In theory, of course, we’ve been here before, with Starmer also trying to connect English devolution with a post-Brexit politics. In 2023, while still in opposition and riding high in the polls, Burnham’s soon-to-be predecessor said his plans for devolution would transform “‘take back control”’ from a slogan into a solution. Alas, things turned out rather differently. Indeed, if a single issue encapsulates the pathologies of the Starmer regime, it is local government reorganization (LGR) — the outgoing PM’s plan to streamline councils — as well as the introduction of more metro mayors. In the two years since 2024, when a flagship white paper was published to address both, quiet constitutional radicalism has met with ever more farcical incompetence. This is Starmerism: triple-distilled.

Because so much else has happened, it’s easy to forget just how ludicrous parts of that agenda are. From 2028, for instance, the largest city-region in Europe will be the combined “metro area” of Norfolk and Suffolk. Feted to have a single mayor overseeing a fiefdom of some 9,200 square kilometers, that mayoral authority will be around the same size as Cyprus — and six times larger than Greater London. The idea of Norwich being the administrative capital of a city-state, eclipsing Madrid or Paris in scope, sounds like something from an Alan Partridge fever dream. For Keir Starmer, it was simply part of re-forging the British state.

Almost as bad is the proposal for a single mayor to cover the whole of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Given the uproar when Emirates sponsored the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth, and planned to paint the iconic building in the same colors as Southampton football club, it’ll be interesting to see how the two places integrate. In Portsmouth, the nickname for the denizens of Southampton, some 17 miles away, is “scum”. Those who live in the home of the Royal Navy, meanwhile, enjoy the nickname “skates” (you’ll have to Google why). There is no history of collaboration between the two cities — both of which enjoy almost 1,000 years of continuous history. It’s a similar story with Cumbria, soon to be a metro area as well as a county, with the authority forecast to be over twice as large as France’s largest municipality. That’s despite the fact that Carlisle, Cumbria’s largest city, has a population of just 100,000, and the region is best known for the empty Lake District.

Would Burnham repeat such bizarre absurdities? There are grounds for cautious optimism. In February 2023, Burnham spoke to the journalist Steve Richards. There’s little reason to be cynical about his remarks at the time, not least because his chances of a national comeback seemed negligible, with Starmer riding high in the polls. And yet, for more than half an hour, the then-mayor for Greater Manchester spoke convincingly of a “place first” approach to devolution. “In a post-Brexit, post-pandemic world,” Burnham intoned, isn’t it clear “that Whitehall can’t cope with this? It’s struggling, and it’s because the wiring of the county isn’t right.”

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By Aaron Bastani

Throughout that conversation two things stood out. The first is how, for Burnham, any localist agenda must fit the needs of communities which already exist. “Legitimacy comes from the people and the place,” as he puts it. Which makes you wonder whether plans for an East Anglia super-region, let alone a South Coast version of Neom, will truly come to pass in his premiership. The second is how devolution isn’t merely a means to rewire Britain’s economy, but to determine which issues matter in the first place. Whitehall’s inability to craft solutions partially stems from the fact it has little idea what the problems are. Policy-making, in the argot of the former Manchester mayor, is thus divorced from place.

Three years on and it’s clear that, in other ways too, Starmer has continued with the very approach Burnham was skeptical of. For all Starmer’s talk of dispersing power away from London, and the public really taking back control, his faction essentially selected the Labour candidate for the west of England mayor (the now disgraced Dan Norris), while blocking Jamie Driscoll from standing in the North East. Then there were the times the leadership’s retinue made Richard Leonard resign as the party’s Scottish leader, and steered the controversial Vaughan Gething to the role of first minister in Cardiff. Starmer, and much of the Labour Right, were comfortable with devolution, and “giving power away”, so long as those who received it agreed with them.

That hints at another divide with Burnham, who, whatever his other faults, seems to have shed any factionalist baggage. He was certainly a Blairite upon entering Parliament in 2001. Yet in his speech on Monday, he took aim at the whipping system and its tendency to foreclose political debate. Looking further ahead, of course, it’s hard to see how a “place first” approach won’t clash with the political management of the Labour establishment: including its propensity to parachute in preferred candidates for “safe seats”.

Still, it’s a start, especially when you consider that Starmer’s approach to local politics — arrogant, entitled and defined from the center — was so inept that it actively undermined confidence in the need for reform. Starmer’s LGR was meant to be the biggest shake-up of local politics in England since the Sixties. If more mayors, furnished with greater powers, is about enhancing democracy, then LGR was about delivering a more standardized bureaucracy across England. Fair enough: my home county of Hampshire presently boasts 15 different authorities, including “two-tier” district and county councils. LGR means that number will fall to five unitary authorities, all enjoying the same range of competences.

While the changes make sense in theory, as has often been the case with Starmer the execution has been disastrous. Why? Because reforming ambition was encumbered by hubris, which in turn fed incompetence, something extending far beyond ambitions of conjoining old rivals like Southampton and Portsmouth. Starmer’s government, with its enormous majority, sought to remake key parts of national life at breakneck speed. As a result, many councils regarded the timetable as unrealistic, with authorities expected to develop new unitary structures, governance arrangements and financial models within months. It often felt like No. 10 was applying the principles of DIY SOS to the biggest overhaul of local government in over half a century.

Alongside the rush, far-reaching questions remain unanswered. For instance, will newly integrated authorities have to pool historic debts? Would a council broadly in the black (such as Portsmouth) have to absorb liabilities from another in the red (like Hampshire County Council)? And if an authority that runs surpluses integrates with another that runs crippling deficits, what help is on offer from the Treasury? These are, understandably, huge points of contention for council leaders across the country. Yet they have been met with little more than hand-waving and vague promises of things being alright in the end. Speak to almost any council leader, and you’ll likely hear shock at how blasé and reckless London has been throughout.

Which brings us to another major difference between our prime ministers, present and future. While Starmer viewed local government re-organisation, and more metro mayors, as a means of achieving growth within the existing model, Burnham regards empowering city-regions as a way of bypassing No. 11 and the most dysfunctional parts of Whitehall. That is, after all, the subtext of him opening an office in Manchester. While the primary aim is to take power out of Westminster and, as Burnham put it this week, create a political “circuit-breaker”, a secondary aspect would be to strengthen the role of the prime minister himself.

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By Aaron Bastani

Whatever you think of it, at least that’s a vision. Compare it to the LGR, whose preference for a “unitary layer” for local government emerged from a single paper published by PWC. The ultimate argument for those vast mayoral authorities from Hampshire to East Anglia, meanwhile, can be found in a report compiled by McKinsey. Why the need for such scale? Because, in order for regional governments to compete for investment, that’s what’s required — with two million inhabitants apparently the starting point to create sufficient capacity, generate adequate brand recognition, and access the right tier of investors.

In other words, those new mayors up for election two years from now are less about empowering local people, or reviving England’s smaller cities, than ensuring creditworthiness. This is why somewhere like Cumbria is suddenly expected to become a city-region. And while this again may sound coherent in principle, you have to question whether such contrived and synthetic entities will garner sufficient democratic legitimacy in the long-term. History and tradition — Portsmouth’s star-and-crescent flag goes back to the Third Crusade — is apparently irrelevant to a Treasury that regards city-regions as little more than economic zones. In a way, it’s strangely reminiscent of arguments for greater European integration made by liberals in recent decades. Reducing transaction costs matters more than anything else. For Burnham, though, if cities are certainly a locus for policy experimentation, they are also places with heritage, history and a continuous culture. His passion for Manchester makes that clear enough.

Ultimately, the two men view devolution as a path to different things — which makes you wonder whether Burnham as prime minister will move to re-assess LGR, let alone oddities like a city-region for Norfolk and Suffolk. And, while we’re at it, why not give the Southampton and Portsmouth city-regions a mayor each? That’s what would happen in any vaguely sane polity.

Which leads us to yet another major fissure between the current prime minister and his successor, with Burnham repeatedly criticizing much of the devolution agenda since 1997. He expressed as much in Monday’s speech, when he promised to offer “new opportunities to extend devolution” in the Celtic fringe by taking power “deeper down”. In words intended for the SNP and Welsh Labour, as much as the inhabitants of such places, Burnham remarked how the “people of Dundee and Bangor feel just as distant from Holyrood and the Senedd as they do from Westminster”.

Now, you might point out, Holyrood and the Senedd are consequences of Blairite reforms. Does Burnham, a former New Labour minister, think they were a mistake? The answer appears to be yes, with Burnham admitting as much while speaking on that podcast with Richards. The original sin of Scottish and Welsh devolution, according to our next prime minister, was the “same Westminster approach… where it’s all national and there isn’t that routing of power at the local level”. Rather than truly empower voters in Wales and Scotland, the Blair government created dysfunctional mini-mes in Edinburgh and Cardiff: places whose political cultures are every bit as complacent as London.

Starmer, by virtue of his connection to Morgan McSweeney and the Labour Right, could never voice such a critique. In theory, the same should be true of Burnham, given his past or present ties to Blair, David Miliband and James Purnell. Yet he’s broken ranks with his old comrades in stating that the city-based approach of the English North — whose champion is none other than George Osborne — has proven more successful.

Perhaps that’s exactly the kind of mold-breaking that’s needed. After all, the historic party of social democracy is betting the house on something which hasn’t worked for a century: pushing power to towns and cities far beyond the M25. Given Westminster’s tendency to hoard power, that’s a huge ask. Burnham’s localism agenda may ultimately end up giving him more influence — not least if he becomes ally-in-chief to existing mayors and council leaders, especially if he spikes the worst aspects of LGR — all while he undermines both the Civil Service and Parliament. As the incoming PM ominously added in Monday’s speech, the political direction he will set “will not be up for negotiation”. Still, even a President Burnham would probably be better than what we have now: spreadsheet devolution with voters a mere afterthought.

With all the mystery around Ozempic in pop culture, old-school anorexia seems strangely simple. Perhaps this explains the internet’s fixation with both Ariana Grande and Bella Hadid, the singer and model who have become the unintended public faces of pernicious (alleged) eating disorders in recent years. Grande has become noticeably less grande since the pandemic; she shocked observers with her rail-thin frame during the promotional junket for the film Wicked, and in the past few weeks has appeared on stage, incredibly thin, during live shows. “She literally looks emaciated,” said one fan on X; others accused her of having “choreographed sitting” into her dance routine, presumably to avoid lightheadedness.

Hadid, for her part, has been posting again about her Lyme disease diagnosis. The supermodel was diagnosed in 2012 at the age of 16, along with her mother and brother. Intermittently since then, she has shared pictures of herself stripped to the waist in a hospital bed, covered in electrodes or on a drip. One fan says it’s really because she “doesn’t eat”. Others scour the contents of her fridge, finding only “juice, yogurt and berries”. “It’s heartbreaking to see her battling with an ED [eating disorder] and Yolanda is all to blame,” reads one comment, with reference to Hadid’s former-model mother who is known for encouraging her other daughter Gigi only to “have a couple of almonds” when the then-teenager complained of feeling faint and hungry. Bella Hadid may well be debilitated by Lyme disease, but her physical frailty is hard to ignore. As with Grande, her disappearing body is viral catnip.

Why is skinny “back” in celebrity culture? We must not forget the specific glamour of anorexia, glamour which is most intoxicating to teen girls. The literary critic Elaine Showalter memorably described melancholia in the Romantic period as a “prestigious disorder of upper-class and intellectual men”. You can see why it was thought of in this way: plumbing one’s own misery required both depth and leisure. Happiness is for oiks. Of course, this perception had no bearing on real incidence, save for the crazy-making nature of idleness which may have brought the black dog unto a few sad squires. Sighing was probably just as common in the scullery as in the library. Nevertheless many illnesses have their mythologies, and if male depression was conferred an elite status in the past then the female cognate today is without doubt anorexia and bulimia.

The virtuous connotations of female eating disorders are that sufferers are meticulous, intelligent, disciplined and detached — coolly incorporeal, pensive and stylishly sad. The prototype of the chic contemporary anorexic is Marya Hornbacher, whose 1997 memoir Wasted, published when she was just 23, detailed her teen years in recovery wards, culminating in a brush with death when she weighed just 52 pounds. In the book, Hornbacher describes her illness with borderline cinematic sumptuousness: “I brought a stack of books and a notebook, packs of cigarettes, and sat coiled in a chair in the corner, rubbing my eyes… swallowing coffee… reading Bertrand Russell and John Stuart Mill and Marx.”

Here is this sophisticated teenager, swapping food (lame) for philosophy (rad!) while going through coffee and cigs like a Parisian poseur. Are we meant to interpret her starvation as cool or awful? The ambiguity is deliberate. While Wasted won huge acclaim and became the archetypal anorexia memoir, Hornbacher’s barely restrained sense of her own emaciated glamor compromised its function as a “warning” for sufferers and their families. Instead, it spurned imitation. Another eating-disorder memoirist, Nicole Johns, author of bulimia tome Purge, says fellow patients would try to “smuggle” copies of Wasted into treatment facilities, treating it as a manual. Hornbacher’s tendency to brag, and her undisguised nostalgia for the allure of her illness — as well as the instructional nature of the account, much of which is in the second person (“you will lift the toilet seat, carefully slide your fingers inside your mouth and down your throat, and puke until you see orange”) — made it premium reading material for the aspiring anorexic.

Today, this mechanism has become part of the very wiring of social media. Since the early days of blogging sites — Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram — eating-disorder pages have been as depressingly constant as pornography. “Pro-ana” (anorexia) posters compete with one another for the lowest BMIs; TikTok content creators get around guardrails by pretending that the calorie-counts which accompany images of their meals are “prices”. Bloggers share “thinspo” (thin inspiration) — pictures of themselves or celebrities; they “body check”, meaning that they show off hollow stomachs or wrist-thin thighs for other girls to use as motivation. Because they are famished, they also post obsessively about food. In this they resemble the subjects of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment in the Forties, in which healthy men were put on extreme diets. Over 24 weeks, the men were found to hoard and obsessively read cookbooks. Had these men been given access to Instagram, they too would surely have gorged on images of food.

Celebrities are also part of the eating-disorder internet. Many super-thin stars, most notably Ariana Grande, have asked people not to comment on their bodies — Grande called speculation about the looks and health of others “dangerous”. But asking fans — the source of your income — to pay attention to only the “comfortable” facets of your persona breaks the contract of fame: celebrity means sacrificing privacy, and exposure is part of the bargain. Commenters diagnosing stars from a distance — or even “concern trolling” (posting skeletal pictures of women they’re “worried about”) — may be distasteful, but it is inevitable. These celebrities are, after all, the ultimate beneficiaries of the attention economy and stand to gain even when this attention is negative; Grande’s secrecy around her alleged condition has in fact only increased the intrigue and therefore the coverage.

I have little doubt that Grande’s thinness is, to some vulnerable fans, aspirational. And there is no denying that pictures of these celebrities are being used as “thinspo”. Grande posting body-checking pictures of herself fitting inside a guitar case means an X user called “Skinny B4 Death” will inevitably add her to their starvation moodboard. Hadid, for her part, has often posed in a way which emphasizes a starved ribcage; this could well lead to users glamorizing emaciation, in a grisly echo of Nineties “heroin chic”. To those quick to dismiss this as a feminist fuss over nothing, use your imagination: you may not give a sod about seeing one too many jutting bones, but then you may not be a teenage girl. For them, such images can alter the course of a life.

The public spectacle of Grande’s and Hadid’s emaciation is functioning, in the age of the internet, like a virtual eating-disorder ward: hypercompetitive and dishonest, bragging and furtive. Particularly since their fans are primarily those most vulnerable to eating-disorder content: namely, girls. The result of all this blog-worthy boniness is that the troubled years of these stick-thin celebrities may end up just like copies of Wasted: tucked under inpatients’ pillows, bookmarked at the bad bits, treasured as a guide for how to disappear.

If there is a foundational dogma to America’s civic religion, it is that the United States is an exceptional country. The reason we emerged as the world’s first modern democracy, the reason we became the most powerful country in history, the reason we defeated fascism and communism and remade much of the world in our capitalist image, is that we’re somehow special. 

For those inclined to see the world through Christian prophecy, we are ordained by God. For those who prefer to see Enlightenment-style “reason” as the engine of civilization, it was the genius of our Founding Fathers that set us on our path to greatness. For those who are more anthropologically minded, it was the curious Tocquevillian habit of Americans to come together in voluntary associations that set us apart. But all agree that we are a uniquely favored nation.

A wider view of history reveals a more mundane explanation: the reason America became a democratic superpower was its abundance of land. 

The long arc of Western history that led to the birth of the United States did not “begin” at any particular moment, but the collapse of the Roman Empire was certainly a major inflection point. The new kingdoms founded by Germanic tribal warlords on the wreckage of the Empire were less sophisticated than the society they had replaced. They lacked the bureaucracy necessary to tax their subjects as effectively as the Romans had, and without that revenue, they could not raise standing armies. Instead, they relied on volunteer soldiers, and compensated them with the spoils of war and pillage. This included plundered treasure as well as, more importantly, land.

Out of this exchange came the military order of feudalism. The power of a medieval king was measured by the military might of the volunteer soldiers pledged to him — otherwise known as his vassals. These men tended to be experienced warriors who could fight on horseback and who could conscript peasants who lived on their land, by force or by payment, to serve as foot soldiers. Generally, the more land a vassal held, the larger his annual revenue and the greater his army. He agreed to wage war on behalf of a more powerful magnate in exchange for the right to rule over a share of the newly conquered lands that military victory would bring. With that new wealth and power, he could, in turn, attract less powerful vassals into his own service.

But this compensation scheme created an intractable problem for the king, who, in the early Middle Ages, was merely the most powerful warlord in a given region at a given moment. The more land he distributed to his vassals, the stronger and more independent they became. Thus, every vassal was a potential rival, and every fief the king granted to them increased the threat they posed to his hegemony.

The remedy only made the problem worse. The king could secure his throne against the predatory ambitions of his rivals only by waging new wars and conquering new lands to distribute to his vassals as fiefs. It was a vicious cycle: staying ahead of one’s opponents in the short term meant increasing the threat they posed in the long term. On top of that, vassals waged their own wars to amass their own retinues of lesser vassals, and were also constantly trying to build their own military dynasties. Political competition created the conditions for endless war.

The militarized politics of feudal Europe produced an intricate vertical social structure: a long chain of vassals and liege lords connected the lowliest peasant to God. At the same time, however, the competition between warlords created a countervailing ideological force: republicanism.

The core region of feudal Europe was the area that was conquered by Charlemagne in the ninth century, stretching from the south of present-day Italy to the Baltic Sea, and from Bohemia to the Pyrenees. In the early days, aspiring conquerors swarmed to this relatively populated landmass, whose large peasant class could be easily forced into serving in infantries. But eventually, the core became overheated. The power of the incumbent lords became too strong to contest, and competition shifted to the more sparsely populated and up-for-grabs lands of the east and the north.

To effectively exploit these peripheral domains, their new rulers had to encourage settlement — and not just by agricultural laborers. Centuries of military competition in Europe had steadily generated new technologies: plane and chainmail armor, long bows, stone castles and siege weaponry like trebuchets. Artisans were needed to manufacture these products, and they in turn required trading centers. In this way, towns became indispensable to the long-term security of any throne.

Sometimes rulers transferred populations to their territories by sheer force, but more often, they were compelled to offer attractive terms to prospective immigrants. Colonists were granted enhanced property rights and civil autonomy. In the 12th century, the charter of Dublin allowed its residents to administer their own local affairs and judge their own legal cases. They were allowed to form guilds and to build as they wished within the city’s boundaries. Legal innovations spread like mushrooms: a charter in a town in today’s Germany would become a template for the founding of a new one in today’s Poland. A transnational legal network began to emerge, bestowing certain rights and privileges upon urban inhabitants, who became known as “burgesses”, or “the bourgeoisie”.

As the kingdoms of the old Carolingian lands spread to the farthest northern and eastern reaches of the continent, new riverine and overland trade routes emerged, criss-crossing Europe. Trade produced wealth, which kings could tax. These new sources of revenue, along with the development of bureaucracy, began to resolve the problem of the conflicting political interests between lords and vassals. Now, instead of exchanging land for military service, monarchs could pay mercenaries to fight their wars, and even raise standing armies. The Hundred Years’ War of the late Middle Ages was fought largely by mercenaries. But at the end of the war, Charles VII created the first European standing army since the Roman Empire by bringing France’s private military companies, which were typically contracted by feuding lords, into the direct service of the king. The move ignited a brief civil war with much of the aristocracy, as the crown was consolidating at their expense.

Over time, to use Max Weber’s terminology, the crown began to monopolize the use of legitimate violence. Royal domains were internally pacified, and warfare became a matter of conflicts between great kingdoms. Something resembling the modern nation-state became dimly perceptible. 

Pacification was good for trade, and the chartered townships prospered. The republican-minded burgesses flourished with them. But the old feudal class structures didn’t simply evaporate. Warrior knights slowly transformed into domesticated aristocrats orbiting the king’s court. These aristocrats continued to control the land, even while fulfilling no obvious social purpose. Stripped of their military function, they became a parasitical remnant of a social order that no longer existed. Peasants, laborers and lesser aristocrats found themselves socially immobile.

The stage was set for class conflict. The newly consolidated political power of the crown, at its apotheosis in the age of Absolutism, began to chafe against the burgesses with their democratic values.

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But for the discontented burgesses, farmers, and lords without prospects there was the promise of America. In the American colonies, there was arable land for anyone with the gumption to venture into the wilderness and take it. If you could tolerate the backbreaking work of clearing forests and the threat of being massacred by Indians, you could escape the economic stranglehold of early modern Europe’s vampire class. Here, the republican values incubated in medieval European towns and cities were free to spread unencumbered by the dead weight of aristocracy. 

Take, for example, those who would come to be known as the Scots-Irish, though they thought of themselves simply as Irish. Their ancestors, largely Presbyterian, had been transplants from Scotland to Ulster, recruited by Queen Elizabeth I as English-aligned colonists meant to displace the native-born Catholic Irish. Conditions were dismal in Scotland, and the land much better in Ireland, so they came in droves. But once there, they found themselves under the thumbs of absentee English landlords, who leveraged the improvements the new tenants had made to their lands to double and triple the rents they charged them. Feudalism had long since passed, but the laboring classes were still being squeezed by the nobles. 

In the 18th century, the Scots-Irish fled Ulster as readily as their grandparents had once fled Scotland, this time to the east coast of the United States. After landing in Philadelphia, they beat a hasty path into the back country, where they chiseled crude farms out of the mountains and hollows of the Appalachians. Once the nation was unified following the War of Independence, the Scots-Irish pioneers, for better and for worse, became the tip of the spear of American expansionism. 

The conquest of western North America entailed a different kind of warfare than their distant European ancestors had waged in the Middle Ages. The Americans faced fierce resistance from an indigenous population skilled in warfare, but not of the sort that medieval conquerors had encountered in Europe. Indian tribes had not constructed stone castles nor built trebuchets. The Americans could take their land without fielding armies in the tens of thousands, and without reordering their society to produce a warrior class and a servile population that could be conscripted as cannon fodder. The settlers who marched west of the Appalachians to conquer Indian lands largely did the fighting themselves, with the US Army playing only an ancillary role. They furnished their own weapons, and put their own lives at risk. They believed not in oaths of loyalty but in liberty, independence, and natural rights. It was a form of conquest and colonization that was entirely compatible with the old republican values of the European bourgeoisie.

After the West had been settled, the bourgeois ideology continued to prosper. Just as the medieval warlords on the peripheries of Europe needed new settlers to secure their power, the United States had a bottomless appetite not only for laborers but for skilled workers, educated professionals and entrepreneurs to develop the economy of a newly conquered continent. As for the burgesses in the medieval European towns, it was a buyers’ market for labor. And the US government attracted laborers in the same way: by offering economic opportunity as well as political liberties the newcomers were denied at home. With the obvious, colossal exception of blacks in the South, who were still ruled by the vestiges of a European aristocracy that would only be subdued in the Civil War and ultimately defeated in the Civil Rights Movement, American democracy flourished under these material conditions. It continued to do so in the 20th century, as America’s economy boomed, increasing the bargaining power of workers, professionals and entrepreneurs with the state. 

Those conditions, however, have vanished. In an age of urbanization and industrialized farming, land is no longer a productive source of wealth to be exploited at the level of the household. Far from needing to coax migrants into the United States to develop our booming economy, we are stanching the flow to prevent them from competing for scarce jobs. And with Artificial Intelligence rapidly displacing human cognitive labor, the incentives for governments to grant new civil liberties to people in order to secure their commitment to the nation and enlist their participation in the economy is becoming non-existent. Humans are losing their leverage over the institutions that rule them as their labor becomes cheap and superfluous. 

At the age of 250, the United States has long ceased to be exceptional. There is reason to question whether its republican spirit will persist much longer. Far too much emphasis is placed on vague notions of some uniquely American commitment to “freedom” to explain the success of American democracy, and far too little on the material conditions that have historically made democracy here possible: abundant land without a landed gentry. Without these conditions, democracy persists in America merely as a matter of inertia. We should be cautious not to assume it will last. 

On dates we took the L train at Halsey Street or Myrtle-Wyckoff and rode west into Williamsburg or the East Village, with their hip bars and coffee shops. But on the ride home, I noticed a gradual but seemingly inexorable shift: the transplants — college-educated 20- and 30-somethings who use the city as a playground — would get off one stop later each year. And later, and later.

And in this barely remarkable transformation lies the secret to the political changes sweeping Gotham. The city’s turn to the outré progressive politics of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America isn’t just political. It relies upon a remaking of the cultural fabric: how it feels, how it works.

Board the train in Manhattan, and the ride is mostly transplants; continue east, and they thin out, stop by stop, until what is left is the rest of us: the construction workers, the doormen who service the Manhattan co-ops, the immigrant families, the locals, me. But a year ago, my wife and I took the train home, and the train was packed all the way to Ridgewood. Everyone was going to one of the bars that had opened a few blocks from the house I grew up in. I stood the whole way. I could not get a seat in my own local spot. 

Ridgewood sits on the seam between Brooklyn and Queens: brick rowhouses, German and Eastern European at first, working class without exception. Its public square was a restaurant, Zum Stammtisch. The name means “the regulars’ table.” Decades later, the Germans made way for Hispanic and Coptic families, who opened their own shops like Rico Pollo or Aghapy Deli. My parents, refugees from Egypt, rented here. Later, on the salaries of two teachers’ aides, they managed to buy a house. There was nothing trendy about the place, but it was safe and stable; I was grateful.

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By Richard A. Greenwald

What happened to my neighborhood is the ordinary course of gentrification. The hipster was invented in Williamsburg around the year 2000, when the rents were cheap and the neighborhood was unsafe. That, in turn, gave people economic incentives to move in and experiment with coffee shops, new restaurants, thrift stores, and art studios. 

The development spiked property values and brought an influx of capital to Williamsburg. The average rent in the neighborhood now is about $5,000 a month, up from shy of $900 at the turn of the millennium. It has a Whole Foods. Naturally, then, those same creative and artsy types moved eastward to Bushwick, whose former industrial areas were rezoned as residential and commercial. But over time, Bushwick rents exploded, given the spread of specialty coffee shops, bars, and electronic-dance-music clubs. Rents exploded to an average of above $3,500, up from under $900 two decades earlier. That’s an exorbitant figure to anyone working outside of finance, tech, and law. 

Then, in the mid-2010s, the transplants came to Ridgewood. The change announced itself in an explosion of notable restaurants. Along Forest Avenue, a residential street off Myrtle Avenue, a dozen places have opened in six years, putting Ridgewood on the culinary map. Rolo’s, located in the base of a row house, is considered the best restaurant in Queens. Hellbender, two blocks up, draws the same clientele.

Two years ago, Time Out New York named Ridgewood the fourth-coolest neighborhood in the world. You can browse Instagram for the best restaurants in the Big Apple, and you will often find multiple Ridgewood options listed among them. And, on top of it all, our very own Whole Foods is coming to the old bank I walked past every day. These places, which I now enjoy with my wife, mean I don’t have to take the train to enjoy city amenities. But the change also means I have to make roughly thrice as much as my parents did to afford their home.

Two storefronts on Myrtle Avenue tell the whole story. One is Joe & John’s, a slice shop that serves as a staple of the neighborhood. When the Knicks played, Joe & John’s hosted giant watch parties for the whole neighborhood. Across the street is Topos, a Left-wing café and bookstore that locals studiously avoid.

Walk into Topos, and a poster of Mamdani greets you, flanked by his slate of now-victorious House nominees. A mood board offers the week’s options: an anti-ICE flyer, a women-against-imperialism meeting, a zine calling for the violent overthrow of the government. Keffiyehs are for sale. Young women wear oversized watermelon earrings (a reference to the one-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict); the espresso machine is peppered with magnets blaring “Free Palestine.”

The music might be Australian lesbian techno-pop or spoken word criticizing America or Lebanese. On the shelves: Abolish Rent, In Defense of Looting, The End of Policing. To the right of the register is a small children’s shelf containing works like Mamdani Walks New York City and Sex Is a Funny Word, billed as an introduction to sex positivity for youngsters. The children’s shelf is tucked away because there are few children. There are only transplants, performing politics fluently for one another.

Standing there, I understood what my neighborhood was becoming: a college town. The tight ring of restaurants, the ideological cafe-bookstores, the absence of families — it all comes together. The Ridgewood transplants are forming an adult campus, their own ecosystem to mimic the liberal college experience.

So like a small college town, there is a spectrum of political involvement, but no objection to the Left-wing ideological system. And underneath this ecosystem is the working class being pushed out by skyrocketing rents and narrowing affordability. The transplants virtue-signal for affordability and call for “decolonizing” the United States, but they are the cause of unaffordability, and they are actively colonizing my home. 

When I visited this week, I found a zine called “a new heaven and a new earth” by chariot wish, a self-described transsexual anarchist (capitalization rules are for the oppressor classes). One poem opens: “I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America, and I’m carrying this rage like a blood filled egg, and there’s a thin line between the inside and outside.”

Suggested reading

The socialist conquest of the Democrats

By Alicia Nieves

This poem, located in this bookstore, in this block that I walked thousands of times near my local pharmacy and my local pizza shop: I cannot help but feel the absurdity. But rage and nihilism toward America form the ideological core of the Ridgewood College ecosystem. Even support of Palestine is done implicitly because Palestine is the tip of the spear in opposing the American imperialist project. The Ridgewood system, and the heart of the DSA itself, represents the nullification of the American way that nurtured me and my family. These ideas gain traction in Ridgewood because of the sheer concentration of transplants, who have a shared restlessness about living in America — perhaps because of their rootlessness. They also have a sense of entitlement created by their artistic and educational attainments, and can’t escape financial stress, notwithstanding their expensive degrees. Hence, they fuel the rise of Mamdani and the DSA.

Claire Valdez, who just took the Democratic nomination for the area’s congressional district — unseating a moderate progressive — is the type exactly. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, worked service jobs, and came to New York around 2015 to make art. She did not grow up in Ridgewood and doesn’t, beyond a nominal sense, belong to it. She will soon represent it because the transplants now turn out stronger than everyone else in the Democratic Party. Hers is no longer a congressional seat for a neighborhood, but a congressional seat if the students of Columbia could elect one. 

I learned how far the opportunism runs during this year’s nurses’ strike. My wife was on the line; I stood with her in the cold. The corporate Democrats said publicly they wanted workers to achieve a favorable contract but behind the scenes were mostly beholden to the bosses. Given this, the DSA — with Mamdani, Valdez, etc. — seemed like a good partner for the striking nurses. But upon closer inspection, from the point of view of the DSA, the long-term solution to the nurses’ pay crisis isn’t greater bargaining power or stronger contracts, but the dismantling of capitalism itself (with a side of anti-Zionism). This is almost certainly not what the actual working-class nurses want, but when you’re stuck between two opportunistic parties, you go with the one that’s at least with you, even if opportunistically.

That is the pact the DSA has made with my neighborhood and with the Democratic Party. Ridgewood is a staging ground for an ideology its transplants intend to export. For the DSA, it presents an ideal place to organize, run candidates, and enjoy life largely insulated. They will fight for affordability while actively causing the issue: they aren’t interested in managing gentrification but, again, dismantling capitalism. And when the neighborhood is fully gentrified in 10 years, they will blame capitalism while continuing to serve as its agents, and they will move on to the next neighborhood.

In their ruling today, the conservative judges were clear. Title IX allows for segregating sports teams by sex “where selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill or the activity involved is a contact sport”. As Justice Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, noted, the regulations “allowed separate sports teams precisely because of the inherent physical differences between biological men and biological women”.

According to Kavanaugh, “sex”, in this context, “cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex”. After all, in 1972, when Title IX passed, “gender identity” was used only in rare medical contexts, and there was no common conception of a sense of being male or female separate from sex.

What was surprising, though, was that all three liberal judges continued to be out of step with even the majority of their political bedfellows, who mostly believe that sports should be segregated by sex rather than gender identity. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, held out for the possibility that a plaintiff like B.P.J — a male minor who took puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones — is an exception to sex, and that the laws only cover some males. The liberal Justices agreed that barring males from female sports doesn’t violate Title IX, but suggested it might violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause because of “unresolved factual questions”.

That is, while we know that male puberty confers an unfair advantage in sport, we don’t know how much advantage is retained when that puberty is blocked and a female puberty is simulated in a male body. After all, B.P.J. may have won West Virginia’s Class state championship in girls’ shot put, but only finished fourth in girls’ discus. Even Penn State swimmer Lia Thomas, who transitioned long after puberty, didn’t win every race against female swimmers.

The conservatives reject such reasoning. Even if kids like B.P.J. retained no physical advantages from being born male, the “empirical claim would not alter the equal protection conclusion”, in the words of the ruling. They’d still be male and still subject to being separated in sports by sex. Those who support division of sports by gender identity often refer to these laws as “bans on transgender athletes”. Of course, they are not. Rather, they’re required to play on teams based on sex; all members of a sex are treated equally, regardless of medical interventions.

That means that some males with blocked puberty won’t be good enough to make the men’s team. As Kavanaugh reminds us, “Title IX regulations guarantee ‘equal athletic opportunity’. The regulations cannot and do not guarantee every student a spot on a team’s roster.”

Parents of kids who have transitioned must impart that just because you have remade yourself doesn’t mean you get to remake the world. It may feel unsafe or unfair to them personally, but it is safer and fairer for almost every other girl on the field. However, it’s unlikely that those parents will pass this on, or that they will see this ruling as anything other than hatred against trans people. It’s unlikely that most Democrats will pivot, either. Just after the ruling, Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts insisted that the Court “cleared the way for Trump and MAGA Republicans to discriminate against the trans community”.

What’s important about the ruling is that it could clear the way for Americans in Democratic-led states to challenge the policies that allow males in girls’ and women’s sports. As Kavanaugh wrote, “Whether biological males may participate on women’s and girls’ sports teams may be a debated policy question.” But when it comes to the legal right, “West Virginia may do so.”

What’s surprising, though, is that nearly all the notable traditionalist voices in the Church hierarchy and among the laity are lining up behind the Pope, rather than the SSPX. This, notwithstanding some “trad” malcontents grumbling about Leo’s commitment to social-justice issues, as they did with his immediate predecessor.

The origins of the crisis lie in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council more than 60 years ago. Rejecting the council’s liturgical reforms and emphasis on religious liberty (within the limits of the common good), French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the society in 1970 with the explicit intention of maintaining preconciliar norms. The break came with Lefebvre’s decision in 1988 to consecrate four SSPX bishops on his own authority. Pope John Paul II declared that, under canon law, Lefebvre and these four bishops had incurred automatic excommunication for their schismatic act.

Yet the successors of Peter continued to nurture hopes of reconciliation. In an act of mercy in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of the four new bishops (Lefebvre had already died by then). A few years later, Benedict’s successor Francis granted SSPX priests the faculty to hear confessions and witness Christian marriages.

In his warning letter this week, Leo alluded to his predecessors’ gestures of Petrine “affection”, made in recognition of “the devotion to liturgical life, commitment to priestly formation, apostolic zeal, and desire for fidelity to Tradition” that characterizes individual members. Yet the SSPX seems undeterred, and is seemingly prepared for a full schism from the Roman communion.

What has surprised many observers, however, is the swiftness with which more mainstream forces in the traditionalist movement have condemned the SSPX in defense of the Pope’s course of action.

Rorate Caeli, the hugely influential trad blog that opposed the Francis papacy over its supposedly liberal direction, warned the SSPX today that “Leo XIV is filled with the heart of Saint Peter and the epistolary sincerity of Saint Paul. Catholics should listen closely.” Likewise, Eric Sammons, the Editor-in-Chief of the trad organ Crisis, wrote this morning: “I appreciate that the Holy Father is acting as a father here, making clear what he is forbidding, and urging his children to avoid that path. I pray the SSPX leadership would stand down.” Cardinal Robert Sarah, who has previously been tipped as a long-shot trad contender for the papacy, lamented earlier this year how the SSPX’s decision had caused a “new tear in the seamless garment of the Church”.

Why the society insists on going ahead with unlawful consecrations, despite the warnings of responsible traditional forces, will remain a mystery. It is, Catholics might say, the “mystery of evil”.

Nor can these memories of what one didn’t learn at school always be relied upon. We were all schoolchildren once, and we know that we didn’t always pay full attention. When people complain that they didn’t learn about a subject at school, it’s always worth testing their facility with trigonometry or titration.

Neither William Dalrymple nor Zack Polanski, apparently, learned about the British Empire when they were at school. On Polanski’s podcast, Bold Politics, they agreed that this was a moral disaster. The British Empire is the “elephant in the room”, the cause of so many of the world’s current ills: everything would be better if only the country’s imperial past were taught in schools.

The problem is that the British Empire is taught in schools. It has been on the national curriculum for history for as long as such a thing has existed. As former education secretary Michael Gove pointed out with a hint of glee, both Polanski and Dalrymple were privately educated, and in private schools the writ of the national curriculum does not run.

In Dalrymple’s case, one gets the sense that he won’t be satisfied until all school history lessons are about the British Empire. He has a monocausal view of the world: the Empire explains everything. The reason for “moral confusion” on the Israel-Palestine conflict, he suggests to Polanski — by which he seems to mean that not everybody in Britain is as fervently pro-Palestine as he is — is a lack of teaching on the subject in schools. His argument for the centrality of the British Empire to the ongoing war is shabby, emphasizing Britain’s training of what became the IDF, for example, without ever mentioning the country’s extensive military support for Jordan during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Both Dalrymple and Polanski stand to benefit from the “I didn’t learn about the British Empire at school” myth. Dalrymple gets to market his books and podcasts as granting access to “secret knowledge” — what could be more enticing than that? Meanwhile, it flatters Polanski’s ego by making him seem like he is taking on a conservative establishment. When he says he wants empire to be at the heart of the curriculum, he obviously does not have in mind drilling schoolchildren with the names of battles and colonial administrators. What he and Dalrymple want instead is a national exercise in self-flagellation.

In that vein, what should we cut from the curriculum to make more room for classes in imperial guilt? Those who insist on making their favorite subjects mandatory often forget that schools and history teachers are already pressed for time. Polanski and Dalrymple guffaw a few times about the six wives of Henry VIII, their go-to example of school history frivolity. When I learned about the six wives of Henry VIII, there was, amidst the frivolity, a serious point to it all. Henry VIII’s chaotic love life, we learned, played a part in England’s break from Rome. That is rather an important moment in our island story. Perhaps it is even as important as our Empire.

Much of the UK’s shoplifting epidemic, and other forms of antisocial behavior, are committed by those most accurately described as vagrants. Just days ago, I witnessed three staff members of a pub having to ask a person to leave as they refused to buy anything, while stuffing several condiment bottles into their bag. The police were eventually called and the person left. This was a waste of staff and police time. Yet how many hours are spent by employees dealing with incidents such as this?

While the repeal of the Act is no doubt well-meaning, that does not mean it is good policy. Speaking as someone who volunteers at a homeless shelter, it is far from a straightforward issue. People become homeless for all sorts of reasons: escaping a violent domestic situation, addiction, mental health problems, or simply because they’ve fallen on hard times. Such people need help and compassion. However, scrapping the Vagrancy Act is neither helpful nor compassionate to them or the rest of society.

Vagrancy imposes direct costs on firms, workers, households, and society. Businesses see footfall decline, as customers avoid areas filled with homeless people, and are forced to hire security staff who are often powerless to stop shoplifters or move beggars away. Workers fear being attacked if they ask a homeless person to leave their store or its doorway. Households witness the cost of the weekly food shop increase as supermarkets attempt to recoup their losses. And whole communities witness their formerly pristine neighborhoods ruined as tent cities pop up across the UK.

The high street and the hospitality industry have already taken a hammering due to the plethora of taxes, regulations and bills they face. By decriminalizing vagrancy, the Government is adding to the list by removing what few legal tools businesses had to deal with yet another costly burden.

To really solve the issue of homelessness, there will first need to be more funding for mental health and addiction treatment. Secondly, we cannot ignore the fact that many people are homeless because housing is so expensive. The only way to make housing more affordable is to liberalize the planning system so that more homes can be built.

There also needs to be strict enforcement. The criminal justice system should be given greater powers to make sure that people get the treatment they need. The kindest thing for people with addiction or serious mental health problems — and for society — is for them to be somewhere they can receive attention, rather than ending up on the streets.

Repealing the Vagrancy Act was the wrong move. Homelessness and begging impose huge costs on society and constitute a tragedy for those who find themselves in that situation. The Government needs to do far more to address it.

It’s clear from the Court’s judgment that trans-identified men with a gender recognition certificate are legally male, and have no more right to use single-sex facilities intended for women than other men. But it seems they will be permitted to do so in establishments run by the trust, regardless of how women feel about it.

If other trusts follow suit, it will be an indictment of ministers’ inaction. Wes Streeting made sympathetic noises about the issue when he was Health Secretary, meeting the Darlington nurses who were awarded £187,000 in compensation last week after being told to share facilities with a trans-identified male.

But Streeting didn’t follow through by telling NHS trusts to follow the law, and the chances of his successor, James Murray, showing more guts are vanishingly small. Murray claims to have changed his mind about gender ideology, saying shortly after he was appointed that he no longer believes that trans women are women. But last week he voted in the House of Commons to allow a controversial puberty blockers trial on children as young as 10 to go ahead.

NHS trusts up and down the country have got the message: despite the ruling, it’s business as usual for captured organizations, while female staff and patients who don’t want men in single-sex spaces will be forced to contemplate going to court.

No one should ever underestimate the degree to which gender ideology has infiltrated the NHS. Hospitals in west London are a warning of how easily trusts gave in. West London NHS Trust has a history of currying favor with trans organizations, boasting in 2023 that it had won Stonewall’s bronze award for “leading LGBTQ+ inclusive employers”. It regretted that it hadn’t made Stonewall’s list of top 100 employers that year, but said it had “undertaken significant strides towards creating an inclusive working environment”.

The trust is based mainly in Acton, Brentford and Ealing, and shares some facilities at Charing Cross Hospital in Hammersmith, where it offers mental health services. The hospital is administered by a neighboring organization, Imperial College Healthcare Trust, which stopped offering “feminizing” surgery in 2021. However, patients arriving for X-rays or to visit sick relatives in 2022 still had to walk along a corridor bearing the message: “If I hadn’t transitioned, I wouldn’t be myself or even alive.”

It should have been obvious to the Government last year, following the judgment, that NHS leaders who had allowed such nonsense to proliferate would not give up without a fight. But trusts haven’t even needed to do that. When there’s a conflict between the rights of the female half of the population and a species of magical thinking, they know which side ministers are on.

And so, yet another failed leader has been sacrificed as an offering to the British public, as Labour carries out an internal coup to stave off an electoral revolution. But even as the Lancastrian usurper secures his hold on Westminster, disbursing sinecures to his faithful retainers, there is no particular reason to believe he will be any more successful in office than Starmer. After all, many of those today celebrating his successful coup were just as feverishly exultant, two years ago, over the coming Starmerite golden age. If they were better judges of the country’s mood, we would not be here today.

Like an incoming headmaster turning around a failing school, Burnham told us Westminster is “broken” in his landmark devolution speech, using language apparently no longer the preserve of Right-wing populists. But will future historians characterize him as a continuity figure, carrying out necessary reforms to save a failing system from itself, or as an agent of total change? His manifesto-by-proxy, The Productive State, which aims to flesh out his much-invoked but nebulous Manchesterism as a program for governance, claims him for the latter role. As it states, the public “ask now for only what is obvious: major, even fundamental changes in British society” to cast off “the meanness and frustration of long years of stagnation and decline”, unabashedly adopting a “declinist” framework still mocked as a Right-wing fantasy by backwards-looking elements of the Labour Left. Indeed, the paper notes, “Labour have hitherto not delivered on that demand. If that feeling does not change, the electoral consequences will be severe and lasting.” That much is true. Yet what is perhaps more interesting than the structural economic reforms the paper suggests, is that its writers frame their socialist ends in postliberal terms, quoting Polanyi and appealing to national sovereignty and state resilience to make arguments postliberals were condemned for a decade ago.

Suggested reading

How to save postliberalism

By David Goodhart

As the foreign policy writer Lily Lynch recently observed, “Most commentators on foreign affairs acknowledge that the liberal order is in trouble, dying, or perhaps even already dead. There was a time when this would have been treated as some kind of fringe Duginist conceit; now it’s approaching mainstream consensus.” The same may be said of the domestic political and economic order so drastically reshaped to fit the vanished dreamworld of globalized liberal capitalism. And so, The Productive State observes, “in an era of weaponized interdependence — where access to energy, critical minerals, and essential supply chains has become a tool of geopolitical pressure”, the question of ownership of vital infrastructure “is a strategic one, which cuts to the heart of live debates about sovereignty in an increasingly geopolitically unstable world”. National sovereignty, state capacity and resilience in a world of global competition rather than co-operation, in which Westminster failure “wears down the basic democratic expectation that public institutions can identify the needs of the public they govern and act to meet them”, eroding the state’s legitimacy: these are Lexiteer arguments of a decade ago, now championed, perhaps too late, by those who would in 2016 have scorned them.

For in economic terms, there is very little, in The Productive State’s condemnation of neoliberalism as the agent of national decline, that could not be said, or has not already been, by Reform’s planner-in-chief and prominent postliberal intellectual, Danny Kruger. That there is such an overlap between The Productive State and postliberal arguments is hardly surprising, given British postliberalism’s intellectual descent from socialism. Even still, it is of note that Burnham’s only open challenger, so far, is the Blue Labour-endorsed candidate Al Carns, standing on a platform of industrial renewal through sensible energy policy in the service of national security. Even if Farage has shied away, recently, from his tentative support of nationalization for key infrastructure, postliberalism already appears to dominate the economic argument, ahead of the next election.

But the arguments for national sovereignty, domestic reindustrialization, energy security and a strengthened state have been won by the deteriorating security environment rather than the esoteric pronouncements of post-liberal commentators: both the former Thatcherite Farage and the Labour soft-left now converge on them for the credibility to advance their own projects. Reform’s Zia Yusuf publicly threatens the prime beneficiary of actually existing British neoliberalism, the outsourcing giant SERCO, for its insufficient zeal in carrying out future mass deportations. The postliberal Labour MP Jonathan Hinder declares, “Put cheap energy before clean energy. Drill for our own oil and gas in the North Sea. Back British industry, by scrapping self-harming Net Zero policies. Seriously start to rebalance our economy away from London. Stop the boats.” The next election will be fought on firmly postliberal territory, quite divorced from the ineffective theorizing of the movement’s intellectuals.

For we live, now, in the unmanaged postliberal order brought about by liberal hubris. A decade ago, Brexit offered Westminster the breathing space to break with liberal nostrums in a controlled and sober way, listening and acceding to the democratically-expressed demands of the electorate. Instead, the Brexit vote was treated as the mindless revolt of unlettered proles, manipulated by social media algorithms and a malign network of populist demagogues. Back in the heady days of Brexit discourse — and I have cause to remember this well — to argue that liberal fantasies of enlightened cosmopolitan governance had seen the capacity and legitimacy of individual states dangerously weakened, threatening the basic political order itself, was reviled as something akin to fascism by those who have only latterly awakened to reality.

Again too late, the very same commentators who, only a year ago, mocked the inter-ethnic violence predicted to result from mass immigration as the product of rightwing fever dreams, introducing the “nightmare” prospect of “hardened borders,” now panickingly declare that “we cannot simply dismiss the violence as just another outburst of a hardened racist few… because to do so would seem to leave us destined to regular summer bouts of pogromist violence”. This crisis is apparently no longer a hard-Right fantasy: through gritted teeth, the writer comes to the conclusion, presented as novel, that “the sight of unvetted young men landing on the beaches of Kent and Sussex is such a glaring signal of state failure that something must be done to stop it”. A year is, evidently, a long time in British political commentary. We cannot, perhaps, ever expect Britain’s liberal Left commentariat to admit that they were wrong, even as they belatedly adopt positions their social standing once rested upon condemning. But Burnham’s ideological malleability — delicately phrased — is such that he can easily adopt much of Reform’s message of a broken, dysfunctional Britain in renewing an establishment consensus he affects to despise.

One obvious danger for Reform is that Burnham, not shy of exaggerated displays of cultural Northernness, will cast them as the party of arrogant, spoiled Southeast England. Early trial versions of this approach, such as moving part of his Prime Ministerial court to Manchester, seem designed more to inspire a kneejerk reaction from his foes than to tangibly improve British governance. But it is difficult to extrapolate too much from his Makerfield win: Burnham is genuinely popular in the Northwest, and simply presented the fastest route to ousting Starmer. Hanging a general halfway through a war is rarely a sign of impending victory; even still, for Reform, the path ahead is uncertain. Running a prominent national-populist intellectual failed in Gorton and Denton; but so did running a no-nonsense local plumber in Makerfield, where a strategic section of the Red Wall has been found electorally wanting. Should Reform now lean into its end-of-pier, ITV1 Red Wall aesthetic, or attempt to woo the middle classes, among whom it has rapidly become the default party of the Right?

It is perhaps in pursuit of a newly radicalized middle-class audience that Farage has begun to write on Substack, focusing on territory simply untouchable to Labour. The Burnhamite manifesto declares that “Reactionary politics… is fundamentally a politics of shrinkage and exclusion: drawing the circle of belonging tighter, withdrawing provision from those deemed undeserving, turning scarcity into a weapon that disciplines and divides,” positing instead a program of mass abundance rolled out by a revitalized British state. Farage’s message is simpler and clearer. As he asserts, the effect of current social housing policy “has been to redistribute the nation’s stock of social housing away from the White British populations who originally inhabited these areas”. Indeed, as he writes, extending Reform’s critique of mass immigration further back in time than has lately been deemed acceptable, “When Labour and Conservative politicians opened Britain’s borders after the war, it would have been simple to maintain a basic principle: the British people paid for these homes, should be housed in them, and newcomers will have to be patient as they earn their way in.” Perhaps addressed at a downwardly mobile, younger middle class, the dangled prospect of redistributing prime urban real estate may yet outweigh fashionable moral poses.

More from this author

Burnham won't quell England's revolt

By Aris Roussinos

Here, on the once-perilous ground of immigration, is the obvious dividing line at the next election, between parties with otherwise converging economic worldviews. As Burnham’s first headache, the spat between his future ministers over Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) reforms, shows, immigration is a source of internal conflict within Labour, caught between an awareness of the public will and its own internal morality, while it is Reform’s very reason for being. To win over his party, Burnham may, as he has hinted, be inclined to abandon Starmer and Mahmood’s ILR reforms, intended to quietly disperse what even the BBC now calls the Boriswave. Yet as clear-eyed, Blue Labour-adjacent commentators like the Labour Realists observe, “the Labour Party cannot transfer the costs of a Conservative mistake on immigration policy onto the British people and win the next election”. It is, simply, in Reform’s greatest interest for the Boriswave to become, as soon as possible in the public’s eyes, the Burnhamwave. Reform’s pitch on the Boriswave, already the Party’s prime line of attack against Burnham, is clear, as Zia Yusuf writes: “If Burnham tries to make the Boriswave permanent, we will reverse it: abolishing ILR, rescinding residence rights of those dependent on the state, and reforming the immigration system so that no Government can ever behave so recklessly again.”

The logic for Reform in the coming election — which we may now expect at any date from Burnham’s formal coronation — is therefore to go further, and harder, on immigration than would have been imaginable even two years ago. There is little ground on which Burnham can fight — on housing, on the NHS, on crime — in which his party’s near-religious sympathy for mass immigration has not poisoned the well. Every new social housing development Burnham promises can, and will, be presented as a source of local danger. The future of British politics, long-delayed, is finally upon us.

For Labour, there will never be a better time for an election than now — but for Reform the attractions are less clear. The Party’s declarations of the urgency of new elections do not fully convince, given its recent electoral setbacks and still nebulous program for government. Yet for both the calculation will be the same: the longer the country has to experience the operation of a Labour government, the more attractive a Faragian reformation will seem. With both parties deploring the dysfunctional brokenness of Westminster politics, victory will come to whoever can more convincingly capture the revolutionary mood. Burnham wants a decade to complete his project: but so did Starmer. Like the violent storms attending Starmer’s downfall, Britain’s decade-long, suffocating political climate now seems ready for dramatic resolution, clearing the air for years to come. The heavens are opening up over Westminster: even in his Manchester fiefdom, Burnham is unlikely to escape the flood.

Over recent years, few writers have been quoted as incessantly as Hannah Arendt. Or rather misquoted — for though Donald Trump’s first presidential win catapulted Arendt’s 1951 book on totalitarianism back into the bestseller list, her fans have largely wallowed in anachronism. Avoiding her most arresting insights, they have instead reimagined Arendt as a kind of Resistance liberal, offering warnings of what happens when “politics as usual” is shamefully disrupted.

“Once again,” wrote Anne Applebaum in her new introduction to the re-publication of Origins of Totalitarianism in 2024, “we are living in a world that Arendt would recognize.” Which makes Arendt’s own response to America’s 200th anniversary so useful now, as Trump’s cage-filled 250th celebrations reach their climax. For the truth is that the philosopher’s own example actually proves she was far more thoughtful about her present than her contemporary followers are of theirs — even if her own hunt for usable versions of American patriotism ended up fomenting its own mistakes.

The most critical Arendt ever got of the United States was in a public lecture in Boston, 50 years ago, to mark the 200th birthday of her adopted land the year before it was celebrated. It wasn’t, she reflected, an anniversary that inspired much confidence in the future. Nor was the problem one disastrous politician, even one as nefarious as Richard Nixon. It was, rather, where capitalism and empire were taking the country, as Arendt looked out at “an increasing disarray in the very foundations of our political life”.

In Southeast Asia, America had gone down to ignominious defeat. The attempt to prop up South Vietnam after the “peace” in 1973 had only led to more war, and the emergency airlift of anyone who could make it out from the roof of the United States embassy in 1975. (Arendt gave special attention to the now almost forgotten “Operation Babylift”, which spirited thousands of orphans out of Saigon before the city fell.)

At home, Nixon’s resignation in 1974 came with soul-searching about how executive mendacity and secrecy undermined trust in government. Indeed, the Pentagon Papers publication had revealed — Arendt suggested — that the agonizing loss in Vietnam wasn’t half as bad as the fact that it took so long for Americans to register the truth about the war, since modern “public relations”, and not just age-old concealment and lying, had obscured their failures.

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Size mattered for the Founding Fathers

By Andrea Wulf

Instead of celebrating anniversaries simplemindedly, Arendt concluded, it was time to confront how badly the American experiment had gone awry. The crimes, mistakes, and sins of the immediate past were like chickens coming home to roost, in the phrase made famous by Malcolm X and which Arendt chose as the title of her speech when it was published in the New York Review of Books.

Arendt claimed that returning to their beginnings could inspire Americans in crisis to overcome their blunders in the mid-20th century. The deeper past of the American founding, she suggested, offered a chance of transcending them. Let us, she admonished, not “forget these years of aberration lest we become wholly unworthy of the glorious beginnings 200 years ago”. In this, she channeled the spirit of her earlier classic On Revolution, which had presented the American Founding as a modern reprise of austere Roman republicanism. She disdained what many people, then and now, take to the beating heart of the American project: whether law, liberalism, or rights. Rather, Arendt thought, America had once exemplified political action for the sake of collective freedom, a value she worried was dying in the modern world.

Amid the celebrants of her day, Arendt certainly refused to look away from the anxiety and depression that the following two centuries had produced. Yet she, too, was stumbling — not so much because of her misunderstandings of the 1770s, as because she confused the stakes of the Seventies. Five decades on from Arendt’s speech, America ended up in the age of Trump — as a direct consequence of the forces unleashed in her day. But she didn’t see them coming.

In her piece, for instance, Arendt mourned “the erosion of American power” following the Vietnam fiasco. But when she mounted the Boston lectern to celebrate the Founding, she didn’t imagine that the Democrats and Republicans alike would move to renew America’s global power over subsequent decades: including its military muscle. For the Democrats especially, the catastrophic defeat of peace candidate George McGovern in 1972 cast the die. From Mogadishu to Kabul, other failed wars, and countless casualties, invariably followed.

The militarism of an American hegemon rehabilitated in the 50 years since Vietnam, alongside the greater damage it wrought around the world, left too many disaffected voters, displeased by the ignominy of their country’s record. It also left an opening for Trump to run twice as a peace candidate — even if he finally and unceremoniously betrayed that promise. All this is a reminder that, as great a theorist of the imperial origins of totalitarianism as she was, Arendt never did glimpse the possibility that America itself had been, or could indeed become, an empire.

Arendt had other ideological blind spots too. Her political theory had always resonated with the ideal of participatory democracy in things like the Port Huron Statement, the 1962 manifesto propounded by student activists. Yet she always preferred to recognize the political action stemming from the deep past of the American Revolution, or Greece and Rome before it, and perhaps in some evanescent modern situations like the French resistance or the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

In her lecture, Arendt raised doubts about her American modernity and its consumerist economy, its mendacious ad-men and image-managers. They were, she said, exactly what made the American Founding indispensable, because it demonstrated public-mindedness beyond private gain or pleasure.

Unfortunately, though, Arendt’s failure to anticipate a renaissance for war was matched by a misrecognition of economic transformation. She did not anticipate that the economic instabilities of the Seventies were giving rise to the neoliberalism of the era since. She acknowledged the economic events, inflation most notably, that defined her decade when the 250th ceremonies were held across the country. Yet in her flawed belief that failed wars are fueled by inflation — a consequence, perhaps, of her German background — she missed the deeper geopolitical reasons for her age’s economic malaise. Both the first oil shock and Nixon’s decision to float the dollar transformed America’s long-term fortunes, even as the neoliberal response to Seventies-era inflation soon redefined the national economy.

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Even more than the return of American militarism, meanwhile, the economic choices beginning in the Seventies produced the most damaging aspects of our own time. It was the American carnage of neoliberalism, after all, that permitted Trump to run against his own party and then the Democrats for betraying the people in the name of “elites”. (Never mind that practically Trump’s only legislative accomplishment is a gargantuan tax cut he gifted to the rich in his first term and renewed in his second.) Talk about chickens coming home to roost!

“We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other,” Arendt wrote, in one striking moment of clarity. “The dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people have stumbled over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut up the past.” When she asserted that people can confusingly stumble into a future so starkly different from the past that it makes their own confusion unintelligible, she was right not least about herself.

Indeed, beyond prompting skepticism of the restoration of American “normalcy” that Resistance liberals today so confidently counsel, Arendt’s greatest value is less about the dangers of prophecy — even if it’s striking that she was hardly the Cassandra of her own age. Rather, she reminds us how easy it is to miss what’s happening under our noses, and pretending that our past, even when we celebrate it, is where the cure for the rot can be found.

In the world that porn has built, young men’s efforts are literally infertile: explosions of violence or otherwise that yield a big, pleasurable nothing. Hatfield’s anti-porn crusade paradoxically embodied this fundamental impotence.

The man was clearly unstable, and his manifesto, with its frequent references to knowledge of secrets that remain “almost entirely hidden from people,” betrays delusions of grandeur. But the manifesto is also of cultural significance, considering the ascendancy of the incel ideology among swathes of the online Right and the percolation of many similar ideas about men, women, and dating in the mainstream. Its Right-Left ideological flattening — Hatfield was both anti-liberal and anti-capitalist; he rails against transgenderism and Western cultural supremacy  — is significant, too, representing the bitter end of Christian metaphysics, even on the Right. 

Hatfield’s manifesto is the first, but possibly not the last, appearance of hypergamy, a new buzzword of the online Right, in a mass-shooting. The word has its origins in an Indian caste law that required women to marry men of the same or higher caste and, in modern parlance, means “dating up.” The desire to “date up” could generically be assumed to be shared by both men and women — aspirational mating is a universal human urge, after all — and to include desires for partner-benefits like social status and finances. But in today’s manosphere and as embraced by Hatfield, it concerns only physical attractiveness. In Hatfield’s definition, this is the only quality that matters when a woman chooses whom to have sex with — which she can do freely in contemporary culture. He defines it as a “phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically [sic] and culturally to just one male.”

As the theory goes, a man’s height and physical attractiveness are signs of “health” and “genetic quality” which are desirable qualities in a mate because they suggest healthier offspring. Hatfield is cribbing from evolutionary psychology, which argues that women are more invested in any individual child than men are, since men can have hundreds of children, and women only a few. Thus women are supposedly especially motivated by attractiveness — which signals health, meaning a better chance for survival of the offspring — in their choice of sexual partners. Women are also choosier about partners than men are for the same reason: the sum number of chances a woman has to pass on her genes is very limited; men have hundreds, or theoretically even thousands, of such chances, no childbearing or nurturing work required. 

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When you combine the female preference for tall, attractive men with a liberal sexual culture, according to the incel theory, you get a situation in which tall, attractive men are having lots of sex with multiple female partners, and the other men are having no sex at all. This, supposedly, has nothing to do with the men’s habits, personalities, or physical presentation, but is purely genetic. In the “hypergamy state,” as Hatfield writes, the “common man” is hopelessly “cast out of the divine realm of truly intimate love and attraction” through no fault of his own. “The only things that matter when it comes to experiencing love as a male … are the length of the bones in your legs, and the shape of the bones in your face.” 

All this takes many wild leaps, but it is to some extent — and more than Hatfield actually references — based on theories of evolutionary biology and psychology that are becoming increasingly popular. One such popular, biology-based idea about the psychology of dating is the conviction among very-online Zoomer young women that the birth control pill “makes you choose the wrong guys.” A groundbreaking work on the matter is evolutionary psychologist Dr. Sarah E. Hill’s book, How the Pill Changes Everything, which focuses on the Pill but also provides a fascinating walkthrough of the evolutionary view of modern dating. According to Hill, the preference for healthy offspring is — and in many more ways than Hatfield’s manifesto suggests — encouraged by female biology, and gene-maxxing in fact does play a significant role in women’s partner choices, though the standard seems more likely to be highly complex issues of genetic compatibility, which is predicted by sexual attraction, rather than brute height-and-looks measurement on some objective scale. Hill would also argue that social and psychological traits such as female partner-choosiness are hardwired by evolution. 

Hill’s research doesn’t support incel conclusions throughout. She has found that women in the pre-ovulation phase of their menstrual cycles are more likely to choose men they find sexier or better-looking. Post-ovulation, the preference switches to men they find rich, nice, or reliable. Her argument is that since hormonal contraception sets female hormones at a permanent “post-ovulation” state, it may be skewing partner choice toward provider types,  and away from the men women are most attracted to. The skew is bad in that it affects birth rates and marital happiness, since couples who have good sexual chemistry also seem to have better child-health outcomes (due to genetic compatibility) and lower divorce rates. Given that around 30% of women in their 20s are on hormonal birth control of some kind, with the share presumably higher among the sexually active, many women in the dating pool, artificially influenced by hormones, in fact should be seeking personality over looks. 

Still, the underlying premise that sexual behavior follows rules of hard science is shared by both men and women. And distorted through a million video clips and Reddit threads, such material could make the position of short, unattractive men seem desperate indeed. Hatfield calls it the “ghastly state of things that the Western world has found itself in” and a “situation of terrible loneliness, isolation, and social degradation.” 

In his theory, this problem for men is particular to the modern world, because while hypergamy ruled in the state of nature, the misty dawn of agriculture and civilization somehow naturally produced monogamy, supposedly a great leveler against the tyranny of female choice. He discounts or is unaware that Christianity was the foundation of monogamy in the West, and that it substantially improved women’s cultural position. Instead, he views monogamy as a spontaneous “stabilizing” development that served the purpose of bringing formerly discarded men into useful social participation by giving them something to live for — subservient wives. “Having gained secure and steady access to intimacy through the institution of monogamy,” he writes, “these men could now experience copulation and romantic love, thereby attaining self-actualization, something which was previously inaccessible to them.” 

Now, Hatfield says, capitalism has eroded monogamy, pushing women into the workforce and giving them the freedom to return to their preferred state of hypergamy. Hence, his call to social violence seeks to end “high capitalism,” and to return women to enforced monogamy with the type of men he refers to as “common” — not tall and attractive. The manifesto concludes with a list of 12 categories of  “class-A targets” that would hasten this state of affairs; section V — yes, he uses Roman numerals — addresses targeting the headquarters of players in the porn industry. “Be unflinching, go forth and KILL THEM ALL!” he commands.

It’s nothing new to say that incels hate and dehumanize women, viewing them purely as sex objects. A description of one woman as a “vaguely female-looking clump of humanoid biomass” in Hatfield’s manifesto is fairly typical. Nor is it new to say that for all their talk of love and intimacy, what such men are really focused on isn’t even sex, but instead status and self-worth. Hatfield’s rant is clearly envious of the kind of dominant man he claims to despise. His fever-dream descriptions of the vile and disgusting life of pleasure and bliss lived out by attractive men are almost touching in their transparency. “And let nobody convince you,” he writes, “that the more wealthy of these males do not occasionally indulge in the blackest depths of depravity and twisted perversions, together with countless attractive women of differing backgrounds, within various orgies and other such hideous events, that take place in their skyscrapers, mansions, and at many luxury hotels in major cities.” Sounds terrible! 

Moreover, the length of the section in the manifesto where Hatfield responds “in dialectical format” to “objections” that he could get a girlfriend if he just changed his behavior, suggests that the whole thing is a desperate cope to avoid accountability, and that the incel project really is just the Right-wing version of progressive victim culture. 

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However, the fully consumerist, materialist understanding of love and dating is, to some extent, a new and unwelcome development. Materialism, according to natural-law philosopher Heinrich Rommen, “regards man as nothing more than a highly evolved animal” and puts “in place of a personal God … a doctrine of impersonal eternal force or of perpetually recurrent changes of matter in accordance with the blind necessity of the laws of nature.” Marxism is one form of materialist metaphysics — society is determined by “the conditions of production” — though Marx, unacknowledged, retained much of Christendom’s old framework of good and evil. What Hatfield calls “biological consciousness” is another kind of materialism — everything happening between men and women is in accordance with our lower animal natures. 

That such a philosophy serves humans poorly is easily visible. The manifesto uses a dehumanizing terminology of “females” and “copulation”; elides the difference between copulation and love; assumes marriage is a mutually hostile transaction for individual benefit; and mostly lacks concern that, in its preferred future state of affairs, most women would be married against their wishes. More frightening is that all the underlying — and essentially Christian — ideals that humanized previous materialist systems and made them aspire to nobility and justice are just … missing for the incels. Moral relativism, and its corresponding ideology of individualist self-pleasure, have been espoused for generations, but it’s never previously been tried without underpinnings of some kind of vestigial morality. Hatfield — and we might here genuinely say through no fault of his own — was trying it. 

In this sense, Hatfield is one of an emerging cohort of young people — and not only men — committed to violence for causes that are either overtly or covertly in search of self-esteem. The confusing new reality in which the political sides seem to be getting mixed up is often attributed to “internet extremism” looking the same in any flavor, but it actually represents a deeper convergence. Is Tyler Robinson — the pro-trans youth accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk — on the Right or Left? It’s hard to tell. Is Luigi Mangione, who allegedly shot an insurance executive, a Left-wing freedom fighter? Is he any different than the failed Seth Scott Hatfield, his Right-wing-ish doppelgänger? And don’t the armed or violent ICE protesters in Minneapolis feel like they’re on the same continuum, despite their arguments of righteous civil disobedience? 

The search for self-esteem, without any kind of restraining hand, isn’t going well. Hatfield targeted the porn industry for peddling a false and humiliating substitute to a good he believed every young man somehow deserves: unfettered “copulation” with an attractive woman. He pathetically failed in his mission, but was highly successful in terms of fully living out the mandate to take only himself and his group’s interests into account, as dictated by the framework most contemporary young people now share. To do otherwise is the kind of hard, self-denying work that the Christian commandments were rather good at, and no materialist version has come close to. Without this kind of work, all activism is masturbatory — and fruitless. 

On Friday, local authorities declared a state of emergency after weeks of sustained Ukrainian air strikes. Kyiv’s campaign to isolate Crimea has battered the area’s transport, military and energy infrastructure, leaving residents grappling with fuel shortages and rolling blackouts. Civilians have subsequently complained of a lack of government preparation.

Crimea’s strife is an embarrassment for the Kremlin, disrupting the start of tourist season and prompting inhabitants to flee from territory that Moscow has endeavored to portray as safe. The peninsula holds deep personal and political significance for Putin: he has argued that it “has always been an inseparable part of Russia” and that the 1954 transfer of territory to Ukraine constituted an injustice in need of correction.

The 2014 annexation sent his approval ratings soaring, fueled a wave of patriotic fervor, and was cast as the restoration of Russia’s great power status. It is the territorial acquisition most closely identified with the man himself and its loss would be a political as well as a military blow, puncturing one of the central claims to Putin’s legacy and “legitimacy”.

Crimea has also played a pivotal strategic role in the war, providing the base from which Russian forces launched their 2022 offensive into the south of Ukraine. Isolation operations, such as the one being carried out by Ukraine, often precede an attempt to seize the territory. Yet, in this instance, that seems improbable, with Kyiv likely lacking the resources for anything more than holding a small area, even if it did launch an amphibious assault.

Rather, these attacks form part of Ukraine’s plan aimed at pressuring Moscow to come to the negotiating table. With the Kremlin continuing to drag its feet, Ukraine’s Crimea campaign has reportedly taken Putin by surprise and shattered his illusions at a time when his generals were providing overly optimistic predictions for territorial gains in the Donbas. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also reveled in seeing Russia being forced to redeploy air defense systems to Moscow and Crimea “at the expense of weakening other sectors of their territory and the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine”.

Strikes offer further military advantages by disrupting Russian supply lines to occupied Ukraine. With Kyiv’s attacks sabotaging alternative logistics routes through Russian-held territory, Crimea — and the Kerch Bridge — has become an increasingly critical artery for supplying Moscow’s forces along the Dnipro. As Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has noted, “there is a direct correlation between how much we strike logistics and the number of assault operations taking place on the front line.”

Attacks have pushed out Moscow’s remaining Black Sea Fleet command and control units to Novorossiysk. Control over Crimea is key to disrupting supplies in and out of Odesa and cutting off access to the Sea of Azov. Kyiv seeks to isolate the peninsula entirely while systematically damaging critical infrastructure, thereby creating siege conditions for inhabitants. British intelligence assesses that the degradation of Russian air defenses has expanded Kyiv’s opportunities for attack. The bridge, a potent symbol of Crimea’s integration into Russia, has already been temporarily shut.

From Catherine the Great’s 1783 annexation to Putin’s over two centuries later, the peninsula is of such strategic importance that, according to former US Army Europe commander Ben Hodges, whichever side controls Crimea wins this war. Ukraine is demonstrating that while Russia may possess Crimea, this is not the same as controlling it. And for the Russians there? In the words of Fedorov, “hell is beginning.”

When the latest but probably not last Iran war started on 28 February 2026, the first victims, for once, were not innocent bystanders but rather Iran’s rulers and executioners, the supreme dictator Ali Khamenei; the Chief of the General Staff and head of Iran’s armed forces, General Abdolrahim Mousavi; the Minister of Defense, Aziz Nasirzadeh; the head of military research & development, Hossein Jabal Amelian; his predecessor Brigadier General Reza Mozaffari Nia, Esmail Khatib, the Minister of Intelligence; his deputy for Israel affairs, Yahya Hosseini Panjaki; some other officials, and also the private citizen Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Ali Khamenei but utterly unqualified for the emphatically non-hereditary supreme leader position. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen nor heard since the bombing, and is certainly mutilated if still alive.

Iran’s furious response to this mass decapitation was the launch of ballistic missiles — not just against Israel and US bases in the region but also against mere bystanders. Of the 1,471 launched missiles from the start on 28 February until 20 April, some 650 were aimed at Israel, 563 landed in the territory of the United Arab Emirates that has long helped Iran’s wrecked economy, 265 landed in Kuwait, where some US aircraft are based but which has always aided Iran, 215 attacked Qatar, which shares its vast natural gas field with Iran, a country that Qatar has never harmed, 194 struck Bahrain, the main regional base of the US Navy, and 135 were aimed at Saudi Arabia, in spite of its complete neutrality.

Iran’s very primitive missiles have been much less lethal than the German V2s of 1944 — some 3,225 of which killed more than 7,000 people in England and Belgium — but with their huge mass of metal they inflicted much property damage even if their warheads did not explode. The older and more abundant Kheibar Shekan weighs 17 metric tons with its 750kg warhead, the newer and larger Khorramshahr weighs close to 20 tons and delivers multiple warheads weighing up to 1,500kg.

What Iran achieved with its 650 missiles aimed at Israel was to damage many buildings and kill 27 civilians and one off-duty IDF soldier, though some 3,000 more were injured across the country, some of them seriously.

While Iran attacked civilians with its very inaccurate missiles, both the US and Israel relied on extreme precision to destroy underground missile assembly plants, detected missile launchers, rocket fuel depots and mixing plants. This entire subterranean industry was the result of many years of very high spending, largely funded by the diversion of the funds urgently needed to provide water supplies for Iran’s second city Mashad, historic Yazd and other cities but for Tehran above all, which may even have to be evacuated, according to Iran’s only elected leader, president Masoud Pezeshkian.

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The dam-building and water supply budgets were not enough, so the nation-wide electrical generation funds were also diverted to the Revolutionary Guards’ missile industries, and also the funding needed to pipe the country’s unlimited natural gas supplies to every city. As a result, last winter and into March when the war started, horribly polluting mazout, residual oil, had to be burned to keep Tehran’s people from freezing, because neither electrical nor gas heating was sufficient in the winter months, even with global warming.

The regime was thus on the edge of systemic failure on the eve of the war, but has now been saved by the way the war was fought — and not fought. The mass decapitation of 28 February allowed surviving Revolutionary Guards officers to take over in Tehran, very much as the SS did in Berlin after Hitler’s death on 30 April 1945, eagerly killing anyone who wanted to surrender until Russian troops arrived two days later.

But this time no troops were approaching Tehran, truly mission impossible because of geography alone if nothing else. Nobody in his right mind could contemplate an advance over 800 miles of desert and mountains on the only road from the Bandar Abbas on the Gulf coast to Tehran, with its 13 million people. If only a tenth still support the regime — that many are salaried in the army, police, part-time militia, Revolutionary Guards and the Bonyad foundations that own much of the economy — it would be enough to start a long season of urban warfare.

No such invasion plan had even been suggested by anyone, so there was no justification for the pre-emptive “boots on the ground” hysteria loudly manifest from isolationist backwaters and White House Vice Presidential staffers alike. As it turned out, however, the hysteria generated by wholly imaginary invasion plans had very real consequences, which in fact determined the outcome of the war till this day.

To understand how fears over a non-event brought about a veritable defeat, one must return to the other military action that occurred just before the start of the bombing, on 28 February. This already seems a long time ago, because everybody in the White House would have laughed at the suggestion that President Trump would ever come to terms with the Revolutionary Guards. Some 3,000 paratroopers of the rapid-response force of the 82 airborne division were sent to the Gulf, to join the 5,000 Marines of the 11th and 31st Marine expeditionary units already there.

They were more than enough to counter the entirely predictable — and predicted — Revolutionary Guard response to the bombing, which was to try to stop the flow of tankers and bulk carriers delivering crude oil, liquefied natural gas and fertilizer down the narrow seaways in the mostly shallow Persian Gulf from Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and — partly — from Saudi Arabia, which can send half its oil by pipeline to the Red Sea, and the United Arab Emirates, which has a pipeline to the Indian ocean for half its oil.

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The Revolutionary Guards and Iran’s navy could not attack the tankers and bulk carriers with their warships, armed motorboats or submarines, all of which were efficiently sunk soon after the bombing started. But they could endanger navigation by dropping sea mines from any traditional dhow or fishing vessel, and even by attacking passing tankers with their anti-tank missiles. That would be enough to cause insurance companies to suspend their coverage, thereby stopping Persian Gulf supplies to the world economy.

That is where the airborne troops and Marines could be highly effective. With ample helicopter transport to take up positions for hours or days on uninhabited Persian Gulf islands and deserted coastal tracts to secure nearby navigable channels, and with strong tactical air support only minutes away to minimize combat risks, they were fully capable of defeating any interfering enemy forces.

By sending them into action, the US could have denied any oil shipments from Iran’s oil terminal at Kharg Island and from lesser terminals at Qeshm and Jask on the Indian Ocean beyond the Gulf, thus cutting off most of Iran’s oil export revenues. At the same time, those ground and air forces could minimize any interference with the tankers and fertilizer bulk carriers transiting from Iraq, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia into the Indian Ocean, minimizing the war’s impact on global commodity markets.

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu had asked only for assured resupplies of aerial munitions when it came to the pre-emptive bombing of Iran’s ballistic missiles, hoping to avoid the danger of an all-out attack that could overwhelm Israel’s defenses. He was surprised and pleased by Trump’s decision to join in and take command of the offensive. He did not pause to consider the possibility that he was forming an alliance with a weaker power, which would let him down.

By then, 28 February 2026, a total of 1,150 Israeli soldiers and local security officers had been killed since the war started on October 7, 2023, the equivalent of 39,100 dead US soldiers given the 1:34 population ratio.

Netanyahu, who was widely unpopular even before the war, was politically unaffected by the loss of more than 1,000 soldiers, but 1,150 killed in action — let alone 39,100 — would have quickly ended the Trump presidency via a fast impeachment with enough Republican votes, among vast coast-to coast mass protests. In other words, Netanyahu’s exclusive reliance on his personal dialogues with Trump, which left Israel’s Foreign Ministry and Intelligence a mere bystander, blinded him to the great change that had transformed the United States into a post-heroic country, no more willing to engage in combat than our NATO allies. Nor is it a political or even a cultural transformation that might be undone by strong leadership, but rather the unavoidable consequence of the collapse in female fertility, now down to 1.6. It means that very few American families have two or more boys, such that one might fall in combat without the family’s extinction. Almost every US combatant is now a “Private Ryan”.

That is why a prudent opposition to more wars in pursuit of quixotic aims — such as the 2003 Iraq war that I testified against before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seeing no chance of bringing democracy to Baghdad, and the Afghan war to modernize unwilling populations — has been transformed into a “boots on the ground” psychosis. Also present within the White House, it equates small-scale and short-lived commando actions with another endless war, nullifying the tremendous strength of US air power, allowing the Revolutionary Guards to win with very few fighters and very few small boats.

So this war fought by an irresolute President has not only allowed America’s worst enemies to come out the winners in spite of their utterly disastrous national policies, primitive missile engineering and clumsy military operations, but has also degraded US military strength down to European levels, because troops that cannot be risked in combat even for great gains are of little military value.

Speaking with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers, Sullivan said the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Iran and the United States on Wednesday gave “significant advantages” to Iran and indicated that “the United States has basically lost this war.”

The agreement signed between Trump and Iran says the Islamic Republic will never have a nuclear weapon, and commits to the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to the US blockade, as well as the creation of a $300 billion fund for Iranian reconstruction. However, Sullivan said that the US was now effectively paying “reparations” to Iran and has “ended up in a worse position today than we were before the war started”. He added: “Essentially what you’re looking at here is a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with a massive financial windfall to Iran, and then a commitment to negotiate a set of nuclear issues that at present are completely unresolved.”

Sullivan served as the US national security advisor from 2021 to 2025 under former president Joe Biden, and previously helped negotiate the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which limited the Islamic regime’s stock of nuclear material and relieved US sanctions on the country. Trump derided the agreement as the “worst deal in history”, and withdrew the US in 2018 during his first presidential term.

In the UnHerd interview, Sullivan argued that the Obama deal had put Iran’s nuclear programme in a “box”, and that Trump’s withdrawal allowed Iran to “move forward again”. Yet with the MOU, he said, Trump has been forced to recognise “the same reality we had to acknowledge a decade ago”, namely that Iran will not accept a complete end to its nuclear enrichment programme. The MOU’s reference to Iran’s “nuclear needs”, Sullivan stated, was a pullback from Trump’s previous declaration that the country could not have a civilian nuclear programme.

“We have to recognise that the US actually could have gotten all of the statements Iran made on its nuclear programme in this deal before it went to war,” he said. “And [the US] wouldn’t have had to pay to reopen the Strait of Hormuz because the Strait wouldn’t be closed.”

While Sullivan celebrated the end of the war, he cautioned that Israel may attempt to “spoil” negotiations due to widespread opposition to the deal. Further, pointing to Trump’s deal to end the war in Gaza, where second-phase peace plans have stalled, he argued that the Iran peace deal may be left “open-ended”.

“Maybe they reach some interim deals about specific things like down blending the stockpile, but I don’t think you’re going to see a comprehensive nuclear deal,” Sullivan said. “I think that will just drag indefinitely.”