It didn’t stop me from making my crush clear in a 2008 Guardian piece about attempting to learn to drive, and falling for my instructor, Graeme. “GRAEME. You know how for years a name can seem totally ordinary, then you meet this brilliant person who has that name and it never looks the same to you again? That’s how it was with Graeme, a very agreeable cross between David Walliams and Mahatma Gandhi.”

I thought about Graeme for days afterward — and all because he was the only person I’d met who reminded me of David Walliams.

I liked Walliams so much that I even found him attractive in some of his Little Britain guises, which were all grotesque, such as Lou, the concerned carer of the apparently disabled miscreant Andy. I also liked him as the recent widow who is reminded of her late husband Ivor by literally everything that exists. I even liked him — horribly — as the gerontophile who has unspeakable fantasies about his friend’s nan. As it transpires, Walliams stands accused of being the very opposite of a gran-fancier: one 15-year-old describes her alleged experience with him as “sexual assault” while another accuses him of grooming her as a teenager. (He denies wrongdoing and insists that he is not a sexual predator.)

Imagine my excitement when he started to hold book signings at a children’s bookstore literally two streets from me. It was as much as I could do not to borrow a child and turn up.  He was late, the Brighton Argus reported, despite owning a property on Hove’s nearby “millionaire’s row”, Western Esplanade, and he did not speak to the newspaper’s reporter. Perhaps he was still smarting from the paper’s revelation that he had been fined £600 for what the judge called a “prolonged piece of extremely fast driving” — 99 miles per hour — on the A27. Maybe that’s when things started going downhill. Still, the thought that he had a house in the ’hood remained pleasant to me. What if I ran into him, looking miraculously ravishing one day, on my way from The Blind Busker to the Gin Tub?

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The Nineties weren't for wet wipes

By Julie Burchill

If I’d been in the habit of watching the ghastly, often gay, you-scratch-my-back talk shows of the time, I might have seen him on Alan Carr’s Chatty Man in 2009 and immediately got over my crush. “Taking time out from starring in Little Britain and going out with every beautiful woman in the country to be here tonight…” says Carr, smarmily introducing his guest. Walliams sashays on to the strains of “Boys (Summertime Love)”, by Sabrina Salerno, kisses Carr on the lips, does what is vulgarly known as a “tit-bump” several times, then exclaims “GET OFF ME!”

What follows is a smorgasbord of smut, sexism and strutting machismo hiding behind a gender-fluid front.

“Boys, boys, boys, I’m looking for a good time?” quotes Walliams. The audience laughs knowingly — and then he pivots. “Because when I was a kid I really fancied the singer, Sabrina…” This is truly a man who wants to have his cock and eat it.

“Where is Sabrina now?” Walliams wonders. The song was more than 20 years old; Sabrina herself was already a haggard 19 when “Boys” was a hit.

Walliams goes on to recall — in the course of plugging his book The Boy In The Dress — that he himself cross-dressed from an early age. Carr inquires why Walliams won’t marry Natalie Imbruglia, a pop star whom he knew at the time and has admitted to falling for.

“She’s turned me down because ‘You’re a vile sexual predator’”, says Walliams, not appearing particularly troubled.

Elsewhere in the comedy world, Walliams’ love life remained a punchline rather than a cause for concern. Jonathan Ross does not emerge well from this mess. He bellowed at the 2004 British Comedy Awards: “The comedy awards is 15 years old — 15 years old! And like most 15-year-olds, it’s drunk, it’s unpredictable and it’s probably going home with David Walliams.” Walliams laughed delightedly.

“Cuddly Gay” Carr doesn’t come out well either. In his semi-autobiographical sitcom Changing Ends, Alan Carr writes: “I thought women were a bit like olives: they turn your stomach at first, but if you persevere, you’d learn to love them.”

Walliams, judging by today’s revelations, seemed to consider the young women he toyed with akin to olives too; insubstantial appetizers. “I am devastated that some of the women I met 10 to 20 years ago have now expressed hurt or anger towards me,” he said in a statement. Who expects an hors d’oeuvre to demand respect?

Walliams does not dispute the investigation’s accounts of him approaching many unworldly young women over social media and going on to meet some of them in person, even at home. Was that what it was all for, the ambition and the striving and the applause? How could so many, including me, have been taken in by so little?

But then Walliams always had a way of knowing what buttons to push. One mother at the Hove bookshop said: “He puts quite a lot of history in the books. I know his granddad fought in the war, in the RAF. When those veterans came on Britain’s Got Talent he got quite emotional.”

But was that apparent emotion any more real than being a grown-up girly-boy — or any realer than the sympathy he showed the Britain’s Got Talent hopefuls before he was recorded deriding them?

It’s said that, as with Russell Brand, the entertainment industry was bending over backwards to conceal Walliams’ habits in order to protect “the talent”. The real question is: was the talent even worth it? We’re not looking at Caravaggio here. We’re looking at a light-entertainment chancer who got lucky.

“Lad culture” is blamed for a lot of the sexually exploitative behavior which took place in the recent past. But, damningly, the likes of Walliams are a far cry from an actual young lad drooling over Loaded’s latest “High Street Honey”. Well, lads, consider the stomachs of the nation’s women well and truly turned in return.

The interior of Fiat’s Lingotto factory in Turin, finished in the Twenties, literally resembled a cathedral with its soaring levels of concrete pillars and ribs. Even in the era of globalization, a powerful car industry centered in Germany and exporting to the world has been an enduring source of European prestige. So it is not entirely an exaggeration to say that the twilight of this car industry heralds a spiritual crisis for the continent. 

The reversal of fortunes has been swift and brutal, manifest in a wave of Chinese electric vehicles and hybrids now crashing over European trade barriers. As recently as 2021, just 1% of new cars sold in Europe came from Chinese brands; last month, one in every seven new cars did, despite EU tariffs of around 30% on Chinese EVs. The challenge could not have come at a worse time. Europe’s car makers have been crippled by the loss of Russian energy supplies, Trump’s tariffs, and the EU’s bungled efforts to phase out petrol engines. They are suffering an even worse mauling in the lucrative Chinese market. 

China has been the focal point of the car industry for decades; but until recently it was European marques selling their vehicles to the expanding Chinese middle class and bringing the profits back home. Volkswagen arrived there in the late Seventies as an auto-making god, teaching Chinese engineers the manufacturing standards that underpinned their own nascent industry. It would later hold the title of China’s top-selling brand for 25 years. Today, as VW undertakes a restructuring that threatens 100,000 jobs globally, it is partnering with Chinese brands to learn how to make the automobiles of the future. Some of those Chinese models may even be produced in its emptying German factories. Imagine if French wines were shouldered out of their own market by foreign upstarts; this gives some sense of the humiliation that will be entailed by VW making Chinese-designed cars in Saxony.

Embarrassed Europeans have typically blamed China’s export success on a sinister plot to deindustrialize Western countries by undercutting their manufacturers with heavily subsidized goods. As Rishi Sunak warned last month, Xi Jinping wants to “make the world dependent on China while China depends on no-one”. There is certainly some truth in this account, but it rests on a misleading image of China as a purveyor of cheap knock-offs. Sadly, the snobbery implied by the phrase “Temu Range Rover” — as the popular Jaecoo 7 has been nicknamed in Britain — has not been earned. Even if China cannot match the German mastery of the internal combustion engine, its car industry has bested the European one in innovation, entrepreneurship and industrial strategy.

The best illustration of this is BYD – an abbreviation of the pinyin name Biyadi – the Shenzhen-based firm which displaced VW as China’s largest brand in 2023, and which has since become the global leader in EVs and hybrids. Fifteen years ago, when BYD was seeking a toehold in the United States, a baby-faced Elon Musk dismissed the challenge to Tesla with a scoff: “have you seen their cars?” It has indeed been a long road for a company founded by the son of rice farmers in rural Anhui province, which started out in the Nineties making batteries for laptops and mobile phones. Yet Musk’s Silicon Valley approach to cars, focusing on a tiny range of products to serve everyone, has proved inferior to BYD’s strategy of challenging incumbents across a wide spectrum of vehicles, from city runabouts to monster pick-ups. 

As of this year, BYD has two models tailored to the European market. According to the company’s adviser for the region, these will answer peculiar conditions such as German Autobahns, Italian mountain roads, and British potholes. They look just like European cars, and deliberately so: BYD is offering something familiar for a lower price, along with an assortment of clever tech to dispel any residual uncertainty about buying a Chinese product. Who has not wished for a tiny vent to douse your smartphone with cool air while it charges wirelessly?

Like the Chinese auto industry at large, BYD rose through a combination of imitation, innovation, and shrewdly adapting itself to government programs at both national and city levels. Its earliest vehicles, not yet electric, were closely modeled on Japanese brands such as Toyota. It released the world’s first mass-market plug-in hybrid in 2008. Around the same time, the Chinese leadership began to throw its weight behind EVs in earnest, offering a range of subsidies for both producers and consumers. It had long shown an interest in developing homegrown “new energy” vehicles, which promised to provide China with a niche in the global market and to alleviate its dependence on imported oil. 

But academics Fengming Lu and Xiao Ma argue that China’s cities were the most important drivers of the industry. BYD entered partnerships with numerous municipal governments, beginning with Shenzhen and Changsha. These deals often proved hugely profitable for both parties. The company received favorable access to land, infrastructure, electricity and labor, in exchange for which it invested in local car-making plants and provided the cities with electric buses and taxis. BYD even opened a railway division to make the most of municipal transport programs. 

Private capital also played an important role. Stock markets allowed local governments to cash in on the shares they had acquired in EV makers and begin the investment cycle again. Venture capital funds, both Chinese and foreign, were crucial to the boom in EV start-ups that took place after 2015, with hundreds of entrepreneurs from the tech sector flooding into the industry. China thus ended up with an absurdly large number of carmakers. This intense competition did not just force companies to innovate, but encouraged brands like BYD to become export giants, exploiting less competitive EV markets overseas.  

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So BYD is not so much a creature of state subsidies as the product of a state-engineered process of Darwinian struggle. The central government used tools such as credit availability, tax incentives and influence over local government priorities to stimulate an explosion of private and municipal ventures, before tightening business conditions so that only the fittest could survive. Since the early part of this decade, China’s EV industry has been in this second phase of cutthroat consolidation. 

One reason that BYD has emerged as a victor is its high degree of vertical integration: rather than outsourcing the production of every last nut and bolt as most Western carmakers have done, it controls most of its supply chain. It has partnered with mining companies around the world to ensure access to crucial minerals such as lithium, which it processes in its own refineries. It develops and produces its own batteries, powertrains, semiconductors and software systems. Consequently, the company is protected against supply shocks, can respond swiftly to market demand, and is able to innovate across numerous domains. 

This all amounts to a humbling lesson for Europe, a continent which long viewed the clean energy transition as an opportunity to show that it can still shape history and determine its own destiny. Instead, the EU is scrabbling to build defenses against the tide of Chinese EVs. Decarbonization targets may be relaxed, and a “Made in Europe” drive is underway to limit state support to European suppliers. 

The situation in Britain is somewhat better or even worse, depending on your perspective. Its government has done little to protect a long-suffering domestic car industry, and its drivers have little sentimental attachment to national car marques, most of which are foreign-owned servants of the luxury market. Britain last year produced its lowest car output since 1952. The country is less threatened by China’s dominance because it has no pretense of even being in the race. Indeed, Chinese EV imports are integral to the Government’s goals of reaching Net Zero and bringing down inflation, since they are cheap and don’t produce CO2 emissions — at least, not after they leave the factory. And the policy is working: though BYD only began selling its cars here in 2023, it was Britain’s second-most-popular brand in September. Hence the irony of a Labour Party that longs to reverse Brexit insisting that the freedom to set its own EV tariffs is a “red line” in negotiations with Europe. 

Why was Europe’s mighty car industry blindsided by the challenge from China? According to historian and commentator Adam Tooze, one reason may simply be corporate greed. Tooze argues that European brands used the post-Covid supply shortages of the early 2020s as cover for a profit-maximizing strategy, making fewer cars and aiming them at the higher end of the market. The deeper causes, however, take us to the fundamentals of political economy. The Chinese state has been ruthless at building up the supply chains, energy security and industrial base needed to succeed in high-tech manufacturing, but it has been equally ruthless in using market competition to foster innovation. Europe, by contrast, has long neglected industrial strategy through a naive faith in global free trade, yet it still allowed its powerful legacy industries to squat over the political system in such a way that new players and technologies have been denied space to breathe. 

However, such bloodless explanations feel insufficient for a matter of deep significance to Europe’s history and identity. They do not pass the cathedral test. One can tell that Europe’s cars are long past their creative peak simply by looking at them: a mass of SUVs with different names but near identical appearances and dimensions, fat blobs in shades of white, silver and black. Gone is the chic elegance of the Citroën that inspired Barthes; gone is the cold, Teutonic glamour of the old Mercedes, the charisma of the red Alfa Romeo driven by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. The decline can be measured in the reaction of passers-by when a vintage car rolls along the street, with its elegant profile, purring engine and rich color palette: they stop, point, let out a spontaneous groan of appreciation. True, cars now accelerate faster than they once did, but the thrill is dampened by an optimization for comfort that gives the impression of being wrapped in cling film.

My neighbor, a professional mechanic, explains the problem concisely: “Old cars have character. Today they’re all made of plastic, and they all look the same.” Some of this is due to government regulation, and the sharing of designs in a heavily consolidated industry; but it also reflects artistic failure in the form of a herd-like pursuit of the average consumer. As a result, we are forced to seek distinction in utilitarian matters such as battery range, trunk space, and, of course, price. The erotics of form has been replaced by the fetish for technological trimmings that dominates YouTube’s vast catalog of car reviews: the voice assistants, the 540-degree parking cameras, the entertainment systems and cruise control settings. If cost, efficiency and gadgetry are what matter now, then it’s not obvious why European consumers should ignore the fruits of China’s booming auto industry, which does these things rather well.

Perhaps cars offer us a barometer of civilizational vitality. Even if automated production lines do not employ the millions they once did, the fact that cars have around 30,000 components and require extensive research and engineering skills makes them fundamental to any serious industrial nation. Developing countries are acutely aware of this, hence why so many of them long to have their own brands. The rise of the AfD amid the bitterness of Germany’s disintegrating automotive sector certainly carries a whiff of Untergang. As for China, the unique prestige of automobiles is undoubtedly a reason that its leaders put so much emphasis on beating the world at EVs. Its industry may be conquering the globe on the basis of efficiency and clever software, but it is still young. It may yet develop a poetry of its own.

So far, so Polish. Yet beneath the surface, Mikstat is unlike any other town in the country, for it’s the only Polish municipality where foreign-born residents outnumber ethnic Poles. “It’s hard sometimes to see a Pole here,” says Kacper, a 22-year-old local loitering in Mikstat’s main square.

He’s exaggerating — foreigners only make up 53% of the area’s urban population of 3,461, according to the latest government statistics. But even this is unheard of in a country that has long had a reputation as one of the most ethnically homogeneous in Europe, and which for years has been idolized by foreign conservatives as one of the last bastions of pure, unspoiled European culture. Some Polish extremists go even further: though we still don’t know his motive, last week’s Kraków shooter was apparently fascinated by Anders Breivik.

For many residents of Mikstat, though, and despite some growing pains, their multicultural existence has become as familiar as the sound of the church bells on Sunday. “Right now, there are the most [foreigners], but they’ve been here for many years,” says Kacper’s friend Dawid, 23 and lanky, dressed in a black-and-white tracksuit. “We’re used to it.”

Immigrants are no longer rare in other parts of Poland either. According to new data, nearly 6% of Poland’s population, or 2.3 million people, were foreign-born at the end of 2025, and though an overwhelming 73% of those are unsurprisingly Ukrainian, a growing number are from Central Asia, the Caucasus, Latin America, and elsewhere. Immigrants today make up 15% of the population of Warsaw, and almost 20% of the southwestern city of Wrocław.

This shift has not gone unnoticed. Poland’s hard-Right has recently pivoted from warning about the potential dangers of mass migration to using places like Mikstat to argue against people already here — all while positioning itself as the kingmaker ahead of parliamentary elections next year. Little wonder, in the wake of the Paris riots last month, that even Poland’s centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk touted his own country’s virtues by comparison, boasting that his government had issued fewer foreign visas than his populist rivals PiS.

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Eastern Europe’s identity problem

By Michal Kranz

If its leaders race to reclaim Poland’s role as a defender of the Europe of old, decades-long economic growth continues to reshape the country’s social fabric beneath their feet, attracting refugees, political exiles, and workers as the domestic birth rate continues to lag. The result is a social milieu more diverse than at any point in living memory, and which will continue redefining what life and identity look like in Poland’s cities regardless of what the politicians claim. Yet rather than heralding some unfamiliar, globalist ideal, this new reality instead echoes an older, pre-modern reality — the melting pot that existed in the country before Nazi Germany and Soviet communism robbed Poland of its multiethnic complexity.

“When I first started living here, there was still this institution of ‘the newcomer’,” says Witold Ślęzak, who heads Mikstat’s house of culture. Bundled up for the chilly November weather, Ślęzak speaks with an authority that belies his meager height.  “A newcomer was a resident of a worse category: he was a Pole, but not from Mikstat.”

If even fellow Poles from other nearby towns were once scorned in Mikstat, it’s not hard to imagine early contact with folks from beyond the frontier. Ślęzak recalls that when the first foreigners arrived in the town, initially from Ukraine as workers before the start of the war, local youths worked hard to get into fights with them. But as both sides grew accustomed to one another, things began to change. “We learned to live next to each other, so to speak,” says Ślęzak, his demeanor friendly but his face deadly serious. “I don’t have any problem with them. We live side by side and somehow we function together.”

If this initial tolerance likely emerged due to the relative similarities between Poles and Ukrainians — Christians, Slavs, lovers of vodka and borscht — the people of Mikstat eventually extended an olive branch to other new arrivals. After the Ukrainians came Moldovans, then Nepalis, and soon dozens more nationalities, most drawn by work at Mikstat’s large meat-processing plant. Today, according to the town’s former mayor, as many as 28 nationalities reside here, hailing everywhere from Indonesia to Georgia to Tajikistan.

John Gómez, a 29-year-old Venezuelan who started working at the factory after arriving in Poland two years ago, praises Mikstat’s quiet, understated atmosphere. “It’s a very peaceful place, as long as there’s work and stability,” Gómez tells UnHerd after he gets off his shift, his blue work lanyard still drooped around his neck. “I’ve liked the lifestyle here.” In front of the company shop at the edge of the factory, other young Latino men mill about as reggaeton floats out of departing cars.

Gómez’s journey to Poland was unconventional. After leaving Venezuela, he made his way through Colombia and Panama’s infamous Darién Gap in the hope of reaching the US. But unable to enter legally, he received a work contract in Poland through an agency. He wasn’t alone — despite its fierce opposition to illegal migration, bringing foreign workers to Poland was a consistent policy of the populist Right-wing PiS government before Tusk’s coalition took power in 2023. Under the party’s leadership, Poland led the EU in the number of new residence permits issued from 2016 to 2022. The impact on Poland’s labor sector was enormous, and by the end of 2025, foreigners made up nearly 7% of the entire workforce.

Even as Tusk’s latest government has suspended the right to asylum, and upped deportations by 320% since 2022, Polish institutions have continued to quietly endorse immigrant workers as a solution to the country’s demographic challenges. In 2023, the state Social Insurance Institution claimed that, in order to maintain its current ratio of workers to retirees, Poland would need to attract another two million foreign laborers over the next decade. That’s obviously fantastical — but what’s clear from cases like Gómez’s is that importing cheap labor isn’t just about economic demand, but also about keeping labor costs low for places like the Mikstat factory. If every developed market economy needs its underclass, then Poland can’t merely rely on richer immigrants from Ukraine or Belarus to fill the gap. Grist to the neoliberal mill, workers from the global south have therefore become a hot commodity.

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The battle for Poland isn’t over

By Michal Kranz

This tug-of-war between appealing nationalistic rhetoric and the hard realities of Poland’s economic hierarchy sits at the heart of contemporary national life. In cities like Warsaw, the service-worker class has become dominated not just by Ukrainian baristas, but also by Uzbek Uber drivers, African food delivery couriers, and Southeast Asian waiters, while interacting with immigrants has become an ever-present fixture of daily life regardless of national conversations around protecting Polishness.

In the Muranów district of Warsaw, just north of the city center and in the heart of the former Jewish Ghetto, Turkish kebab shops, Georgian bakeries, African wellness stores and other ethnic businesses crowd both sides of a long city block along John Paul II Avenue. Iconic red-and-yellow Warsaw trams rumble past groups of off-duty delivery couriers smoking cigarettes, while throngs of Ukrainian Gen Zs look on. Above them all, an enormous Polish flag billows in the distance.

“When I moved here, I saw the block buildings, the Slavic culture, and the cold weather, and people also have a bit of a different vibe,” says Mel, a 27-year-old Vietnamese barista who works at a coffee shop along the strip. “But the longer I live here, the more I feel like I’m immersed in the culture. I started to like it.” Mel adds that they’ve actually faced less open xenophobia in Poland than in the Netherlands — perhaps a function of unfamiliarity with immigrants in general — but that national politics has lately begun to carry an air of danger.

The largest nationalist protest in Poland is organized annually on 11 November, the country’s Independence Day. With political tensions sky-high and a Polish Right that feels more besieged than ever, today’s march could well be volatile. Yet even before this month’s upheavals, the far-Right had already taken their fight to Mikstat, seeing it as the perfect venue to make its nativist appeal. In October, the All-Poland Youth, an ultranationalist organization whose past leaders have gone on to form major Right-wing political parties, recorded a video of several of its members unveiling a banner in Mikstat’s central square, putting up posters throughout the town detailing the negative impacts of mass migration on everything from crime to wages. Both the All-Poland Youth and the protestors in the video declined to comment when contacted by UnHerd.

Locals like Ślęzak are appalled by this show of force. “Why don’t they bugger off and mind their own business,” he says of the All-Poland Youth. “If these people don’t bother them, aren’t aggressive, then why is it so bad that they live next to us, or even better, with us together?” Rather than push foreigners away, many Polish residents of Mikstat have made efforts to incorporate the town’s immigrants into its collective social life, welcoming them into public festivals and holding football tournaments with teams composed of players from different countries.

Contrary to popular belief in parts of Western Europe, and in stark contrast to claims by Joe Rogan that Poles merely want their nation to be “white”, integrating non-Poles into the broader sociopolitical fabric is a national tradition — albeit one largely forgotten since 1945. Starting with reforms in the 14th century, which allowed Jews to settle in Poland as “people of the king”, Poland became one of Europe’s most multicultural states, especially following its union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1569. The resulting Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth encompassed myriad ethnic and religious communities, including Ukrainians, Cossacks, Belarusians, Armenians, Jews, Germans, and even Muslim Lipka Tatars, giving rise to the idea of a “republic of many nations”.

After the resurrection of the Polish Republic following the First World War, the country’s preeminent strong man, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, tried to revive this idea through a model of civic nationalism that allowed minorities to maintain their own identity, language, and heritage — so long as they pledged unwavering fealty to Warsaw. A noble effort though it was, it was an imperfect one. Belarusians and Ukrainians in the republic’s eastern lands were the subjects of on-off forced Polonization, and despite Piłsudski’s good personal rapport with Polish Jews, antisemitism festered in the lead-up to the Holocaust, especially after the marshal’s death in 1935. What followed — invasion, genocide, population transfers, and Stalinist enthusiasm for the erasure of history — ended Poland’s multiethnic dream. And if memory of the “republic of many nations” certainly still exists, today’s migration politics is a form of resistance against exactly that dream.

To that extent, the dissonance between the country’s robust monoethnic identity and the increasing pluralism on the ground is an expression of national evolution in suspension. Of course, the centuries-old communities that comprised the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth differ drastically from the newer, more transient “newcomers” that challenge Polishness today. But like the foreigners conscripted to fill gaps on the Mikstat production line, many of the Commonwealth’s minorities also first arrived as itinerant travelers before settling down more permanently. The Lipka Tatars, for their part, were hired to serve in cavalry units in the royal army before being given land to settle.

Though many guest workers in Poland certainly don’t intend to remain here long-term, other foreigners clearly do. Despite the fantasies of certain Right-wingers, many Ukrainian refugees in Poland will remain even after the war ends, while others, especially the Vietnamese, are ready and eager to welcome their compatriots.

That’s exactly what happened to Mel, who was drawn to Poland by the relatively low cost of living and the opportunity to get a psychology degree in Warsaw, but who could then rely on work opportunities in a Vietnamese community that can trace its roots back to communist times. Now boasting Polish friends, and with a growing love for Polish food, Mel’s circle includes a medley of individuals, of varying economic and cultural backgrounds, that contains shades, however slight, of Poland’s prewar pluralism.

Challenges surely remain. In Mikstat, Ślęzak admits that the immigrants who interact with their Polish neighbors are outnumbered by those who keep to themselves. Perhaps that’s unsurprising: after long shifts at the factory, few have time to do much beyond resting at home, socializing only with those most familiar to them. Other clashes are more explicit: the frequent Russian voices heard in the center of Warsaw remain grating to Polish ears no matter their views on their war, while Poles generally remain suspicious of immigrants from the Islamic world. According to Ślęzak, native-born residents of Mikstat complain about the “loud noise” that their foreign neighbors sometimes cause.

Still, newcomers like Gómez try their best. “It’s very different, but you gradually get used to it,” he says. “In my case, I’m adapting to your culture, because Polish people aren’t going to adapt to my culture, because I’m the immigrant. I’m the one who has come from outside.” That willingness to integrate is exactly what made it possible for minorities to feel a sense of common identity with their Polish Catholic neighbors in the 17th and 18th centuries. The trouble, though, is that for such an experience to arise again, Poles themselves must adapt too — and with the nativist ideal fired by the traumas of the 20th century, it’s unclear how many are willing. If fanatics like the Kraków shooter don’t succeed in bringing down the emerging multicultural Poland, the country’s own inertia may yet do it for them.

This anecdote stunned me when I encountered it in the celebrated Edmund Morris biography of Roosevelt: today, such behavior would be considered rank betrayal of the wife, or even child abuse, given the expectations placed on fathers since women entered the workforce.

The story came to mind recently, when I encountered the convoluted arguments of clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe in her recent book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives. Saxbe presents new research on the neuroscience of paternity that provides some insights into “dad brain” — a euphemism for the stress, fatigue, and depression often brought on by early parenting. But she argues that the condition is good for men and families, a conclusion that her data does not support. 

I read the book in hopes of curing my own case of “dad brain.” Since becoming a father five years ago, I have often felt that my brain is turning to mush. But my hopes were disappointed. 

Saxbe is the head of the NeuroEndocrinology of Social Ties Lab at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She researches the brain science of paternity, with a focus on fathers’ involvement in “hands-on” childcare, performing observational, longitudinal studies measuring various aspects of fathers’ brain activity and hormones before and after the birth of their first child. On average, she has found, a man loses “about 1% of his prenatal brain volume” when he becomes a father. Testosterone levels, too, “naturally drop to support their parenting role.” The effect sizes often increase with the volume of childcare. This is true of testosterone, gray-matter shrinkage in the cortex, activity in the amygdala, changes in oxytocin levels, and the daily downward trajectory of cortisol. 

Saxbe argues that “the downsized paternal brain” reflects “more readiness to parent,” and that these changes are positive. When men turn up their childcare “dial,” she contends, everyone benefits: “It’s not just children who gain an advantage from hands-on dads. These fathers reduce their partners’ stress. They enjoy better marriages….”

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Unfortunately, the book suffers from a foundational contradiction. The author claims that fathers are innately “wired to participate in care,” because their brains and bodies respond to babies in ways that “prime nurturing and sensitive caretaking behaviors.” But most of these supposed adaptations only “come online when fathers invest time and practice into parenthood” — that is, when they agree to abide by the prescription that fathers should participate in childcare. 

If fathers “need parental experience in order to trigger adaptation” in the brain and helpful changes such as increases of oxytocin, this does not technically support the interpretation that fathers are “wired” or even “primed” for hands-on caretaking. If that were the case, there should be evidence of brain changes before, during, and after the birth of a first child, but before the father submits to the practice. This is precisely what we find with mothers, who lose nearly 5% of their gray-matter volume during pregnancy, before they have engaged in caregiving. 

The argument, more accurately, is that fathers can adapt to childcare, to some degree, when they have to.  

Saxbe believes they should have to. And her own language betrays both her biases and the incoherence of her position. She writes, “I’ve heard the claim that parenting doesn’t come naturally to men because they lack the biology for it…. But new research can help us shift that narrative by showing us that great parents are made, not born.” If we’re “shifting the narrative,” that means parenting doesn’t come “naturally” to men: it’s constructed. The transformation, as her own data suggest, requires paternal submission to norms and expectations they prefer to avoid — not to mention acceptance of public-messaging campaigns in the form of parenting books.

This bias leads to a great deal of circular reasoning. For example, Saxbe points out that fathers who had “a greater sense of meaning” showed lower stress and found more satisfaction after their child arrived, so she suggests that struggling fathers find “meaning in the everyday toil of parenting.” Because many fathers “fear” that by doing childcare, they will break “an unspoken code of masculinity,” she lauds one psychologist who asks fathers to bring their child into his office as “a form of exposure.” Finally, she reasons that “time, practice, and experience help shape the brain,” and reports that “fathers who took paid leave showed smaller increases in stress and sleep problems after their baby’s birth” — the cure for not wanting to do childcare is more childcare. 

In other words, if a father gets brain damage and depression from doing the unnatural work of hands-on childcare, he should find meaning in his suffering, go to a therapist who treats masculinity as a phobia, and keep doing childcare until the brain damage and testosterone decline makes him forget what vigor ever felt like. If none of the above works, he might consider an inpatient stay at the University of Southern California Re-Education Camp. 

Would fathers and families be better off if the man steered clear of the kiddie stuff? Perhaps staying away from infants, in favor of securing economic resources and warding off external threats? Saxbe never asks this foundational question.

Ample data from many fields indicate that fathers are rather wired to avoid hands-on infant care. The book admits in passing that only 5% to 10% of mammal species feature males who care for their young. It also concedes that fathers today contribute more to childcare than “even the most hands-on hunter-gatherer dad.” In the American anthropologist John Whiting’s study of 136 preindustrial cultures, Saxbe notes, the typical arrangement in about half of the cases is that mom and baby sleep together, and dad sleeps elsewhere. Looking elsewhere, I found that the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of 186 societies shows “regularly close” contact between fathers and infants in only 3 of 154 cultures, about 2%.

Where Saxbe does consider men who work outside the home and avoid all childcare, she frames it as an eccentric privilege exclusive to “billionaires,” never acknowledging that this has been the historical norm for all men, including working-class men. The British social historian Tim Fisher’s 2006 study of working-class British fathers from 1900 to 1939, for example, observed that hands-on care of babies was not expected of fathers at any time in this period.

One of the most inconvenient facts for Saxbe is that, while paternal involvement with childcare has only a weak effect on real outcomes for the child or family — for example, in two large British samples, how frequently fathers changed babies’ diapers and fed them in the first year of life was not correlated with children’s later behavioral problems at ages 3, 9, or 11 — it has a measurable negative effect on income. In 1993, Norway mandated four weeks of paid leave for fathers, which increased the number of men taking leave to 40%, up from 4%, but had only a small effect on children’s test scores at age 16. It did, however, reduce the later earnings of fathers who took the leave, and possibly their partner’s earnings, too. 

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By Hollis Robbins

The trade-off between paternal childcare and paternal effort in the economy is thus far from obvious. Compounded over time, it is possible that a family’s lost earnings from paternal childcare outweigh the benefits, especially given that when his child is an infant, most of a father’s wage growth is yet to come. 

There is also the issue that the parents’ personal interests are often in conflict. Saxbe found that mothers recovered better after work when their partners did more of the housework. For the partner, of course, “more housework” represents a loss of professional or personal time that won’t be recaptured. This zero-sum dynamic is suggested by Saxbe’s own research, despite that she goes out of her way to deny it — in the book’s introduction, she explicitly says parenting isn’t zero-sum, for example.  

The primary beneficiary of Saxbe’s cultural engineering is the mother, at least those mothers who have been raised on expectations of gender-neutral parenting, at a cost to the father and the family’s economic security. The book demonstrates a clear physiological and psychological trade-off between the husband’s vitality and the wife’s. “Dads who lost more volume in the cortex told us they had worse sleep quality after birth,” Saxbe writes. “They also felt more depressed and anxious, and they had more mental-health problems, even when we adjusted for their mental health during pregnancy…. The same brain adaptations that seemed to track with fathers’ time and bonding with their infants also signaled mental health risks.” The testosterone findings point in the same direction: men with lower T — presumably those who are doing more childcare and have adapted to it better — “struggled more with their mental health.” Higher-T dads — who presumably feel better overall — “found parenting more challenging” and, no surprise, their partners were “more depressed and unhappy in their relationships.”

Dad Brain attempts to rewrite one of the most universally observed tendencies in family formation on the grounds of neuroscientific evidence which itself does not support the book’s argument. The author sometimes seems to be aware of this, and makes thin, post-hoc justifications such as that she is trying to share a fuller range of options for a diversity of modern family types. She allows that in some cultures, dads who aren’t hands-on make sense, because “a father who drags home a tasty goat increases the odds that his child will survive past infancy” (notice the slightly pejorative, cave-man coding), but dismisses it because “our parenting culture expects a hands-on, low-T style of fatherhood.” 

If “our parenting culture” — defined by the female-majority family sciences — expects a high level of involvement from fathers, then neuroscientific data ought to be tortured into a public advocacy campaign promoting paternal involvement. This is the book’s true reasoning. I found it useful in reverse: it taught me just how important it is for fathers to avoid hands-on infant care at all cost. And if we wonder why our society no longer produces Theodore Roosevelts, Dad Brain has accidentally given us the answer.

To those who understand how Europe’s underground economy works, these English lilts make sense. Albanian gangs are all over Britain’s £11 billion cocaine market, from large-scale import to street supply. Earlier this year two Albanians were jailed after arranging for over 500 kilograms of cocaine, with an estimated street value of $40 million, to be smuggled into Manchester airport from Mexico. In the last few weeks alone, Albanian dealers have been locked up for running street-cocaine sales as far afield as Ipswich and Aberystwyth. In September, meanwhile, an Albanian was jailed after being caught driving down the M20 in Kent with £2 million of cocaine in Lidl bags. It’s a trade that comes with serious health warnings for users: last week the Office of National Statistics (ONS) revealed cocaine has become the leading cause of drug deaths in England and Wales, with fatal overdoses involving the drug quadrupling in a decade. What’s more, Albanians also dominate Britain’s cannabis racket, which fuels a £2.5 billion domestic weed industry.

This narcotic revolution happened remarkably quickly. Ten years ago, police and journalists were only just starting to warn about the growing influence of Albanian gangs in Britain’s cocaine underworld. Albanian mobsters were rumored to be the main suppliers to the Groucho Club, Soho’s infamous celebrity hangout; so much cocaine was snorted there that the upstairs snooker room was sometimes called the “Peruvian Procurement Department”. A few streets away, at the Cirque Le Soir nightclub, an Albanian dealer was said to have sold coke in the presence of Frank “Sheriff of Soho” Partridge, the corrupt Met officer in charge of licensing West End nightlife until his arrest in 2015. 

Yet the question remains: how did the Albanians pull it off, especially in a country famed both for its tough native gangs, and for long-established foreign groups like the North London Turks and the Kinahans from Dublin? 

The answer begins with the fall of Albania’s Marxist-Leninist regime in 1992. After decades of socialism, Enver Hoxha’s former subjects stumbled into an unfamiliar capitalist world. “Organized crime was not a concept people in Albania knew much about before the collapse of the Communist regime,” says Fatjona Mejdini, director of the South Eastern Europe unit at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). “Overnight they faced a capitalist system they didn’t understand. So some turned to organized crime as a way to survive.” By 1997, meanwhile, Albania’s already-fragile economy was brought to its knees after the collapse of one of the biggest pyramid investment schemes in history, when around two thirds of citizens lost their life savings. Add the 1999 Kosovo war to the mix and tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians soon headed west in search of prosperity.

For some, crime was an appealing career path, with Albanian gangsters becoming well-known pimps and sex traffickers in the seedier corners of European capitals. By the late Nineties, Albanian and Kosovan thugs, having a deserved reputation for violence, snatched Soho’s £40 million vice trade from Maltese and East End gangs. By 2001, a Home office briefing found they owned 70% of the neighborhood’s saunas and massage parlors.

Sex was shadowed by drugs. Following the end of communism, huge weed farms appeared across Albania, with exports undercutting suppliers from the Netherlands and Morocco. The cannabis was first smuggled by road over the southern border into Greece, and then by boat to Italy, just 45 miles away across the Strait of Otranto. The Italian mafias, naturally taking their cut, were only too keen to help the Albanians move their product around Europe. As Mejdini puts it, cannabis was “the currency that Albanian traffickers used to connect with other criminal organizations in Europe and gain experience in organized crime”.

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It’s here that Britain re-enters the story. As far back as the Nineties, native gangsters had begun swapping armed robbery for narcotics, with criminals like Curtis “Cocky” Warren importing quality coke directly from Colombia to Liverpool, and the Adams family and their Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate building a thoroughgoing cocaine criminal empire. They were joined by foreign groups too: Kurdish and Pakistani heroin smugglers, and Jamaican Yardies who imported cocaine before turning it into crack. 

Riding high on their conquest of Soho’s sex trade, by the mid-2010s Albanians were wading into Britain’s drug world too. They picked a good moment. Around 2015, after all, a kilo of weed sold for £6,000, roughly three times today’s price. Even better, word on the street was that the police had taken their eye off cannabis farms — which, thanks to budget cuts, turned out to be true. 

Armed with cultivation know-how — and, thanks to lax immigration controls, a pool of trafficked labor from back home — Albanian criminals duly set up cannabis farms across Britain. That last phrase evokes a bucolic air, but don’t let it fool you. Even today, exploited “plant waterers” are stuck in grimy and claustrophobic conditions across Britain, facing beatings or even death as armed gangs raid each other’s farms to steal valuable crops. Not that this puts prospective workers off. As Ada Braho, of the Bakhita Centre for Research on Slavery, Exploitation and Abuse explains, the prospect of earning good money in British cannabis farms is “openly discussed” by young Albanians. 

“It’s pretty normalized,” Braho says. “It’s become like a joke that people are waiting to get on the next boat to get a job in a cannabis house. But they are being duped about the level of risk they are being exposed to.” Braho adds that young men embarking on precarious migration journeys are often backed by their parents as part of what she calls “household decisions” — with the proceeds of crime supporting whole families. 

As some Albanian gangs in Britain got entangled in weed farms, better-connected criminals stepped into the high-stakes world of cocaine. Artur and Klevis Hoxhosmani are an excellent example. Hailing from Burrel, a poor town in Albania’s rugged north, Artur claimed asylum in Britain in 1999, when he was just 16. His younger brother Klevis joined him in Bournemouth, on Britain’s south coast, some years later. By 2013, Klevis owned the Crystal Hand Carwash in the Dorset seaside town, and later a coffee shop. As for Artur, he acquired another car wash, as well as a pair of garages. 

From these humdrum beginnings, Albanian prosecutors say the brothers became a powerful cocaine trafficking cell. How? Because they had the proverbial golden ticket: direct connections to a rapidly growing network of Albanian cocaine gangs across Latin America and Europe. More than that, the Albanians developed what one expert has called a “sustainable partnership” with the ‘Ndrangheta — the most powerful Italian mafia centered around Calabria, the poor, rocky region in the toe of the peninsula’s boot. Among other things, ‘Ndrangheta bosses helped Albanian cells embed themselves along key points in the world’s cocaine-shipping network, from ports in Ecuador to transit countries like Sierra Leone and The Gambia. These cosmopolitan links have proved useful in other ways. Unlike most white English gangs — whose members are decidedly monolingual — the average Albanian trafficker might speak four or five languages. 

Partnering with Albanian criminals in Antwerp and Rotterdam, the Hoxhosmanis first smuggled in tons of cocaine from across the Atlantic, bribing customs officers and port officials to ensure things went smoothly. From there, they moved the coke by lorry to France, and then into the UK via the Channel Tunnel, where the brothers picked it up and distributed it to British wholesale suppliers. Police intercepted messages between the gang, which prosecutors say linked them to five tons of cocaine seizures over just eight months, and to powerful associates based in the money-laundering hub of Dubai.

These successes catapulted the Hoxhosmanis into glamorous circles; when they were arrested in Albania last summer, Klevis was in a much-publicized relationship with Kejda Ajazi, daughter of a former Albanian government minister. The brothers also hung out in places like Monaco, and owned a string of villas on Albania’s booming coast, as well as a yacht in Dubai. They now await trial charged with conspiracy to traffic £335 million worth of cocaine from Latin America to Britain and the EU. 

That word “cells” is important here. There is no single “Albanian mafia” in Britain. Instead, Mejdini explains that its coke-trafficking gangs largely consist of small, ultra-loyal kinship groups, almost always formed of brothers or in-laws. A second layer of the cell is usually made up of “associates”, who hail from the same small rural towns as core members. That gives Albanian crime cells a strong glue of shared community and trust — with dire consequences for family back home if anyone proves treacherous. For obvious reasons, that helps prevent police infiltration, especially when newcomers require vetting and references. 

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It’s also true that Albanian gangs in Britain are careful not to ruffle too many feathers. Despite their brutal reputation, outfits like the Hoxhosmanis didn’t displace existing outfits, nor do they now dominate their industry by force. Rather, they eased into Britain’s criminal ecosystem using a mix of know-how, efficiency and fair business practices: ironic given the bewildering scale of corruption in Albania itself. “Albanian groups have a reputation for reliability and delivery,” says Frank Stewart, threat lead for Western Balkans organized crime at the National Crime Agency (NCA). “In general, they are good at working with others and have established a reputation for delivering what they say they will on time and according to the agreement made.”  

Gangland shootings linked to Albanians are rare in the UK. In fact, despite having the least to prove, white British crime groups remain the most aggressive around. Tony Saggers, an international crime consultant and former head of drugs at the NCA, says there’s a reason Albanian gangs figure less in Liverpool than other cities — its cocaine trade is too violent. Trigger-happy gunfights clash with the “violence is bad for business” credo followed by Albanian cocaine gangs and indeed their mentors the ‘Ndrangheta. On the rare occasions that killings do happen, they tend to be carried out when targets are back home in Albania. After a 50-kilo shipment of cocaine went missing in England in 2018, bosses waited to ambush the suspected thieves in Albania, gunning them down when they were driving home from a family dinner.

As older Albanian criminals retreat into the semi-legitimate world, investing cocaine money into nightclubs and restaurants, a new generation of dealers is now stepping up. These younger criminals, many of whom were born in the UK, could pose a greater threat than their elders. More familiar with Britain’s modern underworld, Mejdini notes that they’re better at evading the law, not least around using sophisticated money-laundering schemes to hide their criminal assets.  

Some local Albanian gangsters are able to throw their weight around in their communities, with unsubstantiated rumors of “protection rackets” in the North London suburb of Southgate. A lot of fuss has been made about the “Hellbanianz”, an Instagram-friendly East London Albanian street drug gang with a penchant for well-produced rap videos. Now, though, its leaders are either in jail or back in Albania, and there’s little evidence, from either police investigations or criminologists, that their success in the drug trade translated to real power on the streets of Britain.

The same can’t be said for Albania itself. Ongoing street riots in the country were sparked by the $120-million sale of protected coastal land by Artur Shehu, an Albanian businessman and suspected cocaine trafficker, to Jared Kushner. Donald Trump’s son-in-law hopes to turn the wildlife sanctuary, home to flamingos, turtles and seals, into a massive luxury hotel complex. Certainly, Albania is now so deep in laundered coke cash that the resulting property boom has screwed the country’s economy. House prices have risen to unaffordable levels, and, as drug money has strengthened the local currency, exports are becoming more expensive, weakening sectors like garment manufacturing and agriculture. 

Stemming illegal migration may well help combat Britain’s Albanian gangs. But Mejdini suggests the Government’s efforts could be more targeted, for instance working with the Albanian authorities to identify known criminals. Britain might also cultivate closer links with the UK’s law-abiding Albanian diaspora, improving routes into education, employment and legitimate business, thereby reducing the appeal of crime. For now, though, with those Rolls Royces and Bentleys acting as shining adverts for the bounties of Britain, the road from Blloku to Bournemouth remains wide open. 

The dupe of this latest Mata Hari scandal is Jensen Huang, CEO of the chipmaking firm Nvidia, which he has led since founding it in 1993. Semiconductor chips are “the building blocks of the modern digital economy”, found in everything from laptops to cars, sensing devices, and smartphones. Nvidia designs the most coveted chips, those that are used by AI models such as Claude and ChatGPT, a position that has propelled the company to prominence as one of the most valuable firms in the world, and Huang to rockstar fame. With a fortune that Forbes estimates now places him in the top 10 richest people on the planet, Huang has acquired cultish celebrity: one of his leather jackets raised $960,000 in a charity auction. 

But over the weekend, Huang sent a letter to all Nvidia staff, apologizing for an extra-marital affair. “Corporate CEO has sidechick” doesn’t sound like it should be such a big deal, but this one’s different. The affair was with Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, a Chinese national and senior executive at the Singapore-based cloud provider Megaspeed. This firm was already suspected of smuggling restricted American tech to China, and Ms Huang suspected of being a Chinese spy. The discovery has sent shockwaves through an already jittery tech market, knocking 8% (approximately $350 billion) off Nvidia’s value. 

More than a sex scandal or a story for the business pages, l’affaire Huang is high geopolitical drama, for the light it shines on the stop-at-nothing rivalry between the USA and China on tech. When Bill Clinton advocated China joining the WTO in 1999, it was believed that China getting richer would inevitably make it more democratic, catalyzing the replacement of the CCP with a more Western-like regime. As we all now know, that’s not how things worked out. Instead, the US sacrificed its own industrial base to fuel the rise of a peer rival. But as if that’s not bad enough, today the eagle and the dragon are locked in a neck-and-neck race to preeminence in AI development. It’s this context that makes it so shocking that Jensen Huang, one of America’s nerd princes, should have found himself trapped by a honeypot spy, loyal to America’s chief rival. 

So intense is the competition between American and Chinese AI labs, and so contested is access to the most advanced hardware that powers them, that in 2020 export restrictions were imposed on Chinese import of American semiconductors. Megaspeed, meanwhile, has been under suspicion for some time of trying to find ways round these restrictions. This firm rents data processing power to AI firms across Asia, and uses $1.4 billion of Nvidia chips to power its data centers. But in 2025 an inspection found the number of chips in use was much lower than the number Megaspeed had purchased. Where were the others? Hawks feared they had been smuggled to China. 

The battle for semiconductors is granted another twist by the persistence of a supply bottleneck, that both constrains the AI build-out and affords a persistent sore point to China: Jensen Huang’s island of birth, Taiwan. Nvidia subcontracts the most complex part of its chip manufacturing to factories in Taiwan, an island around the size of the Netherlands and roughly 100 kilometers off the coast of mainland China. Taiwan became the home-in-exile of the Chinese Nationalist government, after their displacement by communists in 1949 — but Beijing insists on the PRC’s right to govern Taiwan too. Chinese maps show Taiwan as part of the Middle Kingdom, and Christian Dior was forced to apologize to Chinese customers in 2019 after making a presentation that included a Taiwanless map of China. 

Taiwan’s principal defense against being annexed by Beijing has long been its dominance in semiconductors. A farsighted program established by Taiwanese technocrats during the Seventies was delivered first by acquiring semiconductor know-how from an American firm, then training a generation of engineers, and finally developing a model that enabled Taiwanese plants to serve US firms without being perceived as a competitor. Aided by this long-term strategy, and a now richly developed base of secondary suppliers and expertise, this precariously positioned island secured a position as chokepoint in one of the most vital technologies of the 21st century. And this in turn has secured ongoing Western support for its independence: what former Taiwanese prime minister Tsai Ing-Wen called its “silicon shield”. 

Will it last? That’s less clear. The tectonic plates may be shifting: the US has poured considerable effort and money into reducing its dependence on overseas semiconductor manufacture. In 2021 Intel and TSMC both responded to US political pressure by announcing the construction of new semiconductor plants in Arizona. Then, in 2022, the bipartisan CHIPS Act provided the US Government $50 billion to invest in semiconductor research, development, and manufacturing within the USA. And while some had expressed skepticism on the “reshoring” project, it seems to be picking up speed: buoyed by AI demand, Intel recently announced that its delayed Ohio semiconductor plant will be re-started.

With semiconductor manufacturing re-shored, would “honeypot” scandals come to an end? I doubt it. There have been many such scandals throughout history, and in each case the basic mechanism is the same: some powerful man gets persuaded by the one-eyed monster not to think too hard about why an attractive woman is suddenly so interested in him. Only the specific configurations of power and money vary.

But as long as powerful rivalries and information asymmetries exist, there’ll be plots to even the scores through seduction. With the US-China rivalry in full spate, the tech bros should perhaps be more braced than they seem to be for an army of Mata Haris. Even if Taiwan loses its unique position, or one side definitively wins the AI race, there will always be new geopolitical tensions, and new information asymmetries.

But if there are lessons in this story for the nerd kings of America, there are also lessons for us in Britain — both in those ways we can’t be China or the USA, and also perhaps in those ways we could be more Taiwan. There’s no meaningful sense in which we can compete as peers with two continent-sized empires. But we might infer from l’affaire Huang that it’s a bad idea to lose all the China experts from your government. Whoops. Also maybe not to take the Chinese government at their word, when they pinky-promise that the mega-embassy they want to build with secret underground rooms, near important buried data cables, isn’t a listening post. 

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Another, perhaps more strategic consideration might be wondering what Britain could learn from Taiwan, about how to live next door to a much larger geopolitical bloc without being too badly bullied. Taiwan shows how a nation that’s not big enough to lead on everything can still preserve independence, by being indispensable in one vital sector. As the US continues its project to re-shore semiconductor manufacturing, and Xi Jinping pledges to assimilate Taiwan, it might not last forever. But the strategy hasn’t failed yet. 

What’s the equivalent for Britain? Perhaps it’s a wild idea, but my starter for ten would be offshore data centers. These are experimental, but not completely so: China launched the first underwater data center earlier this year. I gather the water temperature around the British Isles is well-suited to the cooling needs of such installations, and a prototype is scheduled to launch in the North Sea soon. Of course housing vulnerable and strategically important infrastructure off Britain’s coastline would necessitate restoring our degraded naval defense capability. But this too would be a happy return to historic national norms. 

Jensen Huang, at least, believed in Britain, even if we don’t. Before his personal life blew up, he visited to mark Nvidia’s investment in British startups, while lauding our potential and intellectual superpowers. While recent evidence suggests he’s perhaps not always a flawless judge of others’ motives, his track record suggests he understands a thing or two about building. And we could do with building. Torn as we currently are between the US and EU, we need less effort on “soft power”, “moral leadership”, and pointless acts of post-colonial self-flagellation, and more on a realist effort to build out resources our neighbors need badly enough, to come to our aid in extremis. 

Actually doing this would necessitate being governed by engineers and those who think long-term, rather than bee-brick bureaucrats and decline managers. This would certainly be a change of gear. It might even require a bit of Mata Hari-ing here and there. But I’m with Jensen Huang: it can be done. He might be a flawed messenger but let’s take him at his word, and be more Taiwan.

That adage, however, cuts both ways: for progressives to make the most of their current spring — to make it last — they have to deliver on their core commitments: aggressively addressing the affordability crisis, ending the Iran war, and advancing a just, moral, and prudent foreign policy more broadly. And they have to eschew the boutique cultural causes and hectoring tone that turned voters against them the last time around. Otherwise, spring will turn to another winter before too long.

The midterms were a victory for the Democratic Party, of course. But more consequentially, the election was a triumph for the party’s Left flank. The biggest win on the ledger was that of Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, a standard-bearer of what Matthew Yglesias has called the “clean-living Muslim wing” of the Left. El-Sayed won despite the GOP’s relentless efforts to tar him as an Islamic extremist and the pro-Israel lobby’s expenditure of tens of millions of dollars on behalf of his opponents in both the Democratic primary and the general election. Perhaps more remarkably, even in a red state like Florida, Angie Nixon — a member of the Democratic Socialists of America — came within three percentage points of winning, despite receiving little support from the national Democratic Party.  

The Left clearly has a winning message: a dogged focus on affordability, and a strong stand against American complicity with Israel’s destructive wars. The atrocities in Gaza on their own might not have been enough to sway voters. But the Israeli government’s role in pushing for a US military intervention against Iran further soured on Americans, who (correctly) tied the war’s inflationary effects to their own struggles to make ends meet. 

Vice President JD Vance, in a blistering postmortem, cited the war and his own administration’s close relationship to Israel as two of four key reasons a significant share of Trump-Vance voters shifted their support to Democrats. On Election Day, Trump himself seemed to acknowledge this when he said of US aid to Israel, “Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed when [the Israelis] don’t need it? It’s a bad talking point.” 

There is little downside, then, to Democrats criticizing Israel. Some centrist critics of El-Sayed worried that his focus on Israel’s misdeeds — they would call it something worse, an obsession — would ultimately hurt him. It didn’t. A majority of Michigan Jews voted for El-Sayed.

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Religion can save democracy

By Shadi Hamid

This isn’t to say that every progressive should make criticism of Israel a focal point of their politics. But they can and should at least make clear where they stand. While the Rev. Adam Hamilton of Kansas didn’t talk much about Gaza, his basic orientation in defense of Palestinians — in line with his neighbor-love vision of Christianity — was not in dispute. As early as Oct. 13, 2023, a week after the Oct. 7 terror attack on southern Israel, Hamilton issued a statement that: “I also stand with Palestinians who, for a variety of reasons, live as second-class citizens in the land where they have lived for hundreds of years.” Such statements didn’t stop Hamilton from turning Kansas — yes, deep-red Kansas — blue.

But being on what progressives call “the right side of history” is no substitute for governing well and wisely, something that Zohran Mamdani intuited from the start of his tenure as New York City mayor. You have to get things done and deliver tangible results for the citizens you serve. 

Luckily, there is the “sewer-socialist” tradition — recalling unabashedly Leftist mayors in the previous century who won renown (and re-election) by focusing relentlessly on basic good government and the delivery of services to the working majority. That tradition, which Mamdani has sought to revive, teaches that ideological purity can only take you so far, which is to say, not very far. 

It is here that the past must not be a prologue. Beginning in the mid-2010s through the early 2020s, progressivism came to be defined by “wokeness” — a puritanical approach to politics that divides the world into oppressed and oppressor according to racial and gender identity. In addition to grating on voters with its hectoring tone, woke politics undermined class-based solidarity — once the linchpin of Left and labor politics — by dividing populations along identitarian lines.

It’s telling, then, that in 2026 “wokeness” was no longer the animating issue it had been in previous elections. Here, the Republican Party became a victim of its own success. After Trump’s 2024 victory, wokeness receded in many progressive institutions, which made it harder for conservatives to evoke its specter to motivate voters.

A broad “vibe shift” was the result, with even the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones wondering out loud whether the whole enterprise had gone too far. The obsession with race and gender identity didn’t actually work: it alienated large swaths of the American public and led, at least in part, to Joe Biden’s catastrophic decision to elevate Kamala Harris as vice president.

Going forward, the Left must resist the temptation to re-entertain racial and gender-based identity politics. The danger is that, as enjoyable as power and success may be, they breed overconfidence as well as overreach. Whatever the midterm elections were, they were not a mandate for divisive cultural politics. The good news — for Democrats, at least — is that wokeness has been replaced by Israel-Palestine as the primary progressive litmus test. And unlike many woke causes, this one brings Democrats in line with the median voter. More Americans today sympathize with the Palestinians over Israel, a dramatic reversal from just a few years ago. Fact is, Israel-skepticism is now the majority, mainstream position in American political life — including among Republicans under age 50.

Some on the pro-Israel Right will no doubt counter that the criticism of Israel amounts to the latest iteration of wokeness. But that isn’t quite so. For one thing, this is an issue that implicates world-historic events, such as the Iran war and the stability of the Middle East, unlike pronoun preferences and so-called “microaggressions” at the workplace. 

For the most part, Palestine’s advocates speak not the language of special pleading — “as a member of oppressed class X” — but that of universal rights. At stake aren’t the cultural preferences of the urban precariat, but the principle that Washington can’t underwrite and diplomatically back a permanent military occupation of a people who aspire to self-determination. That sort of Enlightenment-based moral universalism is a much more comfortable place to be for the Left, historically speaking. It also has the benefit of being intellectually coherent.

What the decline of wokeness means, in practice, is that progressives don’t have to be particularly “progressive” on hot-button issues like trans athletes participating in women’s sports, as long as they’re progressive on Palestine. The reason a relative moderate like Georgia’s Sen. Jon Ossoff is largely accepted by the Left is that he’s sufficiently critical of Israel. So he gets a pass. (Ossoff is also Jewish, and the fact that Democrats may very well nominate him for president belies the accusations that the party is in the grip of an anti-Semitic fever.)

But it’s not just a matter of resisting the siren call of woke. It is important for the Democrats to continue moderating on cultural issues in order to solidify their majorities and build as big a tent as possible in the years to come. Culture matters. People don’t vote solely on their material interests. With young men falling behind on a wide array of social and educational metrics, and amid a loneliness epidemic and a birth-rate crisis, Democrats need to be able to speak to America’s broader social malaise.

Fortunately, the midterms were a great day not only for democracy and Democrats — but for religion, too. In the post-Obama years, the Democratic Party became the secular party, with little space for outward expressions of faith. But that appears to be changing. Democrats are finally “getting” religion. Three of the most prominent Democratic candidates — El-Sayed, James Talarico, and Hamilton — were openly and unapologetically religious. They made their faith a central part of their pitch to voters. And they won, including (again) in red states.

Talarico and Hamilton are now standard-bearers of a new and emboldened Christian Left. It was less clear exactly how El-Sayed’s faith informed his specific policy positions, although he did occasionally sound more “conservative” notes on cultural issues like gambling and porn addiction. While critics tried to smear him with the Islamist label, if anything — as Yglesias amusingly noted — it might have helped him to be “a bit more ‘Islamist,’” in the sense of being broadly traditionalist on cultural values, which would have appealed to moderate voters.

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But religion isn’t just, or even primarily, about being socially conservative. As the evangelical theologian Matthew Kaemingk and I argue in our new book Can Religion Save Democracy? (excerpted here in UnHerd), both the Christian and Islamic traditions lend themselves to pluralism, intellectual humility, and learning to live with deep difference. Final, definitive judgments about our fellow citizens are God’s alone. If God is the All-Knowing, then not knowing is part of what makes us human. This opens up space for a more generous and forgiving approach to politics.

This generosity has more direct political implications for Democrats. Another temptation — and this one will probably be harder to resist — is to interpret their electoral mandate as a license to punish Republicans, hearkening back to the endless Russiagate investigations and impeachment proceedings of the first Trump term. Retribution might feel good, but it will only narrow the tent and alienate independents and disaffected Trump voters. 

Talarico’s and Hamilton’s “neighbor-love” Christianity offers a much more inclusive and affirmative vision, in stark contrast to the Christian Right’s apocalyptic preoccupation with vengeance and casting progressives as enemies of both God and the state. If vengeance is God’s alone, then we can be confident that God will sort it out, not necessarily now but in the next life. Adopting a posture of what Kaemingk and I call “delayed justice” can help relieve tension and minimize the existential tenor of our politics. Knowing that Trump will have to give account to a higher power — amusingly, Trump himself seems aware of this possibility — relieves the demand to punish him in the here and now.

The Left has always been animated by a utopian impulse. One might even call it a “religious” impulse in that it speaks to a yearning for transcendence as well as deliverance. To be a progressive, after all, is to believe in progress, that the arc of the moral universe “bends toward justice” — a phrase not coincidentally coined by a theologian. This faith in politics and in human nature has often served the Left well, spawning the great moral crusades of American history, including the abolitionist and civil-rights movements. But it must be tempered by a recognition of its limits. The arc of history may bend toward justice, but it is long and uneven. Politics can help us, but it won’t — and probably shouldn’t — save us. 

Meanwhile, the Republicans’ political winter should be a lesson for Democrats: all it takes to lose a broad coalition is betraying a core pledge and becoming distant from voters’ real concerns. The roadmap for the Left, then, is clear enough: focus relentlessly on affordability, demonstrate competence at every level of government, and stay principled on Palestinian rights while reimagining the American relationship with Israel. Lastly, resist the twin temptations of cultural overreach and political retribution. Easier said than done, of course, but saying it would be a good start.

But stardom began to break down, like so many other religions. In the Sixties and Seventies, young moviegoers rediscovered the great legends, many of whom had died. In the repertory theaters, the classic films had a new life. Kids were still thrilled by the melodramatic ego and the piercing eyes of Joan Crawford. In 1978, Joan was 74, unwell, and retired from the screen. She had no peace. In that year, her adopted daughter, Christina, published a book — Mommie Dearest — that rearranged the publishing world’s attitude to stars. Christina said mommie had been a raging tyrant of domestic order, violent, abusive and fit for ridicule. The book was badly written, and as desperate as any damaged child, but it sold about four million copies. The message sank in: stars might not be writers themselves, but beware the dangers in leaving the story to others.  

So what does Dustin Hoffman want from his book, Look at Me? I doubt he dreams of selling millions of copies. That scale is as archaic now as black-and-white. But in serious age, with a large family to give him approval, he wants — and deserves — respect and attention. “Attention must be paid” comes from one of Hoffman’s big ventures — doing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. To be humbled in a play can win enormous esteem.

One of the best-known anecdotes about Dustin Hoffman is the moment on the set of Marathon Man (1976) when his co-star, Laurence Olivier, growing weary of Dustin’s impassioned attempt to “get into” his character, responded with the acid observation, “Oh, why doesn’t the dear boy just act?” That has passed into show business lore as an example of casual English gamesmanship in the face of a dogged-if-not-humorless American Method-bound denial of reality: the plain fact that the actor is not, and need not be, the character. He is paid to pretend.

Hoffman’s short but revealing memoir does not comment on this remark. But he has his own jab at Lord Olivier. (The two players were innately competitive.) In the early shooting of Marathon Man — where Olivier is a vicious Nazi (remember his cruel dentistry) and Hoffman is the American victim-hero — Hoffman and the film’s director John Schlesinger were alarmed at what they saw as Olivier’s over-acting. They wondered: could they bring the world’s best known greatest actor down a few degrees?

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At one point, Hoffman and Olivier were running their lines together — just reading them over for memorization — with Olivier getting bigger and bigger. So the wily Dustin wondered, “You know, we’ve done it so many different ways, maybe we should do one take like this, where we just say the words, as if it’s the two of us running lines.” 

“Are you saying I’m over the top?” demanded the lord of the stage. Hoffman denied that anxiety, and the two men became pals. So Hoffman admired what Olivier had done in The Entertainer by pretending in such naturalistic detail to be a third-rate comic in an English music hall. What had led Olivier to that pinnacle of excellence? Hoffman asked. Wasn’t it an urge to say something to the world?

“Bollocks,” replied Olivier. He thrust his head so close to Dustin they were almost nose to nose, and he whispered his confession. The energy in acting, its implacable drive, came in. It’s all about: “Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me.”

Dustin Hoffman will be 90 next August. Not that he has given up on youthfulness. As Lawrence Turman (the producer on The Graduate) once said, Dustin is reliable for goofiness and sweetness — and a comedic instinct. A lot of that springs from The Graduate (1967) where he was a strange version of the all-American young man, taken into some disturbing areas of underground desire, but still finally proclaimed as an adorable, tireless mensch in a movie that had that classic Hollywood knack of turning shit into gold. And which is still, probably, Hoffman’s best-known picture.

Not that he was ever a one-shot wonder. He has had seven nominations for the best actor Oscar — after The Graduate, there was Midnight Cowboy, Lenny, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man and Wag the Dog. And yes, he’s still here, still looking for work, aware of what is coming but challenging demise to diminish him.

So he does an autobiography, with the assistance of New Yorker writer Ariel Levy. (Between them, they do sound like him.) But they face stiff competition. Michael Douglas came out in the same season with a very candid book, One Helluva Ride. And only a few years ago, Al Pacino delivered Sonny Boy, which especially in its younger years was a complex and heartfelt story about growing up in New York. To listen to that book on tape, read by Pacino, was to believe that the actor had turned his life into one of his great parts. It’s as compelling as Bette Davis’s The Lonely Life (published in 1962 and still a landmark of the genre).

Look At Me doesn’t have that punch or pain. Pacino often sang about the past, whereas Hoffman just outlines his career. There was something in Pacino’s book that seemed inspired or captivated by revery and remembering. It felt emotionally necessary, whereas Hoffman’s book seems dutiful, despite the good stories and sharp insights. 

But Hoffman has been on hold a while now. His last nomination, Wag the Dog, was nearly 30 years ago, and it is one of his best pictures, though he had more a supporting role than the clear lead. He’s done nearly 40 films since then, including voice work on the Kung Fu Panda franchise, but little that might seem a proper challenge for a great actor. That leaves one asking, has Hoffman moved us or himself enough in the last 30 years?

The best thing in Look At Me is Hoffman’s account of The Graduate. He was never obvious casting for Charles Webb’s book, the hero of which is a thoroughly mainstream athlete in college suddenly uncertain about the rest of his life. In approaching the project, producer Turman and director Mike Nichols had tried some scenes with Robert Redford and Candice Bergen. That’s a long way from the film we still enjoy, and a measure of how far Nichols and his screenwriter, Buck Henry, were not satisfied with the novel’s concept. They felt the guy in the book was a stiff, and in Hoffman they detected a sympathetic awkwardness that really was in Dustin’s nature. Henry and Nichols had Benjamin Braddock start out nearly numb with anxiety — so he would seem seduced by the much older Mrs Robinson. (In fact, Anne Bancroft in that role was only six years older than Hoffman.)

As Hoffman describes it, he believed he was wrong for the picture. He tested but never thought he had a chance. Once cast, he felt increasing pressure from Nichols to accentuate his Jewishness. He was not just uneasy but uncertain what Nichols wanted. It’s a great insight now that Hoffman guesses how far Nichols (ostensibly a big smooth success) was himself torn about his own Jewishness and his feeling of loneliness.

There was a telling moment when he shook hands with Nichols, ashamed that his hand was wreathed in anxious sweat — and felt his director’s hand was in the same state. In truth, Nichols, Turman and Henry (maybe with foresight, but maybe finding their film in the dark) were feeling their way towards one of those American movies that would have its cake and eat it. One in which the flare of subversion and loner persistence actually fitted in with safe conventions of the ordinary. So Ben Braddock could have Mrs Robinson and her daughter — and the daughter (the perfect Katharine Ross) would still marry him happily. And he could walk off as a hero. The Graduate was a big hit — it’s very well done — but it pulls a cool trick in disguising plot elements that should have upset the audience. Like how much betrayal can a family take? And still, the picture was perceived as an assault on middle-class parental attitudes.

It’s remarkable how quickly the awkward novice became not just a star but a very accomplished pretender who had a series of tour de force roles — Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, Jack Crabb going from youth to 121 in Little Big Man, all the way to a moderately attractive “woman” in Tootsie and an autistic savant in Rain Man. Which other actor could have handled that range? It wasn’t just that he startled and excelled; it seemed that he needed the outlandish challenges. He was a Method actor, famously intent on digging into real nature with improvs that could alarm other actors. But there’s a corresponding truth that Dustin was seldom the plain Hoffman. There are exceptions: his Carl Bernstein in All the President’s Men is natural, smart, sardonic, and a master at cloaking his own ego. That film has many virtues but the way he and Redford play off each other is a masterly double act in which Carl seems nettled by, but envious of, Redford’s calm. Still, there aren’t too many films in which Hoffman is relaxed or brave enough to just be himself. 

One example of what he could do is a film seldom remarked on today: Straight Time (1978), in which he plays a man released from prison, a somber, plain guy, who thinks of going straight but is forever enclosed in gloominess. Hoffman intended at first to direct that film, but he found the load of acting and being in control too much, so a friend, Ulu Grosbard, took it over. 

Hoffman surely knew he was picking up a reputation for being difficult or demanding — a perfectionist. Some other actors found him hard to play with; that may mean his improvs were wild, or that he needed to find a path where others could not accompany him. On Kramer vs. Kramer, as he went through his own painful separation, he told the writer-director Robert Benton that their script didn’t grasp the full anguish of divorce. When director Sydney Pollack said a take was OK on Tootsie, Dustin told him, not for me. He was a big arguer on set, and one can hear him being “difficult” in just the way Ratso harangues traffic on the street in Midnight Cowboy.

The addict may act like a victim, but he goes in fear of being cured. Doing a book may be therapy for an actor as well as a way to respect. But I suspect most stars would trade away the book tours and the sales figures for just 10 minutes in a juicy role. Maybe the old guys are doing their books just to let the world know they are available. What we need to appreciate is that every out-of-work actor is desperate. “Just resting” is a danger sign. So old actors write books to pretend they’re still “on”. 

But that was last week. This week, Trump is back on his Truth Social sounding off about Democrat “sleazebags”, and the market is recovering. For the newspaper headlines were far more dramatic than the reality. The Nasdaq fell 4.8% — a correction, not a crash. The index is still up substantially over the past five years. A real tech crash would look very different. 

Meanwhile, Europe still doesn’t get AI. The dollar and AI are what make America so powerful. The Europeans have a single currency, but no idea how to leverage it globally. And they are nowhere in the AI race. The gap between the US and China on one side and Europe on the other is massive and unbridgeable. The only important European high-tech company I can think of is the Dutch company ASML. It makes sophisticated machines which edge tiny pathways into integrated circuits of microchips. Further down that food chain are a couple of German companies that supply the precision optics. That’s good stuff. I raise my hat. Some of our old engineering skills do still count. But we Europeans are no longer at the center of the world; our old maps are out of date.

We have sidelined ourselves by enacting a raft of disastrous anti-tech regulation. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) might have started as an honest effort to protect people from abuse of their personal data, but it ended up a monster — a cookie monster. The legislation is a massive burden on small businesses in particular. And the AI Act has been an act of calamitous self-harm, preventing the formation of a viable AI industry here. Social networks are treated as criminal organizations that need to be censored by officially approved civil society organizations. We should have called it the Tech Business Destruction Act. 

We can’t rule out the possibility that a Democrat-led Congress could usher in a Luddite phase by copying us — there are some Democrats who think like the Europeans. But I don’t think the party as a whole will go down this route. Bill Clinton, don’t forget, turned the Democrats into the party of financial capitalism. And both the Obama and Biden administrations supported US technology. My sense is that this new intake of Democratic lawmakers is different from the European centrist blob. Yes, they are certainly more cautious about data centers, which don’t provide many jobs and consume a lot of energy. But I have yet to see the rabid anti-tech vigilantes we have here. 

In any case, there are limits to politics. We cannot un-invent AI, just as we could not un-invent the nuclear bomb. If a future US administration attempted to cripple Nvidia with ever stricter regulation, it would create a far bigger security threat than one posed by reports that Jensen Huang was dating a suspected Chinese spy. China is the reason America cannot just abandon AI as Europe has done.

Right now, the top Chinese AI companies are lagging behind OpenAI and Anthropic, but not by much. And these models can do mind-boggling things. I created my own AI-driven media app, by getting ChatGPT (which is brilliant at solving open math problems) to give detailed instructions to Claude (which excels at software). After a night of intense hackery, my agents and I created something that would otherwise have cost me a fortune in software development. The idea that AI is just another bubble is spread by people who have no idea what it does and how it works. Many of them live in Europe.

And many of them are economists. There are honorable exceptions, such as Luis Garicano, who recently wrote that physical AI is currently the most important thing that is happening in the world. But too many approach AI through that familiar history of speculative bubbles: right about the valuation and wrong about the revolution.

The economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff wielded an enormous influence on our thinking about what constitutes a bubble with their 2008 book This Time is Different. The title refers to a comment that market optimists have been using since time immemorial to justify high stock market valuations. It is the belief that whatever the technology they happen to be invested in at the time is special. We saw it play out with the Railway Mania in the 1840s, then with cars, radios, even bicycles. And most recently with the dot-com bubble. Investors were not wrong about the technology as such. The internet was indeed a big deal. But they made stupid bets on the wrong companies — like internet cafés in Europe.

The financial economist Robert Shiller gave us a way to assess these bubbles. He developed a metric to gauge whether the stock market as a whole is overvalued: the Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings (CAPE) index. Think of it as a smarter version of standard measures like price-to-earnings ratios. Right now, Shiller’s CAPE stands at 40.7, close to the all-time peak of 44.2 reached during the dot-com bubble in late 1999.

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Taking into account the work of Reinhart, Rogoff and Shiller, it would indeed be rational to bet that AI has pushed stock markets into bubble territory. But be careful. The idea that AI is indeed different is based on something very real. Something that conventional economic analysis has undervalued: this technology is going to transform the inner workings of our economy. And it’s happening already. AI has decimated the white-collar profession of the legal assistant. It is coming for many more. The author Nassim Nicholas Taleb predicted that all jobs that were invented this century are prone to the AI tsunami. I agree. The financial sector in particular. Similarly, our think tanks produce tomes of biased and predictable analysis. The profession of the newspaper columnist, one I happen to know a little about, is also on that list. If I open the Guardian or the Daily Telegraph, and look at the columns there, I know exactly what each columnist is going to say. For AI, predictable, biased and unoriginal journalism is low-hanging fruit. So is pretentious modern art. No wonder that the blob is so alarmed. They are on the list too.

AI is going to have a substantial and measurable impact on the productivity of the entire economy. An AI-assisted law office or newsroom will be able to achieve the same output with fewer people. The productivity effect is not in doubt. But what is in doubt is the timing. History shows that we are often too pessimistic about the impact of a technology and too optimistic about the timing. Ten years ago, the car-tech fanboys predicted we would all have self-driving cars by now. Forty years ago, sci-fi movies suggested we’d be in flying cars. 

If investors get the timing wrong on AI, the market might crash. The tech may have killed the legal assistant but it could take a lot longer for it to see off the mortgage broker or the high-street solicitor. Investors won’t wait indefinitely for promised profits to materialize. That said, progress in AI-driven robotics is proceeding fast and may bring surprises. 

What we are seeing right now is how volatile today’s stock markets have become. The crash in Alphabet’s shares, Google’s parent company, tells us at the very least that the positive AI story is not a uniform one. As the economist Hanno Lustig remarked, current AI stock valuations presume “a structural transformation of US capitalism favouring capital at the expense of labour”. And this is AI’s inherent promise: the replacement of labour by capital. Reinhart and Rogoff’s book may have helped us be more suspicious about financial valuations, but AI isn’t another investment fad. It is a technological revolution. Make no mistake: this time it really is different.

It’s a reaction I can understand. Watching back clips of Brand’s big-haired heyday, it is difficult to understand why nobody raised the alarm. There’s the recording of Brand offering to send his personal assistant to Jimmy Savile, naked; “Nothing wrong with that,” warbles the elder predator. There’s the clip of him on a talk show, bragging about convincing women to “trust me” by posing as gay — before “bang! Pregnant”. There’s the one where he jokes about dragging a woman “into a cubicle” to “show her my pubicles” (a similar account cropped up in court). This was a man whose recurring gag was being vulgar, boastful, libidinous and frightening. In isolation, these snippets are shocking — but lest we forget, these qualities were once the very foundations of late-night television. The rape jokes look stark in retrospect; in their context, they were seen as naughty asides in a comedy culture which loved nothing more. Half the joke was the ambiguity of whether Brand “meant it”. 

It’s impossible to imagine perviness being a joke today, so squeaky-clean is our post-#MeToo mainstream comedy culture — but the recent past is a foreign country. The Noughties, the decade that produced Brand, was positively anarchic by today’s standards. Programs like Never Mind the Buzzcocks (fronted by Simon Amstell) and Big Brother’s Big Mouth (a reality-recap spinoff fronted by Brand) were so watchable because of their sweary, offensive, unpolished banter. Guests would drink heavily, hosts would tease relentlessly and a barrage of obscenities and fights would cap off the night. These shows were combustible by design: panelists’ flimsy egos were flambéed at every opportunity in a way that would give an on-set welfare officer a coronary today. In one memorable spat on Buzzcocks, Amstell goaded the mononymous singer Preston (remember him?) to storm off by reading out the most airheaded portions of his wife Chantelle’s autobiography. 

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Producers today would cower from “platforming” anything quite so third-rail, or even slightly mean — which is why the BBC, ITV and Channel 4’s late-night offering is a revolving door of Rob Beckett, Romesh Ranganathan and whatever green-haired Goldsmiths graduate they can drag off the street. Late-night banter has been replaced by light-entertainment lols in Scottish castles. We are a million miles from the 2007 Brit Awards, hosted by Brand, in which he managed to crack jokes about the Queen’s “privates”, the friendly-fire death of a soldier in Iraq and the hanging of Saddam Hussein. 

Brand belonged to a rougher, readier era of programming in which hosts functioned as ringmasters and made a spectacle of wrangling unpredictable stars. Something “happening” — a fracas, a sly joke, a flash of nudity — was precisely why we watched. After the watershed, moral instruction vanished. After Fiona Bruce had packed up her papers, a band of twenty-something brigands would saunter on set to deliver vulgar nightly sermons. Brand was the most vivid product of this culture — the most flamboyant bird of prey, and a breed now long extinct. Part of this week’s social-media cope is the insincere refrain that Brand was not just evil, but unentertaining — a more honest reckoning would acknowledge that his theatrical, voracious, quippy persona was in fact TV gold. His perviness was not incidental here; it was part of the act. Looking back at clips from Big Brother’s Big Mouth, audiences are delighted by the edginess of it all; they like the feeling of being shocked.

All this — gasps included — meant great ratings. In the 2000s and 2010s, British television was buoyed by a handful of charismatic but creepy men. In the years since, many of these men have been unmasked as various shades of problematic. There is David Walliams, the poor man’s Kenneth Williams, who was dropped by his publisher and lost a tie-in with Alton Towers after being accused of inappropriate behavior towards women (a claim he denies). There’s Gregg Wallace, the cheeky-chappie-in-chief of the MasterChef kitchen who producers brought on as a working-class hero — only for him to be investigated for inappropriate behavior, sexual comments and bullying (allegations he denies). The list of shamed male TV favorites seems to grow by the month: what began with Savile became respectable newsreaders like Huw Edwards and lovable children’s entertainers like Rolf Harris. Understandably, the industry has swapped its riskiest constituents — late-night livewires — for focus-grouped fun like Sky’s Saturday Night Live UK, stocked with on-message TikTok comedians. Not only has this made comedy worse — it also won’t work.

Gutting schedules of rogues is no guarantee of moral perfection. Padding out panel shows with scarf-swaddled softbois is an understandable reflex for production companies keen to avoid the mistakes of Endemol, the one-time handler of Brand. Really, though, you cannot judge a man’s propensity to rape you based on whether he wears natty little Victorian waistcoats or piles up his hair like a Whitechapel harlot. Brand may stick out as an example of where instincts should have been trusted — but so much of modern masculinity has been defanged and made to feel “safe” that real wrong’uns are incredibly difficult to discern. Think of Neil Gaiman, whose alleged sadism (which he maintains was always consensual) was packaged in the disarming guise of a sensitive sex nerd. At a time when audiences — and especially women — are suspicious of swagger, it has never been more fashionable to don sheep’s clothing. If he were starting out today, Brand would pose as a nice boy. There is no better evidence for his slipperiness than his spiritual conversion, itself a flagrant attempt to retcon his rapey years as a period in the wilderness. 

In the Noughties, sexual appetite and celebrity ego were extraordinary bringers of social capital. Today public horniness is reserved for a select group of heavily media-trained women — Sabrina Carpenter and Zara Larsson, for example, who seem only ever to dry-hump their way through pop sets. Meanwhile men are more likely to cry on television and tell entertainment correspondents all about their body-consciousness than crack jokes about shagging. In comics, the transformation is perhaps the most noticeable of all — they have gone from carte-blanche provocateurs to professional personalities, ones who must withstand the same purity tests on the issues du jour as all other celebs.

None of that will stop the Brands of the future. The sanitized stars British networks choose to replace the rogues of yore could be just as odious behind closed doors. Bad behavior seems to seep out of the woodwork of celebrity with such regularity that we have to assume there is something corrupting in fame itself.

Our reckoning over Russell Brand is due. It is right that we ask ourselves how we could have ignored, even praised, such a conspicuous sleazebag. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves about what a bad guy “looks like”. The truly disturbing thing is that Brand, like Savile, was an unusual example of someone who bore his badness as a sort of double-bluff. The plethora of old gods tumbling out of favor over the 2020s represents the whole spectrum from grandfatherly to grotesque — proof of how easily some men slip under the wrong’un radar. In the wake of Brand’s undoing, it is tempting yet fruitless to trawl through old footage of this particular prancing perve to make ourselves feel better about “missing” the truth. In the ultra-horny Noughties, salaciousness was standard fare; today we live in a paranoid purity culture which prefers its famous men to look as unthreatening as possible. But the mistake is to confuse the performance of a personality with the evidence of character. Television may well have changed the men it celebrates, but that doesn’t mean we have learned how to recognize the dangerous ones. 

The pre-smartphone Turkey that Çomak left behind had been dominated by a military determined to tame the religious populism of its politicians. The Instagram-crazed country he re-entered is dominated by the very politician the military failed to tame.

In 1994, Istanbul had half of its present population of 16 million, but was already growing, largely through migration from Anatolia, at the rate of one Newcastle a year. No politician understood that human tide better than Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — street hawker, semi-professional footballer, hard-boiled party boss — who, that year, elbowed his way through a crowded field to become mayor of Istanbul for the pro-Islamic Welfare Party. Erdoğan, too, would see the inside of a Turkish prison: four months in 1999 for reciting a poem at a rally.

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But he and Çomak drew very different lessons from injustice. Çomak taught himself poetry, and the writings he smuggled out of his cell have won him international fame. Erdoğan learned that power punishes weakness, and that victimhood is a potent political tool. Donald Trump said that the only reason he attended July’s Nato summit in Ankara was out of respect for the strongman president who shares his skepticism of the Western alliance. And, even though Turkey was among the last of the G20 to ratify the Paris Agreement, Antalya is now hosting dozens of world leaders at the COP31 climate summit, Andy Burnham among them. But which Turkey will they be visiting? The “New Turkey” that a younger Erdoğan once promised, or merely a stale caricature of the ancien régime he set out to replace?

No longer in a cell, Çomak talks of the marvel of regaining an unobstructed view of the horizon, of being able to lose himself in a crowd. Erdoğan built a 1,150-room palace. That palace has become a monument to an epoch bearing his name. There is little question that Erdoğan’s Turkey has grown in prosperity and self-esteem. In the early aftermath of the Cold War, the country was desperate to join a European Union that didn’t want it, all while promoting a Turkic identity that might win influence (and the odd contract) in former Soviet Central Asia. Today, it is nothing if not confident. A republic founded over a century ago from the ashes of empire is again redefining its region.

Turkish diplomats once cited the country’s “difficult neighborhood” as a shackle on its ambitions, and as a reason to preserve the military’s role in civilian politics. Erdoğan’s great achievement has been to tame the generals and transfer their power to himself. His growing international influence has become a source of national pride but also a useful distraction from his own retreat from democratic accountability.

That neighborhood, though still difficult, has become a kind of portfolio: mediating between Russia and Ukraine, helping to see off the hostile Assad regime in Syria, even locking horns with Israel, albeit in a contest unlikely to draw blood. Turkey once boasted of having Nato’s second-largest army, though large cohorts of conscripts were kept busy whitewashing fences. Now it boasts of drones and a growing defense industry, driven in large part by Baykar, the company chaired by Erdoğan’s son-in-law.

Even so, Turkey has not entirely abandoned the dictum of the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: “Peace at home, peace in the world”— a principle that translates as “don’t mess with me and I won’t mess with you”. Turkey has the industrial and scientific base to be a nuclear power but has so far refrained from pursuing one. In the summer, it joined Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan in a mutual defense pact. Yet even after Houthi missile strikes on Riyadh in October, the government seems happier selling arms than sending troops into harm’s way.

When Erdoğan came to national prominence, the great divides in Turkish politics were between Left and Right, civilian and military. Erdoğan exposed a deeper fissure in Turkish society: the resentment of newly urban, pious and provincial Turks towards a Western-facing secular elite. The founding republican settlement subordinated religion to the state. The bureaucracy, courts and universities saw themselves as guardians of secularism, and the generals saw themselves as guardians-in-chief. The ban on devout women wearing headscarves at university became one of the grievances upon which Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) was founded in 2001.

“Erdoğan’s style is very similar to Trump’s,” says Daron Acemoğlu, the Istanbul-born economist and Nobel laureate. “The secular establishment in Turkey made the same mistakes as the liberal establishment in the US or the UK, but without any of its liberalism.” He argues that it’s impossible to understand the AKP without understanding the contempt that the secular establishment has traditionally shown towards conservative provincials. “Erdoğan is good at propaganda, but when he said ‘in this country there are white Turks and black Turks’, that wasn’t just made up.”

The headscarf may have been the most visible grievance, but the deeper one lay in people’s wallets. Erdoğan, running for the Welfare Party, the movement from which the AKP would later emerge, was boosted into the mayoralty by a collapse of the currency in January 1994, followed by an inflation rate of over 100%. An even worse economic crisis brought his newly formed party to national office in 2002. By sticking to an IMF program negotiated by its predecessors, the new government nursed the economy back to health. For the first time, ordinary families could get a credit card, or a loan to buy a house. In 2019, the six minarets of a vast new mosque appeared on Istanbul’s Bosphorus skyline, but shopping malls, highways and sprawling public housing estates became equally prominent symbols of AKP rule.

Yet the machine that built this loyalty is running out of fuel. The liberalization that marked the start of AKP rule in 2002 has long since come unstuck or else has been corrupted. Arguably, the great accomplishment of post-war Turkish politicians was to oversee the mass movement of people from the countryside into the big cities. But that movement also created social fault lines which, a few generations later, are set to shift again. Today’s voters want more than neighborhood-level favors. They aspire to the good life and opportunities once enjoyed by the old urban elite. They also know that to be successful you need to have the right political connections. The A in AKP stands for adalet or “justice”. For a growing number, that letter has gone missing.

That Erdoğan’s AKP fared so badly in the 2024 local elections — coming second with some 35% of the national vote, failing to win back Istanbul and Ankara, and losing a string of other big cities — is a symptom of that disillusionment. Panic that it was losing control is the driving force accelerating the government’s slide into unfettered autocracy. Hence the response to the recent discovery of a Ponzi-like scheme that has left some £13 billion of savers’ money in limbo, was to arrest the messengers. Five journalists were charged over their coverage of a scandal that extended up the ladder to AKP higher-ups. Accused of spreading false information, two are still in custody, joining 23 other journalists behind bars on assorted charges. Yet the fallout of the scandal is proving harder to contain, undermining even further the integrity of the government and eroding individual saving after sharp losses in other financial markets.

And the government still can’t arrest the price of tomatoes. “How happy is the one who says ‘I am a Turk’,” runs another much-quoted Atatürk maxim. But the all-too-common conversation among today’s struggling middle-class parents, throttled by inflation of around 30%, is how to build a life for their children abroad.

While the reforms after the 2001 crisis opened up a new world of consumer credit and mortgages, a disastrous macroeconomic experiment, pairing low interest rates with high inflation, has now left those managing the economy with only one real option: muddling through. The notion that people could put up with the AKP’s brand of autocratic piety because at least it could manage the economy is long gone. The cliché among Istanbul’s chattering classes had always been that, no matter how bad the economy, the restaurants were always full. “They’re not full anymore,” says Ekin Şahin, whose family is in the trade. “People need a handful of reasons to eat out. No one goes out on a whim.”

Just as New York Times leader writers struggled to explain how Trump was elected not once but twice, a large segment of the Turkish population despairs at what it sees as the cognitive dissonance of fellow citizens who still believe Erdoğan is leading the country in the right direction. Increasingly, however, loyalist support is being whittled away. More than half the electorate declined to back Erdoğan in the first round of the 2023 presidential election, and the 2024 local elections confirmed the drift. As in Trump’s America, loyalty is not inexhaustible. The AKP once sold its campaign for Islamic rights as part of a process of democratization. Whether or not that was ever the case, few believe it any more.

Erdoğan has proceeded methodically, transferring an already powerful state apparatus into his own hands. As mayor, he learned how public contracts could be used to build a base. He defanged the military through the high-profile “Ergenekon” trials of senior officers that began in 2008. He also sidelined senior figures in his own party who still regarded him as primus inter pares rather than top dog. The Gezi Park protests of 2013, a vast spontaneous protest to stop a central Istanbul park being turned into a shopping mall, taught him another lesson; he set about systematically capturing not just the legacy media but newly powerful social media too. The attempted coup of 2016 provided an opportunity to move against vocal opponents. The popular Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtaş was arrested — he remains in jail despite a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights — and the government set about dismantling a rival religious movement, and former ally, led by the exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen. A referendum in 2017 abolished the office of prime minister and completed the transfer of power to a virtually unchecked presidency.

Unlike Trump, Erdoğan has held sway for almost 25 years, long enough to fine-tune a system of censorship and repression. Control of the courts has allowed his government to upend the legal process and divide the opposition. This took on fresh momentum with the arrest in March 2025 of Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayor of Istanbul, days before he was to be anointed the opposition’s presidential candidate. He now faces charges across several indictments, including bribery, embezzlement, leading a criminal organization, espionage and insulting public officials, which together carry a notional sentence of some 2,400 years. Halk TV — a channel that supported the opposition — was put under the control of a court-appointed trustee as İmamoğlu’s defense in court was about to begin. There is now a long list of mayors and elected officials under threat. It remains to be seen whether the fate of his fellow mayors — over 30 are still in detention — will be raised by another great proponent of devolved government and former mayor, Andy Burnham at this week’s summit. The mayor of Antalya, the host city, is also in jail.

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Trump’s plan for Nato 3.0

By Lily Lynch

One explanation for this mounting insecurity is that even paranoiacs have enemies. But while the ruling party may have scored substantial successes in its kulturkampf with the old republican elite, it may now be losing the war. It is not so much that the other side is winning as that Erdogan’s politics of confrontation is wearing thin. Turkish social media hums with clips of schoolchildren, some still in headscarves from after-school Qur’an classes, singing and dancing along to Manifest, a girl band who have just played Wembley Arena after their sentences for obscene behavior at an Istanbul concert were suspended. Survey after survey shows that while the overwhelming majority of Turks identify as Muslim, most agree with Atatürk that religion should be a private affair. Erdoğan set out to mold a pious generation, but young Turks would prefer a decent job.

The possibility, then, is that Turkey is already entering a post-Erdoğan era, even with him firmly in control. As the old sources of popular loyalty weaken, the struggle within the ruling establishment may be less about governing Turkey than about controlling what comes next. One sign of a brewing succession war is that the revolution is now devouring its own. Where repression was once reserved for the regime’s opponents, pro-government pundits and well-connected business cronies are discovering that they, too, can be picked up. Former AKP mayors have been arrested in municipal corruption probes, while the Ponzi scandal has put a former deputy minister and the fund’s AKP-connected chief executive behind bars. These cases look less like a purge than a scramble for position among factions in the presidency, the prosecution service, the security apparatus and the business world. If so, Erdoğan may stay in power long enough to see his own accomplishments unravel.

Where, then, will change come from? Çomak, having given the state 30 years, is not waiting to find out. “I have changed. Life has changed,” he says. “But it cannot be said that there has been any fundamental change in the mentality of power.” Çomak sees little option but to plow his own furrow, to keep writing, and to enjoy the solidarity of a literary community that supported him in prison. He repeats Nietzsche’s old saw that what does not kill you makes you stronger. “Perhaps everyone should spend a month or two in prison,” he adds. “Then they would understand better that there is no room for hopelessness. Just don’t stay as long as I did.”

The new couple was able to spend the summer together, in relatively good spirits, road-tripping to different clinics to get second, third, and fourth opinions on George’s tumor, but George’s prognosis has not improved; they have not found a treatment that will meaningfully push back the horizon of death. They will get married with the unendurable awareness that they have only a few weeks or a few months together.

Elizabeth says that she was in denial this summer and so was George. They could let themselves think that pancreatic cancer was misdiagnosed as pancreatitis. They talked about having five kids together. They had a life in mind. They’ll be lucky to have five weeks, let alone five months.

I wanted to write about them, with their permission, because I think their kind of story is the most important in the world. The tendency of modern society is to remove death and suffering, leaving us unaware of the real stakes of living. But far from being consoling, this trick leaves us wracked with low-level anxiety, as we try to make the next day resemble the previous day and reduce minor sources of risk. Beyond that, the way we talk about each other now excludes any possibility of transcendental devotion, of opening oneself up to suffering and indeed to shame, finitude, and failures of all kinds.

More from this author

The end of deep friendship

By Matthew Gasda

Parallel to the development of my sister’s relationship with George, I developed a persistent depression that has caused me to question whether I want to be alive, and that has, in many ways, made me lose my joy in life. When George went into the hospital last month with sepsis after his stent became infected, his beautiful summer with my sister came to an end, along with their capacity for denial. My sister called home to my parents distraught, blaming herself, saying she should have pushed George to get invasive surgery earlier.

I was at home with my parents, attempting to enjoy a basketball game after a CBD gummy and a glass of wine, intentionally numb. My mom came downstairs, her voice cracked, describing the state Elizabeth was in. All I could feel was the same lassitude I’d felt for most of the past few months, and I recognized that there was something pathetic about the state I was in, even if I couldn’t force myself to change it, to change my brain. It was absurd to not be able to find joy in good health, in the prime of life. 

I had to go for a walk. Once I was outside my own emotions started to inflate, but mostly I saw George. I imagined George; I imagined being George, alone in a hospital bed in Ohio, trying to watch the Sixers-Cavs game that I was trying to watch in Pennsylvania. I was sedating myself intentionally; he was sedated by doctors.

On the walk, I called the woman I love and told her I loved her and started to cry, which is not something I’ve been able to do much of, and kept walking. While this didn’t cure me of my own bad feelings, my very, very deep anxieties, regrets, griefs, I could at least see a way through. I could feel something other than depression, because I saw for a moment through George’s eyes, not my own; I was able to open my eyes and breathe, without taking sight and breath for granted.

Internalizing George and Elizabeth’s situation showed me a glimpse of what I can only call universal truth: we die; love is the only real source of hope; everything is trivial; everything you think is unendurable or frightening is not, if it is not death itself.

All fall, I’ve been reading a book called Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives: The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, written by an Orthodox monk from Serbia who died in 2003. Father Thaddeus talks about rabbits playing in the grass and asks why people can’t be like that: natural, free-spirited, enjoying the sensation of being here. I think that’s a devastating idea.

“Do you have no idea how beautiful life is?” my sister texted me after George went into the hospital. “You have no idea.” My sister is closer to Father Thaddeus than I am, or than anyone I know, or you know, right now, closer to that pure awareness of the good, because she is living so close to death, in a state of mercy.

I think most of us know that something is wrong with the world, with our daily lives. We push death so far away that living at high intensity would be too painful, because it would remind us of our mortality. Yet what we want is for someone to be the guardian of our soul, the guardian of our mortality, to lie next to us, to be tender with us. We want to know our sins are forgiven. We want another rabbit to play in the grass with.

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On love and sacrifice

By Terry Eagleton

As cruel as it seems that George should be diagnosed with cancer on the day he met my sister, there’s another way of looking at it. He was already sick, and God sent my sister to George before his health broke down. Even without a medical miracle, they experienced a miracle: this radical faith and belonging together, this humble caring for each other.

There are other stories like this in the world, and tragedy is everywhere. The reason I wanted to share Elizabeth and George’s story is what it forced me to admit: I’m not so important, my suffering is not so important, what really matters is our capacity for mercy and sacrifice, operating from the trust that there is a reason for things, that, in the words of Romans 8:28, “all things work together for good to them that love God.”

Technological civilization is an illusion and living in the face of mortality, immanent or not, helps us break out of collective anhedonia and into the spirit of forgiveness; it helps us to surrender to God’s will. And we must do so, I think, before it is too late: before our lives pass by, numb, scared, and affectless. We do not have total control over nature, or over ourselves. We are still fragile, breakable, sinful, and so much modern sadness and alienation comes from human beings acting like autonomous agents that will simply be turned off like a phone that runs out of battery, rather than interdependent and mutually forgiving and graceful creatures with souls, who must accept one another, or destroy one another.

Love between individuals, face to face, really is the only thing that cuts through addiction, depression, poverty, loneliness, resignation, and regret. Love for its own sake is the last and only resort against the uncontrollability of the world and the uncontrollable cruelty of human beings when we form groups and tribes.

There is nothing that we cannot lose at any moment. George met my sister just in time to go through the most terrifying thing with someone who loves him. We who have our health might consider ourselves lucky, but no one is luckier than the man who has been brought close to God’s love.

Trump’s presidency has now entered its most dangerous phase. With little left to lose after an earth-shaking midterm wipeout, he is released from political restraint. He has accepted the result with apparent grace, dismissing the fact that the elections were a referendum on his presidency with the assertion that he was not on the ballot — an amusing claim, since he spent the campaign saying the opposite. The mood in the party is somber. The Florida governor Ron de Santis, mooted as a presidential candidate, has described the results as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans”. No doubt rightly, given its impact on prices at the pump, the vice-president JD Vance — also looking to his future — has averred “the reason we lost is the war”. They and many others are pointing the finger at Trump, but he may not care. 

In control of the House and Senate, the triumphant Democrats can launch as many legal challenges as they like. They can block legislation, launch investigations into his crimes and impeach him, but he retains the presidential veto, and the supreme master of the attention economy will not be out of the limelight for long. An adventure in Cuba would be a welcome distraction, and he may yet trigger a greater cataclysm in the Gulf. Trump’s second administration is the experimental refutation of liberal legalism. Post-Trump America is not a constitutional republic but an illiberal democracy, the triumph of politics and executive power over law and procedure.

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John Gray: liberal civilisation is finished

By John Gray

Those who believe Trump shares a mindset with the world’s leading tyrants are mistaken. Neither the Russian nor the Chinese leader displays his all-consuming narcissism. Putin is an archetypal creature of the Soviet system, a cold-eyed killer schooled in the art of survival. Xi is a suspicious autocrat possessed by the insecurity of his position. Putin’s aggression combines self-preservation — his own survival inseparable from that of his regime — with a neo-tsarist vision of a mystical “Russian realm” targeted for destruction by the West. Xi’s “Chinese dream” is the project of making China into the global hegemon and an unapologetic affirmation of Chinese civilization.  

Embodying nothing except his own emptiness and venality, Trump is the ideal dupe for these flinty tyrants. Possibly he fears Putin as the possessor of kompromat of some sort — there must be many possibilities — and he has certainly done business with the regime. But if Trump is behaving like a Russian asset, it is not because he was recruited as a Manchurian candidate in Moscow 40 years ago. Putin never expected Trump to become president (any more than Trump did himself) and seems to view him with bemused contempt. Trump sees the Russian dictator through the lens of his ideal self-image as strongman and admires him as a model of how to use state power to accumulate personal wealth. 

Those who speak of the Putinisation of America can point to undeniable parallels. Putin is a master of vranyo, the Bolshevik practice of telling lies that both speaker and audience know perfectly well are falsehoods — as when he denied that the “little green men” invading Crimea in 2014 were Russian troops. The goal is not persuasion but domination: by imposing a narrative that is transparently false, the very idea of a domain of facts independent of power is undermined. With his incoherent boasting — claiming to have “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability, then justifying a resumption of the war to destroy it — Trump also asserts power over facts. The difference is that Putin knows he is lying, whereas in Trump’s moment-by-moment solipsism, truth has no meaning.

For his critics, Trump is the kingpin of a Putin-style kleptocracy. It is true that his second administration has seen the presidency monetized to an unprecedented degree. Diplomacy has become a rent-seeking family business. Insider trading has been normalized. In August of this year, the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) launched a premier data feed allowing Wall Street banks and high-frequency trading firms access to his market-moving Truth Social posts milliseconds before they become available to the public, with subscribers paying a hundred thousand dollars a month for the service. 

By the time they leave office, Trump, his family and acolytes will have amassed immense riches. Likewise, Putin’s extraction of capital from Russia’s economy has, by some estimates, made him richer than Elon Musk. Yet wealth and government interact differently in Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America. Under Trump, the US is ruled by a variant of capitalism in which the state is used as a means of corporate enrichment at the expense of America’s strategic interests. In Russia’s version of state capitalism, corporate influence is curbed when it threatens the state itself. The same is true in China.

When Russia’s richest oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, became involved in opposition politics and negotiations to sell part of his oil company, Yukos, to American firms, he was arrested at gunpoint on his private jet, sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian penal colony and Yukos bankrupted. When the CEO of the Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, criticized China’s financial regulators, he was taken out of circulation and his business empire dismantled. In contrast, the Trump administration authorized the export of high-end computer chips of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia for export to China. During Xi’s visit to Washington, Trump bent the knee in more than one sense. He reportedly pitched the Chinese leader regarding purchases of American military technology, violating decades-long commitments to Taiwan and other allies. He prioritized corporate gain over national security and America’s standing in the world.

Trump’s “transactional” diplomacy consists of the exchange of American power for promises of private gain. The settlement of the Ukraine war being brokered by Trump’s special envoys, his son in law, Jared Kushner, and the real estate investor Steve Witfkoff, follows this playbook. A multibillion-dollar deal to acquire the international holdings of Lukoil, Russia’s largest remaining private oil company, has apparently been discussed, along with reopening the Nord Stream pipeline, blown up in September 2022. Elon Musk’s Space X — on Trump’s instructions, according to Musk — imposed speed limits on Starshield, which allowed Ukraine to intercept Russian drone and missile attacks. Sanctions have been paused, and Trump has called more than once for Zelensky’s removal. 

Trump’s aim is full-scale economic détente with Russia, which he believes will realize large profits for him and his coterie. Very likely he and they will benefit, but there is something spectral about the fabulous wealth envisioned in these sordid machinations. Why should Putin respect the terms of any deal? The “energy ceasefire” Trump believed he had agreed with him was flouted within hours. Much of Trump’s chicanery is based on fantasies — the reverse of realpolitik. If Ukraine is being sold out, it may be for next to nothing. 

Lured by dreams of financial gain, Trump has torn up whatever remained of an American-led “rules-based” order. This is more than the much-discussed passing of a unipolar order. American power is imploding, with the post-Cold-War leviathan now a floundering, flailing behemoth. Rather than an “unreliable friend”, the US seems closer to the enemies of the countries that depended on it for their security. Yet there can be no assurance that America’s new strategic partners will keep their end of the deal. When they met in St Petersburg in October, Witkoff praised Putin as a “humanitarian” for releasing an American prisoner captured in eastern Ukraine in April 2022. Such a toadying eulogy may be understandable. For the US, Yalta 2.0 may yield little more than the prisoner’s release. The presumed exchange is that Russia ends its support for Iran while the US forces Ukraine to surrender; but America has no way of ensuring Russia’s compliance, let alone that of China or Iran.

The Iran debacle itself began with a whim that set in motion a fateful escalation. The illusory prospect of another Venezuela-style coup, semi-magical in its flawless operational execution, was irresistible. What Trump described in March as “a little excursion” has been a forced march to strategic defeat. The result of decapitating the Iranian leadership has been to install a military dictatorship more repressive than the decaying theocracy it replaced. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has become a permanent threat to the Strait of Hormuz. The pre-war status quo, in which it was an open international waterway, is irrecoverable. 

This was not unforeseen. Similar bombing campaigns have been war-gamed many times, with similar results. As Barbara Tuchman showed in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984), history is not so much a catalog of error as a succession of follies whose consequences can be known in advance. 

However the war develops, America has forfeited its position in the Middle East. Over the past months, its bases in the Gulf and Iraq have been disabled and its armories depleted. Tens of billions of dollars have been expended using costly missiles against cheaper and more quickly replaceable drones. Iran’s partner in the “Axis of Resistance”, the Houthis have turned another vital waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, into a high-risk corridor, while launching a deadly wave of strikes on Saudi airports and refineries.The Gulf monarchies are constructs of European colonialism propped up by American security guarantees that have proved effectively worthless. It cannot be long before regime change comes to the Kingdom, weakened by festering rivalries within the House of Saud since Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz Carlton coup in November 2017. How could the debt-laden US withstand the collapse of the petrodollar, which channeled Saudi oil revenues into an AI-led stock market bubble already showing signs of bursting? 

Another “short, intensive” bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear and energy facilities, which seemed to be prefigured in the “limited” American strikes on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz early this week, would only postpone a further American retreat. Trump’s curtailing aid to Israel has been seen as reducing the likelihood of a resumption of the war. But Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump may still think they can “finish the job”.  

Iran’s economy is being slowly strangled by the American naval embargo that is blocking its seaborne oil exports. Yet the regime retains the capacity to devastate the Gulf’s energy production, causing acute shortages of diesel — the fuel on which the global economy runs — and irreplaceable agricultural chemicals. Undersea cables and data centers could also be attacked. The true Iranian nuclear option is disabling water and desalination plants. Weaponizing its geography, with its mountainous streams, inland rivers and lakes, Iran could wreak an enormous civilian catastrophe in the desert kingdoms of its Gulf enemies. 

At a global level, a species of total war is already underway. In the delirium of the Western mind, Gaza has been singled out as a unique catastrophe, but the reach of the battlefield into civilian life is practically universal. In Ukraine, Putin’s relentless bombardment destroys schools and scientific academies and cuts off electricity and water, aiming to render Kyiv uninhabitable and drive out millions of desperate refugees. Across Europe, Russia is orchestrating assassination, arson and cyber-strikes, together with drone strikes that could easily spiral into mass casualty events.  

The Baltic and Nordic states have fortified their defenses, but most European countries seem paralyzed. Poland — the most militarily prepared — is in the throes of constitutional crisis. Emmanuel Macron’s technocratic centrism has reached its endgame. Teetering on the edge of default, the Fifth Republic is rehearsing the upheaval that will come when Marine Le Pen enters the Élysée Palace — as must now be likely — and Jean-Luc Mélenchon mobilizes an insurrection against her. “Cost-of living” rioting and looting has spread to Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland and Albania, among other countries. It is hard to envision the French banlieues and AfD strongholds in former East Germany accepting the cost of deploying European troops indefinitely in Ukraine. Nor is it clear that Europe could afford to forgo the billions of euros’ worth of oil and gas it buys from Russia (which help Putin fund the war). A European solution is a mirage, and for all the heroic resourcefulness of its struggle, Ukraine cannot go it alone. Unless Zelensky’s supporters in Washington can somehow tie Trump’s hands, the logic of the situation is a brutal partition.

In America, Trump’s rise was a by-product of the neo-liberal cult of globalization. It was not simply an increase in inequality that stoked “populist” revolt. Whole sections of society were denied any productive role. Capital was exported and manufacturing offshored, labor imported and communities abandoned. With their workless families, drug habits and short lives, the human detritus of American industry could be safely left to molder on their reservations. Yet post-industrial decline has now affected much of the middle class. Occupations and career structures have melted into air. Neoliberal economics was the enterprise of re-engineering capitalism without a bourgeoisie, and the hollowing out of middle-class life has continued under Trump’s corporate kleptocracy. There was bound to be a countermovement from the Left. New York mayor Zohran Mandami’s “democratic socialism” is not a movement of organized labor. Like Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zack Polanski’s movements, it is a bourgeois populism, varnishing the status anxieties of heavily-indebted graduates and downwardly-mobile professionals with high-rent progressive causes. Incubated in campus seminaries of anti-Western orthodoxy, Mamdani’s leftism is set to be a deciding force in Democratic politics. 

A sea change is underway in the Republicans as well. As he limbers up for a presidential campaign in 2028, JD Vance is cultivating the same nativist constituency that is the audience of Tucker Carlson — aside from Trump, America’s most accomplished demagogue. A devil’s brew of anti-Semitism, historical revisionism and conspiracy theory is shaping up as the ruling ideology of the MAGA Right. As in Europe, the old center ground no longer exists. 

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Where is Trump’s heir?

By B. Duncan Moench

The midterm clean sweep was a repudiation of Trump more than an endorsement of the Democrats. The winners included Dr Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan, US Senate) and Dr Abdul Hamawy (New Jersey, US House), Egyptian-born Muslims closely aligned with the progressive wing of the Democrats who campaigned strongly against the war. Foreign policy positions that used to be bipartisan are being questioned and rejected in both parties. Europeans who are still invested in the notion that the Trump era is an unfortunate anomaly would be wise to think again. Nothing is further from reality than a reversion to Nikki Haley-style interventionism. It is not fantastical to see the US becoming the first advanced post-Western state and joining Russia in a China-led Eurasian bloc. 

That does not mean such a concert of powers would be stable. If a trilateral summit between Xi, Putin and Trump is held at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Shenzhen scheduled for later this month, their exchanges may well come to nothing. In some ways this looks less like February 1945 and more like the run-up to August 1914. Now as then, great powers are engaged in wars for control of natural resources against a background of tangled and shifting alliances. With multiple players and no one in charge, miscalculation by any of them could bring disaster on all. 

Another future is possible, however. Rather than drifting towards another Great War, we may be entering an era of peace. A curious kind of peace, to be sure, accompanied by unending bloodshed. Proxy wars and urban terrorism will rage unabated. War and peace will, in effect, be one and the same. The West will cease to exist as a geopolitical or civilizational bloc. But joining forces with its adversaries will fuel another stock market boom, and what neo-Marxian theorists fondly call “late capitalism” will enjoy a new lease of life. Having used the neoliberal interlude to build a mercantilist juggernaut, China will re-establish globalization in a dirigiste form that entrenches its economic primacy, with Russia exploited as a vassal state. A certain equilibrium will prevail, underpinned by the shared interests of transnational ruling classes.

Then again, none of this may come to pass. The future may not be advancing authoritarianism but accelerating disintegration. If Taiwan is not easily absorbed, Xi’s autocracy may be overthrown, and China could revert to disunity of a kind recurrent in its history. Putin might be toppled by war-weary oligarchs, only to be replaced by a more extreme anti-Western despot ruling a nuclear-armed Muscovy surrounded by breakaway fiefdoms. The United States may fragment, with enclaves of anarchic high-tech vitality booming alongside wastelands of poverty and desolation, presided over by an enfeebled federal government.

But of one thing we can be certain. Donald Trump has brought Western hegemony to a close. A world-historical figure as much as Napoleon or Mao, the founder of MAGA has ushered in a post-American age.

It’s not immediately clear why Beijing has given Charlotte Brontë’s classic such prominence in the classroom. Thankfully, the West’s top China watchers are on the case. If you’ve read the spate of recent articles from Western media outlets concerning Jane Eyre in China — articles in which there’s been much white-knuckled pearl clutching over China’s “compulsory curriculum” (The Times), “mandatory reading list” (CNN), and other histrionic synonyms for, well, a middle-school syllabus — you’ll find one explanation repeated ad nauseaum. The Ministry for Education has, so we’re told, assigned the didactic, pro-family Jane Eyre as a last-ditch effort to reverse China’s precipitous population decline. As the Economist puts it: “The independent-minded heroine, Ms Eyre, who rejects two proposals before ultimately marrying and bearing a son, has a thing or two to teach young Chinese, the Communist Party thinks.”

To be sure, Chinese officials are wary of the looming demographic crisis. As of this year, marriages have hit a decade-long low; birth rates an all-time low; and China expects a population decline of 250 million by 2050. But even if the nomenklatura did imagine that a 19th-century English novel was the way to win young Chinese hearts and minds to baby-making, Jane Eyre would be a strange choice. For one, the novel just doesn’t really seem to care about Jane’s maternity; Jane’s son, whom Brontë never bothers to name, exists by virtue of a single subordinate clause tossed off in the middle of the book. Our author devotes twice as many words to describing the embroidered chaises of Thornfield Hall as she does to Rochester Junior. Second, Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice enjoy similarly storied literary reputations in China; and the orphaned children, Christian ascetics, and wife in the attic that make Brontë’s novel such an unlikely candidate for the transmission of stolid family values are conspicuously absent in the other two novels. If the Ministry for Education really wanted to assign a conservative-minded English classic, why wouldn’t they have gone with Jane’s more presentable cousins?

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When one turns from CNN to the Chinese sources, however, a much clearer picture emerges of Jane Eyre’s actual purpose in the classroom. Anyone expecting Brontë to be filtered through dense layers of Marxist-Leninist propaganda and Xi Jinping Thought, however, will be sorely disappointed. According to the Beijing Daily article which announced the updated curriculum, the novel will be taught in a course module on “Maturity”, which takes a fairly orthodox view on Jane Eyre’s key themes: “[Jane Eyre] recognized that love ought to be founded upon the basis of spiritual equality, rather than wealth, social status, or outward appearance.”

For the Chinese government, then, the point of teaching Jane Eyre isn’t to promote biological reproduction, but true love. I realize that, at first pass, the notion of faceless Communist Party bureaucrats spreading romantic ideals among the youth sounds absurd. However, Beijing’s pedagogical intervention makes perfect sense when seen against the backdrop of the gender wars raging everywhere in contemporary Chinese society.

Like pretty much everywhere else in the world, gender relations in China are in complete free-fall. We’re all too familiar in the West with developments like the manosphere, tradwives, looksmaxxing, incels, cucks, chads, etc; recent Chinese history has seen the emergence of similar controversies, coded dogwhistles, and ultra-extremist ideological factions along gendered fault lines. One key moment was the April 2024 suicide of Fat Cat (胖猫), the online alias of Liu Jie, who jumped off a bridge following a breakup. In the aftermath, his girlfriend became the target of a concerted nationwide witch hunt led by Chinese incels on the assumption she was a 捞女 / lāo nǚ, or gold digger. Meanwhile, a terminally online subset of “feminist eugenicists” have developed what they term “uterine morality”, or a refusal to settle for “ugly, poor, sick, and abusive men” in an effort to secure the best possible genetic material for their offspring. This January, China’s Ministry of State Security even issued a communiqué framing 性别对立 / xìngbié duìlì or “gender antagonism” as a threat to national security. It’s this toxic mire of gender politics that Chinese teenagers will have to negotiate in order to date, marry, and have children; a plight that makes even the wildest of Rochester’s indiscretions seem tame by comparison.

Contemporary China has left behind what was arguably the central achievement of the Mao era: economic parity between men and women. Following socialist collectivization, Chinese society became highly egalitarian, with the percentage of women working outside the home hitting roughly 90% in urban areas by the Seventies. With women entering the workforce en masse, the state took on the role of performing domestic labor, investing heavily in free childcare centers, collective kitchens, and other welfare programs. The state meanwhile suppressed the development of feminism outside of the proscribed boundaries; as China scholars Angela Xiao Wu and Yige Dong argue, the state’s firm control of “women’s work” reduced femininity to economic categories. Popular representations of women were accordingly non-sexualized, and to some extent androgynous, emphasizing their class identities as proletarians and farmers.

China’s socialist era ended with Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist reforms, whereupon the state abandoned its commitment to egalitarianism for the full-throated pursuit of economic development. As privatization shuttered the state-funded public daycares and kitchens, domestic labor was relegated back to the domain of the family — in practice, back to women. These developments were part of a broader retrenchment of traditional gender norms in the Deng era. The Puritanism of Mao’s China was submerged under a tidal wave of (at the time) risqué advertisements, television shows, and eventually, digital media, as an emerging consumer culture found a natural ally in sex appeal.

While Deng’s reforms generated rapid economic growth, they also intensified class stratification. By the Eighties, socialist egalitarianism was fading; as Wu and Dong write: “against the spectacular rise of wealthy elites and a massive middle-class were forty million laid-off state workers and more than 200 million migrant laborers”. Chinese citizens could stomach the decidedly unsocialist existence of an ultra-rich class so long as everybody else’s living standards went up, too. But this is no longer the case. Youth unemployment in 2026 hit a record high, while precarious gig work is rapidly replacing full-time employment. And with China’s broader economic slowdown showing no signs of abating, there seem to be few options available to check a rising tide of class resentment. This neoliberal precarity is one of the structural problems behind today’s gender crisis.

While most Western readers can easily relate to issues like youth unemployment and class resentment, there’s another problem at work that’s unique to the Chinese situation: a “marriage squeeze” resulting from a dangerously lopsided gender ratio. This is one of the unintended consequences of the government’s laws on family planning. When the one-child policy was implemented in the Eighties, many couples practiced sex-selective abortions to ensure they had sons, given the traditional preference for a male heir. As a result, there are 24.7 million more Chinese men than women, a surplus greater than the population of Florida.

To combine years of neoliberal precarity with a radical gender imbalance would destabilize marriage rates in any country. However, in China’s specific cultural context, the confluence of these two structural factors have created a marriage market that’s nothing short of apocalyptic. These two factors come to a head in the widespread custom of bride price, or 彩礼 / cǎilǐ , a prerequisite step to marriage where the groom’s side of the family must make a payment to the bride’s. From a traditional Chinese perspective, because the bride was considered exclusively a member of her husband’s family, cǎilǐ was paid as ritual compensation to the bride’s family for having “given away” their daughter. Historically, this took the form of tea, jewelry, or deer hides and for most of modern China, bride price was seen as a quaint formality. However, escalated competition over marriageable women has now resulted in a textbook case of supply and demand. Twenty years ago, the average bride price hovered around 10,000 to 20,000 RMB (~$1,500 – $3,000). It has since skyrocketed to around 140,000 RMB (~$21,000) in 2021, a crippling economic burden, especially for rural, low-income households.

Even under ideal economic circumstances, the surge in bride price would have presented a serious financial barrier to would-be grooms. China’s fiscal downturn has made scrounging together the funds more difficult — and the situation is made even worse by the particular cultural dynamics at work when two families come together to negotiate cǎilǐ. In a perverse twist, the poorer the groom, the higher the expected bride price, and vice versa. The logic here is that if the bride’s family feels uncertain about the groom’s financial prospects, they’ll hedge their bets by setting a higher cǎilǐ, which then acts as a kind of surety for the bride’s future. 

In a culture where remaining single and childless carries a heavy stigma, the romantic prospects for the less fortunate among China’s 25 million surplus men are, to put it mildly, bleak. Frustration is boiling over in the nascent Chinese manosphere. Echoing a widespread view, one popular post on WeChat ties the rise in bride price to feminism: “I was born in the 1980s. When I got married, there was no bride price […] Now feminism has even brainwashed some women born in the 1970s into thinking they’re ‘goddesses.’ Policies to boost childbirth are useless. Why not crack down on feminism instead?”

The language of anti-feminist reaction merges with pre-existing chauvinistic rhetoric. “Feminists are anti-family, anti-Han race and anti-state,” imputes one aggrieved commentator. Thus, parallel to the red-pill rhetoric of Western incels, a vocal minority of Chinese men are framing themselves as victims of an international feminist conspiracy. Some of these anti-feminists have even taken to attacking married men; by paying cǎilǐ, so the argument goes, successful grooms undermine “the collective male effort to lower the ‘cost’ of marriage”, making them traitors to their gender.

Meanwhile, Chinese feminism has also developed in response to the destabilized marriage market. Recall that the defunding of socialist institutions for childcare and housekeeping pushed these obligations back onto the family unit, increasing the pressure on women to re-adopt traditional roles as homemakers. In response to these institutionalized values, one strand of Chinese feminism advocates malicious compliance: “entrepreneurial” feminists attempt to leverage their attractiveness to maximize bride price returns on the marriage market. One such entrepreneurial feminist known online as Ayawawa became infamous for her “PU-MV” equation; according to this heuristic, Chinese women ought to balance a high MV, or “mating value” (sexual attractiveness) with a low PU, or “paternity uncertainty” (alleviating masculine concerns of infidelity by appearing chaste, innocent, virtuous, etc.). 

Then there’s the other branch of contemporary Chinese feminism: the “non-cooperative” feminists, who join the chorus of victimized men in their outright rejection of the marriage market: “No kids, no ring, keep living serene” is their go-to slogan. Instead of relying on well-matched grooms to provide economic security, these feminists take the path of Western girlbosses in striving to secure financial independence via their own careers. Mirroring their counterparts in the manosphere, the extremely online “zero-compromise” feminists decry married women as “love-brained”, “precious wives”, and “marriage donkeys”.

Any hope of reconciliation under present circumstances seems well nigh impossible. For a generation of red-pilled men whose ideals of masculinity are still based on “economic success and possession of female sexuality”, confronting the sexually unavailable, financially independent grouping of non-cooperative feminists would amount to a double emasculation. Meanwhile, the utilitarian mindset of entrepreneurial feminism would appear to confirm the manosphere’s most paranoid fantasies about gold-digging wives. As for the few Chinese couples who do end up tying the knot, marriage nowadays is no longer seen as the fulfillment of romantic love, but as a byproduct of rational economic calculation. As things stand, further rounds of acrimony and radicalization are inevitable.

If only due to its destabilizing knock-on effects on marriage, childbirth, and general political stability, the gender wars have come under increasing scrutiny from Chinese officials. At first glance, though, the recent government actions taken on this issue seem haphazard. The CCP has led a (spectacularly unsuccessful) effort to crack down on bride prices even while it enshrines cǎilǐ into law as the bride’s premarital property. And keywords such as “extreme feminism” are censored online even while the Supreme People’s Court rules in favor of the female plaintiff in a landmark case on engagement rape, enraging the manosphere. 

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Yet from a wider perspective, a consistent pattern does emerge. For the manosphere, soaring bride prices are due to unchecked greed of gold-digging feminists — not the result of family planning policies or China’s neoliberal turn. Similarly, for many contemporary feminists, women’s aspirations for economic independence can only be achieved through individual action: either by gaming the marriage market (if you’re an entrepreneurial feminist), or by focusing solely on one’s own career (if you’re the non-cooperative sort). The exclusive focus on the individual action of economic agents, on the grindset, ignores the conscious dismantling of Mao-era collective institutions which forced women back into performing domestic labor in the first place.

How does Jane Eyre fit into all this? What may have seemed like the height of idealism is, properly understood, a fairly cynical ploy. In treating Brontë’s novel as a sermon on the transcendent value of love (“only when two people truly love one another can they achieve true happiness,” quoth Beijing Daily), it becomes another avenue to direct frustration about social ills away from the decisions of policymakers, and into the safely apolitical domain of interpersonal relationships. Schoolboys otherwise in danger of becoming “red-pilled” may learn from the lesson of Rochester, who finds his beloved in Jane regardless of his looks or finances. And as China’s schoolgirls follow Jane’s repeated repudiations of earthly wealth for the higher affairs of heart and mind, they’ll be less inclined to countenance the economic focus of non-cooperative feminism. The story of Jane and Rochester, then, will act as a gentle corrective to the radicalizing tendencies of both the manosphere and Chinese feminism — a balm which nonetheless serves the very same ends of occluding a structural critique. Because so long as netizens are busy talking about gold diggers and gender traitors — or, indeed, waxing poetic about true love — they won’t be talking about high-level policy decisions that led to the broken marriage market, or the changes that would need to happen to fix it.

Some early viewers have been offended by the movie’s “cool, jokey complacency”. The jokes come mostly “at the expense of the myriad political victims of America’s relentless interventionist politics”. Certainly, for those used to the paranoid thrillers from the Seventies like The Parallax View (1974) or The Domino Principle (1977),  which sought to lay bare America’s secret history, McDonagh’s flip, caustic tone seems a deliberate affront. In place of Deep Throat’s gravelly sotto voce in an underground garage, we have a spook laughing about messing up other people’s countries while on a mini-break.

McDonagh, in having Chris spill secrets from his bar stool, deliberately upends the conventions of the great conspiracy thrillers of the Seventies, which depended on the scarcity of disclosure. Their climaxes usually came with a congressional inquiry or a newspaper scoop: Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) ends with Robert Redford’s CIA bookworm on the pavement outside the New York Times, having handed over the story. All the President’s Men (1974) ends with a fusillade of teletyping. To adapt the old Watergate maxim, crimes require a cover-up to register as crimes — and a heroic press to unmask them.

Fifty years on, the secrets are out. Or rather, the secrets are content. Conspiracy theories are the raw material of some of the most popular podcasts and YouTube channels in the world, and they are regularly spouted from the presidential podium. Meanwhile the actual record has never been more available: WikiLeaks cables, Edward Snowden’s slides, and tens of thousands of pages of JFK files declassified by presidential order. There is, if anything, too much of it. Revelation no longer registers, in the same way that Trump’s malfeasance barely registers, because he is so open about it. Asked in January why he was allowing so much conflict of interest, he said plainly: “because I found out that nobody cared.” Why bother with the cover-up?

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Why liberalism triggers conspiracy panics

By Thomas Peermohamed Lambert

The flourishing of American paranoia in the Seventies took its cue from Richard Hofstadter’s seminal essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, first published in November 1964. For Hofstadter, this political approach was used by everyone from John Robison to Joe McCarthy, waving his lists around frantically in hearings. It was pedantic, mock-scholarly, piling up documents and footnotes, then leaping from real facts to a fantastic conclusion: usually the unmasking of the hidden enemy set on destroying American civilization. For all the implausibility of, say, Hollywood being a hotbed of Soviet sleeper agents, the paranoid worldview ends up more coherent than reality, because it leaves no room for accident or ambiguity. Everything can, ultimately, be explained. The paranoiac is therefore a dramatist who has forgotten they are making it up.

If the style of Seventies paranoia cinema owes a lot to Hofstadter, it is Dick Cheney we must thank for much of the content. At a lunch with editors of the New York Times on 16 January 1975, President Ford was pressed on why anyone should trust the commission he had appointed 12 days earlier to investigate the CIA. The agency’s own internal record of its past operations — the so-called “Family Jewels” — held material, Ford said, that would “blacken the reputation of every President back to Harry Truman”.

“Like what?” asked one of the editors.

“Like assassination.”

When Ford’s commission duly reported that June, the assassinations weren’t in it. Cheney, the president’s 34-year-old deputy assistant, had gone through the draft with a pen, paying particular attention to the 86-page chapter on plots against foreign leaders. He inserted recommendations the commission had never voted on, deleted ones it had, and, where the commission had found CIA activities unlawful, recast them as merely exceeding statutory authority or as “improper”.

Cheney’s pen marked a bad day for American democracy but a great one for the country’s thriller writers. The reality of the CIA’s plots, even in the redacted form that appeared in the report of the Senate’s Church Committee that November, was a catalog of bungled kidnaps and assassination attempts, subcontracted to Mafia hoods, Cuban exiles and Corsican gunmen, and, cigars poisoned with botulinum.

It was enough, in the words of the report, to “strain the imagination” — and the gap between the redacted public record and the reality fed thriller writers and Hollywood screenwriters with the myth of CIA invincibility for 50 years, in everything from Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite (1975) to Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), which gave the CIA a starring role in Dallas, right up to the Bourne films, which have the CIA tracking a man across Europe in real time from a bank of screens in Langley.

When the agency’s darkest skeletons were finally declassified in June 2007, director Paul Greengrass printed out all 693 pages and gave them to the cast of The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) — in retrospect, maybe the last gasp of the paranoid style in American filmmaking. The movie’s Operation ‘Blackbriar’ was directly based on the illegal surveillance operations of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton which over two decades had secretly opened more than 200,000 letters passing between the United States and the Soviet Union as well as indexing some 300,000 Americans for being in the anti-war movement.

Today, believers don’t need official documents. Online, they can find thousands of fellow fantasists to back up their ideas and algorithms to amplify their most outlandish theories. The Covid pandemic proved a ferocious accelerant. Uncertainty about whether everyone else would follow the rules fed a more generalized distrust not of the “enemy above”, as Jesse Walker puts it in The United States of Paranoia (2013), but the “Enemy Within”: paranoia directed not at shadowy government agents, but at neighbors behind their picket fences and lawn sprinklers. As a Twilight Zone episode once had it, the monsters are on Maple street.

The circle of distrust narrows, but it never quite reaches the mirror. What the paranoiac fears most is not persecution but irrelevance. Better to be the object of a thousand plots than to discover that no one is thinking about you at all. That is Chris’s predicament in Wild Horse Nine. Malkovich plays him as an Angleton gone to seed, monologuing into a Dictaphone for a memoir to be published after his death, and blabbing state secrets to strangers to watch them react. He isn’t a whistleblower; he’s a man testing whether disclosure still has any voltage, and finding that it doesn’t.

This is the condition Hofstadter didn’t foresee: not that the paranoid style would turn apocalyptic, but that its apocalypses would become so commonplace as to be banal. The hero’s discovery is everyone else’s Tuesday. What’s left, when revelation is worthless, is loose-lipped farce. In HBO’s White House Plumbers (2023), the Watergate burglars, as played by Woody Harrelson and Justin Theroux, are bunglers straight out of Veep: they can barely get through a door. Chaos or conspiracy? How about both?

The idea that the federal government has the responsibility and the capacity to increase the rate of overall economic growth is relatively new. The United States grew from a collection of mostly agrarian ex-British colonies in the 1780s into the world’s dominant industrial and military power by the mid-20th century. But such growth was an accident, the incidental byproduct of policies promoted by various factions for their own short-term purposes. Industrialization to supplant imports was championed by American manufacturing interests that sought to corner the US home market for themselves. These interests successfully used tariffs to exclude manufactured imports from Britain and other industrial nations. Simultaneously, agrarian and mining interests sought the expansion of the borders, at the expense of indigenous Americans and countries like France, Spain, and Mexico. Employers and various economic interests that benefited from more workers or more consumers promoted mass immigration, which was limited mostly by law to white Europeans before the 1960s. American growth resulted from these various selfish projects, not a long-term master plan.

The possibility of endless economic growth itself came into question during the Great Depression. Underlying the early New Deal was the assumption that the most recent industrial revolution, based on automobility and electricity, had reached a plateau. Thinking that continued high growth was unrealistic, many New Dealers sought to focus on distribution of the gains from the existing industrial economy to the less-developed South and West through infrastructure investment, higher profits for farmers through government programs, and higher wages for the working class by means of unions and the minimum wage. FDR made this view clear in a famous address at the Commonwealth Club during his first campaign for president in 1932:  “Our industrial plant is built; the problem just now is whether under existing conditions it is not overbuilt…. A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, an organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help. The day of the great promoter or the financial Titan, to whom we granted anything if only he would build, or develop, is over…. The day of enlightened administration has come.” Many New Dealers feared that the country would lapse into repression and technological stagnation following the end of the mobilization for World War II.

Optimism about the prospects for permanent economic growth, guided by the government, grew after 1945. That confidence was accompanied by the mainstreaming during the war of statistical measurements: GNP (gross national product of national firms at home and abroad) and GDP (gross domestic product only).   

From the beginning, many economists have warned against the promotion of GNP or GDP growth rates as the focus of national economic policy. One of them was Simon Kuznets, who played a major role in the development of the system of national income accounts and pioneered the term GDP. As early as 1934, Kuznets told Congress that “the welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” Subsequently, he warned: “Goals for more growth should specify more growth of what and for what.”

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GDP not only ignores externalities, like the costs of pollution to society, but makes no distinction between bad and good economic activity. Car accidents can increase GDP by generating more income for emergency responders, hospitals, lawyers, and towing companies, for example. 

To complicate matters, GDP is calculated as productivity times employment, defined as hours of work. This means that in an economy with zero productivity growth, GDP can be increased in various undesirable ways: by increasing the number of workers in the labor market, for example,  by importing huge numbers of low-wage, uneducated immigrants; or by legalizing child labor; or abolishing Social Security and Medicare to force people to work until they die. Alternatively, you can increase work hours with the same workforce — making workers labor seven days a week with no holidays. In a country with zero workforce growth or work-hours growth, GDP can still rise solely as a result of productivity growth. A country with stagnant productivity growth but a ballooning workforce will be worse off over time than one with a stagnant workforce and growing productivity — but the two nations could share an identical GDP growth rate on paper.

These issues have not prevented politicians on both the Left and the Right from claiming that their policies will boost the overall rate of economic growth as measured by GDP. In the 1960s, many technocratic liberals associated with John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” were confident that finely tuned, so-called Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies could produce non-inflationary growth. In the 1960 election, the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, criticized the “growthmanship” of the Kennedy campaign and for neglecting public priorities other than growth.

The “stagflation” (combined stagnation and inflation) of the 1970s led to the adoption of new, non-Keynesian kinds of GDP-driven growthmanship by the mainstreams of both parties. Neoliberals of the Right and the Left, in their different fashions, both claimed that the market would generate greater growth if supply constraints were removed.

For Republican champions of “supply-side economics,” the chief constraint on growth was the supply of capital. The solution was to cut spending on the many and to cut taxes on the rich, who would invest their greater share of national income in growth-promoting private enterprise. But the shortage of capital for investment is a myth. In fact, there has been too much American and global investment capital in search of too few opportunities for high returns. The result of cutting taxes on the rich and corporations may have been the funding of genuinely beneficial new technologies, in some cases. But another result has been reckless gambling in assets, leading to a series of bubbles and crashes in stocks and real estate for the past three decades.  

Among Democrats, Left neoliberals of the Clinton-Obama school had their own version of supply-side economics, based on the false claim that the biggest constraint on American economic growth was a supposed shortage of crucial skills by Americans: “Learn to code!” This mistaken analysis led to two policies that harmed the American economy, while enriching two important Democratic constituencies: educators and Silicon Valley donors.  

Raising the number of young Americans herded into colleges and universities didn’t boost American productivity, and it ruined the lives of great numbers who found themselves doing jobs that didn’t require their expensive college degrees. But the overwhelmingly Democratic education industry cashed in.  

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Meanwhile, tech, finance, and other white-collar industries abused the myth of a skills shortage to justify importing foreign workers who, it was claimed, possessed those critical skills.  Silicon Valley became dependent on a pipeline of young, male workers from India, who weren’t, in fact, better educated than Americans — indeed, many were educated at American universities. But many were willing to work for relatively lower wages as indentured servants bound to US companies or Indian “body shops.” While importing (mostly) young Indians to replace American tech workers or undercut their wages, Silicon Valley simultaneously exported much tech production to low-wage, unfree labor forces in other countries, chiefly China, which combines the worst aspects of communist tyranny and capitalist exploitation.

The mythical skilled-labor shortages of neoliberal propaganda weren’t limited to high-tech industries. Dairy farmers, summer resort owners, hotel chains, trucking firms — all claimed that they couldn’t find Americans with the skills needed to work in their industries, when the truth is that they couldn’t find Americans willing to work for the low wages they were willing to pay in the degrading conditions they insisted upon. This massive, economy-wide “labor arbitrage” — the substitution of lower-wage workers for higher-wage workers with different legal rights or in different countries — was enabled and rationalized by the educational-failure hoax spread by Clinton-style Left neoliberals.

Between them, Reaganite Right-wing supply-side economics and Clintonite center-Left supply-side economics have deindustrialized the US economy to the benefit of China, Mexico, Vietnam, and other low-wage countries. Many of the promised “good jobs” in the tech sector have gone abroad to China or to Indian indentured servants on American soil, instead of to American citizen-workers of all races and class backgrounds. Working-class Americans mostly have jobs in the domestic service sector, where unionization and wage levels have been suppressed by mass immigration, mostly of poorly educated Latin Americans. Republican tax cuts for the rich, far from stimulating economic growth, have ballooned the federal debt and deficit — giving Right neoliberals an excuse to call for cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, instead of raising taxes.

Trump and Joe Biden both broke in important but limited ways with the bipartisan neoliberal consensus. In the Biden years, Democrats subordinated economic growth to “social justice” or “equity.” The centrist Democratic authors of the 2025 manifesto “Deciding to Win” found that between 2012 and 2024, the frequency of the word “growth” declined by 32% — while the frequency of “climate” increased by 150%, the term “environmental justice” by 333%, the term “equity” by 766%, and the term “LGBT/LGBTQI+” by 1,044%.

The logic of the Inflation Reduction Act was political, not economic. All sorts of giveaways could be provided to Democratic voters and donors in the name of promoting the “just transition” to a carbon-free economy based solely on “clean” (renewable) energy. Democratic donors who invested in wind and solar facilities got tax credits. Democratic nonprofit community groups were showered with money to fight climate change by paying people to weatherize buildings and the like. Upper-middle-class Democrats got tax credits for their electric cars and solar-powered heat pumps. Construction unions were promised jobs in the build-out of electrical transmission capabilities, wind farms, and so on.  

Racial minorities? Climate-change projects could require race-and-gender tokenism and funnel money to poor, disproportionately black and Hispanic communities. Feminism? Progressives warned that green construction jobs couldn’t be monopolized by those designated enemies of progressive Democrats: namely, white males. The new Rosie the Riveters, building windmills and soldering solar panels, would need publicly funded day-care for their children during work hours — a long-term feminist goal, given a coat of green paint like other progressive priorities.

On one issue, the Biden administration was ultra-neoliberal: immigration. Sacrificing low-wage American workers to the goal of importing future Democratic voters, the Biden administration unilaterally rewrote immigration law to vastly increase semi-legal immigration, while signaling that most illegal immigration would be tolerated. The result was a stampede from abroad to the US-Mexico border, creating a popular backlash that helped re-elect Trump in 2024.

The second Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, racially inflected and brutal as it has often been, has worked in creating tighter labor markets and higher wages in some sectors formerly dependent on a steady stream of foreign serfs. And in his second term, Trump has accelerated the reshoring of industry with inconsistent but sometimes effective tariffs.  With these exceptions, however, Trump policy mostly amounted to warmed-over Reagan-Bush-style Right neoliberalism: anti-tax, anti-regulation, and anti-labor.

At the beginning of Trump’s second term, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent exemplified “growthmanship” with his announcement of a “3-3-3” plan: 3% GDP growth, 3% budget deficits, and 3 million barrels of oil a day by 2028. But with higher taxes and defense-spending cuts ruled out by Bessent, the deficit-reduction goal could be reached only by massive — and thankfully politically impossible — cuts in spending on Medicaid and other middle-class and working-class earned benefits.

At least Bessent’s goal of boosting the GDP growth rate to 3% is more modest than candidate Jeb Bush’s promise in 2015 to boost GDP growth to 4% and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s claim in 2012 that unleashing the free market would cause the growth rate to skyrocket to 10% or even 15% a year. 

In the real world, the US economy has only grown on average by 3% since the 1950s. And mid-20th century growth was boosted by an expanding workforce. In 21st-century America, with a swelling share of retirees and political limits to immigration, most GDP growth must come from productivity gains.  

The problem is that productivity growth depends on unpredictable scientific and technological breakthroughs and their impact on the economy. As the economist Joseph Schumpeter and others have pointed out, technological innovation tends to come in bursts, driven by a transformative “general purpose technology” like the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, electricity, and computers. Governments can help only up to a point, by directly or indirectly subsidizing R&D and promoting the diffusion of new technologies.  

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America’s brain-rotting socialism debate

By Michael Lind

Artificial Intelligence may turn out to be a GPT that inaugurates a new age of prosperity — or it may not. Outside of information technology, most breakthroughs in the material world occurred generations ago. Nuclear energy, photovoltaic solar panels, and jet engines were all developed before 1960. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that between 2025 and 2035, the US economy will grow by only about 2.1% each year, the result of a mere 0.3% growth in the workforce combined with around 2% average productivity growth.  

But most of the growth is likely to be concentrated in a few high-tech software or manufacturing sectors — think self-driving cars and trucks — while most new jobs will be in occupations that can’t (yet) be automated or offshored in the nontraded domestic service sector — think nurses and caregivers for the elderly.  

Here is an opportunity for a new center Left — and perhaps a new center-Right. as well — to break decisively with both Right-wing tax-cut neoliberalism and centrist-liberal skill-shortage neoliberalism. In principle, there is nothing wrong with an economy in which labor-saving technology allows goods production, agriculture, transportation, and, in time, construction to be done by robots and computers, with humans working in “high touch” personal service jobs — as long as those service sector jobs pay good wages and have good benefits and good hours.  

We can debate what government policies are necessary to ensure that, say, nursing-aide jobs are middle-class jobs — “predistributive” measures like increased collective bargaining, or “redistributive” measures like after-tax subsidies to low-wage workers and their dependents.  Social conservatives who want to subsidize family caregivers at the expense of commercial or public care can take part in the debate. But except as annoying hecklers, free-market conservatives will have no part in our national conversation on how to share the gains of whatever growth there may be, for the simple reason that free-market dynamics, without some kind of government intervention, will never translate the profits of investors in self-driving cars into higher wages and guaranteed vacations for nursing aides. 

If there is a lesson from all of this, it may be that abstract long-term national economic growth shouldn’t be an object of public policy at all. Nobody, including academic economists and federal civil servants and Wall Street analysts, is smart enough to devise a plausible plan to grow GDP at this or that target rate. Most voters don’t know what GDP is and choose between the parties on other issues. In practice, growthmanship leads to promises that are quickly forgotten, like Bessent’s 3-3-3 plan, or to giveaways to partisan constituencies justified with the rhetoric of growth, like Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

It might be best to avoid the hubris of post-1945 growthmanship in all its forms and return to the tradition of focusing on particular opportunities or threats — knitting the country together with canals, railroads, or highways, using tariffs to replace British imports with American manufactured goods, replacing slavery with free labor, beating the Germans to the atomic bomb, developing computers, satellites, and rockets in the course of geopolitical competition with the Soviets — and then welcoming, or dealing with the unwanted consequences, of any growth that happens to be generated as a side effect.

The goal of “PPT” — still his official name as this goes to press, pre-appeal — is to stifle allegations of inappropriate sexual activity, some of it potentially criminal. PPT asserts that publication of this material by the Guardian and ITN will very likely trigger a suicide attempt in him, thereby causing devastation to his son. “The claimant contends that publication would expose him to a real and immediate risk of serious harm or death,” the judge was told, as if the man were running from the mafia rather than his own demons.

Understandably, most of the interest in this case pertains to the identity of the claimant and the precise nature of the complaints against him, but there are other revealing angles too. To my mind, one of these is the way that PPT pictures the state’s failure to quash a juicy story about him as equivalent to leaving razors lying around a psychiatric ward. A crucial part of his legal argument pertains to pre-existing problems (bipolar, a trauma background, “personality-related vulnerabilities”), a recent suicide attempt, and a current restraint under the Mental Health Act. Given this background, lawyers acting on behalf of PPT argue that the state has responsibility for his welfare, and that curbing press freedom is a way of exercising this duty of care. Nothing other than stopping the media can save him from himself, apparently, not even hospitalization and appropriate psychiatric treatment.

Ultimately, the judge disagreed that PPT’s suicide was inevitable in the circumstances. Ironically, he did so on the grounds that the man was so miserable, he probably couldn’t see straight: “His prediction of his own future conduct is made in the context of depressive illness, hopelessness and catastrophic thinking … it is not a reliable basis for concluding that no future treatment or intervention could alter that risk.” This presents quite the dilemma for any litigants tempted along a similar path. Emphasize your intense mental disarray, and it will follow that you are an unreliable narrator of impending self-destruction. Play that aspect down, and it will no longer appear that the state has any enhanced duty to protect you. 

This catch-22 speaks to a tension lurking within PPT’s arguments, as the judge presumably noticed. The claimant wanted the court to believe he had sufficient mental capacity to anticipate what he was going to do later, should publication go ahead; yet he also seemed to think that suicide was almost certain, as if rationality had nothing to do with it. At times, in the judge’s retelling, PPT appeared to picture his own mind as completely on automatic, with no space for spontaneous reasoning to get a grip. Show the greyhound the moving rabbit, and it will automatically chase it. Show the celebrity the newspaper scandal, and he will automatically end his life.

A more mundane, less tortuous interpretation of what is really going on here beckons, though the judge avoids naming it. In a covert sort of way, isn’t PPT just threatening to kill himself, if publication were to go ahead? Turning to the world of children’s literature for a completely random example, isn’t this just a much more hyperbolic version of the Violet Elizabeth Bott gambit: “I’ll thcream and thcream ’till I’m thick”? I suppose you could interpret Violet as simply describing a dispassionate hunch about what is likely to happen to her body, should she fail to get her way with William, but it seems more apt to say she is making a threat.

When it comes to talking about our own futures, we are rarely just dispassionate forecasters of certain bodily movements, given such-and-such prior causes. We have agency; we plan; we execute. If I announce that I am going to a party, it is an expression of commitment to that project, not an educated guess. If I don’t end up attending, it is not that my prediction failed due to inadequate evidence; I just changed my mind. To think of humans as black boxes, mechanically producing outputs in response to earlier inputs, is an attitude you can only really take to other people (and even then, not for long). As soon as you start to think about what you yourself are going to do, ardent desires, fears, hopes, and so forth start to bear upon the question from the inside.

I assume that part of what lured PPT’s team into ignoring this basic observation is that suicide is so often treated as something that overcomes you, rather than something you actively do. It hasn’t always been this way. For as long as the Christian taboo against suicide was still strong, successive societies could frame the effort to end one’s life both as an intentional choice and a bad piece of personal judgment. To prevent someone doing it was a way of saving his body — and perhaps his soul too. But once we lost the confidence to criticize the act on those traditional grounds, the only remaining option for justifying intervention seemed to be the conclusion that suicide was really no choice at all. These days, we default to the idea that it is a desperate and irrational act, born of mental illness, picturing the urge to do it as an abnormal interloping presence in someone’s mind. Only occasionally will we allow that someone might attempt it for reasons that are not radically disordered — and in that case, there will be those that seamlessly move from trying to stop you, to offering to help finish the job. Assisted death services are a case in point.

This narrative, that a suicide is rarely a genuine choice, makes a lot of grieving relatives feel better, and I can see why; it is hard to accept that a loved one decided to leave you. And in many, perhaps most cases, the person concerned did not decide; suicides took place in extreme states of agitation, paranoia, or psychosis. But it is one thing to consider a particular case sympathetically, and acknowledge that it looks like the ordinary requirements for rational choice were absent there. It is quite another to present the seductive idea that some mental illness or condition generally “causes” suicide, with scant room for individual agency and varying circumstances in the backstory too.

Increasingly, we hear this sort of thing. Large-scale studies correlate autism, or bipolar disorder, or gender dysphoria, or whatever it is, with a significantly increased risk of suicide. On the basis of such studies, authorities who should know better talk as if the particular mental condition in question is highly likely to directly produce the act. Sufferers receive the message that they are unusually prone to self-harm; a thought which can itself produce frightening emotions, and so put the idea more forcefully and apparently inevitably into their heads. This is not supposed to be a complete explanation of any given suicide either, but it is a baleful possible influence too often ignored.

And another problem with glib causal explanations of suicidal tendencies is that they offer cover for manipulative creeps. They allow wrongdoers to pretend to the world, and even perhaps to themselves, that some undeserved psychic pathology is aggressing them, rather than, say, appropriate feelings of shame or guilt. They can tell themselves that, thanks to the mental illness that allegedly puts them in danger, they are owed sympathy and care from others rather than disapproval; perhaps even that they are victims too. Whether any of this applies to PPT remains to be seen. But if the newly incarcerated Russell Brand conveniently brings up his bipolar and ADHD diagnosis in the next few days, I won’t be at all surprised. There are more Jekylls around than you might think.

***

If you are in need of support, you can contact the Samaritans on 116 123, or visit their website. 

And then, when we’re older, pop culture takes over. The Gay Best Friend is the natural go-to for the female casualties of the Love Wars; think of Sex and the City’s Stanford Blatch, always there for Carrie to cry on when Mr Big treats her like a side-piece.

But we’re on trickier territory when it comes to what might be called “fauxmosexuals”, straight men who act gay to get girls. Before Russell Brand was found guilty of one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, his trial featured a telling moment. After hearing that one of the complainants testified that she had presumed Brand to be gay when they met at a Labour Party conference and thus felt “safe” asking him back to her hotel room, the prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones KC whipped out the accused’s unfortunately-titled 2007 memoir My Booky Wook and confronted the leering Lothario with a photograph of himself at the age of seven, with the caption: “This is the exact moment when I decided to act gay to attract girls. It took 15 years to produce results.”

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Though he claimed under cross-examination that this was a “joke” (wouldn’t be the first unfunny joke he’d told in his long career of alleged comedy — the only time he made me laugh was when he couldn’t find the verse from Isaiah he was looking for on Piers Morgan Uncensored, while thumbing through the Bible for close to two minutes) and denied he had ever pretended to be gay in order to put women at ease, it wasn’t as convincing as it might have been. There is a long tradition of such behavior in this country although, of course, not necessarily leading to any crime. Indeed, one of Brand’s comedic contemporaries — who most people believed to be gay because of the flagrant way he camped it up — is currently undergoing a right royal canceling due to his highly “bloke-ish” attitude towards women.

It doesn’t help that Brand has presented himself as the Rock Star of comedy, right down to the dalliance with Kate Moss and the drug dependency, as it has always been rock stars who have pioneered the false-flit fandango. The first person I ever heard about it from was the late Johnny Thunders, explaining the rationale of the New York Dolls. They would smother themselves in Panstik and stagger about on six-inch heels — to get girls. They were inventing a new definition of sexy but were rabidly heterosexual. Over here, the burgeoning of Glam Rock gave us Marc Bolan, among others. King (or queen) of them all was David Bowie, an enthusiastic and dedicated “swordsman”, who cut a swathe not just through the women of London but the underage groupies of LA, all while wearing dresses, pretending to fellate his guitarist onstage and proclaiming “I’M GAY!” (“And I always have been, even when I was David Jones”) on the front of Melody Maker, conveniently as he launched his Ziggy Stardust shtick in 1972.

Bowie’s career of reverse-coming-out was a comical one to behold over the decades. In a 1976 interview with Playboy he called himself a “bisexual”. It took him until 1983 to tell Rolling Stone (in an interview sternly entitled “Straight Time: No more masks or poses”) that he had always been “a closet heterosexual” and that claiming to be gay had been “the biggest mistake of my life”. Many of his homosexual fans reportedly felt very “let down”; one would need a heart of stone not to laugh. Imagine mistaking David Bowie, the ultimate double-dealing showbiz chameleon, for someone who was going to be sincere.

Meanwhile, the distaff are at it too. Many a lesbian might ruefully remember a straight lady who led her on in a club only to go home with the man she had her eye on after the girl-on-girl snog worked its magic. Men are notoriously keen on the idea of lesbians; not ones who wear check shirts and like to go hiking at weekends, but ones with tousled blonde manes and three-inch fingernails. (The latter is probably a bit of a giveaway that they’re not serious about their endeavor when the camera stops rolling.) But it’s an uneven playground. It’s hard to think of any worldly female luring an innocent young man back to her hotel while pretending to be gay — and then pouncing. Except me, when I was courting my husband 30 years ago.

As if things weren’t spicy enough, in recent years a new development in the world of sexual shape-shifting has taken place. A couple of years ago, I was surprised to see a massive queue at my local children’s bookshop. Interestingly, most of the queuers were girls in their late teens and early twenties; they were there for an author called Alice Oseman, who created Heartstopper, a romance between two teenage boys, published as multiple graphic novels (the UK’s fastest-selling ever, and moving more than eight million copies worldwide) and adapted into an award-winning Netflix series. “We could not be prouder to publish the Heartstopper series,” smugged the chief executive of Hachette Children’s Group. “Heartstopper is published for teenagers but seems to have a huge appeal for older readers too. It’s for everyone.”

Who it is particularly for is young women who get off on the idea of gay male relationships, both romantic and sexual, having largely given up on men themselves. It’s as if only by removing (hetero)sexual politics from sex can sex be fun again, hence everything from Saltburn to “shipping” in which (mainly) women force (mainly) male characters, real and imaginary, from Kirk and Spock to Harry Styles and his former bandmates, into sexual scenarios. To misquote Shakespeare, some are born gay, some achieve gayness — and now we find that some have gayness thrust upon them.

Half a century after Bowie was plowing through London, the beat goes on. A friend told me the other day of a teenage boy evicted from her daughter’s friendship group for pulling a routine straight out of the play-gay playbook. It does feel more like grooming than gaming, she says. It’s like each generation has to find a new way of confusing itself.

But there will always be wolves in sheep’s clothing. Now, Brand has been unmasked and we see what big teeth Grandma has: back in your hotel room, some men don’t actually want to borrow your mascara and listen to your Glee soundtrack, but do something far more primeval. For now the forest is darker and scarier than ever, and the beast really is behind you.

There is a problem with giving the Democrats too much credit for the shellacking the GOP just received, however. It’s a tremendous misunderstanding of American politics.

At a time like this, one must be reminded that America’s modern political system is little more than a two-party cartel masquerading as a liberty-loving democracy. When things go wrong — which, over the last quarter-century, has been more often than not — there’s only one lever for US voters to pull: blue or red. Or, as an Iranian embassy mocked earlier this year, Coke versus Pepsi. One choice is more feminine and multiculturalist, the other more masculine and nativist. But for all their ostensible differences both parties are captured institutions that pursue the ruthless economic agenda of their wealthy donors under the cover of culture-war pyrotechnics.

Not since the fall of the New Deal coalition in the early 1970s has either party genuinely resembled a political organization representing the people. Let’s be frank: both parties have been corrupt as shit for the entirety of Millennials’ and most of Gen X-ers’ lifetimes. They paper over their economic Caesarism with moral-economy crusades enabled lately by social media’s divisive algorithms. It’s a testament to the powerlessness we all feel that this perverse situation is thought of as “just the way things are.”

But history tells us that eventually, the delicate fabric holding a zeitgeist together begins to fray. We’ve seen that potential in the protests across France and much of Europe over the last month. America is on the verge as well — but in a manner more characteristic of its general political passivity.

We all know our politicians are servants of the one-percenters. Most of us live with only modest hopes. Mainly, we wish that a few sizable crumbs will fall off the ruling class’s table every now and again. However, under Trump’s second term, the GOP took advocacy for the one percent to Lex Luthor-like levels. And there’s no better example than how Trump and the GOP have addressed the economic ill effects not only of the war in Iran, but of the data-center gold rush and the trillion-dollar AI buildout that runs adjacent to it. Literally no one — except vested interests — wants data centers built anywhere near their locales, yet the GOP made protecting this industry and resisting all AI regulation their top priority.

Only two days into his second term, Trump stood in the White House with Sam Altman and Larry Ellison to bless Stargate, a half-trillion-dollar data center project, having already torn up the Biden administration’s AI-safety order. Soon after, Trump installed a tech billionaire, David Sacks, as his “AI czar.” Then the GOP leadership padlocked a 10-year federal ban on all state AI regulation onto Trump’s first signature spending bill — drafted so that state laws greasing the buildout could remain legal. Meanwhile, any laws restricting a data center’s power draw or water use become unenforceable. The Senate then, rightly, stripped it out 99-1.

Trump’s response was simply to sign an executive order seeking to preempt the states’ AI laws anyway, a decree which then collided with a surge of state-level data-center regulation laws throughout blue, red, and “purple” states alike.

James Carville might be a tool of the Democratic establishment, but his catchphrase, “It’s the economy, stupid”, is as true as it is cliché, and it’s the core reason for the GOP’s flop. If you get outside the Beltway or the New York media circles, you quickly realize Americans still hate the Democrats. But they now hate Trump and the Republicans even more.

A choice between two, though, is only one more than none. It’s a fact that makes American politics entirely simple. People didn’t like the “Biden economy”, so they pulled the red lever two years ago. They didn’t like what the red lever bought them, so they again pulled the blue lever. If the middle class continues to erode under the Democratic president that might be appointed in 2028, they’ll eventually pull red again. MAGA, though, is dead.

The magic and absurdity of Trump has always been the audacity of his billionaire-populist carnival act. It was the greatest act of class ventriloquism in American politics since the rise of Andrew Jackson and his notorious “Jacksonian Democrats.” For the last decade, through his rambling P.T. Barnum performances, Trump gave America’s poor and working class the feeling of having a leader who understood what took place in their lives. Trump of course never understood working people’s daily dilemmas — but he detested the same people they did. During the mania of “Woke 1.0,” that seemed important.

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For all his flaws, Trump also really understood branding. His followers all got an immediately recognizable uniform and it only cost $34. It didn’t matter that their red hats were actually made in Bangladesh. People gave Trump continual leeway because they hated the woke scolds that much. At the beginning, it also didn’t matter that the billionaire donor class got every single tax carve-out it wanted. Everyone was so tired of the identity-based victimology that burst to the surface under Obama’s administration. They wanted that moralizing control-freak tripe out of their lives, and Trump promised to deliver.

At Trump’s demotic rallies, everyone went home feeling like they finally had a president who wasn’t part of the HR mafia making their work lives miserable. Because Trump talked like them, they assumed he was like them. They were willing to give it time. A public figure who was that hated by the woke mobs earns a long leash with the poor and working class. But patience with their Cheeto Jesus savior was ultimately measured in grocery bills and rent increases.

This week, his time ran out. Over the last two years, voters witnessed the same gaslighting betrayals they had already endured during Obama’s obscene handling of the bank bailouts in 2009 and 2010, then Biden’s paternalistic Covid mandates. The gaslighting became all too familiar over the last two years. Trump was not just “one of the boys” after all. Rather, he was just management in working-class costume.

The signs of GOP disaster have been present for months. In mid-August, manosphere comics Shane Gillis, Mark Normand, and Ari Shaffir appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and began talking about the need for “another Teddy Roosevelt” who would take on big business and super PACs. Rogan stated it plainly: “We thought he [Trump] was going to do it, but it’s clear he’s not going to do any of those things.”

That was the moment everyone should have known it was over for MAGA. For months now, nearly all the Trump supporters I know have been reckoning with a profound sense of shame. Their buyer’s remorse is palpable. They fell for a con man and most of them accept it now.

We must also admit that 21st-century Right-wing populism is an abject failure. Too many populist-adjacent intellectuals hitched their wagon to Trump’s confidence man act. Everyone should have known better, yes. But their excitement to see wokeness get its comeuppance obscured their better judgment. Often, though, the enemy of our enemy is not in fact an ally, much less a friend; at least not when it comes to taking on the greatest system of organized wealth in human history.

Because of Right-wing populists’ ill-fated choice to support Trump, not only JD Vance but any GOP nominee’s chance of retaining the presidency in 2028 is extremely low. There will now be lots of bad-faith “Oh yes, please run her” takes from the Right about the prospect of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez standing as Democrat presidential candidate. But wise observers know AOC has the charisma and the support from the base to win. In the social media age, Americans prize youth and beauty above nearly everything. Anyone who thinks Ocasio-Cortez is too young or inexperienced to be president is naive. This is her moment — just as 1960 was Kennedy’s and 2008 was Obama’s.

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Only a true populist like Marjorie Taylor Greene could potentially save the GOP’s chances in 2028. That is presuming she and Tucker Carlson don’t go through with their recent threats to start a new political party. Regardless, Greene is probably shrewd enough to sit the next election out. All of which means that whether it’s AOC or some other Democrat taking the Oval Office in 2029, wokeness as an ideological imposition is far from dead. The NGO class and the DEI administrative apparatus will ride back into power on the Democrats’ surrogate economy — and Trump will turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to the anti-woke cause.

This is more serious than it sounds. Since Trump’s infamous 2015 ride down the escalator, anti-wokeness has been the magic elixir holding a disparate coalition together. All that’s over now. Voters won’t forget that, when twice given the opportunity to govern, Trump betrayed the middle class, both domestically and abroad. Worse, he used his Roy Cohn-taught tactics to shift the blame for all the economic pain Americans feel onto imaginary enemies. And since the Democrats cannot get significant legislation past Trump’s veto, the GOP will continue to absorb the disaster of today’s AI-driven economy for two more years.

To compete nationally again, the Republicans will have to do more than rail against wokeness and “shitlibs.” They need what the Democrats needed after their years in the wilderness: a Bill Clinton-like figure. Recall for a moment what Clinton’s New Democrats actually did in the early Nineties — they shed the social libertinism that working-class voters blamed for the crime waves and chaos of the Seventies, and then paired a renewed appreciation for social traditionalism with the appearance of economic moderation. That it all ended up as a massive neoliberal con doesn’t change the lesson.

The party rebuilt itself by giving abandoned voters the one thing they’d stopped believing it offered. The GOP needs the same remake, but inverted. It needs genuine economic populism — against the data-center land grab, the AI buildout, the donor class that profits from both — paired with the anti-progressive cultural instincts it already owns.

Will it happen? Every honest observer knows the odds are long. A party remake like that means breaking with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and the rest of the tech-lords — the very men now writing the party’s checks, boosting its top media operations, and building massive data centers in counties that never wanted them. Without anti-wokeness, Wall Street, and tech-billionaire money, who even is the modern Republican Party?

And if the GOP refuses its medicine, the future will belong to another fusion: the AOC-and-El-Sayed “New New Democrats” pairing of the economic populism Americans want with the NGO-designed progressivism they’ve learned to tolerate.

These are desperate economic times. No one should underestimate that pairing’s durability. Voters will hold their noses and swallow the DEI pill — and maybe even renewed mass immigration — if it comes wrapped in anything resembling the New Deal.

I don’t know for certain whether “Erik Thure” refers to Thure Erik Lund, the Norwegian cult novelist a decade Knausgård’s senior, but this advice rang in my ears while reading Lund’s The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch, recently translated by David M. Smith, and the first of Lund’s works to appear in English. Lund, along with Knausgård and playwright-novelist Jon Fosse, makes up a trio of Norwegian writers having an outsized impact on world literature. The “story” that Lund tells — through the increasingly crazed but enlightened voice of his alter-ego narrator — is of a rambling and mostly plotless kind. Yet it is, at the same time, a “mystery” story in the old sense, one that summons the greatest questions and doubts about ourselves, one that against all the apparent odds, excites, rocks, and compels the reader as few novels can. At stake is the value — and the danger — of intellectualism. 

Lund has published more than a dozen books, both fiction and essays, the most recent being Identitet, in 2017. Ditch was first published in 1999, and is the first in a sequence of novels that have marked Lund’s distinctive place in Norwegian letters, all revolving around the central figure of character Tomas Olsen Myrbråten. Knausgård has called Lund the “greatest Norwegian contemporary writer.” It is a crowded field, a generation that has also produced not only the global success of Knausgård’s own autofictional project, but also the slow international rise and then sudden peak of Fosse, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. Knausgård’s praise alone — he calls Lund “the most vital writer I know” — should send the curious out to pick up a novel that is quite unlike anything else. 

This trio can reasonably be said to have pushed the novel into new territory –– whether it’s Knausgård’s aforementioned series of autofictions, Proust-rivaling in scope and capacity for detail, which is (or ought to have been) the absolute and closing statement of that form; or Fosse’s lyrical inner-monologue narratives (culminating in Septology) of drifting souls in rural, seaside Norway, like a Beckett reborn with more warmth and less humor. And then there’s Lund, whose work was previously called “untranslatable” by Knausgård, who carries a political charge and confrontational energy and engages in wild linguistic play.

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The novel opens with what is, in essence, a dramatic device: the name of our narrator, Myrbråten, is placed directly before his monologuing voice begins to speak. It only happens once, but here Lund is subtly distancing himself and a character who might be taken to be a mouthpiece — one whose initials (T.O.M.) also happen to spell out the word for “empty” in Norwegian. “It is no longer me who cries,” Tomas says in his opening remarks, “but the world, the world crying, in me.” So, Tomas both is and isn’t speaking, just as he both is and isn’t a character. Something is instead being summoned — perhaps it is simply an ambiguous indeterminacy, an empty space through which truths might escape.

Yet the voice of Tomas will be our sole guide to the strange and increasingly twisted story. It is a voice that is by turns urbane, offhand, stonily sincere, unceasingly ironic, unhesitating, rambling, repetitious, revelatory, lost, driving forward and always unpredictable. It tells a story without a single true line of dialog or more than a handful of scenes — although many of those come out viscerally, hauntingly well — moving in long, loping paragraphs. With the voice’s totalizing consciousness, Lund reminds us just how strong the influence of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard has been on fiction in the past 30 years or so.

Tomas tells us that he spends daily a “couple long, drawn-out hours at the kitchen table crying. Nothing more than this utterly miserable business: to sit slumped across the table, crying over the awfulness of the world.” A rictus grin is firmly established from the outset. Lund spends his first 50 or so pages in what is essentially a mode of relentless belligerence. It’s like reading a castoff by the Unabomber, a viscerally satisfying, disturbing, and startlingly prescient screed against what Tomas terms “the new, synthetic state of nature,” “the modern science-and-technology-based industrial society,” the “info-technological world-machine,” and “the new narcoticism” that underpins all of it. 

On virtually every page of this heady first section Tomas reminds us that his central problem, both a curse and a blessing, is that of being a “life-of-the-mind individual” in the midst of an increasingly world-consuming “technonarcoticist culture.” “Life-of-the-mind individuals,” he declares, are “characterized by the fact that everything they do, they do because they must.” And this condition, in a world ever more under the machinic impulse of “money’s representative unreality,” comes to resemble an affliction, a pathology. For at the same time “we [life-of-the-mind individuals] have no choice but to believe, to believe in the good. In our time, this is hell.”

The novel’s story, then, such as it is, is Tomas’s transformation. As a frustrated writer, his concerns have, rather improbably, found “sudden manifestation in the form of a long essay assignment, a so-called cultural-historical think piece, commissioned by the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Culture.” It is while he is working on what he repeatedly and snidely dubs his “think piece” — which is to be all about “the problem of cultural relics” in Norway — that “I set off on some trips around the country. And the more I traveled, the more disastrous Norway appeared to me, the more perverted.” 

Lund’s unfolding, eviscerating critiques of his homeland could easily be transferred to any country you care to name, as the hollowing forces of global capital combine year on year to make every place resemble every other place, and each place into all the same kind of “neo-fictive Globoland.” Norway, or at least an essential “Norwegianness” is being turned into a commodity for tourism and a friendly, globalized image, while folk cultures and once-alive communities become “cultural relics” to be transformed into money, all on the way to being replaced by “GloboNorway.” 

Like Lund, Tomas was raised in the country but has matured in the city; concern over the clash between urban and rural and that false divide between “nature” and “culture” drives him to conclude his road trips with a return to his home village. And it’s here that the book’s second part takes place; Lund moves also into a new terrain of language, a kind of contrived country-speak for which Smith, the translator, turned to his upbringing in the American South for a Twainian-Faulknerian equivalent. It’s disorienting, at first. Then it’s hilarious. And finally disturbing. 

Tomas seeks a return, back beyond his intellectualizing conditioning in the city, to a pure harmony with “nature” — first in the village, then, when that goes wrong, up in the strange, surreal and somehow out-of-time realm of “Graygrizzle Flats” under the influence of an Austrian archaeologist-inventor named Walter, where a cult-like group of archaic religious fanatics still dwell; finally, he’s cast out of there, too, and ends up in the final section as a truly de-civilized man: “the Forest Outlaw.” 

And yet the real story Lund seems to be telling must be experienced, first and foremost, through his delight in language and a simultaneous, deep distrust of its power over us. As Smith explains in his translator’s afterword, “life-of-the-mind individual” is his considered rendering of the original Norwegian word which Lund used, åndsmenneske, which any dictionary would normally translate simply as “intellectual” in English. But the Latinate smoothness of this choice (not to mention, perhaps, a certain cultural baggage around the term that suggests, at least to me, an old-fashioned, somewhat midcentury frame of reference) would have lost the essence of the original Norwegian word, which Smith writes has “deep roots.” With åndsmenneske, you have ånd (mind, spirit) plus menneske (person, human). In Lund’s writing, moreover, “the word itself becomes defamiliarized” through Tomas’s constant, ironically repetitive, use of it. Smith’s choice here was a typically good one –it carries, semantically and sonically, the sense of an inherent awkwardness.

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The return of the great American exile novel

By Valerie Stivers

What help might language provide for the sorrowful intellectual, writhing against the increasingly tight confines of the Globo-culture?

Throughout Ditch, Lund writes restlessly in pursuit of linguistic invention, the kind that Anglo fiction seems to have largely abandoned. He employs neologisms, word compounds, and long, rhythmic sentences. The capacity for compound words in Norwegian allows for playful flexibility: some favorite renderings are “problemscapes” and “ennothingment.” And the constant clash and switch between “oral” and “literary” registers also enlivens Lund’s prose’s flow, rendering it at once thrillingly improvised and totally controlled. Such a contradiction, of course, mirrors Tomas’s predicament: he uses language to free himself, yet his prison is made up of it.

The reader might take joy, and some hope for the future from the virtuosity on display here, both Lund’s and Smith’s. Any good translator will actively embrace the innate and irreconcilable differences between the two languages with which they are working. Smith has achieved that — it’s a long time since I came away from any English-language fiction published in the past quarter century with this much excitement in its “vocabulations,” to steal another of Smith’s renderings, still less found myself reeling afresh at the latent energies of language from any contemporary novel. Smith’s work on Lund is a triumph of wit and invention. 

At the same time, Ditch is centrally concerned with the great dangers of language: the ways it is at once indispensable and deadly to the human, to our sense of being. As AI is making clear, mistaking language’s representations for realities — and equating language processes with “intelligence” and “truth” — has unfortunate, and even perhaps insane, consequences. 

For this and many more reasons, Thure Erik Lund is a writer we are lucky to have been given in English at this moment. His work will probably not be embraced by as wide a public as Knausgård’s, or indeed Fosse’s, has been. But this clause-cramped and wild-eyed novel has made me feel freer inside, and we need more of that. So, we must hope David M. Smith finishes the untranslatable task he has started, and gives us the rest of Tomas Olsen Myrbråten’s adventures.

When he was re-elected in 2024, Trump promised to bring down prices; instead, he raised them with his tariffs and his ill-fated war in Iran. The inflation rate, which had been running at 3% when he took office, is now approaching 4%. No wonder Trump’s Republican Party suffered a crushing defeat in Tuesday’s mid-term elections, in large part due to the nation’s worsening cost-of-living crisis. This week, even his own past supporters turned on him.

But the cost-of-living crisis that is reshaping American politics is not confined to the US, nor is it likely to go away soon. The UK is facing similar inflationary pressures. The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) now expects this year’s inflation rate to average out at 3.1%, up from the March forecast of 2.3%. It expects inflation to peak next year at 3.8% before settling down for a year-long average of 3.4% — a full 1.4% above its March forecast. 

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Inflation is here to stay

By Justin H. Vassallo

Much of the discussion surrounding the current inflation spike focuses on the impact of Trump’s war on the price of energy. The assumption is therefore that the high prices are temporary. The OBR assumes that by 2028, the UK inflation rate will be close to the Bank of England’s 2% target once again, making this inflation shock transitory. Ahead of the mid-term elections, Trump made much the same argument: that the price surge will prove fleeting.

Unfortunately, we’ve heard this before. The word “transitory” doesn’t have great currency among economists these days. The original inflation surge of 2021 was initially waved off by central bankers as a brief aberration, but here we are, in the sixth year of above-target inflation that we keep hearing is about to come down. Other than during a brief period in 2024, inflation has not returned to the 2% target Western central banks have set for it. 

In fact, since last spring inflation has been on a steady upward march — a trend we cannot attribute merely to the energy shock caused by the Iran war. In Britain, the European Union, America, Canada and Japan alike, the core inflation rate — which strips out energy and food prices to try and capture underlying pressures — has been stubbornly above target. At some point, you have to ask: when does this stop being temporary?

It appears there is something more than just an energy shock driving up inflation. For a while now, some economists who study the economic impact of climate change have been predicting that the inflation rate will move permanently higher. We may now be in the foothills of what could turn out to be higher peaks.

It had long been assumed that a gradual alteration in climate would over time affect the global economy, with countries such as Canada actually benefiting (from longer growing seasons) and poor tropical countries losing out. But we’re now seeing that the increased incidence and severity of extreme weather events is having a greater impact. Such events hit countries such as Canada harder, since there is so much more infrastructure and hence capital to be damaged or destroyed. In 2023, a summer of wildfires in Canada made it impossible for people to work in agriculture, forestry and mining in affected regions, while rail transportation had to be suspended, further hindering economic activity. As a result of smoke forcing citizens across large swathes of the country to stay indoors, there was an economic contraction that knocked the country’s per capita income back 1.3% that year.

The problem isn’t limited to Canada. Since the Sixties, the average annual number of extreme weather events has risen sevenfold. In the past few years, they’ve begun to take an unprecedented toll: of the 10 costliest extreme-weather events on record in the US, six occurred in the last decade. In Europe, this was seven. In Canada, nine out of 10 of the most costly years insurance companies have ever had to bear have taken place since 2011. These events do the most economic harm in the nations with the most capital to destroy: in 2023, four-fifths of the economic damage due to extreme weather occurred in developed countries. Not only are these catastrophes damaging property and infrastructure, they are raising insurance costs, which ultimately works its way into prices. 

On top of this, rising food prices due to poor harvests resulting from drought, storms or flood damage are driving food inflation. The reason beef prices in America have risen so fast is that a persistent drought, attributed in large measure to higher temperatures, has depleted the US beef herd. President Trump may say climate change is a hoax but such declarations can’t stop prices rising. And the rising cost of food has an outsized influence on voters’ perception of inflation. 

Similarly, while the surge in electricity prices has been attributed to such things as Britain’s gas-dependent pricing system or the excessive demand of data centers in the US, the truth is that energy bills are rising largely because of the costs involved in strengthening infrastructure against harsher weather. One study estimates that electricity bills could rise by as much as 25% in the US to cover these impacts. In that vein, Avanti West Coast rail recently had to pay British customers £20 million in refunds for delays caused this summer, mainly because the current train tracks were not built for such temperatures. Higher running costs will, of course be passed on to customers.

Since December 2019, there has been a relentless pressure on climate-sensitive price categories. US consumer prices have risen by 29%, but home insurance has risen by 37%, electricity prices by 43%  and food prices by 35%. Similarly, in the UK over the same period, consumer prices have risen 33% but food prices have risen 38%. Such pressure raises the latent inflation rate. The result is that when exogenous shocks such as the recent oil spike occur, their effects are amplified. In his testimony to the Treasury Committee in September, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey and his colleagues said that climate change is causing greater volatility in supply shocks and that, over time, the subsequent pressure on inflation will be more upwards than downwards. 

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Why the West is getting poorer

By John Rapley

To make matters worse, higher inflation will be structural, not cyclical — which is to say the normal approach of central banks, of raising interest rates to reduce demand, won’t work. Assuming interest rates remain permanently higher, that will ultimately affect the pricing of other asset markets. 

Take the property market. Benjamin Keys, an expert on the financial risks of climate change at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, suggests that falling house prices are being obscured by countervailing cyclical trends. Though rising storm risks have sharply lowered prices in parts of Florida, the Covid real-estate boom and the trend of boomers retiring to warmer climates have helped to soften overall price declines. Keys argues that unlike earlier falls in asset prices — which were caused by cyclical bubbles that, once burst, eliminated excesses in the economy and put markets back on a sustainable path — such re-pricing will occur for as long as climate change progresses. This permanently higher inflation rate is a feature of something I call the “Icarus effect”: that economic growth triggers a set of ecological, social and political changes which raise the cost of further growth, ultimately slowing it down. 

Though the UK Chancellor John Healey may not be a climate denier like President Trump, he has joined many other Western governments in walking back some of Britain’s Net-Zero commitments in order to lower prices for consumers. Yet while this could reduce costs in the short term, it will aggravate the underlying problem. By trying to reduce inflation, Western governments could inadvertently entrench it.

El-Sayed, speaking to Goldberg, pitched his insurgent campaign as a test of an “alternative hypothesis.” Voters hated the establishment so vehemently that they were willing to hold their noses and vote for Donald Trump twice; they might do something stranger if offered a real alternative — like a Bernie Bro Muslim who antagonized the Democratic establishment nearly as often as he did the GOP.

On Tuesday night, El-Sayed looked like Nostradamus. He predicted he would beat Mike Rogers by seven points, and he won by nearly six in a state Trump carried two years ago. He did it as a Muslim candidate with a Muslim name, whom Trump and other Republicans repeatedly accused of being a jihadist. Haley Stevens’s entire case in the primary was that El-Sayed could not win. Her final act, pulling her endorsement and backing Rogers, was an attempt to make that true.

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Hell is other Leftists

By Ryan Zickgraf

Elsewhere, the populist Left won in places it had no business winning. Bernie Sanders spent the fall crisscrossing districts Trump carried, and his and AOC’s endorsees have turned up on the winning side of the map: Troy Jackson, a former logger and labor leader, unseated Susan Collins in Maine. Sam Forstag, a smokejumper and union leader, claimed victory in Montana. Randy Villegas, a professor and auto-shop owner, won in California’s Central Valley. DSA member Melat Kiros knocked off 30-year incumbent Diana DeGette in Denver and became the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress. And in the Senate, a party that spent years being told to run to the center flipped seats in Texas, Ohio, Kansas, and Iowa by talking like the populist Left on prices, health care, and contempt for the wealthy and powerful.

In doing so, the Left might have finally killed the old “Third Way” theory of the Democratic Party, much like MAGA and Trump’s victory in 2016 upended the old corporations-first, free-trading, globalization-friendly GOP of the Paul Ryan era. 

The Third Way, for readers who missed the 1990s, was the project of making Democrats electable by making them more like Republicans. Born in the Democratic Leadership Council and perfected by Bill Clinton, the theory held that the party had lost the country in the Reagan-Bush era by looking like a union hall with a welfare office attached. The cure was to triangulate: embrace free trade, balance budgets, be tough-on-crime, cozy up to Wall Street, and promise that markets would deliver what government used to. A think tank, also called Third Way, still carries the banner in Washington. 

This strategy was perfected by Rahm Emanuel, who, as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the mid-2000s, took credit for the blue wave of 2006 during the tail end of the George W. Bush administration. Rahm-ism was about trying to please Lindsey Graham and Barney Frank alike with a mix of fiscal conservatism and cultural liberalism led by milquetoast technocrats, which would attract independent voters on the notion that independents demanded a mythical midpoint between the two parties’ agendas.

The logic of the Third Way continued into 2026, as Stevens and other moderate Democrats insisted that the Left had the enthusiasm, but ultimately could not win big elections in November. But on Tuesday, independent voters — and just about everyone else — swung hard to the Left. The blue wave was especially prominent among Latinos, Catholic voters, and voters younger than 30, with one poll suggesting that Gen-Z voters shifted 46 points since 2024. A NBC national exit poll also found that 17% of midterm voters call themselves democratic socialists, and 97% of those voted Democratic. Among voters 18 to 29, a full third say they are democratic socialists, while only 10% say they are MAGA. 

Ted Cruz may accidentally turn out to be the best political analyst of the 2026 cycle. Stumping for Mike Rogers in Michigan last week, the Texas senator made a prediction he clearly intended as a threat: if Abdul El-Sayed wins, he said, the Democratic nominee for president in 2028 will be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Tuesday’s results could prove him right.

Now for the reality check: All of this doesn’t mean, as some archly suggested on social media on Tuesday, that “woke is back” and that Democrats are going to start putting their pronouns back in their email signatures, or wheeling out guillotines to use on Elon Musk — let’s hope not. Despite what Trump and the GOP have warned, there is no communist revolution around the corner. Maybe not even a New Deal-lite. “Democratic socialist” in an exit poll covers, in practice, everyone from the person who has a copy of Capital in their tote bag to the person who would like insulin to cost less. Ask many of these self-proclaimed socialists what they want, and the answer tends to be: lower prices, universal health care, and some relief from an economy suddenly being rewired by AI and an expensive war in the Middle East. 

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It’s the war, stupid

By Sohrab Ahmari

To give credit to the Left, it has promised to deliver affordability and economic benefits and it has toned down calls to end white privilege, abolish the police, and get you fired for your problematic Halloween costume. The Left has begun following the example of Zohran Mamdani, who won New York City on a sunny campaign to freeze rent and make buses free, and proved you can mute the worst of Woke 1.0, keep the substance, and talk like someone who wants to win. You can see the shift in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, too, whose turn toward a more welcoming, kitchen-table progressivism got the full Times profile treatment, in which she claimed to want a progressive movement “that is not rooted in judgment, castigation or being closed off.” 

Yet the Democratic Party — as a brand and institution — is still weak and unpopular, with a platform that fits on a bumper sticker: Stop Trump. Voters, ultimately, may have hired the Democrats the way you hire a bouncer, for whom or what they will keep out. Plus, midterms historically punish the president’s party; the second-term version is especially brutal, and this president arrived at the polls with historically bad approval numbers and a catastrophic Iran war. Voters were in a Vote Blue No Matter Who mood, a doctrine that turned out to be very flexible about who.

Ultimately, everything about this moment feels contingent. What happened Tuesday was a blue tsunami, to be sure, but it also looks less like a realignment than like another turn in a long dealignment, in which the electorate keeps hiring and firing whoever promises relief, because no one can stop creeping American decline. El-Sayed and the rest of the new Left have just been handed that job, and nobody, including them, is sure how to do it.

Perhaps, though, we could just chuck it in ChatGPT? According to a 2025 LexisNexis survey, 61% of UK lawyers have used generative AI for work, with 49% relying on general-purpose chatbot programs rather than specialist legal tools. On the consumer end, “robo-lawyers” are finding clients aplenty. A study by JUSTICE, a legal charity, and the Administrative Fairness Lab found that one-in-six respondents who had experienced a recent legal dispute had consulted an AI chatbot for help.

No longer the exclusive preserve of a cloistered elite, meanwhile, legal research now appears within the competence of sophisticated large language models. A September 2026 report evaluated AI models on practical Dutch legal research. Its best-performing model, Claude Fable 5.1, satisfied 75.7% of individual legal and citation criteria.

One can envision a near future where much lawyering is undertaken by AI. Perhaps clients interact with an interface, which then turns their conversation into a formal submission to the court. Human judges, retained for tradition, then provide desk-based assessments, with neither counsel nor client required to appear. If this premonition is accurate, lawyers are looking increasingly obsolete.

At the risk of breaking the magician’s code, the legal profession has been obfuscating how simple legal argument is for centuries. Behind all the Latin conjurations and private-school wankery, much lawyering involves rote syllogistic reasoning. A general legal rule (“drivers owe a duty of care to other road users“) is applied to the facts of a particular case (“the defendant was driving and the claimant was another road user”) to reach a conclusion (“the defendant owed the claimant a duty of care”).

Once you know the elements of a cause of action or criminal offense, applying the relevant rules to the available facts supplies a framework for assessing probable legal liability and what legal arguments could prove fruitful in court. Ambiguities may exist, particularly when legislation or case law contains open-textured phraseology like “reasonable” or “ordinary”. Yet the arguments that can be put forward follow fairly consistent conventions.

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Camille Paglia is still exhausting

By Jarryd Bartle

Even attempts to soften the law’s rigidity have produced new forms of it. “Equity” emerged in the Court of Chancery to alleviate injustices caused by the strict application of common-law rules. This allowed litigants to seek injunctions restraining immoral conduct, or the rescission of a contract induced by undue influence or misrepresentation. Over time, however, these remedies became governed by elaborate doctrines with strict conditions on how and when courts would intervene.

It has never been easier for amateurs to approximate “black-letter” lawyering: a term for the routine application of well-established principles and rules, named after the heavy Gothic type face used by medieval scribes. “Plain-language” reforms in the last century stripped legal drafting of unnecessary obscurity (“Anton Piller orders” became “search orders”; “Mareva injunctions” became “freezing injunctions”), while widespread digital archiving has brought statutes and case judgments within reach of anyone with an internet connection.

This was not always so easy. As legal scholar Desmond Manderson has noted, for much of common law history legal principles appeared to the public “as runes”, “priestly signs” whose authority was heightened by mystery. The Magna Carta addressed the world firstly in Latin, then French, languages understood by only tiny minorities at the time. The first complete English translation appeared in 1534, three centuries later, and was still largely unintelligible to a mostly illiterate public. The rise of the machines, therefore, is part of a welcome democratization of legal knowledge and expanded access to justice.

So what place is there for counsel in carne in this Brave New World of automated lawyering? In my view, it is precisely in those aspects of advocacy often argued to be archaic and questionable, in the deeply human practice of veiling conflict in ceremony and adorning argument with eloquence.

Legal rationality — rule-bound and amenable to syllogism — may be susceptible to mechanical imitation. That, however, is merely the science of legal practice, not the art. Logical propositions are just part of the advocate’s repertoire. The true power of the legal profession is found not in judgments but in pageantry.

Philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics offers a useful lens in his distinction between knowledge that can be gained from textbooks and the kind of experiential understanding which constitutes cultivated connoisseurship. Oakeshott calls the first technical knowledge, whose chief characteristic is that it is susceptible to “precise formulation”. The second, practical knowledge, “exists only in use” and “cannot be formulated in rules”.

Oakeshott’s distinction is familiar enough in any solicitor’s office. Taking instructions from a client is about more than simply extracting facts and applying rules. The solicitor must receive a client’s account with sufficient sympathy to encourage candor but with sufficient skepticism to discover what has been omitted. One’s role is part social worker, part detective. For a barrister, an entire dramaturgy attends the presenting of one’s case. Like a grand Shakespearean director, counsel orchestrates the show: whether it’s concessions negotiated with opposing counsel, witnesses brought back to inconvenient particulars, or gentle corrections of judicial misapprehensions. Merely knowing the rules encyclopedically, as an AI program will soon be able to, can never capture the talents for commanding a room and furthering an argument.

Viewed with an eye for performance, the spirit of lawyering is centered around a choreography of manners. For Manderson, a true apologist for the occult features of law, a lawyer of substance must attend to “the ambient, the metaphorical, and the rhetorical effects of language”. Take Cicero’s defense of Quintus Ligarius, prosecuted for supporting Caesar’s opponents in Africa during the civil war. In Plutarch’s retelling, Caesar had already condemned Ligarius in his own mind as “a villain and an enemy”, but agreed to hear the celebrated orator out. As Cicero spoke, Caesar’s face “changed color” when he recalled that Ligarius’s prosecutor had fought against him in the Battle of Pharsalus. In the end, Caesar “was so greatly affected that his body shook and he dropped from his hand some of his documents”. Ligarius was spared, as Caesar would soon have cause to regret, given he joined the conspiracy to assassinate him.

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Inside the Magic Circle

By Josiah Gogarty

Whatever allowance we make for Plutarch’s exaggeration, the scene captures advocacy as an art of dramatic revelation and an appeal to the passions. Voice, gesture, stillness and the ordering of disclosures shape how a story unfolds, helping give a client’s perspective presence before strangers. Romanticization is weaponized in the service of empathy and understanding.

In recent times, “rhetoric” has acquired an unfortunate reputation as trickery and, when applied to legal practice, often conjures up images of sleazy hired guns willing to argue — in the words of Jonathan Swift — “that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid”. But true rhetoric concerns the means by which one person makes something intelligible and persuasive to another. This goes deeper than doctrinal analysis, to decisions of emphasis and allusion. As literary theorist and legal scholar Stanley Fish has argued, the meanings of legal arguments are not “embedded in words but emerge and are perspicuous in the light of background conditions of intelligibility”. Whether one’s audience is judge or jury, a cutting distinction can make an overlooked experience legally significant while a well-crafted analogy can move others more than cold deductive reasoning.

Though much of the pomp and ceremony of the courtroom can appear terribly old-fashioned, even the quaintest rituals serve a purpose, one foundational to civilization. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Athena establishes a court to judge Orestes for killing his mother. His acquittal leaves his accusers, the Furies, threatening vengeance upon Athens. Peace comes only when Athena persuades them to accept an honored place within the city, to be seduced into civility. This “show” of authority gives adversaries a way to submit their quarrels to judgment without surrendering their dignity. Ornate performance, whether the supplicant bow before an elevated bench or the regality of judicial attire, signals that trial and judgment are public acts delivered with restraint.

This is natural justice, a practice more conventional than “rational”. Philosopher Roger Scruton famously understood the common law as an inheritance formed through particular disputes, remaining “close to human life and bound up with a given history”. Such experiential nuances are unlikely to be appreciated by an AI which, rather than grounding its decision on the tangled particulars of human circumstance, is designed to string words together on the basis of static, narrow learned parameters.

To ground lawyering in rhetorical artistry necessitates a shift in legal education. If AI can handle the drudgery of locating authorities and assembling arguments, then the human element becomes even more central. Future generation of lawyers will require a capacity for cultivated passions, what C.S. Lewis called the chest: the seat of “emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments”. It also requires a magnanimity of character sufficient to captivate and seduce an audience. Literature, history and poetics deserve a place alongside doctrine. An education devoted exclusively to producing correct answers prioritizes “technical knowledge” over the sensitive, well-rounded soul required for legal practice. We can leave the grunt work to AI, in short, but the delicate business of civilizing conflict still calls for a human touch.

I was 22, and had answered an anonymous Guardian advert for an editorial assistant at an “international magazine company”. The company turned out to be Paul Raymond Publications. I’d secured the interview by captioning a photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger surrounded by half-naked women. It had almost made the team laugh, the young man conceded.

It was the early Nineties, when men’s magazines were a booming global business. I knew next to nothing about porn. Yet here I was, however shit, apparently a front-runner for a job writing it. Among the general dogsbody duties was writing the captions and stories accompanying the photographs in Mayfair, Club and Razzle and the longer ”confessions”: male fantasies told from the woman’s point of view.

He tossed a copy of Club onto my lap. I had never opened the magazine in my life. “What would you improve?” he asked. Lifting the cover gingerly, I wondered aloud whether there was room for women’s actual sexual fantasies in the magazines, as Marie Claire was beginning to publish. My interviewer flinched like I’d morphed into Andrea Dworkin. “We don’t do that here,” he said firmly.

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A life with Siberian tigers

By Polly Clark

I was offered the job. When I graduated in 1990 there was a very deep recession and very few graduate jobs in journalism. I wasn’t going to turn this one down. As I explained to my mother, who was mortified by my new trajectory, plenty of magazine journalists had started in porn magazine publishing, including my then idol, Lynn Barber.

On my first day, the Managing Editor looked up briefly from his lightbox, hemmed in by towers of contact sheets. He was a young man, but had the world-weariness of someone who had seen it all. “If you miss a deadline, you’re sacked,” he said. He oversaw the frenetic production schedules of all the magazines, but his main job was choosing the photographs. His days were spent peering through his eyeglass, parsing the “pinkness” and “neatness” of the girls’ genitals, and the “happiness” and “filthiness” of their faces.

Mayfair was branded as “classy” with reviews of high-end cars, and even a helicopter which I got to take a ride in. Club was “cool”, aimed at a readership that would later flock to magazines like Loaded. And Razzle was the one we actually enjoyed writing for. It also had a rare intrusion of reality: “Readers’ Wives”, that much-loved institution whereby punters sent in naked photographs of their wives sprawled on the settee, against a remarkably consistent backdrop of floral wallpaper and flying ducks. The affection was tangible even if the Polaroids were terrible quality. It was the only genuine reader material and, along with the Razzle Romp, a monthly spread of naked girls splashing in pools of messy food like baked beans or mushy peas, gave Razzle its uniquely jolly appeal.

Everything else was invented by us — even the Letters. The real letters were unpublishable, and a hazard to open: barely literate, often enclosing Polaroids of the sender’s penis — and occasionally, rather touchingly, a marriage proposal to a model.

The writing of pornography was a serious and exacting discipline with a single purpose: to give a man an orgasm. A thousand words had to be exactly a thousand, with at least two sexual payoffs and the correct vocabulary for each magazine. I loved the invention and humour, especially in Razzle, and credit the work with helping make me a poet. Poetry, too, needs a climax, though usually an emotional one.

The confessions were always in women’s voices, but they expressed male fantasies. The models in the photographs were real but their names and their confessions were all invented. Raymond wanted women writers for authenticity, but no actual authenticity was allowed.

A model would arrive on my desk as a stack of photographs. I gave her a name, a biography if required, and a “confession” to fit the pictures. If readers liked her, she’d return, and I’d pick up the thread of a sex life I’d invented for someone I’d never met.

It was harder than it sounds. An editor — or sometimes the whole office — would read each story and pronounce it horny or not horny. My early efforts were humiliatingly not horny. I still blush to remember scouring my mind for an exciting new setting and plumping for the elephant enclosure at the zoo. My colleagues didn’t know I’d been a zookeeper, so thought I was not only not horny but weird.

Once I got the hang of it, I was entrusted with the popular recurring girls. One was “Ginny”, a bright and bubbly blonde girl-next-door type, and a Club favourite. The photographs in Club showed only basic nudity: a shoot would begin with that and progress all the way to hardcore sex, with different stages sent to different countries according to their obscenity laws. We only worked with Ginny’s early shots. Whatever was in the later ones, destined for countries like Denmark, I never saw.

Over the following months, Ginny, in her pictures, lost her sparkle and her eyes grew hollow. The Editor studied the bags beneath them on his lightbox and shook his head solemnly. “Drugs, probably,” he said. But if she didn’t cheer up, she would have to go. Readers would get restive: Paul Raymond girls were always happy. After just a few months gracing our pages, Ginny was gone. I never even knew her name.

The conflict between fact and fiction began to bleed into my own life. Every man I knew, including the nice ones, confessed his love of porn, assuming that because I worked at Paul Raymond I must love it too. When I insisted on a writing credit at the front of the magazine, punters rang the office and masturbated over the phone. The final straw came when a man I really liked asked me, as we were working up to sleeping together for the first time, to recite one of my confessions. When I stumbled, he seemed surprised, then irritated, as though I’d deceived him.

Did he really believe the fantasies I wrote were my own? I was a writer who had learned to make men ejaculate with just my words; after which I went home, curled up in my leg warmers and watched Cheers. Wanting — or, worse, needing — me to embody my fabrications made him into a punter, just like those who rang me at the office, or propositioned a model. When you have glimpsed the punter in your boyfriend there is no going back. I knew I would have to leave the job, or I would be unable to have a relationship with a man without the punter intruding and ruining it all. Before the year was out, I left as a honed writer who could stare down any deadline, but one who could no longer maintain the required pretence.

The magazine pornography of my time at Paul Raymond is of course a universe away from what is now available online. I could never have imagined, when I left Paul Raymond, what pornography would become. A man who once had to brave a newsagent to buy Razzle can now watch an almost limitless succession of graphic sex acts on his phone, in complete privacy. The internet has taken him into the later stages of those photographic shoots I never saw, and far beyond. Yet one thing has not really changed much at all. The old promise has simply been supercharged beyond all imaginings: these women are real, and they really want it.

Ginny was a real person, but everything the magazine claimed about her I had invented. When her face no longer fitted the fiction, she was discarded from our pages. Online, the acts are more extreme, the women even more readily replaced. But though today’s videos show us far more than those old photographs, they tell us no more about what a woman actually wants. And the fantasy still follows the customer home — I’d already encountered that punter in my boyfriend.

Meanwhile, in Oxford, women are queuing down the street to buy books from shelves marked “Monster Smut” and “Unhinged” at Bad Girl Books. Here pornography has taken another direction entirely: into words, with no photographs at all. The fantasies are not necessarily gentle ones, encompassing domination, coercion and sexual violence, sometimes involving monsters, sometimes frighteningly human men. In Navessa Allen’s Lights Out, for instance, a trauma nurse imagines a masked man breaking into her house. After reading her comments online, he decides to oblige. Her fantasy becomes reality within the novel, but nobody reading it is asked to believe it actually happened.

More than 30 years later, I have my answer to the question I asked at my interview: was there room in the industry for women’s sexual fantasies? At Paul Raymond, I put men’s fantasies into women’s mouths and passed them off as real. Now women are writing and buying their own, however outrageous, without pretending any of it is true — or demanding others play along.

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The new pornography legislation coming into force tomorrow draws this distinction, restricting certain extreme pornographic images that appear real, but leaving written fiction alone. Under the Crime and Policing Act, possessing or publishing explicit pornographic images of strangulation or suffocation, among other acts, will become an offence in England and Wales if a reasonable viewer would think the people depicted were real — even if AI-generated. The Online Safety Act also requires platforms to take steps to prevent UK users encountering such images.

Yet the new offences don’t touch written fiction, however disturbing or violent, nor images that are plainly fantastical, including some anime and hentai, which often use monsters or fantasy creatures in pornographic scenarios. The government’s aim is to prevent the normalisation of harmful sexual behaviour through images that look real. There is no attempt to outlaw extreme fantasies themselves.

Bad Girl Books in Oxford sells T-shirts proclaiming “I Heart Fictional Men”. The books may not be my cup of tea, but I’m getting the T-shirt. That doesn’t mean I approve of every fantasy, or would enjoy writing it. But I did love the invention and skill of my writing at Paul Raymond. My trouble with porn began with the insistence that it was real — and that I had to live it myself.

In the wake of the Democratic blowout in Tuesday’s midterms — South Carolina, Kansas, and Texas have gone blue — beware the preachers of holy complexity bent on obfuscating the obvious: President Trump and the GOP broke their pledge of peace, launched an ill-conceived war with Iran, and thus exacerbated an affordability crisis they’d been elected to solve. 

To be sure, other failures marked the first two years of the Trump administration: the chaotic tariff regime, the grotesque corruption, the performative cruelty of ICE, Trump’s own descent from mere reality-TV vanity to ballroom-obsessed, Neronian caprice. But the Iran war — given both its inflationary effects and galling betrayal of one of Trump’s core pledges — looms largest.

The preachers of holy complexity have good reason to avoid this bare truth. Because it indicts their entire project: a hawkish foreign policy that sees US and Israeli interests as identical or nearly so. Its advocates have for years underwritten Israeli maximalism at great cost to American global prestige and domestic well-being. After the ballot-box shellacking wrought by the Iran war, that project faces a bleak future in mainstream American politics. 

Voter polling — what actual voters tell pollsters upon leaving the precinct — is rarely this unambiguous. Nine of 10 voters identified the cost of living as a major concern as they headed to the polls. Only a quarter of voters described the condition of the US economy as “excellent” or “good”, while three-fourths described it as “not so good” or “poor”. And a staggering 87% of voters said they were very or somewhat concerned about the price of gas and diesel.

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By Sohrab Ahmari

Most telling: about 60% of voters told the Associated Press that the Iran war was a mistake. Yes, fewer identified the Iran war as a “crucial” factor than did the cost of living. Then again, the war itself is a cost-of-living issue. 

It’s also true that, as political economist Justin Vassallo noted in these pages, the current inflation is partly structural, having to do with the general trend toward de-globalization. But since energy prices ramify through the economy, the Islamic Republic’s (predictable) closure of the Strait of Hormuz in response to the US-Israeli invasion has unquestionably aggravated the affordability crisis.

As one senior Trump official told me recently, the administration shouldn’t have been “adding the short-term energy shock” of the Iran war to the structural inflationary trends. 

Or take it from outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who recently said: “Some of these Republicans are saying, “Oh, well, the gas, don’t worry. It’s no big deal.” . . . No, no. Listen, we’ve just got to be honest. Gas is higher. It hurts people, working-class people, and it’s higher because of the Iran conflict. That’s just the fact. If you can’t admit that to voters, then you’re gaslighting them, and they’re not going to listen to you on other things.” Even Fox News pundits — yes, them — openly lamented the war’s baleful effects on GOP campaigns Tuesday night.

This matters because, ever since Jerusalem demanded that Washington join its 12-Day War, the hawks and neoconservatives insisted that a military intervention in Iran would be popular, or at least not unpopular. “There is no US downside to striking the Iranian regime,” counseled the former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen in January, a month before the full invasion. A few weeks into the war, he cheered: “The Trump Doctrine is here. It ends forever wars” (the Iran quagmire has now entered its ninth month).

The hawks also went out of their way to pooh-pooh the economic downsides of the war. John Podhoretz of Commentary (where, full disclosure, I once served as senior writer) reassured a radio host that “I don’t think the American people care very much, they’re very uninvested in this. Unless gas prices go up to $250 a barrel, and suddenly it costs $9 a gallon at the pump, what cost is being inflicted on any individual American by this conflict? There is no cost. There is no cost!”

News Nation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said: “The markets seem to have … a kind of anti-Trump Derangement Syndrome, in which Trump can do no wrong. It seems that no matter what he does, the markets love it. … Even while the US blockade was on, the markets seemed totally oblivious.” 

Never mind that the blockade is still on, and that Gulf oil is transiting with great difficulty and at high expense. Ungar-Sargon identifies as a populist of sorts, and thus knows well that what happens to equity prices often has very little to do with the economic conditions of ordinary people. Indeed, in March 2025, she wrote in praise of Trump’s plan to shift the US economy away from finance and toward manufacturing. The headline: “Trump vs. Wall Street”. (But when there’s an unpopular war to defend, one reaches for the nearest non sequitur.)

And when, over the summer, there was a chance at a negotiated settlement in time to extricate the GOP from the Persian Gulf mess, the hawks assailed the talks — relentlessly. “Mr. President, Give Up on a Nuclear Deal With Iran”, urged The Free Press. Which also published the following not-at-all-uniformly-hawkish opinions: “America Will Regret Withdrawing From Iraq”, “Houthi Defeat Is Closer Than We Think”, “The Dangerous Pause in Iran”, “Danger Lurks in JD Vance’s Negotiations With Iran”. You get the idea.

“Trump’s Iran strategy is working,” argued Thiessen. “His vice president isn’t.” (Why the opprobrium targeting JD Vance? Because the Vice President had taken the lead on negotiations with the Islamic Republic.) Ben Domenech slammed Vance as “Hillbilly Obama” for trying to clinch the deal. The hawkish elements of the religious Right dutifully stepped up to claim a just-war case for preemption and against diplomacy; papal teaching suggested otherwise.

These voices, to be clear, weren’t marginal or irrelevant to Trump’s decisionmaking. Far from it. Although many of them began as Never Trumpers, and even prayed that the Trumpian chalice might pass from them in 2024, these pundits and outlets rebranded themselves as MAGA true believers (or respectably Trumpian, in the case of The Free Press). More than that, they took it upon themselves to police the Right’s boundaries, framing the movement’s antiwar dissidents as unrepresentative at best and traitors at worst.

Trump listened. As several administration sources have told me — including both hawks and restrainers — the President in his second term ignored the usual executive-branch processes. The “deep state” had throttled him during his first term, in his view, and he now preferred to hear from loyalists only. He watched a lot of Fox News, and heard directly from pro-Israel mega-donors such as Miriam Adelson. 

One consequence was the lack of foresight and lousy planning that marred the operation, not least Team Trump’s disregard of the Hormuz threat. The echo chamber of yes men and women also, paradoxically, led 2024’s “peace” candidate to realize a long-cherished goal of the more hawkish elements of the deep state he once denounced.

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By Wolfgang Münchau

In the event, the results are disastrous. Trump is hemmed in at home, and while he will retain greater scope for action abroad, his ability to keep waging the Iran war will depend upon congressional Democrats’ power of the purse. The deeper tragedy is the collapse of the remarkable coalition he put together that, by 2024, encompassed the multiracial working class, including half of Hispanic men and a fifth of African-American men. The Iran war, as I warned in these pages in September, was driving a re-realignment favoring Democrats.

But the outcome is worse still for the hawks themselves, especially those who had come to treat American and Israeli interests as one and the same, and to take the aspirations and tone of Israel’s hard Right as an unimpeachable guide for US policy. It had gone too far. At one point last year, US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce described the United States as “the greatest country on Earth” before pausing to correct herself: …next to Israel.” (Cleanliness, recall, is next to godliness, not the other way around.)

Where will they go now? The Middle East hawks still enjoy tremendous institutional power. But their worldview can no longer be considered to be in the American mainstream. Republican elected officials no less than Democratic ones can read polls, and foreign policy must enjoy some degree of domestic buy-in. Even before the GOP’s Iran-war rout, the polling was clear: Israel — at least, in its current, maximalist iteration — is massively unpopular among Democrats, Independents, and younger Republicans. 

Probably, as a number of Trump World sources told me on Tuesday, the hawks will remain part of the broad conservative coalition. But it’s hard to imagine them in the cockpit of Republican governance going forward. Negotiating their long-overdue demotion, however, will prove far from simple.

Manacled and its ilk are foundational texts that define the strange yearnings of hyper-online young women — women who have been yearning especially hard since AO3 crashed last Thursday. Its 11 million users are now withdrawing from their customary dose of steamy fanfic; the site is expected to remain closed for maintenance for a few weeks yet. To my male readers: now is a good time to go girlfriend-hunting in the supernatural section of your local bookshop. It’s Black Friday for maladjusted fantasy foids.

If you can find a copy of Manacled in an internet archive, it’s worth skimming — not because it’s good (it’s not), but because it can be considered a Rosetta Stone for the sexual and romantic hinterlands of Zoomettes. The unmet desires of Gen Z women, now squinting around the dusty stalls of the marriage market, are laid out in technicolor in this strange compendium of snarling villains, whimpering damsels, groaning lovers and smirking captors. The plot, in brief, is this: Hermione finds herself in a Handmaid’s Tale-style arrangement with peroxide-blond bad boy Draco after Voldemort wins the Wizarding War. The evil regime assigns her to be a surrogate for Draco; she is kidnapped and violated, but she thoroughly enjoys it. In the end, they have a baby. Things work out.

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Throughout, there is lots and lots of shagging. Often this comes with amusing Potter window-dressing, as if to reassure the reader that they are not simply perusing erotica. In one scene Hermione “cast a spell to unbutton his shirt and robes and then, with a practiced partial-levitation charm, she pulled him up so that he was leaning against her and pushed all the clothing down off his shoulders and arms”. There is endless throbbing and thrusting, lots of hot breath, a million “wolfish” smiles and pounding hearts, even the occasional appearance of a nipple or two. This is the bread and butter of AO3 and fanfic more broadly: torrid romance between an everywoman protagonist and a brutish but tender, misunderstood man. There is constant sexual risk on AO3 — themes of abduction abound, as do elaborate pretexts for gray-area sex like Manacled’s forced surrogacy plot. Dubious consent, known as “dub-con”, is probably the site’s most distinctive theme. 

Launched in 2009, AO3’s rise to prominence was driven by a bizarre wave of fandom around X-Factor band One Direction in the early 2010s, with “Larry Stylinson”, the romantic “shipping” (fantasy) of the apparently heterosexual members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, becoming a key genre. But it wasn’t all gay. At one time, the internet was also brimming with stories about 1D, a mass-market teenaged boy band, kidnapping girls from concerts and turning them into (willing) slaves. Today, there are as many granular subgenres as you can think of: wingfic (essentially rutting with feathers); mpreg (male pregnancy); breeding kink; gay fanfic (yaoi) for the enjoyment of heterosexual women; RPF (real-person fiction) imagining sexual escapades between celebrities; even Drapple (stay with me: Draco Malfoy and a green apple he is shown eating in the third Harry Potter film). As you might have inferred, sex is often described in extremely graphic detail.

As niche and strange as these subcategories become, they can mostly be read as wish-fulfillment by young women cut adrift in a sexual culture which leaves them cold. The median age of AO3 users is 26. One 2022 study found 54% of them identified as female, while 41% identified as “non-cisgender”, a wildly disproportionate figure which I suspect comprises a healthy slice of AFAB enbys, he/theys and so on (basically the demographics of your local mask-mandated lesbian bar). Almost half of users not only read but write on the site. The writing is therefore abundant, fervent and often shit. But literary pretensions are not the site’s aim; instead, the most successful writers are there to quench their thirsty fans with escalating sexy scenarios. It is evident that posting is as exciting for the writers as for the readers; AO3 is a rare repository of free, non-visual pseudo-pornography in an online sex economy which prefers the most graphic, hardcore, and shareable material possible. For the site’s largely female constituents, this matters: these readers are in flight from the mainstream and in thrall to their own, quaintly analog nerd erotica. The very different private habits of the internet’s men and women is our riven sexual culture in miniature.

The curious thing about AO3 is that, as powerful and prolific a cultural institution as it may be, it is largely invisible to the public. Nevertheless, its sexual themes have long since bled out into the mainstream. The boom in fantasy smut — published novels about minotaur milking farms and other such nonsense — is a direct consequence of internet fanfiction. Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fanfic; the new film Wicker, in which Alexander Skarsgård stars as a sexy man inexplicably made of rattan, is unmistakably AO3 in nature. Then there’s Heated Rivalry, the gay hockey romp which was adapted by HBO last year, which not only began as a series of posts on AO3 but has now inspired a whole new genre about sexual tension between competitive, horny men (again, to be clear, most of its readers are female). I suspect most young women today — even those who, like me, never read fanfic — are subconsciously honed by its sexual values: the valorization of taboo, secrecy, extraordinary emotional dramatics and undying loyalty. There are, of course, male-coded fandoms: edgelord X’s current obsession is “Malfoid”, a girl version of Draco who is blonde, evil, hot and from what I gather, mostly a meme. But none are as sincere, and as reliably twisted, as the female fanfic which Malfoid parodies. To read these stories is to peep through a window into a generation’s sexuality — and the view is frightening.

It is troubling for a feminist to realize that lots of her peers have spent years reading and fantasizing about submission, surrender, abduction, and sexual enslavement. Nevertheless, that is what AO3 is all about; the site reveals the furtive and unrealizable desires of girls unsatisfied by the modern sexual settlement. To see fanfic as a revolt against the gains of feminism is too easy, though; instead, we might consider its themes an uplifting consequence, if a slightly unsettling one, of those gains. In the West at least, institutionalized forced marriage, coercion and rape are so unimaginable as to be deemed fodder for fantasy; that women want to daydream about them is testament to how thoroughly they’ve been expunged, how remote they now seem. And like other corners of modern sexuality gatekept by women — heterosexual polyamory, for example — fanfiction is highly regulated. AO3 prides itself on almost never censoring any fiction, however egregious the content. This is justified by the extremely strict enforcement of tagging rules on the site; so it is that even rape content can remain if appropriately labeled. As with so many “queer” and/or feminine-coded sexual subcultures, taboo is permitted only within the most rigidly enforced rules imaginable. 

None of this makes for good writing. But AO3 is nevertheless an invaluable archive, an uncensored record of what women daydream about when no-one is watching. There is perhaps no more unflinching guide to “what women want” than the weird warrens of this website whose uninhibited readers share their desire to be kidnapped, romanced then wedded by a borderline abusive werewolf CEO. I won’t make the case that AO3 tells us how women secretly want to live; instead, it shows up the fault lines in real-world dating, which has been drained of romance by apathetic casual sex and sterile hookup apps. Women might not want to be kidnapped and forcibly impregnated by an erotically insatiable Draco Malfoy; really, it’s about them wanting to be overwhelmingly desired. The scenario is almost unimportant, the more far-fetched the better — the emotional payload it carries is what matters. To be pursued, to relinquish control, to experience and inspire unfettered passion: fanfiction’s underlying tenets are not so difficult to understand. We may deride the genre as weird, subterranean and obsessive — but really these girls’ yearnings are, upon closer inspection, universal.

Since the Manchester City verdict — guilty on 114 of the 115 charges, nice seasons of “sham” sponsorship deals, revenue overstated by more than £830 million, multiple witnesses the commission found had lied — everything has become a bit Nathan Fielder. In the first season of The Rehearsal, Fielder builds a replica of a Brooklyn bar so that a conversation can be practiced until it has, in effect, already happened before it happens. City’s seasons are the reverse. The match I am watching will probably not count. It is a game that will not have happened.

The news broke on 25 September. I heard it in London, just off a rough and delayed night flight from New York. I was finally in my hotel, napping to Radio 4, and leapt up dramatically. My first words were “bastards”; loud enough to wake my puzzled wife. Then I thought that we — by which I mean Liverpool FC — would get our two or three extra titles, the season we finished a point behind the bastards. A piece by Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian cured me of that. City have cheated each of the other 19 clubs. Once you have read the findings, the word “champions” does not transfer cleanly to the runners-up. Those titles feel soiled. The alternative is that the seasons are simply voided, which has the bizarre philosophical consequence that nearly 20 years of English football did not really happen.

Football came back on 11 October with Liverpool-City at Anfield. Desperate not to watch alone, I went over to my good pal Todd’s place in Dumbo in my full Liverpool training gear, looking like a proper prannet. What was I expecting? Cosmic justice? The universe publicly shaming the cheats? We lost, badly, 3-0, and I couldn’t have cared less. Todd had invited a friend, an Arsenal season-ticket holder no less, and we all talked for an hour afterwards, not about the game or Arsenal’s prospects (they beat us on Sunday!), but about how unreal it all felt, how You Can See Everything it all felt, where the more we see the less we know. Wilson, again, had the phrase for it: ghost football. Like the second after an incident that everyone knows VAR will check, stretched out over weeks, months, years. He is right. I want to identify what sort of ghost we’re dealing with here. 

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Our game is called Association Football, and the association is not incidental. Football is the free association of human beings; a team is a fused group, in Sartre’s sense, in which the free action of each player is subordinated to the collective and elevated by it. Bill Shankly, my boyhood hero, called this socialism: “It is a way of living. It is humanity.” Johan Cruyff put it more drily: “I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.” And yet the material substrate of the game is (and always was) money — “dirty money, often from highly questionable, under scrutinized sources”, as I wrote in my book in 2017, when Gazprom used to be on all the Champions League hoardings. Its form is association; its matter is cash. I argued then that this contradiction could not be resolved and should not be, that it was “an open wound that we continue to scratch at the beginning of every match, every tournament, every season”. Delight and disgust rotate in every game we watch. Fans are not dupes. They know what is happening. And they know that for a moment, the moment of moments, the form of the game can gleam above its matter. That is what we are there for.

I believed that then. I believe some of it still. What I did not foresee was a third state. The commission did not find that City had too much money; everyone knew that. It found that the matter itself was counterfeit: sponsorship deals that were sham, an owner’s money disguised as revenue the club had earned. Cruyff was wrong. A bag of money has scored a great many goals, and the label on the bag was a lie. The rotation has stopped. What I feel is neither delight nor disgust, but flatness.

Following the great philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, I think that football is play and play is repetition. The essence of football consists in repetition: in this game, the previous game and the next game. There is no original match, no Ur-game in the wet 14th-century grass; each game is as genuine as any other because each is proof that the game goes on. From the repetitions, we build series — a season, a run, a history — and from the series we build what I called, with a slightly pretentious nod to Heidegger, football historicity. To be a fan is to live for a history of moments — for an LFC fan, Istanbul 2005, Madrid 2019, and so on — a shared memory of joy that forms a living archive of meaning from which a team can draw when it needs to come back from three down. The end of the season is unbearable — “There will be no football for months!” — precisely because the chain is interrupted.

You cannot void a moment. Agüero in 2012 happened and happened to everyone who watched it. It was wildly exciting (for non-Manchester United fans). What the City verdict destroys is not the archive, but the chain. A match that may later be annulled is not a repetition of the last game and an anticipation of the next; it is a rehearsal, a performance given for an outcome that may never be counted. This is why I now watch the game I love more than life itself the way I might watch gymnastics or downhill skiing: I can admire the physical skill, but I don’t care.

Judgment must come quickly and with a very fiery sword; but it appears that it will not. City lodged their appeal on 1 October, calling the commission’s opinion “unsafe” and their own evidence “irrefutable”. Under the Premier League’s rules, the appeal must conclude within 12 weeks of its filing, and the sanction is a separate hearing. We’ll know by the new year, perhaps. Perhaps not. Meanwhile, City’s chief executive Ferran Soriano tells the staff that the whole case rests on a “single false accusation”, and ESPN reports that the appeal will argue that the money did not come from the owner at all but from the government of Abu Dhabi — so that the defense against disguised owner funding is that the funding came from a state. Which is a morally questionable defense given the probity of the state in question. 

Everton and Forest broke the financial rules too. They admitted it, took their points deductions and played and the chain held. City deny everything. That is the difference, and it is philosophical. The great and sorely missed American philosopher, Stanley Cavell, distinguished knowing from acknowledging. We know what City did. The commission knows. City know. What is refused is acknowledgment, and in Cavell’s reading of Othello that refusal is tragedy itself: Othello kills Desdemona because he could not yield to what he knew. Cavell also says, “I live my skepticism”. We all do now. Every result since 2009 carries the asterisk of a doubt that no further evidence can remove, because what is missing is not evidence. 

Fans know this, and the comic acknowledgment of it is everywhere except where it is needed: in the gallows humor of the other 19, in Manchester United restoring the counter on the Stretford End that marks the years since City last won a trophy. In humor I find myself ridiculous and I acknowledge it in a smile. City’s fans brought inflatable bananas to Anfield, the toy of the innocent Maine Road club of 1988, and did the Poznan in defiance, which is comedy as denial. The Trumpian denialism that has characterized the club’s abominable behavior since the verdict is the tragic version of the same refusal, and tragedies end with bodies on the bed — in this case football itself, our national sport, the global game, rendered completely meaningless. 

Brighton won. It was a good game. I’d like it to have happened.

He isn’t remotely squeamish about the detritus of his fellow citizens: the sodden diapers; the greasy boxes of half-gnawed chicken bones; the “driver Tizer” (litter-picker slang for discarded bottles of truck driver’s piss). Scott is 57, ex-Army, works full time at a car storage facility and devotes hours a week to picking up other people’s trash near his home in Leicester. “You just can’t stop yourself,” he says. “It’s addictive… When I go to Tesco to do a shop, I’ll quickly litter pick outside.” He even went litter picking after his mother’s funeral, “still suited and booted”.

According to Keep Britain Tidy, two million pieces of litter are dropped every day. In the absence of adequate infrastructure, someone has to pick it up, and that’s mostly volunteers. Facebook is home to many bands of litter pickers. The Wombles Community Charity now boasts 200 groups with a total of 40,000 members across Britain, and provides free branded merchandise and equipment, although Scott says his gear was provided by the local council. He opens the back of his car to reveal his arsenal: grabbers, hoops for bags, green bin-liners, gloves. “There are two types of grabber; this one has a handle like a gun,” he says, handing it over to my delight. I begin to snatch at crisp packets and soon enter a flow state, wombling freely.

Once you cure yourself of “litter blindness” — as Scott calls it — you start seeing it everywhere: the bottles rolling across the pavement, the plastic bags sauntering in the breeze, the cans blooming in hedgerows, the wrappers nestling in wheel arches. The abundance of litter may then come to seem like a visual metaphor for a Britain that is itself in the gutter — a nation out of place, lacking the infrastructure to clean up its own mess, populated by people who don’t even notice what a mess they’re in. All of which helps to explain the growing political salience of litter.

One of Andy Burnham’s first acts as Prime Minister was to increase maximum fines for waste offenses from £300 to £5,000 and to crack down on illegal waste dumps, having encountered a particularly noxious example in his constituency Makerfield. However, the issue is a particular favorite of the Right. Reform held a Cleaning Up Britain conference earlier this year, while Restore’s Rupert Lowe, not to be outdone, has organized a series of litter picks. “All over the country decent patriots are coming together to push for real change and restoration. It is wonderful to see,” Lowe wrote on Facebook. The motive is transparent. Not only is litter picking tangibly useful (it’s much harder to object to volunteers in high-vis tabards removing Red Bull cans from a playground than it is to people sharing Right-wing memes online), but it broadcasts a curated message to the masses. Restore-branded litter pickers present themselves as the frontline against a nation assailed by filth and left at the mercy of apathetic authorities.

It’s useful political ammunition, because everyone hates to see litter. A 2025 YouGov poll claims 96% of Brits find litter irritating. It’s the second most condemned anti-social annoyance — just behind dog poo. And yet people do it anyway: Keep Britain Tidy claims that 49% of British adults litter. But what little breakdown of that statistic I could find suggests that most of the admitted litter is food waste like sandwich crusts or apple cores, under the mistaken belief it will quickly biodegrade (an orange peel can take six months). Still, as I survey the littered landscape, it’s the battered beer cans, plastic bottles of pop, McDonald’s meal wrappers, and crushed crisp packets that sag my bin liner.

Scott and I litterpick our way past the skeleton of a bench, venture down a graffitied alley, and emerge into a small arena of long-shuttered shops, where we find a a carpet of wind-blown trash. We begin to clear it but stop when I hoist aloft a used needle. Scott freezes, as if I’ve just picked up a venomous snake. “I’ve been caught on one of these before,” he says — it required several doses of the hepatitis B vaccine. He takes it from me with a Steve Irwin swagger and drops it into a sealed container. While in theory he should report the needle and leave it alone instead of removing it, he tells me he worries about animals being hurt. Estimates vary, but up to three million animals reportedly die each year after becoming trapped in, or consuming, litter.

Green trash bag full, Scott ties it off, places it on the sidewalk, and uploads a photo and location pin to the third-party Love Clean Streets app to be collected by the local council within 48 hours. While, superficially, this volunteer system is efficient, it does nothing to tackle the root cause of litter. As such, it raises a bigger question: who is responsible for keeping the country tidy?

The most littered areas in the UK are also the most impoverished due to multiple confounding factors: infrastructure challenges like council funding shortages or inefficiencies in street cleaning and waste collection; higher concentrations of fast-food outlets; more smokers and vapers; communal bins stretched further and filling faster, and subsequently — on the basis of there already being more litter — a higher likelihood of more being dropped. A formative (and since replicated) study from 1990 found that people are more likely to litter in already littered environments; trash begets trash. It’s this latter issue that creates much of the political discourse around litter, with many arguing that the problem is not infrastructural or systems-based, but cultural — and linked to ethnicity and immigration status. It’s a convenient story, and a familiar one.

I ask Scott about this. We’ve moved on to a different estate and I notice that while there is not noticeably more litter than the previous area, the packaging brands are obviously imports catering to an ethnically diverse market. “This area is, how we say, multicultural. Which is part of it,” he says. As we scour the streets, I notice a lot of clear plastic bottles containing rust-tinted liquid which at first I assume is driver Tizer. “That’s called paan,” Scott says, spelling it out:“P-A-A-N.”

Paan is a traditional, chewable stimulant made from ingredients including nuts, herbs, and tobacco wrapped in a betel leaf. It provides a psychoactive effect when chewed before being spat out on the ground or in a receptacle. It’s purportedly popular in South and South East Asian communities. In 2025, Brent Council revealed it spends more than £30,000 a year removing the red spit stains from public places, although it is yet to publish costs for the much larger, racially neutral cigarette butt and vape clean-up.

Scott, who moderates a litter-picking Facebook group, says he frequently spends time reporting racism, as some members blame ethnic minorities for the perceived increase in trash on the streets. He says a common argument is that “[ethnic minorities] don’t feel they belong here therefore they don’t respect it”.

This theory is nothing new. In 2018, former Tory MP for Gloucester, Richard Graham, when writing to constituents about new measures to deal with waste in the area, said immigrants were “not used to urban recycling”. In 2008, Gordon Brown’s Labour Government issued plans for town halls to develop information packs, instructing migrants about things like spitting and littering (bad) and queuing in an orderly fashion (good). But while there is room for debate on cultural differences like paan, deprivation, not race, is the primary factor in which areas have the most litter — and in a UK context, people from ethnic minority backgrounds are simply more likely to be in poverty.

Moreover, the war on litterbugs predates the immigration boom by some decades. Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government passed the first anti-littering law in 1958, after pressure from Keep Britain Tidy – an organization proposed by the Women’s Institute and launched three years earlier. The act made littering illegal for the first time and introduced fines of up to £10 (equivalent to over £200 today). Parliament legislated again in 1971 and 1983, raising penalties, but the laws remained vague until Thatcher’s 1990 Environmental Protection Act cleared up the legislative mess. This clarified that dropping any item of waste is a criminal offense, and allowed local councils to issue on-the-spot penalty notices. It doesn’t appear to have worked. Littering is a phenomenon linked to modern convenience culture which has only become more entrenched with each new innovation. A 2025 survey across England showed that 77% believe the country’s litter problem has got worse in recent years.

Most litterers are never caught, let alone fined. Nationally, littering fines totaled less than £48 million in 2025 from roughly 200,000 fixed penalty notices, less than five percent of the annual £1 billion cleanup cost. Littering is hard — and therefore expensive  — to penalize. The crime either has to be witnessed by an enforcement officer, or caught on CCTV in such a way that the perpetrator can be easily (cheaply) identified.

As part of its War on Waste Crime initiative, the Government intends to increase fines by 50% to £750, should councils wish to apply it. Scott thinks this won’t help. “That horse has already bolted,” he says, and offers his own suggestion on how to identify litterers. “It’s not that there’s a lack of evidence,” he says over the click of his picker. “There’s dashcams, cameras outside your house. People are catching people. But we need the police to then enforce it”.

Most parties endorse more police to tackle anti-social behavior like littering. Labour’s manifesto contained a section entitled Take Back Our Streets which promises to “crack down on antisocial behavior with more neighborhood police”. The Tories, meanwhile, recently launched a proposal bafflingly also called Take Back Our Streets which pledges to tackle anti-social behavior, including littering, through a combination of more police, hotspot patrols, and community-service street-cleaning. It also includes a proposal to roll out the highly controversial Live Facial Recognition (LFR) in the 100 areas with the highest crime rates.

Even Reform UK has long expressed caution about LFR being used to tackle crime — after all, they can empathize with the embarrassment of being caught doing something illegal on camera. Despite having a manifesto you could fit on the back of a crisp packet, they’ve decided to launch a litter policy, perhaps coincidentally because it’s an anti-immigration talking point. I was surprised to learn that their partner in this endeavor is Clean Up Britain, the self-declared politically-neutral lobby group that boasts diver Tom Daley, host Lorraine Kelly, and crisp-salesman Gary Lineker amongst its supporters.

Clean Up Britain was started in 2010 by John Read. John is 65 and, alongside his anti-littering campaigning, owns and manages the British Football Academy in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. We speak on the phone shortly after he’s touched down at Heathrow. While Clean Up Britain remains committed to “joined-up, effective action,” John is quick to blame the “very large number of selfish, lazy and ignorant people in Britain” for the litter crisis.

“The great thing about running this campaign is we just tell the truth,” he says. “And the truth is immigration is a factor and no doubt some migrants from different cultures treat the country like shit.” He is careful to add that this only applies to “a minority overall,” and that he “wouldn’t want to excuse the indigenous population.” But he reserves his fiercest ire for Keep Britain Tidy — which he describes as “an impotent failed part of the Quangocracy”. “If I was the chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy I’d die a million deaths”.

Keep Britain Tidy is the main source of most data on littering in the UK. It isn’t possible to determine whether the litter problem is because they are rubbish or whether it would be far worse without them. Read, however, believes they exist less to solve the litter problem than to provide “handy greenwashing for corporates”. One example is the fried chicken chain KFC, which has donated £50,000 to Keep Britain Tidy over the last five years. According to Keep Britain Tidy’s own figures, fast food accounts for 22% of litter in the UK.

Criticizing the beloved friendly stick-figure-and-bin logo feels akin to kicking Great Uncle Bulgaria in the bin bags, but in April the Times reported that Keep Britain Tidy had received a £10 million donation from the tobacco industry, conveniently hidden behind a middleman, Clean Streets CIC. This led to a public statement from Action on Smoking and Health distancing themselves from — and condemning — the donation. Nonetheless, Keep Britain Tidy has a platinum rating on CharityScore, and a YouGov poll ranks it the 20th most trusted charity, just below the Royal British Legion.

John Read’s rival organization, Clean Up Britain, also wants to partner with politicians and influence policy. In June, they invited every major political party to collaborate on the issue of litter. The obvious respondent would be Greens, but the party seems to have tossed the issue aside; their 2024 manifesto does not mention litter once. When I ask him why he’s working with Reform UK, Read says that it was simply the only party to respond. He theorizes that “maybe a lot of their support base are very patriotic and, you know, care about the country.”

While the UK debates these varying methods of enforcement, countries like Japan prove that cultural intervention in schools and prioritizing civic pride can transform litter culture. While the UK has non-mandatory education schemes (such as Keep Britain Tidy’s eco schools program), it lacks a national effort to foster personal responsibility for clean streets. In the absence of state-led cultural change, social media is beginning to pick up the slack. Anti-litter influencers such as James and John Makanjuola, better known as The Maka Twins, have stepped up to inspire accountability. Now both 25 and living in London, they set up a commercial cleaning company after university and have since made their name on social media as the pair who will “clean the places nobody asked us to clean”.

“Our mission is to make cleaning fun, change lives through cleaning, and help the community,” James tells me. Through their content, they want to inspire a “culture, mind, and perspective change”. Their philosophy echoes that of the successful government interventions in Japan. “What we do is mainly targeted towards kids and the younger generation,” John says. “By the time they grow, cleaning will be instilled in them.” As part of their campaign, they workshop games for young people to create positive associations with binning rubbish. The pair talk about bringing pride back to cleaning, and believe that the issue of untidy streets “boils down to the individual.”

And in the absence of a more broadly shared sense of personal responsibility, it falls on a few individuals more than others. Litter is the most visible symptom of a country that has stopped caring: the overflowing bins, the verges strewn with takeaway wrappers, and grubby high streets. If the answer lies in civic pride, litter presents a grimly circular problem: the more deprived the area, the more litter there will be, which in turn reduces civic pride.

I catch up with Womble Scott. He’s amiable but seems more frustrated than when we were picking litter. “Although there’s thousands of us doing it,” he says defeatedly, “I honestly think if we don’t see light at the end of the tunnel, I shall think ‘I’ve been doing it for seven years, I want to go fishing’.”

***

Additional reporting by Tracy King

So why, we might wonder, is His Maj choosing such a complicated form of winter sunshine break in the first place? Why can’t he just do two weeks all-inclusive in Bermuda like a normal person? Daiquiris by the pool would doubtless be more enjoyable than trundling around Caribbean states making speeches while people who don’t see the point of him demand apologies or money in recompense for events centuries in Britain’s past. The answer is of course that all three of Charles’ holiday destinations are Commonwealth states, and two retain Charles as titular monarch. All 34 African and Caribbean membership states have now joined the call for reparations.  

But what is this Commonwealth for? In one corner of my living room stands a tea-trolley that used to belong to my grandmother. It’s a beautiful piece of furniture, which you can convert from a two-story conveyance into a handy fireside table by activating a hidden mechanism. But though it’s ingeniously made, it doesn’t have a role in our house, except storage. The floors are too uneven for it to be useful transporting things, and afternoon tea doesn’t happen. 

The Commonwealth feels like that tea-trolley: evidence of something clearly once of social significance, whose context has disappeared. Along with that context, so too has much of the detail of how we got from there to here. And there’s a link between this fact and the ever more insistent demands that Britain atone for slavery: namely our loss of any account of British history that hasn’t been pre-filtered through a post-war internationalist perspective (which is to say, at least until recently, an American perspective). 

This pre-filter is so habitual now as to be largely invisible. From Mumsnetter to senior politicos, people in Britain have absorbed the idea that the First World War was fought for “democracy” or “freedom”. But no such interpretation was offered for this conflict at the time. Rather, it was understood by the European belligerents as driven by balance-of-power concerns.

It was the American President Woodrow Wilson who conjured the notion of these conflicts being contests between abstract goodies and baddies, when he told Congress in 1917 that the world must be “made safe for democracy”. A similar dynamic is writ even larger in the historiography of the Second World War. And we’re all so used to this story now that the habits of mind within which the older balance-of-power mindset made sense are now as defunct as my grandmother’s tea trolley. Accordingly, too, the more utopian, internationalist one that replaced it has made the task of accounting for Britain’s imperial history exceptionally difficult. And the history of the Commonwealth itself illustrates this transition. 

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This entity began as a realist adaptation to changing geopolitical forces. It was conceived of in 1926 as a response to a shift in relations between Britain and important imperial holdings as a consequence of the First World War. The exigencies of imperial worldwide coordination in that conflict had forced a new degree of independence across dominions including Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand. Then, following the war, these states were understandably reluctant to relinquish this new autonomy. Matters came to a head in 1926, when the Canadian Prime Minister demanded that the British Governor-General, Julian Byng, dissolve the government and call an election. Byng refused, triggering a dispute over who was in charge. 

The row prompted a conference, led by former Prime Minister Lord Arthur Balfour, which aimed to align existing imperial law with reality. The end of these discussions was the Balfour Report, which explicitly described the various British imperial dominions as not dominions at all. Rather, they were “autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations”. This definition was formalized in 1931, along with an “imperial preference” policy which set advantageous trading terms among Commonwealth nations. 

This settlement didn’t last long, though — and as it evolved, it grew gradually less pragmatic, and less concrete. This was with no small thanks to the American statesman Wendell Willkie, a close advisor of Roosevelt, who was a vocal critic of British imperialism. Willkie called for leadership of the world to pass instead to America. In time, and with Willkie’s encouragement, dismantling the European empires (and their trade clubs, such as the Commonwealth’s “imperial preference”) would become an explicit aim of American foreign policy. 

When the Second World War broke out, the US made it a condition of the 1941 “lend lease” agreements, by which America supplied aid to Britain, that the latter would agree to work toward ending these preferential trade arrangements. Then, after the war, US loans to an effectively bankrupt Britain were again explicitly tied to economic liberalization, culminating in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1949. This ended any meaningful economic role for the Commonwealth, leaving behind little save a ceremonial role, a vague do-gooding remit, and some ambivalent memories. 

To be clear: it’s not exactly that the British Empire was alive and well until America dismantled it. The phrasing of the Balfour Report, all the way back in 1926, suggests that in some respects Britain had by then already begun decolonizing herself in favor of a pretense of being first among equals. But decolonization was certainly accelerated by other geopolitical factors and actors. 

What emerged, then, was a self-effacing post-war Commonwealth of values and vibes, in which “British” was deliberately discarded. It always had its critics. Enoch Powell challenged it through the post-war decades, as a geopolitically incoherent bit of “make-believe”, comprising states without meaningful, real-world commonalities or obligations to one another, whose artificial agglomeration encouraged Britain to act against her own national interest while smuggling damaging alterations into Britain’s historic constitution. 

But in the Commonwealth’s defense, it succeeded in one respect: it sustained some kind of continuity between the historic empire of Great Britain and the post-war state that succeeded it. Importantly, by not actually doing very much, it achieved this without challenging the anti-imperial internationalism that came to define the post-war “West”. This “West” was always understood to include, perhaps centrally, the now disarmed, post-imperial, post-war polities of Britain and Europe. 

For decades these polities took full advantage, diverting erstwhile defense budgets toward welfare and other civic causes. The price was an obligation to internalize the Wendell Willkie account of their own past. And this of course also meant, for the same reasons, promoting a strictly post-imperial internationalism, as one component in (or perhaps more accurately, a sideshow to) the “rules-based international order”. To this end, the intergovernmental Commonwealth Secretariat was established in London in 1965. Looking down its contemporary page, it’s hard to see what distinguishes its program (youth, gender, climate change) from any other large international NGO. And what enabled so much of geopolitics to become, for a while, variations on the same NGO theme was of course the reigning pax Americana. 

But now pax Americana is over. Whether installing Marco Rubio as de facto viceroy of Venezuela, or bombastically demanding Greenland, Trumpian geopolitics has departed sharply from the 20th-century rubric of values and moral leadership. Europe’s security umbrella feels correspondingly much less secure, and very much less proof against sudden downpours. Labour politicians are nervously mumbling about how we should stock up on canned food, and German youth are protesting at mandatory conscription for young men. The populations of Russia and Ukraine are being ground to paste in a horrifically futuristic mecha-war. 

In this context, perhaps it’s no wonder that people are beginning to wonder what the Commonwealth is for. It worked well enough for decades as a kind of Rorschach institution: for the imperial governing class, a vehicle for international do-gooding, for the monarchy, a ready-made touring itinerary, and to others, a kind of ghost empire in a good or a bad way depending on where you stand. If this is now dissolving into ever more shrill demands for reparations, this suggests an intuition among those making the demands, that the crumbling of pax Americana is an existential threat to the whole Commonwealth project. 

The evolution of the Commonwealth tracked the evolution of Britain from prosperous independent statehood to whatever it is we are now, governed chiefly by debt and wishful thinking. It began life as a realist adaptation to changing imperial dynamics, then devolved by degrees into a nostalgia-tinged way of duplicating the spreading US-led NGOcracy. But this all presupposed the persistence of a stable US-led international order. If that ends, so too does the game of International Values. No wonder there’s a rush to bounce Charles and our bankrupt British state into some kind of admission of liability before the music stops.

Will Burnham and the King cave to the pressure? It’s not impossible. Britain is desperately skint, but elite British self-delusion has sustained the Commonwealth for more than half a century now, and old habits dry hard. More generally, all indications are that America’s provinces will cling to the post-war moral vision long after the imperial core abandons it forever. Indeed the principal bulwark against meek acquiescence to the tin-rattling is the admixture of Commonwealth-heritage elites such as Kemi Badenoch into Britain’s leadership class: people able to see the game for what it is. Badenoch recently decried the latest calls for reparations as “navel-gazing” and a “distraction”.

Though equally, the Nigerian slave-owning ancestry of the Green Party’s Antoinette Fernandez hasn’t stopped her lending her voice to the call for reparations, presumably as long as her family isn’t the one paying. And perhaps this points to at least one significant long-term Commonwealth achievement: the ways its architectures and networks have afforded a launchpad for elites across its 56 states into the transnational overclass. The exclusive airport lounges of the 21st century are genuinely and amicably diverse, even if the pluralism common among the wealthy and influential doesn’t reliably replicate lower down the social hierarchy, either in Britain or overseas.

Could the existing Commonwealth ever evolve into the federation it long ago gave up trying to become? This has become so implausible that Canada has opted to cozy up to the EU instead. As for us, if we want closer union with polities that hate everything about Britain except the money we send, we might as well do the same. So perhaps before Our Andeh says something we all regret, on our affiliation with either of these august societies, we should start the campaign to de-colonize the Commonwealth by removing Britain from its ranks. If it really is a club of equals, it’ll be fine without us. As for Charles, we can club together and get him a package holiday for next year.

As such, while promoting An American Pickle, Rogen remarked that the State of Israel “makes no sense”. He despaired that, “as a Jewish person, I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel my entire life”. But he was also fed pickles: proper, New York, dill-and-garlic, half-sour, girthy, lacto-fermented pickles. Not the small, wrinkly, saltier-than-the-Dead-Sea variety you get in Israel, locked up in austere metal cans. No, it is in these old-world, Pale of Settlement pickles, the sort you’d find in a good pastrami on rye or speckling lumpy chopped liver, that Rogen invests his Jewishness. It is to this pickle that he writes his Jewish love-letter.

He is not the only one. The American actress Hannah Einbinder caused a stir when she said “Free Palestine” at the Emmy Awards last year. Her speech rapidly became a symbol of a much-touted rupture between American Jews and Israel, or else the pro-Israel old guard in America, who still think wistfully about their years on kibbutz in the Sixties, and the younger “anti-Zionist” whippersnappers, for whom Israel is an irrelevance at best and a painful embarrassment at worst. Einbinder is adamant that her activism, including her rejection of “liberal Zionism”, is rooted in her Jewish values and upbringing. “Something actually Jewish to cleanse the stories,” she captioned a picture on Instagram of a handsome platter of pickles: pickles, you see, are actually Jewish, while Zionism is not. “Lotta Zionists sayin im not Jewish,” she posted on a different occasion in gratingly Zoomer style; “well then explain why im drinking electrolytes out of a pickle jar ive been reusing for half a year!”

Now consider, against this vibrant, self-confident culture, the pickle of Anglo-Jewry. Our haimisha cucumbers, delicious though they are, wither at the comparison. They sexed her up, Mrs Elswood, a few years ago; and in so doing, I am sorry to say, they made her appear less Jewish. The gherkins are drenched in vinegar instead of being allowed to ferment in their own fluids: it is like making champagne with a SodaStream. There is no fresh, citrusy dill in those glass jars. There are only indeterminate “flavorings”, and a handful of mustard seeds wafting around pointlessly like dust caught in the light.

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When the English ate the rich

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It is a perfect symbol of Anglo-Jewry. There is no nostalgia in Britain for the early-20th-century pickle vendor, and still less for the shtetl; there is no great longing for the old times. It is no accident that the “Els” in “Mrs Elswood” comes from Elstree, the apogee of Jewish embourgeoisement. Elstree is a leafy, affluent, commuter-belt suburb, only a 25-minute train ride from St Pancras, but tucked away safely in the Green Belt, out of Sadiq Khan’s maw. Nothing interesting has ever happened there: even Elstree Studios, where bits of Star Wars and the music video for “Bohemian Rhapsody” were filmed, is really in Borehamwood. Elstree suits the purposes of a parochial, inward-looking community; 18% of all working Jews in Britain work professionally for a Jewish organization, and there’s no shortage of Jewish organizations nearby. It would be quite pleasant, I think, to begin one’s life at Barnet Hospital and end it at Bushey Cemetery; to be always tethered to this stolid patch of the world, where London meets Hertfordshire, except maybe for three enervating years studying politics at Nottingham. Britain gave its Jews all the good parts of shtetl life — the gossip, the match-making, the comforts and excitements of community — without any of the persecution and penury. It gave the Jews Elstree, and the Jews are grateful.

“I like Britain”, says Anglo-Jewry’s Nestor, Lord Finkelstein, “and its suburbs and its boring democracy and its middle class gentility and its small ideas”. What makes Britain a great place for Jews is its “bourgeois complacency”. The heartbreak of the recent antisemitic attacks in Heaton Park and Golders Green and the wider rise in hate crimes is compounded by the sense that this complacency is no longer possible. Jewish suburbia will endure, but it will have to be more vigilant, more suspicious of the outside world.

England’s bourgeois life has always appealed to Jewish immigrants. The great historian of Tudor England, Geoffrey Elton, born Gottfried Ehrenberg in Twenties Germany, dedicated his last book to The English, whose bourgeois ways had convinced him that he “had arrived in the country in which I ought to have been born”. Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Sträussler, did not, like so many of his fellow writers and artists, go berserk in the summer of 1968: “I was too old, too self-conscious, too monogamous, too frightened of drugs, too much in love with England, and too hung up to let it all hang out.”

It is interesting that, where Anglo-Jewry does produce genius, it tends not to be avant garde. Elton was an old-fashioned historian, and Stoppard quite an old-fashioned playwright. Both men had a soft spot for Thatcher, whose own affection for British Jews is well known: many Jews numbered among her constituents in Finchley and her colleagues in cabinet. Elstree’s seat is Conservative and always has been. There have been Jewish socialists in Britain too, of course: Isaac Deutscher, Eric Hobsbawm, Ralph Miliband. But as Britain’s Jews shifted Rightwards, they became peripheral to the community. In 2015, only 15% of British Jews wanted to make Ralph’s son Ed Prime Minister, only slightly more than would vote for Jeremy Corbyn a couple of years later. (He is probably even less popular among British Jews today, in light of his policies as Foreign Secretary.) The paradigmatic Jewish public intellectuals of this era were rather men like Keith Joseph and Nigel Lawson, nobody much to the Left of Isaiah Berlin. The historian William Rubinstein (no relation) wrote in his 1982 book, The Left, the Right and the Jews, that, once British Jews had entered the upper-middle class, “the old Leftist enthusiasms of the shtetl are abandoned for the warm security of the center Right”.

Anglo-Jewry flourishes in the warm security of the suburbs, and it flourishes in a suburban kind of way. The British rabbi Lionel Blue once quipped that “The Jews are just like everyone else, only more so”. Among British Jews there is a high degree of characteristically British social anxiety, tending towards conformism. This probably is not conducive to creativity and artistic experiment. Except, perhaps, for Howard Jacobson, British letters lack a Philip Roth or a Norman Mailer. Roth himself seemed to grasp why. His alter ego in Deception complains about the English character of England’s Jews. England was missing something that he was accustomed to in New York: “Jews with force…, Jews with appetite. Jews without shame. Complaining Jews who get under your skin. Brash Jews who eat with their elbows on the table. Unaccommodating Jews, full of anger, insult, argument, and impudence.” He finishes on that familiar American note: “New York’s the real obstreperous Zion, whether Ariel Sharon knows it or not.”

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that when British Jews chafe against this bourgeois conformism — or when they express disdain, in particular, for its attachments to Israel — they are quick to look to obstreperous America. If the Jews are just like everyone else, only more so, and the British middle classes on the whole are “America-brained”, then British Jews are the most America-brained Britons of all.

In his much-discussed polemic Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel testily declares that he does not care about Israel “more than any other country, and to assume I do is racist… my Jewish identity is about Groucho Marx, and Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, and Philip Roth, and Seinfeld, and Saul Bellow, and pickled herring, and Passovers in Cricklewood in 1973, and my mother being a refugee from the Nazis, and wearing a yarmulke at my Jewish primary school…” None of these things, he concludes this rant, “has anything to do with a Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away”.

Most of the things on Baddiel’s list — six, by my count — do, however, have something to do with a North American country 3,500 miles away. For those British Jews who wish to forego Jerusalem, New York is the only possible alternative. It’s an increasingly attractive proposition. However Right-wing British Jews may be, four in five dislike Benjamin Netanyahu; looking only at Israel’s demographics, the trends that Netanyahu embodies are only going to get stronger. Nine out of every 10 Jews in the world live either in America or in Israel. The rest of us, the one in 10 Jews who don’t live either in America or Israel, simply choose which of those poles to look to.

If Netanyahu can be said to represent one pole, then perhaps Larry David, who appears twice in Baddiel’s list, represents the other. One thought kept coming to me while reading Blake J. Harris’s weighty new tome, Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David: there could be no Larry David in Britain. Perhaps that is why British Jewish comedians like David Baddiel admire him so much. Bourgeois conformity is not kind to “social assassins”. Elstree’s no place for eccentrics.

The biography doesn’t dwell much on David’s Jewishness, but it doesn’t have to: it is simply self-evident that David is a product of a quintessentially Jewish world. Before he made his name with Seinfeld and then Curb Your Enthusiasm, David was best known to the American public for playing an Orthodox rabbi on the sketch show Fridays in a fictional low-budget TV show called Matzoi!. The premise is that he is some kind of kung fu master, who shouts out “Oi!” in place of “Eee-ya!”; he is protecting the world from a sinister group called “Global Organisation of Young Irrational Maniacs” (GOYIM).

Curb (much more than Seinfeld) is chock-full of Jewishness. Its soundtrack is infused with klezmer. Plotlines often involve Passover seders, Friday Night Dinners, shivas, minyans, and bat mitzvahs. There is lots about the Holocaust: the classic “Survivor Fight”, or the scene where Larry steals a pair of shoes from an exhibition at the Holocaust Museum.

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And yet what is striking about Larry David’s Jewishness, in Harris’s biography as much as in Curb, is the conspicuous absence of Israel. Only one episode of Curb features Israel prominently, “Palestinian Chicken”, and it ends with Larry stuck in the middle between a pro-Israel crowd on the one side and an anti-Israel side on the other. He, like Baddiel, is basically indifferent to this “Middle Eastern country three thousand miles away”. David is not anti-Israel, by any means: he recently irritated some of his fans by mocking the anti-Israel politics of the DSA. But it seems that Israel does not play an especially significant role in his Jewish identity.

Now compare him with the British Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen — at whose birthday party (one learns from the new biography) David was introduced to his now-wife. Here Israel is inescapable. Often, while playing his characters, Baron Cohen slips into Hebrew. He also has an enduring fascination with the Mossad, exhibited in The Spy (2019) and his character Col. Erran Morad, now starring in the new Ali G film. Larry David’s Jewishness is American and diasporic. Baron Cohen, on the other hand, looks to Israel.

That is quite typical of British Jews. There is, in Britain, extremely little home-grown Jewish “anti-Zionism” to speak of. While 37% of American Jews identify themselves as Zionist, 66% of British Jews do. Even among young British Jews “anti-Zionism” is practically non-existent: one is far more likely, in my experience, to be regaled with tales about “antisemitism on campus” than to encounter young Jews saying words like “genocide”, “apartheid”, or “Ben Gvir”. It is telling that the main Jewish spokesperson at the now-proscribed Palestine Action, Max Geller, is American.

The independence and assertiveness of America’s Jewish community is something that Jews in Britain have historically envied. British Jews may cling to the warm security of its boring suburbia, but they have also always admired America’s capacity for promoting Jewish flourishing. It was a British Jew, Israel Zangwill, who coined the term “melting pot” to refer to American multiculturalism. “Ah, Vera”, says a character in his 1908 play of the same name, “what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labor and look forward!”

But even in America, pickles and “anti-Zionism” won’t be enough. There are pickles aplenty in Curb Your Enthusiasm — there is even “the pickle boy” — but there are not only pickles. Larry David’s Jewishness draws from deeper sources. It helps that he is old enough to remember the old-timey “Noo Yawk” Yiddishkeit in its pomp. It is not clear that younger American Jews have inherited much of this, nor that their attachment to the superficial trappings of Jewish culture, abstracted to such a degree that it could be practically any Eastern European immigrant culture, can sustain a community indefinitely. America’s Left-wing Jews also face a steep demographic decline. Zangwill envied America for “looking forward”, but the “anti-Zionist” American Jews today seem to prefer looking back: at the shtetl, the Bund, the Yiddish-speaking pickle man. The Jewish community in Britain today is frightened, its suburbs most of all, and less sure of itself than usual. But it is, in its humdrum way, resilient and durable.