The California governor is all but openly campaigning for the Democratic nomination, with his aggressive press operation and willingness to engage with Right-wing podcasters. Conventional wisdom suggests his bid will flame out. He presides over a state drowning in social and economic woes. California is expensive, its streets are filled with the homeless, and the state’s population is no longer growing.

The knock on Newsom is that he’s a coastal liberal who has never run in an election where he’s had to take Republicans all that seriously. Vice President JD Vance, who seems poised to be the Republican nominee two and a half years from now, is likely enthused about the possibility of facing down Newsom on the debate stage. 

Newsom is slick, too slick, and he oozes California privilege. He was the guy who imposed Covid lockdowns and then went dining at the tony French Laundry restaurant. He is a creature of San Francisco’s Democratic elite, a relentless ladder-climber who owes his early career success to billionaire heir Gordon Getty, a family friend, and to Willie Brown, the Democratic power broker and former mayor who also elevated Kamala Harris..

There is nothing terribly inspirational about Newsom’s backstory. He played the inside game well, got himself elected mayor, then lieutenant governor, then governor. Now, he thrills the Democratic base as he apes Donald Trump on X. (“SEND IN THE ADULTS!!! GRANDPA IS TIRED” Newsom’s press office replied recently to a Trump video.) In a few years, he’ll be left in the dust by some other Democrat, perhaps a more “serious” standard-bearer like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttgieg, Joe Biden’s former transportation secretary and a 2020 contender. 

All of this isn’t wrong, and could come to pass. But there is a certain kind of pundit who underrates Newsom’s appeal and can’t quite comprehend that this California liberal could be poised to seize the Democratic nomination and become the next president of the United States.

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Can Democrats save free speech?

By Ross Barkan

Isn’t Newsom just Hillary Clinton with hair gel and a smarmy grin? Maybe. What he also is, however, is a budding media star, equally comfortable on television and podcasts, and he relishes a political brawl. He has no trouble with Fox News, and he hosted the late Charlie Kirk on his own podcast, which has become strikingly popular. In 2023, he staged a Fox debate with Ron DeSantis, who looked like, for a brief moment, he could be the next Republican nominee. Pundits derided the Newsom-DeSantis debate as a publicity stunt, but it was, for the California governor, a chance to flex real media muscle. 

What became clear was that DeSantis, for all his braying about the “free state” of Florida and California’s ills, could not dominate Newsom. Republicans, until then, had imagined Newsom to be another liberal patsy. They didn’t think he could hit back. One conservative who did notice Newsom’s potential, Matthew J. Peterson, then editor-in-chief of The Blaze, put it best: “he’s comfortable in his own skin like Trump, and doesn’t just want to be there, but is comfortable and assured and loves being there.”

Indeed, Newsom has more in common with Trump than many Democratic or Republican pundits might believe, and this will be a strength for him in 2028, not a weakness. He is savvy at holding the spotlight, identifying and bludgeoning enemies, and adapting to shifting political moods. 

In the old Fox formulation, bullies versus nerds, alphas versus betas, it was increasingly obvious that Newsom, the oily former jock, was a man fit for the quasi-demented and deeply influential arena of cable TV. Unlike DeSantis, who was also an outstanding amateur baseball player — he participated in the Little League World Series and captained his Yale squad — Newsom retained his ex-jock aura, or at least the sensibility of a guy who was comfortable with athletes and celebrities.

He swaggered and slithered like Jerry Maguire. This, too, would be Vance’s problem if he ended up on a debate stage with Newsom. For all Vance’s tough talk, he still sounds like the doughy, overachieving Yale Law grad who is secretly pleased with himself for rustling up a pair of blue jeans in his bedroom closet. Newsom, meanwhile, is a bit like the guy who cut class all the time and bedded the homecoming queen. 

If his Trump resistance is shtick, it’s effective shtick. He has read the national electorate well. He executed on a successful push to get a gerrymandering referendum passed in California, countering the Texan push to add more GOP House seats. A Democratic-base voter is desperate for a politician who will mock and belittle Trump on Trump’s own terms. And even the happy warriors like Zohran Mamdani, who don’t sound like Trump, understand that you’ve got to be able to mix it up with the president and his supporters. Mamdani’s chummy White House visit didn’t hurt him because he didn’t offer Trump any concessions or even smile for photos. 

Newsom has never had much of a fixed ideology — he occupies the Left flank these days, but was a centrist, business-friendly mayor of San Francisco — and he’ll be able to conform himself, come 2028, to whatever mood the voters might feel. This, again, is like Trump — or maybe another famous politician born in 1946, Bill Clinton. Newsom knows conservatives expect little from him. In that way, they are no better than the Democrats, coddled in their bubbles, and they are used to punching at what never punches back. The older Republicans can still remember Sean Hannity’s nightly thrashing of Alan Colmes. In Newsom, they see only the latest woke lib, when they would be better off conceiving of Newsom as a West Coast Clinton: debonair, chameleonic, and cutthroat when needed. Clinton exuded alpha charm. He commanded a press conference room and a TV screen. Newsom isn’t so different.

The other knock against Newsom is electability. If he does beat the field in 2028, including Kamala Harris, how can he possibly triumph in the purple states? Didn’t a Californian just go zero-for-7 in the key 2024 battlegrounds of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia? Newsom could certainly struggle in the rural towns and swing suburbs. It’s not like he has any experience winning these people over.

But don’t be too certain of the electability arguments. Recent history has shown that there’s no way to really tell which kind of candidate can triumph. A black man with a foreign-sounding middle name and less than one term in the Senate wasn’t supposed to win two presidential elections. A fading reality television star who boasted about his sexual conquests and demonized war heroes wasn’t supposed to win two presidential elections. And in New York City, a 34-year-old Muslim socialist wasn’t supposed to beat back (twice) a former three-term governor. American politics is getting stranger all the time. And President Gavin Newsom, if still unlikely, is not at all beyond the realm of possibility. One challenge Newsom will have is convincing an electorate weary of political elites and eager for outsiders that he is one of them — or close enough, anyway. In such an anti-establishment country, can the chosen son of Democratic San Francisco actually get himself elected president? Soon enough, we’ll know.

That might sound far-fetched now, but the writing is already on the wall. Emanuel’s tried-and-true mantra — “Never let a good crisis go to waste” — is back in fashion in liberal circles. The crisis, of course, is Trump: a singular, exhausting force whose re-election has caused moderate Democrats to yearn for the days of “Build Back Never” and the blunt instrument of a potential nominee who both sharp-elbowed and sharp-tongued.

Since November, Democrats have started talking like they’ve been binge-watching Veep on HBO rather than their old favorite: The West Wing. Party operatives and candidates are swearing like sailors in interviews, swaggering on social media (The Democratic National Committee itself even promoted Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s labeling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as “a fucking liar”), and senators are testing out their best “tough-guy” impressions. Likewise, mainstream outlets abound with op-eds insisting that liberals must elect a bully and “learn to punch back.” The stage-managed belligerence is new; the emptiness behind it is not.

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What the AI doomsters get wrong

By Ryan Zickgraf

Enter Emanuel, who smells opportunity and is eager to cast himself in that role — grizzled, pragmatic, and so combative that he was once nicknamed “Rahmbo.” As a bonus, no one else has a resume of salty language in politics like Rahm; he’s been wielding F-bombs in Washington longer than congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh has been alive. (The unfunny fictional Twitter thread turned coffee table book The F—ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel even made cursing his entire personality.)

But the big fucking problem with Rahm trying to become president isn’t his attack dog style, it’s who and what he’s barking at. The pithy catchphrase he’s market-testing on the talk-show circuit these days is that the current batch of Democrats “is weak and woke,” which is a fine diagnosis, but Rahm himself is bad medicine. He’s the Machiavelli of moderation, a veteran of nearly every Democratic Party capitulation of the last few decades, from NAFTA to the Wall Street bailout to a health-care law designed not to offend the insurance industry. “He gets things done,” was the line from Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, in 1996, but what Rahm was building was the ideological cul-de-sac that Democrats have been stuck in ever since: socially liberal, fiscally neoliberal, and emotionally constipated.

When Rahm admitted recently that he was “a product of Bill Clinton,” it was an unintentional self-own. I’m sympathetic to the view, espoused by author Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal, that Clinton was secretly the biggest villain of the neoliberal era of US politics because he spearheaded the Democratic Party’s heel turn from Party of the People to the Party of Technocrats, bought and paid for by Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. While Republicans were busy tut-tutting “Slick Willie” for his scandals and affairs, Clinton was busy enacting their agenda. He accomplished things that neither Ronald Reagan nor George Bush (H. or W. — take your pick) could only dream of: welfare reform, the crime bill, NAFTA, and the deregulation of the financial and communication industries — legislation that hurt his coalition but boosted the party coffers.

Rahm didn’t just ride that wave — he helped engineer it. As the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the mid-2000s, he built the model that defined the party’s soul-sickness for decades. The so-called blue wave of the 2006 midterms was mythologized in the book The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Finally Ended the Republican Revolution. His formula was simple: stoke fear about Republican extremism, then run safe, centrist technocrats (preferably veterans) in swing districts to peel off liberal-leaning GOP voters. Then legislate like you’re trying to please Lindsay Graham and Barney Frank. If you couldn’t beat the neocons, his logic seemed to go, you might as well become them, but with better manners, more bike lanes, and cooler gay bars. As Thomas Frank once put it, “(Rahm) loves one class of citizens and strongly disapproves of another.” Entrepreneurs, good. Labor, bad.

During his tenure as Obama’s chief of staff, Emanuel played the role of enforcer not for bold ideas, but for trimming them down to a size acceptable to Joe Lieberman and the pharmaceutical lobby. He opposed including a public option in the Affordable Care Act from the start, dismissing those demanding comprehensive health care reform as “fucking retarded” and instead backed a deal that locked Americans into private insurance. He urged Obama to abandon ambitious climate legislation, slow-walked financial reform, and urged caution at every major turn — an odd posture for someone known for yelling and sending a dead fish in a box to a pollster. Under Emanuel’s watch, “Hope and Change” got converted into “No Fucking Way.”

When he wasn’t magically shrinking Obama’s agenda, Emanuel was making bank on Wall Street — more than $16 million as an investment banker in a few short years. He also served on the board of directors at Freddie Mac at a time when it misstated its annual revenue, and later, the mortgage giant was blamed for playing a key role in the 2008 financial crisis. Oops.

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Democrats are wasting a populist moment

By Justin H. Vassallo

Then came Chicago. After he was elected mayor in 2011, Emanuel ran the city like a SimCity expansion pack for the financial elite. He closed public schools by the dozen, declared war on teachers’ unions, outsourced public services, and shoveled tax incentives toward developers and corporations. Then came scandals, like the cover-up of a dashcam video of a black 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald, killed by Chicago police. Chicago journalist Ben Joravsky once described Emanuel as Mayor One Percent, who possessed “as much determination, will, and chutzpah as anyone alive,” but that he wastes it all on “wimpy policies that largely preserve the status quo.”

And yet, everyone’s collective memory seems stuck in a Covid brain fog, as if history started sometime in 2016. To desperate Democrats who have an exceedingly thin bench, Emanuel looks like a grownup. To everyone else, he seems like the reason they stopped voting. His brother Ezekiel (no, not the Hollywood agent, the other one, the doctor) once wrote an essay in The Atlantic headlined Why I Hope to Die at 75, arguing that ambition curdles and creativity fades with age and that it’s better to flame out than fade away. By that logic, Rahm’s political career should’ve been dead and buried long ago.

Instead, it’s threatening to return like a nostalgic aughts-era sequel no one asked for; one about as welcome as wearing low-rise jeans with a visible thong to a Senate confirmation hearing.

This week’s special election defeat in Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court race for the Trump-backed candidate, Brad Schimel, is not cause for immediate worry. Democrats have turned out in greater numbers in special elections throughout the Trump era, rendering them poor guides to partisan general elections, and Wisconsin’s results mirror that long-term trend.

Plus, Trump’s job approval rating remains historically high for him at about 48 percent, only half a point lower than in early February. The share of Americans who believe the country is on the right track is also at its highest for decades, save for a brief period in early 2021 after the Covid vaccine became broadly available. Given America’s high level of political polarization and the degree of vitriol regularly spewed at Trump and his team, these figures indicate that Trump has mostly maintained his support and remains politically strong.

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What if Trump played nice with the Democrats?

By Henry Olsen

There is nonetheless a growing trend that suggests this might change. Trump is increasingly pushing a raft of policies that appeal mostly to his already-committed base. Tariffs on allies, annexing Canada, and a slash-and-burn approach to the federal budget: such measures excite MAGA World but raise serious concerns among the moderate middle, whose votes sent Trump back to the Oval Office.

If Trump continues down this road, he runs the risk of doing exactly what each of his predecessors have done for the past 30-plus years. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden: each leader won by ostentatiously appealing to the center, only to tack hard to the Left or Right once safely in office or, in Bush’s case, re-elected. The presidents’ parties always suffered as a result, either relinquishing control of Congress in horrific midterm losses, or failing to keep hold of the White House.

This is Trump’s potentially fatal temptation. If he can resist playing to the partisan base, he could go into the 2026 midterms in position to expand GOP control and dominance. If he succumbs, however, 2026 could be a year that will live in Republican infamy.

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What the AI doomsters get wrong

By Yanis Varoufakis

Trump’s rise and resurrection are largely due to the continued failures of more mainstream politicians. America entered the post-Cold War era on top of the world as the only global superpower. It has yet inexorably declined, losing wars it chose to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its trade policies created the rival power, Communist China, that Washington now fears. Those same policies led to the deindustrialization that fueled the working class’s shift to the Right. Progressive social policy has shattered America’s social consensus, and mass immigration has both pushed Americans even further apart and heightened the economic pressure on the native-born working class.

Those failures, common across the democratic West, have been magnified by a peculiar American failure. Every president since Clinton’s 1992 victory has campaigned as someone who represented the forgotten center of public opinion. Each in power has instead turned their backs on those promises and the voters who placed their trust in them.

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Trump’s fantasyland America

By David Masciotra

The likes of George W. Bush and Barack Obama instead used their political capital to prioritize issues and stances favored by their party bases. Instead of bringing Americans together, these unexplained about-faces pushed them apart and contributed to the steady rise of distrust in institutions and mainstream politicians.

Clinton set the pattern. He campaigned against incumbent President George H.W. Bush as a “new Democrat”, someone who could reform welfare, reduce crime, and stand up to his party’s Left. Clinton took office with large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress as the country endorsed his interpretation of the Reagan legacy.

He instead moved sharply to the Left once inaugurated. His initial budget included a tax on energy that would have punished ordinary Americans. He sought to allow gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military at a time when homosexuality was still largely disfavored. Most important, he tried to create a universal health system that would have dramatically upended care for everyone.

This was not what Americans thought they were voting for when they backed the charismatic young Arkansas governor. They gave him a historically sharp rebuke in the 1994 midterms, returning the GOP to Senate control and giving Republicans a majority in the House for the first time in half a century.

George W. Bush ultimately followed the same course. He campaigned in 2000 as a “uniter, not a divider”, and originally followed on that course. The 9/11 attack shifted his and the country’s focus from domestic to foreign policy, and the seeming victory in the war versus Iraq allowed him to clinch re-election. Republicans held both houses in Congress and started Bush’s second term in their strongest position since 1928.

Bush immediately sought to use this majority for something he had never hinted at: so-called Social Security reform. It had long been a goal of conservatives to move the government-pension program from a uniform entitlement to one based on individual investment, and Bush began his second term trying to make this dream a reality.

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The War on Terror returns home

By Will Lloyd

His problem was that he had no mandate to do this, having never made it a key part of his platform. Congressional Republicans wanted no part of such a poorly planned scheme, and Bush abandoned it without it ever even receiving a congressional hearing.

The damage was done, though. Moderates who thought they were getting one thing got another, one they neither liked nor understood. The deteriorating situation in Iraq also contributed to the public shifting towards Democrats. The GOP lost control of both houses in a disastrous 2006 midterm election.

Barack Obama took office in 2008 with the potential to remake his party’s fortunes. Democrats rode dissatisfaction with Bush and the economic collapse to give the party its largest majorities in the House and Senate since 1978. Democrats began talking about undoing the Reagan years and returning the party to the decades-long dominance they had held before the Gipper upset their apple cart.

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Bill Clinton won't go away

By Kat Rosenfield

Obama instead led his party to a midterm disaster even worse than Clinton’s. Democrats lost 63 seats in the House, the most any party had lost since 1938. Republicans gained six Senate seats and would have picked up more but for some ultra-conservative “Tea Party” nominees who lost otherwise winnable races.

Obama “accomplished” this by making a Leftward shift more dramatic than Clinton’s. Having pledged to unite Red America and Blue America, he pushed for a cap-and-trade policy to fight climate change that would have dramatically hiked energy prices for everyone. Like Clinton, he made revamping health care his priority, pushing through the unpopular ObamaCare reform that extended government subsidy and control over the nation’s massive health sector. Democratic dreams of a new era of big government were buried in the 2010 midterm graveyard.

Joe Biden was simply the latest in this long line of losers. Americans thought they were voting for a return to normalcy after Trump’s tumultuous first term. They instead got proposals for multitrillion-dollar government spending programs, with inflation adding salt to the wound, and a renewed progressive culture war. Trump’s continued unpopularity limited Democratic losses in the midterms, but the party still lost House control and Biden’s own re-election dreams were doomed by his unpopularity.

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Trump and Biden shouldn't fear death

By Terry Eagleton

Trump, like his predecessors, was elected to end this ideological warfare. Control the border, get the economy moving again, protect entitlements, and end the woke war on common sense: these were the primary themes Trump campaigned on and which voters accepted. His path forward should be clear.

He certainly is moving quickly on two of these. Trump has effectively ended illegal border crossings and is moving to deport as many illegal aliens as rapidly as possible. His executive orders to remove federal funding from institutions that promote DEI and permit transgender women born as men to compete in women’s sports remain widely popular.

Yet Trump seems to be making his predecessors’ mistakes at the same time. Polls show Americans do not want to annex Greenland or make Canada the 51^st state, yet Trump keeps talking about it. People are divided on imposing tariffs, but they largely oppose levying them on longtime allies and only clearly favor them when levied on imports from China. Trump nonetheless seems determined to dramatically upend 35 years of globalization without the slightest effort to explain the rationale behind this sweeping change.

Trump’s foreign policy also threatens to upend decades of policy in the face of public opinion. About 60 percent of registered voters, and about half of Trump voters, have a favorable opinion of NATO. Yet his relentless criticism of the Western Alliance has convinced most other NATO members that he would not fulfill America’s treaty obligations for mutual defense if they were attacked.

The same is true with Russia and Ukraine. Seventy-two percent of Trump voters see Russia as an enemy or as unfriendly, and only 5 percent of Trump voters sympathize with Russia in its war with Ukraine. They may want military aid to be reduced or eliminated, but they do not want the plucky country to fall under the Kremlin’s sway, much less be humiliated by Washington. Yet the administration is bent on going further than the public.

The signs also point to further shifts that excite the base and frighten the middle. Many Trump backers are urging him to defy court orders blocking some of his executive orders, but 82 percent of Americans think a president should obey court orders even if he disagrees with them. Republicans may agree with his continued deportation of migrants in defiance of a court order for him to stop, but independents disagree by a 20-plus-point margin.

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Trump’s order to dismantle the Department of Education as much as practicable under law also risks public condemnation. Republicans want him to do that, but independents largely do not. Even a quarter of 2024 Trump voters do not want him to eliminate the department. His tiny margin of victory, and the GOP’s midterm hopes, would dissolve if even a small group of those people switched sides.

It’s easy to understand why Trump is doing this. His most loyal and fervent backers like all of these actions, and Trump likes to reward people who are loyal. The problem is that his majority rests on many people who are not MAGA loyalists or GOP donors.

Especially among nonwhites, that majority includes millions of people who had never voted for him before. They backed him because four years of Biden Leftist incompetence persuaded them that he could solve their problems. Focusing on these new things engenders the same “bait-and-switch” feeling that have led swing voters to become disillusioned for decades.

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By Gerard DeGroot

There’s still plenty of time for Trump to get back on track. Stop talking about annexing Greenland or Canada. Explain why tariffs will cause short-term pain but produce long-term gain so that voters are willing to ride out any downturn. Show that what you want in the world is allies who can pull their own weight, not making America isolated in a world we can no longer dominate.

Trump should especially focus on showing positive results on his key platform planks by next November. Ramping up deportations while reducing the number of people wrongfully expelled will satisfy his base and swing voters. He should also keep culture-war fights to battles that unite rather than divide Americans.

Above all, he should rally Americans around shared ideals. Next year is also the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Trump should launch a big initiative to promote it and give many speeches that explain how and why that document provides the foundation for everything he wants to accomplish. That would wrong-foot his progressive enemies, who would be unable to resist the temptation to take issue with his words and thus make “what is America’s promise” the defining question for the midterm.

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An elegy for the American Dream

By J.D. Vance

Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting Thomas Paine’s famous line in his 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense: “we have it in our power to make the world over again”. That’s a utopian sentiment, but even Reagan knew that couldn’t happen all at once.

Trump can remake America, but he can’t do it by dividing his coalition and continuing a generational pattern of presidents saying one thing and doing another. Slow and steady wins the race. A little more focus and less scattershot razzle-dazzle could break the destructive pattern and cement America’s willingness to break with the past and move toward Trump’s view of American greatness.

I’m talking, of course, about the 1980 election. Though I could mean 2024. For in their Republican triumph and desolate Democratic failure, the contests are remarkably similar. That’s clear wherever you look, from the focus on hostages, variously in Iran or Gaza, to how Trump and Reagan tapped into the concerns of young people and the middle class while Harris, like Carter, relied on exhausted (and exhausting) invective while offering nothing more substantive themselves.

Not, of course, that smart historical dovetail is merely a matter for historians. On the contrary, it offers hints about how the defeated Left-wing of American politics may yet revive. For just as the Democrats absorbed the lessons of 1980, readjusting their message, returning to the White House, and ultimately dominating the political scene until Trump’s first victory in 2016 — so too must their modern successors relearn the practical policies that made their forebears so potent.

That earlier Democratic revival, culminating in the liberal dominance of the Nineties, wasn’t really about any single policy. Rather, to quote former party activist Ted Van Dyke, it was about “being more in tune with the voters’ thinking”. Unlike the miserable Harris campaign, or indeed those waged by Carter, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale, what became the New Democrats focused not on vague appeals to “values” or “joy”, but on winning. With brilliant communicators like Bill Clinton, as well as the early Al Gore or Gary Hart providing youthful energy, they spoke both common sense and empathy, managing to reach New York liberals and hard-nosed Southern bubbas.

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By Leighton Woodhouse

What a contrast with today’s Democratic Party, led by a senile old man, and stalked by progressive mediocrities such as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Living in their own universe, they have little idea of what Main Street thinks, drawing instead on the progressive culture increasingly dominant in classrooms, offices, the media, and indeed the government bureaucracy itself. Their outreach to the masses consisted largely of tapping hyper-partisan celebrities. It’s a message that fell on fallow ground everywhere from suburbs and exurbs to smaller cities — basically anywhere in America that looks set to grow over the coming decades.

Far more even than Obama, in short, people like Clinton understood Americans in ways reminiscent of Truman and Reagan. That, in turn, was reflected in the post-Eighties policy agenda. Turning away from Carter’s missives about national malaise or arguments for green austerity, they instead embraced economic growth, personal responsibility and colourblind racial policies. Rather than back the policies of green lobbies or civil rights activists, they embraced a kind of Fabian liberalism. As a fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute, I witnessed this approach first-hand, as we attacked Democratic Party bromides on issues such as racial quotas, criminal sentencing, trade and education, often to the consternation of traditional party constituencies.

What of Democratic policy in more recent times? Biden’s huge expansion of government did boost some special interests, notably green and race grifters, as well as wealthy stock and property owners. But Bidenomics failed to lift up the bulk of the working and middle class, even as inflation hit hardest among the least affluent. One-in-four Americans fears losing their job over the next year, even as roughly half now think the vaunted “American Dream” of home ownership has become unattainable, particularly in coastal cities.

This divergence, of both policy and personnel, has had stark consequences. By shifting to the centre, Clinton undermined Reaganism while once more becoming competitive in parts of the South and Midwest. These days, though, the Democrats are electoral poison across much of the country. That’s clear enough when you consider the success of their opponents. Trump more than doubled his margin among working-class voters, enjoying a lead over Harris of more than 10%. He also gained among other traditional Democratic voters, including Jews, Asians and even some African Americans. Perhaps 45% of Latinos, arguably the most critical voting bloc in the land, stumped for Trump too. That’s a record for a Republican: in 2012 the GOP candidate managed under 30%.

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America's destiny lies in the New South

By Joel Kotkin

And if that should make grim reading for liberals, surely the most galling thing is that many Democrats don’t even seem willing to face facts. With their base in the professional classes, the federal bureaucracy and the media, the party now operates with almost Stalinist conformity, using influencers to lambast their opponents with a ferocity even the Man of Steel would have appreciated. Party supporters seem out-of-touch too: a recent poll of urban professionals found their views on everything from meat consumption to freedom of speech differs drastically from those of most Americans.

This Manichean mania has led progressives not to rethink but assail. As Van Jones, a long-time Democratic operative has observed, once voters choose wrongly, they’re dismissed as racists and fascists. It goes without saying that this kind of selective scapegoating is not a workable political strategy.

Not that the situation is hopeless. Look backwards to the Eighties and contemporary Democrats will find a clear roadmap for the future. First, they should move away from identity politics. To regain primacy, they’ll need to row back on progressive ideas such as transgenderism, reparations and racial quotas, all backed by no more than 30% of Americans. Second, they must focus on economic growth and opportunity. Unlike Biden, Clinton understood that expanding government for the sake of it is pointless. Rather, he favoured tax policies that would spark growth, and poured billions into law enforcement to address the popular concerns over crime.

Whatever one thinks of them, meanwhile, redistribution of income, universal healthcare and higher taxes on the corporate elite are all popular ideas. Especially given Trump will doubtless oppose these measures, they seem like good ways of peeling off his base.

None of this will be easy to achieve in practice. Nowadays, reformers face an ever more strident progressive base — one whose whole raison d’être is destructive identity politics. MSNBC’s Joy Reid, whose inanity epitomises an entire ideology, is already blaming white women for failing Harris. Activist Democratic women, for their part, blame the vice president’s defeat on misogyny among the multi-racial unwashed.

In the first instance, then, the Democrats must find their Clinton, someone who can bridge the gap between more radical progressives and the big money people who fund the party. Fortunately, there are signs that new leaders are emerging, politicians brave enough to break with the progressives on issues such as immigration and fracking. That includes John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro, both Pennsylvania senators, as well as the New York congressman Ritchie Torres. Together with Andy Beshear in Kentucky, they’re far better harbingers of a revived party than rich boy virtue signallers like Gavin Newson (California) or J.B. Pritzker (Illinois), both of whom have done a masterful job of undermining their own economies.

There’s other good news for the Democrats, with much of the country clearly primed for a return to the centre. Los Angeles, Oakland, St Louis, San Francisco, Buffalo, Seattle — in all these cities, far-Left candidates have been squashed by more moderate alternatives. So too were Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, two members of the “Squad” decisively beaten by more traditional Democrats. A dozen Soros-funded district attorneys, ominously radical in their approach to criminal justice, were similarly turfed out.

No less important, the Democrats must realise that their Republican rivals are far from invulnerable — this is the first time in 20 years that they have won the popular vote. No less than the Left, the Right is plagued by its own lunatic fringe, particularly on issues like book bans, guns, and abortion, which in different ways tend to alienate independent voters. The record of the cacophonic GOP House majority is hardly enviable.

Trump, being Trump, is bound to make things easier for reasonable Democrats. His grave personal faults will make a repeat of Reagan’s “morning in America” unlikely. More to the point, Trump will struggle, as did Biden, with increasing global instability and the country’s bewildering concentration of wealth. Trump, then, may offer bigger profits and lower taxes, but as the heir to fortune and worshipper of mammon, he remains an unlikely leader of a “people’s party” that reflects what most people actually need and aspire to. As their electoral successes vividly prove, the New Democrats understood just that.

Outside Italy, meanwhile, the Romeo who told one biographer “Think of how many women there are out there who would like to go to bed with me, but don’t know it”, and reportedly called Angela Merkel “an unfuckable lard-arse”, is immortalised in Bunga-Bunga, a Covent Garden restaurant serving metre-long pizzas.

It is an achievement, I suppose, to have been the epicentre of a sex scandal so epoch-defining and internationally notorious as to have provided the name for a restaurant that isn’t even in your own country. The term “bunga bunga” was reportedly introduced to the world by Ruby Ruacori, real name Karima El Mahroug. Berlusconi was accused of paying El Mahroug for sex in 2010, when she was just 17; El Mahroug claimed it was a lap-dancing game, in which the winner got to have sex with Berlusconi.

The events mesmerised the press, nationally and internationally. The details were juicy, the settings opulent, the men powerful, and the girls pretty. The tabloids feasted. But could this larger-than-life figure reach such prominence today? Though Peak Bunga was barely more than a decade ago, the stories feel sepia-toned, as though they belong to a different age.

We’ve been through the looking-glass at least twice since then: first, the Great Populist Earthquake of 2016, then Covid, and all their respective derangement syndromes. Along the way, we seemingly abandoned the sinking ship of tolerance and shared values altogether, in a flotilla of quarrelsome social-media lifeboats.

Somewhere in there was #MeToo. There was Epstein. We swapped headlines for clickbait. Politics now comes pre-marinaded in competitive victimhood. An out-of-context video clip can trigger international social media meltdown. And in this dyspeptic climate, there probably is less political bandwidth for uncritically lionising the priapic, piratical, rule-bending alpha-male mafioso type than there was in the Age of Bunga.

Officially at least, modern politics runs on rules, procedures, and meticulous attention to everyone’s feelings. So is his death, as one internet mourner put it, “the end of an era”?

Well. Public mores have, perhaps, shifted somewhat. But have the underlying patterns that shape how sex, money, and power interact shifted too? While we may have declared, officially at least, that we are no longer at home to Mr Toxic Masculinity, it’s far from obvious that men have stopped wanting to be around attractive young women. Nor is there much evidence that male power and status are any less magnetic to women than they have been at any other point in the long history of hypergamy. And nor has the inevitable resulting confluence between high-status men and young, nubile women grown any less asymmetrical in terms of raw power. So whatever we may wish to tell ourselves about how #MeToo changed everything on this front, the reality is: #MeToo changed very little.

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Why Gen Z prefers dogs to babies

By Mary Harrington

It’s true that there is a Berlusconi type: men (they are always men) of prodigious energy and appetite, boundless and infuriating charisma, and a cheerful indifference to the rules. The type, perhaps mercifully for the rest of us, is relatively rare – but Berlusconi is far from unique. Back in 1998, there was Bill Clinton: wildly charismatic, ferociously on the make, awash in rumours of perjury and nepotism — and, famously, lying about sexual doings with intern Monica Lewinsky.

Britain’s foremost contemporary exemplar of the type is the also charismatic and priapic Boris Johnson, who survived his own sex scandal only to leave No. 10 over that of Chris Pincher. In a 2003 Spectator interview with Berlusconi, Johnson betrays the wide-eyed admiration of a senpai for his sensei: marvelling at the energy, hospitality and sheer opulent extra-ness of this “balding, beaming, bouncing multi-billionaire”, whom he describes as “the fizziest old dog you have ever seen”. Game, we might say, recognises game.

In turn, when such men become game themselves, their hunters usually lead with sexual wrong-doing. The accusations didn’t stick to Clinton, and only partially stuck to Johnson. But another of the same type, the epicentre of many post-Bunga political derangement syndromes, is now wrangling his own intensely politicised sex scandal: Donald Trump. In 2018, rumours emerged that Stephanie Clifford, real name Stormy Daniels, had been paid $130,000 to keep quiet about their affair. (There were also rumours of a “pee tape”, of which the less said the better.) The allegations have since cross-pollinated with a flurry of others, all of which add up to a miasmic impression of general dodginess and yet another indictment (or, to Trump supporters, banana-republic-style persecution of a feared political enemy).

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But as these big beasts age, we might be tempted to think their time is past. Berlusconi is on his way to his “fascistic” (according to Vanity Fair) mausoleum. The Orange Man is in the mire. Even Britain’s own pound-shop Alpha, Boris Johnson, has left Parliament. And the times really have changed: in 2018, Monica Lewinsky resurfaced, reframing her previous statements about a “consensual” affair in the #MeToo language of “authority, station, and privilege”.

But it doesn’t follow from this that young, pretty women are any safer today. It hardly seems likely that the corridors of power are any less stuffed with rich, entitled, horny men than they ever were, just because Harvey Weinstein got a punishment beating. Nor does it seem much more likely than before #MeToo that a woman will automatically get redress, should they find themselves in a sticky situation with such a man. Consider, for example, the recent fall from grace of Observer journalist Nick Cohen. Cohen is, to be clear, not a classic Berlusconi type; he was, however, the subject of numerous complaints, over a great many years, from female colleagues about sexually inappropriate behaviour.

Nothing was ever done – until campaigning barrister Jolyon Maugham identified Cohen as an enemy on Maugham’s pet issue of transgender rights, and set out to collate the rumours about Cohen. The paper apologised, following his departure, for ignoring the allegations so long.

The lesson is bleak. If a lower status woman accuses a higher status man of sexual impropriety, few will pay much attention – except that man’s political enemies. And the greater the power differential (as, for example, that of children trafficked to Epstein Island, seeking redress against billionaires and politicos), the more likely a horny plutocrat’s horniness will go unjudged and un-criticised.

Silvio Berlusconi left behind two ex-wives, five children, and a 33-year-old girlfriend. It seems implausible that such a rampantly oversexed man got all the way to his seventies before suddenly developing a taste for “bunga-bunga”. So why did his appetites take so long to cause a scandal? Well, Berlusconi was, by his own lights, someone whose modus operandi turned less on rules and procedures than on webs of friendship, loyalty, power-broking and obligation. He was upfront about this, saying of his convoluted business interests “If I, taking care of everyone’s interests, also take care of my own, you can’t talk about a conflict of interest.”

We can perhaps catch a glimpse of this network of interests, via the relationship between Berlusconi and the half-English, one-time showgirl Nicole Minetti, another central figure in Bunga-gate. After appearing on Berlusconi’s TV show ‘Scorie’ in 2007, Minetti trained as a dental assistant, later helping to repair two of Berlusconi’s teeth after someone threw a marble statuette of Milan cathedral at him in 2009. The following year, Minetti was picked, age 25, as a Lombardy candidate for Berlusconi’s People of Freedom Party, despite having no political experience, and was placed on Lombardy’s regional council a few months later. A couple of years after that, in 2013, Minetti was convicted of procuring minors for sex at Berlusconi’s notorious parties. During the trial, wire-tapped tapes appeared to show Berlusconi promising Minetti a seat in Parliament.

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The most likely explanation of Berlusconi’s evading the Bunga Police for so long, then, is that despite decades of efforts to catch him breaking rules against (among others) drug trafficking, tax fraud, mafia links, bribery, and abuse of office, his carefully-crafted network of interests preferred to keep him in situ. We can only speculate as to what changed circa 2010, to inspire his enemies to turn bunga-bunga against him, but one thing should be clear: the exploitation of a prostituted child was the least of anyone’s concerns.

Some cases don’t even get as far as the one against Berlusconi. Clinton emerged largely untouched from the Lewinsky scandal. And when, in 2019, seven women came forward to accuse Joe Biden of sexually inappropriate behaviour, precisely nothing happened – #MeToo notwithstanding – except that supporters went in to bat for him. We can of course make no inferences about the truth or otherwise of the allegations. But it should be clear enough that “Believe Women” has a great many qualifiers, of which the foremost is “when it’s politically expedient to do so”.

What is the lesson, then, for those women young and beautiful enough to find themselves courted by (or attracted to) charismatic and powerful men? It’s a bleak one: nobody cares if you get hurt. Even those women who avoid being treated as wholly disposable, but build careers and their own power-bases in the shadow of such men, may find themselves pitilessly exposed once inconvenient. Ghislaine Maxwell got 20 years. And while Berlusconi contested every allegation, receiving a final acquittal last February, Nicole Minetti was jailed for five years in 2013. No equivalent efforts were made to appeal her sentence.

And should you find yourself used and discarded by a man with more power than you, the only way you will find redress is in being used again, most likely by another man with more power than you. Only this time it’ll be as a weapon. And #MeToo counts for nothing, in this mix, unless you were groped by a Republican. I wish I had a more upbeat message, but the cold truth is this: if you attract the attention of men with big appetites and bigger bank balances, and you don’t want to be used either as a sex toy or political weapon, heed the medieval proverb. “She who sups with the devil should use a long spoon.”

And yet, only 18 years separate the two men’s births; they are of the same generation. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that their political careers seem inextricably bound.

Both presidents were explicitly defined as the antithesis to a tumultuous predecessor, with Carter as the anti-Nixon and Biden as the anti-Trump. Both were elected into eras of high inflation. Both had low approval ratings. And both pursued a foreign policy of restraint that, according to their critics, only emboldened aggressors. Carter’s administration saw the Soviets invade Afghanistan, following the fall of Saigon under Nixon-Ford. Biden’s saw Russia invade Ukraine, following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban a year before.

For all these parallels, though, there is a crucial difference: the composition of their party. While Biden’s party has all but severed its ties with the white working class, Carter was the last president elected by the coalition that grew out of Roosevelt’s New Deal America. The states of the former Confederacy all voted for Carter, as did the Southern evangelical regions that would later become a mainstay of the Republican party. Carter also appealed to white voters in the northeast by promising not to use federal force to change what he called the “ethnic purity” of Irish-American, Italian-American and other neighbourhoods resistant to racial integration.

Even before Carter’s election, the future of the Democratic Party had been foreshadowed — in George McGovern’s doomed campaign of 1972 and Nixon’s landslide victory that followed. By the Obama years, the McGovern coalition of college-educated white voters and racial minorities was the Democratic mainstream, growing by absorbing many former liberal Republicans concerned by the rise of conservatism and populism within their party. What had been the obsessions of northeastern liberal Republicans in the 2000s — family planning and environmentalism — became the leading issues of a Democratic Party that caters to rich and professional elites.

This was not inevitable. Until 1975, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, a Catholic as well as a liberal, insisted that human life begins at conception. By 1992, however, a brief period in which Democrats were allowed to disagree about the issue ended: at the Democratic convention that nominated Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Pennsylvania Governor, Bob Casey, was denied the right to speak because of his opposition to abortion rights.

Until the Seventies, the environmental movement had been similarly dominated by well-to-do, patrician northeastern voters, whose great cause was wilderness conservation. The New Deal Democrats, by contrast, favoured conservation as well as industrial and infrastructure development. But as wealthy Republicans switched their allegiance, the Democratic position shifted. The party began to call for the removal of more acreage from development and for increasingly draconian laws on what businesses and homeowners can do with their property. Just as its new pro-choice stance drove out many Catholic and evangelical Democrats, so the increasing environmentalism of the party, symbolised by Al Gore’s rise, alienated many former moderate Democrats.

Early in his career, Joe Biden was a New Democrat like Bill Clinton and, to some degree, Jimmy Carter: he was pro-business in economics and culturally moderate. But while Clinton was a socially moderate Southern governor like Carter, the rise of the McGovern coalition continued during his presidency. A 1996 Pew report described the alienation from the Democrats of New Dealers, whom it described as “older, unionist, socially conservative” (and implicitly white): “Clinton’s support is weakest and hostility to him strongest (23% unfavourable) here among all Democratic groups… New Dealers, who often defected to Ronald Reagan, are the Democratic group least satisfied with the quality of the presidential candidates this year. One in three (30%) would prefer a GOP Congress if Clinton is re-elected.”

By the time Obama was elected, this New Deal coalition was finally and fully replaced. Indeed, Trump owed his 2016 primary and presidential victories to his appeal to white working-class voters from traditionally Democratic families, many of them members of union families in the industrial states of the Midwest and mid-Atlantic. Rather than mourn their loss, many Democrats saw the expansion of their vote among college-educated Americans and immigrants and started to believe they could dispense with white working-class votes altogether.

Yet in 2020, fearing a second loss to Trump, Democratic elites rallied behind Biden and pressured the progressives and Sanders, in many ways an old-fashioned New Dealer, to drop out of the race. The other great voting bloc in the present-day Democrats — black Americans — was rallied to vote for Biden in the primaries, winning him the presidential nomination. Biden went on to win the presidency and, in the midterm elections two years later, lose the House of Representatives. The great wave of revulsion against Donald Trump that many Democrats had counted on in 2020 and 2022 turned out to be a trickle.

This didn’t dissuade Biden, though. His administration has been the most Left-wing in US history. While Obama sought to make concessions to moderates and conservatives, Biden’s domestic agenda has mirrored the aims of the billionaire-funded progressive non-profits and public-sector unions that now dominate policymaking in the party. In just one term, he attempted to impose an extreme lockdown agenda, meeting resistance in the courts, and ordered his executive agencies to make race and gender inclusion central to all of their activities, whatever they may be. Meanwhile, the border crisis continues to fester, and his much-touted Inflation Reduction Act appears to have done little to stem inflation, instead handing out cash to renewable energy firms and wealthy owners of electric vehicles.

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America's empire is bankrupt

By John Michael Greer

Why did the Biden administration turn over policymaking to progressives, who make up only a quarter or so of the electorate and half of Democratic voters? One theory is that Biden wanted to forestall a more progressive challenger in the 2024 Democratic presidential primaries. Either way, Biden and his allies are taking no chances with his renomination: the Democrats have made South Carolina, with its large number of black voters who gave Biden the nomination in 2020, the first primary state, replacing Iowa and New Hampshire, whose largely white progressives are to the Left of many black Americans.

Whether this strategy bears fruit remains to be seen, but Biden has advantages that Jimmy Carter lacked. Although Carter responded forcefully to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Republicans portrayed him as weak, and the prolonged American hostage crisis in Iran and the failed mission to rescue the hostages damaged his reputation. To date, however, the mainstreams of both parties have supported Biden’s policies in Ukraine, and few Americans will condemn him for finally ending the war in Afghanistan.

And Biden possesses an ally that Carter did not have — the US media. America’s establishment newspapers and networks were often critical of Carter, and even though most journalists were Democrats, the prestige press attempted to treat Republicans fairly. But during the 2020s, America’s mainstream media organisations were radicalised into becoming more or less explicitly partisan Democratic outlets, even in their news coverage — playing up Republican scandals and downplaying anything harmful to Democrats. Biden has held far fewer press conferences than other presidents, raising questions about the effects of age. Yet the press continues to treat him as a leader whom they must shelter and support, rather than a president to be questioned and investigated.

But perhaps the greatest difference between Biden and Carter is also the President’s greatest strength. While Carter had to fight the genial Reagan for his second term, Biden may be engaged in a rematch with the scowling, histrionic Trump, who is leading among Republican voters. Some polls show Trump slightly ahead of Biden, but polls are not votes, and it is hard to imagine significant numbers of voters who went for Biden in 2020 switching to Trump.

Biden, then, unlike Carter, may succeed in becoming a two-term president. What will that mean for the Democrats? Well, there was something poignant about Biden recently letting slip that Carter had asked him to deliver his eulogy. It seemed entirely fitting. If and when Biden does fulfil Carter’s wish, it won’t just be a eulogy to America’s 39th President, but to a Democratic Party that no longer exists.

Rector was a black prison inmate who had shot a man in a restaurant over a $3 cover charge and then murdered the policeman who came to negotiate his surrender. Rector then tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the head. He survived but was effectively lobotomised. When he was executed, he had no idea why he was tied to a gurney with a lethal needle in his arm — no idea as to his crimes, still less that this was an electoral stunt. It took 20 minutes for them to find a vein to administer the fatal injection. The Prison Chaplain, no bleeding-heart liberal, resigned in disgust. Clinton didn’t need to be there but he knew was good politics. The Democrats had to show they were to be trusted on law and order. And Clinton needed a distraction from the Flowers story.

Clinton was campaigning as a reassuringly Right-of-centre Democrat with an easy southern charm. He was the “explainer-in-chief”. People say he could light up the room with his charisma. And he had the appearance of being disarmingly honest.

Then, 25 years ago, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. And we learned that Clinton could look straight into the camera and tell flat-out lies. “But I wanna say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” When Nixon lied, at least he had the decency to look shifty and sweaty. For Clinton, it was easy, almost as if the truth-telling part of his brain were disconnected from his emotions.

The facts were stark: he was a powerful man who had exploited the affections of a young woman 27 years his junior. Bill was no longer a Democratic Party asset. But it’s the lying, more than the sex scandals, that will be his lasting political legacy. Perhaps no one in such high office has been as good at it, before or since.

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Prince Harry is a Freudian dream

By Giles Fraser

He managed to combine a certain sort of flirtatiousness with emotional vulnerability. His own complex psychological backstory gave him a dangerous insight into the human condition that enabled him to connect. He comes across as your friend: he holds eye contact to create intimacy; he directs his body language towards you.

Clinton’s dark genius was to make these emotional connections with people and then exploit them. Trump lied all the time, but we came to expect that. Trump was emotionally illiterate. No one really believed him. Bill, however, was so persuasive that the public realised they could no longer tell the difference between truth and lies. And that bred a kind of political cynicism that has come to characterise our engagement with the public sphere. This week is the 25th anniversary of the post-truth era, Clinton being its patron saint.

But it’s not just that Clinton made it so much more difficult to distinguish appearance from reality. One other consequence of his lying was that, absent some sense of agreed truth as a common reference point between political opponents, disagreement twisted into mere power struggle, an expression of force. A new kind of bitterness entered the political blood stream. The Left and the Right came not just to differ but to hate each other.

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Bill Clinton won't go away

By Kat Rosenfield

On August 17, 1998, Bill Clinton became the first sitting President to testify before a grand jury investigation. Later that evening, he went on television and admitted that he had had an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky. Although he said his answers about Lewinsky had been “legally accurate”, he threw himself at the mercy of the American people. He did the whole emotional, confessional thing. He said that he had been the object of a political witch hunt, that this was a matter between him and the two people he loved the most, his wife and daughter. He even brought God into it.

Three days later, Clinton ordered a massive cruise missile attack on targets in Afghanistan and Africa, including a pharmaceutical company in Sudan that made medicines to treat malaria and diabetes, but which US intelligence had mistakenly linked with Osama bin Laden. One might call this the Ricky Ray Rector defence. A Los Angeles Times poll taken a few days later showed 84% of respondents believed that this attack would, in turn, lead to a response by terrorists on US soil.

People keep on defending Bill Clinton because they have been overly charmed by him. And too often they assume that doing bad things politically is somehow the preserve only of Right-wing political extremists. Yet here is a man who is both a centrist and a complete wrong’un.

The late Christopher Hitchens was mistaken about many things, but he was right in his contempt for this man and those who supported him: liberals “lost their souls” defending Clinton. They knew he was a liar who had serially exploited women like Lewinsky, but they held their nose and voted for him anyway. That stain on Lewinsky’s blue Gap dress became a stain on the whole of American politics.

Safe. Legal. Rare.

For those whose interest in the American Left only goes back as far as the Obama administration, it’s hard to explain what a triumph this was. Not only did the phrase create a big tent under which even people who felt morally ambivalent about abortion could comfortably gather, it also forced Republicans into insane, reactionary counter-positions. As well as safe and legal abortions, the Democrats were promoting comprehensive sex education and contraceptive access, which would help prevent unwanted pregnancies from happening in the first place — and Republicans, rather than make common cause with their enemies, mostly opted to argue against these things.

And so, for a brief but magical moment, the Democrats could reasonably claim to be the party of fewer abortions and more shagging, while conservatives were left to take the deeply unpopular position that all non-procreative sex was bad, actually.

Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic has observed the remarkable staying power of “safe, legal, and rare”, which “translated into language the inchoate sentiments of millions of Americans so exactly that they had to hear it only once for it to become their firmly held position on abortion”. The message was so effective that Hillary Clinton even resurrected it in 2008 during her first (ultimately unsuccessful) play for the Democratic presidential nomination. Two years after that President Barack Obama explicitly identified the phrase as “the right formulation” when it came to discussing abortion.

And yet, in the past 10 years, “safe, legal and rare” has fallen out of favour, as arguments emerged in the more language-obsessed corners of the Left that the “rare” part was unduly stigmatising. “It posits that having an abortion is a bad decision and one that a pregnant person shouldn’t have to make”, one activist wrote last year, in an essay demanding the phrase be retired.

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It’s hard to overstate the utter self-sabotaging lunacy of this argument, which not only undermined one of the most popular lines of party messaging in decades but is also farcically nonsensical: “safe, legal, and rare” are surely a solid and desirable set of criteria for any medical procedure that is both unpleasant and unplanned, as abortions (but not only abortions) invariably are.  And yet, the argument prevailed: by the time Hillary ran for president in 2016, the word “rare” had been excised from the Democratic party platform.

In its place arose a variety of messages, none nearly as effective, and some deeply strange, even ghoulish. Among the most notable side effects of the argument that abortion need not be rare is an increasingly prevalent notion that perhaps pregnancy should be. In the days following the leak of the draft Supreme Court decision that ultimately overturned Roe v Wade, the very online Left traded horror stories about what it can do to your body. One much-shared Twitter thread from an obstetrician enumerated the risks of pregnancy like a carnival barker marketing a house of horrors: “Hemorrhage from miscarriage or ectopic, sepsis, blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, hyperemesis and intractable vomiting, increased domestic violence, exacerbations of heart disease, lupus and rheumatologic disease, hypertension, seizures, and mental illness, diabetes” — it’s all right here, folks, and that’s before we even get to the torn anal sphincter and urinary incontinence! Step right up, ladies!

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Roe v Wade deserves to fall

By Kat Rosenfield

The pro-choice press has only reinforced the horror, by giving us wall-to-wall coverage of the danger of pregnancy and childbirth. Here’s New York Times columnist Pamela Paul with a gut-twisting account of her emergency C-section, which culminated in “being held down by two doctors while my body parts were gathered and reinserted into my torso”. Here’s Kate Manning in the Washington Post talking about urine leakage, blood-covered bedsheets, “cracked nipples and infected breasts”. Here’s Scientific American warning us that “even a seemingly ‘safe’ pregnancy is not without significant risk”. Of course, the intention is only to emphasise that nobody should be forced to go through this — but you would be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that not only should abortion be available on demand, but that no woman in her right mind would ever carry a pregnancy to term unless she had some sort of death wish.

Gone are the days when the Left took pains to emphasise that it was not pro-abortion, but against unwanted pregnancy; instead, this moderate stance has metastasised into a demonisation of pregnancy in general. Some have framed this as a look-what-you-made-me-do position forced by the anti-choice Right: “If there was ever anything beautiful about pregnancy, the anti-abortion movement has devoured it, and spat up something hateful in its place. Pregnancy, for many, will now end dreams, alter futures, maybe even kill,” writes New York Magazine‘s Sarah Jones.

In a recent essay for The Bulwark, Mona Charen laments that “young women reading these stories may get the impression that pregnancy is a hellscape of pain, disfigurement, and degradation”. (I disagree with this argument not in substance but in scope: these stories are no less terrifying to women in middle age who, in their waning fertility, might have been on the fence about having kids and are now loathe to do so lest they turn into the Elephant Man.) But even if this type of rhetoric doesn’t ultimately put a dent in the birth rate, it seems to reflect a penchant on the Left for the opposite of coalition-building, for busting up the movement one taboo turn of phrase at a time. Goodbye, “rare”. Goodbye, “women”. Goodbye, “choice” — the beating heart of the movement, now categorised as “harmful language” — and goodbye to the allies who favoured these terms, now severed and drifting away from the movement like Inuit elders who have outlived their usefulness, cast onto an ice floe to die.

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By Kat Rosenfield

Most remarkable is that abortion access is, in fact, an issue with direct bearing on the lives of a vast majority of Americans — not only women, but any man in a heterosexual partnership with one — and yet some of the loudest voices on this issue insist on describing it as anything but. Consider the now-notorious tweet in which the ACLU listed all the groups most impacted by abortion bans. “The LGBTQ community” was second; “women” were not listed at all.

Such rhetoric is inevitably adopted in the name of inclusivity, which is funny, given how it not only sparks internecine infighting but also rules out virtually every position that might have had widespread resonance in the way that “safe, legal, and rare” once did. It was especially surreal to see this happen in the month or so following the leaked Dobbs decision, which left little doubt that Roe would fall. Neither the revelation of imminent doom nor the arrival of said doom last week could deter the Left from its determination to eat itself alive. Abortion is now banned, or on the verge of being banned, in nearly half of America’s states — and yet we’re still sniping about white women like it’s 2016.

The inability to organise reflects an adolescent impulse within contemporary feminism, an urge to define oneself primarily through the rejection of the waves that came before us. The “safe, legal, and rare” message that framed abortion as necessary but not necessarily desirable is just another relic of the bad old days of Bill, an era in which liberals not only elevated a tomcatting playboy to the presidency, but rallied behind him amid rape allegations, impeachment, and his prosecution for an affair with a then-23-year-old White House intern. That parts of Clinton’s messaging might still be popular with contemporary voters is irrelevant; everything he touched, everything that coexisted in the same moment as his presidency, is tainted by the nauseous aura of boomer cringe.

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By Hadley Freeman

The problem is that we don’t have anything nearly as good to replace it, at a moment when a mass call to arms could not be more desperately needed. The absurd suggestion that abortion access is best understood as an LGBT issue, rather than a woman’s one, isn’t going to help us match the momentum of the Right in a post-Roe world; neither is the imperative to “Shout your abortion” while painting pregnancy as an undesirable, disfiguring disease. These tactics cause rifts even within a base of committed pro-choice activists; a truly inclusive abortion rights movement would surely look more like the painstakingly moderate — and highly successful — Repeal the 8th campaign in Ireland, which respected more conservative elders (there was a “Grandfathers for Yes” faction) rather than rejecting them.

Without a course correction, the Left will soon back itself into a corner, not unlike the Nineties Republican reactionaries who adopted radically unpopular ideas rather than make common cause with their opponents, only worse. Not only are we at war with the Right, we’re also at war with ourselves, with the memory of what the pro-choice movement used to be. It’s a battle that is poorly conceived and ultimately unwinnable in its refusal to acknowledge the truth: that abortion access is vital and necessary, but abortion itself is not a good thing.

No woman sets out to have an abortion; nobody wants one on its own merits. Like most medical procedures, abortion is a solution to a problem — either an unwanted pregnancy, or a desired pregnancy gone awry. In an ideal world, abortion would not only be rare, but entirely unnecessary. It is because we don’t live in an ideal world, and never will, that the right to choose must be preserved.

Just like the neocons before them, they are bewitched by the prospect of war with an enemy they believe poses a threat to their way of life. The only difference is that this deadly menace doesn’t live in some far-off land, but right at home. They might even live next door.

As The New York Times put it in an editorial last week, “the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends”. And there is only one way to survive this threat: to “mobilise at every level”. The NYT was, of course, referring to the attack on the Capitol last January: “Jan. 6 is not in the past,” we’re warned. “It is every day”.

It is hard to exaggerate the feverish excitement with which many progressives responded to the Capitol riot. While the spectacle of hundreds of Trump supporters smashing their way into one of the sacrosanct sites of American democracy generated widespread condemnation, for many progressives the dominant emotional register was one of apocalyptic disgust — and arousal.

Here, finally, was irrefutable proof that they had been right all along: that Trump’s hateful rhetoric would finally become a hateful reality. Here, finally, was a war that could give their lives meaning. There were now Right-wing insurrectionists among them, and they would need to be fought. It was almost as if, on some deep level, they had wanted the Capitol siege to happen.

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By Edward Luttwak

Every group that spoils for war needs a wound or trauma to mobilise around. For the neocons and the liberal hawks who supported them, it was the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That wound would take a lifetime to heal; but it was also massively generative, filling a spiritual void at the heart of American life at the End of History.

In the half-decade prior to 9/11 one of the biggest political stories in America centred on President Clinton’s marital infidelity with a 22-year-old intern. Was a blowjob really an act that existed outside of the realm of “sexual relations”, as Clinton had sought to claim? And should his receiving them in the Oval Office warrant his resignation? In America, the period leading up to 9/11 was, in other words, one of monumental banality and puerility.

The instant the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 that period came to an abrupt end. America had entered, in Martin Amis’s expression, “the Age of Vanished Normalcy”: idle talk about illicit blowjobs would no longer cut it. This was a time of war, a clash of civilisations. Such was the level of danger that we could no longer wait for threats to gather, but would need to pre-emptively act to stop them from emerging.

It was all very dramatic and clarifying, as Christopher Hitchens acknowledged from the very start: “I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a travelling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated.” Hitchens, who confided that he felt “exhilarated” at the prospect of this confrontation, would soon go on to insist that it was a matter of moral principle for the US to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. He was less rousing and persuasive on whether it was the prudent thing to do, but prudence was never Hitchens’s metier.

The storming of the Capitol was to elite liberals what the destruction of the World Trade Center was to the neocons: a bracing vindication that they had been right all along, and a pretext for engaging in a battle that would give their lives a greater meaning and a chance to prove their virtue. What could be more exhilarating than taking on the historic forces of white supremacy now threatening to destroy the republic? And what could be more virtuous?

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None of this is to deny the vast ideological differences between the neocons and modern progressives, the most salient of which is that the latter would never support an American-led occupation of a Muslim-majority country. Nor is it to make a false moral equivalence between the events of 9/11, where more than 3,000 civilians were murdered in carefully coordinated attacks, and the events of January 6, where the only person who was shot and killed was one of the rioters.

Yet the parallels between these two political tribes are striking. So keen were the neocons to invade Iraq that they had to drastically inflate the threat-level of the Saddam Hussein regime. They did so by arguing that the threat was “existential”: that if Saddam were to remain in power, he would not only continue to amass WMDs, but would likely use them to attack America. It later transpired that this argument was based on unreliable evidence: no major stockpiles of WMD were ever found and Saddam’s relationship with al Qaeda was overblown. But such was the war fever that had gripped the neocons that they were apt to ignore any evidence that contradicted their conviction.

Today’s liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patently doesn’t exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, like comparing the storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.

Note my use of inflate: no one would deny that there is a white power movement in the US, and there is much evidence to suggest that far-Right terrorism in America has increased markedly over the last few years. It is, however, important to maintain a sense of proportion: America is intensely divided right now, but the idea that the country is in the grip of a perpetual far-Right insurgency is catastrophic to a pathological degree.

In his 1989 article The End of History?, Francis Fukuyama declared that the great ideological battles of the 20th century were over and that Western liberal democracy had triumphed. This, he argued, was a good thing. But, concluding his essay, he lamented: “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

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More than two decades later, people in liberal democratic societies such as America enjoy a level of freedom, opportunity and material wealth unmatched anywhere else. And yet, as the response to the Capitol riot shows, they suffer from a deficit of meaning and spiritual fulfilment. This, as Fukuyama observed, fuels a sense of nostalgia for history and all its dramatic entanglements. “Such nostalgia,” he noted, “will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.”

So when The New York Times publishes an editorial on how “every day is Jan. 6 now”, it is hard not to see this as a form of nostalgia for the kind of historical drama and contention that is clearly missing from the lives of the comfortable, Ivy-League educated, New-York based journalists who wrote it and who represent the vanguard of what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology”. Their hysteria, then, says more about themselves than the events of last year.

In his memoir, the Vietnam War veteran Philip Caputo reflects on his motivations for enlisting in the war. Preeminent among them was the desire “to prove something: my courage, my toughness, my manhood, call it whatever you like”. For those Western liberals who secretly wish for an impending civil war at home, the thing they most want to prove is not their courage, and it certainly isn’t their toughness or manhood, something which they would no doubt contemptuously regard as toxically heteronormative. Rather, what they desperately want to prove is their virtue — even if it means engaging in irresponsible fear-mongering and flagrant exaggeration.

I owe my life, no doubt, to an American pilot I’ve never met, who dropped a bomb a couple of years ago on ISIS fighters in the garden of the surrounded farmhouse in rural Deir Ezzor where I and SDF fighters huddled, waiting to be overrun. In these modern wars, the bombs that come hurtling out of the sky, rending the air like a bolt of lightning, land with pinpoint accuracy, transforming the course of a battle in an instant, like the judgment of an angry and invisible god.

Over the years, in battles across northeastern Syria, I watched the US Air Force rain down death on ISIS fighters, and then wandered, hours or days later, through the carnage that ensued: mangled bodies in their dozens, grey with cement dust or black with putrefaction, hurled by the explosion into all manner of strange and inhuman shapes.

In Raqqa five years ago, I embedded with Arab fighters of the SDF as they called in airstrikes against ISIS militants, which would level entire apartment blocks to dislodge one sniper. A year later, I followed local volunteers as they dragged the shrivelled, stinking bodies of airstrike victims from the city’s rubble: ISIS wives or local civilians, identifiable only by the detritus of a life suddenly cut short — passport photos, purses, makeup bags and soft toys. 

The devastation of Raqqa after the battle, its apartment blocks crushed by the pinpoint precision of American military technology, looked hardly less total than that of rebel-held Eastern Aleppo, levelled by the wantonly imprecise barrel bombing of the Syrian regime, whose helicopters hovered unbearably over the city like flies over a dining table, disgorging their bombs at random. Yet even if the effect, in destroyed buildings, seemed much the same, surely the morality of the two approaches was different? 

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By emphasising precision and at least making a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties, surely the American way of bombing is an act morally distinct from the indiscriminate punishment dealt out by the Syrian regime? If the intentions are good, can the results be evil?

It is, in part, to answer this question that the Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn has written the new book Humane, an exploration of how the West’s effort to conduct wars while minimising harm has had the unintended consequence of creating a world of forever war. He takes his cue from a speech Tolstoy puts into the mouth of his character Prince Andrei in War and Peace, in which the Russian aristocrat notes that war should be kept as brutal as possible, otherwise the temptation to keep waging it will become too great. As Moyn notes, “humanitarianism led advocates to compromise in pursuit of humane war and publics to feel good enough about themselves in the bargain to permit it to go on and on”, with the result that “endless war has become part of the way Americans live now”.

Rattling through the twin strands of the initially European effort to impose humanitarian rules on war, and the parallel American effort to abolish war altogether, Moyn assembles the evidence for his thesis: that from the Clinton era onwards, the mantra of Never Again has led the United States into an endless mission to bomb more and more of the earth in pursuit of global harmony. As he observes, “of all the peoples in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason”.

A non-interventionist of a strain once dominant in American politics and only now slowly becoming the hegemonic worldview once again, Moyn is a critic of the process by which the postwar American empire legitimated itself through war for humanitarian ends. After World War Two, as he notes, “self-styled internationalists… insisted that America had to commit to a globalised peace ‘scheme’”, yet “it would only emerge slowly that this option meant committing the country to global war”. 

Victory in World War Two and then in the Cold War both stood for Moyn as roads not taken, as American leaders refused to give up the prospect of global domination. Following the Vietnam War, as American military elites committed themselves to eliminating its indiscriminate bombing and targeted war crimes, the new discipline of International Humanitarian Law fused with the fact of America’s sudden global preeminence to create the logic for liberal interventionism.

As Moyn notes, in the decades following Vietnam, the Western popular memory recentred the Holocaust into the war’s retrospective justification: “Peripheral in moral consciousness before, ‘ethnic cleansing’, culminating in genocide, became the defining evil of war past and present.” Coupled with unchallenged American hegemony, “the new Holocaust memory coincided with the aftermath of decolonisation, and a skepticism along with it that others were up to the challenge of ruling themselves. The result was not a demand for peace but for interventionist justice.” 

With the postwar taboo on initiating wars obscured, America was now morally entitled — encouraged, even — to launch its own wars in contravention of international law, as long as it could be argued that they prevented genocides: yet “no-one asked at the time whether that implied that war itself — especially if it could be purged of its cruelty — was not that bad”. For Moyn as for Realist scholars, the two notionally distinct strands of interventionist thought, “foreign policy neoconservatism and liberal internationalism”, found themselves “closer to each other than their followers liked to admit”.

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From the Clinton era, which “did the most to drive the drift into militarism, no matter the legality of the wars involved”, through to the advice of scholars like John Yoo, who famously provided legal cover for the Bush administration’s use of torture against captives in the War on Terror, Moyn traces the humanitarian and legal steps by which the American empire committed itself to endless, global war. Yet it was the Obama administration which really committed America to constant war, in a process by which the President elected on a peace platform became “a permanent if humane war president”, the architect of a massive expansion of drone strikes — a means to avoid the moral cloud of torture, by instead simply assassinating perceived wrongdoers — and of special forces operations on the ground. 

Moyn’s central thesis is that the well-intentioned humanisation of war functioned “as a spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down”; and that the push to forever war was driven by the liberal interventionist pressures of human rights activists, who demanded “even more humane war than the good guys were willing to offer”. It is a neat argument, but surely an incomplete one.

It is primarily the vast disparity of power, and the almost total absence of risk to American pilots and drone operators that allows these wars to rumble on forever, not the minimising of harm to foreign civilians. It is only if American casualties were higher, and not civilian ones, that we would sooner see an end to America’s wars of choice. The pinpoint accuracy with which a missile can be sent to its chosen target does not mean that, in the fog of war, the target was well chosen in the first place. 

The recent extermination by drone of a blameless family in central Kabul only hit the headlines because it happened in the capital: if it had happened in the countryside, as has happened thousands of times in the past two decades, it is doubtful that anyone would know about it; and fundamentally, even in such a high profile case, few people in America cared much even then.

As for the push Moyn discerns by liberal interventionist commentators to drag American power into distant wars, a more cynical interpretation would be that moral causes only initiate American wars when the potential targets are already American foes. There was no clamour in Washington for a campaign against Saudi Arabia for its bombing of Yemen, for example, or against Bahrain for its lethal suppression of demonstrations, or against Turkey for its scorched earth suppression of armed revolts in the Kurdish east and invasions of northeastern Syria, or against Azerbaijan for its aggression against Armenia and beheading of captives. When the human rights oppressor is a US ally, advocates and journalists either tend not to make the case for intervention, or it is ignored.

Ultimately, for all his focus on the humanitisation of war, it is empire that Moyn is against: if America were militarily incapable of intervening in tangled squabbles at the other end of the world, it would feel no moral compulsion to do so. That compulsion may be the moral justification for empire, but fundamentally it is its product. Where there is no capacity to act, there is no moral compulsion. There will be no American war for the Uighurs, because it is not in America’s power to launch or win one; human rights abuses like Xinjiang are deployed as a diplomatic tool to delegitimise China in the international sphere rather than as a call to arms.

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Civilians will always die in wars, and Moyn does observe that it is better on the whole that fewer die, even if he is against wars in general, and American wars in particular. But did unipolarity foist on America the moral obligation to intervene in distant wars for humanitarian ends? Slightly unsatisfyingly, Moyn evades answering this question, but then it is perhaps an unresolvable one. He observes that the initial humanitarian cause in Libya morphed into “an illegal regime change, with deplorable consequences for that country”. Yet the later intervention against ISIS improved the lives of many Syrian and Iraqi civilians, even if it extinguished the lives of many others. 

But at this point, balancing this difficult central dilemma may already be a historical question. The 2015 Russian intervention in Syria marked the end of the unipolar moment by showing that a rival power, by committing itself to a cause peripheral to the United States’s core concerns, can call the fading superpower’s bluff. And contrary to Moyn’s assertion that we may be entering an era of total US global policing, the rise of China has vastly accelerated the end of unchallenged unipolarity.

A war with China where the US may lose tens of thousands of personnel in the first day is a qualitatively different prospect from vaporising a defenceless presumed enemy at the push of a button, and the Biden administration does not seem in a hurry to enter into it. America’s responsibility to protect was only ever a function of its capacity to do so. Now that capacity appears in doubt, the question is already moot.

We are back to a world of wars of necessity, for naked geopolitical advantage, and not wars of choice, driven by moral compulsion. The results, over the coming decades, may yet answer Moyn’s unanswered question of whether America’s attempted humanisation of war was really so bad after all.

State of Terror, co-written by Clinton with veteran thriller writer Louise Penny, represents a familiar sort of pivot for a politician who’s traded public service (and in this case, pantsuits) for the world of publishing. The story meanders through well-trodden territory — a sordid tale of corrupt bureaucrats, conniving conspiracists and an international terrorist plot to detonate dirty bombs on US soil — and features, as all books of this type do, a plucky heroine who is clearly a fantasy avatar for the author herself.

Blonde, Spanx-wearing, never afraid to get her nicely manicured hands dirty, Clinton’s Ellen Adams is a fiercely competent woman in a world of condescending (if not outright hostile) men; the book’s opening scene finds her arriving late and covered in mud to the President’s State of the Union address, where she sprints shoeless through the halls of the Capitol while her male Chief of Staff politely negs her appearance. (“With all due respect, Madam Secretary, you look like a hobo.”)

Apart from their entertainment factor — and State of Terror, while it won’t win any literary prizes, is a perfectly enjoyable entry into the genre of novels by former politicians — books like this tend to generate interest as a perceived window into the psyche of their authors. Given the opportunity to reimagine themselves in fiction, who do these political icons become? (Bill Clinton has taken his own turn at this in a pair of novels co-authored with James Patterson: his hero, Matthew Keating, is an ex-president and ex-soldier who is still so virile in his post-POTUS life that his hobby is challenging his secret service agents to shirtless canoe races — which, of course, he always wins.)

Clinton does show some restraint here: her protagonist is the Secretary of State to a former political rival, despite what was surely a tempting opportunity to fulfil the author’s thwarted presidential aspirations by putting her fictional avatar in the oval office. But she also doesn’t miss an opportunity to use her heroine as a mouthpiece for dire, hectoring rhetoric about the threat to the nation posed by a certain former president and his supporters. The terrorist plot at the centre of the book is basically a feverish progressive fantasy in which American citizens, including high-ranking military and government officials, are so backwards, so racist and so super mad about gay marriage and immigration that they’ve decided to stage a coup, kill millions of people, and annihilate three American cities with nuclear bombs.

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In a press release accompanying the book, Louise Penny describes how she and Clinton came up with its storyline: “Before we started,” she says, “we talked about her time as Secretary of State. What was her worst nightmare? State of Terror is the answer.” This may be partially true — the possibility of nuclear weapons in terrorist hands surely terrifies anyone whose job is to keep the international peace — but it also elides the fact that State of Terror was clearly written with much more current concerns in mind. It was, after all, during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State that the Benghazi attack by Islamic militants killed four American citizens — and yet we’re supposed to believe that what kept her up at night was fear of an attempted government coup by proto-MAGA chuds?

But this is the real form of wish fulfilment that Hillary Clinton’s pivot to fiction offers. Not an opportunity to recreate herself as a hero on the page, but a chance to occupy a particular role within American culture: that of the erudite elder statesman whose wisdom and experience transcends politics, who has earned a graceful retirement into book-writing or painting or winery-owning or whatever, but who may still have valuable things to say from time to time when it comes to matters of state.

What’s interesting is that this is a role usually reserved for people who’ve held our country’s highest office — and not, crucially, for those who wanted the job but didn’t get it.

And yet, awarding such status to Hillary Clinton is entirely in keeping with her broader role in the aftermath of the 2016 election, when the prevailing opinion in the media was that she’d been cruelly, maybe even illegitimately, robbed of the presidency. #NotMyPresident trended on Twitter. New York magazine reported that a group of “prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were urging Clinton to challenge the election results, having found “persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” Millennial icon Lena Dunham described sobbing with denial after Clinton’s loss: “It’s her job.” Even nine months after Donald Trump was sworn into office, many members of the media — and even Clinton herself — were still openly suggesting that he might have colluded with Russia to steal the election.

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Amid all this, something peculiar happened: in rejecting Donald Trump as our leader, Americans bestowed the status and dignity of the office on his opponent. Hillary Clinton wasn’t, and never will be, our president… but look, she tried. Isn’t that good enough?

And with the publication of this book, it’s almost as if the last four years never happened, or at least happened differently. It’s not hard to imagine an alternate timeline in which Trump never won the election, in which Clinton’s political trajectory continued as intended, and in which her successful tenure as President was followed by a graceful transition into a new life as a writer of political thrillers. For those who wanted to see Clinton succeed on her chosen path, it’s enough to make the past four years seem like nothing more than a bad dream.

What is hard to imagine is that this would happen for anyone but Hillary Clinton. It’s particularly hard to imagine that a man would be granted a similar position of status and influence as a sort of consolation prize for losing an election. In a world where political power has always been held and aspired to largely by men, only women get credit for, nevertheless, persisting.

Hopefully, it won’t always be thus. But for now, in the absence of any actual woman presidents to occupy this role, all we can do is make an icon of the one who almost got there. Five years later, we’re #StillWithHer: the would-be shatterer of glass ceilings, the might-have-been Madam President. And while Hillary Clinton never did manage to succeed her husband in the country’s highest office, in the aftermath of her phantom presidency, she does in fact exceed him: her book, unlike his, is actually pretty good.

These lines are from Impeachment: American Crime Story, a 10-part dramatisation of the tragedy of Monica Lewinsky, which airs in the UK this week, because our appetite for gossip does not dim with the age of it. Lewinsky was 22 when she began her affair with Bill Clinton, who was 49.  When the affair was exposed, and he was impeached — then acquitted — his personal approval ratings rose, which should be insane, but isn’t. American voters like tales of sin and redemption if the protagonist is male.

Lewinsky, though, was ruined as Christine Keeler was ruined. The man survives; the woman does not. In Impeachment, when the FBI arrest her for perjury — for saying she did not have a relationship with Clinton — she says: “I will never have children. Because no one will marry me.”  It is an accurate prophecy so far.

Monica Lewinsky need not be shamed, but we should. I am the same age as her, and all I remember is the dirty dress and the oral sex and the cigar, none of which I wish to know about, or should know. A woman giving pleasure to a man she is infatuated with is not something that disgusts me, though we were asked to call it that: why?

Monica’s sufferings after her friend Linda Tripp, assuming the dimensions of a witch from a fairy tale, recorded their conversations and made them public, were without end. She was punished, as sexualised women are always punished; drabs are punished in other ways.  Lewinsky was reduced to a series of transient acts which we are supposed to believe define her. Like Christine Keeler, she became “a dirty joke”.

The #MeToo movement invites us to examine our misogyny towards Lewinsky. She has gained some autonomy at last. She co-produced the documentary 15 Minutes of Shame about the dehumanising intent of the internet, in which she points out that she was the first woman to be destroyed by it, though many others follow her.  (The affair was an early Matt Drudge scoop. Many people made money from her.) She is an executive producer of Impeachment, so it is her story, a one-sided collection of truths.

She was not sexually harassed by Bill Clinton, but she was manipulated. It was a consensual affair, and she has always said so, but she was peculiarly vulnerable, which is surely why he chose her. It was an affair she did not want to end; an affair that he ended, though he did not seem able to let her, entirely, go. They had a cruel and tender dance of novelty gifts and meetings and telephone calls. Clinton’s secretary, a decent women tasked with managing Lewinsky’s tears, had pity for them both. Clinton once chided Lewinsky, saying all he thought about, night and day, was her search for a job after she was exiled from the White House to the Pentagon but wanted to return. Folly is neither a crime, nor a story and Electra is both adult and child – who chooses to lie down? The affair brought her, by her own testimony, anguish and joy. She defended him for years but now she thinks he abused his position: that is, she wishes he had saved her from herself. He didn’t.

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If Linda Tripp had not taped their conversations, Monica Lewinsky would have been allowed to become herself. Instead, as David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker, she became the Mona Lewinsky, whose eyes are not windows but mirrors. If you think Bill Clinton used her, look at the world. She was taken hostage to be an archetype because archetypes are obliging, particularly this one: the ruined innocent.

There are three villains in this story, beyond Tripp and Clinton, twin antagonists feasting on youth and folly. They are the media, the political class, and the public.

The media reporting was disgraceful, beyond the tabloids who bought stories from her lovers that told of sexual fetishes and stalking. (Lies, all.) One married lover said she had aborted his child. They met when he was her teacher, though that was not dwelt upon by the newspaper who bought his story. Liberal feminist broadsheet columnists called her stupid and mocked her appearance. One, seeing her in a restaurant, noted and published what she ate, seemingly ignorant of — or just morally oblivious to — Lewinsky’s obvious eating disorder. All this, the public ate themselves.

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There was a genuine hater of women too, who gave the media everything:  Kenneth Starr. He was the lawyer who investigated Clinton after the Whitewater scandal, and when he could not adequately punish Clinton, he punished Lewinsky. Starr traduced, bullied and dehumanised her, eventually offering her immunity for her secrets, but I sense, in his dealings, both the self-hatred and the lust she incited in Clinton, and America more generally. Starr tricked her into perjuring herself. He threatened her family; he refused to let her friends defend her, which is why her memory is a cigar, a sexual act and a dirty dress. He is Judge Danforth in The Crucible though he does not know it. When I read that, in 2016, he resigned from the presidency of a university that failed to investigate sexual assaults against female students, it read like his final act of barbaric misogyny.

The misogyny has not waned; the reach of #MeToo, despite its noise, is small so far. Bill Clinton was not harmed by the affair, but his wife was and that is the epilogue to this tale. She had to answer for him when she ran for the presidency in 2016: was her husband’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky an abuse of power? She was, Hillary said, an adult, and it became part of the miasma of loathing that engulfed her. America, in the end, would rather have a pussy-grabber than a bad feminist whose husband exploited a young woman Hillary couldn’t bring herself, in this instance, to defend. Bill Clinton got away with it, and so Donald Trump, but Hillary didn’t. Twenty years on, and another woman lost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These books are a sort of ultra-niche entry into the “own voices” category of fiction: written by an author (in this case, a President) who shares key identity characteristics with his characters (also Presidents.) In fact, the president in Clinton’s new book, Matthew Keating, becomes an ex-president himself just 60 pages in, after his power-hungry VP, Pamela Barnes, leverages the fallout from a botched kill operation in Afghanistan to defeat Keating in the Democratic primary.

Keating is understandably demoralised by this experience; on the eve of Barnes’ inauguration, we find him standing morosely on a snowy tarmac, lamenting his one-term presidency while his wife attempts to comfort him: “Matt, you could have done so much more if the entire system hadn’t been crippled long before you entered the Oval Office,” she says. “From Twitter mobs to focus groups, nothing can get done anymore.”

Ah, Twitter: a destructive force capable of crippling democracy itself! But when the narrative jumps ahead by two years, Keating remains at loose ends: procrastinating on his memoirs, and filling the hours by challenging his long-suffering security agent to canoe-racing competitions. (In what is perhaps a bit of wish-fulfilment on the part of the book’s author, Keating is the repeated winner of these races. He is also, he makes sure to tell us, not wearing a shirt.)

Needless to say, these books are not great works of literature. The President’s Daughter is in many cases profoundly silly. Barnes, in particular, is a Machiavellian caricature whose nightly routine involves sipping Scotch like a James Bond villain while her wormy husband massages lotion into her cracked and aching feet — “a constant irritant since she stood up for herself and others and entered politics years back.” It is representative of the overall writing quality that one cannot tell if this is simply a clunky accident of sentence construction, or if we are meant to believe that Barnes’ feet literally hurt from figuratively standing up.

But choppy writing and crappy character development aside, Bill Clinton’s little renaissance as a co-writer of pulpy political thrillers is fascinating for what it reveals about the unique conundrum faced by the men who used to be President — and, per American tradition, retain the title for life — but are now, alas, just men.

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Will Democrats mask America forever?

By Kat Rosenfield

There’s a certain expectation, or at least a desire, that American presidents step back from public life after they leave office. George Washington set this bar when he retired to his farm in Mount Vernon in 1797, expressing “a determination not to intermeddle in any public matter” for the rest of his life. It’s an example that has proved inspirational: when Barack Obama left office, he too referenced the “wise American tradition of ex-presidents gracefully exiting the political stage and making room for new voices.”

Obviously, this tradition is not being observed in our present moment. America’s most recent ex-president not only eschewed the graceful exit, but is reportedly expecting to be declared the real winner and reinstalled in office any day now.

But it’s also never really been a tradition, or at least not a universally popular one. For every George Washington, there’s a John Quincy Adams, who not only refused to retire from public life but ran for Congress and served nine terms in the House of Representatives (a politician to the end, he collapsed on the House floor during a heated debate over the Mexican-American War and died two days later.) William Taft advised his successor on foreign policy and eventually lobbied his way into a supreme court appointment. Herbert Hoover left office only to spend the rest of his life bitching furiously about Franklin Roosevelt to anyone who would listen.

Some of this behaviour may stem from a lack of examples to follow. Hoover, for instance, was the sole living ex-president for a full twenty years after he left office in 1933, and perhaps felt a special obligation (or at least no particular compunction) when it came to being a thorn in the side of his successors. But in recent decades, the field of former presidents has become much more crowded, with up to half a dozen of them milling around at any given time.

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And while it was once possible to imagine these men as toothless entities, politically neutered and doddering away at some pet humanitarian project or hobby for their remaining years, being a public figure is a different thing in 2021 than it was a few decades ago. In the age of the influencer, anyone who’s ever occupied the public stage of the American presidency is granted a degree of permanent cultural power that can’t be simply shrugged off. Social media makes it much easier for ordinary people to become famous; it also makes it much harder for a prominent person to step back, to disappear. Even Obama, who has more or less kept his promise to stay out of politics after his presidency, is still wielding influence in the form of a massive Netflix deal that has expanded to include podcasts.

It’s no surprise, then, given how difficult it is for presidents to fade away, that our political parties’ relationship with their one-time leadership has gotten complicated. The past ten years have seen the emergence of an especially strange alchemy, whereby former presidents lose their own party support while gaining it across the aisle.

George W. Bush, for instance, was reviled by the left when he was still in office: we called him the “worst president ever”, we were immensely relieved when his second term came to an end, and we were delighted when he kept a relatively low profile in the years that followed. But then, in 2016, Bush was suddenly back on our radar — when he reportedly walked away from Trump’s inauguration speech saying, “That was some weird shit.”

It was the start of a transformation: the so-called worst president ever suddenly seemed more like a benign uncle, one with a cute painting hobby and a bleeding heart for immigrants. The GOP rejected Bush as a traitor to the cause, but on the Left? Some hated to see it, but an undeniable rehabilitation was occurring in the form of internet memes, political nostalgia, and even praise from his Democratic successor.

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Meanwhile, a version of this same phenomenon can be seen playing out in the opposite direction with Barack Obama, who has lately riled the radical Left (and delighted the folks at Fox News) by coming out against the excesses of progressive orthodoxy. “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly,” he said, addressing an audience of young people in 2019 — and then, just days ago, reiterated his concerns in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. But while these comments play well among Right-wingers, who commend Obama’s reasonableness, they irk many of his former supporters. In one representative article, a writer bemoaned the former president for “yet another needless prescription of acquiescence to a bloc of Americans on the wrong side of history.”

Which brings us to Bill Clinton and his complicated legacy. Even if he’d wanted to, this is one ex-president who couldn’t just disappear into the ether once his White House tenure was up. He’d had his turn, but now it was hers — and as a former president-turned-political spouse, Bill was obligated to stand dutifully by Hillary’s side while she climbed the ladder of power, up to and including a quest to hold the same office he’d vacated sixteen years previous.

It was hard to fully appreciate the cascading series of absurdities that surrounded Bill Clinton’s new role in public life: that the President who’d been impeached over a sex scandal was now expected to play, of all things, a devoted and supportive husband. That his presence was required on Hillary’s campaign trail because, despite everything, people still liked him better than her. That his wife somehow ended up running against the only guy in the world whose vulgar and boorish behaviour could make Bill — the alleged rapist, the intern defiler — look positively genteel by comparison. That a mere fifteen months before #MeToo became a decade-defining movement and media obsession, the biggest Bill Clinton story of the year was that he had frolicked with balloons at the 2016 Democratic National Convention like an adorable, demented child. (The second biggest was Trump’s press conference just before the October 9, 2016 presidential debate, featuring three women who’d accused Clinton of sexual assault.)

Could this have been a new way forward for a former American president? Might Bill Clinton have enjoyed a reputational renaissance as First Gentleman to Hillary’s Commander-in-Chief, at least until the #MeToo movement came along to make things awkward? It’s possible, but since Hillary lost that race, we’ll never know — and we’d also rather not talk about it.

In a party that aims to position itself as the safest space for women, to make no apologies for abuse or assault, the lingering presence of a confirmed-pervert-maybe-worse is a terrible liability. Sure, we were willing to pretend we’d forgotten about all that, back when Bill Clinton was the grimy ribbon wrapped around a package marked “important” and “historic,” a package that contained the first female U.S. President. But now, we’d rather he just went away.

And while co-writing pulpy thrillers with James Patterson isn’t quite retiring to a Mount Vernon farm, it does give the man a way to occupy himself, and to garner attention on a different, non-political stage. A Clinton who is ensconced in a fictional world full of kidnappings, terror plots, and shirtless canoe races is a Clinton who won’t get in the way of Democratic policy-making or interrupt the long march toward progress.

Unless, of course, “The President’s Daughter” turns out to be Chelsea’s 2024 campaign slogan.

A presidency that has reliably done what sweet-smelling people in big American cities believed could not be done, is about to do it again. Trump is going to go out with a pardon bang. There won’t be enough room in heaven for all the people he’s going to forgive.

First, as he has already demonstrated with the pardoning of Michael Flynn, his dishonest former national security adviser: when his people need help they are going to get it. CNN reported recently that “hundreds of his allies — including some of his closest business associates and many high-profile criminals — are ramping up their efforts to squeeze out the final ounces of his presidential power”.

There is, apparently, a White House spreadsheet keeping track of requests. The President is energised and engaged in this enterprise. He has told advisors not to share any information with Biden’s team that could be used against him in future.

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Does this matter? Not much. After all, previous presidents have behaved in a manner that Donald Trump would find hard to match. President Andrew Johnson pardoned, in 1868, all soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. In the 70s, Peter Yarrow of the folk rock band Peter Paul and Mary had been convicted of indecent behaviour with a girl of 14. Jimmy Carter pardoned him.

Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger who had been in prison for selling cocaine. Roger repaid Bill rather poorly: less than a month later, he was arrested for driving drunk and disturbing the peace.

No, the problem here is not the badly behaved outsiders. It’s the administration folk. The convention is that they are not treated leniently by the outgoing president, because of the risk that the pardons pervert the entire system of law. Someone working for the president could act criminally in pursuit of the White House agenda so long as the president approved.

An unlawful president could encourage or force his people to commit crimes with the firm promise of pardon. As one commentator put it: “That creates a system of rule by decree. Laws would be completely at the discretion of the president — a recipe for autocracy.”

There is an example of this under Trump: he is alleged to have told Department of Homeland Security officials to shut down the Mexican border entirely to migrants. If they got in legal trouble, he would pardon them. He denies it and so do they; but the risks are obvious.

Even more obvious is the risk that the President takes a truly nuclear option and pardons himself.

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For prosecutors, The Donald is a target-rich environment. Huge! So many irons in so many fires! So much money! So little propriety! “If he is on-site for your big day, he will likely stop in & congratulate the happy couple.” With those words the Bedminster Golf Club owned by President Trump tried in 2017 to drum up wedding business. There is no word on whether the ploy worked. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine that it did not.

But either way, was it ok? This is a business owned by the President, using his public role to benefit himself financially.

Or what about the visit of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to New York in 2018, during which his entourage stayed at the Trump hotel in Manhattan? They spent enough to put the property, which had been loss making, into the black for the financial quarter of the visit. Perhaps there was nowhere else to stay. But what about the 67 trademarks that have been granted to the Trump Organization from foreign governments during his presidency? China alone has granted 46 of them — more than any other country.

Or the scrapping of a bipartisan plan to relocate the FBI out of its prime central Washington location to the suburbs? The Bureau currently lives blocks away from the President’s D.C. hotel; vacating the building might have allowed a competitor hotel to move in. Hotel developers had bid on the site. President Trump was personally involved in a meeting about the building location just weeks before the announcement that it wouldn’t be relocated.

In September this year a non-profit group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington set out these and other conflicts of interest and called them corruption. They put a number on it: 3403 such breaches of conventional norms during the presidency up to that point.

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And of course, we have not considered his taxes (or lack of them) or the pay-off allegedly made to a porn star before the 2016 election that, if it had been made in pursuit of winning that election, was an expense he ought to have reported.

By the way, the tax liability is hugely important and quite simple. Mr Trump appears to have claimed in the past that certain properties he owned were far more valuable when using them as collateral for loans than when valuing them for tax purposes. He has firmly denied any wrongdoing of any kind, but the way he ran his businesses creates a suspicion of fraud on a scale that would be seriously criminal if it were true.

Here we get to the guts of the pardon issue. The only pardon that really matters is the pardon Mr Trump issues to himself and his immediate family. Nobody knows if this is legal. Nobody knows if it’s possible. But plenty think he might try it.

And if he does? Yes, there are all manner of precedents that risk being set. A nation that simply ignores — or allows to be ignored — the suggestion of huge abuse of power by its commander-in-chief does not exactly radiate civic health. This is plainly in a different league to Bill’s let-off for Roger Clinton.

But there again, perhaps it would allow something useful to happen. Perhaps a pardon would triage the whole case against Mr Trump. People could get over the Bedminster Golf Course Wedding Offer — and focus instead on the things that could not be pardoned.

Because state crimes (not being the bailiwick of the Federal government) cannot be pardoned by any president, and the tax fraud case, if it were ever brought, would come in New York State. Other states could follow suit. Mr Trump (again I stress he denies all wrongdoing) would be in deep legal trouble — without all the fuss about the Saudis paying money to his hotels getting in the way. His self-pardon would do no more than clear the barnacles off the boat.

His advisers may feel that complexity is his friend as it has been during his whole business life. He will be chased by all manner of worthy seekers after justice. But will he ever be caught? I wouldn’t bet on it.

The first is Sky’s four-part documentary, Hillary, on her life and 2016 run for the presidency. It is a sad affair, with villainous Hillary sitting in a chair, a victim of everyone, especially herself. She is over-dyed and over-tidied, like a woman trying not to make Donald Trump throw up, though she doesn’t know why. She has been shouted at so long she is shriven.

Does camera-ready mean sex-ready? The way American women dress for television cameras is heavy with self-disgust and shame. Why isn’t she wild-haired and in rags, like the brittle intellectual she is? Here I impose my own narrative on how Hillary should look but this story is full of women who internalise their own misogyny and talk about not trusting Hillary Clinton because they don’t trust themselves.

“I’ll try not to move so much,” is her first apologetic line to camera. She is angry too – that an imbecile beat her in a competitive exam without answering any of the questions; without actually entering the examination hall. She is shouting at the interviewer, but I doubt she is aware of it: “People feel, ‘that you are not authentic’. What is this about? When people say I’m not authentic. I’m sorry if I’m not brilliantly charismatic on TV,” – she isn’t sorry, and why should she be? — “But I’m the same person I’ve always been.” She isn’t. How could she be? What woman is the same at 72 as at 22? Why must a woman apologise for seeking power?

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She knows the answer. The young Hillary is doughty; and needs must. Girls, she says, “didn’t want to get better grades than their boyfriends”. She ran for the presidency of the student council, lost to a man, and did all the work anyway, because he asked her, and “because I was interested”. I wondered if her marriage was no different.

She describes the entrance exam for Yale law school. She sat down and, “These guys started harassing us. ‘What are you doing here? You don’t belong here. You can’t go to law school’. Or my favourite: ‘If you get into law school and take my place and I get sent to Vietnam and die it’s your fault’.” He thinks she is a witch: a witch with a pen. If she succeeds, he will die.

“In those days,” she says, “you got no points for being emotional. You get no points for trying to fight back or defend yourself. When you train yourself like that and then you fast forward into an age where everybody wants to see what your emotions are and how you respond….” She trails off into — “it’s really a different environment”.

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By Tanya Gold

She was the first female lawyer at her firm: “When I was going to court as a young lawyer it was a spectacle. These good old boys would say, ‘oh gosh’. It was like the talking dog. ‘She can not only stand on her hind legs she can clap her front paws’.”

A judge said to her: “Miss Rodham you just look so pretty, stand up there and show us how pretty you look today, just turn around.” The judge sounds like Donald Trump; quite a lot of people in this story sound like Donald Trump, because he is on television, which seems to be the American dictionary. But the child who had screamed at her Republican father, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry a Democrat!” had already gone.

Someone shouted, “Hillary, iron my shirt!” to her at a rally; did he speak for All Men?  “If there is anyone left in the auditorium who wants to learn how to iron his own shirt, I’ll talk about that,” she said. He did know how to iron his own shirt. He just didn’t want to and, as a man, he felt a future Secretary of State should do it for him, if she is female. Men are allowed this kind of entitlement is the moral of the story: women are not. We must be likeable, like kittens. We must save men by ruining ourselves.

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By Tanya Gold

She is still intensely female: she blames herself. “I was too quick to be defensive,” she says, “I didn’t play the game well enough”. I would say the game was unplayable; and that she cannot bear that she lost makes me love her.

The second piece of art is a long dream sequence, or a novel: The West Wing with less shouting, and fewer men. It is Rodham: What if Hillary Hadn’t Married Bill? by Curtis Sittenfeld. It is Hillary’s imagined memoir and the reading of it is an urge for possession. Pageant queens are divided into constituent body parts. Female politicians are divided into constituent character defects and foul passions.

Here, without flourish, in the clear, unworldly style of a second-wave feminist don — the archetype Hillary most resembles, a woman whose dark secret is a passion for paperwork — Sittenfeld imagines a Hillary Rodham who never became Hillary Clinton.

“I was,” her Hillary writes, “a hardworking and not beautiful middle-class Midwestern girl with a mean father. I had never believed the world existed for my enjoyment”. This Hillary is endearing: an innocent. Her idea of flirting is to give a man a Reinhold Niebuhr biography.

Bill Clinton, a charismatic with a Don Juan complex, is vain enough to seek a clever mate; he courts her. But in fiction, he is self-aware. He knows he will ruin any woman: the Don Juan is not a lover but a thief. He tells Hillary, “the thing that’s wrong with me is incurable”. I have never heard selfishness framed this like before: as a disability. Is that how he won two elections?

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Fictional Hillary leaves Fictional Bill, who is corrupted by the absence of her love. They become political rivals, and Hillary’s only moral error, quickly learned from, is a failure to embrace intersectionality as quickly as she should.

Rodham is amazingly plausible until the end. It is a novel about a woman who assumes a mask because she knows she will not survive without it; and then she is hated for the mask she is forced to wear. This dynamic is familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the witch trials: if you drown, you are innocent. If you do not drown, you are guilty and can, for variety, be burnt.  She knows it is a lie for they will hate her anyway. It is also a novel about media stupidity – I cringe at the journalists seeking drama before truth – and the electorate’s decadent confusion: does it seek a competent administrator or a narrative to appal them?

Fictional Hillary is not saddled with Bill’s legacy, and she does not benefit from it: “I was not responsible for his behaviour, not even by extension. This absolution was my reward for losing him.” So, the essential conundrum of the real Hillary Rodham Clinton — did she betray feminism with her marriage to become Trump’s “crooked” witch? — is removed. I am glad, because when you bluntly ask the question, you realise how silly it is. This is a better question: Is Hillary qualified to be president, no matter who she is married to? A better question still is: can you define someone by their marriage and call yourself a feminist?

Hillary Rodham Clinton — the synthesis, both married and talented — is a paradigm, which is why it is essential to look beyond her to all women, which is, you will realise if you read about her work, all she ever wanted. What a shame it is that it couldn’t be done; but no surprise.

No one ever actually says the words “Epstein didn’t kill himself” in the new documentary miniseries, Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, which has been on the Netflix most-watched lists in the US and UK for several weeks. But we hear from the celebrity pathologist Michael Baden, who argues that fractures in Epstein’s neck suggested murder rather than suicide, and from victims including Virginia Robert Giuffre, who describes the process by which Epstein’s powerful friends became powerful enemies following his downfall. The viewer is relied upon to reach her own conclusions.

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I was surprised by Filthy Rich, but not by these provocative claims. Surely everyone knows by now that famous people were tangled up in the Epstein affair — Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Prince Andrew, along with many more — and that wealth and power were at the heart of it all. Just in case you missed the message in the title, the opening credits show us the streets of New York and Palm Beach papered with $100 bills. It’s all about the money, honey!

No, what surprised me about the victims’ accounts of Epstein’s crimes was how similar they sounded to accounts detailed in various Serious Case Reviews published in the UK over the past decade, investigating the official response to child sexual abuse committed by gangs in cities including Rotherham, Rochdale, and Oxford. The perpetrators in these cases were able to evade justice for many years, not because they were rich, “filthy” or otherwise, but because of the failures of the police and local authorities, combined with the gangs’ efforts to groom their young victims and then intimidate them into silence. Epstein raped his victims in his mansions and on his private jet. These gangs raped their victims in cheap hotels, public parks, and in grubby flats above takeaway joints. The long-term harm done to the girls was not much different.

Filthy Rich gives us the impression that Epstein’s initial success in eluding the authorities was a direct consequence of his wealth. It is certainly true that he was able to hire a stellar legal team, who harassed his teenage victims with questions including “is it true that you’ve had three abortions?” But then, famously, the victims of the Rochdale gang were faced with 11 rounds of cross-examination by 11 barristers, all of whom asked similarly distressing questions. And while Epstein undoubtedly used his status to menace the girls he abused, it’s foolish to suggest that a perpetrator needs either money or powerful friends to silence children, not when murdering a victim and her family in an arson attack works just as well. Analysis of victim surveys in both the US and the UK reveal less than 1% of rapes result in a conviction, meaning that avoiding imprisonment is not only unremarkable, it is the norm. You really don’t need to be an Epstein to get away with Epstein’s crimes.

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But the details of his crimes are only one facet of the Epstein legend. He is among a number of serial sexual predators who have come to public attention in recent years, but certain crucial elements of Epstein’s story have allowed him to assume a unique cultural position as the biggest and baddest predator of them all.

There is the manner of his death, of course. The abundance of circumstantial evidence and motive means that, although it may be cranky to believe that “Epstein didn’t kill himself”, it is not actually deranged. Added to this semi-plausible claim is the fact that the figure of Epstein slots so neatly into a narrative of power run amok. Given that his co-offenders allegedly included Democrats, Republicans, and members of the British royal family, this unusually adaptable conspiracy theory can be put to many purposes. For anti-capitalists, Epstein can play the role of representative of the sinister global elite; for conservative adherents to the Church of QAnon, he embodies the corruption of the deep state and its obedient political class. This is an idea that, in an age of hyper-partisanship, manages somehow to be non-partisan.

At the same time, some of the absurd details of the Epstein affair have captured the imagination of a certain style of arch nihilist who spends too much time online. “Epstein didn’t kill himself” is a serious claim, but it is also a joke, popularised on social media and now featured on beer cans and Christmas jumpers. In his opening monologue at the 2019 Golden Globes, Ricky Gervais used the phrase as a punchline and, in response to groans from the audience of Hollywood celebrities, spelled out the anti-establishment essence of the meme: “I know he’s your friend, but I don’t care.”

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Sometimes a villain comes along who perfectly captures the mood of the moment. He (for it is almost always a ‘he’) steps into a cultural role that seemed to be waiting for him. Charles Manson achieved this in 1969, after orchestrating the murder of seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, in an orgy of violence that, in a horribly dark twist, could have been lifted straight from a film by Roman Polanski, Tate’s husband. Anyone suspicious or fearful of the counterculture now had a focus for their anxiety in the form of the drug-addled, dead-eyed followers who carried out Manson’s atrocities. These murders marked the end of the optimism of the Sixties, coming to symbolise the dark side of ‘free love’.

Looking further into the past, neither Epstein nor Manson are yet able to match the iconic position of Jack the Ripper, whose legend has survived because it has proved so malleable. As the author and academic Clive Bloom describes, the Ripper was variously understood by his contemporaries to be anything “from an anarchist terrorist, to a twisted social reformer, mad doctor, psychotic aristocrat or homicidal immigrant of Jewish or ‘Asiatic’ background.” Over time, his representation changed, so that by the 1960s he had morphed from a working class man of the East End to an upper class toff in a top-hat, “symbol of a predatory aristocracy.” The Ripper, his true identity forever unknown, can be whoever we want him to be.

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I suspect that Epstein could be headed for a similar legacy — a match for Manson, if not perhaps for the Ripper. The word ‘Epstein’ already functions as a metonym, code for a genre of conspiratorial discourse that looms larger than the man himself.

This is not a welcome trend, although it may be an inevitable one. The process of immortalising a hideous predator serves to push his victims out of sight, their stories useful only insofar as they prop up the villain’s legend. For all of his money and power, Epstein was not vastly different from any of the other child abusers who regularly go unpunished, and to elevate the status of his seedy crimes is to also elevate the status of the man himself. He deserves to be despised and then quickly forgotten, but he won’t be — the myth of Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich is too compelling to be abandoned now. And while we cannot be sure exactly how he died, I do feel confident in making this — regrettable — conjecture: if he had known quite how famous he would become in death, I’m quite sure that Epstein would have been delighted.

Throughout the decade, however, the Canadian academic Thomas Homer-Dixon was working on what would become his great work The Ingenuity Gap. Published in 2000, the book warned that the human ingenuity which has allowed for complex mass societies and technological progress may at some point not be matched by the human ingenuity required to avert the crises that this change could conjure up.

I would like to call this book “curiously neglected” but to be honest I can understand why it slipped into obscurity. It is overlong, and a little rambling, and marred by the presence of some lumpy liberal shibboleths. Nonetheless, Homer-Dixon was formidably prescient.

At one point he noted that “violent insurgencies and terrorist groups are becoming more high-tech, transnational and powerful relative to the states they oppose,” meaning “rich countries will see more homegrown terrorism” and conflicts in third world nations will “become… generators of waves of outward migration, and havens for transnational terrorist and criminal networks.” One year later, planes smashed into the Twin Towers, and a decade aftewards Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was announced as the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq.

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Coronavirus would have provided an interesting case study for Homer-Dixon’s book. In The Ingenuity Gap, he used the example of the United Airlines Flight 232 air disaster to illustrate how crises can develop in complex systems.

“When the plane’s tail engine disintegrated, the flight crew immediately faced a staggeringly complex task,” he wrote: “Multiple, simultaneous, and interdependent emergencies converged in the cockpit. Some were recognized and understood, some were misunderstood, and some didn’t even cross the crew’s threshold of consciousness. As the crew members tried to make sense of their instruments and the data they received via their eyes and ears, problems cascaded into other problems with almost overwhelming speed.”

When COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, multiple interdependent emergencies exacerbated the crisis. Chinese authoritarian paranoia obscured the magnitude of the threat; neoliberal openness helped to spread it around the world; Trumpian electioneering produced a lack of American seriousness.

Meanwhile, the virus appears to have continued to mutate, with Chinese scientists now suggesting that it has developed into two strains, one significantly more aggressive than the other (although others have disputed this). While one could justifiably observe that diseases have ravaged mankind for millennia — and once with a slow, grim inevitability — it is still concerning how ill-prepared we are for such outbreaks.

There are two ways of facing an ingenuity gap: maximising ingenuity and minimising risk. Of course, an optimist could point to all the times that human ingenuity has averted crises. As the professionally cheerful Steven Pinker has written:

“As long as we are entertaining hypothetical disasters far in the future, we must also ponder hypothetical advances that would allow us to survive them, such as growing food under lights powered with nuclear fusion, or synthesizing it in industrial plants such as biofuel.”

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This is true, but it also reminds me of what the Irish Republican Army said to Margaret Thatcher in the aftermath of the Brighton Bombing, which the British Prime Minister thankfully survived. “Today we were unlucky,” the IRA reminder her, “but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always.” My point is that human ingenuity can, and will, spare us from calamity. But it has to do it again, and again, and again, whereas it would only take one crisis to spell our doom. As Peter Franklin wisely wrote for UnHerd last month:

“It doesn’t matter that, on average, epidemics (or even pandemics) aren’t that bad; it only takes one extinction level event and it’s game over. For this reason and others, [Nassim Nicholas] Taleb, with his colleagues Joe Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam, argue that we must transform our thinking. When it comes to a novel pathogen like coronavirus, over-reaction is the only rational response.”

As Franklin also observes, though, dealing with a crisis might not be as important as transforming a world in which people are “creating the conditions in which new diseases frequently emerge”. Minimising risk to keep our ingenuity gaps small can involve difficult trade-offs. I think research into artificial intelligence, for example, carries the intolerable risk of creating a monster with capacities that dwarf our own, but I realise that its blessings, such as the recent discovery of new antibiotics thanks to machine learning, make this a difficult question.

But if mankind has an ingenuity gap, we also have one between our creativity and our common sense. We all know heavyweight boxers have a tendency to make hundreds of millions of dollars and then blow the lot. Their incredible talent for training and fighting is not matched by long-term financial sense. Similarly, modern man has had the genius to invent antibiotics and the stupidity to make them far less effective thanks to their large-scale use in fattening livestock to produce cheap animal products, or, farcically, their common use as a treatment for the common cold.

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Similarly, the Chinese government has developed an extraordinary authoritarian apparatus — which appears to have achieved astonishing feats of containment since COVID-19 began to spread — but for years did almost nothing about pathogen-rich wildlife farms and wet markets because they posed a threat to public health rather than the stability of the regime.

Curbing these practices would have involved no greater suffering than some kinds of rare meat being unavailable and other kinds of meat being more expensive. I appreciate that this might sound vexing to some but as the alternative is significantly greater pandemic risk it seems like a small burden to bear. We cannot expect our ingenuity to always pay off debts that our irresponsibility has incurred.

Of course, it could be said of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book that major outbreaks, and plane crashes, have become significantly rarer. For all of our errors, there is truth to that. Still, one difference between our societies and aircraft is that the latter have all kinds of fail-safe mechanisms. There are, for example, system redundancies, which means that planes can function without pieces of equipment, as well as frequent procedural checks. COVID-19 has exposed the fact that our societal fail-safe mechanisms are exceedingly outdated.

Unlike Singapore, Western societies were not prepared for strict border checks. Unlike South Korea, we were not prepared for large-scale testing. Unlike China, we were not prepared for drastic containment. No one was prepared for the necessary closure of some supply lines and travel routes. While disasters have become more rare, we have neglected our ability to withstand them once they suddenly occur.

But as well as minimising risk in order to avert catastrophes, we can maximise experience. In one paper, Thomas Homer-Dixon returned to the example of United Airlines Flight 232, and specifically its captain, Alfred Haines, whose composure and skill helped to ensure that many lives were saved. Haines suggested that he had landed the plane, against all the odds, thanks to luck, but Homer-Dixon did not believe him. He said that it was Haines’ intimate familiarity with the machine that gave him the experiential knowledge he required.

Experiential knowledge, Homer-Dixon argued, is what we need, and “to cultivate wisdom in our societies, the wisdom that comes from working with complex systems for long periods of time so that you can recognize their patterns of behaviour, so that you have an intuition for what they’re going to do and how they’re going to respond.”

We do not know how destructive COVID-19 will be, but I hope we are learning from it: learning about how such pathogens develop, and how they are spread, and how they are treated, and how politics and economics affect their containment and are affected by them. If there is another outbreak it could be even more disastrous, but experience might help us to respond effectively.

It was a real badge, back in the day. No word on how many were printed or what funds it raised, but, hey: different times. The campaign swag of the Sixties and Seventies has an innocence about it, an innocence that Donald J Trump’s campaign was never going to follow.

No sireee, as the pretty girls might have said. The Trump campaign, bored with the bright red Make America Great Again hats, has hit on a new piece of kit. Its genius is that it offends not only with its message but with its very presence on earth.

It’s a plastic straw. Or, to be more precise: 200,000 straws, followed as soon as possible by 100s of thousands more. The idea was hatched when a man named Brad Parscale couldn’t drink his iced tea. Mr Parscale is the campaign manager for the 2020 re-election bid. He was, according to RealClearPolitics, “eating a quick meal when his paper straw, an environmentally-friendly and government-mandated drinking instrument, became soggy, crimped, and useless”.

“I’m so over paper straws,” Parscale tweeted along with a picture and the hashtag “#LiberalProgress”.

I’m so over paper straws. #LiberalProgress

This is exactly what they would do to the economy as well. Squeeze it until it doesn’t work. pic.twitter.com/zKfiZiSHV5

— Brad Parscale (@parscale) July 18, 2019

Others followed and the Trump straw was born. Each comes embossed with “Trump” on the side, and at a price of $15 for 10 straws they make a tidy sum for the re-election campaign of the 45th president of the United States (almost half a million dollars at last count).

But, of course, the straws do so much more. They are instruments of culture war. They are weapons. They can raise the blood pressure of an enemy to dangerous levels without having to be removed from the cup. In this way, they are recyclable.

They are the perfect V sign to flick at the busybodies on the east and west coasts of America who tell folks how to live. The city of Washington, D.C., where Brad Parscale was failing to suck his tea satisfactorily, is rumoured to have a special squad of ‘straw police’ making sure plastic is never used.

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As one of the Trump team told Realclearpolitics, “It is a great marketing stroke which coincides very much with the President’s disdain for political correctness and dictating how people live their daily lives. These straws are a perfect marriage of the Trump approach to things and of Trump-marketing. It just works.”

Take that, weak paper suckers!

And as with so many Trump initiatives, something that seems like a random act of political aggression, unwedded to anything you could call a strategy, actually turns out to have an impact beyond what could possibly have been planned.

The Trump straw has come onto the scene at the very moment that recycling in America is collapsing. And this is not a Trump myth. Across the nation the huge surge in interest in recycling of recent years has been turned on its head. Who says? Well, the impeccably liberal reporters at National Public Radio devoted some considerable effort to investigating the industry this summer and what they found is that the cause of the change is pretty simple.

As NPR explained: recycling in America started with organised crime. In the Eighties, the mafia controlled garbage in New York. An Alabama businessman named Lowell Harrelson wanted to turn trash into energy, so he found a mob boss, he bought 3,186 tons of garbage, put it on a big ship, and set sail to find a landfill. It was messy. No-one wanted to take the rubbish. Authorities in Mexico and Cuba threatened to fire artillery shells at the barge if it tried to dock.

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In the end, the waste was returned to and incinerated in Brooklyn. But the garbage barge gave birth to an interest in rubbish and getting rid of it: eventually an interest in recycling. For the best part of two decades, the Chinese stepped in where the Mexicans and Cubans and others had failed: desperate for cash and employment, they took America’s recyclable rubbish.

But now the Chinese economy is in a different place. A cleaner place. Last March, they banned the import of rubbish from around the world – including plastic.

The impact in America has been dramatic. Some municipalities across the nation are now insisting that rubbish is sorted and cleaned – it needs to be washed three times to be recyclable – in order to keep it pure and economic, or they are just giving up on it and are putting all their rubbish back into landfills in the old-fashioned way.

There are some experts who think that landfill is the best place for garbage anyway. Thomas Kinnamen from Bucknell University told NPR that the Chinese had let a good deal of plastic end up in the sea, and said that moving waste around the world elicits a greater environmental cost than burying it.

So, the whole business of recycling is now being questioned for its environmental bona fides while becoming steadily more impractical. As ever, on the one hand the Trump message is clear: You do not have to feel bad about yourself. You do not need to change what you do. You can carry on as your parents did.

And on the other side:

“Errr, maybe spend more time going through your rubbish and sorting it. Then get rid of only some of it. And we might bury it in any case. And you need to pay more for the privilege.”

This is how culture wars are won and lost. And the Trump straws underline the biggest challenge facing the Democratic candidate who eventually emerges to fight Trump. This person is going to have to be a communicator of genuine Reagan or Clinton like abilities.

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He or she is almost always going to be on the more complicated side of any argument with this President and not just because he simplifies (and lies) but because the cases the Democrats want to make often depend on evidence that is relatively unclear, or subject to change or scientific re-thinking. There is nothing wrong with this of course: life is complicated.

But the communication of complexity requires, in an age where the jejune is king, some real mastery of messaging.

The Trump straws and the death of American recycling can be addressed. But that sucking sound is the President guzzling all the attention and the political fizz once again. The paper straw crowd are going to have to work hard to guard against the sogginess that leads to drinking disappointment.

Look up those words online and you’ll find them ascribed to Cicero (though you’d be a fool to take that as read). Whoever said it was being a tad harsh. Finding fault in others, rather than ourselves, is a peculiarly human quality.

We’re all in denial about our own faults – which is why those of others provide such a welcome distraction. All the more so, if their faults also happen to be our faults. In such a situation we can surface our flaws while also displacing them. How therapeutic!

*

For Left-leaning readers of The Guardian and the New Statesman there’s some therapy to be found in a pair of essays about the ramshackle state of conservatism. I’m not saying that the authors (Andy Beckett for the Graun and Robert Saunders for the Staggers) are fools for finding fault on the Right – there’s a lot to be found there. Nevertheless, their essays are more interesting for what they inadvertently reveal about the state of the Left.

Here’s the nub of Saunders’ argument:

“British Conservatism has broken with three of its most important traditions. It has stopped thinking; it has stopped ‘conserving’; and it has lost its suspicion of ideology. Historically, the Conservative Party has been a party of ideas, but not of ideology.”

Beckett’s argument is not dissimilar, though he tackles American conservatism alongside its British counterpart (conservatism everywhere else is pretty much ignored). Like Saunders, he sees the conservative movement as intellectually moribund. Talking about free market think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic, he observes that they have “grown old together” and that their “answer to every problem has remained essentially unchanged: lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government.”

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Well, yes – it would do, because that’s what they believe in. If you look at corresponding think tanks on the centre-Left, their answer to every problem has also remained essentially unchanged: higher taxes, more regulation, bigger government. Still, it can’t be denied that this is not a golden age of conservative thought. Saunders, a historian, draws a contrast with previous, more intellectually fertile eras – such as the Tory response to Labour’s landslide victory in 1945; and, a generation later, the first stirrings of the Thatcher revolution.

Clearly, there’s nothing so momentous going on today. But then there doesn’t have to be. In the 1940s, conservatism had to be reinvented for the era of the universal welfare state. In the 1970s, with the post-war settlement coming undone, there was another great transition underway – this time to neoliberalism. Today, the failings of neoliberalism are plain for all to see, but a transition to something else is nowhere in sight.

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Beckett talks about a “revival of the radical left”, but what does this actually entail? Intellectually, the most interesting ideas on the Left in the UK and US depend on outlandish scenarios: the end of scarcity (Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism); a complete decarbonisation of the national economy in the space of just 10 years (the Green New Deal); reversing the roles of monetary and fiscal policy, so that central banks issue governments with all the money they need and taxation is used to control inflation (Modern Monetary Theory). These are fascinating speculations as to what might be possible several decades hence. But as a basis for escaping neoliberalism in the here-and-now, sci-fi socialism is a non-starter.

If the intellectual Right has nodded off, it’s because the intellectual Left is in dreamland.

*

The last time the Left mounted a semi-serious challenge to the status quo was in the 1990s, under the leadership of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. That, however, was about reforming neoliberalism not replacing it, which was why the conservative rethink at the time was so half-hearted. Compared to 1945, it took the Tories twice as long to recover from the defeat of 1997.

But is Saunders right to claim that the Conservative Party has “produced no significant thinker in decades”? It rather depends on one’s definition of ‘significant.’ If one sets the bar at the speeches and pamphlets produced by Tory thinkers like David Willetts and Oliver Letwin in the 1997-2010 period, then I’d challenge anyone to name a Labour Party thinker of recent decades that could be seen as more significant. Only the heterodox Blue Labour school of thought comes anywhere near.

Saunders does give ‘Red Toryism‘ a fleeting mention and there’s a quick hit on David Cameron’s ‘Big Society‘ from Beckett. It’s sadly true that, to quote Beckett, “these visions of renewals have melted away” (as did Theresa May’s attempt in 2017). However, it’s important that we see these failures for what they are – not intellectual, but political. The culture and practice of contemporary politics is dominated by style not substance, presentation not content. The comms guru is king, not the policy wonk – and certainly not the public intellectual. Ideas like the Big Society did not fail as ideas – but because the people with actual power only ever used (and then discarded) them as gimmicks.

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Those who insist that Conservative Party never properly modernised are wrong. The Tories have not only modernised, they’ve post-modernised – and that’s the problem. They’ve adopted a style of politics in which there is no reality, only narrative. In this world, to communicate an idea is functionally equivalent to implementing it – to have it talked about is the same thing as getting it done.

Okay, I’m exaggerating somewhat – there is a level of government where gesture is set into motion, even if it doesn’t happen with much force. However, it is hard to exaggerate the extent to which the centre of power is concerned first and foremost with immediate impressions.

*

The hollowing out of our political culture is not an exclusively Right-wing phenomenon. Indeed, the modern masters of spin were Bill ‘I feel your pain’ Clinton and Tony ‘pretty straight sort of guy’ Blair. The rest of the political spectrum followed where they led. One need look no further for an explanation for the dumbing down of our politics.

However, because it applies left, right and centre, it doesn’t suit a narrative of specifically conservative intellectual decline. Beckett and Saunders therefore look elsewhere for causal factors that they seem to attach to the Right alone.

For instance, Saunders believes that the Conservative Party has lost its “sense of history”:

“As the historian Kit Kowol argues, ‘Conservatives once used the past to imagine the future. Today, they are trapped by the only history many of them now know: the Second World War.’ The result is a cartoonish morality tale that privileges resolve over reflection, in which ‘every leader becomes either a Chamberlain or a Churchill, foreign policy a question of appeasement or intervention, and all difficulties capable of being overcome with a dose of ‘Dunkirk Spirit’.”

But isn’t there a Left-liberal equivalent? For instance, in crediting the EU with maintaining the peace in Europe – as if Germany might invade Alsace-Lorraine again. Or what about the dodgy parallels drawn between 21st-century populism and the 1930s? If you want Tories to stop banging on about Churchill, then perhaps lefties could stop using deadly-serious words like “fascist” and “Nazi” with such careless abandon.

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Winston Churchill is not the only Tory icon, of course – there’s Margaret Thatcher too. Saunders compares the Conservative Party to an “ageing Eighties tribute band, [flubbing] wearily through the same tired playlist, barely noticing that the stadiums are empty, the hairstyles ludicrous and the fans long departed.” Ouch! There’s more than a little truth to that, but it still leaves the Tories 10 years ahead of the Seventies leftism of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. A sure sign of our inability to move on from the neoliberal era is that the Right has regressed to its heyday and the Left to before it even began.

*

If nostalgia is not an exclusively Right-wing political vice, what about what Beckett calls the “modern conservative media bubble.” There’s Fox News in America, Tory tabloids in the UK – and all manner of online echo chambers. The Right’s capacity to insulate itself from inconvenient truths and challenging viewpoints can’t be good for its intellectual health.

And yet there’s a Left-wing media bubble too – and one that extends a long way into public broadcasting, academia and most of the cultural establishment. With a safe space that big, it’s easier for Left-wingers and liberals to shut themselves off from contrary opinions than it is for conservatives.

But what about Brexit? Theresa May’s is the fourth Conservative premiership to be destroyed by the Europe issue. Isn’t this evidence of a specifically Right-wing dysfunction – one that’s all set to consume the next Tory Prime Minister too.

Has the party taken leave of its senses? A movement that was all about resistance to revolutionary change is now ready to rush headlong into the unknown of a no deal Brexit. How is any of that conservative? Saunders puts it this way:

“A political tradition that once sought chiefly to conserve now resembles an apocalyptic cult, ready to torch Britain’s trade relations, parliamentary institutions and even the Union itself in order to build the New Jerusalem on their ashes.”

But hang on – who are the real revolutionaries here? Committing ourselves to a European project of ever-closer union, a single currency, loss of control over national borders, enforced austerity and the prospect of further integration within a system of laws very different from our own represents a profound discontinuity in our development as a nation. The electorate was asked whether it wished to remain within such an enterprise and more people said no than yes.

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Let’s not pretend the choice was ever between business as usual and disruptive change. The choice was always between two disruptions – either to our national sovereignty or to our trading relationships with our closest neighbours. This isn’t a dilemma that the Conservative Party chose for itself, but one it was presented with. Indeed, it is presented to us all – including the Left. By enforcing the so-called ‘four freedoms’, the European project guarantees the continuity of neoliberalism and punishes entire nations for attempting to choose a different path. Now that there is no more avoiding the issue, the Labour Party also finds itself torn apart by the dilemma.

*

So, yet again, we see that intellectual crisis of the Right is a crisis for politics as a whole. The only way forward is not to focus on how badly the other side is dealing with it, but to look closer to home.

That advice applies to conservatives too, of course. As well as listening to what the likes of Andy Beckett and Robert Saunders might have to say about the crisis of the Right – they also ought to analyse what conservatives say about the crisis of the Left. As I said at the outset, we all project our deepest, unacknowledged insecurities upon others – therefore the faults we see in our enemies are the most honest guide to our own.

In this respect, the most interesting thing about conservative accounts of what ails the other side is the idea that the contemporary Left is alienating, indeed betraying, its traditional sources of support.

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That’s not wrong, but the contemporary Right is doing exactly the same – above all by allowing the dream of a property-owning democracy to die, and standing by while vested interests suck the life out of the productive economy.

As things stand, the traditional parties of Left and Right are locked in a stalemate – while haemorrhaging support to parties of protest.

Neither side will recover until they start seeing their own faults first.

The tides of democratic politics have always come in and out, but never have they done so with such speed or pitch. It is hard not to celebrate a part of this.  For as long as the franchise has existed British and American politics has been regularly poisoned by the perception that there is an ‘elite’ or ‘establishment’ that makes decisions over the heads of the voters.  The idea that everything that matters can be cosily arranged in ‘smoke-filled’ (more likely detergent-scented) rooms and that nothing really changes has a strong pull on popular grievance.

The rise of Jeremy Corbyn, like that of Donald Trump in America, is – among other things – an angry shout against this trend. When people criticise either Corbyn or Trump for their lack of political experience they miss the point. Both Trump and Corbyn are the result of generational forces which are satisfied to throw a stun-grenade into the political class and find justifications for their action after the fact.

In America the relevant parts of the right now find themselves called upon to give ever-more frequent, as well as better, answers for their actions. In Britain the people who supported Corbyn have seen a different phenomenon occur. For the time-being the demands for explanations have gone away. Because Corbyn did not lead the Labour party to utter collapse in June’s unwise general election, the demise or splitting apart of the Labour party did not occur. Instead the Labour party is more united this year than it was last year, though it is now cohering and unifying around what was until very recently recognised to be one of the wildest extremes of British politics. If there is to be a reckoning over this – as there is bound to be – it has been delayed longer than that on the other side of the Atlantic.

It shouldn’t be especially surprising that Britain’s grenade-throwers emerged on the political left.  The political right in Britain is – even, or perhaps especially, after the Brexit vote – a relatively unified political force.  Its views on free trade, immigration and education – for instance – remain fairly uniform.  On the British left, however, a period of correction would appear to have been needed since at least the 1990s.

A portion of the left was never happy or content with the era of Tony Blair, any more than Bernie Sanders voters were ecstatic about the Clinton era.  Blair and Bill Clinton, like Gerhard Schröder in Germany, inhabited and encouraged a language of political moderation and ardent positioning on the centre-left, even as they portrayed any and all political opponents as motivated not so much by wrong-headedness as by deep evil. The positioning was not all verbal. These leaders all appeared to signal a genuine new era on the left, with a political movement finally at peace with the free market as well as the free movement of peoples in an era of increasing prosperity.

There were two blows to this apparent consensus: one global, the other personal.  The global blow came with the 2008 financial crash – a crash which also exacerbated the concern that a certain level of free movement created cultural as well as economic draw-backs for any local labour force.

But perhaps even that could have been weathered had the personal not intruded. Until Bill Clinton’s retirement former Presidents in the US made some money out of office by writing their memoirs. None had previously achieved Clinton’s level of wealth by giving speeches which earned him in an hour more than the average worker could hope to save in a lifetime[1.  CNN calculated that “Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, combined to earn more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring.” Report from 6 February 2016.]. Tony Blair watched his friend’s amassing of Croesus-like wealth and appeared to think it was good thing, spending his time after office with the apparent sole aim of joining the super-rich in as short a time as possible[2.  Estimated to have a personal wealth of £60 million (a Daily Telegraph investigation from June 2015), there has been a particular complaint that he has made his money by consorting with the wrong kind of people. The Daily Mail ran a series in March of last year that set out to tell “the sickening truth about how Blair’s made millions from doing dirty deals with dictators”.] Worse was the behaviour of Schröder, who appeared to have signed up to work for Gazprom even before he had left his elected office,[3.  See The Guardian from 13 December 2005 when the former German Chancellor abruptly resigned as his party’s leader and walked into a lucrative job with Russia’s Gazprom and, more recently, the Financial Times of 13 August 2017 reported: “Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, looks set to deepen his already close ties with the Russian energy sector, after he was nominated as an independent director to the board of state-controlled oil company Rosneft…Mr Schröder’s appointment to a senior role in a commercial project he had championed while in government proved highly controversial at the time, with many German politicians accusing him of an ethical lapse. He has consistently denied he had done anything wrong.”] and rewarded his new employer in Moscow by reprimanding Eastern European leaders whenever they expressed concerns about Vladimir Putin and his potential direction of travel.

The backlash against this was always bound to be not only considerable, but personal. And these events could have churned up no better lodestar than a ploddingly consistent backbench MP, who never made his peace with the post-1980s model of western capitalism (or the general consensus against the use of political violence) but who had said the same things in his obscure corner of politics for more than a quarter of a century. If everybody else was only out for themselves, what reason other than deep personal integrity (and potential rightness) could be found to explain the career of Jeremy Corbyn? And who better to support at such a juncture of confusion and self-interest?

Perhaps the Labour party’s remaining moderates are waiting for an accident.  Perhaps they are waiting for a miracle. Yet in the process they have actually proved one of the fears of many Corbyn supporters – which is that political survival appears to interest politicians more than any residual sense of what is right or wrong.  Moderates in the Labour party have chosen their poison, and will have to account for it one day. But in doing so they have also dug the trench of public cynicism several feet deeper.