This is deadly earnest stuff, pitched like a sermon: in a lesser writer’s hands it might tilt toward the sentimental. But in Baldwin’s voice (which, by that point in his career, was nearly the same in talking as it was in writing), it is graceful, perennially relevant, and true. These days, when even the word “empathy” sounds to some like the language of stuffy social justice activism, the mere mention of race or sexuality only sets off the same dull culture-war script we’ve been playing out for decades. In our general hangover from the whole “Woke Era” (for lack of a better term) — which essentially canonized Baldwin as a kind of guiding shaman/saint — we run the risk of forgetting the pressing racial and sexual issues that era ultimately failed to address. We may be tired of hearing about them; we may resent the proliferating academic vocabularies with which they were often  discussed; but we’re still not free of them. Nor are we free from the insight and genius of James Baldwin himself, who really was one of the most important writers on the intertwined evils of racism and sexual bigotry.

Though really, Baldwin was one of the finest American writers full stop: an excellent novelist and a moral essayist without any peer in the 20th century. He was also an unbelievably complex man: self-loathing and self-indulgent; courageous; jealous; a born performer, who enjoyed his fame, yet remained essentially religious in his sincerity and commitment to civil rights campaigns in America. These were the same paradoxes out of which he penned numerous of the most personal stories and essays of his time — and it’s this picture of Baldwin that Nicholas Boggs’s tremendous new biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, gets perfectly right. The key is in the subtitle, A Love Story. Since, at least in Baldwin’s writing, everything always came back to that most easily over-complicated, easily-dismissed, ubiquitous four-letter word.

In pursuit of its subtitle, Boggs’s book divides itself into sections, according to the great male loves of Baldwin’s life. The first — not a sexual relationship, to be clear — spans his early years under the influence of his mentor, the great Harlem Renaissance painter Beauford Delaney, whom Baldwin met as a young man in Upper Manhattan. The rest of the book covers several longer periods, in each of which a particular man (generally a bisexual, often married, man) became the focus of Baldwin’s artistic and romantic imagination: first the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, then the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, then the French artist Yoran Cazac. These periods roughly correspond to those passages of time which Baldwin spent in France, in Turkey, and finally, in France again. Indeed, despite his many trips back to America — particularly in the Sixties — Baldwin spent most of his life in relative exile from the United States, bouncing between paramours.

Besides his many smaller love affairs, Baldwin’s greatest romances revolved around vague domestic fantasies about these “mostly heterosexual” men, and the commingled “family” of people he gathered around him: artists like Delaney, friends like Mary Painter, or personal assistants like David Leeming, Baldwin’s eventual biographer. Boggs is exhaustive in his attempts to tie these romantic pursuits — along with Baldwin’s developing sense of himself as a black, gay man in a time of absolute upheaval around American society’s relationship to those identities — into the progression of his novels, from Go Tell it On the Mountain (1952) to Just Above My Head (1979), and his greatest works of non-fiction, from Notes of a Native Son (1955) to The Devil Finds Work (1976). There is almost nothing in Baldwin’s own books which Boggs can’t trace back to what was happening in the writer’s life as he planned, wrote, and revised these works, sometimes over years.

At times, this gives the reader an insightful look into Baldwin’s actual creative process. Yet Boggs’s biographical literary-critical method verges on becoming a vice, hewing pretty closely to the most clichéd ideals of writing-as-therapy, sometimes leaving little room for the possibility that Baldwin’s creations might have come from a deeper imaginative space, and not just from an attempt to achieve personal catharsis. Still, if it is a vice, it’s the only one, in what is otherwise a remarkable book of social and personal history. Some passages are so vividly rendered, Boggs manages to do the near-impossible, making one of the most tumultuous times in American history — the crest of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 and 1964 — seem furiously present-tense and unpredictable. This is especially true of the episode encompassing Baldwin’s near-breakdown, while trying to stage his first play, Blues for Mister Charlie, with Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio in New York. Baldwin’s unbelievable levels of stress make sense, when one realizes he had only recently traveled to a violently desegregating South, afterwards organizing his infamous meeting with Robert Kennedy, to get more explicit support for civil rights campaigners. He had also just participated in the March on Washington, where his scheduled speech was pulled, partially due to Baldwin’s reputation as a known homosexual.

Given his intimate relationships with fellows artists like Lena Horne, Marlon Brando, and Lorraine Hansberry — as well as his his brief friendships with civil rights leaders like Malcolm X, Medger Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Huey Newton, and Stokely Carmichael — it’s no surprise that a biography of Baldwin also doubles as a social history of American culture from the Forties to the Seventies. It reveals him as one of his own time’s greatest and sharpest moral voices — a man writing with unforgiving clarity about the inner struggles of black Americans and sexual minorities, not to mention the moral rot of a white America that couldn’t let go of its racial divisions (nor its deep psychosexual angst about those divisions, something Baldwin insisted was irrevocably intertwined with the roots of white supremacy). And at a certain point his expatriate exile and homosexuality both left him nearly adjunct to the newly forming canon of black American art.

Yet what remains most inspiring and influential in Baldwin’s writing is how he recognized, from the start, that the struggle for freedom for Black America (and White America, too, in the end), was inseparable from his own search for personal freedom, for the freedom to create himself. Like his close friend (and fellow genius) Nina Simone, the righteous rage which radiated out from his words was an undeniable personal rage, not just a greater, symbolic one. For Baldwin, the need to be free — free as a gay man, and as a black man — in a society set up to punish him for being either, was no different from the call for greater freedom across America, or across the globe. Yet for him the American Dream was a fairly monstrous myth, a myth of American innocence: one in which the country’s vision of freedom always came at the expense of the enslaved and the persecuted. Real freedom would require those who profited the most from the arrangement — white Americans — to let go of their innocence, to realize the horrors which had been required to create that naïve Dream.

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That is, seriously grappling with American racism would mean understanding just how much it had to do with sexual fear and jealousy (as all racism ultimately does). But what was clear to Baldwin — one of his darkest but most important insights — was that there is no greater nightmare than America’s perennial wish to believe in that innocence. As he stated many times over, the creation of “white” as a category not only built a framework excluding black people from free society, it corroded the souls of white Americans, too — by only ever allowing them to be white. Reducing their lives and identities, to arbitrary ideals of racial purity, which would have to be defended (no matter how absurd, or immoral) in order to preserve the institution of slavery. For Baldwin, the restoration of abused black Americans, after centuries of horrors, would mean getting to the bottom of the historical disaster that was “whiteness” — which had left white Americans as confined to that destructive racial category as their black compatriots were to theirs.

Of course, there is a kind of fatalism that crops up, when we consider just how long this historical situation went on, how much it still defines American society. Baldwin himself spent much of his career growing weary and pessimistic about the hope for this kind of large-scale change. There are echoes of his later stance — his sadness about how little could be done to really achieve equality for black Americans and sexual minorities — in the general pessimism which has plagued so many social justice movements this century. Indeed, there is still widespread exhaustion with how much still has to be done, not least in combating poverty, or dismantling America’s hellish prison system (not to mention the kinds of outright white supremacist rhetoric and sexual bigotry which the MAGA movement has been happy to popularize again, even ironically). Across the 2010s and into the early 2020s, this pessimism tended to manifest as a directionless obsession with guilt, atonement, and the moral surveillance of other people — something our social media panopticons make too easy. Yet puritanical strains of social justice campaigning simply run counter to reality: freedom can’t be achieved by defining and enforcing any particular creed or morality. In order to be free, people must, as the philosopher Hegel once said of Shakespeare’s characters, be able to become “free artists of themselves” — a phrase which fits Baldwin’s own personal mission of freedom perfectly.

Baldwin was adamant, always, that though the world may be broken, though pessimism may in fact be realistic, people still always have a choice to love. We may call that trite, or dismiss it as sentimental. We may complain about how unrealistic it is, or about how many complicated political issues there are that get in the way of ostensibly simple ideals like love and peace and, yes, empathy. Yet if we don’t accept the possibility that love is always a choice — vulnerability, difficulty, pain be damned— then we doom ourselves (and each other) to hate, violence, ignorance, and evil. In a way, it’s exactly as simple as this. A lot of political rhetoric is only designed to make it seem ridiculous compared to, say, the realpolitik of immigration or law enforcement (as if human morality and spirituality could ever be reduced to a political argument). But if there is any lesson to be taken from James Baldwin’s life and work, it is that no matter how fatalistic we are, no matter how “realistic” we may wish to be, the only things that matter in the end are the things we do out of love. And that real human freedom would be the highest possible expression of that love.

That random element inevitably results in controversy. Nearly every year, a large segment of the fan base walks away convinced that the lottery is fixed by the league brass in advance. Like so much in America, the NBA draft and its unique system of talent allocation is on the verge of losing its legitimacy.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Each spring, the NBA holds a lottery to determine the order of the first 14 picks — those are awarded to teams that failed to make the playoffs. The four worst are given the best odds at a top four pick, but it’s not guaranteed. Ping-pong balls, weighted according to regular-season record, are drawn behind closed doors and the results revealed on national television. A month or so afterwards, the actual draft proceeds in order, team by team, each selecting the player they believe can change their fortunes.

This year, though, the results are even more shocking. Despite very long odds, all three top picks in the lottery landed with middling teams which already have All-NBA-caliber players (as well as previous championship banners). Each of the teams rewarded with a coveted top-three pick comes with a host of reasons that make a fix plausible. The most notable — and oft-repeated — being that the Dallas Mavericks were given the top draft spot in return for selling one of their best players, Luka Doncic, back to the Los Angeles Lakers for a dubiously low price.

Former top picks LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neal have shared their suspicions (and relevant anecdotes) around the lottery delivering their talents to what seemed, to them, like the league’s preferred destinations. Dwyane Wade, the Hall of Fame guard and now part owner of a small-market team, added further fuel to the fire. In a recent interview, Wade danced very close to admitting the lottery results are in fact predetermined. “When you’re in the NBA, it’s a business,” he said. “Sometimes they have to do what’s best for the business.”

On some level, though, whether the draft is rigged is beside the point. A perception of backroom dealing threatens any sport’s most sacred commodity — the idea of fair play. All the same, there’s something essential that the conspiracy-mongers miss. The draft, and its lottery, has always existed to shield American fans from a reality which, owners believe, American national culture can’t psychologically handle.

Unlike football clubs in Europe — where the richest teams can just buy the best players — American sports owners let their fans cling to an illusion of competitive parity. Drafts are the foundation of that illusion. A performative ritual meant to uphold the fiction that every team has a shot, no matter how small their market or feckless their owner. At its core, a draft, as a system of resource allocation, mirrors a deep contradiction at the heart of American thinking. Like the nation itself, US sport insists on a democratic mythology centered around the country’s unique take on the Protestant work ethic — fairness for all, success through effort, and a staunch belief that underdogs can reach the top of the mountain even when faced with the worst possible odds.

This “overcome — no matter what” mentality permeates all aspects of US decision-making. In the founding era, Americans needed to think this way. The entire nation was barren frontier. Civilization had to be built from scratch. Immigrant settlers without a belief in their ability to overcome perished or, at minimum, became a burden on communities that had few extra resources to offer. While this overcome-the-odds mentality served the early stages of the country well, in the 21st century, it has ossified into a hyper-individualist “society does not exist” mentality. Something that encourages citizens to avoid acknowledging that equal opportunity is now less a reality and more a manipulative mythos (if not a farce).

For instance, Gen Z faces a less affordable existence — and worse employment prospects — than possibly any generation in US history. However, nearly 70% of college-age Americans still believe that they will someday be rich. Predictably, they attribute that prospect’s likelihood to their personal work ethic and guile. As a national culture, Americans believe — with near religious conviction — that the system will eventually reward them and “everything will even out in the end” if they just “work hard enough”. Sports drafts consciously play into this mentality. However, recent progressive reforms to the NBA’s lottery distort it in destabilizing ways.

The NBA is by far the most technocratic — and the most overtly progressive — of America’s Big Four sports leagues. This applies both to the league’s public-facing politics and its constant tinkering with the structure of the game itself. From shortening the time allowed to cross half court, to eliminating defensive hand-checking, to legalizing zone defenses, nearly every recent rule change has been designed to boost scoring and dampen the sport’s physicality — an aesthetic the league’s front office increasingly finds distasteful, for corporate-related reasons. As a result, the NBA is without a doubt the most manicured of all American sports leagues.

In the summer of 2020, amid the post-George Floyd reckoning, the NBA allowed players to replace the surnames on their jerseys with social justice slogans like “Black Lives Matter”, “I Can’t Breathe” and even “Education Reform”. It has also operated the WNBA at a significant financial loss for nearly three decades — a loss that has actually grown in the wake of Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark’s meteoric rise to stardom and the accompanying spike in attention women’s basketball has received. The NBA’s paternal support of their sister league isn’t driven by profit but by ideological principle: it sees the WNBA as an essential public service campaign. Given the league’s consistent commitment to social engineering, it should come as no surprise that fans increasingly suspect this ethos might bleed into its system of talent distribution — i.e., the draft.

Unlike NFL helmet-ball, which lets the worst team draft first (fittingly brutish and old-fashioned), the NBA’s leadership habitually re-engineers the rules of its draft lottery system in an attempt to discourage what it considers bad behavior — in this case, “tanking”. In other words, teams intentionally losing to secure better draft picks. The NBA’s current lottery system was specifically designed to discourage this by providing far less favorable odds for the worst teams than before. However, in a manner typical of progressive policy, the recent lottery reforms have in fact produced the opposite result while somehow still hurting those most deserving of assistance. Paired with other changes in team payroll structure, also meant to promote fairness, it’s only made it harder for well-run franchises to sustain their competitiveness long-term. Team salary caps are now also so rigid that clubs can’t retain role players around their stars without sacrificing the depth needed for playoff competition. As a result, teams are now more dependent than ever on the draft and the cheap, young players it provides.

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Small-market teams — and league integrity overall — would most probably be better off if the NBA scrapped the draft, and its lottery, altogether. Instead, eligible young talent could enter a structured free-agent pool under union-negotiated salary tiers. Teams would still operate under a strict salary cap, but the power dynamic would shift. Instead of team managers gambling on lottery ping-pong balls, they’d compete to convince young prospects that their system offers the best path to success — as happens throughout European football academies (not to mention National Collegiate Athletic Association recruiting).

Top talent, especially in a small-roster sport such as basketball, always gravitates toward the best opportunity. No high-powered agent would put a potential super-star behind a successful veteran in their prime on a lengthy guaranteed contract. Nor would they send them to a franchise with a reputation for mismanaging top-player development. In the system I propose, small-market success stories — teams like the Indiana Pacers, Utah Jazz, and Oklahoma City Thunder — might actually dominate the world’s top professional basketball league. They’d at least avoid the indignity of having to lose on purpose for years on end simply to improve their meager odds of securing top players. Under a more European arrangement, they’d win by being competent — not by luck or the privileges of wealth or location.

Ironically, this year’s Finals were the first in the NBA’s modern era to feature two small-market teams. Indiana and Oklahoma City got there the old-fashioned way too — patience, development and savvy financial management. The recent implementation of something akin to a hard salary cap has, in some ways, greatly helped the small-market teams compete, resulting in six different champions in the last six years — a level of parity unheard of in previous eras.

However, despite some of the most hard-fought and exciting Finals play in recent memory, the TV ratings for this year’s Finals (minus game seven) have been some of the worst on record. A major disappointment for the television providers, which almost guarantees the introduction of future structural “reforms” seeking to bring the league back in line with domination of wealthy, large-market teams like the Los Angeles Lakers, who just got one of the league’s best players for practically nothing. Hence the conspiracy theories surrounding how their trading partner, only a few months later, got the number one pick despite — literally — the worst odds possible.

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The NBA is nothing if not conscious of its own image, not to mention its massive profit margins, much of which comes from mammoth television and merchandise contracts. Given those priors, fans are hardly paranoid to ask if the league’s constant tinkering carries over into its draft lottery results. And so perceptions of the NBA draft lottery have become a microcosm of Americans’ declining faith in their institutions. These days, you don’t need a tinfoil hat to broadcast your suspicions of foul play. According to Gallup, public trust in every major American institution has cratered, from Congress (a laughable 7%) to higher ed (just 36%) to the presidency itself (26%). What Gallup does not say is that Americans increasingly believe their institutions are not just broken, but that they’re being run exactly as intended — for insiders only. Fans’ perception of the NBA’s draft lottery slots into this broader national disillusionment: it performs legitimacy while running its most consequential decisions behind velvet ropes.

The NBA’s need to constantly adjust its lottery structure shares ideological DNA with increasingly unpopular DEI favoritism practices — a deliberate show of randomness that conceals centralized control. However, what it really delivers is a platform for institutional preferences cloaked in algorithmic mysticism. And when fairness becomes understood as a social engineering project — unaccountable technocrats construct the illusion of chaos, carefully manage outcomes behind the curtain, and gaslight anyone who implies they’ve put a thumb on the scale.

Naturally, the NBA’s yearly lottery ritual happens in a private room. No personal cameras. No smartphones. Only hand-picked VIPs and pre-approved media are allowed. This isn’t transparency; it’s security theatre — lottery as high-church liturgy. Faith replaces evidence and the congregation is expected to clap politely from the pews.

Of course, the NBA’s draft lottery doesn’t need to be rigged for that perception to become a system-ending problem. What matters is it feels rigged or, at least, unfair and dishonest. That perception, at some point, will become inseparable from fans’ view of the basketball league as a whole. And, in this way, the NBA draft and its lottery has achieved something characteristic of late-stage America. It offers fans a spectacle they can still believe in — if only they ignore their own instincts and trust authorities with the most to gain.

My book Hillbilly Elegy is really an exploration of the American Dream as it was experienced by me and my family and the broader community in which I lived.

It chronicled a real decline in the American Dream, not because people weren’t consuming as much as they have in the past – if you look at the trend lines, we’re certainly able to buy more stuff today than we ever have been able to. It’s a story about family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse, community decline, decline of the manufacturing sector, and all these senses of dignity and purpose and meaning that comes along with it.

When I was growing up, what the American Dream meant to me was that I had a decent enough job to support my family, and I could be a good husband and a good father. That’s what I most wanted out of my life. It wasn’t the American Dream of ‘the striver’. It wasn’t the American Dream, frankly, that I think animates much of Washington DC. I didn’t care if I went to Ivy League law school, I didn’t care if I got a best-selling book, I didn’t care if I had a lot of money. What I wanted was to be able to give my family and my children the things I hadn’t had as a kid.

That was the sense in which the American Dream mattered most to me. Now, that American Dream is undoubtedly in decline, what should a conservative politics do in response? I think a first and preliminary step is that we have to distinguish between conservative politics and libertarian politics.

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I don’t mean to criticise libertarianism. I first learned about conservatism as an idea from Friedrich Hayek – The Road to Serfdom is one of the best books that I’ve ever read about conservative thought. But I believe that conservatives have outsourced our economic and domestic policy thinking to libertarians, and because that’s such a loaded word, and because labels mean different things to different people, I want to define it as precisely as I can.

What I’m going after is this view that so long as public outcomes and social goods are produced by free individual choices, we shouldn’t be too concerned about what those goods ultimately produce. An example: in Silicon Valley, it is common for neuroscientists to make much more at technology companies like Apple or Facebook, where I think they quite literally are making money addicting our children to devices and applications that warp their brains, than folks who are neuroscientists trying to cure Alzheimer’s. I know a lot of Libertarians who will say ‘Well, that is the consequence of free choices. That is the consequence of people buying and selling labour on an open market, and so long as there isn’t any government coercion in that relationship, we shouldn’t be so concerned about it.’

What I’m arguing is that conservatives should be concerned about it. We should be concerned that our economy is geared more towards the development of applications than curing terrible diseases, and we should care about a whole host of public goods, in addition to that, and actually be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish some of those public goods.

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I want to tell a story, one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve heard since my book came out. A woman I met in southeastern Ohio — which is really ground zero for the opioid problem and so many other social problems that all of us care about in this country — was telling me about a young patient she had who had become addicted to opioids. He was eight years old and he was already addicted to Percocets. The way that this kid became addicted to opioids is that he would do drug runs for his family. Because they didn’t have a lot of money, if he made a successful drug run, they would actually give him a Percocet as a reward. That was how this kid, at the tender age of eight, became addicted to opioids.

I think there’s a tendency in our politics on the right to look at this kid and say ‘You know, it’s a tragedy what’s happened to him, but it’s fundamentally a tragedy that political power can’t touch. Parents need to make better decisions. This child, God willing, needs to make better decision when he grows up.’

I think that ignores the way in which human beings actually live their lives – the cultural, economic, and environmental contexts in which this kid grows up. It ignores the fact that this kid lives in a community that has too few spare dollars to spend and too many spare opioids. That is a political problem. That is something that we decided to do using political power. We allowed commercial actors to sell these drugs in our communities. We allowed our regulatory state to approve these drugs and to do nothing when it was very clear that these substances were starting to affect our communities. That was a political choice and political power can actually fix it.

That kid lives in a community where even if he makes good choices later on in life, he lives in a place where there are virtually no good jobs for a kid of his educational status and his social class. If he wants to earn a decent wage, if he wants to work at a good job, those jobs in his community have largely gone overseas thanks to forces of globalisation that we unleashed because of political choices. We made the choice that we wanted that kid to be able to buy cheaper consumer goods at Walmart instead of having access to a good job. And maybe that was a defensible choice – I don’t think it was– but it was a choice and we have to stop pretending that it wasn’t.

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I’ve been blown away by some of the research that I’ve seen in the past year about the way in which pornography warps young adults’ minds, and how they interact with their environment, and how they interact with their own sexuality. We know that young adults are marrying less — they’re having less children. They’re engaging in healthier and productive relationships less and less, and we know that at least one of the causes of this is that we have allowed — under the guise of libertarianism — pornography to seep even into our youngest minds through the channels of the Internet.

Again, we made a political choice that the freedom to consume pornography was more important than public goods like marriage and family and happiness. We can’t ignore the fact that we made that choice, and we shouldn’t shy away from the fact that we can make new choices in the future.

And even if this kid marches through an opioid epidemic in an environment and a community where there are very few good jobs, and even if he finds himself in a healthy relationship and wants to do the thing that I most defined as core to my American Dream – start a family and have happy, healthy children – he will confront a society and a culture and a market economy that is more hostile to people having children than maybe at any period in American history.

There are a lot of ways to measure a healthy society, but the way that I measure a healthy society, or I think the most important way to measure healthy society, is whether a nation – whether the American nation – is having enough children to replace itself.

Do people look to the future and see a place that’s worth having children? Do they have good enough jobs so that they can make the necessary sacrifices so that one of the parents can be home with that kid most of the time? Do they have economic prospects and the expectation that they’re going to be able to put a roof over their kid’s head, put food on the table and provide that child with a good education?

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By every statistic that we have, what we see is that people are answering ‘No’ to all of those questions. For the first extended period in the history of the American nation, our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us. Now I know some libertarians will say “Well, that choice comes from free individuals. If people are choosing not to have children, if they’re choosing to spend their money on vacations or nicer cars or nicer apartments, then we should be okay with that.”

I think there is a good libertarian sympathetic response to that. We can point out, for example, that areas of the world and areas of the country with fewer children are less dynamic. We can point out that we have a social safety net that’s entirely built on the idea that you will have more workers and more people coming into the system than retire, and to do that, you need to have children being born. But I think to make this about economics is to concede too much of a premise that we don’t want to concede.

When I think about my own life, the thing that has made my life best is the fact that I am the father of a two year-old son. When I think about the demons of my own childhood, and a way that those demons have melted away in the love and laughter of my eldest son; when I see friends of mine who’ve grown up in tough circumstances and who’ve become fathers and have become more connected to their communities, to their families, to their faith, because of the role of their own children, I say we want babies not just because they’re economically useful. We want more babies because children are good.

Libertarians aren’t heartless, and I don’t mean to suggest that they are. I think they also recognise many of the same problems that we recognise. But they are so uncomfortable with political power, or so skeptical of whether political power can accomplish anything, that they don’t want to actually use it to solve or even to try to help address some of these problems.

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If people are spending too much time addicted to devices that are designed to addict them, we can’t just blame consumer choice. We have to blame ourselves for not doing something to stop it. If people are killing themselves because they’re being bullied in online chatrooms, we can’t just say parents need to exercise more responsibility. You have to accept that parents live and swim in the same cultural pond as the rest of us.

It is one thing to be a good parent who monitors your kids screen time. It is another thing to tell a kid whose entire environment, whose school friends, whose school bullies, whose teachers, whose work friends all use these technologies and use them in a way that is increasingly causing social problems and say, “we can’t do anything about that other than let our parents be better about screen time.” We live in an environment and in a culture that is shaped by our laws and public policy, and we can’t hide from that fact anymore.

The question conservatives confront at this key moment is this: Whom do we serve? Do we serve pure, unfettered commercial freedom? Do we serve commerce at the expense of the public good? Or do we serve something higher? And are we willing to use political power to actually accomplish these things?

I serve my child, and it has become abundantly clear that I cannot serve two masters. I cannot defend commerce when it is used to addict his toddler brain to screens, and it will be used to addict his adolescent brain to pornography. I cannot defend the rights of drug companies to sell poison to his neighbours without any consequence, because those people chose to take those drugs.

It is time, as Ronald Reagan once said, for choosing, and I choose my son. I choose the civic constitution necessary to support and sustain a good life for him, and I choose a healthy American nation so necessary to defend and support that civic constitution.

This is an edited version of a speech entitled ‘Beyond Libertarianism’, delivered by JD Vance at the National Conservatism: Founding Conference in Washington DC on 16 July

But in the odd moment during the performance when I briefly regained the ability to think, I was struck by the fact that everyone in the cast spoke, and sang, with American accents. It’s clear enough from the show’s cast list that pretty much every performer is UK-born. The Theatre Royal Drury Lane is, obviously, in the UK. Frozen is set in a fictional country with Nordic styling. Why, then, the accent?

It would have been jarring to see the Frozen story done with English accents — but equally, it’s hard to think of a more vivid example of American soft power than a stage full of English actors performing an American movie in American accents. And of all the delivery mechanisms for that soft power, there are few more pervasive, and powerful, than the American cultural colossus Walt Disney.

Disney, a $200 billion corporate and creative titan, is itself an instance of the American Dream: founded by two Midwesterners on creativity, hard work, sweating employees, and the ruthless protection of copyright. (They’ll even sue day care centres for using Disney images without a licence.) In Disney’s princesses, we can trace the evolution of that American Dream.

The first two, Snow White (1937) and Cinderella (1950), are straight retellings of European fairy tales: in effect, transposing Old World mythologies to New World media. But the ideology that would, in time, replace those mythologies was already taking shape on a far bigger scale.

In 1918, five years before Disney was founded, President Woodrow Wilson responded to the bloodbath of Europe’s first Great War with Fourteen Points. Here he laid out the germinal version of the now-familiar “rules-based international order”, and set America against overt imperialism, declaring that “the day of conquest and aggrandisement” was over. He declared: “National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self determination’ is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action.”

Of course, Wilson’s proposed solution did not result in lasting peace. Between Snow White and Cinderella, the Old World went to war again, and by the time peace was declared in 1945, some 70-85 million people had died. During that time, European confidence in their traditions, faith, and political legitimacy grew as exhausted as their coffers.

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Disney has always spread propaganda

By Geoff Shullenberger

In the shattered aftermath, the governments of 50 nations including Britain and the United States founded the United Nations. Conveniently for the still-confident and far-from-exhausted United States, this new body built a one-way ratchet for dismantling rival empires into its founding charter, via an obligation to “promote self-government” including across then-colonial holdings. But if more than a little geopolitical self-interest crept into the American approach to post-war peace, it was not a purely cynical project. Twentieth-century American culture was also magnetic: against the grim background of post-war Europe, it’s not difficult to understand how the ebullience, informality and sheer prosperity of American products and entertainment might have been so appealing.

As Europe’s empires fell apart piece by piece, aided in no small way by the universal solvent of American-style liberal democracy, so America grew more confident — and Disney moved from transposing to re-working the Old World’s mythical legacy. Sleeping Beauty (1959) was the first princess to make significant changes to the fairy tale: no longer a barely-veiled allegory of female sexual awakening, in Disney’s hands it became a tale of heroic (and more or less overtly Christian) masculine agency fit for a now-ascendant superpower.

Following the deaths of Walt and Roy Disney in 1966 and 1971 respectively, there were no princesses for a couple of decades — at least until history ended. But a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the princess machine roared to life again, and with a confidence born of its standing as the foremost cultural behemoth in the world’s only superpower, Disney flung caution to the wind.

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The traditional princess stories were rewritten in alignment with the now-ascendant American mythos of “self determination”. The Little Mermaid (1990) inverts the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale: a story about the tragic consequences of trying to be what you aren’t becomes one about overcoming family constraints to become whatever you want to be. In Beauty and the Beast (1992), bookish Belle escapes stifling provincial life for a higher destiny (and a nicer house). Tangled (2010) stars a Rapunzel who saves her prince, rather than the other way round, even as she affects her own escape from the tower. And by the time we get to the 21st century’s best-loved princess — Elsa, in Frozen (2013) — the source myth is all but unrecognisable, beneath a story about the perils of repressing your true nature.

Just as the New World redesigned older mythologies to fit its own increasingly dominant narrative, it became clear that for “self determination” to be truly universal, its European legacy had to be sidelined as well. To begin with, this simply meant adding stories appropriated from further afield, such as Arabian Nights (Aladdin, 1993) or the Ballad of Mulan (Mulan, 1998), to deliver a range of self-actualising princesses with different skin tones.

That’s all gone wrong since the End of History itself came to an end. Now, even Disney’s princesses are growing politicised. But just as the Global War on Terror turned the spread of democracy from a matter of leading by example to one of imposing by force, so too the American culture those princesses deliver to little girls worldwide has grown less cohesive, less ebullient, and simultaneously more fractious and moralistic. In turn, this has paralleled a slow stagnation in American culture and lifestyle, notably for those further down the food chain, where the middle class has been shrinking since the Seventies — even as incomes continue to rise for the wealthiest.

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This slow dimming of the American Dream has brought increasingly bitter internal politics — and with this, the Disney soft power juggernaut has turned its focus inward, proffering not entrancing, confident morality tales that project the American moral vision outward, but didactic ones that project an identitarian update of that moral vision toward Americans themselves. And, in particular, toward those Americans who retain a residual fondness for what remains of the New World’s European cultural legacy.

A trajectory already well under way by the early 2010s, this has now so fully permeated ‘educated’ American opinion that by 2018 undergraduates were writing papers about historic racism and sexism in the Disney canon. And thus, inexorably, Disney has found itself dragged into the culture war, via a growing conflict between the mostly progressive views of its staff and a Disney-buying American public who don’t necessarily share those views.

For the bottom line is that a soft-power colossus on the scale of Disney could only avoid politics as long as the imperium itself was in agreement on the fundamentals. Now, though, this is no longer the case, and the result is a running battle for who owns the princesses. That battle has seen, among other recent skirmishes, a backlash to multiracial casting decisions for live-action remakes of Snow White and The Little Mermaid; a subsequent anti-racist backlash-to-the-backlash; and even a revocation of Disney’s special tax status in Orlando following the company’s intervention in Florida legislation on sex education in schools.

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But amid the fighting over the meaning of Disney’s princesses, what will happen to the future stories? Can there even be new princesses? The demand for more sparkly dresses is, after all, insatiable. And you only have to glance at the extremely strong feelings on both sides of the Atlantic prompted by Meghan Markle’s brief and divisive brush with the British monarchy, to see that even a nation founded in repudiating the Crown still often longs for a sprinkle of royal magic.

But when every new work is minutely scrutinised for the stereotypes it reinforces or challenges, and assessed less on narrative power than compliance with “self determination”, what does this do to the storytelling? Well, consider that the only character in Encanto, the most recent big-ticket Disney animation, who has experienced any significant real-life adventure is the heroine’s grandmother. And Abuela’s adventures, which happened long before the movie takes place, are portrayed as a traumatic backstory that results in her stifling her grandchildren’s self-actualisation. In effect, it’s a Disney princess adventure about the impossibility, under modern conditions, of making Disney princess adventures.

In the name of universal self-actualisation, then, the ascendant American imperium is now seeking to sand its culture free of all Old-World legacies and associated stereotypes. But this raises the question of whether a stereotype-free princess story would even be possible. What are stories, after all, except stereotypes which we embrace imaginatively? And it’s far from clear whether a 21st-century America suffering from a self-inflicted inability to tell compelling stories can ever be as internationally influential as the 20th-century version that propelled the Land of the Free to global hegemony.

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But even if it can’t, both Disney and the American imperium still have a very long way to fall. Queen Elizabeth II may have been Britain’s longest-ever serving monarch, but (as attested by the sea of blue sparkly nylon in Covent Garden last Sunday) the hearts of countless six-year-old girls around the world belong irretrievably to Queen Elsa.

And even if, as some predict, the American Dream really has peaked, it took the British empire a long time to come apart. Former colonial outposts are often the last to abandon the imperial ways: there are, to this day, Anglican schools in parts of the world a long way from England, where imperial-era English is spoken with an elegance long since vanished from the British Isles. I suspect that long after the global American empire is a dim memory, there will still be little girls in far-flung places, playing ice princesses in glittery, grimy blue nylon.

But the so-called “Holy Mowers” who maintain this beautiful spot are in something of a quandary about the very purpose of their existence: mowing. After all, this is “No Mow May” — a movement that began in 2019 in Britain and has taken off not just in this country but also in the US. It calls on mowers to give it a rest during the late spring as a way of allowing wildlife to be, well, a little more wild. Plants need pollinators and pollinators needs plants, so let the weeds return. Alas, its detractors think this creates an unholy mess, giving the dreaded green alkanet a free pass during this crucial growing month.

How we came to fall in love with the closely cut grass lawn is a long and fascinating story. Two years after my new church was opened in 1714, the landscape gardener Capability Brown was born. Known as England’s greatest gardener, Brown’s landscapes created the now familiar aesthetic of the English country house — Blenheim, Chatsworth, Burleigh — surrounded by clumps of trees, lakes, and vast swathes of cut lawn as far as they eye could see. Gone were the straight avenues of trees and geometric fountains; the new look was an imagined reconstruction of nature as God intended. Brown was not just copying nature; he was, some said, improving on it.

Styled as unaffected, the Brown look reflected the view that the English had of themselves: free and unmannered. In truth, it was just as mannered and even more expensive to produce than the more obviously artful and rectangular gardens that it replaced. And Marxists were right to point out that all the means of production, the way wealth was generated, was deliberately out of view. It was as though the aristocratic lifestyle could be built upon a few effortlessly grazing sheep. Later gardeners came to regard the Brown revolution as something of a cliché and a bit of a con.

But nonetheless, the idea that a little slice of paradise and individual freedom could be found in cut grass took hold in the most remarkable way. With the invention of the cylinder mower in the 1830s, the cut grass paradise was democratised. Even those moving from the country to the town could have a little patch of their very own Eden. Sport, too — golf, cricket, football — all required a mown surface. And as the British Empire spread its influence around the world, the lawn became a symbol of domestic success and tranquility.

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In the US especially, the lawn represented the bourgeoise American Dream, the promise of domestic happiness available to all. It mattered not that the climate was unconducive. Millions of gallons of water were redirected to keeping this promise alive. Fertilisers were invented to keep the weeds down. Hours and hours of maintenance were required. As Yuval Noah Harari said of wheat: it’s not that we domesticated grass, but that grass domesticated us. But No Mow May is something of a fightback. The lawn is being cancelled — not green enough and too imperialistic.

And what all gardeners know, of course, is that the weeds will inherit the earth. This is especially true in Kew churchyard. Among all the fading gravestones, our constant mowing is only a temporary and ultimately futile act of resistance. It’s what we think we ought to be doing as responsible stewards of the natural world. As if the natural world relied upon us for its preservation.

Though perhaps it does. On the other side of the cricket pitch from the church is the Kew Gardens’ Herbarium, containing over seven million dried plants. Kew Gardens also houses the largest collection of living seed and plant diversity on earth: 2.4 billion seeds are carefully stored, frozen or dried — a priceless insurance policy for a future time of ecological crisis. I could not be more aware that it is now science, not religion, that is building Noah’s Ark.

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At best, religions are a supporting act, taking our lead from others. The vision of some uniform, Capability Brown-inspired paradise has not helped us. We need different visions of how the natural world and the human aspiration for beauty and order might work together. And I suspect this will mean less carefully managed spaces and more appreciation of the serendipity of the wildflower meadow, with its bees and bugs and butterflies.

After all, a weed is simply a plant growing where it is not wanted. This has a parallel in Mary Douglas’s famous definition of dirt as matter out of place. Mud tramped in from the garden becomes dirt in the kitchen. For Douglas, this idea of everything having a rightful place implies the existence of a kind of social order that is premised upon a map of the world in which everything exists in relation to that map. Religion has generally been very influential in drawing these maps, as Douglas brilliantly explained.

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Some maps are more helpful than others, though. The Capability Brown map of the world was profoundly unhelpful and, unfortunately, deeply influential. It set up an impossible view of the natural world and invited us all to participate in its aesthetic and social pretence. It was always a kind of aristocratic deceit. And as a consequence we came to view the real natural world — green alkanet and all — as some sort of uninvited intrusion. Unnatural even. That’s the irony.

No Mow May freaks some people out. Their garden doesn’t look like it should. The dreaded weeds are re-appearing. But what is wrong here is not the weeds, but the way we have come to think about our gardens and our natural spaces. What we need is not fewer weeds but a new map of the natural world and our place within it. We can redesignate them as plants. Learn to make your peace with them. Because when you are six feet under, they will still be growing there above you.

Critical race theory is now widely accepted by the liberal-Left media and much of academia. It’s not just the bad laws of the Jim Crow south. And it’s not just a few racist people here and there. Racism is not some bad apples; it is as American as apple pie.

For Martin Luther King and, later, Barack Obama, American racism was the consequence of a liberal and egalitarian country failing to live up to its principles; for supporters of critical race theory, by contrast, these principles were predicated on the subjugation of black people. The American Dream is rotten to the core.

In critical race theory, then, the key historical moment is not the abolition of slavery — or the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which brought an end to segregation in public places — but the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that “separate but equal” public schooling was unconstitutional. It violated the fourteenth amendment — which, after former slaves were granted citizenship, had assured all citizens “equal protection of the laws”. If black Americans have separate schooling, they can’t realise that equality: so concluded the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

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This seems like a tremendous achievement. Indeed, in many standard textbooks on the history of the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board is seen as the first big crack in the edifice of Old Jim Crow. But the founding father of critical race theory was sceptical about its positive impact. In an article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1980, Bell argued that the decision was based on:

“value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.”

In other words, the decision was motivated not by principled idealism but cynical self-interest. Domestic legislation in the fifties was shadowed by the Cold War — and in the battle against communism, America wanted to be seen as a moral exemplar.

But Bell’s critique of Brown v. Board runs deeper than this. Bell considered himself a realist, and viewed those who celebrated Supreme Court victories with bemusement. A few laws don’t change 250 years of slavery followed by 100 years of segregation and terror. “My position”, he wrote in his 1992 Faces at the Bottom of the Well, “is that the legal rules regarding racial discrimination have become not only reified (that is, ascribing material existence and power to what are really just ideas) … but deified”. This is because “the worship of equality rules as having absolute power benefits whites by preserving a benevolent but fictional self-image, and such worship benefits blacks by preserving hope”.

Hope was the very emotion, however, that animated the politics of King and Obama. (The latter’s second book was entitled: The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.) But Bell is having none of this.

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“I think,” he writes, “we’ve arrived at a place in history where the harms of such worship outweigh its benefit”. Those who persist in clinging on to the vision of the nation as a bastion of enlightened values are, according to him, at best naive.

This display of world-weariness, in contrast to doe-eyed idealism, is one shared by the most esteemed black American intellectual in the second term of Obama’s presidency: Ta-Nehisi Coates. No one writes much about Coates anymore. Perhaps because he left Twitter. The last memorable thing he did was base a villain in a comic book on Jordan Peterson. But six years ago, after the publication of his book Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, he was anointed by Toni Morrison as James Baldwin’s successor — the nation’s intellectual and moral conscience on matters of race.

Coates isn’t a theoretician like Bell; he is a polemicist. In his writing, the realist attitude central to Bell’s critical race theory is expressed with piquant force. Racism is a constitutive part of America’s identity, Coates argues, and anyone who deviates from this fact is deluded, naive or malevolent. “There is nothing”, Coates writes about racists, “uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy”.

Coates is known for his essays in The Atlantic, which are stylish, personal, historical and very long. The overall mood is one of disenchantment. The American Dream is not for black people. Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his son, and it contains no consoling words for the future: “I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals”. The view that the moral arc of history bends towards justice is an illusion. “America”, Coates writes, “understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men”. He is an atheist.

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Bell was not; he was a Christian. And his detached pessimism was tempered by an aggressive moralism. In his book, Ethical Ambition, which mixes memoir and self-help, he emphasised that:

“humanity at its essence is both an ongoing readiness to recognize wrongs and try to make things better, and the desire to help those in need of assistance without expecting reward or public recognition”.

So there is a point in being human, and that point is to do good. The virtues that are most important to Bell are “passion, courage, faith, relationships, inspiration and humility”. He often reads less like a radical subversive than a hokey Grandpa, slipping you moral maxims rather than sweets. Which raises the question: how can someone with such piety end up conceiving an ideology characterised by doleful pessimism?

Bell is in truth an unlikely candidate for the godfather of critical race theory, an ideology sceptical about the positive impact of anti-racist legislation. When he was younger, he worked for the NAACP, the establishment anti-racism group that believed American society could be transformed through the legal system. He worked, in particular, as a civil rights lawyer in the fifties Deep South. But eventually the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights division asked him to stop being a member of the NAACP: they thought he couldn’t be objective. He quit his position in the department, but continued to work for the anti-racist organisation.

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One plausible way to reconcile these two sides of Bell — the moralist and the pessimist — is to emphasise his Christianity. He believed in the permanence of racism just like any Christian believes in the inevitability of sin — nevertheless, the inevitability of sin does not mean we shouldn’t try to be better.

But perhaps a better way to account for this tension — a way that explains the similarities between Bell and non-Christians like Coates — is to view his conception of critical race theory as a case of thwarted idealism in the American Dream. America did not become a post-racial utopia after the civil rights revolution; therefore racism is a permanent feature of American society. Just like every passionate atheist is in some sense an inverted believer, people like Bell who are so antagonistic to American idealism belie their underlying attachment to it. This is true of critical race theory in general.

Although he is not a Christian, Coates is as profoundly American as Bell. His criticism of the nation is animated by his acceptance of American exceptionalism. “One cannot”, he writes, “at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error”. His proposal is this: “to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard”. In other words, he takes at face value the ideals of the American Dream (the very same American Dream that, he argues, is not for black people).

Meanwhile, the opponents of critical race theory see its ideas as hostile to — or at least inconsistent with — America (Fox News has mentioned it over 1,900 times in four months). In an exact inversion of critical race theory’s contention that racism is present in every aspect of American life, many on the Right — in this case, Christopher Rufo — now complain that critical race theory has “pervaded every aspect of the federal government” and poses “an existential threat to the United States”. Rufo and his ilk aren’t opposed to, say, teaching the history of slavery and segregation in American schools; what they oppose is schoolchildren acknowledging their whiteness. Rufo calls it state-sanctioned racism.

The irony is that critical race theory is not, as it sees itself, a realist’s ideology. And it is not, as its main opponents view it, fundamentally un-American. Like many on the conservative American Right, it espouses an idealised view of the nation’s self-professed values: if they truly believed these values were fundamentally corrupt, then what would be the point, as Bell and Coates do, of holding America to them? The truly realist position is one like Coleman Hughes’s: he has shown, with evidence and dispassionate argumentation, that black Americans have made material progress in recent decades.

Although Rufo may deny this of himself, many on the conservative Right do cling on to a form of American idealism that is insensitive to the existence of racism. But critical race theorists cling on to their own idealism by concluding that, because America is not yet a post-racial society, racism is an inexorable feature of the country. The vision of the shining city on a hill becomes the sole means by which to judge the nation — while the material realities of black people fade into the distance.

Given this “veil of ignorance”, drifting unmoored from history, what would you choose? A cutthroat, greedy glorified casino? A land structured by the hierarchies of class, wealth, race and gender? An egalitarian but oppressive East German dictatorship? Or, more plausibly, some kind of Scandinavian-style social democracy, in which the strong and ambitious have room to rise, but there’s a well-provisioned welfare state for the weak and unlucky?

Such, in very simplistic terms, is the argument developed in John Rawls’s seminal book A Theory of Justice, which was published exactly fifty years ago this month. For many readers, it remains the last genuinely great work of Anglo-American philosophy, an enduring guide to the principles behind a good society. In the United States it sold an estimated 300,000 copies, though how many readers made it all the way through is an unanswerable question. And almost overnight, it turned Rawls into the leading champion of liberal democratic pluralism, apparently reconciling individual liberty and social good, freedom and fairness, aspiration and responsibility.

That was Rawls in January 1971. Half a century on, what went wrong? In the academy, Rawls retains a high position. Even though his book has been challenged, philosophy students and professors across the English-speaking world still speak his name with awe. Yet the values he came to represent – justice, fairness, decency, pluralism – have rarely seemed so embattled. Perhaps, in some parallel universe, Hillary Clinton is currently hosting a White House event to mark Rawls’s legacy. Not in our own, though. Instead, in an irony of exquisite cruelty, the anniversary of Rawls’s most famous work coincided with the gravest crisis in American democracy since the Civil War: an orgy of violence at the United States Capitol actively encouraged by President Trump.

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“President Trump”. To Rawls – a shy, gentlemanly, scholarly man, who taught for four decades at Harvard and died in 2002 – those two words would surely have been utterly unimaginable, the antithesis of everything he held dear. But of course philosophy – just like history, social science, art and culture – reflects the age in which it was written. And Rawls’s world, to put it bluntly, is dead. He may be about to exit the White House, but we live in Trump’s world now.

Rawls’s life tells the wider story. He was born in Baltimore in 1921. In those days his hometown was a handsome and enormously successful port, railroad hub and manufacturing city – a far cry from the drug-scarred wasteland depicted in The Wire. The son of a well-known local lawyer, he lost two of his brothers in childhood to diphtheria and pneumonia – a reminder of the fragility of life in pre-New Deal, pre-Great Society America. And he grew up in an environment suffused with understated religious belief, studying theology at Princeton and seriously considering entering an Episcopalian seminary.

Yet the single biggest influence on Rawls was the Second World War. He served in the infantry in the Pacific and endured days under fire in the trenches in the Philippines. According to one account, the future philosopher found this particularly traumatic because he and his comrades knew it would end in torrents of blood: the Japanese would never surrender and would take no prisoners. “One soldier in a dugout close to Rawls stood up and deliberately removed his helmet to take a bullet to the head,’ it says, ‘choosing to die rather than endure the constant barrage.” That was not all. A few weeks after the war ended, Rawls was sent to Hiroshima. There he gazed upon the ruins of what had once been a thriving city, the ultimate demonstration of man’s power for destruction. Some fifty years later, he was still haunted by the sight.

For the next quarter-century, however, Rawls lived in a world that was demonstrably getting better. It is hard to think of any society, at any time, that has ever matched the dynamism, optimism and cultural confidence of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s – the years of booming suburbs and jangling jukeboxes, drive-in movies and Technicolor blockbusters, Vladimir Nabokov and Marilyn Monroe, the civil rights movement, the Apollo missions and the New Frontier. This was the world in which Rawls moved to Harvard and began work on his great work. The articles flowed: “Justice as Fairness”, “The Sense of Justice”, “Distributive Justice”, laying the foundations for the behemoth to come.

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Later, critics complained that Rawls had been too kind to his own society, his own time. He was too comfortable, they said, too moderate. He assumed too much common ground; he had produced an elegant justification for the liberalism of his class. As the New Republic’s Linda Hirshman later put it: “Just close your eyes, Rawls said, and think of what kind of political society you would make if you didn’t know who you were … and you’d produce unlimited free speech and moderately redistributive capitalism.” In Hirshman’s words, “this white male Harvard professor closed his eyes and produced the government of Cambridge, Massachusetts”.

Even if that’s true, can you blame him? In the mid-1960s, if you had asked most people around the world where and when they would choose to be born, where they would take their chances behind a veil of ignorance, they would probably have chosen the United States of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In the richest, most powerful country on earth, the latter’s Great Society was transforming the lives of millions, offering a hand-out to those who needed it. Unemployment was a thing of the past, inflation not yet a pressing concern. Americans drove American cars, and they always would. Things could only get better. In this context, why wouldn’t you assume that given the right liberal principles, people would inevitably find their way to a fairer society?

But in January 1971, when A Theory of Justice reached the shelves, the wheels were coming off. This was Richard Nixon’s America now: more abrasive, more divided, more anxious about the future. The carnage in Vietnam was taking a heavy toll. The shambles of Watergate, the last time sensible people were seriously worried about a presidential coup, would deal a severe blow to the image of American democracy. The OPEC oil shock, the widening fissures of race and gender, the growing anxieties about crime and pornography, the sense of a chasm between the “elites” and the “people”, even the first glimmers of a technological revolution that would destroy millions of jobs worldwide – all these things were taking shape in Nixon’s America, at the very moment of Rawls’s intellectual triumph. Even Donald Trump was taking his first steps into the Manhattan real estate market.

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The decades since then, spanning the lifetime of anybody under the age of fifty, have not been kind to the assumptions with which Rawls grew up. In 1971 it was reasonable to think that with the advances of the civil rights and feminist movements, social solidarity would become stronger, not weaker. As rising affluence closed the gap between rich and poor, people would become more aware of what they had in common. And the new gospel of court-protected human rights – of which Rawls is often seen as a champion – would ensure even the weakest were treated fairly and equally. All perfectly sensible expectations. All wrong.

Perhaps the biggest thing, though, is simply a question of style. When critics discuss Rawls today, they almost always mention that he was a middle-class, Ivy League-educated white man. In radical circles, the value that he personified above all – a quiet, reserved, urbane civility – is now treated as fake, inauthentic, a marker of privilege. Even that brilliant image of the “veil of ignorance” is now used to beat him. “Eyes Wide Shut: John Rawls’s Silence on Racial Injustice” reads the title of one blistering academic essay. “He placed many layers of muffling abstraction between his readers and real-world struggles for justice,” complains another critic. “Rawls was so deeply in the grip of white ignorance about the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the creation of the modern Western world,” the black philosopher Charles W. Mills recently explained, that black students who dream of change “will get no help from white Rawlsianism”.

So much, then, for one of the greatest philosophers the New World has ever produced. There’s plenty of time for a comeback, of course, and A Theory of Justice will surely never go out of print. But will the next fifty years be kinder to Rawls? Probably not. The next half-century is unlikely to be an age of self-confident liberal pluralism: quite apart from the strongmen in Russia, China, Turkey and Iran, American democracy itself has rarely seemed in weaker health. And the common ground, the tolerance and decency for which Rawls stood, seems vanishingly elusive.

One story says it all. Last autumn, while the staff of the New York Times were tearing themselves apart about the Black Lives Matter movement and the growing violence in America’s streets, one columnist circulated a copy of Rawls’s essay on public reason. “What we’re having is really a philosophical conversation, and it concerns the unfinished business of liberalism,” she wrote. “I think that all human beings are born philosophers, that is, that we all have an innate desire to understand what our world means and what we owe to one another and how to live good lives.”

“Philosophy schmosiphy,” one of her colleagues wrote back. “We’re at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?”

In 2002, there was no such uncertainty — at least according to one unnamed Bush aide, who explained how American imperial power was so unstoppable its government could remake reality at will:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

To put it simply: America got to decide what was real, because America was the only hegemon. Believe that or not, two decades on, our confidence in the plastic nature of reality has certainly been accelerated. With an unprecedented chunk of the population confined to their homes, and digital screens now the main window on to the world for many, politics and reality increasingly feel connected by only the thinnest of threads.

Something of this distorting effect — this weirding of public life — infuses the strange recent story of Hilaria Baldwin, the celeb-influencer wife of actor Alec Baldwin. Born Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas to all-American parents in Boston, she was revealed recently to have spent the last decade pretending to be Spanish.

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Why did no one say anything? It’s a safe bet that Hilaria’s parents knew she wasn’t really Spanish. It’s also reasonable to assume that Alec has met his in-laws, at which point no doubt he would have learned that they were no more Spanish than Hilaria. Presumably most of her friends knew, too, and a fair number of her enemies. So why did everyone just nod and smile for a decade, while Hilaria pretended she’d forgotten the English word for ‘cucumber’ on cookery programmes?

There are two plausible explanations for this. The first is that the oath of omertà was upheld, even by those who didn’t wish her well, because her circle believed she had the power to inflict negative social consequences on anyone who broke it. The second, and to me more interesting, possibility is that no one wanted to be the one to dunk on the power of dreams.

For belief in this power – whether promoted by Walt Disney or under the scientific-sounding “Law of Attraction” – is held by Americans of all social classes, all the way from White House aides to the working class. Or at least it was in 2002, the year that Bush aide was interviewed, as I discovered when I took a solo post-university trip across the United States by Greyhound bus.

The Greyhound bus routes that lattice the USA are probably as close as that car-centric nation gets to affordable long-distance public transport. Most passengers are simply trying to get cheaply from A to B, but curious or foolhardy tourists can buy an open pass and go road-tripping. It’s best attempted when you’re young enough to go without sleep, showers and personal space. It’s also, by English standards, surreally friendly. Everyone talks to you on a Greyhound bus, whether you like it or not. Jammed into cramped seats, rattling through empty wilderness and humid one-horse towns, I had many such conversations. They left me with the impression that even the most impoverished Americans believed they could create their own reality, through sheer force of conviction.

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Is it true, though? Or is it just another American Dream? Well, while the optimism underscoring this belief is very American, the Hilaria view of reality — perhaps we could call it “Hilarity”? — is not wholly baseless. What you expect to find in the world will, to a degree, colour what you actually find. If you’ve ever hunted madly for your keys while repeatedly looking straight past them because they were somewhere slightly out of the ordinary, you’ll know what I mean.

But there are also limits to Hilarity. I can’t believe my keys back into my handbag if my toddler has in fact buried them in the sandpit. Indeed, the fact that those around Hilaria grew tired of honouring her version of reality, and that someone eventually broke ranks, surely speaks to a wider disenchantment with the power of “positive thinking” that’s taken hold in the years since my Greyhound road trip.

For example, we know now that the confidence expressed in America’s reality-creating power by that Bush aide was misplaced. America’s ability to forge a new liberal, democratic paradise in the bomb craters of Iraq and Afghanistan was not, in fact, limitless. Nor was the absolute power of the Western financial system, later that decade, able to create money out of nowhere simply through financial engineering, without any substantive foundation in making anything.

And so, were I to board a Greyhound bus today, I’m not sure I would find big dreams nearly as evident in what American writer and photographer Chris Arnade calls “back-row America”. Or at least, I suspect I’d find such dreams as battered by subsequent disappointments — just as the spooky, humid and beautiful city of New Orleans was by Hurricane Katrina, three years after I visited. Perhaps that goes some way to explaining why today, for many, faith in the power of dreams has curdled into its bleak mirror-image: belief in the pervasive presence of shadowy forces and malign conspiracy.

The power of this curdled variant of Hilarity made its presence known yesterday via hundreds of protesters in Washington. In Hilarity terms — or in terms of reality-as-symbol — the power of seeing the inner sanctum of that “shining city on the hill” stormed by QAnon characters has shaken America to the core.

Meanwhile, a stubborn rump of those nearer the top of the pile are still hanging on to the old, more stable reality. It is, after all, relatively easy to believe that the world is whatever you want it to be when you have a self-righteous internet filter bubble, as well as the political and financial resources to bankroll your convictions and shield yourself from evidence to the contrary. But if reality in the 21^st century has proven most sharply disappointing to those at the bottom, the cracks in Hilarity are now visible upstream too. Just look at the elites’ repeated shock at “un-progressive” electoral results that were in fact anything but shocking. And with QAnon invading the Capitol, both liberals and conservatives alike are now waking up to the profound displacement of stable narrative that defines 21^st-century American politics.

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Still, if the eruption of Trumpism implied a threat to the grand progressive narrative, Trump’s deposition has been treated by many as a repudiation of that threat – despite not being the anticipated landslide at all. It has also been hailed as a return to American internationalism. After the election, Joe Biden promptly announced that America is “back, ready to lead the world”. That’s all very well, but it raises an important question: to what extent does that story still fit?

The initial signs are ambivalent. According to the prevailing narrative behind Hilarity’s world-as-we-wish-it, the democratic West should be forming a united front in support of freedom and liberal values. But just as Hilaria’s haters were only going to keep schtumm as long as they were afraid of her, those very ideals once promulgated by Pax Americana seem to be on the wane. As far back as 1987, Paul Kennedy argued that the USA could not sustain global hegemony indefinitely while its relative economic power continued to shrink. In this light, with China predicted to overtake the US economically by 2028, should we really be surprised to see the EU thumb their noses at the incoming Biden presidency, by declining a transatlantic alliance to contain China in favour of securing a market for German manufacturing with Beijing?

Yet at the core of Hilarity is the idea that belief can only be transformative if you really believe. Setbacks cannot derail the true believer. The existence of a competitor hegemon with increasingly tangible ideological and geopolitical clout is merely a minor setback, and unlikely to dent the faith of those still committed to America’s vision of global utopia. Witness the reaction of that high priest of progress, Stephen Pinker, to 2020’s war, death, famine, pestilence, snake-infested seafoam, and new Ed Sheeran releases: these events are blips, he insisted, and things are still getting better.

It’s not yet clear, then, whether the implosion of Hilaria’s personal myth-making is an omen indicating a general loss of American faith in the power of dreams, or just an intensified battle over doctrine. The American longing for power to define reality may become even more of a free-for-all. Certainly the emergence of “the QAnon shaman’’as the face of the Capitol invasion suggests how widespread and occult the American weirding of politics is. My bet is that this weirding is only just beginning. And I suspect the increasingly fractious elite debate about such events will continue to interact in unpredictable ways with those realities that stay irreducibly real whatever we want to believe.

For it’s all very well noting that the world has shifted for those who, in part thanks to the pandemic, now experience reality mainly through increasingly skewed and angry social media lenses. But for those whose occupations don’t allow for working from home, or who are facing the brutal pinch of the Covid recession, real versions of reality will not be displaced. Meanwhile, as world powers compete to shape the globe post-pandemic, this contest for hegemony may well take more material forms.

But amid this turbulence, the future belongs not just to the loudest voices. It belongs to whoever is best able to navigate the noise. That is, it belongs to whoever can build both power and a vision of a good society on seeing the world as it really is.

Soon after the arrival of the new millennium, the family ploughed all their savings into a four-bedroom house in a nice neighbourhood in southern California. No deposit was required — banks wanted customers, everyone was buying property and prices were rising — but monthly payments were tight. They hoped to refinance after a year to ease the pressures, as promised by the salespeople, but somehow that never happened since the house was never worth enough for such a deal.

Then came the crash. Prices began to falter in 2006, then plummeted as panic set into property markets. Little did this family know their humble mortgage was the sort of sub-prime loan being passed around by sharks in the financial sector. Banks chopped up such loans and sold them in complex mortgage-backed packages to investors who thought they were buying safe products. Instead, these 100% mortgages, often flogged to low-income citizens, helped spark a financial contagion that is still resonating around the world today.

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“We thought we were upgrading,” said Juan, 40. But the house that his family had bought so proudly for $500,000 went under the hammer at an auction for $225,000, losing them about $150,000 — money they had worked so hard to save in order to clamber onto the lower rungs of the property ladder. “We never knew that prices would collapse and we’d lose all our money. It was very difficult for us all.”

Today, Juan lives in the ‘Siesta’ trailer park in Imperial Beach, barely 10 miles but a world away from his birthplace on the other side of the border. He showed me his mobile home — white with a maroon stripe along the side — which sits among 103 spaces on the tidy five-acre site filled with rows of similar vehicles. One resident has been settled there for four decades while many others have spent years on the site. “I like it here,” said Juan, though he admitted it was cramped. “These parks are one of the last places where you can live in a good community. In my big house I never knew my neighbours, but here we all talk.”

His new home costs $650 a month. This is about one-third of average rental prices in Imperial Beach, where rents are rising fast and at a higher rate than the national average. Little wonder that amid a housing crisis that spans the United States, there are 22 million Americans — an astonishing one in 15 of the population — living in what is politely termed ‘manufactured housing’. Most own their trailers but rent the land beneath them. Some sites look like the dishevelled Hollywood stereotypes, filled with noisy families and tatty trailers, but many are neat and homely.

Trailer parks reflect affordability rather than mobility these days, with most residents earning under $50,000 a year. I visited another one near Los Angeles that looked like the sweetest suburbia, filled with lovingly-tended plants and even white picket fences. Yet as Juan’s story shows, they also reflect the gaping inequalities of the world’s richest nation — along with the continuing impact of a financial crisis that left many working people so embittered against elites, fuelling a sense of dislocation that led to Donald Trump’s election.

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Increasingly, trailer parks reflect something more sinister as well: the rapacious nature of unchecked capitalism that sees the homes of poor people as an asset to be bled, rather than pockets of humanity that deserve protection. Private equity firms, hedge funds and rich speculators are muscling in on the parks, sensing higher returns than on many other property investments. They are buying out traditional ‘mom and pop’ operators — a state of affairs that alarmingly echoes the sub-prime crisis that forced many families from their homes. And it is sparking loud claims of exploitation as low-income tenants complain angrily of rising rents and reduced maintenance.

Many residents have been left terrified. They fear that if rising rents force them to move out, they might end up among the bedraggled armies of homeless people on the streets or, at best, squeezing into the homes of siblings or parents. Inevitably, this is becoming a hot political issue seized upon by progressives. Senator Elizabeth Warren, for instance, visited one site in Iowa where people were fighting a 70% hike in their rents after it was taken over by an investment firm. “They come into parks like this with a vacuum and see how much money they can take out,” said the Democratic presidential candidate.

Last year, the tranquillity of Siesta — which lies less than one mile from the Pacific waves — was shattered by the news that their owner was planning to sell the land for condominiums. “We were given a letter saying they wanted everyone to attend a meeting,” said Juan. “When we got to the meeting there was a lawyer who said the park was being sold and you guys must all leave. He said we had six to 12 months to get our stuff and go. He had no feeling about how this would affect our lives. No feeling for the people in wheelchairs, with families or the elderly people.”

They were offered relocation assistance, including $500 in costs. Yet while it is called a mobile home park, the average age of its trailers is 25 years old and many parks will not take a vehicle older than five years. New ones can cost $100,000 and fresh arrivals often face higher rents. “We were all so scared,” said Tricia Harrelson, 59, who has lived there more than two decades after moving from Boston due to her former husband’s military service. “Some people think everyone living in these parks are stupid, that they’re idiots, because they are lower class citizens. But it’s been like a family here.”

Harrelson — like many of those at the park — is on federal benefits, since she suffers severe health problems sparked by trauma. She faced two armed robberies in quick succession when working as a supervisor at a credit union. She told me her rent had surged $300 in seven years after rising just $50 over the previous 18 years, while also claiming the site had become run down prior to its proposed sale. “We wanted to fight back but didn’t know how to do it,” she said.

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Juan decided to try. He organised a meeting and, to his surprise, 42 other residents turned up. “Everyone felt angry and the same way,” he said. “People were telling me I would be kicked out of the park but I thought I’d nothing to lose since we were going to be thrown out anyway.” They started to enlist support from local politicians, attending city hall meetings to press their case, and made enough noise that shortly before Christmas the owner’s plans for redevelopment were withdrawn.

We’ve won a battle but I do not think the war is over,” said Juan. I was not surprised when he told me later that he wants to see Bernie Sanders win the presidency for he thinks their struggle is symptomatic of important wider issues confronting the United States:

“Rich people are out of sync with the rest of the country. They should see that without the working class, the people in these parks, they would not be able to afford all the good things they possess. These finance firms want to put poor people out on the streets so they can replace them with middle-class properties. But if the rich woke up, they would see that we are not bad people just because we are poor.”

Many other residents on the site share his distaste for predatory capitalism — but some prefer an alternative brand of political populism. “I don’t like big corporations buying land and tearing down trailer parks where people live. I also don’t like what rich people do when they have money,” said Maria Hirneisen, 57, who has lived in Siesta for 22 years, having moved from New Jersey. But she is a fan of Donald Trump. “I like what he is doing. Trump does not care what people think. People wanted something different to the usual politics and he has stirred up a few dust clouds.”

To appreciate the scale of the US housing crisis, consider this finding from a survey last year, quoted in the Financial Times: median-priced homes are too expensive for average wage earners in three-quarters of the country. In Imperial Beach, the median sale price last year was more than $620,000. Meanwhile mobile home sites are often sitting in prime real estate locations; many started as housing for returning troops after the Second World War, and were built on the outskirts of towns and cities before becoming enveloped by urban sprawl over subsequent years. Thousands are situated near the sea, lakes or other desirable attractions.

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Analysts believe the need for more affordable housing is increasing, especially among millennials and pensioners. It is estimated 10,000 Americans retire each day — half of them without savings and with average social security benefits of about $1,300 a month. Yet Mobile Home University, run by one of the biggest investors, advises how to boost profits in “the hottest arena in real estate” by raising rents and cutting back amenities. “With 20 per cent of Americans trying to live on $20,000 or less, the demand for mobile homes has never been higher — and the big winners are the owners of mobile home parks in which these customers reside.”

Frank Rolfe, the body’s founder, boasts that trailer parks have the highest yields in commercial property, as he churns out publicity promoting such investments. “One reason that mobile home parks have long held their value is the simple fact that virtually no city or town in the US will allow new parks to be built,” said one article. “Why? Nobody wants a mobile home park as a neighbour, and their vocal dislike eliminates any chance of political approval. In the entire United States, it is estimated that less than 10 new parks are built each year — below the number torn down for re-development.”

In a couple of states — South Carolina and New Mexico — mobile homes comprise about one in six housing units. The three biggest owners have more than 50,000 sites each, while private equity firms such as Blackstone and Carlyle and sovereign wealth funds have been snapping up sites — to the alarm of activist groups such as Manufactured Housing Action. “We exist to counteract predatory investor schemes,” said Kevin Borden, the executive director. “They usually increase rents and decrease maintenance. These people are making profits of 20 to 22 per cent from some of the poorest people in our country.”

Borden believes trailer parks are vital to national well-being — at a time when gentrification and rising house prices are driving low-income citizens from city centres. “If you look at our country’s housing situation you can see that we’ve not figured out a strategy since the 2008 crisis for people to have decent and affordable homes. Mobile home communities offer something good for all those people getting pushed out of urban areas.”

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One man who shares his concerns is Qui Vuong, 57, who came to the US after the fall of Saigon and today lives in a community largely filled with elderly Vietnamese migrants, beside a Catholic church in Santa Ana. The sleek Mercedes parked by his three-bedroom home indicates a prosperous past. He tells me over coffee how he thrived in finance in Texas before costly heart surgery, followed by a promise to care for his terminally-ill partner, landed him in a Californian mobile home park.

“I had no concept of what a trailer park was because I could always afford homes, especially in Houston where the cost of living is so low,” said Vuong. “There is a stigma associated with them because they are for people who can’t afford houses. But these are not bad people, just people with limited resources or scaling down. Yet you seem to have no rights and no laws to protect you because mobile home owners are seen differently to the rest of society.”

During his time running pension funds he was at one point approached to invest in trailer parks. “They saw it as another source of excess returns to beat the market.” Now he is fighting to protect residents from price-gouging after seeing typical rents at his park rise from $600 to $800 in just four years. “People here are scared,” he said. “There are people on the final edge of the safety net for survival. If they face another $50 in rent, they must turn to their families for help.”

Vuong nurses ambitions to set up a fund to protect rather than exploit such places. “I think I’m in the right place for a reason,” he said. He is highly critical of the predatory owners of trailer parks. “They say it is the market and that it is capitalism but they are too stupid to see how it is hurting their own self-interest since it is simply not sustainable.”

Then this affable man takes a sip of his coffee before adding: “This shows how capitalism has lost its soul.” As I walked around the homes in his community, many with neat little gardens and wheels hidden by fake brick facades, it was hard to argue.