He had started his Washington career working for the Right-leaning Weekly Standard magazine. In a town of grey suits and cement blocks, he wrote with cleverness and style. I covered local crime for a small newspaper in Alabama. But I wanted to write like he did, so I asked: to work for the Weekly Standard, did I need to buy into a whole ideology? Or could I write for the Left-leaning New Republic, too? I wanted to tell all kinds of stories.

I’ve returned to his answer many times since. “Just pick a side,” he said.

In the years that followed, Carlson rose, then fell, then rose higher again, and often I wondered how he did it. I believe among the millions of words he employed — the thundering waterfall of words; the warring, imprecatory, wheedling words — only one mattered most: “you”.

This was his great insight. Instead of describing events from around the globe with detachment, he invited viewers into a conspiracy of knowing. It was a modern Gnosticism, a rebellion outside the gates of information. And his audience — an ageing, shrinking middle class — found that call irresistible. It was ingenious television.

Never mind that he was one of the most influential figures in the ruling party. Never mind that the most powerful news network paid him $20 million per year for that influence, on the highest-rated cable news show in history. It wasn’t about him. The mobs are coming for you.

Then, a few months ago, Carlson suddenly lost his lofty seat. In a book published today, he claims Fox News fired him as part of a $787.5 million deal with Dominion Voting Systems, after the network broadcast Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud. “They agreed to take me off the air, my show off the air, as a condition of the Dominion settlement,” Carlson says in Tucker, a biography by Chadwick Moore. “They had to settle this.” (Dominion’s lawyers flatly deny this: “Dominion made no requests or demands whatsoever regarding Mr Carlson’s employment with Fox.”)

In the days after his downfall, Carlson posted a video to social media in which he described how most of it — the whole televised political battle — was a sham, but that he would soon reveal the truth. And he concluded with a final, second-person invitation: “See you soon.”

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Now Carlson truly does find himself cast outside the gates, maybe for the first time. He’s been an insider since his magazine stories turned into occasional television appearances, which became regular guest spots on CNN, then a hosting job on the show Crossfire, which pitted him against the liberal commentator Paul Begala. Carlson’s most famous moment on that show was a catastrophic encounter in 2004 with the comedian Jon Stewart, who accused Carlson and Begala of faking their outrage. “You’re partisan — what do you call it? — hacks,” Stewart said. He had drawn back a curtain to reveal the machinery of television debate, and the show never recovered. CNN soon cancelled it.

Carlson moved to MSNBC, where he hosted a show called Tucker. It never really caught on, and after its cancellation Carlson retreated to start a website called The Daily Caller, a conservative tabloid that gained popularity but never much respect as a real source of news. Then, in 2013, Carlson began his true upward trajectory, joining Fox News to co-host the chatty Fox & Friends. In 2016, he took over his own primetime show.

His timing was serendipitous, coming in the churn of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. But Carlson didn’t win an audience of millions by accident; he was exceptionally effective at the job, in ways small and large. His pacing, for instance, is impeccable. Speaking on television is hard — too slow and you’re plodding, too fast and you seem nervous — but Carlson had perfect timing. More importantly, he understood historical timing; as white Americans shifted from majority towards minority, many hardened into a political bloc and eyed institutions with distrust. Carlson recognised the power in their grievance and made a shift alongside them, casting himself as a populist voice for the forgotten and downtrodden.

It was a deft dance with his audience. It required them to forget that he rose to prominence wearing a bow tie, an affectation he began at preparatory school; that he lunched at The Palm on DuPont Circle in Washington, deep inside the Beltway; that he embodied the very Republican establishment against which he raged. It required him to rage for you.

Carlson and his producers pioneered a new style of commentary. Instead of bowing to Jon Stewart’s accusations of manufactured outrage, they built a full-scale factory. It worked like this: producers would scour the American landscape for someone — anyone — behaving in outlandish ways. Hyper-wokeness worked best, but sheer nuttiness served at a pinch. Then they presented this fringe behaviour as central, as representative of them, the un-Americans who would supplant you.

It started with mere exaggeration about issues that genuinely, legitimately, do matter to Americans. Immigration, for instance. In 2017 in Pennsylvania, a Roma refugee child couldn’t make it to a bathroom on time, pulled down his pants, and defecated outside. By the time Carlson injected the story into the national consciousness, “gypsies” had overrun the town and left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human faeces”.

Viewers reacted with anger and fear. And soon Carlson’s show grew so big it competed less against other news programmes than the internet itself. But rage is a market with inflation. By the end of his tenure at Fox, Carlson railed against candy: “Woke M&Ms have returned. The green M&M got her boots back, but apparently is now a lesbian maybe?”

For a time, a conscientious viewer could overlook the widgets tumbling from Carlson’s outrage assembly line because they mattered so little. “You know the official story about pandas. They’re cute but adorably helpless, which is why they’re almost extinct,” he told viewers in 2018. “But like a lot of what we hear that’s a lie.”

Then, in 2020, the country suffered a presidential election so fractious it tore at the fabric of American society. The author Mark Bowden and I wrote a book about the effort to overturn that election, and much of our attention went to the literal machinery of democracy: the vote tabulators made by Dominion and Smartmatic. As we pieced together accounts from county-level election officials — themselves almost all conservative Republicans — reality diverged ever-further from the version put forward by Carlson and his colleagues on Fox News. And we wondered: how are they getting away with this?

Carlson had retooled the factory, and instead of cranking out horny pandas and woke M&Ms, the show offered viewers conspiracies about matters of life and actual death. The apparatus of democracy. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The war in Ukraine.

Segments from Tucker Carlson Tonight started appearing in Russia’s internal propaganda. And suddenly he wasn’t getting away with it. Dominion weighed in with a gargantuan defamation lawsuit against Fox News, a suit so strong that Fox scrambled to apologise, repeatedly and in prime time. Then, thanks to the suit, the private text messages of Fox’s biggest stars went public, revealing that they didn’t believe the lies from Trump’s team. “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson wrote of Trump’s lawyer, to a colleague. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” Carlson didn’t believe any of it. But he had picked a side.

Uglier, if less consequential, revelations followed. The day after the January 6 attacks, for instance, Carlson had sent the following text to a producer:

“A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.”

All of it — the Dominion reporting, the hypocrisy about Trump, the racist messages — led Fox News in April to pull their highest-rated host from the air. In Tucker, Carlson’s biographer describes Carlson’s downfall not as the consequence of his own actions, but instead, naturally, as the result of a conspiracy with foreboding consequences for the reader: “What’s most stunning was the brazenness. A major network had caved to political and regulatory pressures, and the leftists behind it didn’t even feel the need to pretend otherwise. This is the way healthy societies die.”

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Carlson remains under contract with Fox — still receiving a paycheck according to the new book — although he has created a showdown with the network since then by broadcasting on Twitter (since renamed “X”). The videos portray Carlson in exile, and there’s an element of truth to it. He’s still fabulously wealthy and famous, but he no longer sits on the Fox News throne. Instead, he broadcasts from a less polished set, where he uses his hand to scroll his own teleprompter, and his shows feel like an attempt to grab a piece of a younger, online zeitgeist. Take the two-and-a-half-hour interview with “alpha male” influencer Andrew Tate, which Carlson began by claiming public schools in America are removing urinals from boys’ bathrooms because “masculine qualities are oppressive” and boys should “sit down when you pee, like a good little girl”. Carlson used a different set, for that episode, as Tate is under house arrest in Romania, awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking.

It is impossible to say where Carlson will go next. Maybe he’ll find a larger, younger audience. Maybe, like Howard Stern, the former broadcast radio shock jock who turned to satellite radio, he’ll shift to a narrower but even more lucrative format. Only one option seems unimaginable: that he could simply fade away.

At the end of the new biography, Carlson muses on his future, and makes what he intends to be a jab at television. One last conspiratorial offering for you. But for years he was the leading voice on the format, so instead it comes across as unintended confession: “You can tell when someone’s lying to you or when someone’s shading the truth or trying to spin you,” he says. “And there’s a lot of artifice in television.”

As Nathalie Tocci, chief advisor to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles, notes in a recent paper, “the European project developed under… an order made up of international organisations, laws, norms, regimes and practices premised on US power”. Yet today, “that world is fast fading”. While the US remains the only state able to project power globally, it “no longer represents the undisputed hegemon of the international system”. Indeed, as Tocci observes, China’s rise “suggests that we can no longer claim with confidence that economic prosperity and political freedoms can only go hand in hand”. Moreover, our dramatically different experiences of Covid “suggests that the jury is out on which governance system is perceived as best addressing the pandemic crisis, prompting questions about the management of other global challenges too”.

To his credit, Biden squarely addressed these pressing questions. Summoning up the ghosts of past confrontations, he declared that “we’re at an inflection point” between those who believe that “autocracy is the best way forward… and those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting those challenges”. For the President, “Democracy will and must prevail… We have to prove that our model isn’t a relic of our history.”

Yet this justificatory emphasis on democracy as the foundation of empire is a relic of a very specific moment in world history. As the historian Stephen Wertheim observes in his book Tomorrow the World, following the fall of France in 1940, American foreign policy elites feared that a Nazi victory would see the United States hemmed into the Western Hemisphere. But the British victory in the Battle of Britain opened up a new prospect, hitherto undreamed of by American politicians: first of an Anglo-American imperial condominium, dividing up the post-war world between them; and then, as Britain’s relative decline became apparent, a vision of total global hegemony.

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“Americans ever since, from experts to ordinary citizens, have considered world dominance to be their nation’s natural role,” Wertheim notes. It is an ideology which “holds that the superior coercive power of the United States is required to underwrite a decent world order” — one which “assumes that in order to prevent the international realm from descending into chaos or despotism, a benign hegemon must act as the world’s ordering agent,” with that onerous burden falling upon themselves.

To turn its wary populace into eager participants in this imperial project, American intellectual and foreign policy elites framed global expansion as the establishment of a universal liberal-democratic order, guided and protected rather than ruled by Washington. As Wertheim notes in a passage that is as true of American liberal commentators today as those of the 1940s, “anything less [than global supremacy] would be an abdication, tantamount to inactivity, absence, and head-in-the-sand disregard for the fate of the world.” America’s pursuit of global hegemony was not a sordid, self-aggrandising imperial project like that of the fading European powers; instead, it was a moral duty, a noble sacrifice undertaken for the benefit of the rest of the world. In such a way, Wertheim writes, “the country jumped from ‘isolationism’ to ‘imperialism’, acquiring a taste for unilateral intervention everywhere in order to remake the world in the image of the United States”. In doing so, they constructed the global order whose waning days we now inhabit.

Yet by making the Second World War the founding myth of the American-led order, certain pathologies were built into the system which now threaten its survival. As a useful myth became liberal dogma, the neurotic belief that the end of American hegemony would mean the return of dark forces has become so entrenched that it constrains America’s ability to negotiate reality. In the same way US political radicals appear doomed to endlessly replay the ideological battles of 1930s Germany in the streets of America’s cities, it is always 1933 in the world of the D.C. liberal hawk: American hegemony is all that stands between the free world and the rise of new Hitlers, destined to crop up from the blood-soaked soil of the Old World without regular American pruning.

The increasing salience since the 1990s of a Hollywood-esque understanding of the Second World War exemplifies this distortion of reality in the pursuit of a grand, moralising origin myth. It is a worldview shorn of moral compromises, such as the necessary alliance with Stalin’s murderous regime, in which every challenger to US hegemony magically becomes a new Hitler. Complex and intractable ethnic, tribal and sectarian conflicts — literally inexplicable in such a moral framework — are either reduced to the evil deeds of individual dictators, whose removal will lead automatically to the flourishing of liberal democracy, or ignored as too difficult to comprehend.

The results are plain to see. As Tocci notes, more in sorrow than censure, “the last war which the US led and unequivocally won both militarily and politically was over Kosovo 22 years ago.” In the ever-expanding wars since then, the US has “won militarily, but (abysmally) lost politically.” The result, as she observes, is that “the outcomes of the many wars that have been fought in China’s absence during the decades of its economic rise have been, in one way or another, to China’s strategic advantage.”

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The danger for America, then, is that its leaders have become high on their own ideological supply, overlaying their fantasy map on the real world. It seems, at times, that by fusing the Realist desire for hegemony with an idealistic mission to remake the world, America’s elites believe they have secured the mandate of heaven for their project. Challengers, from Putin to Gaddafi to Assad, are not merely opponents; they are rebels against the arc of history, individual reincarnations of the 1930s whose very existence, let alone survival, is morally unbearable.

Indeed, there are worrying intimations that America’s leaders believe the victory of liberal democracy is predestined, purely through its own perceived moral virtue: as if the victories of the Second World War and the Cold War were won by holding the correct ideology, and not through the possession of stronger industrial bases and amoral political alliances. The rise of China, concomitant with America’s decline, is largely the unintended product of such a dangerously idealistic worldview.

Yet like the American millennials role-playing Weimar, their elders continue to re-enact the sacred myth on the global sphere, invoking the litanies of another time, on another continent, for their magical power. By intoning the sacred word democracy over and over again at the Munich conference — including three times in his concluding sentence — Biden echoed the themes of his first domestic foreign policy speech: that he will “host the summit of democracies early in my administration to rally the nations of the world to defend democracy globally” and that “there’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy”. The riot at the Capitol and the future confrontation in east Asia are now part of the same Manichean struggle, a worldview we could term the true D.C. cinematic universe.

Of course, Biden’s framing is not true in a literal sense: the same speech contained a pledge to defend Saudi Arabia — which is not noted for its liberal governance — even as he announced the welcome end of American military support for the Saudi kingdom’s bloody and disastrous war in Yemen. Likewise to confront China, the US will need to enhance alliances with authoritarian or dubiously democratic South East Asian states, with even India’s commitment to “liberal democracy” in the American sense increasingly debatable. Even in Europe, Poland, the most eager cheerleader for America’s continued military dominance on our continent, displays a far more equivocal approach to both liberalism and democracy than Biden’s framing suggests. As in the first Cold War, America can either promote global democracy or preserve its imperial reach, but not both.

Nevertheless, the democratic ideal retains immense rhetorical power for defenders of the American-led global order. Thus the openly imperialist writer Robert Kagan argued recently that Americans must “accept the role that fate and their own power have thrust upon them”, because “the only hope for preserving liberalism at home and abroad is the maintenance of a world order conducive to liberalism, and the only power capable of upholding such an order is the United States”.

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In starker terms than Biden, Kagan argues that the empire is necessary to preserve democracy at home: an America that retreats from global hegemony would no longer be America. But as the Realist professors of International Relations David Blagden and Patrick Porter observe in a recent paper arguing for a strategic withdrawal from the Middle East, the precise opposite case can be made. The pursuit of global hegemony since the end of the Cold War has seen the United States overstretch itself, taken on unsustainable levels of debt to fund its military expansion, eroded the country’s image abroad, militarised policing at home, enabled the rise of China and fostered disillusionment and political radicalism in America. The Trump era, they note, was not so much a threat to America’s global mission as its product, a marker of growing popular dissent to imperial overreach now observable on both the Left and Right of the American political system.

As they observe, America’s “position as ‘global leader’ is premised on a set of impermanent and atypical conditions from an earlier post-war era”, but “the days of incontestable unipolarity are over, and cannot be wished back”. The result is that “overextension abroad, exhaustion and fiscal strain at home, and political disorder feed off one another in a downward spiral, cumulatively threatening the survival of the republic”.

The US empire is, then, at an impasse. Its moral and political justification of overseeing a global order of universal liberal democracy — the closest real-world equivalent to the Kantian perpetual peace that has both motivated and eluded liberal idealists for the past two centuries — is now beyond its capabilities to maintain. Yet to return to its core imperial concerns of the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Northeast Asia, as Blagden & Porter counsel, would tarnish the imperial crown. Without the idealistic universalism that has justified America’s global mission since the Second World War, the US empire would be an empire like any other: self-interested, amoral, and hostage to the cycle of rise and fall that has seen every other empire pass into history. Kagan is in this sense correct: without the justifying myth to organise the empire around, the moral logic of the entire enterprise falls apart.

Even within the heart of the Nato alliance, European strategic autonomy therefore represents a dilemma for America, which, as Blagden & Porter note, has always “displayed a longstanding preference for preventing even its major allies in Europe and Asia from exercising true strategic autonomy”. A more autonomous Europe lessens the strategic burden on the United States, allowing America to refocus its forces on confronting China; yet a more autonomous Europe will also be less constrained by American pressure, and more inclined to pursue its own interests.

How does this end for America? Biden and the presidents after him will be forced to make a hard choice: whether to retrench to a smaller and more manageable empire, or to risk a far greater and more dramatic collapse in defence of global hegemony. In the meantime, perhaps our European allies are correct in discerning a greater opportunity to rebalance the Atlantic alliance in our favour for the first time in decades. A more modest American commitment to a limited democratic order, rather than an unsustainable global one, can only enhance European influence, including ours, especially as the bloody distractions of the Middle East, America’s self-defeating imperial burden, fade from prominence. American leaders will soon be forced to choose between realism and idealism; the same is also true of us.

But we parted on good company and I withdrew, with suitable obsequiousness, through what I thought was the door. Straight into his walk-in closet. When I sheepishly emerged, he was asleep.

Back then there was certainly a somnolence about the mainstream US media, a resting-on-laurels patrician grandeur — walk-in closets for the anchors, self-regarding “journalism studies” courses for the youngsters. It all suggested that, in the internet age, they didn’t know what was about to hit them.

Well, it’s hit them now. Right between the eyes. Both the Fox and CNN news channels are about to be displaced by Newsmax (to the right) and MSNBC (to the left). Not that it matters too much. Today, the traditional networks are largely watched by people whose hands shake too much to change the channel when the adverts come on for Viagra or dentures.

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In fact, according to Pew research, more than half of Americans get some or most of their news from social media, mainly Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And as Pew points out, this new-age media isn’t particularly helpful: Americans who turn to social media for political news are not only “less aware and knowledgeable about a wide range of events and issues”, but they are also “more likely than other Americans to have heard about a number of false or unproven claims”.

Perhaps the biggest of those claims is that Donald Trump won the election. Certainly large numbers of Americans believe it: around 32% according to a recent CNN poll. Meanwhile, YouGov reports that one in five voters — and 45% of Republicans — supported the storming of the Capitol.

What are we supposed to do with them? In the new age of Biden, the call goes out, let the values of pluralism that he would have recognised as a young man — the values of Walter Cronkite in his pomp — be the lodestone for the healing nation.  Blitz the dotty folk with real news, regulate social media, tell the truth in White House press briefings and, most importantly, respect facts. Breathe in. Respect truth. Breathe out.

It’s a seductive suggestion. But the philosopher kings and queens are wary. They wonder if the answer to ignorance is something other than knowledge, something even more difficult to pin down. In a recent column for the Atlantic, Anne Applebaum wondered what we should do with the “seditionists” who stormed the capital. Her conclusion: “Drop the argument and change the subject.”

Don’t bother with fact-checking. Don’t harangue people about Democracy and Freedom and the American Way. In fact, stay right off these subjects.

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There is a growing body of academic research that supports this view — a body added to recently by the Cambridge philosophy research fellow, Daniel Williams. In a blog published by the LSE, Williams introduces us to the idea of “rational motivated ignorance”.

“For a typical citizen,” Williams says, “political knowledge is just as often a liability as a source of power. Ignorance protects us from painful truths, insulates us from responsibility for our actions, and sustains the relationships that we depend upon for meaning and belonging. To understand and address societal ignorance, we must come to terms with such benefits.”

Here we return to Applebaum’s solution of simply changing the subject. As Williams puts it: “When societal ignorance is rational motivated ignorance, the solution cannot be ordinary forms of knowledge dissemination, persuasion, and fact checkers. Instead, our solutions must be much more targeted towards the interests and incentives that make knowledge costly for individuals.”

To which Joe Biden might reply: Huh? What does this actually mean? What should I do?

“Make the problem narrow, specific, even boring, not existential or exciting,” is Anne Applebaum’s suggestion. “’Who won the 2020 election?’ is, for these purposes, a bad topic. ‘How do we fix the potholes in our roads?’ is, in contrast, superb.” What this suggests — both for those who want to reclaim the Republican party and for those who want to press ahead with the Democratic agenda — is a move that is neither left nor right, but down.

It may not take the Democrats in the comfortable direction of the middle way. In fact, Biden’s unity agenda — some kind of bipartisan fudge that brings the nation together — might be a mirage best avoided. Instead, say a number of Democrats, what America needs is something far more radical.

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They agree with Applebaum that the only way to forward is to simply get on and fix things. No doubt they’ll point to Obama’s first term, which was stuffed with serious misjudgements: they fruitlessly waited in vain for Republican support before spending money on infrastructure; they abandoned radical plans to create something like the NHS for all Americans, when in fact even the watered-down Obamacare was fought against tooth and nail by the Congressional GOP and still is.

David Sirota, an advisor to Bernie Sanders, wrote recently that the healthcare woes of the Obama administration “should be a harrowing cautionary tale for Biden on both the policy and the politics.” But Biden should know better: “He had a front-row seat in watching a bad-faith Republican opposition kill a much-needed initiative, and then use Democrats’ failure to deliver to win at the polls. He of all people should know that this story never ends well.”

And so America’s new President faces a paradox. In order to win back the middle ground, perhaps Biden needs to be radical. Certainly, he needs to reorder America — to actually provide solutions in a way that Donald Trump mainly failed to do.

As for where Biden should start, he could do worse than return to the musings of Donald Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon. Following the 2016 election, he called for a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and tax increases on the rich, boasting that “if we deliver, we’ll get 60% of the white vote and 40% of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years”.

Well, that doesn’t sound too bad for the Biden team; the philosophers and the party radicals leading the way. Perhaps, as Walter Cronkite used to say, “that’s the way it is”.

In theory, the American political mainstream believes that extremism is not acceptable. The minute that people take up arms or act violently against agents of the state is the point at which all democrats (with a small “d”) unite in condemnation. In practice, too, that theory is borne out: a recent Washington Post-ABC News survey found that 89% of Americans denounced the actions of the Capitol rioters.

In the past year, however, both the Left and Right have seen political violence carried out in their name — and both have floundered in their responses to it. Just as the recent Capitol riot tainted the Right, so the violence of last summer’s protests following the death of George Floyd shamed the Left. Yet while both sides have been at fault, neither seems any closer to facing up to that fact. Instead, both prefer to the blame the other, all the while denouncing the unfairness of their own treatment.

The consequences of this are deeply worrying. Polls show that almost a fifth of Republican voters feel some support for the actions of the Capitol rioters. That is a significant, and concerning, chunk of the Republican base. But it is analogous with those on the Left who continued to support the Black Lives Matter movement, even after weeks of nationwide rioting and looting. Indeed, three months after the protests began, 28% of the American public continued to express “strong support” for the movement — a fall of just under 10% in three months.

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So why have both the Left and Right struggled to control their extremes? It seems to me that there are three principal reasons. The first is a by-product of the information age: namely, that today’s fringes are amorphous. In 1964, when then Republican candidate Barry Goldwater sought to draw a clear line between the conservative movement and the far-Right, he was famously urged to excommunicate the extremist John Birch Society. In recent weeks, people have called on Republicans to do the same with the “alt-right” and those associated with the Capitol riots. Last summer, meanwhile, many thought it would be shrewd for the Democrats to disassociate themselves with BLM and Antifa.

The trouble, however, is that today, unlike with the John Birch Society, political groupings on both the Left and the Right rarely meet physically, while their leadership and membership structures are anything but clear. It’s all very well demanding that the Republicans sever ties with the “alt-right” — but how do you decide who is “alt-right” and who is not? On the other side, how — other than referring to the law — do you identify which parts of BLM are acceptable and which are not? The answer may not be impossible, but it is certainly harder than in the past.

What makes this even more tricky are the second and third challenges to reining in political extremes. The second – a feeling of unfairness following the condemnation of political violence – has been evident throughout conservative commentary in recent weeks. The American Right has been almost unanimous in its condemnation of the violence at the Capitol. But, at the same time, there has been a tendency to caveat this denunciation by contrasting it with the reluctance of Democrat officials to criticise the violent BLM-Antifa activists last summer.

Typically, they invoke the case of Kamala Harris, who in June gushingly told the comedian Stephen Colbert: “This is a movement. I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware… That they’re not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.”

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Of course, it is clear that America’s new Vice President was admiring protests, rather than the violence that followed them. Yet a Republican could be forgiven for holding it up as proof that there are double-standards at play. If, after the storming of the Capitol, Donald Trump or Mike Pence had said that the rioters were “a movement”, that they “were not going to stop” and “should not”, they no doubt would have been accused of legitimising violence.

The problem is that this perception of asymmetry – that feeling of unfairness – cuts both ways. For their part, Democrats claim that whereas the BLM protests had a legitimate cause, the Capitol riot did not; that whereas their perception of police racism in the US is accurate, Trump’s claims about the “stolen” election are not; that while the person they blame for instigating the violence was in the White House at the time, the people accused on their side were not in comparable positions of power. Both sides believe themselves to be in conflict with an opponent who is stronger — and that sense of injustice will not just disappear.

Then there is the third structural problem faced by both sides when dealing with their own extremists: the way in which their political opponents gleefully disrupt what should be moments of reflection to score political points. Since the Capitol riot, for example, the words “terrorist” and “domestic terrorist” have rarely had such a good outing on left-wing cable news channels such as CNN and MSNBC. For instance, CNN presenter Don Lemon made the following claim on-air:

“If you voted for Trump you voted for the person who the Klan supported. You voted for the person who Nazis support… You voted for the person who incited a crowd to go into the Capitol and potentially take the lives of lawmakers. Took the lives of police officers. Took the lives of innocent lives who were there on the Capitol that day.”

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Here, Lemon used a shocking but isolated incident to take a broad swing at the entire Republican movement. It was a crude tactic, but I suspect few on the Right would not have done the same had the crowd in Washington on January 6^th belonged to the far-Left. Few would have been able to resist the opportunity to present events in a way that tarnished all of their political enemies.

Yet such opportunism only serves to deepen the cycle of division. It was hardly surprising that, immediately after Don Lemon’s monologue went viral, the GOP sent out a fundraising email to its supporters titled “Did you see what CNN said about you?”.

So what can the American majority — the people who disapprove of political violence on all sides  — do to stop the spread of extremism across American politics? Well, the Left and the Right could start by agreeing that both sides house extremists who need to be identified. Then, when that’s achieved, they should be fair, consistent and nuanced when apportioning political blame.

All of which may seem remarkably straightforward —and, to an extent, that is true. But at the same time, we must not forget that the future of American politics is at stake. At present, it is riddled with hatred. And with politics, like anything, you get out what you put in.

For the pro-Trump rioters who ransacked the Capitol this month, the bogus claim that the election was stolen remains at the heart of their belief system. But surely this isn’t the majority view among the 76 million Trump voters? Actually, it appears it is. Republican voters really believe their man won. Take, for example, a recent Data for Progress poll which offered respondents three choices: “I trust the election results and believe Biden should be inaugurated”, “I have some doubts about the election results, but believe Biden should be inaugurated”, and “I don’t believe Biden should be inaugurated”.

Of the 463 Republicans sampled, only 16% said Biden won cleanly, while 29% claimed he won despite some irregularities. Meanwhile, 49% replied that Biden should not be inaugurated. If we screen out the 6% who said that they didn’t know, this means that over half of Republicans think the election was stolen.

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By Michael Tracey

When I conducted my own poll of almost 400 Trump supporters two days after the Capitol was stormed – using Prolific, an online survey platform – the results were much the same. I asked “Which statement comes closest to your view of what happened in the 2020 election?”. The answers, with emphasis added, were as follows:

• Trump lost to Biden fair and square: [17%]
• Trump almost certainly lost to Biden, but it would have been closer without rule violations that helped Biden: [13%]
• Trump probably lost to Biden, but it would have been closer without rule violations that helped Biden: [19%]
• Trump would have got more votes than Biden without the rule violations that helped Biden: [51%]

Even with my attempts to tease out a nuanced response, a majority of Trump voters echoed Trump’s conspiracy theory that the election was fraudulent. And surely it is a conspiracy theory. While none of us was there to count each ballot, I trust the US legal system, electoral process and the social science of election fraud more than hearsay. The same, however, cannot be said for Trump’s supporters, whose trust in the electoral process appears to have frayed. It’s a result, I suspect, of the wider social disconnect between voters and elites that both Michael Lind and Robert Putnam link to the demise of mass-membership associations such as unions and churches. They used to give people a rooted social connection to national political institutions, a phenomenon which since the 1960s has faded.

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Who are the real Shy Trumpers?

By Eric Kaufmann

Does this mean that Trump supporters are putty in his hands, devoted to a cult figure? Not necessarily. If they were, they would enthusiastically support him running for president in 2024. It would be a chance for their stabbed-in-the-back leader to redeem himself. But when I asked my Trump-voting sample, “What is your preferred vision for the Republican Party’s future?”, they were decidedly cool on Trump when compared to a hypothetical Trumpist politician with more respect for liberal democracy:

• Donald Trump runs again in 2024: [29%]
• A candidate who is more presidential, respectful and gets things done, while adopting Trump’s views on controlling immigration, nationalism and being willing to challenge the mainstream media, political correctness and elites: [55%]
• A candidate who is more presidential, respectful and gets things done, and avoids Trump’s views to focus on older Republican arguments like limited government, free markets, the family and resisting tyranny in the world: [16%]

All of which suggests that there is certainly room for a Republican candidate who can articulate the so-called “left-conservative” populist views espoused by anti-Trump intellectuals such as Andrew Sullivan and David Frum. Meanwhile, support for a candidate espousing the post-Reagan “fusionist” Republicanism of tax cuts, family values and promoting democracy garnered a paltry 16%.

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Donald Trump's ruinous legacy

By Michael Tracey

And so the hope for a return to the ideological status quo in American politics appears a vain one. As the below table — which compares the results of my two questions — reveals, even among those who accept that Biden won fair and square, a respectable Trumpist candidate beats the fusionist conservative 53-35. On the other side, moreover, even the die-hards who say that Trump won narrowly prefer a Trumpist over the man himself. In fact, the Trumpist always comes out on top.

Source: Prolific, January 8, 2020. N=393.

What this shows is that while a cultish devotion to Trump’s charismatic authority is important, it is secondary to the mainly cultural grievances — such as the policing of speech — which provided his 2016 election with an impetus. A skillful politician who fights back intelligently but unapologetically on these issues, while respecting democracy and procedural liberalism, has a serious chance of emerging as the next Republican presidential candidate. And though Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton will no doubt be leading figures jockeying for that mantle, we shouldn’t neglect the possibility that an outsider may ride into town once again.

On December 17, Martin apparently had a phone call from one ‘Captain Video’, from outer space, telling her that a saucer was to land in her backyard to pick her up, at four that afternoon, just before the end of the world. When the ship didn’t come, Martin and her rapidly-assembled coterie fell into despair. But then they discussed the matter further, and realised that the true meaning of the message had been that salvation would come later that day.

So it went on. On December 21, while yet again waiting for the spaceship that would save them when the earth was destroyed at precisely 12pm, it was suggested that perhaps the lounge clock they were timing the planet’s destruction by was wrong. Thus, the room of true believers waited for a second, slower clock to chime midnight, fingers presumably in ears. When, still, nothing happened, it was agreed amongst them that God in his infinite mercy had decided to save everyone. This time.

In terms of their own timeline QAnon is now perhaps at its first midnight clock. That makes this week both a fecund and an unnerving time for believers. Unnerving, because there is as yet no word from the high priest. “Q”, the anonymous figure who speaks the revelations that hold QAnon together — supposedly someone inside the Trump White House with high, ‘Q-level’ security clearance — has remained silent since polling day. His movement is a lifeboat drifting.

The last post in Q’s preferred receptacle — a messageboard on extreme speech site 8kun — was on November 3. It was a photo of a swimming pool-sized US flag on a hill, entitled “largest_flying_flag_in_america.jpg”; a quote from the Gettysburg Address: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom  and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”; and the words: “Together we win”.

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Is QAnon on the brink of power in America?

By Travis View

But the prophecy failed. Winning was not what happened. Ostensibly, Trump has now lost. So, what hope is there for those who believe he is the last line of defence against a Deep State paedophile conspiracy? Will he still be held up as the Lion of Judah when he’s reduced to hosting chat and light entertainment on Trump TV in 2021?

For now at least, like Trump himself, most believers remain in the denial phase. It’s easily done, at a time when the line between QAnon and not, between Republican and kook, is more blurred than it has ever been. The President continues to regularly erupt on Twitter over illegal voting. His son Eric posts discredited images of someone ‘burning 80 Trump ballots’. Even Republican moderates are perturbed by the vertical Philadelphia vote spike and the Sharpies in Arizona. Trumpist clickbait blog The Gateway Pundit has been making hay while the conspiracies shine with stories like “System ‘Glitch’ Also Uncovered In Wisconsin: Reversal Of Swapped Votes Removes Lead From Joe Biden”, making reference to an original ‘glitch’ in Michigan’s Antrim County that mistakenly awarded 6000 votes for Trump to Biden.

If Trump has his way, somewhere within that cacophony of allegation, the courts will now magnify a few grains of truth.

This would be easier to disentangle if there weren’t also a vague sense that the media are playing their own kind of fast and loose to hasten Trump’s departure. “It is totally impossible!” said Trump’s attorney Rudi Giuliani, discussing the six contested states that all seem to have edged for Biden in his video stream, Rudi Giuliani’s Common Sense. “Illogical. Irrational. That the same thing would happen in all five or six places where there were close votes.” USA Today reported that Giuliani was “ranting” in “a bizarre internet video” with “ink-stained hands”, but a quick inspection will show a fairly solemn version of the ex-mayor, with fairly clean hands, poring over tables of Arizona voters rolls.

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Facebook is radicalising your parents

By Gavin Haynes

And so, the mainstream media muddies the water, creating a perfect cover for QAnon theories to mingle unmolested. On InfoWars, Steve Pieczenik, a former state department assistant secretary, and Tom Clancy co-writer turned QAnon truther, explained how the ‘voter fraud’ had been permitted by an all-seeing Trump because it was in fact an elaborate sting operation against his enemies: “We watermarked every ballot paper with blockchain technology…. We know very well where every one went. All of this was expected.” Or, to quote Q’s unofficial slogan: Trust The Plan.

But the open-ended nature of Q allows for many different plans. In Philadelphia, two men were arrested on gun law violations after turning up at a polling station apparently hoping to ‘straighten things out’. The back window of their Hummer was plastered with QAnon decals.

Trump seems comfortable playing all angles. Before the election, at the town hall interview that replaced the second debate, he was asked about QAnon, and openly winked at them: “I don’t know anything about QAnon… I know they’re very concerned with paedophilla”. A vote’s a vote, after all. Indeed, there was some heated talk before polling day of a ‘Quacus’: with an estimated 5% of Republican candidates in some way connected to QAnon, would the movement now have to be treated as simply another voting bloc — slapping on some pork barrel come budget-time for the anti-Satanism lobby?

In fact, most of those connections were tangential, and the vast majority of Q-endorsing candidates were no-hopers, who lost on election day. A few did slip through the net: Marjorie Taylor Greene won her Georgia Congressional race by default after her opponent withdrew, and Lauren Boebert is now a Congresswoman-elect in Colorado’s third district. Both have rowed back somewhat: while Greene once said she considered QAnon “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out”,  ever since her campaign took off, she has been careful to avoid the subject.

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How corporations can delete your existence

By Gavin Haynes

National-level politics tends to homogenise. The liveliest supporters are usually found lower down the ballot paper. In the unlikely neighbourhood of Brooklyn, Mark Szuszkiewicz stands on the brink of election to the State Assembly. In one Instagram post, replete with #QAnon and #Q hashtags, Szuszkiewicz suggested that Tom Hanks became a Greek citizen after Greece declared paedophilia a disability. Hanks denies the allegation.

As with any falsifiable event in the life of a cult, from Heaven’s Gate down, there’s great danger for those who find they can’t deal with the cold slap of reality brought by new evidence. On the QAnonCasualties forum, the news this week was often grim: “I hoped I’d never have to write this… My aunt who was ultra QAnon shot herself earlier today, she left a note saying she was terrified the cabal was coming for her and her kids because of Trump’s loss.”

Yet for most, as sub-plots like the watermarked ballots show, this is a moment for reinvention, not dissolution. In October 2017, the prophecy went out that Hillary Clinton would be arrested by the end of the month and shipped to Guantanamo Bay. When that failed to happen, some suggested that Clinton had been arrested, but was wearing an ankle bracelet, others that the Hillary Clinton appearing at book signings and TV interviews was simply a clone. So QAnon’s disappointments are full of rich creative potential. Perhaps we are about to see a new dawn, not a sunset.

One of Festinger’s key criteria in his study was that, if the believer’s views are to adapt, they “must have social support”. The individual on their own, Festinger theorised, would be too weak to push back against irrefutable evidence. But if multiple people could talk their way round to a new consensual reality, reinforce it to each other, then all would be good again.

In that sense, at least, Q is like blockchain. Where blockchain is a distributed ledger of banking, with each transaction housed on a multiplicity of individual computers which all check each other’s homework  — Q is the distributed ledger of conspiracy. With tens of thousands of eyes group-sourcing the meaning of any given clue — and a natural internal market signal-boosting the most optimal — the Q hive mind may prove just as indestructible.

The Democrats expected non-white voters to be outraged by Trump’s often-racist rhetoric — and worked hard to mobilise them, in the hopes of a landslide victory for Biden. The data so far suggests they succeeded in boosting black turnout; and yet the Democrat party failed to increase its margins with black voters. The election was won on a knife-edge, and Trump performed far better than expected with black Americans (and even more so with Latino voters).

Some pundits believe that Trump’s stronger than expected showing is a repudiation by white voters (who still make up the majority of the electorate) against this summer’s BLM movement. Though research has shown that the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protestors were peaceful — and that much of the worst violence during this year’s racial unrest was committed by white actors — white Americans are less likely to recognise the difference between the protests and the riots. Trump has regularly conflated them in his rhetoric.

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How white radicals hijacked Portland's protests

By Michael Tracey

Meanwhile, Trump has played up his pre-Covid economic performance while downplaying the need to address racial issues, and a plurality of voters seem to have ranked the economy as their number one issue according to exit polls. These polls show that 80% of those for whom the economy was the most pressing issue went for Donald Trump, while 90% who viewed racial injustice as the most important issue went for Joe Biden.

Nevertheless, Biden’s advantage on race did not lead to higher margins of support from black voters compared to four years ago. Black women voted almost uniformly for Democrats, as they have done for some time; the major surprise in this election concerns black men, especially younger black men who were targeted by both campaigns. Washington Post exit polls indicate that Trump won 18% of black men. Although possibly within the margin of error, this is an apparent increase from the 14% of the black male vote that he won in 2016 according to the Pew Research Center.

Even if the increase in black male supporters is a polling error, just the fact that Trump appears to have at least held steady among this demographic represents a victory for the Republicans. The President’s appeals to white nationalists such as the far-Right Proud Boys group, and his use of racially-coded language that plays upon suburban white fears, could have easily alienated black men.

The Democratic candidate is part of the explanation. Despite being Obama’s Vice President for eight years, Biden came in to the election with racial baggage, most notably his cosponsoring of the 1994 tough on crime bill that contributed significantly to the subsequent mass incarceration of black Americans. The Trump campaign was able to capitalise on actual Biden gaffes, as when he told a famous black radio host that “you ain’t black” if you support Trump. The Republicans were also able to invent false accusations, claiming that Biden once referred to young Black men as “super predators” (it was actually Hillary Clinton who made that remark in the 1990s).

While attacking Biden on race, Trump’s more effective tactic was to claim credit for tangible improvements that black Americans experienced during his presidency. The President highlighted record-low pre-Covid unemployment rates for black people, as well as criminal justice reform, support for historically black colleges and universities, support from conservative black clergy, and so on. Trump’s consistent message that he has done more for black voters than any president since Abraham Lincoln, hyperbolic as it may be, seems to have actually affected a non-trivial number of black voters.

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How propaganda will win the presidency

By Peter Pomerantsev

In the final weeks of the election, Trump touted a $500 billion dollar economic plan for black Americans — labelled, in a bit of Trump-style branding, the Platinum Plan. The plan was vague on specifics and unlikely to match what Republicans in Congress would actually be willing to support, but the economic promise was appealing to black celebrities such as rappers Ice Cube and Lil Wayne and to ordinary black men looking to improve their prospects.

Princeton politics professor and race scholar Omar Wasow (an old friend) commented on Twitter that “maybe, next time, instead of campaigning on ‘Stronger together’ or ‘A battle for the soul of the nation’, Democrats could try a novel slogan like ‘Jobs.’” During the pandemic, layoffs have disproportionately affected black communities. And even though the Biden campaign did have a detailed economic recovery plan, the Build Back Better plan, which both focused on job growth and incorporated policies to address racial inequities. But Biden and his camp did a poor job publicising it, rarely emphasising it in major speeches or during the debates.

Nevertheless, while Biden lost black men at the margins, his campaign appears to have won the turnout game. For a number of reasons, black men have long voted in significantly lower numbers than Black women; the gender gap among black voters is higher than the male-female difference of any other demographic, and getting more black men to vote became a key goal of Democrats this year (Republicans, by contrast, have been accused of suppressing black turnout, knowing that higher numbers of black voters will benefit Democrats overall).

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The Democrats can't take the black vote for granted

By Christopher Rhodes

The Biden campaign was particularly focused on increasing turnout in swing states with significant black urban populations: for months, the Democrats conducted voter education campaigns and provided resources to promote absentee voting among black people, who had previously been sceptical of mail-in voting. The team especially targeted black men; for example, the Biden campaign put out a series of “Shop Talk” advertisements that featured young black men meeting in black-owned barbershops to discuss issues most relevant to them.

During the last weeks of the campaign, Biden and running mate Kamala Harris, who will be the first black vice president, made high profile appearances to drum up in-person black votes for Election Day. They framed black turnout as a justice issue, denouncing  suppression efforts and appealing to the legacy of recently-deceased Congressman John Lewis, a Civil Rights Movement icon who championed black voting rights.

Biden’s efforts to bring in high numbers of black voters appears to have paid off. Because mail-in ballots are processed last in many American states, we only started to see their effect days after the vote. Biden seems to have won overwhelming support from mail-in votes coming out of heavily black urban areas such as Atlanta and Philadelphia. These numbers could well have pushed him to his narrow win in Pennsylvania, which secured his overall victory.

So, yes, the Democratic Party does still have an edge with black voters. But if it doesn’t want to continue losing ground among black men in particular, it would do well to pair its mobilisation efforts and justice agenda with the type of economic appeals that were effective for Donald Trump. Perhaps it really is as simple as a slogan like, “Jobs”.

The jacket, for instance. In June 2018, Melania was photographed departing a Texas Air Force base after visiting a shelter for detained immigrant children. She was wearing a jacket, olive green, with stark white letters on its back, a message that looked like it had been dabbed on with a child’s paintbrush: I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?

What did it mean? Everyone had a theory, including Donald Trump, who tweeted that the garment was meant as a message to the “Fake News Media” — even though many believed that it was a message to Trump himself. Still others, the harshest critics, insisted that she meant to convey her disregard for the children; one imagined her strolling through a crowd of traumatised migrant kids with I REALLY DON’T CARE emblazoned on her back. (Don’t worry, she didn’t.) Whoever the intended recipient of Melania’s disregard, everyone agreed that the jacket mattered.

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How the Trumps silence their women

By Tanya Gold

By the end of the week, the jacket — a flimsy, $39 piece of fast fashion from Zara that had probably been purchased by some trollish GOP stylist rather than the First Lady herself — had been imbued with as many layers of symbolic meaning as a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Much less was made about the visit itself, despite its significance: Donald Trump signed an executive order to end his controversial family separations policy later that month, suggesting that Melania’s choice to involve herself in the issue was not just out of character but perhaps even influential.

But the jacket controversy was only a continuation of a well-established pattern. By the time the 45th president took office, we were already used to filling in the blanks where Melania might have been, but wasn’t. There was no place on Donald Trump’s campaign trail for a perpetually-present spouse, even if she’d wanted to be there; the thrice-married and notoriously philandering candidate made no pretence of being a paterfamilias in the tradition of family values Republicans.

When he did bring family onstage, it made for a striking portrait: Melania on one side, a passel of large adult children from his previous marriages on the other. And unlike other political wives, Melania’s appearances were sparing and strategic: popping up to dismiss Trump’s “grab ’em by the pussy” tape as “boy’s talk,” or delivering a rare 11th hour rally speech in PA (where her husband did in fact secure a surprise win.)

These appearances held all the more impact for how rare they were. Mostly, Melania was a non-entity, an inscrutable sphinx whose expressionless face betrayed nothing at all. The mystery was part of the allure, on both sides. For Trump’s supporters, Melania was part of the package that made him not just electable but aspirational: a gorgeous, glamorous, much-younger model, as much a symbol of his success as his solid gold bathroom appliances or luxury real estate portfolio.

But for his opponents, she was an intriguing cipher. There was her absence from the campaign trail and her apparent lack of interest in public life. There was the photo of her from election night — unsmiling, eyes closed in either an inopportune blink or a silent plea for strength — at the moment where Trump pulled ahead in the polls.

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A victory for Trumpism

By Justin Webb

There was the infamous moment at the Inauguration, a smile that flashed onto her face and then vanished the moment her husband stopped looking. The moment became a gif, and the Left became briefly obsessed with the notion that she was secretly One Of Us. #FreeMelania trended. Offers of salvation were extended. An article at the Atlantic explained that Melania’s fleeting smile spoke to something bigger: “The image seemed to reveal, in its frozen fluidity, an unspoken truth — about Melania, about her marriage, about all of us.”

When Melania remained in New York for months after Trump transitioned to life in the White House, speculation abounded that she was planning a divorce. Clearly, she wanted out; clearly, she hated him as much as we did. Armchair body language experts noted her obvious disdain for her husband. Armchair conspiracy theorists speculated that she’d simply opted out of the First Lady thing entirely, hiring a series of doppelgängers to take her place.

Of course, if people had given even half as much credence to the thoughts and feelings of Real Melania as to the fantasy Resistance Melania who lived in their imaginations, they would’ve realised their error. Long before she became the first lady, she made it clear that she wanted no sympathy: “People, they don’t really know me, people think and talk about me, like, ‘Oh, Melania, oh, poor Melania,'” she said. “Don’t feel sorry for me.”

That was October 2016.

By the time Trump had finished out his first year in office, the pity had evaporated — and evolved. Where Melania’s silence once seemed full of intriguing possibilities, now it became intolerable. Without any actual statements to parse, and with her public initiatives limited to a short-lived (and widely mocked) “Be Best” campaign against cyberbullying, we were forced to scrutinise her non-verbal forms of expression in search of secret messages, which is to say, we had to trash her outfits.

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Why Latinos stumped for Trump

By Alex Perez

That jacket was only the beginning; just a few months later, a weeklong tour of Africa culminated in countless headlines about Melania’s hats. Especially problematic was a getup that looked a little bit like the character Rene Belloq’s, from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Had Melania intentionally copied her outfit from a fictional Nazi in a movie from 1981? Had she ever even seen Raiders? Who knows? Who cares? What was important was that she did not explicitly deny it, and therefore, one could only assume the worst. As Allure noted, all this nonsense could’ve been avoided: if she’d just gone hatless, she “might not have caused the Internet to call her out for looking like a First Lady-shaped dog whistle.”

That’s right: Caused. Look what you made us do, Melania!

And in our minds, the First Lady’s transformation was complete. Before the reality of President Trump set in, she represented a sort of dark hope: a secret sympathiser, a saboteur, a Judith hidden in plain sight inside Trump’s political tent. But as denial gave way to disillusionment, and Trump himself proved not just uncontrollable but impervious to shame, criticisms of his presidency began to heap on the shoulders of his seeming enablers.

Melania’s lack of public presence started to look like not just complicity, but something more insidious, a pretence of powerlessness when she really had her hands on the levers. The one thing we know for certain about Melania is that she’s one of the few people whose opinion Trump cares about — so why wasn’t she leveraging that influence for good? Why couldn’t she just, like, do something about him?

When did we stop feeling sorry for Melania, and start to hate her instead? Why did she stop being a vehicle for the hopes of a fiery resistance, and start becoming guilty by association? Whatever the reason, it certainly wasn’t anything she did, because what Melania did was what she’d always done: nothing. Her presence in Trump’s re-election campaign, as in his White House, has been as sparse as ever. Even the inevitable book from a former advisor, Melania and Me, was less a blockbuster tell-all than a confirmation of what we already knew: that she never really wanted to be here.

And where her husband, facing likely defeat, seems determined to leave kicking and screaming, Melania’s impact will be most remarkable in its nonexistence. A stiletto heel print in an East Wing carpet here, a half-hearted rose garden renovation there: the leave-no-trace First Lady. We hardly knew her, and now, we never will. She’ll cross the threshold of the White House, get into the limo, and disappear — into the luxurious, comfortable, and above all, private life that was all she ever wanted. As for the rest of it, she just really didn’t care. Did you?

“So much of the experience of watching returns,” remarked frustrated MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes to two leading pollsters, “was anchored by the polling going into it. And it was a bad night for polling—an enormous polling miss.”

Far from learning from the mistakes of 2016, the polling industry seemed to have got things worse. Whether conducted by private or public firms, at the national or local, presidential or senatorial, levels, polls were off by wide margins. The Five Thirty-Eight final poll of polls put Biden ahead by 8.4 points, but the actual difference in popular vote is likely to be closer to 3-4 points. In some close state races, the error was even greater.

Why did they get it so wrong? Pollsters typically receive low response rates to calls, which leads them to undercount key demographics. To get around this, they typically weight for key categories like race, education or gender. If they get too few Latinos or whites without degrees, they adjust their numbers to match the actual electorate.

But most attitudes vary far more within a group like university graduates, than between graduates and non-graduates. So even if you have the correct share of graduates and non-graduates, you might be selecting the more liberal-minded among them. For example, in the 2019 American National Election Study pilot survey, education level predicts less than 1% of the variation in whether a white person voted for Trump in 2016. By contrast, their feelings towards illegal immigrants on a 0-100 thermometer predicts over 30% of the variation. Moreover, immigration views pick out Trump from Clinton voters better within the university-educated white population than among high school-educated whites. Unless pollsters weight for attitudes and psychology – which is tricky because these positions can be caused by candidate support – they miss much of the action.

Looking at this election’s errors — which seems to have been concentrated among white college graduates — I wonder if political correctness lies at the heart of the problem.

Political correctness refers to the policing of speech so that it conforms to cultural taboos, especially the ones concerning race, gender and sexuality. Those who wield taboos gain rhetorical power, encouraging them to stretch the meaning of concepts such as racism to encompass non-racist actions such as voting for Donald Trump.

Across all racial groups, 80% of Americans say “political correctness is a problem in our country”. Only the small “Progressive Activist” 8% of the US population largely thinks it’s not. In practice, the burden of political correctness arguably falls most heavily on university-educated Republican supporters. Data from a recent Cato Institute survey shows that 88% of Trump-voting graduates compared to just 44% of Clinton-supporting graduates agreed that “The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive.”

Republican supporters with degrees tend to work in graduate-dominated environments, where organisations and peers are more likely to enforce norms of political correctness. As a result, it is highly-educated Republican supporters who are most shy about revealing their beliefs at work.

As figure 1 illustrates, 45% of Republicans with degrees, compared to 23% of Democrats with degrees, said they feared that their careers could be at risk if their views became known.

How does this affect polling? Republican pollster Frank Luntz told Emily Maitlis that Trump voters were over twice as likely as Biden voters — by a 19 to 9 margin — to conceal their intended vote from others. I would expect this ratio to be considerably higher among university graduates, which would, accordingly, skew predictions the most among graduates.

Pollsters claim to have overcome this problem by comparing telephone and online surveys and finding no difference. Since online surveys are anonymous, they reason, a ‘shy Trump’ effect should reveal itself by comparing these two methods, and they find none.

However, we also know that people who internalise social norms often conceal their views in online surveys. The psychologist George Herbert Mead referred to people’s ‘generalized other’, a kind of mental peer group we carry around in our heads that sits in judgement upon us is even if no one is actually watching. For instance, in a recent survey of North American academics, I found that just 23% of academics were willing to state they would discriminate against a Trump voter for a job, but the actual share when using a concealed technique called a ‘list experiment’ was 42%. Likewise, a 2010 study found that the share of white Americans willing to endorse zero immigration jumped from 39% to 60% when the question was concealed in a list, rather than asked openly.

There is also a problem of blowback among elite Republicans. Frank Luntz has also said that feedback from Trump-supporting respondents revealed considerable resentment towards pollsters, who were perceived as part of a media establishment out to misrepresent them. Indeed, studies show that using words like ‘racist’ to describe Trump or his policies tends to increase support for them among conservative respondents by provoking what is termed a ‘reactance’ effect. Knowing you are perceived as racist by elites for supporting Trump may make you less likely to answer a call from a survey firm you associate with that chastising elite.

Again, this perception is likely to be stronger among Trump-supporting graduates than Trump voters with lower education levels, who are less likely to circulate in politically-correct social environments. Research confirms that highly-educated white liberals have the most skewed perceptions of the actual views of Trump supporters, in part because their social circles tend to be politically homogeneous. The problem is worst among those most attentive to politics.

This may explain why the polls didn’t do badly in predicting the white non-graduate vote but failed miserably among white graduates. According to a Pew survey on October 9, Trump was leading Biden by 21 points among white non-graduates but trailing him by 26 points among white graduates. Likewise, a Politico/ABC poll on October 11 found that ‘Trump leads by 26 points among white voters without four-year college degrees, but Biden holds a 31-point lead with white college graduates.’

The exit polls, however, show that Trump ran even among white college graduates 49-49, and even had an edge among white female graduates of 50-49! This puts pre-election surveys out by a whopping 26-31 points among white graduates. By contrast, among whites without degrees, the actual tilt in the election was 64-35, a 29-point gap, which the polls basically got right.

Even with reasonable caveats about the accuracy of exit polls, the size of the polling error among white graduates is the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and is arguably linked to problems of concealment and reactance which loom largest among white graduate Trump voters. That’s why, in order to fix polling, we first need to fix political correctness.

The most important effects of speech policing are often indirect, shutting down important conversations across value divides that could improve policies and reach greater consensus on hot-button issues such as immigration, education or policing.

Like a referee in a football game, we need to call penalties when real racist or sexist infractions have been committed, but must stand firm against cries to those based on false accusations grounded in hair-trigger suspicion and conceptual stretching. Failing to do so silences voices that need to be heard, such as college-educated Trump voters, while breeding anti-elite resentment that demagogues exploit. If America cannot reform its regime of speech discipline, it has no hope of overcoming its yawning cultural divide.

Earlier in the week, a professor of politics had reminded me that election nights in the United States were traditionally times to heal campaign wounds and celebrate their democracy. No longer. For the mood of America is angry and divided — and this was seen all too clearly outside that famous white building, as results flowed in from around the country. One woman with a piercing voice preached Christian messages, while a person inside a papier-mâché Donald Trump waved its tiny hands nearby. A bearded man with a bandana, carrying the US flag, explained to reporters why he was not wearing a mask, watched by a Black Lives Matter protester whose head was encased in a gas mask. Nearby an enterprising soul pursued his vision of the American dream with a makeshift stall selling BLM T-shirts.

After watching this vaudeville show for a while, I walked back to my hotel to catch up on the latest results, only to find bizarre scenes outside on a roundabout. It was almost 11pm, yet on the lit-up steps of a large church a film crew was recording an ecumenical religious service as a couple of homeless guys stood watching. “That’s so off-key,” said one observer after a young preacher in red and white robes starting singing. On the other side of the circle scores of young protesters were gathering. Most were clad in black balaclavas, while many carried gas masks and some wore helmets and body armour, or held shields. About 20 police on bicycles watched them warily as a helicopter hovered overhead, then I counted as 18 cop cars in a convoy pulled up on an adjacent street.

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What's the mood in Trumpland?

By Ian Birrell

The demonstrators moved off towards the White House, led by a figure waving an anarchy flag. They chanted the sort of stuff I had heard ten days earlier in Portland, Oregon, mostly revolving around the concept that all cops are bastards but also dismissing Joe Biden as much as Trump, as they disavowed the need for police or a president. They angrily rounded on a man who seemed to be urging them to stay peaceful and things briefly became ugly, but then they marched on letting off their fireworks and shouting their slogans. The police watched but did not intervene. This is, after all, a country where citizens have the constitutional right to protest.

These late-night sorties in the capital are another indication of the fissures in this country, exposed so starkly in the tight election race. I saw this clearly in Portland, where there have been almost-nightly protests for months and the city centre has been boarded up since May; I saw it when travelling into the heart of Trumpland in West Virginia, where many see Biden as a prisoner of the Left. One country but two very different outlooks on life, a nation filled with partisans that think their political foes deserve prison and protesters that believe they have the right to take the law into their own hands.

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How white radicals hijacked Portland's protests

By Michael Tracey

Look at the polls and there are stark differences in perception between the two tribes on everything from the state of the economy to the fight against the pandemic. Now look at the new electoral map and you see this sharp delineation across the land: a vast chunk of Republican red across the middle fringed by Democrat blue states on the left and top right.

Back in my hotel room, I watched, appalled, as Trump falsely claimed victory in states he has lost, made phoney accusations of fraud and pledged legal challenges to official state results. Even after four years of his leadership, which has so diminished the US, it was still shocking to watch a president deliberately stoke the fires of discontent smouldering away so dangerously in America.

Just over a month ago, I was in Belarus, watching protesters fighting to free themselves from the shackles of dictatorship. I saw huge numbers turning out each week in mass demonstrations over a stolen election, along with smaller marches by women and grannies. They have been met with sickening violence, mass arrests, water cannon, tear gas, rubber bullets. Some have been jailed, maimed, sacked from jobs. I was chased myself by the paramilitary police. But I left inspired by people showing bravery, restraint and unity in the face of state brutality, driven by their desire for the sort of freedoms that we take for granted in our democracies.

I had seen the same raw courage in Hong Kong a few months earlier, as another set of people, many of them still teenagers, confronted the terrifying might of the Chinese dictatorship with just umbrellas and wok lids to place over rounds of tear gas fired at them. They freely admitted their fears and the almost certain futility of defeating the Communist Party chiefs who were tightening the noose around their city; they carried on in the faint hope they could salvage democracy. “What alternative do we have?” asked one. “Who thought the Berlin Wall would fall?” said several others.

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The fall of the Wall powered up my politics

By Ruth Davidson

Back in the States, today, we have a shameless egotist in the White House, stirring up dissent in a volatile climate as he seeks to cling on to power. The leader of the world’s most important democracy is casually corroding the kind of political freedoms that those people in Belarus and Hong Kong are risking lives and liberty to achieve. At the same time, his behaviour offers succour to the world’s autocrats. This demeans both his nation and the nature of democracy at a time when it is losing support, especially among younger generations frustrated by its failures.

I am relieved if this is the end of Trump’s time in power. Yet while there is much to absorb from these results, they appear in many ways a terrible outcome. Nothing is certain as I write but it looks like a cliff-edge Democrat victory, close enough for Trump to spray around allegations of fraud and send in his army of lawyers to challenge results. It seems the Republicans may hold on to the Senate, ensuring the partisan games so off-putting to many citizens will continue to tarnish Washington. The narrow result means the GOP will probably remain wedded to Trump-style populism (although it may prove less lethal without such a skilled showman at the helm) while Biden will come under renewed pressure from progressives — inflamed into insane fury over four tough years of Trump — to turn sharply Left after squeaking to victory.

Biden is a genial character. He has shown unexpected strength in resisting the Left over his long campaign. But however genuine his desire to unite his nation, it is hard to see how this doddery and consensual politician will solve the deep-rooted issues that led to Trump’s takeover four years ago. Is he really the person to tackle profound issues of capitalism, globalisation, inequality, racism, technology and the desperate need for political reform that are tearing apart America? Sadly, whatever happens over the coming days and months, it is hard to be optimistic that the whirlwind of fury buffeting the soul of the nation can be salved, whichever elderly man is running the country.

Look at that electoral map again: after four years of the disruptive Trump in office, almost half the voters in the United States wanted to see him returned to power, even amid the pandemic, while the other half see him as devil incarnate. On both extremes sit unsavoury groups that proclaim the use of violence to achieve their goals in a country seeing surging gun sales. Only a fool would dare predict what comes next. Yet all is not lost, even when police chiefs and sober analysts discuss the possibility of serious civil unrest. For one thing still seems to unite pretty much all the people here, regardless of their political stance — the desire to end all the hate and patch up their differences. There is still hope for American salvation.

While it is still likely that Joe Biden will win the American presidency, the Democratic party has suffered a shocking setback this year.

What happened? According to the conventional wisdom, shared by Democrats and Never Trump Republicans, Trump’s victory in 2016 had been a fluke. Hillary Clinton would have defeated Trump easily, save for one or more contingent factors — alleged Russian interference, the FBI investigation into Clinton’s personal email server, the weakness and unpopularity of Clinton as a candidate.

In 2020, Democrats and their anti-Trump Republican allies told us, normality would be restored. Other than the socialist Bernie Sanders, it was thought, practically any Democrat would be able to knock off Trump, one of the least popular presidents in American history, even in the state-based electoral college, which in 2000 and 2016 allowed the loser of the popular vote to become president.

The 2020 election was supposed to have been shaped by a wave of public revulsion against not only Trump but also against his party. The Republicans would lose control of the Senate and lose seats in the House of Representatives, giving the Democrats control of all three branches of government. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s former Labor Secretary, called for a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to identify the accomplices of Trump in his supposed four-year reign of terror. The Republican Party would be exiled to the political wilderness forever.

Or perhaps it would be rebuilt as a new party which came to grips with modern America by internalising the norms of woke Democratic media, academic and business elites, so that in time there would be two enlightened American parties devoted to rooting out white privilege, defunding or radically reforming the police, and promoting a Green New Deal and open borders immigration policy.

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A victory for Trumpism

By Justin Webb

The hopes of Democrats for a new era of one-party Democratic rule in Washington, D.C. depended on two groups — college-educated white suburbanites and Hispanics. Their hopes have been disappointed. According to exit polls, white college graduates were almost evenly-split. Democrats, over time, may benefit from the drift of former highly-educated Republicans to their party, but the 2020 result is far from the overwhelming repudiation of Trump by moderate and progressive whites with college degrees that Democrats hoped for.

An even greater shock was movement in the Hispanic vote toward Trump. Overall, according to exit polls, Hispanics favoured Biden by 66 to 32%. But Cuban-Americans with their strong anticommunist tradition helped Trump to win Florida. Trump’s share of the Hispanic vote in Florida rose from 35% in 2016 to nearly half in 2020.

The Democratic advantage with Hispanics between 2016 and 2020 eroded elsewhere, including Georgia (40% advantage to 16%) and Ohio (41% to 24%).  In Texas, Trump’s share of the largely Mexican-American vote climbed from 34 to 40%.  In Starr County, Texas, the county with the largest proportion of Hispanics in the U.S., between 2016 and 2020, the Democratic candidate’s margin of victory shrank from 60% in 2016 to 5%.

In another Texas district along the U.S.-Mexican border, Gina Ortiz Jones, the Democratic candidate who was widely favoured to win, lost her race for a congressional seat to Tony Gonzales, a Republican. Previously the majority-Hispanic district had been represented by an African-American Republican, Will Hurd.

These results are not entirely surprising. Trump did better with Hispanics in 2016 than Romney had in 2012, and the Republican share of the Hispanic vote inched up in the mid-term elections of 2020.

But Exhibit A in the progressive indictment of Trump has been the claim that he is a Mexican-hating xenophobe whose emphasis on curtailing illegal immigration is motivated by white nationalism. Trump’s much-hyped border wall was compared by liberals and leftists to the Berlin Wall. The separation of unauthorised immigrant families in detention (a practice that began under Obama) was Hitlerian and the U.S. Border Patrol was the new Gestapo.

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Who are you calling a dictator?

By Daniel Kalder

This entire political narrative, shared by the mainstream media and the overwhelmingly-Democratic professoriate with the Democratic party, has imploded, undermined by the drift of Hispanics toward the Republicans in 2016, 2018 and 2020.

The conventional wisdom was right about one thing: Trump was an incredibly weak candidate. By the standards of other presidents, he has been consistently unpopular. He has been a failure in all three of the traditional roles of the U.S. president, who combines the offices of ceremonial head of state, leader of a party in Congress and commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. Trump is incapable of reassuring the public in his role of head of state, as his clownish, narcissistic performance during the early months of the COVID-19 epidemic showed.

As an outsider who won the Republican nomination against the wishes of most Republican leaders, he has always lacked leverage in dealing with Congressional Republicans who would prefer a continuation of Bush era policies to his economic nationalism and rhetorical (more than real) populism. As commander-in-chief, like Obama he has failed to extract the U.S. from simultaneous forever wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Unlike Obama, who launched U.S. campaigns in Syria, Libya and Yemen, Trump has not started any new wars.

In addition to all of these weaknesses, Trump has been more demonised by the media than any president in history, including Richard Nixon, who was not accused of being a foreign agent as well as a criminal. The Mueller investigation into fanciful claims that he was an agent of Vladimir Putin installed by the Russians in the White House in 2016 consumed most of his term. When Mueller’s legal team absolved Trump, the furious Democratic majority in the House then impeached him over claims of misbehaviour in investigating Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s dubious business dealings in Ukraine. The Republican Senate majority had to save him from being removed from offices.

Nevertheless, this unpopular, weak, and widely-despised president will either win the 2020 election by a hair or lose it by a different hair.  As a result, both Republican and Democratic strategists must be thinking:  what if Trump had been a more attractive, conciliating and competent figure?

The Democrats can take comfort in the fact that they appear to be on the way to winning the popular vote, although that does not matter if they lose the electoral college. But they must be disturbed by the fact that if Biden wins the electoral college as well, it will probably be by a slight margin. Moderate Democrats will argue that their party veered too much to the left on issues like Black Lives Matter, abolishing the police, immigration, and “interrogating white privilege”. Populist Republicans will argue that the Republicans can do even better following a policy of Trumpist national populist conservatism with a less divisive candidate. And both moderate Democrats and populist Republicans will be right.

A significant factor in the Democrats’ defeat, I argued, was a style of politics that prevented them from developing an ambitious vision of America’s future — one that was capable of inspiring people from all walks of life. Indeed, it seemed that ever since the 1980s, American liberals had gotten out of the vision business altogether. They redirected their energies from party politics to movement politics, focusing attention in particular on minority and gender identity movements.

While that shift was morally comprehensible, it made it harder for liberals to speak of the common good across group lines. It also ingrained the habit of forgetting large constituencies that did not fit into the liberal-Left identity narrative, such as working-class whites and evangelicals — the latter group making up about a quarter of the adult population. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. Otherwise you give your opponent the opportunity to, as Donald Trump did with great success.

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Why Iran-Contra still matters

By Matthew Goodwin

This movement politics mindset proved to be electorally suicidal. From the 1980s on we witnessed a massive transfer of political power, in large sections of the country, from the Democrats to an increasingly radical Republican Party. The most perverse consequence was that as Democrats ceded ever more geographical ground to Republicans, particularly in state and local governments, they lost the ability to protect the very identity groups they professed to care about — in particular, their right to vote. More than half of all African Americans, for instance, live in the deep red South.

Yet Democrats resisted the obvious lessons to be drawn from these developments: that you cannot help anyone if you do not hold institutional power. And you cannot acquire that power without a vision that transcends group attachments, without denying them.

Democrats have had four years to ponder their defeat as America crumbled around them. Now that hopes of a Democratic landslide have been dashed and defeat is within the realm of possibility, the question remains as to whether they have drawn the right lessons from their electoral performance. The signs are decidedly mixed.

The good news is that Democratic politicians, party functionaries, and most importantly donors focused their energies on addressing the common good and capturing the political centre. They had seen that in the 2018 midterm elections the seats the party gained were mainly won by centrist candidates who focused on building a suburban base, particularly among white women.

They also realised that while minority groups make up an important part of the base, many of their members are culturally conservative. African-Americans, particularly older ones, are more likely to have reservations about the LGBT movement. A significant portion of Latinos oppose abortion due to their Catholic faith and have more conventional views about marriage and gender roles.

That seems to have registered, because in the recent election Democratic candidates generally avoided cultural and identity themes (apart from police reform), despite the efforts of Republicans and Fox News to provoke them into it. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ran a rather old-fashioned campaign based on policy, competence, and basic decency, and pointedly did not portray the Democratic Party as a “rainbow coalition” of distinct groups. This bodes well for the future.

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Why Iran-Contra still matters

By Gavin Haynes

The bad news is that the cultural Left is even more focused on identity than it was in 2016. In part, this is due to the Trump experience. What we back then genteelly called “populism” has degenerated on the Right of the Right into a reactionary force of poorly-educated whites with their own identitarian agenda. It is tempting to want to fight fire with fire.

But over the last summer, other events revealed just how large the gap has grown between the ambition and tactics of political Democrats and those of the cultural Left. Here I am thinking of elites whose power base is in universities, the media, Hollywood, the publishing and advertising industries, the art world, and philanthropic institutions. It also includes young activists whose notion of political engagement is identity-based, confrontational, and social-media driven.

This cultural Left has been behind the so-called “Great Awokening” on race of the past five years or so. I speak here not of economic and social policies intended to improve the condition of African-Americans, which is a historical duty. Nor of legal protections for gay, lesbian, and trans people. I refer to the focus on symbols and gestures meant to display one’s conformity with enlightened opinion on such matters.

Consider the aftermath to the impressive early demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in May. There were massive, peaceful gatherings in cities and small towns across America (and the world). But very quickly the situation degenerated into conflicts over symbols. Countless cultural institutions felt compelled to make statements about racial justice, and some of their directors resigned after making acts of contrition.

Many businesses followed suit and announced requirements that employees attend “anti-racist” training sessions, run by highly-paid, self-declared “consultants”. Twitter mobs descended on people thought to hold impure views. Editors were fired for running controversial pieces, while a researcher was fired for circulating an academic study on racial attitudes. What began as a summer of civic solidarity ended with squabbles about “cancel culture” that contributed nothing to improving life for non-elite African Americans.

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What's the mood in Trumpland?

By Ian Birrell

A major force behind this wrong turn was the liberal media, which has fallen into bad habits during the Trump presidency. Feeling that they had not been hard enough on Trump in the 2016 election, reporters got used to calling out “lies,” of which there were plenty. But the distinction between demonstrable lies and differences of opinion has gotten lost in the process. The standard of journalistic impartiality is being jettisoned in the name of an undefined “moral clarity.”

Central to these efforts has been editorial pressure on reporters to emphasise the racial dimension to stories and to play an active role in rewriting the national narrative. For example, in 2019 the New York Times launched “The 1619 Project” to mark the date when African slaves first arrived in the United States. What began as a thought-provoking idea soon became a tendentious effort to make the crime of slavery the true founding of the republic. Historians complained about inaccuracies and the Times silently corrected them, while still standing behind the project’s editor, who won a Pulitzer Prize. Young reporters were left with the impression that such efforts will still help them to advance their careers.

While the Biden campaign was not overly distracted by these psychodramas, it would be a mistake for Democratic leaders to pretend any longer that they don’t exist. Right-wing media will keep the culture war over symbols before the public eye, which can only help the Republican Party. That means that the Democratic politicians must explicitly distance themselves from ideological “anti-racist” rhetoric and political theatre, such as efforts to tear down statues of American presidents. And they must resist efforts to distort American history in our schools.

Democratic voters care about racial justice but they are focused on the present and the future, not on litigating the past. They also believe in fair play, open debate, and legitimate differences of opinion. They want to build America, not indict America. Democratic leaders must make it crystal clear that they feel the same way. No matter what the final results of this year’s elections, they desperately need to do some housecleaning if they hope ever to build a durable Democratic majority in our lifetimes.

The short of it is that Cuban-Americans, staunch Republicans due to the GOP’s anti-communism rhetoric, were always going to break for Trump. But the massive gains signal the birth of a broader political realignment, which aims to transform the Republican Party from a white working class party to a multicultural working class party. The coming days will show that it wasn’t merely Cuban-Americans who strongly favored the President in Miami-Dade, but also Venezuelans and Nicaraguans and other Latinos previously considered unattainable by Republican think-tankers. To put it simply, the President, to the dismay of Democrats who’ve labelled him xenophobic and racist for years, built a formidable Latino coalition.

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Black America can't take it any more

By Christopher Rhodes

The driving force behind this realignment is the fact that the blue-collar sensibilities that drive the white working class also animate Cuban-Americans and other Latinos. Many Latinos, and especially Cuban-Americans, are ferociously patriotic and have a deep love for America, a country that grants them the ultimate immigrant dream: if you work hard, you get to play hard. The month leading up to the election has been one big party in Miami, with caravans, concerts, and massive boat parades. If you’ve been to one of these raucous events like I have, you realise that they have an all-American good-times NASCAR vibe to them. You might hear more Spanish than English and run into various salsa dancers, but there’s an unmistakable American energy to these get-togethers — it’s all freedom and fun and unironic Americanism.

Democrats, so often embarrassed by America’s more “uncouth” elements, are no doubt mystified by this jovial Latino Americanism, because they fail to see what is most obvious: Latinos see themselves not as Latinx, or even Latino, but as Americans.

Democrats increasingly miss the obvious due to their commitment to wokeness, an ideology that will never be popular with proud working-class Latinos. The elite media class and woke Democrats have somehow convinced themselves that in order to ingratiate themselves with Latinos they must talk down to them and act as white saviours to these poor “people of colour.” This is repellant to Latinos, but especially to Latino men, who are traditionally masculine and will never accept the victim label the woke love to thrust upon chosen minorities.

Post-election numbers will show that Latino men went for Trump in massive numbers — and not just in Miami-Dade — as the touchy feely, feminised wokeness of the Democratic Party is the antithesis of the machismo found in Latino male spaces. The Cuban-American UFC fighter and Miami resident Jorge Masvidal, who recently stumped for Trump, is a prime example of the type of guy drawn to the President’s bravado. There are many others out there like him. Masvidal, who is certainly rough around the edges and a certifiable badass, would make the Democrats cringe with his “problematic” tastes and beliefs; but he represents the young, urban Latino male — unlike the effete and focus-grouped Lin-Manuel Miranda, a Democratic Party favourite.

Which brings us to that lovely word so beloved amongst the young, hyper-woke consultants that so often set the tone for the Democratic Party: Latinx. I’m not saying that the usage of Latinx has led to the Latino realignment, but the commitment to a word that is incredibly unpopular to the group that it is supposed to signify, says it all and speaks to a greater Democratic failure: woke Democrats believe that merely assigning a group a label grants them dominion over said group.

Latinos, many of whom left countries that sought to impose their will on them, will resist this dominion at all costs. This should be common sense, but as the Democratic Party increasingly focuses on the fringe beliefs of woke elites, the failure to see the obvious will only increase. The “socialism is coming” angle of Trump’s Latino outreach, for instance, was considered fear-mongering by the Democrats, but it never occurred to them that this would be an extremely potent message to Cuban-Americans and other Latinos that had escaped repressive regimes and who actually fear socialism; instead of allaying the fears, they criticised the messaging.

It should go without saying but let me spell it out to the Democratic Party: Latinos come to America because they want to live in America, which means that they want to be Americans. They don’t want to be Latinx or “people of color” or token trinkets without agency. It’s right there in the name after all: Cuban-AMERICANAmerican. If you look, instead of label, you just might see it.

That was the really weird thing: almost everybody had predicted that this speech, or a version of it, would come. Pretty much everyone, too, would have predicted an incidental violation of the Hatch act, a non-existent attitude to masks and social distancing in the audience, and the presumptuous use of “Hail to the Chief” as walking-on music. All that stuff is what betting pundits would call “priced in”.

But the Trump who took the podium was not what we’d expected. He seemed relaxed. He even opened with a joke: “This is without question the latest news conference I’ve ever had,” he said. He sounded wry — a tone not hitherto identifiable in his register. “We love you!” someone shouted out, and he looked a little bashful. He had said many times the day before that he hadn’t prepared a speech. That is itself is a rhetorical strategy; to seem spontaneous is to seem authentic.

He modestly thanked “the American people” for “their tremendous support” and said in a downbeat way that “millions and millions of people voted for us tonight — and a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people, and we won’t stand for it. We will not stand for it.” That was the payload — or, at least, the foreshadowing of it. Good rhetorical tactic: say what you’re going to say, then say it, then say that you’ve said it.

He was, in effect, teasing the theme of his speech. So far, though, the velvet glove. He sounded a little sad, a little thoughtful. As he repeated the phrase “we won’t stand for it” he unpacked the contraction in his auxiliary verb: “We will not stand for it.” That “not”, standing alone, gets a bit more emphasis; puts a bit more steel and determination into the phrase. But still, it was downbeat: regret rather than anger. Here is the tone of the teacher in the old joke about the inflatable school, telling off the little boy with the pin: “You’ve let me down, you’ve let your classmates down… You’ve let the whole school down.”

All this was an effective approach at the level of tone. The basic argument of his speech — the logos of it — was to make a baseless claim that the election was being stolen, and to protest before the results were even in that it was unfair and that he wouldn’t accept its legitimacy. But had he come out thundering – had he looked personally aggrieved, flushed of face and bombastic – he’d have looked weaker than he did. He’d have made it nakedly about his own ego and his own interests.

He framed his remarks, instead, in such a way as to cast himself as the father-protector, speaking up for the little people. The wannabe autocrat is never a wannabe autocrat: always a humble servant of the “will of the people”. Instead of petulance, he made an affectation of regret and bewilderment: “We were getting ready for a big celebration. We were winning everything… and all of a sudden it was just… all gone. We were literally just getting ready to get outside and celebrate something that was so beautiful, so good.”

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When will my fellow liberals learn?

By Mark Lilla

On came the slathering of superlatives: “such a vote… such a success… record numbers… this is a record… there’s never been anything like it… incredible movement”. Even as he started to ramble through the progress of the election, he still maintained that tone of humble surprise. You seldom hear Trump admitting weakness or doubt at all, but here he said: “We won states that we weren’t expected to win – Florida.” Given that no Republican in living memory has won the Presidency without winning Florida, that’s on the face of it quite the admission. But it’s a tactic, the better to offset the claim that “We didn’t win it — we won it by a lot.”

But ramble he then did – offering a bewildering stew of facts and conjectures and partial figures as he hopped from state to state. The middle of this speech was simply a mess – not coherent enough even to convey, as I guess it was supposed to, a big-picture grasp of figures.

Not that the figures really mattered in the end. Because the burden of the speech, the key passage, came after all that and it essentially negated all that came before. One moment he was talking about the prospects of a famous victory in the great state of North Carolina, the next, mimetically enough, he declared: “And all of a sudden everything just stopped.”

And then, there it was: the F-word. “This is a fraud on the American public,” he said. “This is an embarrassment to our country.” Here was isocolon, two balanced phrases of about the same length in parallel, reinforced by the repeated opener “this is”. He followed it up with the figure of metanoia, correcting himself and making a statement stronger, to build a head of rhetorical steam: “We were getting ready to win this election… Frankly, we did win this election.”

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Joe Biden brought a sponge to a knife fight

By Sam Leith

And then the meat of it: “So our goal now is to ensure the integrity, for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner, so we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list, okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment. And we will win this. As far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.”

It doesn’t need me to parse the illogicality of all this — that he moved from complaining that “everything just stopped”, to demanding that everything stop; that he made a dishonest elision between “voting” and the counting of votes that had already been cast; that he boasted about votes still being counted in states he expected to win, while railing against votes still being counted in states he didn’t; that he has moved from complaining that treacherous Democrats would use the Supreme Court to decide the election to demanding the Supreme Court decide the election…

The people who see that clearly aren’t the people he’s really talking to. And for the people he’s really talking to, he will have done a scarily effective job. They will have heard “integrity… good of the nation… law used in a proper manner” associated with one side of the argument, and insinuations about shady ballots turning up at 4am on the other. They’ll have heard a leader expressing regret and sadness at having to take a step he never wanted to take to defend them.

And they’ll have heard in the confidence of his unusually quiet voice the indicative incarnation of their hopes: “We will win this. As far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.” The irony is that had he actually believed that, he’d never have stood up to make this speech.

The truth, though, is rather more mundane. Good quality opinion polls are the best — indeed, the only — real datapoint for quantitatively estimating the outcome of an election before it has happened. They’re obviously not perfect, but they’re the best information we have. Whatever you may hear to the contrary, the political betting markets are mainly a measure of the consensus view of politically engaged middle-aged blokes, who in turn calibrate their hunch against… opinion polls.

There are clear incentives for pollsters to get it right — but they aren’t stated often enough. For most of these companies, the political work is a loss-leader, a kind of shop window for how accurate they are so they can make their real money selling brand trackers to McDonalds or whatever. They join in at election time to prove that their method works, that the numbers they give you about your business demonstrably correspond to what the population really thinks. As far as evil masterplans go, pushing an agenda by putting out dodgy election poll numbers is a terrible one — because unlike the pundits, who can couch their analysis in noncommittal theoreticals, you will be found out on election day.

I’ve been closely involved in pollster world for most of the past ten years and have developed a sort of broad brush heuristic for thinking about the polling evidence. First, only pay attention to the good quality pollsters — in most elections, there’s usually a surprising “random pollster that called it right last time” but more often than not they don’t pull off the same trick twice. Second, don’t bet the house on differences of one or two percentage points — presume that even the best pollsters will be a little bit wrong. Third, pay particular attention to the in-house pollster “MRP” models, of which the most robust is from YouGov (where I used to work).

Once you’ve got the big picture of what the data is saying, compare it with the media narrative. This, in betting terms, is where the “value” lies. Given that the polls won’t be exactly right, does the consensus seem overly invested in small poll differences, or insufficiently convinced by large ones? In the turbulent past five years of politics, there have been upsets in both of these directions.

Further reading

What's your vote really worth?

By Tom Chivers

In the UK, the General Election of 2015 was a gruesome event for most pollsters – most had it near-even between Ed Miliband’s Labour and David Cameron’s Tories, but Cameron went on to win an overall majority, thanks to the Labour collapse in Scotland and the Lib Dem collapse in England. It was, at the time, the most-polled election in history, and the media were furious they had given the numbers so much air-time and had missed the real story.

So when the Brexit referendum came around in May 2016, they were determined not to make the same mistake twice. Despite many polls showing a very close race, there was a deeply-held superstition, sustained by the betting markets, financial markets and media, that people would ‘see sense’ at the last moment and vote to Remain (as they had in the Scottish referendum in 2014). In the run up to the Brexit vote I wrote with frustration in The Times, the Guardian and Newsweek about this mysterious overconfidence, and how it wasn’t borne out by the data.

From the same author

Is Donald Trump toast?

By Freddie Sayers

The Trump victory over Hillary Clinton later that year was a strange combination of both effects. The polls were slightly wrong, and some of the state polls very wrong, but overall they showed a close race. Had we purely gone on the data, with the appropriate humility that with such a novel candidate attracting a novel electorate the polls would likely be additionally off, the possibility of a narrow Trump victory across the battleground states should not have seemed remote at all.

Donald Trump is not a novel candidate any more, he’s the President; and there’s certainly nothing novel about Joe Biden. It was a volatile campaign in 2016, with a high number of undecideds and high third party support; 2020 is none of these things. The main technical error in 2016 — higher turnout among demographic groups that don’t normally vote in such number — has now been corrected by most pollsters. The much-quoted ‘shy Trump’ phenomenon remains unproven, and when we spoke to Robert Cahaly, its main advocate, he couldn’t explain convincingly how it could be measured. For it to be a serious effect, you would have expected Trump in 2016 to have overperformed in Democratic areas where it was most shameful to support him, but that is not what happened. Plus, the midterm polls in 2018 were already demonstrably better.

Since the pollsters are collectively terrified of repeating the errors of last presidential cycle, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had over-compensated in their adjustments and we end up finding they have been over-estimating the Trump vote. Nobody wants to be the pollster predicting a massive Biden landslide right now: if there’s any “adjustment of the weights” going on it is more likely to be softening the Biden lead into safer single digits.

Further reading

Of course Trump can win

By Matthew Goodwin

One clear indication of this reverse effect would be if Texas goes blue. Joe Biden doesn’t need to win it, but the polls are tantalisingly close, though moving slightly in Trump’s favour in the final week. In Democrat circles the possibility of winning Texas is mentioned with a whisper, as if to speak it out loud will jinx the possibility. It feels unlikely, like it somehow can’t happen, but the data says it is possible. This would put Biden in historic landslide territory.

More broadly, Biden’s advantage in the polls on election day – a 7-9 point national lead, and apparently ahead in almost all of the battleground states — equates to a much more comfortable margin than Hillary Clinton had. Biden has roughly double the lead in the top battlegrounds, double the national lead and double the favourability advantage of Clinton in 2016. If the same degree of polling error that afflicted 2016 was applied here, Biden would still win comfortably.

All of this is why I believe it is reasonable to expect that Joe Biden will win the election by a comfortable margin, possibly a very big one. Put another way: if Donald Trump does pull off another surprise and wins re-election, fair and square, it would be an astonishing event. It would mean that the mechanism we have relied on for assessing public opinion for decades — a key part of the way governments decide on public policy, most recently on Covid-19 — is fundamentally broken. It would mean we have to rethink the basic epistemic foundation of our public conversation. It would be scintillating — so much so that I wouldn’t give a moment’s thought to those bets I placed on a big Biden victory. There’d be far more important things to worry about.

For Ellul, that meant establishing the underlying myths that hold a society together: the American Way of Life, faith in Progress and Happiness. Everything, from conscious PR campaigns through to unconscious decisions by movie makers, connected people to these underlying myths: “Propaganda in the United States is a natural result of the fundamental elements of American life.” Ellul saw the country’s over-intense insistence on its cohesive identity as a symptom of uncertainty about whether it could hold together.

“There is only one America. No Democratic Rivers. No Republican Mountains” intones a Joe Biden Presidential campaign ad, with lush shots of the American landscape. It’s a message that goes right to the anxieties that have always lingered underneath the surface in America. The backdrop of today’s Presidential election is the fear that America is disintegrating as an imagined community. Americans are alarmingly polarised: increasingly more likely to dislike and distrust people from other parties; less likely to live near them and, as a recent Pew Research poll shows, placing their trust in different partisan media environments. In response, each Presidential campaign has chosen opposing strategies for its election ads. It’s a test not so much of policies but which dynamics are stronger: the forces pulling America together, or those pushing it apart?

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By Peter Pomerantsev

“We’re the United States of America” stressed Biden in an epic ad last week, which showed a shower of images of people from all walks of life: a rainbow coalition brought together by the Democrats with Biden’s personal emotional experiences as the glue. Biden has positioned himself as someone who has experienced horrific personal loss with the death of his wife and two sons, meaning he can feel other people’s pain too. ‘We are united in our trauma’ is the message, with Donald Trump defined in absentia as the “divider in chief”, incapable of empathy. Biden’s betting big that even some possible Trump supporters are worried about the divides in American society and will vote for a candidate that stresses unity: Vote for Trump and we might lose America.

The Biden team have taken into account that, in a world where all the old Left-Right economic ideologies don’t cleanly define parties, the only thing that can bring a diverse coalition together is something more nebulous: a feeling that each can project its own agenda onto. Trump won 2016 with anger and resentment, now Biden is betting that more positive emotions can compete: “compassion” his ads say, “is on the ballot.”

The Biden campaign is also swimming with Christian motifs. In perhaps his most moving ad, one of his speeches is interlaced with Black Eyed Peas singing ‘Where is the Love’. “Father, father, father help us / Send some guidance from above,” they plead, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if they meant God or Biden. At the end of the ad we see a line from Cornel West: “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Then the word Love appears on a black screen, after which the word Vote appears, the Os of the two words crossing. There are echoes of the American Pledge of Allegiance: “One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Ellul argued that effective propaganda has to tap into existing myths to be successful: the ad needs to resonate with a big underlying thing that people live by already. And so Biden connects his own campaign with the powerful founding story of American religious redemption, the caring father of a nation that has lost its way in the last four years, but just needs to, as another of his ads puts it, “remember who we are”.

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Why Iran-Contra still matters

By Ian Birrell

Part of Donald Trump’s propaganda power has also been to connect his own story with a fundamental American myth — that of the businessman, the dealmaker. It’s a myth he has played into his whole life and cemented when he hosted The Apprentice. The sophisticated arguments from Trump critics accusing him of crypto-fascism don’t resonate with audiences who know Trump as the guy who hosts a prime time business reality show. (How can he be Hitler when he was in Home Alone 2?) And he is constantly selling Americans some great new deal he’s sealed. In recent ads on a tour of Pennsylvania he even used clips of Biden admitting that Trump’s trade deal with Canada and Mexico is “better than NAFTA”. But the salesman role is not only metaphorical. When I checked Trump social media ads with the help of NYU’s ad-tracker tool, I found people were literally using The Donald as a way to promote their own deals: something called ‘Trumprack’ was flogging Trump whisky flasks and sweaters (“a sweatshirt for the silent majority” ran the tagline).

Trump’s critics also accuse him of being a cheesy, sleazy salesman — but maybe that’s part of his appeal. He can play every embodiment of the American wheeler-dealer drama, from a gauche Great Gatsby to the door-to-door salesman down on his luck. After he came out of hospital recently there was something pathetic and desperate in the way Trump begged pensioners to vote for him. Here was Trump as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman — but one who could then, in an ad filmed the same week, fly into the White House on a helicopter to martial music in scenes with a whiff of Mussolini. The Salesman dies — and is resurrected!

But the dealmaker myth is hard to tap into when the main threat facing the nation is one that can’t be flattered or bullied into submission. No matter how artful Trump is, Covid-19 will go about its business. And so the President is left invoking divisive ‘wedge’ issues: Biden will strengthen ‘the radical Left’ and usher in riots; Trump will defend wealthy suburban lifestyles from poor people in the inner cities. The ads are right out of B-movie urban apocalypse movies, with thundering cords and burning buildings; you half expect Kurt Russell to appear.

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America's establishment still sneers at the Right

By Gavin Haynes

Trump seems to be hoping that the forces driving America apart are so strong he can further fuel them, then ride them to victory — or at least into confusion. Some fear that what might be just an ad campaign for Trump will be taken seriously by Right-wing militias. Every week I get a newsletter from The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank, about the latest online campaign in the dankest parts of the internet. Such groups are already trying to seed doubt in the results of the election if it goes against Trump and planning pitched battles in its aftermath. They are waging a vicious civil war — but for now it remains in squalid echo chambers.

Whether Trump wins this week or not, can the cohesion Ellul saw as essential to the American project ultimately survive in a media landscape broken up into such information archipelagos?  The way Trump is both reality show and buffoon yet a symptom of things genuinely disturbing makes this election, like so much with the Trump era, seem simultaneously petrifying and silly. An ad from actor Mandy Patinkin, who is running his own pro-Biden get-out-the-vote campaign, captured the tension best. It starts with a sense of impending doom and drama: “This November 3rd everything is at stake” it bellows, only for the ad to break off and cut to a discussion in the recording studio between Mandy and his wife about whether he is being too hysterical. They try to re-record the ad in a more measured tone, but keep on slipping into angst, finally screaming “It’s going to just be more fucking chaos.”

First, you had to rely on the local newspaper to tell you where the event was even located. The report was based on sources who “spoke on the condition of anonymity” — as though the venue of a public presidential campaign rally was some sort of state secret. In trying to gain entry to the event that afternoon, I encountered a police officer who informed me that “pre-registration” had been required to attend, even though there was no publicly-available information as to how to “pre-register.” Finally, a Biden volunteer spilled the beans: the event was really open only to “party officials and donors.”

Now, this can supposedly be attributed to the Biden campaign’s hyper-cautious approach to the Covid pandemic. And there’s probably some validity — both political and epidemiological — to that rationale. But it’s still peculiar, and one might say disturbing, that public campaign events during the final phase of a presidential election have been effectively privatised under the auspices of virus control, as though that were the only option to ensure social distancing. If the price of mitigating virus spread is giving in-the-know elites another tier of special access to engage in the electoral process, that’s quite a bleak (and self-interested) tradeoff.

And there are more cynical interpretations of the Biden campaign’s tack here, because it’s an open question as to whether the general public would be interested in showing up to his events in the first place. Donald Trump, for his part, is still holding rip-roaring rallies several times a day like nothing’s changed since 2016. In Luzerne County that Saturday afternoon, Trump supporters far outnumbered Biden’s as they gathered en masse on the outskirts of Biden’s own event, with the goal — successfully accomplished — of shouting loudly at Biden’s motorcade as it entered the high school where the “drive in” event was taking place. They also drowned out the small cohort of Biden supporters who did manage to gather on the perimeter, shouting additional pleasantries at them like “Pedo Joe” and “Where’s Hunter?”

Granted, Luzerne County saw some of the biggest shifts to Trump anywhere in the country in 2016, helping him win Pennsylvania overall in a jarring upset, so you’d expect there to be an “enthusiasm” disparity there. The county was perhaps the national epicenter of electoral trends in de-industrialised, heavily white, economically adrift areas of the US that delivered an upset victory to Trump — he received a full 35% more raw votes there than the previous Republican nominee Mitt Romney did in 2012, which was an astonishing shift over just four years, even as raw population in the county steadily declines. And much of that support remains fully in tact. But still, the scene that day was so weighted against Biden — again, at his own event — as to be comical.

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By Ian Birrell

If nothing else, the 2020 campaign will test the theory that on-the-ground, observable, in-person enthusiasm is any kind of significant determinant to a national election outcome. And in fairness to whoever’s calling the shots in Biden-land, there’s already some tentative reason to believe Biden’s unprecedentedly hands-off approach may work. Even pre-Covid, during the Democratic primaries, the scant attendance at Biden’s campaign events and his paucity of paid campaign staff became a recurring object of ridicule. But then he ended up winning states he’d never set foot in by wide margins, blowing out candidates who’d raised and spent far more money.

Conversely, Trump’s swashbuckling rallies across the country in 2016 were routinely sneered at by journalists as self-indulgent wastes of time, but these rallies likely did have an appreciable pro-Trump impact in electorally crucial areas such as Northeastern Pennsylvania. Home to outsized proportions of white people with less educational attainment — the percentage of residents who possess a college degree in Luzerne County (23%) is well below the national average — voters there had an observably specific cultural affinity with Trump. And while that affinity remains — they have no qualms about displaying it with huge TRUMP flags attached to huge pickup trucks barrelling down the road — the question is whether this continued enthusiasm will be overridden by other segments of the electorate newly energised in opposition to Trump.

Either way, some humility on the “enthusiasm” issue is warranted, especially given the country’s mass transition to entirely new methods of election administration, whereby huge percentages of ballots are being cast well before Election Day. A member of the “Bikers for Trump” group which bombarded the Biden event, when asked who he foresaw winning Pennsylvania, replied: “If it was just regular votes, Trump. With this mail-in bull crap who knows.” (The man declined to provide his name.)

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America's establishment still sneers at the Right

By Gavin Haynes

I also spent some time in nearby Scranton, PA where Biden was born, a fact he mentions constantly, and which provides an easy, cliched backdrop for a tedious number of journalistic inquiries into the state of the race in Pennsylvania. Though the city and surrounding county still lean Democratic, Trump also made enormous inroads there in 2016. Directly adjacent to the Biden campaign office in downtown — at which you can mosey in and pick up a slightly drab-looking “BIDEN” logo face mask — sits a shoe repair shop owned by Barry Lawrence. The interior of the shop is in partial disarray, and posted depressingly to its door is an eviction notice signed by a county magistrate.

Lawrence told me he was unable to operate his shop for approximately four months in the initial stage of the pandemic, and his landlord refused to cut him a break on rent. This was made all the more harmful because he said he didn’t know how to apply for one of the so-called “PPP” loans made available by the CARES Act, which was passed in March to support shuttered small businesses. But even as he’s now able to open his store back up, it’s barely made a dent. He’ll have to vacate just two days after the election.

“Business is dead,” Lawrence said. “People are still thinking about the pandemic. Nobody wanna be out.” He accepted a Biden/Harris campaign placard to put in his storefront window, though when asked about his candidate preference expressed no particular pro-Biden enthusiasm. “We need something better than what we have,” he said, almost mournfully.

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Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful

By Michael Tracey

Whether Trump himself can rightfully be blamed for Lawrence’s inability to get the loan is debatable, but one can’t deny that prolonged Covid-induced dread isn’t very helpful for the incumbent. Especially for voters who’ve made every effort to abide by mitigation protocols in their own lives, while Trump has a somewhat spotty track record in that regard. For the record, face masks were required for entry to a “Trump Victory” campaign office in Montgomery County as of Sunday, October 25, which apparently is not the case in the White House — site to at least one known “super-spreader” event. Montgomery County, a diversifying Philadelphia suburb, is among the few places in the state that actually trended Democratic in 2016, and that’s where Biden’s campaign is banking on boosting turnout to overcome Trump’s likely sky-high margins in rural areas — areas where, it should be said, mask-wearing is considerably less embraced.

Luckily for Biden, volunteers hardly even have to make an affirmative case on his behalf, when the “negative” case (against Trump) is so all-consumingly dominant in the minds of Trump’s opponents. Jeanne Boland, a Biden campaign volunteer from Scranton, said she hadn’t bothered getting involved in the 2016 election but now was going all-out after four year of being inflicted with what she clearly felt was a non-stop series of Trump-related horrors. “Honestly, I thought Hillary was a lock,” she recalled of this time last cycle.

And out of what she said were hundreds of interactions she’d made over the preceding several days, Boland “only talked to one voter who actually said that they haven’t made up their minds yet.” This is borne out in polling data, and also makes the “final stretch” of this election (to use another pundit cliche) seem altogether different from 2016, when there was a palpable sense of fluidity in the waning days of the race. Now, you either want Trump in, or you want him out. A binary question. Biden is almost a side-story. Voters seldom mention him — it’s all Trump, all the time.

An older woman exiting an early-voting polling place in a largely black area of Northeast Philadelphia on Monday, having just checked the box for Biden, was asked to rate the candidate’s performance over the course of the campaign. “Sufficient,” she said. This is amusing for anyone who can remember the rapturous enthusiasm engendered by Barack Obama in 2008, and even to large extent in 2012 — particularly (but by no means exclusively) in black neighbourhoods. Hillary Clinton’s failure to rouse comparable enthusiasm was a significant contributor to her loss four years ago. This time, though, Trump appears to have provided all the enthusiasm — pro and con — that anyone needs. And if being merely “sufficient” is enough to win a national election in 2020, as it may well be, then the country has really lowered its collective expectations.

But her card wouldn’t work at the cashpoint either. She tried another one. With the same result.

Laura opened the banking app on her phone. It said only ‘error’, then automatically closed.

She finally abandoned her shopping and went into the nearest branch of Santander. There, the counter assistant seemed just as mystified. After about an hour of waiting, though, Laura was called through into the manager’s office.

“I’m going to read a statement out for you,” the manager said. “But I’m not going to be able to answer any of your questions after that.”

He read out:

“We have locked your bank account. We can’t give you any more information. We might be in touch in future with more information. But we don’t know when that might be.”

Could she have her money? No.

But how was she supposed to get home? After all, she lived eight miles outside of Leeds, and now she had no bus fare. Apparently, this was not the bank’s business.

This low-rent version of The Trial went on for another three weeks. Frequently, Laura would phone up Santander customer services. She’d be put on hold for ages. Then the phone would just go dead. She wrote to Santander to complain. They wrote back: they weren’t interested in her complaint and wouldn’t be taking it any further. Meanwhile, her rent, standing orders and Direct Debits stacked up, the late fees and penalties mushroomed around them, as life tumbled towards chaos.

Nearly a month on, she received a letter from Santander:

Under the terms and conditions… we can withdraw banking facilities at any time, and in line with company policy we don’t give further details.

The account had been closed. Without apparent irony, the balance had been appended as a cheque.

‘Laura’ could be any of us. But she is also Laura Towler, one of the founders of Patriotic Alternative. Towler is a sort of next-gen BNP type, a net-savvy white identitarian who campaigns against mass-migration, and occasionally winks to her Telegram followers about ‘you know who’ (they know alright: The Jews). It would seem that Towler had been expelled from Santander for her views. But in line with the bank’s conditions, this has not been made clear.

By a strange coincidence, in the same month, the same thing happened to Mark Collett, her Patriotic Alternative co-founder. Only, Collett doesn’t bank with Santander — he is with HSBC. Somehow, the same thing also happened, in different countries, to Europe’s leading young white identitarians: Brittany Pettibone and Martin Sellner.

Coincidence abounds in the modern world. Last year, on the other side of the Atlantic, various alt-ish-Right figures who banked with JP Morgan Chase woke up on the same morning to find that they no longer banked with JP Morgan Chase. They included the chair of the Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, former InfoWars staffer Joe Biggs, Project Veritas associate Laura Loomer, and Martina Markota, a Trump-supporting performance artist.

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Of those four, it’s the other Laura whose case drives home the full capriciousness of corporate power in a networked age. Loomer styles herself as the “most banned woman in the world”. In addition to Chase, she is banned from PayPal, from VenMo, from The Cash App, Airbnb and Instagram, from Lyft, Uber and UberEats, from the blogging monetisation platform WordAds and the t-shirt print-to-order site TeeSpring, from Twitter and Facebook — obviously — and from any one of a half dozen other platforms for digital congress.

Some of these bans are strongly self-inflicted; controversy is her currency. She got booted from Uber in 2017 after ranting about being unable to find a taxi driver who wasn’t Muslim in Manhattan, in the hours after the NYC terror truck attack. Twitter banned her in 2018, after she laid into Ilhan Omar, the Muslim Congresswoman, claiming, scandalously, that Omar was part of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed”, and ”women are abused” and “forced to wear the hijab.” Later that month, wearing a gold ‘Juden’ star (Loomer is Jewish) she handcuffed herself to Twitter HQ, to protest the decision.

But many of those bans are mere cascade effects. TeeSpring works with PayPal. PayPal had already declared Loomer an unperson, and thus they informed TeeSpring that they would have to stop supplying her. Ditto Venmo and The Cash App.

You don’t want to mess with the people who make the widgets that undergird the financial system. In 2018, in response to activist pressure, MasterCard began choking off various far-Right and internet Right figures. That in turn meant their often lucrative Patreon accounts were cancelled: YouTube ‘Classical Liberal’ Carl Benjamin lost $12000 a month. Now, in a post-Covid world, where we’re often being told that cash is no longer acceptable, some are also being told that electronic banking is no longer for them. It’s an interesting crossroads.

The likes of Towler might be distasteful. But if that alone is the bar for the arbitrary exercise of power by, say, the PR department of NatWest, then all kinds of people — from Cat Bin Lady down — stand to be unpersoned.

Right of admission is always reserved — we all know this — and you might say that these examples are just the market at work. Except that some things are so fundamental to our everyday lives that they’re not so much markets as the thing that you need in order to use a market.

In the dying days of Gordon Brown, an attempt was made to guarantee every citizen’s right to a current account. It was quickly shot down by the Big Five banks (after all, it wasn’t as if they owed the government any favours). A decade on, that tide is further out than it has ever been.

In the banking system’s capacity to disable the individual without pro-actively doing them harm, there’s an echo of the elegance of the Chinese government’s social credit. “There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to. What’s really scary is there’s nothing you can do about it,” was how Liu Hu put it — a Chinese journalist, who ran afoul of social credit in 2019. But perhaps Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ episode would be a more apt comparison. In our hemisphere, that kind of deletion is done more cheerily, coated in the veneer of freedom of choice and association, by PR and HR, not by the grey monolith of The Party’s star council.

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By Aris Roussinos

Increasingly, we allow our corporations to police the soft boundaries of acceptable speech and thought, from Sainsbury’s rejection of ‘racist’ shoppers to the Yorkshire Tea wars to Tampax’s latest bloodbath.

Ironically enough, the license that companies now take as part of their remit is a perfect mirror image of the Cake Problem: the oft-rehashed libertarian thought experiment, over whether a fundamentalist Christian cake-maker should be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding. When US Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson was posed the question in 2016, he said that they should — and added that he would equally require a Jewish baker to make a Nazi wedding cake. The underlying principle is one of neutrality. Where two belief systems clash, if they remain polite and cooperative, shouldn’t the public still retain an underlying right of service?

Evidently not.

Another great thought experiment dawned in August of last year, when Laura Loomer stunned the Republican establishment by winning the GOP primary for Florida’s 21st Congressional District. The 21st is West Palm Beach, where Mar-a-Lago lives. Trump himself has already cast his vote for her.

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Clearly, Loomer’s campaign has been adversely affected by her various bans. At the time of her deletion, Loomer’s tweets were getting 150 million impressions a month. As she puts it: “They just assume that people can afford TV, and that they’re not going to get all their information through social media.”  She might have wingnut tendencies, but Loomer is also half of the choice for voters in the 21st District.

This year, “in the interests of transparency and fairness”, Twitter has given every single candidate standing in the US election a blue-check verified account. So, when she won her primary, she applied to have her accounts reinstated.

No dice. She can’t get on Big Social, the broadcast networks are ignoring her, and her opponent, Lois Frankel, won’t even say her name, let alone debate her.

Should she win — still a long shot — Loomer has sworn to spend her time on Capitol Hill breaking up the tech giants’ monopoly. So couldn’t it be said that they’re acting to titrate their own legislative environment?

F.A. Hayek, and his prophet on earth Margaret Thatcher, saw the market as the best bulwark against tyrannical state power — that by pulling lots of little levers every day with our cash, we’d effectively be voting, in a constant dialogue of mini-democracy. It was only towards the end of their regime that the Thatcherites began to realise that some things — from trains down — remain public utilities in spirit, no matter who runs them.

As the Hunter Biden story still freezes the New York Post’s Twitter feed, it seems the power of the corporate lever-pullers to mould the outer edges of democracy is as strong as it has ever been. We can vote with our wallets, sure. But what if the scope extends way beyond a single product line, into an entire kind of product, or the social architecture that makes products possible? What if the lever-pullers are our wallets?

I am not saying that Russian has not developed, and is not using, a relatively sophisticated set of clandestine schemes to operate in the online world. But Russian activities on the internet (and on social media) receive much more prominence in the news relative to their actual importance in shaping the world in which we live. Most probably this is because journalists are obsessed with social media: it has upended traditional journalistic business models and made them all poorer with more stressful lives.

After all, the success or otherwise of a clandestine scheme could be said to be linked to its clandestine nature, which, judging by the number of legislature-led inquiries, reports, arrests and shutting down of Russian networks could lead us to conclude that the Russians are not achieving their aims. Furthermore, it is not clear that Russian activity has changed the course of a democratic event anywhere. As the outgoing head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Alex Younger, said recently:

“I haven’t seen in the UK any occasion where this stuff has made a strategic difference … The Russians did not create the things that divide us — we did that. They are adept, albeit in a rather crass manner, at exacerbating those things.”

(The UK conducts the same sort of cyber activities in Russia too, just as ineffective, and more as a result of the need to be seen doing something rather than doing something.)

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So to a wider point: what are Russian strategic aims in 2020, and are they being reported accurately in the media? This is not a dig at the media per se. It is difficult to report on strategic issues: they are complex, multi-layered, and usually intertwined in a detailed history. Moreover, the public generally has a penchant for controversial articles and a short attention span, particularly for foreign affairs and defence matters. But here is what I think is the real story about Russia.

Russia has two main geostrategic aims. The first — an eternal one for Russia — is to establish a series of allied states in its near abroad. This region stretches from the Baltic states, through eastern Europe and the Caucasus, to the ‘stans. It would love to extend this ring of countries to Mongolia, but that battle has already been lost to China. In short, it is trying to recreate the breathing space that it had in Soviet days, pushing opponents — and their armies, listening stations, and espionage—further away from their border. Russia is so vast that it considers this buffer space geostrategically essential.

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This aim, if you like, is driven by fear and we can clearly see the Russian activities that go some way to achieving this aim: the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the covert/proxy Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, as well as its current support for the Lukashenko government in Belarus, and towards Armenia in its current dispute against Azerbaijan.

Russia’s second geostrategic aim is to be a global player again. It wants to be listened to; it wants other countries particularly powerful ones to listen to it. It wants to be respected. This isn’t as silly as it sounds, in fact it is incredibly human: lots of countries’ leaders are driven by the perceived status of their country. And for President Putin, who considers the fall of the Soviet Union to be the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century”, this aim is driven by the idea of re-establishing Russian honour.

It is hard to see how Russian online activity achieves those two goals. Is “disrupting” democracy an end in itself, or a means to an end? It is far more likely to cause people worldwide to consider Russia a pariah state. Russia doesn’t want to be a pariah state; it wants to be a great power. The social media stuff feels, at best, like a distraction.

So what is going on?

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Great powers are usually referred to as such because of vast economic, political or military power. Taking them in turn: Russia has a GDP a bit more than half of the UK’s (with approximately twice the population), a 10^th of China’s, or a 14^th of the United States’. Its political alliances with other countries are paltry compared with the US, or even China. Realistically, Russia can only compete on military terms.

Some figures. There are four militaries greater than a million-strong in the world: China, India, the US, and Russia. Russia has a similar sized navy to the US, twice as many main battle tanks, similar numbers of submarines, half as many aircraft … in short, while not at the same level as the US (or China) in terms of technology or global deployability, Russia’s military is at least in the same bracket as other great powers, particularly when that bracket is widened to include France and the UK, the other UN security council members. But there is one area where Russia does have parity with the US, and exceeds the capabilities of all the other great powers: nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are special in many obvious ways, but not least in the fact that they are the only type of weapon (along with their delivery systems, and systems that can defend against those delivery systems) that have been subject to arms control agreements where Russia and the US have specifically agreed to limit, or reduce over time, the numbers of specific types and categories of weapon.

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By Mary dejevsky

Both countries understand that by limiting specific short range missiles (the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty), or systems to shoot intercontinental ballistic missile systems out of the sky (the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty), or overall numbers of warheads or delivery systems (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)), it is possible to reduce uncertainty about what one’s opponent is doing, and remove their ability to launch a successful first strike. If you can achieve these two things, nuclear weapons are much less likely to be used, or so the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction goes.

The problem is that these treaties have been breaking down. In 2002, the US pulled out of the ABM treaty because — they said — they needed missile defence against North Korea and Iran. In 2019, the US pulled out of the INF treaty citing Russian violations. The only nuclear arms control treaty in force is START: it came into force in 2011, and features limits on warheads and delivery systems that are a small fraction of the high numbers held during the cold war, and has robust inspection and verification mechanisms — but the treaty runs out in February next year.

Russia has proposed a five-year extension on the same terms (an option enshrined in the original treaty), but the US is saying that it wants to bring China in as well, as well as to expand the treaty to cover all nuclear weapons, not just those covered by the current treaty. Russia says this is not possible without a discussion about anti-missile defence, which the US says is off the table.

So, as a result of the breakdown of the ABM and INF treaties, Russia began to develop a range of new delivery systems including hypersonic missiles. From its perspective, it had to restore the balance that a more developed US missile defence system would upend. These new weapon systems are both short range (at a range that would have been covered by the INF) and intercontinental. One of the long range missiles has an ability to hit its targets at Mach 27 — yes, 27 times the speed of sound — which completely negates US missile defence.

Unveiling these (and other) weapons in 2018, Putin said “No one has listened to us … You [will] listen to us now.”

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Trump's unpredictable nuclear policy

By Gerrard Degroot

How did we get into this position? Unfortunately, the attitude of the US towards Russia during the pre-Trump decade can be summed up in President Barack Obama’s 2014 statement that Russia was a “regional power”, acting out of weakness rather than strength. It was not a top geopolitical foe, he said. Perhaps, rationally speaking, Obama was right, but he got the psychology so, so wrong. And strategy is profoundly psychological. Russia, and particularly Putin, wants to be a top geopolitical foe. It wants to be seen on equal terms.

Joe Biden has 16 days after his (probable) inauguration to agree to the Russian proposal of a five-year extension to START, the only current nuclear arms control agreement. Of course, the US needs weapons controls agreements with China, but they probably need to focus on AI, rather than nuclear weapons. Fundamentally, Russia wants to play at the top table, and an arms control agreement is a cheap way to allow them to do so: it implicitly acknowledges Russian “strength”, at almost no cost.

Issues such as these are the true strategic currents in the world today, not inconsequential meddlings on Facebook; if only the media would cover them that way.

“This is not a drill. The Reichstag is burning,” blared a five-alarm-fire warning in the Washington Post by Dana Milbank, who may want to consider a title change from “columnist” to “in-house hysteric”. Not to be outdone, establishment weather-vane Thomas Friedman joined the fray in the New York Times with an equally shocking exhortation: “I can’t say this any more clearly,” he hyperventilated. “Our democracy is in terrible danger — more danger than it has been since the Civil War, more danger than after Pearl Harbor, more danger than during the Cuban missile crisis […]”.

If these fevered prognostications even bore the faintest resemblance to political conditions in the United States, it might seem a bit odd that the pundits in question have since moved on to other subjects. Or to put it this way: if they really believed their own fantastical rhetoric, shouldn’t they have spent the past few weeks taking action more tangible than rattling off a few throwaway columns and browsing Twitter? Not that any “resistance” brigade composed of pallid middle-aged journalists would be especially formidable on the battlefield, but the point is that their conduct doesn’t come anywhere close to matching the incredible alarmism of their words.

More destruction could be in store next month than was wrought in World War II, the most devastating global military conflict in human history? All of civilisation was nearly wiped out in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but we’re supposed to believe that whatever harm is brought about by the election aftermath will exceed that? If so, why aren’t these people stockpiling canned food and training for hand-to-hand combat?

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Joe Biden is no radical

By Michael Tracey

They’re not doing anything of the sort because this latest round of histrionics is just a continuation of a theme that has characterised the Trump era: political and cultural elites, whose psyches have been profoundly damaged, will churn out nonstop waves of hysteria rarely noting afterwards if their frenzied forecasts ever panned out. As a largely accountability-free profession, there is no penalty in the opinion-making world if the catastrophising ultimately proves to be just a bizarre projection of their own angst.

The logic of these latest prophecies, to the extent that any can be discerned amid the haze of paranoia, is that Trump will refuse to abide a “peaceful transition of power” after the election. Instead, he’ll throw the country into some sort of protracted armed insurgency by calling upon white supremacist militias to do his genocidal bidding in the streets. Hugely viral tweets, including one by a credentialed member of the White House press corps, helped foster this belief by alleging (without caveat) that Trump had explicitly incited a Civil War.

This is the most frightening answer I have ever received to any question I have ever asked. I’ve interviewed convicted killers with more empathy. @realDonaldTrump is advocating Civil War. https://t.co/8eMY9Csuhp

— Brian J. Karem (@BrianKarem) September 23, 2020

Of course, the basis for the allegation was a typically garbled comment by Trump at a press conference. But there had already been an atmosphere of unfounded dread in the air, thanks in part to long disquisitions in The Atlantic — the leading clearinghouse for the neurotic elite speculation — playing out with utmost seriousness various as-yet-fictitious scenarios whereby Trump refuses to concede the election and the American constitutional order summarily crumbles.

Once you accept that this doomsaying is less about Trump himself, and more about an elite media class that has overdosed on five years of Trump-related dopamine rush, a darkly comical aspect emerges. The foot soldiers of Trump’s supposed post-election coup were declared to be the “Proud Boys,” a group of glorified performance artists and trolls who’d barely even register as a political force were it not for all the manufactured coverage intended to elevate them as frightening foils. If it truly falls on them to wage Trump’s Civil War, then this will be the goofiest and least daunting Civil War on record.

And as for the “peaceful transition of power”, it’s possible that Trump will dispute the election results in some fashion. The lawyers are gearing up in both parties, given the country’s wide-scale transition to mail-in-voting.

Irony must be lost on these prophesiers, however, because while Trump did not encounter any overtly violent coup upon assuming office in January 2017, his own transition to power was anything but ordinary. The country’s security state apparatus had launched an unprecedented brazen intervention into electoral politics, and hobbled his administration in a morass of investigation and quasi-scandal before it even began. Trump’s erratic communications style might in some sense violate customary “norms” of American political comity, but the behaviour of the FBI and CIA in 2016-2017 will have a far more long-lasting impact on what’s regarded as “normal” power-transfers.

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Can British media steer clear of the American sewer?

By Douglas Murray

One wonders how these media organs could ever hope to adapt to post-Trump life, with all the painful withdrawals and lingering psychological damage that will undoubtedly entail. One option is to simply keep going back over and over again for a fix, even with Trump out of office. Chris Hayes of MSNBC recently suggested one potential option: “Some kind of truth and reconciliation commission.” Interesting thought, because if this theoretical “commission” is tasked with uncovering the reasons for Trump’s rise to power, it will find that perhaps the chief culprit is NBC Universal, which provided Trump with a 14-year perch as one of the country’s most well-known network TV personalities.

Either way, the elite-peddled angst about some forthcoming Civil War is made all the more absurd because it almost gives Trump more credit than it deserves. His re-election campaign is flailing, and it has nothing to do with white supremacist militias readying for armed conflict. Compared to his successful 2016 campaign messaging, the current iteration is a hopeless wreck. Much of Trump’s time is spent impotently fuming about the “radical Left”, and he repeatedly brought up the phrase during the depressing first “debate” with Joe Biden.

Review the transcripts from his debate encounters with Hillary Clinton four years ago, however, and you’ll see not one instance of Trump making reference to anything like the “radical Left,” or any of the other heavily-ideologised attack lines that his advisors and handlers this time around have so relentlessly imparted on him to emphasise. Trump’s downfall, should it arrive next month, will be explicable by a variety of factors, ineffectual and incoherent pandemic response paramount among them. But they’ll all be far more banal, and therefore less emotionally satisfying, than those currently engrossing the elite commentariat.

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How US journalism lost its spine

By Michael Tracey

Of course, one can always easily find examples of comparably grandiose doomsaying among pro-Trump partisans scattered throughout the Right-wing media ecosystem. But when the “youth activist” Charlie Kirk pronounced in an address at the Republican convention that Trump is nothing less than the “the bodyguard of Western Civilisation,” this was understood to represent a foolish, deluded Right-wing sensibility. Yet when similarly ridiculous claims are made by respectable elite outlets, the expectation is that all right-minded, well-educated citizens will nod in solemn, knowing agreement.

All of these insane proclamations have to be understood as fulfilling some depraved psychological purpose. This purpose is to elevate combatants in America’s pantomimed Culture War to the status of world-historic combatants, on whose shoulders the fate of the country rests. Many of the purveyors are pure cynical charlatans, but others probably have come to believe their own preposterous rhetoric, which is an indication of how deep the delusion runs.

Among the prophesiers, there is clearly a kind of perverse psychic need for the Trump saga to end with a salaciously climatic conclusion. If you are so inclined — that is, if you are so blinkered by four years of mostly self-inflicted psychological turmoil — then Trump is always going to provide a daily deluge of material that could justify your angst. But a tempered and public-spirited media would have developed strategies by now, five years into the theatrical trolling, to avoid withering into a shrieking stupor every time Trump makes a purposefully-provocative offhand remark. If anything, this emotional fragility has only burnished Trump with an unearned mystique. Because by now, what he’s working with is mostly just schtick.

If Trump goes down to the defeat, it will be largely because of his own incompetence, and one manifestation of that incompetence is that his (admittedly unorthodox) communications style has been only that: a communications style. PR. And for the US intelligentsia to have been so addled and demented by a PR shtick couldn’t be a better demonstration of how vapid and untrustworthy they are.

It soon transpired that Professor Segal was a retired 76-year-old biophysicist, living in the Soviet-controlled puppet state of East Germany. But by then it was too late. Critical faculties, as we know, can go out the window during pandemics — whisper ‘scientific evidence’, and frightened people will believe what you say.

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Are the conspiracy cranks a little bit right?

By Gavin Haynes

The Soviets knew this. As the AIDS epidemic worsened, the lie that the virus was created in a Pentagon laboratory proliferated in the Soviet press, which widely cited the Segal report. The Soviet news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti, which together had over 100 bureaus worldwide, amplified the story; it began to go viral, appearing in dozens of sympathetic or unsuspecting newspapers around the globe. By the end of the decade, it had appeared in major outlets in more than 80 countries. This disinformation campaign, codenamed ‘Operation Infektion,’ was the most successful of the Cold War.

Its legacy is felt to this day. The genocidal conspiracy theory is disproportionately believed in black American communities — to the extent that it hinders HIV prevention. One survey of black Americans found that 48% believed that AIDS was an artificially made virus, and 27% believed it was made in a government laboratory.

And although the Cold War is over, the old Soviet strategy of race-baiting as a form of information warfare against America lives on. Indeed, the techniques have only become more potent, as our modern information architecture — the Internet, smartphones and social media — makes it infinitely easier for bad actors to disseminate disinformation quickly and widely.

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America is losing the information war

By Nina Jankowicz

As the battle for America’s soul threatens to rip the country apart ahead of November’s election, race has become one of the key partisan battlegrounds. This is being exploited with devastating precision by the Russians — who’ve been refining their methods for years. As Special Counsel Robert Mueller found in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election, the Kremlin started laying the groundwork in 2013 — well before Donald Trump had even announced his candidacy. That year, it set up the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — a unique mash-up between a digital marketing and intelligence agency, whose task was to experiment with social media to fuel polarisation in American society. Race was one of the most fertile battlegrounds.

In mid-2014, IRA agents travelled to the United States in an “intelligence gathering mission” in order “to obtain information and photographs for use in their social media posts”. Then, from their base in St Petersburg, they built fake pages, communities and personas that looked authentically American. These included ostensibly Left-wing groups like ‘Black Matters’, which targeted black Americans by appearing close to ‘Black Lives Matter’. This disinformation project was known as ‘Operation Lakhta’.

A paid ad sponsoring the IRA’s ‘Black Matters’ page on Facebook

Paid ads publicising the group went straight for the jugular: this one features photos of three young black Americans — Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray — who were killed either in police shootings or custody. Rice was only 12. He had allegedly been shot on sight for playing with a toy gun.

Once they had ensnared followers, and as the election grew closer, groups like ‘Black Matters’ became a vehicle for the IRA’s attempts to suppress the black Democrat Vote. Agents posted emotive narratives of political alienation, suggesting that Hillary Clinton did ‘not care for Blacks’, or that a race between Trump and Clinton was ‘one that Black people should sit out’.

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Britain’s race pain is not the same as America’s

By Ralph Leonard

But the IRA wasn’t just baiting black voters on the Left; it was also targeting white voters on the Right. Again, race was the trump card. Agents set up pro-police social media groups that promoted the so-called ‘Blues Lives Matter’ movement. In a sponsored ad for one of these pages called ‘Being Patriotic’, the IRA urged white conservative Facebook users to ‘like’ its page by pushing anti-BLM content. These ads were just as emotive as the ones aimed at black voters. The one pictured below, in the full text, attacks Hillary Clinton — warning that she is the ‘main hardliner against cops,’ and that Donald Trump is the ‘one and only who can defend the police from terrorists’.

‘Being Patriotic’ Promoted Page on Facebook

As the IRA’s operation grew, it found it could socially-engineer the real-life actions of American citizens — manipulating many, for instance, into attending political rallies organised and promoted from St Petersburg. Donald Trump’s campaign unwittingly boosted one such event on its Facebook page, but the IRA also ran anti-Trump rallies after he won the election. One, organised on the ‘Black Matters’ page, managed to convene up to 10,000 protestors in Manhattan’s Union Square, who then marched on Trump Tower, four days after the Republican victory. ‘Join us in the streets! Stop Trump and his bigoted agenda!’ said the Facebook event page for the rally. ‘Divided is the reason we just fell. We must unite despite our differences to stop HATE from ruling the land.’ The tragic irony, of course, being that division was exactly what the Russians were exploiting.

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Abolishing the police is a cop out

By Mary Harrington

The Democratic House Intelligence Committee has publicly released a cache of IRA social media advertisements from between 2015 and 2017, demonstrating how prolific they were. On Facebook alone, the IRA purchased 3,393 ads, which 11.4 million Americans were exposed to. They built 470 Facebook pages, and created 80,000 pieces of organic content, which reached over 126 million Americans.

It is difficult to quantify the extent of the IRA’s influence; it’s worth bearing in mind that the election that was decided by just 70,000 votes. It would be naïve to attribute Trump’s victory wholly to Russian interference, but it is nevertheless clear that the poison the IRA injected into US public discourse has played some part in making it increasingly febrile.

And now the 2020 election looms. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and global BLM protests, race has re-emerged as the critical dividing line. And Russia is better placed than ever to exploit it, with methods that grow more sophisticated with every passing month. Though the situation is developing as you read this, there are already some clues as to how their tactics are evolving.

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The liberals are falling into Putin's trap

By Peter Franklin

On 12 March 2020, CNN, Twitter, Facebook and the network analytics firm Graphika exposed another disinformation operation. While Project Lakhta was run by IRA agents in St Petersburg, by 2020 the work had been outsourced to Ghana, where the IRA was operating behind the front of a fake NGO called Eliminating Barriers to the Liberation of Africa. EBLA had office buildings, employees and a website, which at first glance looked legitimate — it referred to an array of ‘projects’ and had a big ‘donate’ button. On closer inspection, the façade crumbled. The donate button did not work, the site was populated with Latin-stock text, and one of its projects claimed to have raised $231.53 billion — over three times Ghana’s annual GDP​.

The IRA had employed Ghanaian operatives to entice black Americans to join online communities, then post positive messages that would encourage them to have pride in their racial identity. Agents would then start to feed these manufactured communities negative messages, making followers feel angry and isolated. The aim was to alienate black voters from the rest of society. The Ghanaian operatives were encouraged to play with content to see what would resonate and what would go viral, just as the IRA agents have done since 2013. EBLA employees had access to a library of memes and images — many simply recycled from the IRA’s stock, built up at the time of the last election.

It was not hard for these operatives to guess that they were targeting American audiences — particularly because they were told to post content on social media during the late afternoon and night in local Ghanaian time, to correspond with US daytime. Still, it would have been quite a leap for them to figure out that they were being unwittingly used as agents of a Russian disinformation campaign. This split-level subterfuge — practised on both Americans civilians and Ghanaian operatives — led the operation to be dubbed ‘Double Deceit.’ That it had been outsourced to African soil made it even harder to trace, and fight, the true perpetrators of this assault on America.

It’s reassuring to think that Operation Double Deceit was exposed, but it would be surprising if Russia doesn’t have other irons in the fire ahead of this year’s election. Perhaps more worrying, though, is that Russian disinformation against the United States has become a hyper-partisan political issue. With one side paranoid about Russia — seeing it everywhere — and the other denying that Russia is a threat at all, the Kremlin’s strategy is working beautifully.

While armed vigilantes and pro-and anti-BLM protestors were filling the streets of America earlier this year, these divisions were being weaponised by foreign actors; Americans, meanwhile, were too busy downplaying or magnifying the Russian threat for their own ends to organise any coherent response. Obviously, this does nothing to help race relations. In fact, extreme partisanship undermines the security of the entire nation, by blinding Americans to the real threats.

When the dust settles in the wake of the 2020 race, the US is likely find that, yet again, it was too slow to understand and react to foreign psychological operations.

Maybe there is some hypothetical revolutionary Left-wing candidate out there who could theoretically seek to carry out such a frightening agenda. But the candidate fielded by the Democratic Party in 2020 is not some wild-eyed Robespierre reincarnate. It’s Joe Biden. And the apocalyptic scenario prophesied by Republicans about a potential Biden presidency can only be seen as comical in the context of his actually-existing political record.

Unlike in 2016, when the personage of Hillary Clinton provided a boundless source of intense consternation, Donald Trump and the Republicans seem far less inclined to run against Biden as such. Instead, they’ve taken to portraying him as a walking corpse with severely limited cognition — and therefore it won’t be him pulling the strings once he’s wheeled into office, they contend, but a variety of other nefarious radical forces working behind the scenes. Fliers that declare “The Radical Left Has Taken Over Joe Biden” have been hitting mailboxes across the country, featuring grim images of Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez interposed domineeringly over a confused and oblivious Biden.

On the one hand, party coalitions are always going to have a role in setting the president’s agenda; Trump, for one, more-or-less outsourced his own legislative priorities to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell for the first half of his tenure. And to the extent that Omar, Sanders, and “AOC” constitute a coherent ideological faction, certainly they would jockey for influence under a Biden administration.

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How white radicals hijacked Portland's protests

By Michael Tracey

But the casual castigation of Biden as a mere Trojan Horse for the “radical left” totally disregards the significance of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, which if nothing else were a direct repudiation of the “radical left” — insofar as such a thing exists within the constraints of US electoral politics. Biden’s victory resoundingly blunted the ascendance of left-wing activists who tried and failed to seize the reins of the Democratic Party, mainly by way of the five-year Bernie Sanders campaign. As Biden reminded an interviewer in Wisconsin this week: “I beat the socialist… That’s how I got the nomination. Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist.”

It’s impossible to ever know what exactly a general election featuring Democratic nominee Sanders would have looked like, but a few things seem plausible. First, it wouldn’t have been necessary to “tie” Sanders to the activist Left, as they would have been the proud, unhidden core of his campaign operation. Figures like Shaun King, whom the Sanders campaign elevated as a top surrogate (King was even selected to introduce Sanders at his 2020 kickoff event) doubtless would have been the gift that kept on giving for Republicans. (Google him if you must.) And a fair number of the most ideologically adventurous twentysomething protesters who have run rampant for the past several months surely would also have been active Sanders supporters. Perhaps it’s possible that Sanders could have animated new segments of the general electorate and won against Trump regardless. But the project of “tying” him to the more excitable elements of the activist Left would not have been complicated. It just would have been a fact.

To use the same playbook with Biden as might have been used with Sanders, however, suggests a lack of imagination on the part of Trump and Republicans.

Even Sanders, despite being a professed socialist, never advocated for the mass appropriation of private property or full-scale nationalisation of industry. As president, he likely would have pursued relatively modest redistributive policies — modest compared with the welfare state policies that characterise other modern-day left of centre governments. But at least the inevitable “socialist” attack would have had the benefit of reflecting a term with which Sanders actually describes himself. Over nearly five decades in government, Biden has never touched “socialism” with a ten-foot pole.

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What if Trump loses the election?

By Justin Webb

Nothing about the mad rush to saddle Biden with socialist baggage is particularly new. In the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain accused Barack Obama of conniving to implement socialism, with the charge having stemmed from an incident that in hindsight seems remarkably quaint. At a campaign stop in Ohio, Obama expressed his belief to a man dubbed “Joe the Plumber” that “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” McCain, whose electoral fortunes had crashed that autumn alongside the global financial system, saw this as a last-ditch opportunity to warn American voters about the possibly Mao-like designs that Obama had in store.

But with eight years of an Obama/Biden presidency in the bank, to call what was enacted during that period any kind of triumph for “socialism” would be laughable. And if the idea with Biden is that he’s so cognitively inept that he’d inevitably capitulate to the forces of radicalism which surround him — well, few would doubt that Biden’s sharpness has conspicuously diminished in his latter years. But he did exhibit the mental acuity required to get himself through a historically large Democratic primary field, and then go on to successfully “unite” the Democratic Party to a greater extent than was the case at this time in 2016.

Where the “Radical Left on the march” argument does have something at least approaching a point, is that the Democratic Party’s professional class has evolved sharply on questions of race and identity in the past several years — and especially since the onset of the nationwide protest movement this summer — with emphasis on diversity and representation now having reached a dogmatic fixation. However, it would be inaccurate to characterise this professional class shift as an embrace of “socialism” or even “radicalism”. More accurately, it’s a re-orientation of elite attitudes and signalling patterns, without any attendant shift in underlying power dynamics.

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Bernie's failure is a lesson for the Left

By James Bloodworth

One pronounced feature of the Trump era is that those who have adopted the most histrionic rhetorical postures are just the same old banal careerists resorting to emotional theatrics. A recent example is professional left-wing activist Max Berger, who declared on Twitter that a fascist coup was underway. Berger previously worked on the campaign of Elizabeth Warren. It will be these types who gain additional institutional power in the context of a Biden presidency, and they will no doubt be inordinately fixated on matters of race, gender and sexual orientation. But are they “radicals”? Not really. They’ve just adopted the patina of rhetorical radicalism to justify their remarkably conventional life choices.

Even for avowed “democratic socialists” like AOC, the Republican PR strategy depends on exaggerating their influence within the overall Democratic party coalition. However much the party’s Congressional delegation has inched marginally leftward, for instance, the most powerful and catered-to faction are still members representing affluent suburban districts whose victories in 2018 enabled the Democrats to secure a majority. Names like Elissa Slotkin, Dean Phillips, and Cindy Axne aren’t nearly as well known as those who loudly place themselves at the centre of social media attention such as “AOC”, but the electoral formula which propelled them to oust Republican incumbents in states critical to the Electoral College (Michigan, Minnesota and Iowa respectively) is the formula now being most closely followed by Biden on a national scale.

And if Biden wins in November, it will owe heavily to these very kinds of voters — his most significant polling advantage is currently among white women with a college degree — not leftist radicals. Will Biden at least give Bernie & co a nominal “seat at the table”? Sure, that’s likely. Biden is running more as a traditional coalition-manager than any kind of insurgent seeking to overturn the consensus of the party he leads. But the Republican histrionics intentionally misportray which forces within that coalition would wield the leverage in the event of a Biden presidency. (“AOC” once suggested that in a more sensibly-apportioned parliamentary system, she and Biden would not even belong to the same party.)

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How US journalism lost its spine

By Michael Tracey

Those who predict a revolutionary socialist upheaval under Biden might want to spend some time asking actual socialists what they think about Biden. Because the mood they exhibit isn’t particularly celebratory. A group of erstwhile Sanders activists have contented themselves with declaring “Not Him, Us” in their attempt to hector any remaining left-wing holdouts to suck it up and vote for Biden. These as-yet-anonymous manifesto writers decree that “Defeating fascism is priority #1” and as such, mobilising a ‘popular front’ against Trump is of urgent necessity. “The 1930s taught us one lesson we can never forget: we must unite — even with neoliberal opponents — to defeat fascism,” the group concludes.

Leaving aside the analytical accuracy of drawing a parallel between the present-day United States and 1930s Germany — let’s say the comparison seems a tad off — the increasing prevalence of this logic within left-wing activist circles means Biden has less need to appeal to them directly. It’s already been deemed morally obligatory for these activist types to join with the dreaded “neoliberals” in order to blunt the rise of global fascism, as personified domestically by Trump. And so whatever leverage they might have wielded in a Biden term has been forfeited from the outset.

In an alternate timeline, Republicans might take solace in Biden as a buffer against an invigorated activist Left which — it’s true — has made strides in recent years, both organisationally and within the popular culture. And the professional class Dems will probably agitate for bizarre racial and gender identity policies if given entry-points into the Executive Branch. But most of it will be superficial posturing — a speciality of those kinds of operators. And Biden himself is most eagerly courting endorsements from people like John McCain’s widow Cindy for a reason. He’s had going on 78 years to display the radicalism now being attributed to him, and there’s little sign of it yet.

It is entirely plausible — likely even — that Donald Trump will win a second term in the White House. Readers who are following the election through the polls will likely disagree. According to the latest snapshots the race is still Joe Biden’s to lose. The Democratic challenger is enjoying average leads of more than six points in the national polls and four points across the all-important battleground states. Today, Trump leads in just three crunch states: Georgia, Iowa and Texas. If the polls are correct, then the path that Trump took to victory four years ago is simply no longer available.

Biden can also point to other strengths: he remains in a stronger position than Hillary Clinton was four years ago; his ratings have been higher and more durable; he is routinely hitting or surpassing the 50% mark while in the latest polls he leads Trump by an impressive 16-points among women, 20-points among graduates, 20-points among Millennials, 23-points among the slightly younger Zoomers, 39-points among Hispanics and Latinos and 67-points among African Americans.

While there is evidence to suggest that Biden is failing to inspire strong support among the latter two groups, this should be seen alongside the fact that he is polling significantly stronger than recent Democratic challengers among pensioners who, crucially, are more likely to vote. Look at all of this and you might conclude that Trump, rather than winning four more years in power, is actually on course to become the first one-term President since George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992.

But what if the polls are wrong? What if people are lying? And what if Trump’s voters are more committed to this election than their opponents? The fact that the polls give Biden a strong chance of victory but the bookies give him only a 54% chance suggests that I am not the only one pondering these questions.

Indeed, it is not hard to tell a different story. One reason why I went against the grain four years ago by warning that Trump would pull off a surprise was because of a collective failure to interrogate groupthink, question the polls and ignore his in-built advantages, including strong support for his national populist message among key groups of voters who had been cut adrift by the liberal consensus that had ruled America for decades, irrespective of whether there was a Democrat or a Republican in the White House.

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Why Boris Johnson keeps on winning

By Matthew Goodwin

Today, it is similarly not hard to spot Trump’s strengths. On the economy, jobs and other issues his numbers are good if not impressive. Take this week’s poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal: Trump leads Biden by 16 points on immigration, 10 points on the economy, 9 points on dealing with China and 2 points on crime and violence. Biden leads on healthcare, coronavirus and race relations but when Americans are asked to choose the issue that will decide their vote, they choose the economy by a country mile (16-points ahead of coronavirus). The number of Americans who think the economy would get better under Biden are outnumbered by those who think it would get worse.

And the jobs are coming back. Signs continue to emerge that the U.S. economy is past the worst of the pandemic. Last week, the unemployment rate dropped to 8.4%, well below market expectations and the lowest rate since the Great Lockdown began, and considerably down from the 15% rate in April. Positive economic news could now continue until the election and this will inevitably be jumped on by Trump as he heads into the presidential debates in little over a week. “The economy is coming back,” he will say: “don’t let Biden ruin it.”

And then comes the question of enthusiasm or, more accurately, the lack of it. Just one in five Americans feels enthusiastic about Biden. This figure does rise to 40% among his own supporters but even that raises an awkward point — not even a majority in Biden’s own camp feel enthused about his candidacy. This should ring alarm bells.

For one thing, these are eerily similar to Clinton’s numbers in the final polls four years ago, when just 19% of voters and 41% of her voters felt this way. And for another they contrast sharply with Trump; while closer to one in three Americans feel enthused about the incumbent this rockets to nearly three-quarters of his own supporters.

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How universities shut out conservative academics

By Matthew Goodwin

Biden and the Democrats are clearly working on the assumption that their anti-Trump message will be just as potent as a pro-Biden message, because the latter is sorely lacking. Ask Americans whether they are voting for or against the respective candidates, and while 40% of Biden voters say they are voting for the Democratic candidate a much larger 58% say they are voting against Trump. Now look at the opposing camp, where a remarkable 78% are voting for Trump.

This, I think, speaks to a wider failure and one that could yet confront not just Democrats but liberals more generally should the nightmare of “Trump 2” come true. Since the revolts of 2016, liberalism has essentially had two opportunities to reply to the new alliance of cultural conservatives and national populists: the first was through the Brexit culture war; the second is through today’s campaign against Trump’s re-election.

The first went disastrously wrong. Rather than engage meaningfully and seriously with what Brexit represented, a request for change, liberals did all they could to block the vote outright, overturn it or dilute it so that it was largely indistinguishable from the status quo.

Along the way, they repeatedly derided and dismissed the other side as racists and relics from the past. The failure of liberalism to rise to the occasion and chart a more constructive path forward was then reflected in what happened next: Boris Johnson’s comprehensive victory, the worst Labour vote since 1935, and the passing of the Withdrawal Agreement.

If, after four long years, this winter the Democrats similarly fail to articulate a compelling, convincing and successful reply to Trump-ism, then alongside recent events in Britain this will confirm that liberalism is in a much deeper crisis than people thought four years ago. Aside from exposing the fact that “anti-populist” campaigns are on their own insufficient, a Biden defeat, coming so soon after Brexit, would throw light on a glaring absence of ideas that might otherwise be capable of maintaining or even saving the liberal project.

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By Justin Webb

Some writers have alluded to the potential significance of this moment. Pointing to violent protests in cities such as Portland and Seattle, and a tendency among Democrats to explain Trump away by pointing to electoral procedures, the writer Shadi Hamid has remarked: “I struggle to imagine how, beyond utter shock, millions of Democrats will process a Trump victory. A loss for Biden, after having been the clear favourite all summer, would provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change — at a time when disillusion is already dangerously high.”

Writing on this platform, Justin Webb similarly asks what actions, after a second Trump win, would Biden’s “radicalised” supporters consider proportionate and reasonable: “We do not really know any more; what we do know is that Joe Biden’s denunciation of violence -unequivocal and heartfelt and sympathetically reported by most of the media — is not regarded as wise or just by large segments of his supporters”.

These are all interesting observations. But perhaps the deeper question to ponder is not just what will happen to individual parties and their supporters should such a moment arrive, but also the broader philosophy that has governed our societies for much of the past half-century. A second Trump win would not only confirm to the world that his opponents have failed to find a serious ideological reply but that liberalism itself is failing to rise to the challenge that has been presented by the post-liberal turn.

The former Vice-President is not exactly the type you would imagine clad in all-black combat-style street apparel, hurling commercial-grade fireworks at police officers. Rather, he drafted the infamous 1994 omnibus crime bill in concert with the National Association of Police Organizations. He is even known to venerate the arcane institutionalist ethos of the US Senate — whereas to insurrectionary anarchists, such institutions could only be tools of oppression.

But the Trump Era has an odd way of bringing about unexpected ideological convergences. In the announcement video that formally kicked off his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden paid homage to what he called the “courageous group of Americans” who descended upon Charlottesville, VA in August 2017 to confront an assembly of Right-wing rally-goers. Among that “courageous group” were Left-wing activist factions broadly classified under the banner of “antifa”.

For Biden, what transpired in Charlottesville was a “defining moment,” and formed the basis for his decision to launch a third campaign for the presidency at age 76. While Biden did herald generic American idealism in that announcement video — which would be anathema to most insurrectionary anarchists — in the gravity he assigned to the Charlottesville episode, he also affirmed a core tenet of the “antifa” worldview: the notion that a uniquely pressing fascistic threat has gripped the country, and crushing this threat is a matter of unparalleled world-historic urgency.

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Certainly, if you picked any “antifa” member at random, there’d be an almost 0% chance that they would express any kind of personal enthusiasm for Joe Biden. But there’d be a virtually 100% chance that they’d express a great deal of enthusiasm for the theory that “fascism” is an accurate characterisation of America’s current state of governance. Biden would be similarly enthused to present a variation of this analysis, albeit from a slightly different ideological angle. He typically intones things like, “This is not who we are”, rather than “All Cops Are Bastards”.

Still, where Biden is united with “antifa” is in assigning such outsized importance to the role of small-time “fascist” agitators like the ones who gathered that weekend three years ago in Charlottesville (despite ultimately being outnumbered by Left-wing activists) on account of the validation they are purported to have received from Donald Trump. For both Biden and “antifa,” this dynamic constitutes the chief prism through which contemporary American political affairs must be viewed.

And for both Biden and “antifa,” this mode of analysis has been hugely successful. “Antifa” has succeeded in stoking nationwide insurrectionary fervour on a scale unseen in decades. Given their opposition to Trump as the alleged fascist-in-chief, as well as their appropriation of the “Black Lives Matter” protest mantle, they’ve received an extraordinary amount of mainstream liberal legitimation.

Democratic Party operatives have even gone so far as to exalt “antifa” activists as the modern-day equivalents of US soldiers fighting in World War II — while apparently exhibiting no embarrassment for invoking this comparison.

Another clear beneficiary of the “fascism” panic, somewhat paradoxically, has been Biden. A supreme irony of the outsized role that “anti-fascism” has played in post-2016 US political discourse — as popularised by both liberals and leftists, who often claim to be at odds with each other but nonetheless overwhelmingly agree on the underlying “fascism” prognosis — is that it has ultimately limited the possibility of actual Left-wing policy reform.

Democratic presidential primary voters had been traumatised by the non-stop barrage of Trump-related hysteria churned out each and every day by profit-driven corporate media outlets, and laboured under the sincere belief that Trump’s America bears some bonafide relation to Weimar Germany. As such, a plurality were understandably uninterested in foundational reform to the Democratic Party.

That was bad news for socialist Bernie Sanders, who ended up losing handily in the 2020 primaries to a former Vice President whose entire campaign was predicated on little more than restoring the pre-2016 Democratic Party to power.

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And in a way, you can’t particularly blame those Biden voters. Because if your main sources of information tell you for years on end that the reins of state have been seized by an out-and-out fascist, who is fuelling a siege of “Nazi” street agitators, whatever deficiencies the Democratic Party might have at the moment are of little or no concern. Now even Sanders himself has called for a “united front” against Trump ahead of the election, seeming to suggest that the precedent of Francisco Franco is historically apt. Wasn’t the whole problem with Franco that he couldn’t be voted out?

Never mind that Trump would have to be quite a feckless fascist to allow himself to be constantly maligned in the country’s major media, plotted against by his own administration underlings, and impeached. The decidedly unsexy reality is that Trump has been a fairly weak executive, at least relative to his predecessors in the postwar era.

But his radically unorthodox communications style belies any dispassionate assessment of this record, thus the fascism-mongering persists more-or-less unabated. And for all the warnings of a Reichstag Fire moment always supposedly being around the corner, the past six months of Covid and riots were a missed opportunity for any genuine fascist seeking to consolidate power. Trump appears largely content with issuing inflammatory tweets.

So as riots continue around the country, and corporate news networks describe post-protest scenes with raging infernos as “mostly peaceful”, the temptation can be to write this off as mere partisan side-taking. Certainly there’s an element of that — most journalists desperately don’t want to see Trump win in November.

But thanks to the prevailing “fascism” framework, their opposition to Trump isn’t just a matter of ordinary election-year preference. It’s imbued with existential, civilisation-altering significance. How could anyone in their right mind not do everything within their capacity to ensure the defeat of fascism? Once you accept the premise that fascism does in fact accurately describe the current state of American governance, all bets are off — journalistically and otherwise.

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Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful

By Michael Tracey

So even if the “anti-fascists” in the equation are burning down cities, they will still never exist on the same moral plane as the actual “fascists” whose champion occupies the White House. Hence, riots which result in the destruction of huge swaths of Kenosha, WI magically become a “mostly peaceful” affair according to CNN and the New York Times.

Yes, journalists also presumptively ascribe a certain virtue to any protests that occur with the imprimatur of “Black Lives Matter”. But racial disparities have been a fact of American life since the dawn of the republic. The unavoidable explanation for why they’ve taken on such frantic energy in the past several months is the alleged spectre of fascism, namely Trump. With a Democratic President, even one as vanilla as Biden, there will doubtless be future race-based controversies. But they won’t have the cosmic weight as those that occur when a “fascist” president also looms.

Adding to the growing list of ironies, Trump’s primary conception of the presidency has less been Fuhrer, than “Pundit-in-Chief”, whereby he proudly brandishes the role of world’s loudest media critic — with media criticism having been one of his life-long passions. Given that experience, Trump knows how to expertly pry at tensions in how pundit narratives get constructed, and the “peaceful protest” cliché provides all the material that could ever be desired in that respect. Kayleigh McEnany, in tweeting a photo of a recent Trump air hanger rally in Pennsylvania, described the attendees (only half-jokingly) as “peaceful protesters”.

The reason she did this is because if one follows the recent patterns of media nomenclature, any and all “peaceful protesters” should be painstakingly accommodated, even if their gatherings produce widespread arson attacks or increase the Covid-19 infection rate. There is no impartial explanation for why the “peaceful protests” of this past summer deserved praise, adulation, and rousing defences from the standpoint of pandemic mitigation. Again, only does this make sense when inserted into the blinkered fascism vs. anti-fascism context.

One wonders if these protesters and rioters have ever paused to consider why it is that so many establishment media outlets are so consistently eager to advocate on their behalf, with the phrase “largely peaceful” having been stretched well past the point of absurdity. And one also wonders why so many powerful forces are so willing to join in affirming their “anti-fascism” worldview — up to and including, in his own way, Joe Biden. For all the talk about dismantling systems of oppression, those who actually wield power in 2020 America seem to view the “fascism vs. antifascism” dichotomy as awfully convenient to their own self-preserving interests.

It is symptomatic of how diseased American strategic thinking has become over the past 30 years that so few Americans in a position to influence the direction of US foreign policy would have the guts or insight to issue a similar warning today.

That cannot be said of President Trump’s nominee to become ambassador to Germany, retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor. It’s a selection that sends a clear message in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Macgregor, who has previously been on the shortlists to be either US national security advisor or Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, would be that rarest of creatures in Trumpworld: an appointee actually in line with the policies the President campaigned on in 2016.

In him, Trump would at long last have a high profile advocate for foreign policy positions that arguably won him the election four years ago. Macgregor has been a staunch supporter of the President’s efforts to finally bring a real and lasting peace to the Korean peninsula. He has also long been an outspoken proponent of a worldwide US military drawdown, in particular calling for a serious rethink of the benefits of NATO.

President Trump has consistently called on America’s NATO partners, especially Germany, to increase their defence expenditures up to 2% of GDP. In that regard, he is not dissimilar from his presidential predecessors: both George W. Bush and Barack Obama regularly expressed frustration with NATO member countries for not spending more of their budgets on defence.

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Like the President, Colonel Macgregor recognises that, in aggregate, the EU has a larger population and economy than the U.S. and is perfectly capable of defending itself. Unfortunately, the cold war defence alliance has, in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, transformed itself into a global policeman, and a reckless one at that: the disasters of Iraq, Libya and Syria have not only undermined regional stability, they have also hampered efforts by Trump to make peace with North Korea and come to a modus vivendi with Russia.

But in some respects, Macgregor has gone even further than the president and will doubtless spell out some hard truths to the German government if he becomes the next US Ambassador to Berlin. Just last year, he called NATO a “zombie”. Even more controversial during a period of bogus “Russiagate” fanaticism, Macgregor has inconveniently reminded us that “the promises given to President Mikhail Gorbachev by President George H. W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Francois Mitterrand, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and their foreign ministers in 1990 — not to expand NATO eastward; not to extend membership in the NATO alliance to former member states of the Warsaw Pact—were ignored.”

This strategic commitment has not just been ignored with impunity over decades, but recently exacerbated, given America’s decision to place more US troops right on Russia’s doorstep in Poland. Indeed, NATO’s ongoing eastward expansion to Russia’s borders — encouraged by successive Democratic and Republican Administrations in Washington alike — has revived tensions with a bellicose Moscow, an irresponsible threat inflation that has revived the perpetual gravy train that flows to the Pentagon.

Macgregor, who holds a PhD from the University of Virginia, will hopefully restore some coherence to Trump’s foreign policy. He has long been a critic of the militarisation of US foreign policy, while also calling for long needed reforms in the US armed services. His credentials on that score are unassailable: Macgregor was awarded a Bronze Star with a V device for Valor in the first Gulf War for his heroic leadership in the Battle of 73 Easting, but he remained a staunch critic of the Iraqi occupation after his retirement from the armed forces in 2004.

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Under normal circumstances, in a normal country, the elevation of someone of Macgregor’s stature would have been hailed by the press and foreign affairs commentariat. Alas, we are a long way from that now, and so, predictably, Macgregor’s nomination has set off a round of ad hominem attacks designed to derail his confirmation.

We’ve seen this movie before. Rather than address a nominee’s core competencies, the establishment engages in character slurs, asserting racism or the standard canard, anti-Semitism. For example, back in 2012 when President Obama nominated another war hero with contrarian views that threatened to upend to the bipartisan consensus, Chuck Hagel found himself on the receiving end of unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism by leading neo-conservatives, such as William Kristol, Eliot Cohen and Jennifer Rubin.

The focus on only a handful of Macgregor’s past statements are just a pretext for the real reasons his nomination is drawing fire. First, he is a target because his views run 180 degrees counter to those who compose the DC foreign policy “blob”, namely those working in government, think tanks, and academia, none of whom have ever been held to account for its many grave failures over the past 20 years.

Even worse, many of these same Establishment figures are now predictably reaching out to Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden. A report last week quoted unnamed “individuals who work for conservative think tanks in Washington” who have acknowledged “informally speaking with members of the Biden team in recent weeks.” The former Vice-President himself has spent his entire career in the beltway, and reflexively shares the prevailing biases of the Washington foreign policy consensus.

That’s certainly not Douglas Macgregor. He is one of the leading figures of Washington’s small and besieged but growing and determined, counter-establishment. In addition to his role as a contrarian commentator on Tucker Carlson’s popular broadcast, Macgregor is a member of the board of the Committee for the Republic which has long served as the social and intellectual nexus of DC’s counter-establishment.

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The counter-establishment is rightly deemed a growing threat to the militarist status quo and plays a crucial role in pushing back against the bipartisan foreign policy that is instinctively predisposed to militarism and open-ended fiscal commitments to the Pentagon. Equally fundamental is that this group reflects the growing views of the American public which, according to recent polling, revealed a national voter population that is largely sceptical of the practicality or benefits of military intervention overseas.

Indeed, since the election of Donald Trump, DC ruling elites on both sides of the political aisle have made it abundantly clear that in their view the only people who are qualified to run for the presidency are those who refuse to question the status quo. Through incessant leaks against Trump and the dissemination of stories of dubious reporting (coincidentally, always occurring whenever a troop reduction anywhere is publicly mooted), they are seeking to ensure that never again will an outsider with heterodox views challenge the existing militarist status quo in a manner that subverts their foreign policy objectives.

Macgregor, if he had his way, would reduce the number of generals and colonels — and, of course, the huge amount of dollars now allocated to the Pentagon. President Trump, whether we approve of him or not (and the authors most assuredly do not) has not had, until now, a single high ranking member of his administration who understands, much less cares about what American imperial overreach has done to its own citizens. In Doug Macgregor, he finally will have a figure who will make this case very forcefully — and on an influential European stage.

The case for Macgregor’s confirmation is clear: after 20 years of endless wars during which they have been buffeted by three recessions and a global pandemic, the American people want the US to step away from the frontline and seek to solve problems at home. Macgregor’s appointment would move us closer to that goal. Were his nomination to be subverted, however, then we would see who really pulls the strings in Washington. It would also illustrate that, regardless of who wins the 2020 election, the country is likely to continue down the path to perpetual, ruinous warfare.

For those who haven’t gone down the rabbit hole themselves, the broad QAnon narrative is a classic “new world order” conspiracy theory with an interactive and online twist. In QAnon world, the whole planet is controlled by a cabal of satan-worshipping pedophiles. Many QAnon adherents bizarrely believe that this cabal tortures children to extract a substance known as adrenochrome, which they purport (incorrectly) contains hallucinogenic and anti-aging properties. This cabal supposedly controls everything worth controlling, including politicians, the media, and entertainment.

In QAnon lore, these villains would have continued doing their evil indefinitely were it not for Trump’s 2016 triumph. Trump is believed to be battling this cabal with the help of a group of military intelligence officials known as “Q Team”. The QAnon faithful hold that these military intelligence officials are releasing coded messages about the operation to defeat the cabal on simple messageboards. The posts from the anonymous entity known as “Q” started on the infamous 4chan board, but now Q posts exclusively on 8kun. QAnon followers believe that by decoding these imageboard posts, they can learn the truth of this dramatic, secret war of good vs. evil.

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The belief that Trump is cryptographically revealing his secret plan to cleanse the world of evil rapidly made inroads in mainstream American politics. Trump himself has used his Twitter account to boost QAnon, quote tweeting or retweeting QAnon accounts more than 185 times. QAnon followers have appeared at Trump rallies ever since July 2018. After Q told QAnon followers to take the “digital soldier oath”, thousands participated, including the embattled former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn.

However, QAnon has also been connected to domestic extremism. In February 2019, the Phoenix Field Office of the FBI warned that QAnon, and other baseless conspiracy theories, pose an extremist threat. To cite a few examples of how this threat has manifested in the real world: a QAnon follower named Matthew Wright pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge for holding an armed standoff on the Hoover Dam Bridge. In New York, a QAnon follower with a history of attempting “citizen’s arrests” of politicans named Anthony Comello faces a second degree murder charge for the killing of a reputed mob boss.

A suspected QAnon follower named Ryan Jaselskis attempted to set fire to the Washington, D.C. pizzeria Comet Ping Pong, which is often baselessly accused of being a children sex trafficking hub by believers in the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory, the major predecessor of QAnon. Recently, in response to increased targeted harassment from QAnon followers, Twitter announced that it would no longer promote QAnon content in its recommendation algorithms or search results.

The insurgent QAnon movement is causing headaches for the Republican Party leadership, who appear to be unwilling to condemn the group for fear of losing much-needed votes, but are also unwilling to give direct credence to a conspiracy theory-driven movement that is loaded with political baggage.

The GOP congressional candidates have varying levels of enthusiasm for QAnon. On the extreme end, Oregon Senate Candidate Jo Rae Perkins gushes about QAnon at every opportunity, sometimes to the consternation of her own campaign staffers. “Where we go one, we go all,” Perkins said in one video, reciting the QAnon slogan. “I stand with President Trump. I stand with Q and the team. Thank you Anons, and thank you patriots. And together, we can save our republic.” In response to the nomination of Perkins, the Oregon Republican Party issued a statement that is devoid of any enthusiasm: “By virtue of being the GOP nominee, this is what we do — support them in winning the general election.”

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Other politicians have refused to acknowledge their QAnon-promoting past. For example, Marjorie Taylor Greene, candidate for Georgia’s 14th district, at one point was an active QAnon promoter. In one December 2017 video, she said that “many of the things that [Q] has given clues about and talks about have really proven to be true”. She has since not responded to inquiries about her QAnon beliefs.

Though Trump congratulated her victory, other Republican leaders threw their weight behind Greene’s opponent in the August 11 runoff election — but not because of QAnon. Rather, GOP leaders condemned Greene due to uncovered Facebook live videos comments in which she makes bigoted comments and promotes anti-Semitic tropes. A political action committee affiliated with conservative mega donor Charles Koch has also requested a refund of their donation to Greene’s campaign. Despite all that, Greene is currently the favored candidate to win both the runoff race and the general election.

At least one congressional candidate has distanced herself from QAnon since entering the general election. Lauren Boebert of  Colorado appeared on two QAnon livestream shows while campaigning. During a live streamed interview with QAnon promoter Ann Vandersteel, Boebert said “everything I’ve heard of Q — I hope this is real.” She has since said she doesn’t follow QAnon and called it “fake news”.

While QAnon followers aiming for national offices tend to draw the most attention, QAnon followers are also running for state offices. There are currently 12 known state-level candidates who have endorsed or given credence to the conspiracy theory or promoted QAnon content. One of these, Kevin Bushey, a Republican candidate running for District 151 of the Maine House of Representatives, is even a leader of a Zoom-based QAnon church that reads “Q Drops” — messages posted to image boards — alongside bible verses.

Even setting aside the absurdity of QAnon’s premise and the domestic extremism, the movement itself is nothing but a drain on society. Followers often get so obsessed with the practice of “decoding” Q posts that they alienate their own family and friends. QAnon followers clogged the National Human Trafficking Hotline with bogus tips, making it more difficult for real victims to seek help. They sometimes even take credit for the work of actual investigative journalists.

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But as a political movement, QAnon is a stunning success story. What other cause has adherents poised to be elected to Congress just three short years after inception?

It’s reasonable to ask how many of these candidates promote QAnon because they are true believers and how many think they may gain an electoral advantage by promoting QAnon. Candidate Jo Rae Perkins, in reference to her outspoken love of the movement, said in an interview: “It’s a very, highly calculated risk that I’m taking. Most people play it a lot safer than I do. It’s either pure genius or pure insanity. It’s one of the two. The voters are going to have to be the ones that make that decision.” As this is the first election year with a robust crop of QAnon candidates, it is also the first test of QAnon’s electoral viability. 

In November, in addition to learning whether or not President Trump will be elected to another four-year term, the vision of QAnon’s political future will be clearer. There is some historical precedent for a movement fixated on conspiracy theories gaining a significant share of power in American legislative bodies. The first third party in the United States, the Anti-Masonic Party, was dedicated to the proposition that freemasons were running a shadow government and were secretly plotting to control the world. Though the Anti-Masonic Party was short lived, at their peak in 1833 they controlled 10.5% of the House of Representatives. 

However, the QAnon community has an advantage that the Anti-Masonic Party didn’t: the ability to organise remotely online. Perhaps that won’t be enough to overcome the grudging support of Republican leadership and the stigma associated with a movement that has promoted absurd claims like that JFK Jr. is secretly alive or that there are “mole children” being rescued from Central Park in New York City.

But perhaps the advantage of social media organising will be crucial, allowing QAnon to achieve levels of political power that the Anti-Masons couldn’t. As always, it’s unwise to count out the carnival sideshow, no matter how wacky it appears.

If it looks screwy — I owe how much to HMRC? — it’s often worth searching for a misplaced zero.

But what if the sums and your feeling of what is ‘roughly right’ coincide perfectly because you are not only a dimwit when it comes to calculation but a you have no idea about wider truths either: you cannot do a ballpark calculation sensibly because you don’t know what a ballpark looks like?

This horrifying coincidence of mathematical and spatial myopias did great damage last week to the reputation of one of America’s best-know broadcasters and to MSNBC, the Left-wing Fox News equivalent that plays an important role in geeing up Democrats for the presidential fight.

I will get to why it matters so much in a moment but first the fun of the broadcast. It was a live interview between square-jawed Brian Williams (in 2007, one of Time magazine’s Top 100 most influential people in the world, though a bit of a lion in winter these days) and a woman called Mara Gay, who is a member of the New York Times editorial board, a former Wall St Journal reporter and a graduate of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, one of the top academic institutions in the United States.

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They were doing what people do on cable news: discussing a tweet.

The tweet had said that Michael Bloomberg had spent $500 million on his presidential campaign. That bit was true. Then, noting that there are 327 million Americans — also true — the tweeter suggested that Bloomberg could have given each American a million dollars “and still had lunch money left over”.

Brian Williams went full Ron Burgundy.

“When I read it tonight on social media, it kind of all became clear,” he said.

“It’s an incredible way of putting it,”

“It’s an incredible way of putting it,” agreed Ms Gay. She added: “It’s true. It’s disturbing.”

Cue massive hilarity and embarrassment and piling-on. Numerate America pointed out that 500 million divided by 327 million is roughly 1.5. Not a million. Just one dollar and fifty cents could have been the gift Bloomberg made to everyone in the nation.

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Now, wait a moment. Highly educated people are often innumerate — UnHerd’s Tom Chivers frequently, if gently, points this out. It’s awful but it’s true. Effortlessly numerate commentators stand out because there are so few of them. One of the reasons why Evan Davis is such a wonderful asset to the BBC is that he can count: he can see numbers.

So let’s give Brian Williams and Mara Gay a pass on the maths. Let’s assume we are all of us (except Tom) in the same glasshouse here and we are eyeing the stones but deciding not to throw. No: let us concentrate instead on the context, the ballpark.

This is the real horror story. These two people, whose entire jobs can be described as knowing things about society, seriously believed (“It all became clear.” “True.” “Disturbing.”) that it might be possible for Michael Bloomberg to give every American a million dollars without it making any impact on his wealth. Every American. Folk in small-town diners. College kids. Donald Trump. My own daughter Clara (as a citizen, I assume she’d qualify — yippee!)

How could that feel right? How could it feel true? Why would he not have done it already and asked if they might consider voting for him when they cashed the cheque?

The answer is that for a certain group of Americans who want to see change but not pay for it, the idea has taken hold that all that needs to happen for everyone in the nation to be wealthy is for a few billionaires to give away part of their wealth: note ‘part of,’ not even much of it.

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The idea has skewed the debate about healthcare that seems likely to be the ground zero of the presidential campaign in the autumn.

Plenty of Sanders supporters seem to genuinely believe that American healthcare could become free at the point of delivery — entirely government funded — if a few wealthy people paid more tax. Perhaps they think Mike Bloomberg could fund it.

It’s barmy. And to be fair to Senator Sanders, he makes no such claims. Yes, he points out that according to the think tank the Institute for Policy Studies three people — Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos — own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population.

True. Disturbing, even.

But Sanders does not pretend that going after them and them alone is not enough to change America.

As well as “getting rid of billionaires” (he has a car bumper sticker promising this so it must be true) he acknowledges the need for the much less wealthy to chip in: employees would pay a 4% premium on all income above $29,000 to fund Medicare for All, he says. So once you earn serious money you would be paying a decent whack.

And here’s the rub. Williams seems to think — along with so many on the American Left — that it is not about him. The billionaires will foot the bill for fairness. But it’s nonsense. The brilliant English think-tanker Richard Reeves pointed out years ago — in his book Dream Hoarders — that the top 20% of the USA should be where the finger is pointed and the redistribution might begin. These, Reeves says, are the comfortably off who have used their wealth and their cultural power to cream off the best of American life for themselves.

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“It would be an exaggeration to say that the upper-middle-class is full of gluten-avoiding, normal-BMI joggers who are only marginally more likely to smoke a cigarette than to hit their children,” Reeves wrote. “But it would be just that — an exaggeration, not a fiction.”

This is where the debate about American inequality should perhaps be focused: where it could make a real difference. It’s not (just) about the billionaires; it’s about the glass floor that separates the upper-middle-class of America from the rest.

It’s about persuading the gluten-free joggers to have respect for people who live in communities in which gender roles are still marked. In which family ties still matter more than any other. In which you run in the street only to get away from a mugger or the police.

Many of these folks rather like billionaires. They admire their energy. They envy them their yachts. Suggesting to them that life could be dandy if the billionaires coughed up is insulting to their intelligence, and avoids, according to those who study these matters seriously, the real problem.

In sleek studios in New York, it is easier to discuss tweets about billionaires and mangle maths than to focus on what would drive real change. That would require a talk about class. Where do millions of people like Brian Williams spend their holidays? Where do their kids go to university? And are they willing to give up their privilege? As a fellow broadcaster I suspect he’d employ one of our favourite get-out clauses — always true on the Today programme of course — “I’m so sorry, we’re out of time…”

I believe that Corbyn is an anti-Semite. I also believe that the Tories, who don’t care about immigrants, exploited this. It is gruesome to watch the campaigning video of Boris Johnson in the Grodzinski Bakery in Golders Green, selling doughnuts and calming Orthodox Jews, and then to read that the Dubs amendment to offer sanctuary to refugee children was rejected by his government. Simply put, they used us. Why wouldn’t they?

If Corbyn’s racism was exploitable by the Right, it is awful to watch this strategy crossing the Atlantic to fell Bernie Sanders. He is called the Jewish Corbyn. He isn’t. He is called an anti-Semite. He isn’t. The charge is absurd. Even so, it has begun.

Bernie Sanders’s father, Elias ben Yehuda Sanders, left Galicia, Poland at 17, in 1921. He was fleeing pogroms; later, most of Galician Jewry was murdered at Auschwitz. “The threat of anti-Semitism is not some abstract idea to me,” he has said. “It is very personal. It destroyed a large part of my family.”

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Jewish birth doesn’t exempt you from being anti-Semitic — read the blogs of the Tony Greenstein, the son of a rabbi, now expelled from the Labour Party for his “noxious behaviour” if you disagree — but Sanders calls himself “a proud American Jew” and I believe him; he is a proud Jew in the Socialist tradition. Two things made his politics, he says: growing up in poverty in New York and the murder of his extended family in Poland.

There are two charges aimed at Sanders. The first is that he is not supportive enough of Israel. What kind of Israel is he not supportive enough of? A Greater Israel with ever-expanding settlements, with all hope of peace extinguished, in which any violence is forgivable as long as it is not towards a Jew? I would hope not; that is Trump’s kind of support and it is not, for me, support. It is, rather, enabling of the very worst elements in Israel; a summoning of something awful.

Sanders is a garden variety liberal Zionist. He supports a two-state solution, and credibly. Corbyn could never manage this, even if it was his party’s official policy. Sanders, though, wrote this in an essay for Jewish Currents: “The founding of Israel is understood by another people in the land of Palestine as the cause of their painful displacement. And just as Palestinians should recognise the just claims of Israeli Jews, supporters of Israel must understand why Palestinians view Israel’s creation as they do. Acknowledging these realities does not ‘delegitimise’ Israel any more than acknowledging the sober facts of America’s own founding delegitimises the United States.”

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It is hard to disagree with this analysis; rather, it is comforting to read such sense and empathy. Even so, he is embroiled in a fight with American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). He refuses to attend their conference this year, although he did offer to give a speech in 2016 (and was rejected). “The Israeli people have the right to live in peace and security,” he says. “So do the Palestinian people. I remain concerned about the platform Aipac provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights. For that reason, I will not attend their conference”. Aipac called the remarks “odious” and “shameful” and invited Mike Pence to speak instead. Please suppress your laughter.

The second charge against him is the company he keeps, and it is true that some of his associates — the congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar — do not share his support for a two-state solution and have sometimes fallen into anti-Semitic tropes. In 2012 Omar tweeted that Israel has “hypnotised” the world (she apologised) and Tlaib has falsely blamed Israel for the death of a Palestinian child (she retracted).

What do you say to these unpleasant associates? You could say that Sanders has other associates anti-Zionists would despise, such as the kibbutzniks he stayed with in Haifa in 1963. He later wrote: “It was there that I saw and experienced for myself many of the progressive values upon which Israel was founded. I think it is very important for everyone, but particularly for progressives, to acknowledge the enormous achievement of establishing a democratic homeland for the Jewish people after centuries of displacement and persecution.” Sanders needs to build a progressive coalition to defeat Trump; and we must accept, the Left being what it is, that many are anti-Zionists. But they — and this is the crucial difference with Jeremy Corbyn’s situation — are following a Jewish liberal Zionist now and I read that as victory.

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This is not enough for Sanders’s Jewish enemies. They say he doesn’t practise religious Judaism — why should he? A Jewish acquaintance who stayed with Sanders on the Haifa kibbutz made a ludicrous intervention in print, saying that Sanders refused invitations to his children’s bar mitzvahs. He also complained that, when they stayed on the kibbutz, Sanders sat under a tree reading Karl Marx with his “rootless Jewish soul”.

These squabbles are normal within the Jewish community, where competitive Judaism is a sport, like chess, and the ancient debate about whether Jews should be particularists — in this case, unquestioning Zionists — or universalists — in this case, avid Socialists — rages on; how best, is the unanswerable question, do we remain safe?  Sanders’s politics, I fear, is the real cause of the hostility, and this angers me; the claims of his “anti-Semitism” are spurious and cruel. Mike Bloomberg, the non-practising Jewish capitalist, has escaped such claims of “non-Jewish Jewishness”.

I have spent too much time trying to explain what anti-Semitism is, and what it isn’t. Seeking peace in the Middle East and having the integrity — and the charisma — to attract anti-Zionists when you are a liberal Zionist, and always have been, isn’t anti-Semitism. It’s good politics and cause for hope. Do American Jews really trust that the racism that Donald Trump summons — for cynicism — will not overwhelm them too? If they do, they are mad.

Take the current row about self-confessed “data nerd” (see Twitter profile) and Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg and his recently unearthed comments about farming. Bloomberg is a poster boy of the digital age. A Harvard Business school alumnus, he made his billions — more than 60 of them — from selling computer software to the financial services industry. That made him the 12th richest person in the world. But for all this lucrative data savvy — or perhaps because of it — Bloomberg has shown himself to be excessively clumsy in his reflections on the degree of difficulty required to grow crops. Speaking to a group of Oxford University students in 2016, soon after Trump became President, Bloomberg reflected on a contrast between the intellectual demand of farming and that of the information age:

“If you think about it, the agrarian society lasted 3,000 years, and we can teach processes. I could teach anybody — even people in this room, no offence intended — to be a farmer. It’s a [process]. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that.”

“Now comes the information economy, and the information economy is fundamentally different because it’s built around replacing people with technology, and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyse. And that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set. You have to have a lot more gray matter.”

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Why I like my politicians to be hypocrites

By Giles Fraser

Supporters of Bloomberg have insisted that these remarks have been taken out of context. His opponents, from Trump to Sanders, have used them as evidence that Bloomberg is out of touch with middle America, and with the all-important rural constituency in particular. And there is little doubt these comments have damaged him. But what is going on here is more foundational than mere optics. For what data nerd Michael Bloomberg is revealing in these comments is the tendency of the nerd mentality to reduce certain forms of practice, and the practical intelligence required by them, to pieces of information. It is the subjection of techne by episteme.

To use the philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 representation of the issue, the distinction here is one between different forms of knowledge; as he put it, the difference between “knowing-that” (roughly speaking, episteme) and “knowing-how” (techne). Here is an illustration of the difference. Imagine I ask you if you know how to swim, and you say “yes, of course”. But when you get into the water, you sink to the bottom and need rescuing. “I thought you said you knew how to swim,” I challenge. “Oh, I do,” comes the reply. “I have read many books on the physics of buoyancy and about the mechanisms of human propulsion through water. I know all there is to know about how to swim.”

In other words, knowing-how is not necessarily reduceable to knowing-that. You can know all the science there is of swimming or bicycling or farming, but be absolutely rubbish at doing it. Conversely you can be Mark Spitz in the water and not know the first thing about the physics of buoyancy. In other words, farming may (and does) contain a wisdom that cannot be boiled down to “you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn”.

Among those things that Plato identifies as a techne — including weaving, music, cookery, riding a chariot, farming — is that of politics. Politics is a craft as much as it is a science. And those, like Bloomberg, who have been schooled in the information age may have a handle on all of the graphs and data points that are available, but without a sense that politics is an art, and without the knowing-how talent at practising it, the nerdish would-be politician is bound to fail. Take heed, Dominic Cummings.

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And they will fail, not least because confusion between knowing-how and knowing-that is extremely funny. And being laughed at is political kryptonite. Why funny? Let me offer another example — and bear with me here.

The American author John Updike is — like both Bloomberg and Trump — golf obsessed. So am I. And like me, Updike must have spent hours poring over detailed instructional literature explaining how best to hold the club, and the detailed mechanics of how the human body might deliver the club face to the ball at exactly the right angle and speed. Irritatingly, I have friends with what we call “natural ability” who don’t have to go through all this nonsense. They just stand up and hit the ball. Mere mortals like me have to break the process down and carefully reconstruct it. And inevitably, something of the ‘natural ability’ bit gets lost in the process.

In 1959, Updike wrote a very weird short story about how to drink a cup of tea in the style of a golf instruction manual. “In seizure, first touch, with feathery lightness, the rim of the saucer with the pad of the index finger of the right hand… A split second — perhaps .07 — later, the first knuckle of the middle, ‘big’ finger, sliding toward of the centre of the saucer’s invisible underside, and the tip of the thumb must coordinate in a prehensile ‘pinching’ motion.” It goes on like this, on and on, for pages. The comedy here is the comedy of trying to reduce knowing-how to various assertions of knowing-that. And, of course, it’s totally ridiculous to try. Laughable.

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This is the comedy that brings down the nerds from their political thrones. From Cummings’ science-obsessed reduction of politics to information and statistics, to Bloomberg’s inability to recognise the inherent wisdom in a form of practice such as farming, the nerdish desire to collapse knowing-how to knowing-that will tend to be exposed at moments of philosophical comedy where they reveal themselves to be ridiculous.

And this drives the nerds mad. For despite the fact that the information age has granted data nerds great fortunes and cultural power, when faced with the ballot box, it is knowing how, not knowing that that tends to triumph. From Clinton (Bill, not Hillary), to Trump and Johnson, the information age has given us very un-data-y politicians, those whose political intelligence is located in the gut and not on the spreadsheet. Sure, as Plato himself recognised, techne and episteme have a more complex and mutually supporting role than I have described for the purposes of illustration.

These days, top golfers require both. But in the political realm at least, the Cummings-style knowing-that always finds itself playing a supporting role to the Johnson-style knowing-how. In all those worlds where wisdom can be digitised — finance, computers — the nerds will win. But my prediction is that faced with the rat-like political cunning of Donald Trump — someone who knows how to exploit Bloomberg’s knowing-that ridiculousness — Bloomberg will lose. Just as he would on the golf course.

As it happens, Bloomberg and Trump are golf buddies. And, notwithstanding all the claims that he is a terrible cheater, Trump is nevertheless the better player. And Trump rubs it in. “Mini Mike is a short ball (very) hitter. Tiny club head speed”, he tweeted about Bloomberg’s golf game last week. This is the sort of nastiness that nerds have long been subjected to by the playground bully. Bloomberg may be far richer than Trump, but in the wide open space of a democratic contest, Trump knows how troll Bloomberg. And it will probably work. Because at the ballot box, just as out on the links, knowing-how usually beats knowing-that.