were set out unapologetically by Yoram Hazony, another organiser and a prominent Israeli intellectual whose influential 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism helped set the backdrop for the conference.

“Today is our independence day,” he declared:

“Today we declare independence from neoconservatism. We declare independence from neoliberalism. From libertarianism. From what they term classical liberalism. You can give it any name you want but that set of ideas that sees the atomic individual, the free and equal individual as the only thing that an educated person needs to know about politics and if he or she knows the free and equal individual then he or she has the ability to set out and rule the world. That worldview we are declaring independence from today.”

*

Hazony’s call to arms was typical of the conference generally, which was as much about owning the libertarians as it was “owning the libs”. The event was another reminder – not that one were needed – that the coalition that constituted the conservative movement from the 1960s to the early 2000s lies in tatters. 

For decades, the majority of that movement accepted the logic of fusionism: the libertarian and traditionalist wings knew they needed each other and made peace, albeit an uneasy one, with one another. That has changed – largely thanks to Trump. 

Emboldened traditionalists, including the national conservatives, are reconsidering their answers to the biggest questions in politics. And, like an enthusiastic recent divorcee, they are playing the field in the marketplace of ideas. The breadth of mainstream Right-wing American politics is wider than it has been for generations. Proceedings at the conference were astonishingly nonconformist, a reflection of the fact that all bets are off on the American Right in 2019. Sometimes that open-endedness was thrilling. Other times it was unnerving.

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Almost none of the economics in Tucker Carlson’s speech, titled “Big business hates your family”, would have been taken seriously in Right-wing Washington circles before 2016. According to Carlson, the main threat to Americans living the lives they want to live comes from business, not government. He praised Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, which she co-authored with her daughter, as “one of the best books on economics” he has read and more important than anything social conservatives have written recently. Echoing the Left’s critique of so-called woke capitalism, he described identity politics as a distraction obscuring who the winners are in today’s economy. 

The new anti-business consensus is striking and if there is a grand realignment happening in American politics (it certainly felt like that was what was happening among the national conservatives this week) it is far from clear who, if anyone, will be left to stick up for the market.

*

Elsewhere, on the rise of China, technology, the opioid crisis and the consequences of deindustrialisation in America’s heartland, the new nationalists seemed determined to break with the past, but unsure on exactly which path to take instead. 

The outlines of a concrete agenda were discernible. Attendees voted in favour of a motion in favour of a new American industrial policy, securing the border was almost universally settled on as an urgent priority. The West’s welcoming into the fold of China, including its admission into the World Trade Organisation, was overwhelmingly spoken about with regret, and attendees were gearing up for a new cold war. John Bolton described this East-West showdown as having “elements of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations. In his speech on Sunday night, Peter Thiel called for an FBI and CIA investigation into Google for “seemingly treasonous” cooperation with the Chinese. On Tuesday, the President promised to look into his supporter’s accusations. 

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At the crescendo of his speech, Thiel delivered a broadside against American Exceptionalism. “That exceptionalism obscured everything,” he said:

“The doctrine of exceptionalism has lead to a country that is exceptionally overweight, that is exceptionally addicted to opioids, that has exceptionally dysfunctional public infrastructure where it costs ten times as much to build a mile of subway as it does in socialist western Europe, that is in short exceptionally un-self-aware, exceptionally un-self-critical… Nationalism has nothing to do with this sort of exceptional un-selfawareness… Nationalism is going to ask hard questions.”

That might the start of the search for a new conservatism, but two and a half years into the Presidency of a self-described nationalist, the movement should arguably have fewer questions and more answers. Ultimately there was a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde quality to the new nationalists gathered in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom. 

*

Sometimes the brand of nationalism being expounded on stage sounded entirely innocuous. “To oppose nations is to oppose a force of nature,” argued Chris DeMuth. One minute Brog sounds like Oprah, or an actor delivering a banal ‘political’ Oscar acceptance speech: “We need to love our fellow citizens. We must feel connected to each other. A connection is deep enough to overcome our superficial differences.” Who could disagree with that? 

But then fellow organiser Hazony declared nothing less than Judeo-Christian jihad on liberals and fellow conservatives alike for trying to “privatise religion”: 

“We thought we could just stay reasonable having gotten rid of God’s scripture. And guess what, there’s no shred of truth to this at all. We tried it. We did. It turns out it was God and scripture that were holding the entire set of structures together. Not reason, tradition. You throw out Christianity and the Jewish contribution too with it, you throw out God and within two generations people can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman. They can’t tell the difference between a foreigner and a citizen. They can’t tell the difference between this side of the border and the other side of the border. They can’t tell the difference between paying back your debts and simply borrowing forever. The only way to save this country, to bring it back to cohesion, the only way to bring it back to independence and health, the only way to do it is going to be to restore those traditions.”

What is it that Hazony wants? Is he hoping for some kind of spontaneous culture-wide religious revival? If so, he could be waiting a long time. Or does he want to nationalise God as part of an overtly political programme? That is not a solution that strikes me as being in keeping with America’s republican traditions, nor is it one that the country is likely to unite around. This was the problem with a lot of what I heard at the conference. Either conservative nationalism is a series of civic bromides that only the wokest of the woke would object to, or it is something spikier, something millions of reasonable Americans from both parties will take issue with, and with good reason.

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By Peter Franklin

America’s new nationalists never miss an opportunity to emphasise just how divided the country is: ‘The times are dire’; ‘What can bind up our wounds? What can bring us together?’; ‘These are frayed times’. 

Yet they are unstinting in their refusal to build any bridges or acknowledge any share of the blame for that disunity. They appear oblivious to the risks of what happens when their theory becomes real-world politics, risks that chants of “send her back” in North Carolina on Wednesday made abundantly clear. In the eyes of many, the President and some of his more zealous supporters are a real source of conflict and division. Until they face up to that tension – perhaps by calling out, or at least acknowledging the existence of, Donald Trump’s racist tweets – their solemn sounding calls for national unity will ring hollow.