“Would you like to choose your hold music?” inquires the automated voice. The tone is solicitous, therapeutic, and infantilizing. You are not addressed as an adult citizen conducting business, but a vulnerable subject whose emotional state must be stabilized before anything substantive can occur. 

This logic now extends far beyond call centers. Contemporary institutions often present themselves as gentle, conflict-averse, and therapeutic, even as they exert quiet forms of compulsion. I recently received an email from a university learning-support officer, copying in a student who had missed every dissertation meeting to date. The purpose, I was told, was simply to “introduce us,” since the student felt anxious about having fallen behind. The tone was friendly and reassuring — but it carried an unmistakable instruction: the student was not to be penalized, or even questioned, for non-attendance. A relationship between two adults — and one in which there was clearly a teacher–student hierarchy — was subtly recast as one requiring mediation and emotional cushioning.

Call it the West’s collective infantile disorder.

This institutional style did not emerge by accident. It reflects a longer cultural process in which adulthood itself has been steadily hollowed out. The social critic Neil Postman diagnosed a trend toward cultural infantilization in the West as early as the 1960s in The Disappearance of Childhood. His argument was that mass media, particularly television, were eroding childhood as a distinct life stage and, with it, adulthood, which depends upon childhood as a sort of apprenticeship. For Postman, adulthood consisted of hard-won capacities for self-restraint, delayed gratification, conceptual thought, historical awareness, reason and order.

A culture increasingly organized around spectacle, immediacy, and emotionalism undermined these qualities. And thus, Postman contended, childhood and adulthood merged, producing adultified children and infantilized adults. Adulthood is no longer a stable moral category that can tolerate ambiguity and regulate the self.

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The American thinker Benjamin Barber extended this diagnosis by locating its causes in neoliberal capitalism and the transition from a productive to a consumer economy. In his 2007 book, Consumed, Barber described the “radically individuated” consumer as someone free to choose from among endless options, while remaining powerless to change the “menu of the world” itself. Under these conditions, the Protestant ethic of restraint and effort gave way to an infantilizing ethos of immediate gratification. Citizenship was eroded, as shopping displaced civic participation as the defining mark of freedom. Political life, in turn, was reduced to preference, feeling, and grievance. 

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the heterodox scholar Christopher Lasch similarly diagnosed the emergence of a narcissistic personality type in which “the egomaniacal, experience-devouring, imperial self regresses into a grandiose, infantile, empty self.”

Together, these processes have produced a pervasive therapeutic culture enveloping education and major institutions alike. Management styles, DEI regimes, and pedagogical practices have become increasingly risk-averse and emotion-managing. Universities routinely affirm their commitment to free speech, for example, but only insofar as it does not disrupt “campus relations” or generate complaints. Teaching is increasingly framed as “trauma-informed,” with trigger warnings, flexible deadlines, opt-out provisions, and student-led choices over how — and sometimes whether — difficult material is encountered.

Mass media — whether Postman’s bugbear of television, or today’s social media —  accelerate but do not originate this process; it is more true to say that we evacuated adulthood, and technology filled the vacuum. Before the advent of TV sitcoms, people weren’t all reading Kant — they were reading penny dreadfuls, romances, and Westerns. 

Some blame this institutional malaise on a spreading “feminization” — emotion over logic, sympathy over rationality, softness over necessary rigor. The error in such a diagnosis lies in confusing the presence of women with the feminization of authority — a moral and institutional condition that is neither caused by, nor reducible to, women themselves. 

Feminization is exemption from existential adulthood — an exemption women were long denied the right to refuse, and is now being visited upon us all. It’s a structural position in relation to authority that borrows the language of care while stripping adults, of either sex, of responsibility and choice.

The adult understands that responsibility for her life ultimately rests with her. The child, by contrast, lives in a world organized by others: what time she wakes, what she eats, where she goes, who she may see, what counts as “good for her.” Decisions are presented as facts of the universe, rather than as choices made by someone else. Because she lacks autonomy, the child experiences limits as givens — as natural, immovable constraints — rather than as contingent arrangements that could be questioned or changed. Children submit to this position innocently. Women, however, have historically been required to inhabit it: denied legal and political autonomy across much of the West, and still so in many societies today.

Women, in short, had to be consciously feminized. This was especially the case for women at the dawn of industrial capitalism. That moment saw a transition away from the household as the primary sphere of agrarian production (in which both men and women had to participate) toward the male-dominated factory. Meanwhile, the household, as Lasch argued, became exclusively the site of family reproduction. It was expected to function as a refuge from the competitive brutalities of the industrial world “outside.” Women — especially middle- and upper-class women exempted from factory life — were now to serve as nurturers: to become feminine, as wives and mothers themselves and creators of future wives and mothers.

All this meant, to a great degree, that they had to be infantilized: think of the dreary submission to authority and repression of sexuality demanded of Victorian girls in Jane Eyre. Now, amid the decline of manufacturing and the rise of a services-led consumer economy, both sexes are being similarly infantilized: the authorities are the virtue police, and the repression extends to our language, our professional behavior, and even our thoughts.   

Even where the feminine position is not imposed, it may still be chosen, because it is safer. As Simone de Beauvoir observed, it can feel easier to “take shelter in the shadow of men”: to relinquish hard responsibility for life’s decisions, to play happy families, to lose oneself in prescribed feminine roles, whether as wife, mother, or, more recently, trad-wife fantasy. This is not something to which men are immune. Since everyone has been a child, human beings are susceptible to nostalgia for a time when life felt carefree: when responsibility could be disowned. Men, too, may hide behind given masculine roles, treating them as unquestionable, rather than chosen.

Within this framework, it is understandable to connect institutional weakness to the growing presence of women in the professions, particularly as women now outnumber men in college education. The consequences of the growing presence of women are said to include decisions driven by emotion, rather than rationality; an exponential growth of wokeness; and, most seriously, institutions losing the capacity to accomplish their own stated goals.

It is possible to quibble with the empirical details offered in support of this claim. While female medical students now outnumber men, for example, male doctors remain overrepresented in the most prestigious and highly remunerated fields, such as surgery, and are considerably less likely to shift to part-time work, particularly when they become parents. At the same time, the feminization of professions, as sociologist Paula England has shown, tends to be associated with declining pay and prestige, a pattern observable in fields such as biology and computer science. But this “feminization effect” is quite different from the one at issue here: namely, the extension of the way women used to be treated — as child-like creatures — to all of society.

Similarly, proponents of the feminization thesis warn that the legal profession is losing its capacity for impartial judgment as a result of women’s presence on the bar and the bench. Yet it is worth noting that in Britain, the most controversial human-rights asylum rulings, including cases involving migrants with serious criminal histories, are not typically issued by women acting on sentiment, but by male judges applying what they understand to be established jurisprudence within existing human-rights frameworks. 

For example, The Telegraph has recently published several investigations into how immigration judges apply the European Convention on Human Rights to allow migrants and foreign criminals to remain in Britain. These decisions are not “heart-led” so much as procedural, risk-averse, and insulated from democratic accountability — they are not feminine, but represent a feminized form of authority.

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Women’s participation in public life has often strengthened institutions rather than weakened them, particularly in roles requiring long-term stewardship rather than short-term display. After the 2008 financial crisis, many central banks and financial institutions sought to increase the proportion of women at board and executive level, reflecting evidence that more mixed leadership teams were associated with greater caution and institutional stability. At the highest end of technological and organizational complexity, this pattern is even clearer. At SpaceX, Elon Musk appointed Gwynne Shotwell as president and chief operating officer precisely because of her capacity to translate ambition into execution. While Musk embodies risk, Shotwell has been widely credited with providing the operational discipline that turned SpaceX from a visionary startup into a functioning aerospace institution. Critics of feminization misidentify a moral collapse afflicting both sexes as one caused by only one: women.

Today, infantilization is both forced upon us and is increasingly chosen — by men and women alike — because freedom, once attained, has proved exhausting, bleak, and unromantic. Empowerment arrived without a handbook for existential ethics and choice was steadily reduced to consumption. Institutional infantilization works through compulsion masked as care; individual retreat into infantilized roles works through consent. The two reinforce one another.

This helps explain the growing pattern in which sexual libertinism and conservative domesticity appear not as opposites, but as forms of retreat. Women who move seamlessly from radical sexual politics to idealized visions of wifehood and motherhood do so without contradiction, because both positions offer refuge from the demands of moral authorship.

Masculinity has developed its own evasions. On the Right, many propose a return to masculine “thumos” — the warrior virtues of hero, king, or strongman —  as an antidote to supposed feminization. Mary Harrington has framed this in terms of masculine archetypes; N. S. Lyons and R. R. Reno see it embodied in figures such as Donald Trump, representing “strong gods” against a civilization weakened from within. 

The internal abdication of authority leads to Nietzschean ressentiment, as Douglas Murray rightly insists. Having given up our power, we succumb to mean-spirited envy that seeks to tear down what it cannot create. We see this truth all around us in the spread of ugly, untalented graffiti in urban centers; not street art, but defacement: the scrawling over of buildings and of genuine murals alike by those incapable of producing art of their own.

Ressentiment thrives where agency has collapsed and adulthood has been hollowed out. It is the product of a culture that no longer expects individuals to act, choose, or bear the consequences of freedom. It is immaturity embodied: a sneering hostility towards achievements that required long years of labor, discipline and self-control.

Murray rightly extols humility and gratitude, which are supremely adult virtues, once cultivated during childhood when that stage was understood as an apprenticeship to adulthood. Properly understood, gratitude is not passivity or deference, but what Hannah Arendt described as augmentation: the capacity to receive an inherited world, to build upon it, to criticize it where necessary and to extend it without obliterating it. 

Authority, in this sense, does not demand obedience but presupposes responsibility — a willingness to take up what has been handed down and make it one’s own. But this prescription only works if the goal is properly understood. The task is not to overcome feminization or to revive masculine aesthetics, but for men and women alike to relearn how to live as adults, with courage and without refuge.

There is even a move to re-evaluate his one-term presidency. Ejected from office in 1981 with abysmal polling numbers, the economy in a mess, and his party at war with itself, his years in the White House are now presented by his liberal fans as a triumph of far-sighted policymaking with a surprisingly enduring legacy. The distinguished political journalist Jonathan Alter has hailed Carter’s “visionary domestic achievements”. He appointed more female judges than all his predecessors put together (although, bathetically, he is the only president to serve a full term without being able to appoint a Supreme Court justice). Fifteen pieces of environmental legislation were passed on Carter’s watch, doubling the size of the national parks and providing subsidy for green energy. He liked to think of himself as a scientist (sometimes rather exaggerating his naval officer training to describe himself as a “nuclear engineer”) and recognised the impact on the climate of fossil fuels. He even installed solar panels on the White House roof (President Reagan had them ripped off, shipping one of the panels to the Carter Library, which seems like a rather pointed act of trolling).

In foreign policy, Carter’s crowning achievement was the Camp David accords in 1978 — the peace agreement signed between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a rare moment of hope in the Middle East. The accords were a genuine achievement for a modest man who nevertheless had a deep, if sometimes misplaced, faith in his ability to bring people together.

Even so: poor old Jimmy Carter. For all of these achievements, and for all his manifold personal virtues, he remains the cardigan-wearer who nagged Americans to turn the thermostat down, the lonely fisherman in a pond in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, who was implausibly attacked by a hitherto unknown creature called a “swamp rabbit”. His relations with Congress — which was, after all, controlled by his own party — were probably the worst of any president since Andrew Johnson provoked the House of Representatives into impeaching him in 1868. Tip O’Neill, the long-standing House Speaker couldn’t stand the peanut farmer from Georgia, regarding him as a provincial who thought he was above having to learn Washington’s ways. Carter once invited O’Neill to the White House for breakfast but served him cookies and coffee instead of ham and eggs. In a misguided economy drive, he stopped serving liquor at receptions. Carter gave the impression that the only reason to pass legislation was because it was the Right Thing To Do, which was almost the opposite of how Washington politicians understood it. The result was that, despite big majorities and a relatively successful “batting average” in getting bills through Congress, important legislation on health care, tax and welfare reform failed. Long lines at gas stations were an everyday testimony to Carter’s failure to grip inflation and the energy supply crisis. And with fatal political consequences, he appeared to dither over the American hostages in Tehran.

His appeal in the 1976 election was as the un-Nixon. He grinned rather than grimaced. He was a fair-haired Southerner who promised, like a Boy Scout, to do his best, who would roll up his sleeves and mend the machinery of government. It is true that back when he ran for the Georgia governorship in 1970, Carter had not been above a few pseudo-Nixonian nods and winks to segregationists, but once in office he was clear as a bell in his opposition to racial discrimination. With Carter, there was no profanity, no wiretaps, no hush-money payments, no impeachment — and no White House taping system for the benefit of future historians. So undoubtedly, he was a triumphant success at Not Being Nixon. But that is a low bar.

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We can admire the rise to the presidency of someone so fundamentally honest — not least in the light of some of his successors. But the unfortunate truth is that Jimmy Carter could be excruciatingly inept at the business of politics, which is to say the business of winning power and using it. He was a prophet cast into a nation of sinners, and the trouble is he talked like one.

The best example is his so-called “malaise speech”, a televised address to the American people on July 15, 1979, which he had originally intended to be an address about the OPEC-instigated energy crisis but became instead a meditation on the “crisis of confidence” facing the nation. (He never actually used the word “malaise”, though it suited his opponents’ purposes to imply that he did). If the 1983 Labour Party manifesto was supposedly the “longest suicide note in history”, Carter’s half-hour-long sermon, mixing self-pity and moral exhortation, must have come close. Certainly, it’s hard to think of another politician who more publicly admitted failure.

In the 10 days before his address, Carter had invited a cross-section of Americans to Camp David to listen to their advice. Not just business, religious and political leaders but ordinary citizens too. He sat there in the presidential retreat soaking up their advice and their abuse and then, astonishingly, read out some of their most pungent criticisms on live TV. “Mr President, you are not leading this nation — you’re just managing the government,” one of them told him. Another said, “you don’t see the people enough anymore.” He had worked hard to enact his campaign promises, he said. And then added, rather plaintively, “but, I have to admit, with just mixed success”. Oh dear.

And then came the main body of the homily. The President paused, looked earnestly into the camera, and told Americans that “all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America”. There was a challenge “more serious than energy or inflation”, one that was a “fundamental threat to American democracy”. That challenge was a “crisis of confidence”.

A few weeks before this weirdly compelling, disconcerting TV appearance, Carter had met the cultural historian Christopher Lasch, whose book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations had been published earlier that year. Lasch argued that the decline of paternal authority and excessive consumption had fundamentally altered American culture since the Fifties. A new personality type consistent with “pathological narcissism” had been normalised. Lasch’s ideas were imprinted all over Carter’s speech. We used to be a nation that “was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and… faith in God,” said the President. Now, “too many of us… tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” In a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone, the President was blunt: “We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

So, what was to be done? Well that, in the end, was up to the viewers. It was hard being President, Carter was saying, and try as he might, there wasn’t much he could do about so fundamental a dislocation in American culture. Since we, the people, were the ones who had lost confidence, it was the people, ultimately, who had to get us out of the mess.

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The only other speech in the canon of American presidential rhetoric comparable to Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech is Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address in March 1865. At his moment of victory, with the Confederacy on the point of total destruction, Lincoln did the most extraordinary thing — he blamed everyone, Northerners as well as Southerners, himself just as much as his enemies on the battlefield, for the sin of slavery that had caused the war. Self-abasement can work as a political strategy, but to put it mildly, it’s a brave choice.

As Carter’s present-day defenders are quick to point out, the “crisis of confidence” speech initially seemed to go well. He had a polling bump. The White House received warm messages of support from citizens who were heartened to hear a president speaking the truth. But over time, the speech was reframed, as speeches always are, by the wider reputation of the speaker. For Carter’s enemies — and there were many — the speech made their case for them. “You see paralysis and stagnation and drift,” Carter said, truthfully. “You don’t like it, and neither do I.”

His great Capitol Hill rival Ted Kennedy didn’t hide his disdain: “Now, the people are blamed for every national ill, scolded as greedy, wasteful, and mired in malaise.” The youngest Kennedy brother’s decision to challenge the President in the Democratic primaries wounded Carter badly. But waiting in the wings was Carter’s ultimate nemesis, Ronald Reagan. There are some, said Reagan pointedly, in his twinkly way, who claim “that our energy is spent, our days of greatness at an end, that a great national malaise is upon us”. They say, “we must cut our expectations, conserve and withdraw, that we must tell our children not to dream as we once dreamed.”

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Unsurprisingly, in the midst of inflation and unemployment, Reagan’s feel-good let-it-rip optimism crushed Carter’s earnest calls for restraint and faithfulness. In an era of close elections and intense bipartisanship, it can be startling to look at the electoral college map for 1980. Reagan carried 44 states. Poor old Jimmy Carter.

Carter was unlucky in some respects. He faced a series of interlocking economic challenges that would have daunted any occupant of the White House. But in other ways, he had a golden opportunity when he came into office in 1977. America was not at war, there was unified control of Congress, and while he faced his fair share of crises at home and abroad, there was nothing on the scale of the dramas that others faced: no big terrorist attack, no threat of a nuclear exchange, no great civil unrest, no pandemic. How on earth, then, did he end up mournfully speaking to the voters about their lack of confidence?

With Christopher Lasch’s words in his mind, Carter was not necessarily wrong about the culture of narcissism. Donald Trump, after all, is the apotheosis of pathological narcissism, his election a dystopian fulfilment of Lasch’s worst nightmare. But Carter was very mistaken if he thought that such a profound psychological and cultural shift could be combatted by earnest exhortations from the Oval Office. “This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning,” he said. Fair enough, but sometimes the larger interests of a political project require politicians to hold back the unvarnished truth. His political opponents’ characterisation of his speech as entirely negative were unfair — he ended with a painfully sincere plea for Americans to “join hands” and commit to the “rebirth of the American spirit”. But what might work in a Sunday School didn’t work in a big and complex polity, at least not when Reagan was more than willing to give messages of happiness and reassurance. Poor old Jimmy Carter.

But this time around, as many reviewers have already pointed out, we are presented with a maturer version of Rooney’s concerns — and a longer book with it. Gone are the characters who write for a living. Gone, too, are the earnest disquisitions on capitalism and inequality. Her characters are now more likely to discuss logic puzzles, or Christianity.

There is Ivan, and there is Peter. The brothers Koubek, who have just lost their father. The much younger Ivan is a brilliant chess player, who could have ended up as an incel but is instead having an affair with Margaret, a woman 14 years older than him. The older Peter is a lawyer and one-time debate champion. He’s also something of a Zhivago, with one woman to suit his heart’s deeper yearning, his former girlfriend Sylvia, and another to suit his needs, his sort-of-girlfriend Naomi, a younger collegiate OnlyFans type, who is such a cliched self-destructive beauty, she seems to have wandered in from Rooney’s first two books.

It’s not, then, all that new. But there is the injection of something, which marks a real divergence from her other novels: an attempt at self-conscious prose style. Rooney has never been much of a stylist, confessing to relative indifference to the language itself. When writing about Ivan or Margaret, Rooney works in her traditional third-person present-tense narration — a partial return to the mode of Normal People. But when writing about Peter, Rooney adopts an internal monologue generally broken up into terse, subjectless fragments.

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This monologue will probably get Intermezzo called Rooney’s most Joycean novel. Though other than her essential Irishness, the charge doesn’t properly stick. There’s nothing like Stephen Dedalus or the toddering Leopold Bloom, ordering the whole cosmos in his head, as if he were both God and Falstaff. Not even if the conspicuously educated Peter Koubeck is constantly referring to Hamlet, or the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, the most interesting writing in the book is often here, in the certain wandering monologues of Peter Koubek:

Says she’s staying with Max for the month, good old Max.
See him sometimes at Sylvia’s still. Useless he was too in
competition. Too nice, not ruthless enough, always seeing both
sides. Funny though. All her friends are. Lightly she has to hold
the world, lovingly but lightly…

It’s the first time I’ve read Rooney and felt the excitement of the writer at work with words. After reading those lines, it’s hard to say that Rooney is a writer uninterested in language. Even if it’s sometimes laboured, the freer syntax is a welcome change — it made me realise just how bare and overly-crafted her writing could be before. And as her former embarrassment with the artier side of the equation evaporates from many of the novel’s best pages, Rooney can now write something like that last sentence: “Lightly she has to hold the world, lovingly but lightly.” It’s among the most musical, most balanced phrases in her oeuvre.

Unfortunately, she cannot really sustain such a musical construction. Perhaps this isn’t entirely fair on Rooney: chess, logic, and debate are more clearly the organising themes of the book. And they’re especially good metaphors for all of her books, which have featured tight units of desperate people, engaged in romance as if it were a game they somehow had to win. Intermezzo is much the same, reading like nothing so much as Rooney’s account of a chess match. The way characters manoeuvre to get what they want, while poring over their own motives. These character dyads are very much opponents, and Rooney writes them as though forced to chronicle every last rhetorical move.

This makes the novel absolutely infuriating. And it brings me to the crux of Rooney’s wild success: that Rooney is indeed the perfect writer for our times, but that this may be a very sad thing for our times. For as good a writer as she often is, Rooney’s novels are stubbornly, even obsessively, about constructing ultra-realistic accounts of social behaviour between individuals in the 21st century. Rooney is consumed with psychology. So are her characters. Margaret, Sylvia, Naomi, and Ivan and Peter Koubeck are only the most recent in a long line of Rooney characters who are constantly musing about their own psychology, constantly searching for breakthroughs and finding that their insights don’t always bring them the peace and confidence they’re looking for.

This is wisdom on the part of Rooney, I must admit. She’s too smart and fine a writer to allow a character to have a revelation and then wrap it up, pat, in a nice truthy ribbon. She’s too cunning a psychological portraitist to let her characters off the hook. All are to blame, all are selfish, yet all need grace and compassion. One of the reasons people adore her books is, I imagine, because they would very much like to reach out and cradle these characters the way they, too, wish they could be cradled. I feel it when reading her books: an immense tenderness for these poor lonely people, the desire to help them because they remind me so much of me.

In this way Rooney is the great portraitist of the age — and that is precisely what depresses me. Because ours is an age so dreadfully and myopically concerned with its own psychology, often at the expense of everything else. What else but a self-obsessed culture would be so consumed with therapy as a substitute for life? The trouble with Intermezzo is just how little there ends up being in it besides this exhaustive play-by-play of human behaviour. In the narcissistic jail of contemporary life, Rooney is hardly a Prison Warden, yet neither is she a true accomplice in the escape. More like a priest on the eve of execution, there to dispense forgiveness but incapable of intervening in our ultimate doom. This is not to say she must intervene: there’s nothing Rooney ought to be doing, if we’re to regard literature as free in any meaningful way.

But there is, I think, a failure to interrogate the deeper myths which her books have all come up against, and skated over. This isn’t unique to Rooney — she’s merely in the position of most exemplifying it, because she’s become so adept at realising the minutiae of our contemporary psyches. The first of these myths is the most contemporary one. Our culture is fundamentally still reeling from the introduction of the idea of the Blank Slate, somewhere during the Enlightenment, after aeons of belief in essential nature. It’s there in contemporary gender theory, just as much as it is in the Silicon Valley techno-utopians transforming themselves into efficiency-machines. It’s the myth that at bottom we are infinitely changeable — that there is no bottom, really. Only the infinite input of senses, into an empty box.

Early in Intermezzo this rears its head in Peter’s monologue, as he muses about “classical conditioning”. It haunts the rest of the book. Isn’t it all just conditioning? Isn’t it all just bodies cajoling, persuading, conforming to other bodies, atoms colliding blindly in the dark? Yet in our world, this myth has become inseparable from another: that of the passing away of Nature. Just as we are watching a planet slowly dying because of our technological progress, so we’re trying to choke ourselves of any sense that there is a similar Human Nature — any set of instincts, beauties, or talents which are mysteriously inherent, or inheritable. We’re not sure which to hate more: the idea that there is something inherent in us, or the idea that there is not.

However, what lingers at the edge of Rooney’s fictions, and of all our contemporary fictions, is something deeper and stranger. Something we can’t quite seem to give ourselves up to. In Rooney’s work, it’s generally there in her allusions to the Catholicism of her native Ireland, and it buzzes around the boundaries of her work. In Beautiful World, Where are You, it was Alice and Eleanor’s conversations about Jesus, their wonderment at their perfect and pious friend Simon. In Intermezzo it resurfaces: Ivan or Margaret or Peter will think briefly about Jesus, about God, about bigger plans. But they will, like Rooney does, come just shy of admitting that there’s some more transcendent thing at play. This is the predicament of so much mundane fiction today: it insists that we must be concerned with the real world of practical socio-political problems, yet largely exiles the imagination, the capacity of fiction to open up the world for play.

There’s a logical paradox to the Blank Slate, which I’m sure Rooney herself would appreciate. If all we are is what our senses take in, then where does the capacity to compare things come from? How do we choose what to focus on? There must be something innate that can tell one sense from another. But this is a hard thing to accept. Rooney’s best quality is that she wants to take the confusing questions of nature vs. nurture head on. The issue is that she has chosen a very predictable form of fiction, all about the question of whether characters can change or not. Her project is to map out the webs of motives and reasons that drive her characters’ psychologies, but this only ends up reproducing the worst patterns of our contemporary self-absorption.

As in real life, her characters’ psychological revelations are Russian nesting dolls: self-discovery is ultimately as good as repression for continuing to lie to oneself, which is what her characters are continually doing, even as they confess their sins to one another. As a portraitist of our age, Rooney is at least wise enough not to say that this is the end of the story. Her books always wrap up at the moment her characters finally collapse and admit their problems. And this is a fine and ancient project for a book, to take characters from alienation to reconciliation. But in Rooney’s language, in the language of behaviour alone, it ends up looking conspicuously like therapy. And to paraphrase something the great prophet of modern narcissism, Christopher Lasch, once said: a narcissist is someone who can survive infinite therapy.

Since then, writers from the Right, Left, and centre have all offered appreciative reassessments of his work, again focused mainly on The Culture of Narcissism and Revolt of the Elites. A third book, however, published 40 years ago this year, has received comparatively less attention.

The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times was framed by Lasch as a follow-up to Culture of Narcissism; his aim, in part, was to correct a widespread misapprehension that his 1979 bestseller had amounted to a secular “hellfire sermon” — as the New York Times review put it — castigating the moral failings of his contemporaries. Then-president Jimmy Carter, who invited Lasch to the White House to discuss the book, seemed to have read it this way. To Lasch’s frustration, he relayed what he took to be the book’s thesis in his famous “malaise” speech when he declared: “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

In the opening pages of The Minimal Self, Lasch assured his readers that, to the contrary, they would “find no indignant outcry against contemporary ‘hedonism’, self-seeking, egoism, indifference to the general good — the traits commonly associated with ‘narcissism.’” His complaint that his diagnosis of a “culture of narcissism” had been misused as “a journalistic slogan that merely restates moralistic platitudes in the jargon of psychoanalysis” holds true for many recent repurposings of his work, whether it is liberals decrying Trump as “narcissist-in-chief” or conservatives citing Revolt of the Elites while ridiculing pampered Left-wingers. What is too often absent is the dimension of Lasch’s work that avoids the satisfactions of indignation and instead invites us to understand those we find contemptible — and the deep sources of our own contempt.

Our increasing “concern with the self”, Lasch explains in The Minimal Self, “takes the form of a concern with its psychic survival”. The issue with the contemporary narcissist, in other words, isn’t that he demands too much, but too little. “Under siege,” Lasch wrote, “the self contracts to a defensive core, armed against adversity.” This “minimal or narcissistic self,” he goes on, “seeks both self-sufficiency and self-annihilation: opposite aspects of the same archaic experience of oneness with the world.” The underside of what looks like narcissistic grandiosity is an implacable “sense of inner emptiness”.

The error of the “moralistic indictment of ‘consumerism’”, Lasch argued, was the failure to see it “as part of a larger pattern of dependence, disorientation, and loss of control”. This pattern derives from the fundamental modern restructuring of social, economic, and political life into systems far too vast for anyone to comprehend, much less exert any control over. Adrift in “a world of giant bureaucracies, information overload, and complex, interlocking technological systems vulnerable to sudden breakdown”. individuals have lost “confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and provide for their own needs”.

Liberal commentators trying to make sense of the 2016 election weren’t wrong to find in Lasch’s analysis of narcissism, as Dionne put it, “unflattering jolts of recognition about Trump himself — the lover of praise, the seeker after friendly audiences, the creator of a world in which he is always at the centre”. But too often, they fell into the moralising Lasch strove to avoid in their treatment of the President and of his followers, whom they framed as grasping, self-absorbed white men wounded by their declining power and privilege — a theme most recently reiterated in the controversial book White Rural Rage. The issue isn’t that there’s nothing whatsoever to this description: rural whites, like other demographics, are indeed reeling from what Lasch called the “diminishing expectations” of the present era, as is evident in the rise of deaths of despair. But the moralising accusation of narcissism obscures the deeper sources of such collective pathologies, as well as the extent to which the accusers exhibit comparable symptoms.

A less selective reading of Lasch helps to account for what many pundits take to be the great enigma of the 2024 election cycle: how is it that a man assailed by trials and scandals that would have long since tanked the career of many politicians before him retains a lead in most polling? The answer is that the once-and-possibly-future “narcissist-in-chief” dramatises more vividly than any other public figure the beleaguered condition of the self under present conditions. His enduring hold on his followers, as well as his ability to broaden his appeal to demographics previously claimed by his rivals, speaks to the general retreat of more aspirational political sensibilities in favour of what Lasch called “the imagery of victimisation and paranoia, of being manipulated, invaded, colonised, and inhabited by alien forces”. Trump’s key achievement, in this regard, is simply survival — in the face of the overwhelming forces arrayed against him.

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That the “survivalist” vision identified by Lasch four decades ago extends far beyond Trump and his supporters can be seen in the way his most fervent opponents appeal to it as well. Upon his election in 2016, they published endless guides to “surviving Trump”, and we can be sure this genre will be revived in the event of a second term. As an ACLU official recently told The Atlantic: “All we must do is survive four years.” And yet, because his liberal opponents are busy casting Trump in the role of would-be dictator, they often can’t see why many who share their general feeling of besieged helplessness might appreciate a figure who seems to withstand a constant onslaught by his enemies with verve and humour.

It isn’t surprising that Lasch’s sobering vision was forgotten until recently. The same year The Minimal Self appeared, Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign ran one of the most famous ads in the history of presidential contests: “Morning in America.” The ad boasted of Reagan’s record of taming inflation and lowering interest rates, declaring that “our country is prouder and stronger and better”. Reagan went on to win 49 states and, over the subsequent decade, America came out on top in the Cold War while its booming tech industry fuelled a new era of growth that consigned the dark years of “malaise” to oblivion. There was nothing minimal about America’s ambitions at the high point of unipolar hegemony: rather than a retreat into pessimistic survivalism, at least up until the financial crash of 2008, the greatest risks facing the nation were overconfidence and overreach, from the housing bubble to the Global War on Terror.

Today’s Lasch renaissance, then, reflects a return to the bleak conditions the author evoked when he described how “American technology is no longer the most advanced; the country’s industrial plant is decrepit; its city streets and transport systems are falling to pieces”. Whether they promise to “make America great again” or to “build back better”, our leaders aren’t oblivious to this predicament. But when they encounter obstacles — the Deep State, congressional gridlock, or the many other abstract systems even the most powerful of us must contend with — it is far easier to retreat into the minimalist politics of survival and promise to fend off the feared enemy for a few more years. The indefinite perpetuation of this despondent state of affairs — and not the other spectres so often conjured up by political fearmongers of all stripes — is the gravest danger we face.

Lasch had an affinity for the common man. He made appeals to religion and tradition for moral guidance; he saw the family as a “haven in a heartless world”; he regarded a sense of pride in one’s hometown as essential for the community functioning of Middle America; and he called for a political economy wherein people would be able to access meaningful work that called them to a higher vocation. These visions never came to fruition during his lifetime. But that hasn’t stopped others from attempting to pick up the mantle. Today, his heirs can be found across the world — in the increasing trend towards homesteading and localism.

In The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Lasch argued that American culture had become increasingly addicted to instant gratification, which placed individual desires, unmoored by virtue-based cultural norms, above the flourishing of the common good. Fundamentally, he attributed this cultural rot to the idea of progress, which, he explained in Mass Culture Reconsidered two years later, is couched in the “refusal to acknowledge limits to human powers”, and ultimately “tears people out of familiar contexts and weakens kinship ties, local and regional traditions, and attachments to the soil”.

Over the past few decades, a growing movement of individuals and communities has embraced this idea — choosing to reject the dominant culture of consumerism and “progress” in place of homesteading and localism as functioning alternatives. Most of these people, I have suggested, are driven by a larger, more amorphous sense of risk, which I attribute to the trend of societal decline.

I recently interviewed a number of small-scale home producers in and around Chicago, and most appeared to be driven by a larger, more amorphous sense of risk and societal decline. There, I was as likely to find a rural second amendment libertarian as an urban progressive socialist. In certain cases, their distrust concerned government regulations and labelling schemes; in others, there was a general sense of uncertainty around industrial food production and corporate incentives toward profit-maximisation; still others had become fed up with the entire food system after attempting to resolve persistent health issues. Despite their divergent politics and backstories, they all shared an impetus to turn to home food production to gain some sense of control and self-sufficiency.

Cultural historian Morris Berman calls this Dual Process, or the ways in which people are forced to discover alternatives in the twilight of a waning civilisation. Berman suggests that as societal functioning breaks down — as it did in Ancient Rome — people find other ways to meet their basic needs. It is in this process of meeting those needs that individuals, usually unconsciously, develop parallel institutions that could end up developing into the society that succeeds the collapsing empire.

Homesteading is, in many ways, borne out of this sense of alienation. It involves, at its most basic, taking part in the home production of goods, such as rearing livestock, hunting, fishing, beekeeping and preserving foods. This was the common mode of living for most of human civilisation until the industrial revolution, but it didn’t disappear. Interest in home production returns in waves: as victory gardens during the Second World War; as the back-to-the-land-movement of Sixties and Seventies; and now as a new self-sufficiency movement spurred in part by the pandemic and the sense of disorder that followed the decline of urban life and global supply chain shocks.

Often, the individuals I spoke to felt drained by the meaningless work of “email jobs” and an ever-increasing treadmill of consumerism. Here, they channelled Lasch’s remark in The True and Only Heaven (1991) that “capitalism itself, thanks to its growing dependence on consumerism, promotes an ethic of hedonism and health and thus undermines the ‘traditional values’ of thrift and self-denial”. Through the act of homesteading, however, these individuals have started to flex their atrophied muscles by taking responsibility for their needs. Lasch argued that a distributed universal ownership over the means of production, both through household production as well as “small producers — farmers, artisans, master craftsmen, journeymen” were essential for a functioning republic.

In general, homesteaders seek to reduce their reliance on technology and other external systems that may one day prove unreliable. As a result, many are forced into a daily confrontation with the unfiltered messiness of nature through work with their hands, unmediated by screens or advanced tools. Lasch drew on thinkers such as William Morris in The True and Only Heaven, suggesting there is a fundamental dignity of labour in creative handicrafts, and a certain “pride of workmanship formerly associated with small-scale private ownership”. Juxtaposed with the wage labour of early factory life, or even rote spreadsheet work in a modern office job, the act of production in the home can be immensely satisfying.

Homesteading is by definition driven by an interest in self-consumption, which differentiates it from a commercial small farm. However, some home-scale producers do have budding cottage food businesses selling at farmer’s markets. The Smith Homestead in Mississippi, for example, started out with a small garden over health concerns and access to healthy foods, and now has a small operation selling hand-made soaps, candles, handicrafts and fresh foods locally. It is also quite common for these households to share or barter in informal economic exchanges. In that way, it becomes both an act of self-reliance and a way to make an accessible, meaningful vocation in the crafts of small-scale production in the home.

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It’s hardly surprising, then, that many homesteaders also advocate localism, whose goal is to build resilient and sustainable communities by prioritising local resources and production, and instilling a kind of civic pride of place and belonging. According to Lasch, what he calls “particularism” was an antidote to the progressive idea that we could or should love every citizen of the world in the same way we love the members of our families or communities. He pointed to people such as Willa Cather, who spoke to the particularities of place, attributing “Nebraska’s vigour and prosperity to the presence of Bohemian, Scandinavian, and German immigrants”.

Today, people engaged in homesteading seek a similar sense of belonging, something they feel has been robbed from them by the atomised society of the advanced economies they were born into. Take, for example, the recently published children’s poem “All the Ways You Can Stay“, by Wally Chamberlain, who grew up on a third-generation dairy farm in rural New England. Intended as a remedy to Dr Seuss’s “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!”, which encourages young adults to leave their hometowns for office work in the nearest metropole, Chamberlain offers:

“The barns they all lean, and the field’s overgrown.
Paint peels quicker on a house that’s not home.
It’s hard to see, but indeed is the truth,
That places will fade without memories and youth.
Yes places need people, and this one does too,
And maybe this place, and these people, need you.
Your family, your friends, these hills, and this town,
They’d not be the same, without you around.
So leave if you must, but perhaps not today.
Stop and consider all the ways you can stay.”

What this reveals is that, despite recent pearl clutching that homesteading is adjacent to “white supremacy” or localism is “blood and soil”, many engaged in these activities care not just about prioritising individual action, but also about building communities that champion ecological sustainability and decentralised power structures, including caring about hyper-local politics and informal economies. These people often come together to share knowledge, resources and support, creating networks that prioritise resilience and self-sufficiency. Roxanne Ahern of Happy Holistic Homestead, for instance, hosts a “swap and shop” a couple of times a year with neighbours where everyone exchanges clothes and other gently used items. Again, for Lasch in The True and Only Heaven, there is a power in informal networks developed by the Common Man, which can be the foundation for the “revival of active citizenship”.

Looking towards those experimenting in homesteading and localism, we might therefore gain some insight about the modern world engaging with the not-so-distant past — a time where relying on nature to scratch out a larger force was commonplace. Those who are seeking a fundamentally more meaningful existence, through the rejection of the false promises of technological progress and the embrace of the limits of nature, are showing us the glimmers of a path towards a life that could simultaneously begin to address our spiritual and economic woes.

Lasch spent his career documenting the tragedies and loss in industrial modernity. He wrote of “the decline of craftsmanship, the fragmentation of the community, the loneliness of the modern metropolis, the subordination of spiritual life to the demands of the market” — but never lived to see a fully embodied example of people celebrating “the goodness of life in the face of its limits”. If Berman’s Dual Process theory is correct, and we are firmly in a moment of civilisational decline, we are also in a moment of great promise and opportunity. Almost 30 years after he died, Lasch’s vision could soon become a much-needed reality.

Once upon a time, a fully realised person was something one became. Entailing education, observation, experimentation, and sometimes humiliation, “coming of age” was hard work. When the project succeeded, we developed a gradually richer understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a fruitful life. This ongoing project was halted only by death. Maturity was the result of accumulated experience (some of it dire) and much trial and error (both comical and tragic), helping explain why wisdom, as opposed to intelligence, was mostly the preserve of the old. We admired the “self-made man”, because character was a creation — one constructed often at great cost. Many a “character-building” adventure, such as joining the Army, was a trial by fire.

These days, discussion of “character” is largely relegated to fiction workshops and film reviews. Instead, we relentlessly address “identity”, a hollowed-out concept now reduced to membership of the groups into which we were involuntarily born — thereby removing all choice about who we are. Rejecting the passé “character building” paradigm, we now inform children that their selves emerge from the womb fully formed. Their sole mission is to tell us what those selves already are. Self is a prefabricated house to which only its owner has a key.

This is not an essay about transgenderism per se. Nevertheless, our foundational text is excerpted from Christopher Rufo’s September 2022 comment, “Concealing Radicalism”, which quotes adolescents from a TikTok video on gender assembled by Michigan’s education department:

“I am a triple threat: I’m depressed, anxious, and gay.”

“Last night at about 2am, I put in my bio that I identify as ‘agender’, which is different than non-binary because non-binary is like neither gender, right? Agender is like the grey area between genders.”

“Hi, my name is Elise. I’ve used she/her pronouns all my life. But recently, and for a while, I’ve been struggling with gender issues as well as a whole lot of other identity things. So, I finally gave in and ordered a [breast] binder for myself and it just came in today.”

“A rational observer might suspect,” Rufo notes, “that these youths are in a state of confusion or distress, but rather than explore this line of reasoning, the education department.,, promote a policy of immediate and unconditional affirmation.” He quotes Kim Phillips-Knope, leader of the LBGTQ+ Students Project: “Kids have a sense of their gender identity between the ages of three and five, so about the time that kids have language, they can start to share with us whether they’re a boy or a girl — usually those are the only things that they will identify as, because those are the only options we’ve given them.” He adds: “In response to a teacher who asked how to respond to a student in her classroom who claims to have ‘she/he/they/them’ pronouns, Amorie [a staff trainer] responded adamantly: ‘Go with what the kid says. They’re the best experts on their lives. They’re the best experts on their own identities and their own bodies.’”

I further submit: throwing kids who just got here on their own investigative devices — refusing to be of any assistance aside from “affirming” whatever they whimsically claim to be; folding our arms and charging, “So who are you? Only you know” — is child abuse.

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By Hadley Freeman

The idea that your psyche is set from birth is intrinsically deterministic and therefore grim. The vision it conjures is fatalistic and mechanical: all these traits are hardwired, and life involves winding up the clockwork toy and watching it totter across the floor until it runs into the wainscotting. If a newly emerged self already exists in its entirety, there’s nothing to do. In contrast to becoming, being is an inert affair.

We haven’t given these young people a job. Contemporary education strenuously seeks to assure students they’re already wonderful. Teachers are increasingly terrified of imposing any standards that all their wards will not readily meet, so everyone gets a gold star. The Virginia school district of the once-renowned Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology now aims for “equal outcomes for every student, without exception”. A pedagogical emphasis on student “self-esteem” became dislocated from “esteem for doing something” decades ago. Why should any of these kids get out of bed? No wonder they’re depressed.

Minors don’t know anything, which is not their fault. We didn’t know anything at their age, either (and may not still), though we thought we did — and being disabused of callow, hastily conceived views and coming to appreciate the extent of our ignorance is a prerequisite for proper education. Yet we now encourage young people to look inward for their answers and to trust that their marvellous natures will extemporaneously reveal themselves. With no experience to speak of and no guidance from adults, all that many kids will find when gawking at their navels is pyjama fluff. Where is this mysterious entity to whose nature I alone am privy?

There’s nothing shameful about being an empty vessel when you haven’t done anything and nothing much has happened to you yet. Telling children, “Of course you don’t know who you are! Growing up is hard, full of false starts, and all about making something of yourself. Don’t worry, we’ll give you lots of help” is a great deal more consoling than the model of the ready-meal self. We demand toddlers determine whether they’re “girls or boys or something in-between” before they have fully registered what a girl or boy is, much less “something in-between”. Placing the total onus for figuring out how to negotiate being alive on people who haven’t been given the user’s manual is a form of abandonment.

Adults have an obligation to advise, comfort, and inform — to provide the social context that children have none of the resources to infer and to help form expectations of what comes next.  Instead, we’re throwing kids helplessly on their primitive imaginations. The first time I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I clearly remember answering, “a bear”. I wasn’t trying to be a wiseass. I just wasn’t up to speed on the ambitions to which I was expected to aspire. Little wonder that kids are now “identifying” as cats. Next, they will be identifying as electric lawnmowers, and we will have asked for it.

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This notion of the pre-made self is asocial, if not anti-social. It separates personhood from lineage, heritage, culture, history, and even family. You are already everything you were ever meant to be, never mind where, what and whom you come from. But seeing selfhood as floating in a vacuum is a recipe for loneliness, vagueness, insecurity and anxiety.

By contrast, a self constructed brick by brick over a lifetime has everything to do with other people. The undertaking involves the assembly of tastes and enthusiasms, the formation of friendships and institutional affiliations, participation in joint projects, and the development of perceptions not simply of one’s interior nature but of the outside world. Character that is rooted in ties to other people is likely to be more solid and enduring. The elderly are most in danger of desolation when they’ve outlived their friends and relatives. Who I am partially comprises decades-long friendships, my colleagues, my fierce devotion to my younger brother, a complex allegiance to two different Anglophone countries, and a rich cultural inheritance from my predecessors.

In my teens, we employed the word “identity” quite differently. We thought having an “identity” meant not only being at home in our own skins, but also having at least a hazy notion of what we wanted to do with our lives. It meant connecting with the likeminded (I found kindred spirits in my junior-high Debate Club). An “identity” was fashioned less from race or sexual orientation than from the discovery of which albums we loved, which novels we ritually reread because they spoke to us, which causes we supported, which subjects interested us, and which didn’t. It meant figuring out what we were good at (I was good at maths, but in second-year calculus I hit a wall) and what we couldn’t stand (me, team sports). Identity was fused with purpose: I knew I was drawn to writing, the visual arts, and political activism (the latter making me rather tiresome).

We were as self-involved in our determination to be individuals as Gen Z, but that particularity was commonly assembled from the cultural smorgasbord of other people and what they’d thought and made: Kurt Vonnegut or William Faulkner, Catch-22 or The Winds of War, Simon and Garfunkel or Iron Butterfly, hostile or gung-ho positions on Vietnam. Naturally this is a version of identity subject to change. That’s the point. It’s supposed to change. I no longer listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

The self is not found but made, because meaning is made. Rather than be unearthed like buried treasure, meaning is laboriously created, often by doing hard things. I cringe a bit recalling the person I was in my twenties, because she represented an early stage of an ongoing project that I have modified much in the years since. My twenties were an early draft of a manuscript whose sentences I have revised, pruned, and qualified. Ideally, if I keep forcing myself to do hard things — take on the premise of a novel that at first I have no idea how to execute, move to still another country, cultivate new friendships — the later drafts of my eternally incomplete manuscript will be more captivating. I would arguably be a fuller person had I done the very hardest thing — having children — but as a not-half-bad second best, I have committed to a marriage of 20 years and counting and thus to a man who moors me. Only death will part us.

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Of course, in constantly reforming and refining who we are, we can lose aspects of ourselves from earlier drafts that we should have kept. I no longer dance alone for hours in the sitting room, and I miss that abandon. For years I crafted ceramic figure sculpture, and I’m not sure that substituting journalism as my primary side-line to fiction writing constituted an improvement. Towards the very end of our lives, many of us will drop pretty much every paragraph we ever added, and we’ll go from novel to pamphlet.

Nevertheless, given the choice I’d prefer to spend time with me in the present than with me at 35. I know more (although what I learn now has trouble keeping up with what I forget), my sense of humour is sharper, and rather to my surprise I’m humbler. I’ve more perspective; while that perspective is often bleak, that very bleakness — a gleeful bleakness — can be entertaining. I’m not as neurotic about what I weigh, and I am more generous, both in relation to contemporaries and younger aspirants. I’m less concerned with my professional status, and I think much more about death (which is torturous but intelligent). Some of this profitable evolution was effortlessly organic, but much has issued from a challenging career, the fruit of taking a big risk in my youth that’s paid off.

Clearly, some aspects of character, of self, are determined from the off. I’d never have become a nuclear physicist no matter how hard I tried. But the conventional “nature versus nurture” opposition still eliminates agency: you act mindlessly as whatever you were born as, or you are submissively acted upon. Where on this nature-nurture continuum does the object of all this theorising have a say in the outcome? I’m leery of venturing into the prickly no-go of sexual orientation. Yet while I’m open to the idea that some people are born gay, choices can affect what gets you off. We hear repeatedly from big consumers of online pornography that their tastes begin to change, and it takes more and more extreme videos to become aroused, until actual humans in real life will no longer do the trick. Watching porn is a choice. Even sexual proclivities exhibit some plasticity.

Following the modern script, 14-year-olds have learned never to say, “I’ve decided to be trans”, because all my friends are trans and I feel left out, but always, “I’ve discovered that I am trans”. This passive, powerless version of self has implications. We’re telling young people that what they see is what they get — that they already are what they will ever be. How disheartening. What a bore. Whatever is there to look forward to? Many victims of this formulation of existence, which apparently requires little of them besides all that being, must reach inside themselves and come up empty-handed. At the direction of the sort of educational authority Chris Rufo quoted above, they’ve undertaken a psychic archaeological dig, only to be left with a pit. So they feel cheated. Or inadequate. Convinced that they alone among their peers exhumed nothing but a disposable cigarette lighter.

By withholding the assurance, “Don’t worry about not knowing who you are; you’re just not grown up yet, and neither are we, because growing up isn’t over at 18 or 21 but is something you do your whole life through”, we are cultivating self-hatred, disillusionment, bewilderment, frustration, and fury. Young women often turn their despair inward — hence the high rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and cutting. Young men are more apt to project the barrenness of their interior lives onto the rest of the world and take their disappointment out on everyone else.

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In a trenchant essay last autumn, “Mass Shootings and the World Liberalism Made”, Katherine Dee seeks a deeper explanation for the mass murders committed by disaffected young men, whose blind rage and misanthropy now express themselves in the US at a rate of twice per day.  Gun proliferation, Dee claims, is not the core driver. Rather, “we have a nihilism problem”. The videos left behind by the Sandy Hook child killer Adam Lanza suggest a belief that “even if we could free our ‘feral selves’ from the shackles of modern norms, there would be nothing underneath. Just blackness. A great gaping hole. For many mass shooters, the only reasonable response to this hole is death — the complete extermination of life. Not just theirs.”

According to Dee, all these atrocities have hailed from “a world where everything revolved around the individual”. The result is narcissism, which “is expressed through our perpetual identity crises, where chasing an imaginary ‘true self’ keeps us busy and distracted. We see it in the people who use their phones and computers like they’re prosthetic selves, who are always there, but never present, gazing endlessly at their own reflection in the pond.”

An authentic sense of self commonly involves not thinking about who you are, because you’re too busy doing something else. It is inextricably linked to, if not synonymous with, a sense of meaning. Nihilism, an oxymoronic belief in the impossibility of believing anything, can prove literally lethal. Young men who feel no personal sense of purpose are inclined to perceive that nothing else has a purpose, either. They don’t just hate themselves; they hate everybody. In telling people who’ve been on the planet for about ten minutes that they already know who they are, and that they’re already wonderful, we’re inciting that malign, sometimes homicidal nihilism. Because they don’t feel wonderful. They’re not undertaking any project but, according to the adults, inertly embody a completed project, which means the status quo is as good as it gets — and the status quo isn’t, subjectively, very good.

Transgenderism may have grown so alluring to contemporary minors not only because it promises a new “identity”, but because it promises a process. Transforming from caterpillar to butterfly entails a complex sequence of social interventions and medical procedures that must be terribly engrossing. Transitioning is a project. Everyone needs a project. Embracing the trans label gifts the self with direction, with a task to accomplish. Ironically, the contagion expresses an inchoate yearning for the cast-off paradigm whereby character is built.

We should stop telling children that they’re the “experts on their own lives” and repudiate a static model of selfhood as a fait accompli at birth. Sure, some inborn essence is particular to every person, but it’s a spark; it’s not a fire. We could stand to return to the language of forming character and making a life for yourself, while urging teachers to exercise the guidance they’ve been encouraged to forsake.

As we age, we’re not only that unique essence in the cradle, but the consequence of what we’ve read, watched, and witnessed; whom we’ve loved and what losses we’ve suffered; what mistakes we’ve made and which we’ve corrected; where we’ve lived and travelled and what skills we’ve acquired; not only what we’ve made of ourselves but what we’ve made outside of ourselves; most of all, what we’ve done. That is an exciting, active version of “identity” whose work is never finished, full of choice, enlivened by agency, if admittedly freighted with responsibility and therefore a little frightening. But it at least provides young people something to do, other than mass murder or gruesome elective surgery.

When Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism in 1979, well into the post-war wealth boom that turbocharged the industrial era, he argued that narcissistic tendencies develop partially as a result of industrial society. He identified phenomena as disparate as the modern school system, sport, psychotherapy, advertising and consumer culture as playing a role in the development of widespread, unchecked narcissism. But he didn’t go far enough: it was a glut of energy resources that instilled in us the belief that we could control nature as if we were gods.

For decades, our standard of living in the developed world seemingly increased without end. The improbable access to energy coupled with crony capitalism turned wealthy societies into pure consumers, swallowing anything and everything the economy could imagine and manufacture. Our system was unrivalled in history. Our inner Narcissus was unleashed.

Two major trends influenced our narcissistic tendencies in this energy-rich universe: we developed personal meaning in consumption, turning what we wear, where we eat, and where we shop into our religion. Consumption became a signal of belonging in a world breaking apart any semblance of community.

We also developed a collective philosophy of progress that told us we have won history: we had conquered all the resource and material challenges of the past. We believed that our collective wealth as a species was only going to keep growing. No wonder, then, that progressivism, in its traditional sense, became the widespread political psychology exactly as the upward slope of oil consumption looked almost exponential.

These two widespread psychological outcomes unveiled the worst of our egocentric propensities. On the one hand: we identified with what we chose to consume, an inward-looking narcissism, displaying self-worth through ostensibly corporate fandom, a religion of the self. On the other, we displayed an optimistic faith in human limitlessness.

Fusing the two together, the abundance of cheap energy lumbered the developed world with a narcissistic psychosis. You can see this in everything from the overvaluation of an individual’s salary and power as measures of success to the denigration of caring roles and familial obligation. In each case, the focus is on the individual thriving while ignoring the interdependence that makes life possible.

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But look at the world today: the seemingly constant upward trajectory of humanity is faltering. On the far side of industrial development, we have begun to reach a peak — in affluence, in meaning, and now in access to resources and position. Increasingly, there is widespread social disorganisation and political dysfunction as our high-energy society reaches its material limits. Economic theorists call this the crisis of capitalism; energy analysts call it peak oil; social commentators call it the meaning crisis; Weber called it disenchantment; Marx called it alienation. Whatever we want to call it, we have fewer resources now and it is changing how we think.

According to relative deprivation theory, as individuals in a society achieve a certain level of affluence and sense of security, any lowering of that standard leads to a feeling of entitlement and a sensation of being robbed. Sociologists suggest this sense of loss can often foment social movements and result in society wide outbreaks of deviant behaviour.

But this general sense of malaise and unease has also created a widespread culture of victimhood. Similar to Lasch, who relied on the clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder to explain societal narcissism, I believe that these tendencies are manifested in borderline personality disorder, or BPD. The characteristics of BPD include a sense of paranoia, the feeling that you are on the receiving end of unfair treatment, and a sort of mental witch-hunt against the individual or group believed to be behind it.

The political factions we now see arising out of various forms of social disorder — environmental, economic, financial — demonstrate just this trend: a widespread cultural outbreak of borderline personality disorder, centring around victimhood. Just as the seemingly endless exploitation of cheap energy caused us to once see ourselves as gods, our now-dwindling resources have us seeing monsters lurking everywhere in the shadows.

Consider the class of overproduced elites, the neurotic radicals of our current era. Working on the assumption that cheap energy and growth would maintain its trajectory forever, our institutions oversaw the creation of more white-collar positions. But today, at the end of the hyper-industrial era, these positions are becoming scarce. And what follows is not just a sense of deprivation-fuelled entitlement, but also a kind of bitter in-fighting with victimhood as its currency.

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Take the madness of our universities as an example. Individuals prepare their whole lives to go into academia, only to graduate into a cratering job market with nearly-impossible-to-land positions. In certain fields, PhDs work for years as low paid adjuncts or postdocs, often moving around the country with young families in the hopes of one day finally landing a tenured position. But instead of recognising the end of limitless white-collar growth as the proximate cause, frustrated would-be academics turn to those gaining the limited positions as both the enemy and the cause. In a dark psychological twist, victimhood politics have now become a means to secure a scarce position.

Similarly, those suffering from clinical BPD have been known to use their sense of victimhood as a way to control situations or achieve desired ends — such as when privileged white women pretend to be women of colour, or when activists attempt to dethrone existing “privileged” elites under the pretences of racism, sexism or some other victimisation of underprivileged groups.

But while this trend might be most immediately apparent within leftist, or “woke”, identity politics, there is also a parallel strain of victimhood politics in something like the red-pill movement made up primarily of young men. Frustrated by the lack of healthy male role models, opportunities to experience coming of age rituals and meaningful work, these men have now turned to women as the proximate cause of their ills, like early-modern peasants blaming witches for their misfortunes.

They bemoan the gynocracy, haunted by memories of mothers and teachers who have controlled and scolded them throughout their lives. And as a result, they seek out strong and often toxic role models who feed into their victimised self-perception and encourage misogyny. Fundamentally, this is just the same kind of aggrieved politics as the derangement of late-stage liberalism: this is not the life I was promised, I must find a nearby scapegoat to pin the blame on.

These are just two examples from the Left and Right, but this broader culture of BPD is widespread and growing. Radical feminists blame men, ecomodernists blame Luddites, vegans blame ranchers, environmentalists blame climate change deniers — the list goes on. But while this culture is clearly unhealthy, it’s also a natural and understandable psychological response to the sense of powerlessness fostered by an increasingly constrained material world.

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The ultimate destination of this narcissistic fantasy is ridding the world of all its evildoers — a kind of gnostic apocalypse in which only the truly righteous will enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet this is the exact opposite of the cultural approach we’ll need to survive. In the previous era of increasing resources, we had the riches to increase our independence; we no longer needed one another to survive. Today, however, as resources and stability begin to wane, we must rely on one another again.

The antidote to the individualistic culture of narcissism created by the upswing of energy resources, as well as the culture of victimhood birthed by its painful downswing, is a culture of interdependence, an acceptance of limits, and a reliance on mutual care. Historically, humans living within material constraints were forced to rely on one another to get by, with some of the worst impulses of human nature constrained by mutual interdependence. Our greatest moderating force is the experience of being relied upon, and relying upon others.

Fossil fuels drove us all crazy: perhaps the collapse of man’s brief age of energy abundance can make us sane again.

Sounds like bad news, right? Perhaps. But it has always been this way. Historian Arthur Herman’s 1997 book The Idea of Decline in Western History describes declinism from its nineteenth-century origins in concepts of racial and intellectual degeneration to its late twentieth-century manifestations in the eco-pessimism of Al Gore and Ted Kacyznski. Herman’s major point — that theories of decline evolve in a dialectical fashion both with theories of progress and with competing theories of decline — is about as unexciting a perspective as any author can offer, so it should hardly come as a surprise that his work failed to stem the tide of warmed-over apocalyptic literature.

As a historian, I always regard with bemusement the various attempts at laying down universal “laws of history”, much less writing the history of the future. The former, even in the hands of individuals such as Peter Turchin or biophysicist Jared Diamond, seems too close to writing an adversarial legal memorandum: first you state the laws, then you fit the facts, which at any rate are always disputed. The latter is closer to fiction than to history, more interesting for what it tells us about an author than for the validity of its claims.

“The collapse of the world is a young man’s game,” Peter Karsten, my dissertation advisor, used to tell me, citing both the history of English property law — which historians F.W. Maitland and Frederick Pollock framed as a perpetual conflict between parents seeking to protect their estates and children interested in selling them to experience fleeting material pleasures — and his own experience as a young officer on a destroyer during the Cuban missile crisis. His point was: no matter how apocalyptic the times, life goes on, much as it always has, for good and (mostly) for ill.

Scattered along the stages of life’s way are, of course, a handful of catastrophic events, born of weather or war or whatever other time and tide-tossed horrors mankind must face. More common are tiny tragedies such as the closing of a family business, the diminution of a hometown, the untimely death of a breadwinner — all collapses of a sort, setting lives on downward trajectories, and sometimes difficult for even the sharpest minds to distinguish from broader trends that might actually imply planetary extinction or the “passing of a great race”, whatever those concepts would entail.

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The discourse of decline and collapse, then, plays out primarily on this personal level. For example, Peter Turchin first theorised “elite overproduction” as the source of societal collapse in his 2016 book Ages of Discord. But the idea that there were too many would-be elites floating around was at the front of my mind five years earlier, when I was applying for tenure-track history positions. And even after I secured one of these coveted jobs, the effort left me scarred; I came to regard the humanities as a dying field enthralled by mumbo-jumbo, an ember near extinction that served as a microcosm for the world itself.

Beyond the realm of the personal, at the level described by Herman, decline and collapse represent a topic with perennial appeal for public intellectuals and their publishers. Books on the subject are always among the best-selling releases in any given year: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Earth in the Balance, The Twilight of Democracy, The Democracy Trap, Democracy on Trial, Giving Up on Democracy, The Frozen Republic, The Selling of America, The Bankrupting of America, The Endangered American Dream, and Who Will Tell the People all appeared within a ten-year span between 1985 and 1995, during which time the United States continued to hold peaceful federal and state elections while my own household priorities were related to bare-minimum subsistence and survival.

It is simple enough to explain the public’s thirst for this material — personal setbacks of any sort can make a person feel as if the whole world is coming to an end. For public intellectuals, the incentives to produce it are irresistible. Predictions and forecasts are some of the easiest pieces to write, particularly if their reckoning is far enough in the future that their author can change directions if the winds begin to shift. And as Pierre Bourdieu noted in his essay “The Metamorphosis of Tastes”, intellectual work constitutes a field where supply — increased as colleges and universities graduate more would-be public intellectuals — creates its own demand. Elite overproduction of this sort might not serve as a bellwether for social unrest, as Turchin argues, but it represents a useful shortcut when determining how much writing will be published relating to the relationship between social unrest and elite overproduction.

After all, the prophets of decline rely heavily on the work that came before them. One of the most obvious genealogies runs from Friedrich Nietzsche, whose pioneering work in its expurgated, pro-German form prompted Oswald Spengler to write his own historical analysis of concepts like “race”, “blood”, and cultural creation in the West. Spengler in turn inspired Arnold Toynbee to produce an even longer series of works, which borrowed Spengler’s concept but welcomed the West’s gradual decline. All the while, everyone else was reading them in order to respond to their work, with a 1928 Time review of the second volume of Spengler’s The Decline of the West noting that “it was imperative to read Spengler, to sympathise or revolt”.

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When one views declinism at a far remove from its truth or falsity, its professional function becomes apparent: it is a fun and easy thing for intellectuals to argue about. These ideas become mere pieces on a chessboard, with the moves of the authors improved and refined over the course of their careers. This is not necessarily good or bad, but rather the nature of the marketplace of ideas.

However, this work, when consumed carelessly and in bulk, can exact a significant toll on members of an already-atomised society. Even sophisticated readers of decline and collapse literature find themselves reacting to it on the personal level — more personal than ever before in a society of extremely siloed “selves” and “identities” four decades past the “culture of narcissism” examined by Christopher Lasch. In such a world, even people far removed from poverty struggle to imagine their posterity. Millenarian fantasies of death and hellfire sell well when the people building society cease to imagine a future. The idea of the world ending in one’s lifetime certainly offers a romantic prospect for some melancholy souls.

But the world, even the world of recorded history, will likely outlast these naive notions. The Annales School of historical writing’s concept of the “longue durée”, with its emphasis on the impact of slow-changing factors such as geography and climate, offers a mature counterpoint to “histoire événementielle”, the event-driven historical approach that popular historians struggle to avoid, given the ease with which every minor political scandal or protest march can be laden with significance and transformed into a portent of the end times.

My own perspective on the matter aligns most closely with G.K. Chesterton’s, as articulated in his short essay “A Much-Repeated Repetition”. There, Chesterton noted that “although the life of man is a terrible thing at many times and in many places” and “he has much to put up with in any case”, he “has not to put with the horror of history repeating itself”. The future outcome of human history remained a mystery to him, but he was sure that tyrants laid to rest did not rise from the ground again like blades of grass. “In history a thing recurs,” he wrote, “but it never recurs quite exactly.” The story of mankind remained “literally a story: that is, a thing in which one does not know what is to happen next”, and thus a narrative in which one still has an active role to play throughout their lifetime.

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A heavy dose of declinism can ease an anxious mind by providing a compelling justification for passivity and quiescence, but this is also its most invidious side effect. Under its influence, one might sneer at small things you can do right now, focused interventions that can turn the tide of this or that event.

But we are never quite as powerless as we assume. For example, the campaign against critical race theory in education was largely the work of one man, Christopher Rufo. His efforts, love them or hate them, appear to have played a part in the outcomes of several 2021 American elections.

Mind you, victory or defeat in a process as mundane as an off-year election hardly means the end of world. But this, thank heavens, is precisely the point.

But now the kids are back in the public domain, in the form of Greta Thunberg and her ageing entourage. The future is back on the table. Our 95-year-old monarch has urged world leaders at COP26 to make sacrifices “not for ourselves, but for our children and our children’s children, and those who will follow in their footsteps”. The wrinklies gluing themselves to roads for Insulate Britain claim they want to “protect future generations everywhere”, while their nihilistic godparent Extinction Rebellion says its goal is “creating a world that is fit for generations to come”.

Yet none of this talk about future generations is really about children, or the future. Rather, it is better understood as a highfalutin form of presentism; the projection of a state of emergency into the years ahead, to provide moral cover for political and economic decisions made by global elites above the heads of their citizens. Forget the present day, and the choices of the current demos. All that matters is action — and the only people who can act are those with the power to do so. Otherwise, as Greta says, it’s all just “blah blah blah”.

Such rhetoric might be widespread. But it cannot mask the fact that questions such as what to do about climate change are ripe for democratic decision-making — particularly because they involve weighing up the costs and benefits of policy measures in the context of our lives today and our children’s tomorrow. Indeed, rather than engaging electorates in a long-term debate, we see a global elite hell-bent on wrapping up international commitments in a two-week conference, egged on by protesters demanding that they “talk less and do more”.

Unfortunately, this call to bypass citizens in the project of ‘the future’ has some appeal — not least among young people, who have been socialised into the idea that that democratic power counts for little, and that if they want change to happen, they need to look to those with the power to bring it about. “We can’t be the ones that will make that change, we can just show that it needs to happen,” a participant in the COP26 ‘school strike’ protests told the BBC, speaking to the infantilised assumption that meaningful solutions can only come from the top down.

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Implicit within this, climate activists express the sentiment of living in a ‘risk society’, in which human experience is framed by a magnified sense of threat and uncertainty, and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. The concept of risk society was theorised by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens in the late 20^th century, to capture an ‘end of history’ situation in which globalised modern threats render human agency obsolete. From this perspective, the problems confronting our society are insurmountable. When confronted with the threat of a climate emergency, to which the only possible solutions presented are swift, global, and significant measures, democratic decision-making by citizens in separate nation states seems ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst.

And yet our current state of crisis has exposed a contradiction in this denial of human agency. During the Covid pandemic, and now with the climate emergency, a fatalistic accommodation to the survivalist mentality of the risk society has accompanied a fantastically hubristic narrative offered by world leaders in politics, science, Big Tech and other globalised entities. An insistence on the unprecedented, super-infectious deadliness of Covid ran alongside proclamations that humanity could eradicate this virus; that, as in a war, we can win. With the climate emergency, however, overwrought claims of standing on the brink at “a minute to midnight” are offered as excuses for the idea that we can, in a few short years, stop the warming and turn the whole thing around.

What is offered, in this vision, is a ‘new normal’ starting from actions made today, designed to undo the damage caused by actions of the past and start again. It is a form of techno-survivalism that can only be achieved by citizens, acknowledging their powerlessness and demanding that elites use their power to make a change.

This situation was elegantly anticipated by Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist, in his 2011 book Collateral Damage. Discussing the “divorce between power and politics”, Bauman noted that “the discrepancy between available means and postulated objectives of action takes the form of a perpetual confrontation between politics afflicted by a chronic deficit of power, and power freed from politically imposed limitations”.

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Bauman suggests that in our perpetual state of global emergency, the nation state is written off as insignificant, with national democracies either unfit, or incapable, of enacting the change that needs to happen. Voters are consigned, by their chronic deficit of power, to shouting at each other on the sidelines, while global elites enjoy the freedom to do whatever serves their interests according to the mandate of saving tomorrow. While consent is marshalled, or manufactured, through the spectacle of campaigners demanding that political elites do whatever it takes, techno-survivalism offers an enormous opportunity for the powerful to exercise their interests.

And yet it also creates significant problems for the elites themselves. Take the interminable sleaze scandal dogging our Tory government. With a majority of 80, Boris Johnson’s lack of opposition, both in terms of its size and its ideas, combined with its extraordinary power grab over the course of the pandemic, has handed the Executive huge latitude to do whatever it likes — something for which it is now being punished with unflattering newspaper front pages every day.

If Bauman is right, and politics has ceased to count for anything meaningful, what does that mean in practice? Ultimately, in detaching themselves from the demos, our political elite has detached themselves from the means of working out what they should be doing. And this could ultimately be their downfall. As Christopher Lasch noted in The Revolt of the Elites, by isolating themselves from their societies, elites undermine the foundation of their legitimacy.

As much as they benefit from wielding their power, an untethered elite also finds itself buying into the fantasy that the world will keep turning without human agency — of any sort. But it clearly won’t. During the pandemic, initial ‘work from home’ orders were swiftly counteracted by a swathe of exceptions, as governments were forced to acknowledge that ‘essential’ jobs required people to do them; while later attempts to cajole the WFH crowd back to the office was met with a sullen resistance. Likewise, the ‘green revolution’ planned by COP26 can be imposed from above, but will require a buy-in, with people choosing to replace their cars and boilers while calculating what this means for the quality of their lives.

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As trust in politics declines, people find other means to exercise their interests; and these are less susceptible to mediation and control. For elites, legitimacy is the thing that enables them to retain authority. And that requires building a relationship with the past and present, rather than annihilating it in the name of ‘the future’.

Edmund Burke — hailed as an inspiration by the ‘intergenerational equity’ crusade — explained this rather well in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Society, he argued, should be understood as a “contract” to be looked upon with reverence, because it was not only about the needs of the present day. It is a “a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection”, which transcended the contribution of any particular generation, thus becoming “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”.

Yet today’s modern conservatives are guilty of a spectacular misreading. For them, the intergenerational contract can only be honoured by ripping up the past and legislating on behalf of the future. This free-wheeling power-grab might yield some short-term gains; but at some point, the wheels will come off. It won’t just be the future generations of the apocalyptic imagination that will bear the consequences, but those of us who are living with them right now.

Living in the Gilded Age, there were plenty of poor people for journalists to sympathise with — the streets were teeming with working-class Americans who had been cast out of the comforts enjoyed by the obscenely wealthy industrialists. You might think modern-day America — a new Gilded Age in which the gap between the rich and the poor is wider than it has been in living memory — would provide another such opportunity for American journalists to sympathise with the lower classes. You would be wrong.

Back in 2016, journalists, Democratic politicians and Never Trumpers struggling to comprehend how they lost the election came up with two competing explanations. One camp argued that it was a protest vote stemming from the economic anxiety and despair birthed by globalisation, stagnant working-class wages, and downward mobility for the shrinking middle class. The other camp argued that Trump’s supporters were simply racists.

Hillary Clinton was the rare figure to hold both views, immortalised in her infamous comment that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”. One might have expected that after Clinton lost the election, liberals would question the efficacy, if not the morality, of calling a quarter of the country racist.

Instead, they doubled down: it wasn’t just a quarter; it was half the nation. Everyone who voted for Trump was racist. By 2017, the very term “economic anxiety” had been branded a dog whistle for racism by some of the highest profile journalists in the country. So definitive was the racism explanation that during the 2020 election, the New York Times appears not to have run a single op-ed from a Trump supporter explaining their vote; how could the paper of record publish people who everyone knew were avowed racists?

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How did this happen? How did the journalists, thinkers, influencers and professional Tweeters who too often set the agenda for the nation — people who consider themselves on the liberal and progressive Left — manage to police out of existence the devastating effects of globalisation on the middle and working classes of all races? How did we allow the definition of racism to melt until it covered people — of all races — who found their lots slightly improved over the three years prior to the pandemic, a time when wages for the bottom 25% rose for the first time in a decade?

You have to be pretty far removed from the pinch of economic anxiety to confuse it with bigotry. And indeed, America’s media has undergone a status revolution over the past century.

Writing in the Nineties, Christopher Lasch observed that the Left had begun to portray the nation, the neighbourhood and even the commitment to a common standard as racist, as part of a larger attack on populism and abandonment of the working class. But in truth that shift was a long time coming; throughout the 20^th century, American journalism went from being a working-class trade to a highly educated caste.

As I chronicle in my new book, American journalism was born in the 19^th century of a populist revolution in the form of the penny press, which was explicitly produced by and for the labouring class. At the time, the newspapers in circulation existed solely for the political and business elites: they were prohibitively expensive, and contained shipping schedules, wholesale prices, speeches from Congress and other things that interested few except those whose livings were made in business or politics.

The cheap penny papers filled that gap in the market, and were soon impossible to ignore thanks to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who purchased them every day (catering to the lower classes has the benefit of there being so many of them, after all). From that moment, through the middle of the last century, journalism became a blue-collar job, one in which a journalist was as likely to not have a college degree as to have one.

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This is no longer the case. If a 1937 study found that fewer than half of journalists were college-educated and many hadn’t even finished high school, by 2015, 92% of American journalists had a college degree, a number that’s certainly even higher today. And college itself is no longer enough; to become a journalist today in a rapidly constricting industry, you have to go to the best colleges and take multiple unpaid internships in the most expensive American cities — where the vast majority of journalists remain.

But journalists today are not just more educated and progressive than the country at large; like other highly educated liberals, they have become increasingly affluent. As the local newspaper industry collapsed in the face of the internet, it squeezed those who made it to the top 10%, while dropping everyone else out. The fact that the starting salary of a digital media job is so low is not proof of the industry’s egalitarianism but of its exclusivity; who but the scions of the wealthy can afford to live in New York City or Washington, D.C. on $35,000 a year?

With a few exceptions, journalists along with the rest of America’s highly educated liberals now, by and large, belong to what the French economist Thomas Picketty calls a Brahmin Left. And as journalists became more highly educated and more affluent, they stopped writing for or about the working class. In its place, a moral panic around race and an obsession with causes once confined to academia — open borders, intersectionality, anti-racism, anti-Zionism — provided a convenient alibi for an elite that still sees itself as on the side of the little guy.

It’s not all on individual journalists, though. Journalists have for decades been more liberal than their fellow countrymen. But in the past, this liberalism was checked by their publishers, who were often the owners of large corporations, or Republicans, or both. They wanted their newspapers and their news stations to appeal to the vast American middle, which meant that journalists were not at liberty to indulge their own political preferences.

Then came the internet and with it the collapse of the local newspaper industry and the birth of a business model that was diametrically opposed to the goal of getting the widest circulation. Success is now rated in terms of engagement rather than circulation or ad revenue. And the best way to achieve this is to build a niche audience — more often than not, a highly educated, highly affluent, highly liberal niche audience who use the politics of identity to mask their success.

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In other words, the media’s moral panic around race in America and the abandonment of the working class go hand in hand, like a photo of Angela Davis on the cover of the New York Times’s T Magazine and a Cartier ad on the back; like affluent liberals in New York’s most expensive neighbourhoods demanding we defund the police amid a historic rise in murder taking place in neighbourhoods just ten blocks away; like American Express hosting diversity, equity and inclusion training sessions in which the facilitator tells employees that capitalism is racist.

This perfect alignment of journalistic and corporate interests is one of the great ironies of the progressive culture war. It makes individual journalists feel like heroes while making their bosses and shareholders (and themselves) even richer.

Of course, the racism of state actors remains a problem in need of urgent repair; police brutality, for example, remains a scourge on communities of colour. But the racial moral panic obscures — and therefore perpetuates — the real divide separating America into two groups: an economic and cultural one, a giant and ever-growing chasm separating the college educated from those they disdain.

And therein lies the real tragedy: the liberal news media has abandoned the working class, allowing conservative outlets to swoop in and cater to them. The conservative media may not do much to help the economic fortunes of the downwardly mobile, but at least it doesn’t sneer at the working class while abandoning them economically.

That, ultimately, is the story of today’s national media landscape in a nutshell: with few exceptions, it is waging a moral panic around race to disguise the abandonment of the working class — and it’s getting rich off of it.

It seems intuitively obvious, almost tautological, to say that we live in a “therapeutic culture”. Even if we no longer speak of our id or superego, our everyday language is filled with pop-psychiatric jargon — trauma, grief, and abuse; narcissism and “borderline personality” and PTSD. When Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described her experience during the January 6 riot to her followers on Instagram, she spoke of her “trauma” and her status as a “survivor” of sexual assault, while accusing Republicans who downplayed the event of using the “tactics of abusers”. Not that she’s alone: the conservative Daily Signal has accused AOC herself of “gaslighting” the public over rising crime rates.

But Rieff’s point was not merely that we had come to view ourselves in therapeutic terms, supplanting older moral and religious modes of evaluation. He was making an argument about the wider implications of this shift in perspective — a shift that he considered to be, without exaggeration, the most important cultural development in the West since the Enlightenment. Indeed, Rieff saw it as nothing short of an apocalypse. Modern therapeutic culture, in his view, had become what he called in his later writings an “anti-culture”: a negation of the very idea of culture that, because it set itself in opposition to everything that had traditionally given human lives meaning, was inherently unstable. It could not reproduce itself indefinitely, and would be succeeded, Rieff predicted, by barbarism and chaos.

Although chiefly remembered today for his brief marriage to Susan Sontag, Rieff was a brilliant, if idiosyncratic, thinker who developed a strange and powerful critique of modern culture. Born in Chicago, in 1922, to Lithuanian-Jewish parents, he flirted with Marxism in his early years — during World War II, he was surveilled by the FBI as a potential subversive —  before shifting his attention to Freud. His first book, 1959’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, was a popular success that offered a revisionist account of Freud arguing for his importance as the premier cultural theorist of modernity.

The Triumph of the Therapeutic appeared seven years later, in which Rieff examined Freudian psychoanalysis by contrasting it with the theories of three of his “successor-critics”: Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung, and D.H. Lawrence. Each of these three, Rieff argued, recognised that Freud had dealt a near-fatal blow to traditional religious morality but were unsatisfied with his refusal to construct a new ethical system in its place; each, in their own way, sought to use the techniques of therapy to create a new surrogate faith. Triumph was also the first glimpse of the polemical anti-modernism that would characterise Rieff’s later work. Though he continued to affect a pose of scholarly detachment, he was clearly disturbed by the apparent victory of the Freudian worldview. As the social critic Norman O Brown, a fan, said of the book: “instead of souls we have neuroses, instead of sacraments we have shows.”

Rieff’s later work would prove reactionary, hermetic, and sparse. In 1973, he published Fellow Teachers, a jeremiad against the counterculture and what he considered to be the degradation of the “sacred” institution of the university. It won a handful of admirers, including Brown and George Steiner, but it was too strange for anything like mass appeal. Rieff subsequently retreated from public life for the remainder of his career. He taught, published little, and concentrated on research for a magnum opus in which he hoped to give a systematic account of his theory of human culture. He eventually abandoned the project and passed what he had completed over to former students. The results were finally published as the trilogy Sacred Order/Social Order, the first volume of which, My Life Among the Deathworks, came out in 2006, the year of Rieff’s death.

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Thanks to the cryptic style in which it is written, Sacred Order/Social Order is a tremendously difficult work to read — one critic compared it to “chewing ball bearings; every once in a while there is a cherry”. In it, Rieff does, finally, offer something like a schematic for his theory of culture, delivered in strange expository passages sandwiched in between his close readings of “deathworks”, the sociologist’s term for the modern works of art and literature (Joyce, Kafka, Nietzsche, etc.) which have served to naturalise what he considered to be the therapeutic rebellion against authority.

All societies, in Rieff’s telling, are sacred, in that they point to an authority beyond themselves. The task of “culture” is to “transliterate otherwise invisible sacred orders into their visible modalities — social orders”. This “transliteration” occurs by rendering the moral commandments given in advance by a culture’s highest authority — God, in the case of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim civilisation; the primitive vitality of nature in the case of classical pagan civilisation — into terms that people can understand and internalise, so as to regulate their behaviour in line with their culture’s conception of good and evil. Ensuring that this transliteration takes place is the task of the cultural elite (or “officer class”), who control both the character-forming institutions and the symbolic language through which commandments are expressed within the secular world.

Rieff believed that the commandments of sacred authority always come originally and primarily in the form of “interdicts”, or prohibitions — “Thou shalt not” sleep with your mother or covet your neighbour’s wife. “No” comes before “yes,” and “no” is the ultimate origin of culture. It is only by first restricting the legitimate range of behaviours, and in particular the expressions of instinct or libidinal energy, that cultures can be said to operate on their members. Culture is repression.

Why did Rieff consider repression primary? As Antonius AW Zondervan explains in his excellent Sociology and the Sacred, Rieff came to this idea through his study of Freud. In Freud’s theory, repression is triggered when an idea is so intolerable or offensive that it would cause the conscious self — the ego — immense psychic distress to become conscious of it. But, Rieff asked, intolerable or offensive to what? Initially, Freud might have answered: to the superego, the part of our psyche that represents internalised social morality. But, Rieff pointed out, Freud later came to believe that repression was not merely a function of superego prohibitions but could also be triggered by an unconscious part of the ego itself.

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How a 1990s book predicted 2020

By Ed West

Rieff thought Freud’s admission — of the existence of an unconscious ego repressing intolerable thoughts — should revolutionise our understanding of the psyche. It meant that the “interdicts” are not merely “social morality” but are sunk so deeply into the structure of the self as to effectively constitute it; they are what shape a formless mass of instincts into a person. They represent a primal, unconscious morality whose origin Rieff traced to the sacred commandments at the heart of our culture’s religious tradition. We can obey or transgress them but never abolish them.

All this may seem quite esoteric, but it is important for understanding Rieff’s account of therapeutic culture. The modern West, in his telling, is the first culture in history that has attempted to deny the legitimacy of the interdicts and to live without some form of sacred authority. Therapy is our means of getting away with this denial. The therapeutic ethos teaches us to overcome the guilt and shame, especially around sexuality, prompted by what we have come to regard as the unrealistic, unhealthy, and oppressive moral prohibitions inherited from Christianity. But because, for Rieff, these prohibitions are a core part of our psyche, therapeutic culture can only ever lead to their transgression or negation, never to their genuine overcoming. He believed, for instance, that sexual liberation was seen as a positive ideal purely because it transgressed the inherited Christian virtue of chastity. It was good because it was the opposite of what our religion used to teach; it had no positive value in itself.

Indeed, this is how Rieff came to understand our culture war. He believed that the Western elite had abdicated its responsibility to continue transmitting moral commandments, instead embracing an ethic of liberation and transgression designed to free themselves from the too-strict demands of the interdicts. But because this cultural shift had penetrated deeply only among elites, the result was a constant war between the “officer class” and the population at large, who still clung to a basically traditional conception of the moral order. Elite cultural output — both the modernist high art that Rieff analysed and the pop culture of our own day — had become a series of “deconversion therapies” attempting to train the lower classes out of their supposedly primitive superstitions, which in his telling were actually the vestiges of a sacred impulse toward transcendence.

For Rieff, of course, such efforts were doomed to failure. Even if the therapeutic elite succeeded in loosening the hold of the interdicts, they could not create new ones because their moral codes referred to no transcendent authority. Injunctions to be nice and rational, or not to be a “shitty person”, simply cannot burrow their way into our unconscious selves in the same way as commands from God. But without these commands to bind us together into a “saving larger self”, we are subject to persistent existential unease — a small, nagging sense that there should be something more to life, some higher meaning, than earning money and consuming sensory experiences. Indeed, to live according to the therapeutic ethos is, according to Rieff, to deny our nature as human beings. We crave the limitations, and the clarity and meaning, provided by a genuine authoritative culture, and we cannot live without them indefinitely.

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Rieff’s is a strange sort of counsel. As both Christopher Lasch and George Scialabba have noted in essays about his work, he is an atheistic defender of the social and existential necessity of religion; Brown compared him, with some justice, to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, armed with the tools of psychoanalysis rather than Catholic dogma. Others might be inclined to place him alongside Oswald Spengler as a blackpilled mystic of Western decline.

But it is hard not to notice certain resonances between Rieff’s doomsaying and some of the stranger political developments of our own time. On the Left, the rise of wokeness or “cancel culture” can be read as the expression of a longing, among the children of our therapeutic culture, to revive some idea of Good and Evil, to erect taboos and restrictions and impose a new moral order. On the Right, the cultural and intellectual energy is with those who, whether they speak in religious terms or not, denounce the “degeneracy” of the modern West and long for a restoration of traditional authority. Even something as strange as the QAnon conspiracy theory expresses something of the primitive religiosity Rieff believed was built into our psyches: faced with a world they believe is out of joint, Q believers posit an elite cabal guilty of one of the few crimes, paedophilia, for which the old interdicts retain their full force. And that is to say nothing of the results of America’s efforts to transplant therapeutic culture into Afghanistan.

Rieff predicted that the logical endpoint of therapeutic culture was an orgy of violence — “Immediately behind the hippies stand the thugs,” as he wrote in Fellow Teachers. Such an orgy is still nowhere on the horizon. But I suspect we should take seriously his suggestion that somewhere deep in our minds is a longing for, or at least a receptivity to, the demands of the sacred, which also happen to be the one thing that our culture seems genuinely comfortable repressing. And as good therapeutics, we can always count on the return of the repressed.

Despite appearences, Cryptofash — his pseudonym mocks the tendency of online leftists to accuse their critics of “cryptofascism” — is not your typical Right-wing internet troll. He’s a Marxist who regards “leftism” as the ideology of bourgeois supremacy, the twenty-first-century equivalent of the classical liberalism that Karl Marx spent his mature years attempting to demolish. “My critique focuses on the Left,” Cryptofash writes in one of his periodic straight tweets, “not because they are worse than the Right, but because they are better than the right at precluding proletarian class consciousness.”

Cryptofash is one of the more visible members of a political tendency known as the “post-Left”, the latest in the endless stream of new and strange ideologies thrown up by social media. Although professing commitment to traditionally Left-wing goals such as anti-capitalism, the post-leftists are defined mostly by their aggressive hostility to both the Democratic Party and the radical Left — including the Democratic Socialists of America and the academic-literary Left of magazines such as Jacobin, n+1 and Dissent.

Aside from Cryptofash, other leading lights include What’s Left? co-hosts Aimee Terese and Oliver Bateman, editor of The Bellows Edwin Aponte, the Irish writer Angela Nagle and a coterie of pseudonymous Twitter accounts, such as @ghostofchristo1. Red Scare co-hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova might be considered fellow travellers.

The core assertion of the post-Left is relatively simple: The real ruling class in America is the progressive oligarchy represented politically by the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, the media, the upper layers of the national security state and federal bureaucracy, and of highly educated professionals in general. The Republicans, however loathsome, are largely a distraction — a tenuous alliance between a minority faction of the ruling class and petit bourgeois.

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Effectively incapable of governing outside the bounds set by the Democrats and Democrat-aligned media, corporations, NGOs and government bureaucracies, the GOP’s real function is to serve as a sort of ideological bogeyman. By positioning itself as the last line of defence against phantasmic threats of “fascism” and “white nationalism” coming from the Right, the ruling class is able to legitimise its own power and conceal the domination on which that power rests.

Leftists, in this telling — whether Ivy League professors or Antifa militants on the streets of Portland — are thus little more than the unwitting dupes of the ruling class. However much they profess to hate the Democratic Party, they are, in practice, its running-dog lackeys. They support the party electorally, harass and cancel its designated enemies and enforce pro-Democrat ideology in the media, academia and the workplace. Crucially, they also help maintain the permanent state of moral emergency that serves as a pretext for the expansion of ruling class power, whether in the form of the increasingly direct control that tech monopolies wield over political discourse or the pursuit of Covid policies that transfer wealth upward and subject workers to a dystopian regime of medical surveillance.

At the core of this diagnosis is the idea that “identity politics”, “antiracism”, “intersectionality” and other pillars of the progressive culture war are mystifications whose function is to demoralise and divide the proletariat.

Similar criticisms have been made by Left-wing writers such as Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels, but whereas these “class-first” leftists tend to regard “identitarianism” as a liberal deviation from authentic leftism, the post-leftists regard the idea that there still is a radical Left meaningfully distinct from the Democrats as meaningless. And because post-leftists see the Democrats, and by extension the Left, as their primary enemy, they have no problem engaging and even entering into provisional alliances with the populist Right, especially on cultural issues. Hence the right-wing memes.

Of course, the post-leftists operate at varying levels of coherence and theoretical sophistication, and most of them have produced far more in the way of podcasts and tweets than sustained considerations of political theory. (Cynically, one might say they are less of a “tendency” than a Twitter clique centered around Aimee Terese.) But it would be a mistake to dismiss it altogether on those grounds — the Dirtbag Left’s Chapo Trap House podcast, after all, has played an outsized role in the revival of millennial socialism, and it is always difficult to predict which of today’s shitposters will be setting the tone of the culture five years from now.

For one thing, the post-Left channels powerful currents of Marxist and post-Marxist critique that have been downplayed or forgotten during the “Great Awokening” and the recent socialist renaissance: from Amadeo Bordiga’s communist hostility to “anti-fascist” collaboration with the bourgeoisie to Christopher Lasch’s early writings about the medical-therapeutic state as a tool of class domination.

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But perhaps the most obvious spiritual predecessor to the post-Left is the Italian-American philosopher Paul Piccone, the founder and long-time editor of the critical theory journal Telos and another Marxist who eventually left the Left only to find himself in a strange alliance with the Right.

Piccone began his career as a disciple of Herbert Marcuse and proponent of his theory of “one-dimensionality”, which held that capitalism had advanced to such a degree in the West as to effectively abolish all opposition to itself. With the proletariat co-opted by consumerism, radicals, in Marcuse’s view, should instead look for resistance from racial minorities and other outcasts who had yet to be integrated into the system.

But by the late 1970s, Piccone, reacting to the failures of the New Left, had broken with Marcuse. He began to argue that the new social movements that Marcuse had perceived as expressions of anti-system negativity had in fact been forms of what Piccone dubbed “artificial negativity” — pseudo-radical protest movements generated by the system itself.

Piccone agreed with Marcuse that by the mid-20^th century, capitalism had triumphed over all internal resistance. But he believed that because the system required such resistance in order to periodically restructure itself and avoid stagnation, it had begun to manufacture its own controlled opposition. He interpreted the initial Civil Rights movement, for instance, as a product of the system’s need to “rationalise” the segregated labour market of the South, after which it seamlessly transitioned to promoting black nationalism in an “attempt to artificially reconstitute an otherness which had long since been effectively destroyed”. The allegedly radical protest movement against the Vietnam War had, similarly, merely allowed an evolving US capitalist class to abandon an imperial quagmire that had become obsolete.

Indeed, Piccone grew so pessimistic about the “artificial” nature of Western leftism that he spent much of the rest of his career seeking out extant pockets of, and resources for cultivating, “organic negativity” — his term for social practices and political formations that genuinely stood outside the logic of the system. Some of these he found on the far-Right, in the regionalism of the Italian Lega Nord, the anti-liberal political theory of Carl Schmitt, the paleoconservatism of Paul Gottfried and Samuel Francis, and the right-wing “identitarianism” of Alain de Benoist. Such explorations, or flirtations, were justifiable because, in Piccone’s view, nearly all of what passed for radicalism in the mature societies of the West was pseudo-radicalism that ultimately served capitalist interests. 

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Although Piccone could be more than a bit conspiratorial, it is not hard to see how his “artificial negativity” thesis could be applied to a great deal of the officially sanctioned cultural radicalism of today, which may help to explain why ideas similar to his are beginning to resurface. One can also point to the experience of leftists during the Trump years who found themselves corralled into an anti-Trump popular front that had them allying with not only centrist Democrats but also Never-Trump Republicans, including many of the architects of the Iraq War.

Bordiga had famously argued against this sort of broad-based “anti-fascism”, which he warned would “breathe life into that great poisonous monster, a great bloc comprising every form of capitalist exploitation, along with all of its beneficiaries”, and this is indeed what happened — socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, initially popular for their opposition to the “corporate” establishment of the Democrats, ultimately fell in line behind the party’s leadership and urged their followers to do the same.

The Trump years also revealed something about the nature of power in the United States that, once seen, is difficult to unsee. For all the warnings that Trump would turn out to be Hitler, he in practice turned out to be more like Berlusconi — a vulgar entertainer with a sordid personal life who in most respects ended up governing like a normal politician.

What happened on the other side of the aisle was more subtle but also, in the long run, more sinister. We saw the national media collaborating with shadowy intelligence agents and researchers to launder a conspiracy theory about Russian collusion and, later, employ the same playbook to block Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan. We saw constant media-generated and wealthy NGO-funded campaigns against racism and sexism welded to the electoral priorities of the Democrats. We saw “Critical Race Theory”, a crude ideological rationalisation of the Democrats’ coalitional logic, elevated to the level of quasi-official religion. We saw Twitter suspending The New York Post for publishing embarrassing information about Joe Biden’s son in the run-up to the election and payments processors such as PayPal partnering with progressive NGOs to monitor their customers and report “extremists” to law enforcement.

In short, we saw the consolidation of a near-unified ruling class bloc explicitly aligned with the Democratic Party against the potential disruption of Trump. This development has already created a host of strange new political alliances. If it holds, we should not be surprised if more than a few anti-capitalist radicals begin to reassess who their real enemies are.

How things have changed. The US and UK have vaccinated most of their populations and are reopening. Australia, on the other hand, is doing worse than ever. Last Saturday, the country broke its 2021 daily record for Covid-19 case numbers, despite roughly 60% of the population living under a strict lockdown.

International borders are still shut to all but 3,000 weekly arrivals, keeping more than 38,000 citizens stranded abroad. Meanwhile, internal borders between Australia’s states and territories closed 120 times by the end of last month. Australia is effectively fragmented into eight different countries, each with its own hard borders.

And so Australians are left with one question on their lips: when will this end? The bleak answer, at least according to the Government’s pandemic exit strategy, is not anytime soon. According to the plan, lockdowns will no longer be required when 70% of Australia’s adult population is vaccinated, and borders will reopen when 80% of adults are vaccinated. At present, however, thanks to a shortage of Pfizer jabs — combined with mixed messages from the Government and health officials regarding the safety and efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine — only 20% of Australia’s adult population is fully vaccinated (compared to 75% in the UK). Relief for beleaguered Australians is therefore months away, even under the most optimistic scenario.

How has lockdown become so acceptable in Australia, a country where the seven-day average for Covid-19 deaths sits at just two? The answer, I suspect, is because its impacts are not equally shared.

Lockdowns’ worst effects have not been felt by Australia’s elites, including the professional middle classes, who dominate the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, the media and the academy. The same social classes also dominate politics, since today’s professionalised political parties are only weakly linked to their erstwhile social foundations. Consequently, their interests and worldviews have shaped the framing of the pandemic and responses to it.

It is by now well-documented that the pandemic’s impacts have widely diverged along the fault-lines of pre-existing social divides, often deepening disadvantage. And nowhere has this been demonstrated more clearly than in Australia.

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While the Government’s main support schemes, JobKeeper and JobSeeker, wound up earlier this year, elite and middle-class incomes have continued to grow during the cycle of lockdowns, increasing already yawning gaps. Throughout the country, the industries worst affected by Covid-19 were twice as likely to employ workers with less than high-school qualifications. While incomes in the worst-affected industries more than halved, in the least affected industries they remained unchanged.

Higher income households have also saved a higher proportion of their income. As saving rates shot up last year, reaching an average 22% in Australia — the highest in 60 years — richer households again benefited disproportionately. Their additional income was funnelled into investments, growing household wealth. Similarly, property prices in Australia rose 16.1% in the 12 months to July 2021, and the share market reached its highest-ever level on 10 August 2021, with the gains accruing mainly at the top. Most striking, however, has been the transfer of wealth to the richest of the rich. Australia’s billionaires had doubled their wealth during the pandemic’s first year.

For a time, economic growth resumed and unemployment dipped to 5%, though 60% of all new jobs were casual or part-time. The recent wave of lockdowns impacting Australia’s biggest cities has upended Australia’s fragile recovery, however, causing economic activity to contract by an estimated $13bn in the September quarter alone. While elites and professionals settled back into their domestic bubbles, many lower paid and blue-collar workers carried on as before or bore the brunt of the economic fallout.

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After all, someone has to leave their home to ensure the taps don’t run dry, clean Covid exposure sites, stock supermarket shelves and collect the rubbish. During Sydney’s current lockdown, one in ten infected residents caught the coronavirus at work. Since many of these workplaces are essential, this limits the efficacy of the lockdown, which has no end in sight.

Yet in some ways, these workers may be grateful to have a job. The number of unemployed in Sydney swelled by 300,000 over recent weeks, while casual workers’ shifts in the hospitality industry were cut by two-thirds. Although state and federal payments to workers and small businesses for lost income were boosted in July, the current patchwork of payment schemes exclude many, for example, all those who are receiving welfare payments, who are consequently struggling to survive. In Sydney alone they number 400,000.

In 1996, iconoclast American historian Christopher Lasch’s book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, was published posthumously in America — yet its resonance today is surely apparent in Australia. In the book, Lasch argues that elites in Western societies, including the professional middle classes, have abandoned their responsibilities towards their fellow-citizens and nations, orienting themselves towards cosmopolitan identities and agendas. Noblesse oblige, as limited as it was, was replaced by a sense of moral superiority, derived from the feeling that their elevated position in society was earned and meritorious.

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If Lasch had been around today he would have readily recognised that the elites in our Covid-stricken societies — not just in Australia — are still in revolt. Faced with these devastating impacts on their fellow-citizens, many elites and middle-class professionals have preferred to look the other way, conflating their own interests with society’s.

They have become lockdown’s biggest cheerleaders and portray their own compliance with lockdown rules as an expression of individual moral superiority, conveniently forgetting that the privileges afforded by their income and lifestyle are not shared by all. They have dismissed resistance to lockdowns as extremism, although evidence from recent rallies in Australia suggests that a number of participants were not fringe-dwelling conspiracists, but ordinary people struggling with long lockdowns.

Although counterfactuals are always fraught, it is hard to imagine lockdowns becoming a mainstream public health measure in a world in which elite interests would have been badly harmed by them. Elites’ disregard for the rest of society makes matters worse. In the longer term, however, the unequal effect of its many lockdowns is likely to deepen the legitimacy crisis already plaguing Australia’s democracy.

Before Covid, few believed that the British people would accept population-wide restrictions for over a year. Yet official concerns over whether we would obey the rules swiftly dissipated as it became clear that a national lockdown was not only the most effective way forward, but also the most popular one.

You don’t have to buy into fusty caricatures of the plucky, liberty-loving Brit to find something rather troubling in this. It is one thing for people to run for cover when confronted with a terrifying new disease. It is completely another to become so cautious of each other that we look to the Government to tell us when we can hug our Grandma or let our children play freely.

It is not that we have suddenly become a nation of introverts; nor, given all the low-level rule-flouting that has been going on, does it appear that we have actually stopped seeing our nearest and dearest. Instead, we seem to have tacitly embraced loneliness as a way of life.

In 1950, when the project of sociology was more about developing big ideas than deconstructing them, David Riesman published his bestselling book The Lonely Crowd. Riesman’s central thesis was that the typical American had transformed from being “inner-directed”, with norms and values passed down through the generations and internalised at an early age, to “other-directed”: trained to be continually responsive to present-day influences — and, therefore, better suited to a bureaucratic era dominated by advertising, television and HR departments.

It spoke to an unease about the tension between the individual and “mass society”. But while Riesman’s insights fell on fertile ground, particularly in Richard Yates’s bleak 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, his diagnosis of conformity has continued to be misunderstood. Indeed, his depiction of an atomised society attuned to the “radar” of other-direction, as opposed to the “gyroscope” of inner-direction, continues to chime with prejudices about mass society; the cover of the book’s 2001 edition predictably features a flock of sheep.

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Riesman, however, insisted that he was not pointing to an increase in conformity, but rather a change in how people came to conform. “Other-directed” people were not behaving as an undifferentiated mass, but as individuated souls searching for cues about how to act from those around them. Critics who interpreted Riesman’s insights as a problem of the conformist “crowd” missed the bigger point about loneliness.

This is where his discussion has most relevance today. In a similar manner, some lockdown critics choose to deride the public as misguided “sheeple”, mindlessly conforming to Government diktat; at the other extreme, some lockdown proponents assume that people are incapable of making sensible decisions and need to be banned from thinking for themselves. By constructing their claims around caricatures of “the individual”, they fail to engage with the kind of people we have become.

A quarter of a century after Riesman theorised about the changing American character, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism diagnosed post-war American society as suffering from a pathological insecurity, brought about by the long corrosion of family and community bonds in the face of increasingly intrusive cultural forces.

But it is Lasch’s far less well-known book The Minimal Self, published in 1984, that contains the most prescient warning for today. In it, he describes how the belief that political action can create a better world has given way to an inward-looking focus on personal survival, with the primary ambition being “to hold one’s own life together in the face of mounting pressures.” Crucially, he says, the result is a self that is “beleaguered”. And like today, one consequence of this beleaguered selfhood was “a kind of emotional retreat from the long-term commitments that presuppose a stable, secure, and orderly world”.

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Fast forward to the 1990s, and the kind of personality that was valued by Western societies was already shaping up to be both “other-directed” (as Reisman warned) and “beleaguered” (per Lasch). As the end of the Cold War finally brought about the collapse of political institutions and grand ideologies, this minimal self stood exposed and increasingly alone: as if to vindicate Thatcher’s famous claim that “there is no such thing as society”. There was, in essence, no such thing resembling a crowd.

Of course, both Lasch and Riesman have their critics, who correctly point to the differences between constructed “ideal types” and people in real life, who, as the past twelve months have shown, get on with living, loving, and taking responsibility for their families and communities. But our response to lockdown indicates that their theories are not as abstract as they might appear. Indeed, the past year seems to reveal a character type that is not merely other-directed or beleaguered, but what we might call other-deflected: yearning for contact and intimacy with others, while attuned to pulling back at the whiff of potential danger.

Other-deflection has been around for some time. We see it in the hesitant character of public speech, shot through with fear of causing offence; in the ambiguous value attached to sexual relationships, where people are continually encouraged to approach commitment with caution. And we have seen it, writ large, with the pandemic. For frightening and deadly though Covid has been as a disease, the enforced cessation of all spontaneous human contact has been as much about our quest to balance our desire for social contact with fear of its consequences.

When public health officials claim that we have got used to certain social distancing practices so they might as well persist, or psychologists advise people that they should “just say no” to family and friends who break lockdown rules, they are tapping into this sensibility. And even though people in real life may be bending The Rules, the absence of a public validation for physical interaction has given social life a nervy, provisional quality. For example, hugging Grandma in secret becomes a risky act that we choose to do even though it’s wrong, rather than something that is taken for granted that we ought to do because it’s right.

And so as we slowly emerge from lockdown, with our radars constantly scanning for dangers that we might pose to others and that others might pose to us, a grim truth is slowly coming into focus: that, in this age of the “New Normal”, we are loneliest when we are together.

The Roy family occupies the most rarefied level of globe-trotting oligarchs. Dropping down a rung or two on the pyramid of power, consider the moral ecology inhabited by the broader gentility: the salaried decision-makers and ideas-managers who service the global arrangement from various departments of the ideological apparatus. They may work in NGOs, the governing bodies of the EU, corporate journalism, HR departments, the celebrity-industrial complex, the universities, Big Tech, etc. They, too, enjoy a kind of freedom, but it is decidedly not that of the high-spirited criminals depicted in Succession. So far from living “beyond good and evil”, this broader class of cosmopolitans asserts its freedom through its moralism, precisely. In particular, they have broken free of the claims of allegiance made upon them by the particular communities they emerge from.

How does this work, psychologically? The idea of a common good has given way to a partition of citizens along the lines of a moral hierarchy – one that just happens to mirror their material fortunes (as in Calvinism). Instead of feeling bound up in a shared fate with one’s countrymen, one develops an alternate solidarity that is placeless. The relatability across national borders that the gentlefolk feel in one another’s company — the gracious ease and trust, the shared points of reference in high-prestige opinion — has something to do with their uniformly high standing in the moral hierarchy that divides citizen from citizen within their own nations. The decision-making class has discovered that it enjoys the mandate of heaven, and with this comes certain permissions; certain exemptions from democratic scruple.

The permission structure is built around grievance politics. Very simply: if the nation is fundamentally racist, sexist and homophobic, I owe it nothing. More than that, conscience demands that I repudiate it. Hannah Arendt spelled out this logic of high-minded withdrawal from the claims of community in the essays she wrote in response to the protest movements of the 1960s. Conscience “trembles for the individual self and its integrity,” appealing over the head of the community to a higher morality. The latter is discerned in a highly subjective, personal way. The heroic pose struck by Thoreau in Civil Disobedience is the model for this kind of moralistic anti-politics of conscience, in which the good man may be quite opposed to the one called a good citizen.

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In The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch spelled out in greater detail the role that claims of racial and sexual oppression play in securing release from allegiance to the nation — not just for those who identify as its victims, but for those with the moral sensitivity to see victimisation where it may not be apparent, and who make this capacity a touchstone of their identity. It becomes a token of moral elevation by which we recognise one another, and distinguish ourselves from the broader run of citizens. Both Lasch and Arendt argue that black Americans serve a crucial function for the white bourgeoisie. As the emblem and proof of America’s illegitimacy, they anchor a politics of repudiation in which the idea of a common good has little purchase.

This illegitimacy transcends any particular historical facts about slavery and segregation. Indeed it transcends America, as one can surmise by the ease with which American grievance politics has been exported throughout the Western world. In this we sometimes see the use of American historical references that have been weirdly transposed, as when a house once lived in by Rosa Parks was relocated from Detroit to Berlin, the financial seat of the European Union. (Under the empire of Christendom, the market for material relics from the Passion of Christ was similarly global; they left the holy land and ended up in various seats of earthly power.) Most recently, the transatlantic festival of George Floyd attests to the fact that it isn’t simply America that stands accused.

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The social order is corrupt, then. The labour movement once had an alternative order to offer in its stead, drawing on the socialist tradition. It was one that included African-Americans – not as African-Americans but as workers. And this movement was fairly successful. The pressures that organised labour brought to bear on business and the state helped to secure America’s brief period of shared prosperity, lasting roughly from the end of WWII to the 1970s.

What happened then? The new prominence of the term “repressed” in the 1960s is significant, and marks a shift into a new terrain of psychologised politics. The object of attack for the “new Left” was no longer laissez-faire capitalism but “society”, the Freudian superego more or less, with its insistence on standards of behaviour that are binding on all. Arendt and Lasch both identify this attack on shared standards as the decisive inflection point in our turn away from a politics of the common good. Society is taken to be inherently oppressive, and discredited in the name of liberation.

One can find such an idea in a selective reading of Freud, for whom there is an inherent conflict between self and society. But for Freud, reconciling oneself to this conflict and entering into the world of shared meaning and exchange, indeed identifying with it, is how one becomes an adult. The world does not love you simply for being you, as your mommy does. One holds oneself accountable to prevailing norms, or else remains trapped in infantile narcissism.

The Left’s posture of liberationism provided an interpretive frame in which the deadly riots and wider explosion of urban crime in the 1960s was to be understood as political rather than criminal. This interpretation played a key role in the wider inversion: it is “society” that is revealed to be criminal. The utility of urban rioting for the new Left lay in the fact that it was thought to carry an insight into the illegitimacy of even our most minimum standards of behaviour. The moral authority of the black person, as victim, gave the bourgeoisie permission to withdraw its allegiance from the social order, just as black people were gaining fuller admittance to it.

Consider the images that had so impressed the nation in the 1950s and lead to the passage of civil rights legislation: marchers demanding equal treatment, and being willing to go to jail as a demonstration of this allegiance to the rule of law, impartially applied. The civil rights movement began as an attack on the injustice of double standards; it was a patriotic appeal to the common birthright of citizenship, as against the local sham democracy of the South. Notably, the civil rights activists of this time wore suits and ties, the costume of adult obligations and standards of comportment. But in a stunning reversal achieved by the new Left working in concert with the Black Power movement, Lasch points out, “the idea of a single standard was itself attacked as the crowning example of ‘institutional racism’.” Such standards were said to have no other purpose than keeping black people in their place. This shift was fundamental, for shared standards are what make for a democratic social order, as against the ancien régime of special privileges and exemptions.

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For the new Left, then, it was not capitalism but the democratic social order altogether that was the source of oppression — not just of black people, or of workers, but of us, the college bourgeoisie. The civil rights movement of black Americans became the template for subsequent claims by women, gays and transgender persons, each based on a further discovery of moral failing buried deep in the heart of America. Hence a further license, indeed mandate, granted to individual conscience, as against the claims of the nation.

But the black experience retains a special role as the template that must be preserved. The black man is specially tuned by history to pick up the force field of oppression, which may be hard to discern in the more derivative cases that are built by analogy with his. Therefore, his condition serves a wider diagnostic and justificatory function. If it were to improve, denunciation of “society” would be awkward to maintain and, crucially, my own conscience would lose its self-certifying independence from the community. My wish to be free of the demands of society would look like mere selfishness.

The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained, African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening the social order, strangely enough. For it is now an order governed by the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. Somehow these free agents, ostensibly guided by individual conscience, have coalesced into something resembling a tribe, one that is greatly angered by rejection of its moral expertise.

The notion of expertise is important. There appears to be a circle of mutual support between political correctness, technocratic administration, and the bloated educational machinery. Because smartness (as indicated by educational credentials) confers title to rule in a technocratic regime, the ruling class adopts a distinctly cognitivist view: virtue does not consist of anything you do or don’t do, it consists of having the correct opinions. This is attractive, as one may then exempt oneself from the high-minded policies one inflicts upon everyone else. For example, the state schools are turned into laboratories of grievance-based social engineering, with generally disastrous effects, but you send your own children to expensive private schools. You can de-legitimise the police out of a professed concern for black people, and the explosion of murder will be confined to black parts of the city you never see, and journalists are not interested in. In this way, you can be magnanimous while avoiding the moral pollution and that comes from noticing reality.

With this clerisy’s systemic lack of “skin in the game”, the idea of a common good becomes a weak abstraction. Maintaining one’s own purity of opinion, on the other hand, has real psychic consequence, as it is the basis for one’s feeling of belonging — not to the community one happens to reside in, but to the tribe of the elect.

If the ideal of a de-moralised public sphere was a signature aspiration of liberal secularism, it seems we have entered a post-secular age. Populism happened because it became widely noticed that we have transitioned from a liberal society to something that more closely resembles a corrupt theocracy.

Above all, the life into which they enter will be a bare one. Even where each constituent part of student life remains in place, it will be hard to act with confidence, fluency or grace amid the uncertainty. The “student experience” was always a dismal expression; now it is a sad joke.

But this is not the only threat that incoming students face. Universities are front and centre of the new culture war and the dominant culture in the humanities and arts is soaked in an anxiety-ridden politics of negation. It is a world with which I am all too familiar, from many years’ involvement in the far-left, which — stripped of materialist analysis and class content — increasingly finds its base in the university. I had come to see those years as misspent but essentially inconsequential and a little embarrassing.

What is remarkable is not that I found these politics wanting — most who move through these scenes eventually do — but that, shorn of their economics, they now appear culturally hegemonic and unassailable. Today these politics represent what Wesley Yang described as the “successor ideology”, the default politics of a new elite coming of age, and this language is the currency of the professional managerial class in the English-speaking world. They do not seem so inconsequential anymore.

I spent my teenage years immersed in Marxist and anarchist circles and literature, at protests and occupations, squats and reading groups. I would listen to ageing Cockneys give talks on class interest and exploitation in the backrooms of dusty pubs. It may not have been much, but it did at least feel like we could lay claim to the heritage of a genuine radicalism.

When I arrived at Cambridge a decade ago, then, I was taken aback to encounter many like me. Indeed most of the students studying the arts and humanities were well to the left of Labour, which was regarded as a bit of a joke. There were differences, of course, with my previous political world: at Cambridge, the talk was of activism and oppression rather than organising and exploitation. Political economy and class were downplayed and gender, race, colonialism, sex work and mental health came to the fore. This allowed participants to see themselves not as the guilty children of the elite, but as subjects of a politics of anti-oppression in their own right. It felt less like a historical reenactment society and more contemporary, urgent even.

That this ancient institution was saturated with radicalism posed a problem for my self-image. Calling yourself a communist or anarchist was just not very interesting anymore. As we occupied university buildings and demanded the impossible from the safety of our cloisters, it seemed to me that the age-old debate between left-communists and anarchists who believed in the spontaneous uprising of the working class, and the Trotsykist idea of an intellectual vanguard at the helm of the revolutionary movement, was decisively resolved in favour of the latter.

Some blame academics for the radicalisation of students, but in truth self-selecting mechanisms ensured many of us arrived pre-radicalised, and from there it spread memetically, not didactically. The internet was a far bigger radicaliser than Left-wing academics. The handful of academics involved with the political scene were outliers and most were political liberals.

The next three years played out predictably. The organiser of a gay night was denounced for playing a song by Katy Perry because another song of hers was deemed problematic. A rare working class boy had his Union Jack flag stolen and set on fire during a commemoration for the Queen, while students (many of whom from one elite international school in Geneva) denounced him as a racist. We queued round the block for Judith Butler and we tried, sometimes successfully, to get others blocked from public platforms altogether.

Rumours would circulate about people who were “problematic”, often socially awkward men whose problem was that they interrupted people. Talks on sex work and the radical possibilities of kink proliferated. One of my more sordid memories is of person after person taking turns at a public assembly to declare themselves “disabled”, presumably by nature of their mental disorder, and therefore oppressed. A good friend was condemned in a public blog by his ex for the crime of suggesting that her new activist friends might not have been making her very happy.

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At first, there was a rush — the feeling of belonging to a community, particularly one defined so clearly against an other, gave meaning and purpose to life. Taking part in “action”, the more covert the better, strengthened this sense of conspiracy. But over time the world darkened and lost colour. Our intellectual world shrunk and everything was subjected to the same dreary analysis. Real conversation became impossible, replaced with irony, intersectional bromides and endless talk of mental illness.

The college was a bucket of crabs and happiness itself suspect, a mark of privilege, as with the rugby lads who had the audacity to actually enjoy themselves. When there was laughter it was heavy and jarring, filled with irony and bitterness, never light or free. The elitism of the university discounted even appreciation of the beauty of its buildings or the surrounding countryside, although by then we were probably too far gone to notice. Though we were aware of our enormous privilege we contrived to see our time at Cambridge as some grim fate foisted upon us.

Right now, the discourse is centred on “cancel culture”. It was not cancellation but closure that defined our social-political scene, and that now characterises the culture at large — the ideas left unexplored, the varied uses of the English language reduced to greyscale, and, in the end, the elimination of joy, curiosity and wonder from our lives. (This closure plays out just as surely among liberal and Right-wing culture warriors, who are reduced to dull defences of free speech. This essay, in its own way, contributes to that closure too. Life is good and there is so much more we could talk about!)

Few have described this process as well as Philip Roth in American Pastoral. The lifelessness of it all and the impossibility of any lightness or dialogue, as he put it: “The monotonous chant of the indoctrinated, ideologically armored from head to foot — the monotonous, spellbound chant of those whose turbulence can be caged only within the suffocating straitjacket of the most supercoherent of dreams. What was missing from her unstuttered words was not the sanctity of life — missing was the sound of life.”

Roth wrote of the manipulative potential of compassion, the only recognised virtue: “There may not be much subtlety in it, she may not yet be its best spokesman, but there is some thought behind it, there’s certainly a lot of emotion behind it, there’s a lot of compassion behind it…” On top of this there was the moral certainty that erases any concern about means. “Rita was no longer an ordinary wavering mortal, let alone a novice in life, but a creature in clandestine harmony with the brutal way of the world, entitled, in the name of historical justice, to be just as sinister as the capitalist oppressor Swede Levov.”

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Unhappiness brings with it power over others. Where compassion is the highest virtue, this power is almost limitless. Misery also provides the motive to wield this power, and mental blindness to one’s own culpability in its exercise. The principal protagonists of this scene nestled into their unhappiness and woke politics was the form of emotional manipulation its outward expression took. Its obscure language games were about codifying the rules of social engagement so that its anxious subjects could navigate social life as much as they were about prohibition.

Whenever a clip goes viral of a person, clearly in some mental distress, repeating the usual platitudes, it is impossible not to see the anxieties of life under late modernity writ large. They are there in the voice, constantly on the point of breaking, in the incredulous, widening eyes, and in the earnestly furrowed brow. It is a recognisable form of distress, but not one found among those at the sharp end of genuine political tyranny or destitution. It is hard not to conclude that a whole generation has been terribly misled about how best to pursue a life of meaning and resilience.

Social theorist Mark Fisher described from first-hand experience the manipulation of this scene as a Vampire Castle which “feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups — the more marginal, the better — into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampire Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering — those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.” The Vampire Castle recruits on the promise of community and self-healing. The reality is an ouroboros of emotional manipulation, stripped of the political and of all that makes life interesting and worthwhile.

So when Black Lives Matter adopts the same therapeutic language in their description of their praxis — “we recommit to healing ourselves and each other… we intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depletive… we practise empathy… we are self-reflexive… we support each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another” — it makes my skin crawl. I dread the thought of anyone that I love getting sucked into this false community.

Undergraduate wastefulness, self-absorption and misery are nothing new, but the form they took presaged what was to come. In another age, we would have been conservatives — frightened of the outside world, haunted by anxiety and guilt, unafraid to speak or think freely. But instead, the politics of my old friends set the national agenda.

We would have laughed at the idea we formed an elite and we certainly didn’t act like one. But we were the vanguard for a movement that has swept the English-speaking world in the subsequent decade. We still professed to be fighting the old powers — patriarchy, white supremacism, the nuclear family, colonialism, the university itself. But in truth we represented what Christopher Lasch called psychological man, “the final product of bourgeois individualism,” and were being trained in elite formation for the therapeutic age just as surely as our forerunners had been for the previous, paternal age.

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In the past two months, this new elite has discovered its collective strength. The cultural politics of the emerging professional managerial class have joined with the rage of those with first-hand experience of police oppression. The anxieties of the milieu I left have found in white guilt a steady resting place. The emotional manipulation developed in elite institutions has developed a motte-and-bailey style of argument (superbly analysed by Jacob Siegel) which is impossible to push back against without seeming callous. And every institution, public or private, has simply buckled.

Towards the end of American Pastoral, the protagonist Swede Levov — poor Swede Levov — wonders whether he tried to be too understanding of his daughter’s descent into the furthest reaches of the political fanaticism of the late 1960s: “Perhaps the mistake was to take seriously what was in no way serious.” He gave an inch to the madness of his daughter’s utopian ideology and she took a mile, blowing up a suburban post office and killing two people. Yet this doctrine has graduated out of the elite universities where it first festered and is rewriting our institutions and our history. It must be taken seriously.

Last year I argued in American Affairs that the way through the culture war was a radical economic settlement that gave people security and order; socialist means to achieve conservative ends. This now looks naïve. The material genesis of the radical cultural politics that has shown its strength in the last few months lies in the overexpansion of higher education, which produced a new middle class that is materially discontented and uncomfortable in its own skin. The globalisation of American pathologies has given this new urban class, present across the Western world, a politics that is carving through our institutions.

Providing decent work and the possibility of home ownership in big cities, therefore, combined with the longer term goal of overhauling higher education, seemed the best strategy for overcoming the listlessness of an elite fraction disenfranchised from a world that failed to live up to its promise. Perhaps it still is. But the embrace of this movement by the rich, and the profound philosophical break it represents with the old order, suggests it has a logic and a momentum of its own and its potential is without limit. It is a politics of negation and renunciation and there is no end-point. There is always more work to be done.

The book had been published in Britain in the spring of 1995 but as February and then March 2020 came and went, we were all rather distracted. For a few months the pandemic was so overwhelming that even normal politics died down — only for it to inflame again, more incendiary and toxic than ever, at the beginning of June.

Across the US — and around the world — graduates and young professionals took to the streets, leading a bizarre anti-revolution in which immigrant shops were ransacked and working-class neighbourhoods forced to defend themselves from violent college-educated protesters and their allies.

Here was a revolution backed by almost all billion-dollar businesses and public institutions bar the US presidency, and whose leaders had almost nothing to say about poverty or unemployment. Their demands were for more diversity and racial equality, already sacred ideas among the cognitive elite, all of it accompanied by bizarre, quasi-religious public declarations of faith.

It was the Revolt of the Elites.

Christopher Lasch never lived to see his great work published, but since his death from cancer in February 1994, it has developed a cult following among unorthodox sections of Right and Left. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy warned of a growing cultural and social divide caused by a rapacious free market and the radical politics of the Sixties, one that would lead to extremism and division.

Yet what Lasch saw in 1994, but which has only now reached its apogee in 2020, was how social revolution would be pushed forward by the radical rich and resisted by the rest. “It is not just that the masses have lost interest in revolution,” he wrote: “their political instincts are demonstrably more conservative than those of their self-appointed spokesmen and would-be liberators.” If this continued, then the top strata of society would become increasingly alienated by their society and country, and turn against it, something that has come to pass with the first corporate-backed revolutionary movement in history.

Lasch was born in 1932 in Omaha, Nebraska, the heart of the original populism movement in the Midwest, and it was populism and the progressive era that would be the focus of his teaching, at the University of Iowa and later Rochester, New York.

He came from one Left-wing intellectual family and married into another; his father Robert was a Pulitzer-winning journalist, and after Harvard the younger Lasch married Nell, the daughter of Harvard historian and prominent liberal intellectual Henry Steele Commager (who, like Lasch’s father, outlived him).

Lasch was thoroughly on the Left during the 1960s, indeed he moved further in that direction, but as Alan Ryan wrote soon after his death, he “emphasised what many on the Left have thought to be the guilty secret of American liberalism: its affection for corporate organisation, and a thoroughly manipulative view of the relationship between the new social sciences and the populace whose lives the liberals wanted to improve”.

Lasch’s most successful book, the 1979 The Culture of Narcissism, was highly critical of American society’s self-obsession and was hugely influential, partly thanks to the support of President Jimmy Carter. Indeed, Carter so liked the book that it inspired his election speech on “the American malaise”, a misjudgement said to have cost him support against the cheery, optimistic Ronald Reagan.

The Culture of Narcissism is still read and widely quoted, although the heavy reliance on psychoanalysis seems somewhat dated (or at least out-of-fashion) today. Yet Roger Kimball wrote of it that “What one witnessed in its pages was the spectacle of an intelligent, politically committed man of the Left struggling to make sense of a culture in the grip of a radicalism that had turned out to be almost entirely bogus.”

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As the Reagan era went on, Lasch was increasingly critical of, and criticised by, both of the mainstream camps in American thought. His opposition to divorce alienated feminists, as did his assertion that economic integration into the workforce did not necessarily mean emancipation; but neither did his thinking chime with the mainstream conservative movement then dominated by the legacy of William Buckley.

Tragically, by the time that Lasch came to write his great work, he was dying of leukaemia, and the book was completed only with the help of his daughter Elizabeth. The title was a play on Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, written in the inter-war period when it seemed reasonable to worry that liberal values might not survive democracy and the rise of the workers. Yet by the end of the century Lasch observed that it was the rich who threatened democracy.

Revolt of the Elites comprises 13 essays on America’s “democratic malaise” — he liked that word — divided into three parts, the “intensification of social divisions” in America, the decline of public discourse and finally the spiritual core of the country’s crisis, headlined “The Dark Night of the Soul”.

Throughout the book runs Lasch’s moral core, his support for the average man, something which inspired his hostility to the dominant ideologies of Left and Right. He strongly opposed economic inequality because it was corrupting; highly unequal societies tend to bring with them graft, extremism, violence and outside interference, eliminating Republican virtue. Lasch lamented that in America, the top tenth owned more than half the country’s wealth, a warning that now seems as quaint as newspapers in the placid 1950s worried about Teddy Boys. The decline of pensions and savings, and the rise of what we now call zero-contract hours, would lead to the collapse of the middle class and with it the decline of the nation.

Lasch also saw that the eroding of a common culture, values and standards, which was the major legacy of 60s cultural radicalism, ended up creating a gulf between social classes. If there were no common values to hold people together, what was to stop the rich and powerful trampling over the rest of society, cloaking their self-interest in furious self-righteousness?

And so it has come to pass, with the rise of woke capital, an amoral business model in which CEOs make thousands of times more than their lowest earners, all the while distracting attention with support for therapeutic but increasingly extreme politics.

It was Lasch who saw more clearly than anyone that the New Left had a symbiotic relationship with the culture of modern corporate capitalism — emphasising choice, therapy, self-actualisation, narcissism and the rejection of limits, not just physical but financial and moral.

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Lasch also saw meritocracy as a sham, or at least “a parody of democracy”, because neither social nor geographic mobility were adequate substitutes for real social justice. “Social mobility does not undermine the influence of elites,” he wrote: “if anything, it helps to solidify their influence by supporting the illusion that it rests solely on merit. It merely strengthens the likelihood that elites will exercise power irresponsibly, precisely because they recognise so few obligations to their predecessors of to the communities they profess to lead.”

Although not a Marxist, Lasch saw politics through the prism of class, arguing that elites of both Left and Right had the same economic interests. “Even when they disagree about everything else,” he argued, they “have a common stake in suppressing a politics of class.”

Indeed, the fashionable social causes of the 21^st century not only ignore class, but actually further increase hostility to the poor. Evidence suggests that thinking about “white privilege” reduces sympathy for people struggling in poverty, while the association of bigotry with the non-college educated has normalised snobbery to an almost pre-modern degree. People once might have sneered at less educated people, but they would have done so privately at least; now comedy routinely makes the less educated and less geographically connected its punchline.

“The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare,” he wrote: “in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate.”

Yet whereas conservatives at the time saw the market as the solution, Lasch often viewed it as a problem, capitalism being in symbiosis with radicalism. By encouraging instant gratification and the ephemeral, especially when it came to jobs, the market undermined the family, which he called “a haven in a heartless world”. The very things that radicals attacked — “the authoritarian family, repressive sexual morality, literary censorship, the work ethic, and other foundations of bourgeois order” — have already been “weakened or destroyed by advanced capitalism itself”.

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Because of the expansion of higher education, elites had also developed a stronger sense of their own identity and culture, spoke increasingly to each other and began to see the “people” not as a cause to sponsor but as the problem, something well-observed already during the 1968 protests.

Wealthy families had traditionally settled in one location, often over several generations. Many economic leaders were exploitative or cruel, but many others had a sense of responsibility and pride in their home towns; proximity and the idea of posterity encouraged a mindset in which elites felt some responsibility to those who worked for them, and this helped to reduce income inequality to its lowest level at mid-century. With the growing free movement of capital and of people what little connection was gone, and with it any sense of sympathy.

Lasch wrote: “The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’ as they imagine it; a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middle-brow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy. Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture.”

In contrast multiculturalism “suits them to perfection, conjuring up the agreeable image of a global bazaar in which exotic cuisines, exotic styles of dress, exotic music, exotic tribal customs can be savoured indiscriminately, with no questions asked and no commitments required”.

All of these trends, towards knowledge economy winners cut off by geography, education and sensibility, would lead to a situation where “The talented retain many of the vices of aristocracy without its virtues.”

Worse still Lasch, while not a practising Christian, understood the importance of religion, and that without it politics would inspire “the feeling of self-righteousness that is so commonly confused with religion”. It would bring all the negative hallmarks of faith, the fanaticism and intolerance, but none of the devotion, the selflessness, the agonising.

The trends that Lasch observed would only accelerate after 2001, following China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation, the further erosion of America’s manufacturing base, the collapse of its skilled working class, and the increasing radicalisation of elites who benefited from globalisation and came to identify with it. This would result in the election of perhaps the most grotesque narcissist to ever lead Lasch’s country, and when Trump was about to be inaugurated Ross Douthat identified Revolt of the Elites as one of two books that foresaw the era, calling it a “polemic against the professional upper class’s withdrawal from the society it rules and a critique of the ways in which multiculturalism and meritocracy erode patriotism and democracy”.

Lasch has also come to gather a following in Britain where thinkers vaguely described as post-liberal, Blue Labour or Red Tory follow his analysis of capitalism, radicalism and the decline of the family. But his influence has seeped into mainstream British politics, too, as the Conservative Party has begun to attract voters alienated by the increasing values divide the great social critic wrote about. This weekend, Michael Gove cited Lasch as one of the thinkers who foresaw the failures of meritocracy, the great divide between the city and the town, and the mutual alienation it would bring. A quarter of a century after his prophetic book, we’re all living in Lasch’s world now.

The recent bout of Twitter hysteria prompted by Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, rashly sharing photographs of the family bookshelves, may just have been another pointless skirmish in the culture war, but it illustrated one thing very clearly: our self-appointed censors do not have even a passing familiarity with the political thought they seek to expurgate from the world.

By focussing their outrage on Gove’s ownership of a book by David Irving, Owen Jones and the other intellectual luminaries of Twitter progressivism skimmed over Gove’s far more interesting reading choices, namely works by Guillaume Faye and his partner in the French New Right, Alain de Benoist. One would think an engagement with the political thought of our nearest European neighbours would solicit, if not their approval, then at least their interest: but then there are few political movements as insular or intellectually incurious as late-stage British liberalism.

For their benefit, then, the French New Right, or Nouvelle Droite, began as a movement in the late 1960s to forge a new path for European conservatism, rejecting both the culturally dominant Marxism of the period, and the Atlanticism of the mainstream Right.

Influenced by the Konservative Revolution of pre-war Germany, particular the civilisational pessimism of Oswald Spengler, the merciless critique of liberal democracy assembled in the works of Carl Schmitt and the complex and hard to define body of work created by Ernst Junger, the Nouvelle Droite’s think tank GRECE (Groupement de Recherce et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européene, or Research and Study Group for European Civilisation) established itself, for a time, as an influential body on the French political scene.

In 1979, however, GRECE found itself cancelled by a campaign of demonstrative outrage in France’s liberal Le Monde newspaper, accusing the group of an entryist infiltratation of mainstream conservative institutions, particularly the Le Figaro newspaper. Marginal in electoral politics, GRECE nevertheless gained influence in the meta-political sphere, as part of what we could call the Gramscian Right; understanding that politics is downstream of culture, the Nouvelle Droite aimed to influence a new generation of Right-wing thinkers to reject the worldview of mainstream conservative and liberal thought in place of a standpoint quite outside standard Left-Right divisions.

The Nouvelle Droite rejected the domination of the European continent by what it characterised as an imperialist United States, which spreads capitalism and liberalism across the world through a vulgar and thuggish combination of hard and soft power, destroying individual societies and turning the world into an indistinguishable mush of rootless consumers.

Early enthusiasts of the work of Christopher Lasch, critiquing the emergent class of globalised elites, the Nouvelle Droite in some ways anticipated the current trend in both the United States and Europe towards post-liberal thought, though they followed this line of thought in another direction entirely.

Actively supporting Third World national liberation movements, decrying globalisation for its homogenising effects, and sounding urgent warnings of looming ecological collapse, de Benoist and Faye anticipated the anti-globalisation movement of the millennium, before it petered out into commodified pseudo-protest.

Equally, by warning that mass migration into Europe would lead inexorably to ethnic conflict and mass casualty terrorist attacks, and by railing against the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of globalisation and cosmopolitanism, the Nouvelle Droite anticipated much of the discourse of today’s populist Right, though they explicitly rejected what they saw as their petty nationalisms in favour of the unification of Europe and Russia into a single civilisational superpower.

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Avowedly anti-capitalist, anti-American, anti-globalisation and pro-European unification, there is, unfortunately for the online censors, therefore very little evidence of Nouvelle Droite influences on Gove’s personal politics. Indeed, many of its lines of thought can be traced more clearly in European politicians as superficially distinct as Macron and Orban than in any British figure.

Its concerns over the prospect of Islamist terrorism resulting from migration into Europe can perhaps be discerned in Gove’s Celsius 7/7, though even here there is a major point of difference. Gove’s book contrasts global jihadism with a Western liberal tradition he urges us to defend; the thinkers of the Nouvelle Droite, by contrast, saw liberalism as the root problem and jihadism as a natural, if culturally alien response, parallel to their own rejection of liberal values.

Unlike Gove, whose book is situated firmly within the tradition of Western liberalism, Faye echoes Islamist ideologues by asserting that: “The rise of radical Islam is the backlash to the excesses of the cosmopolitanism of modernity that wanted to impose on the entire world the model of atheist individualism, the cult of material goods, the loss of spiritual values and the dictatorship of the spectacle.”

Of the two books by Faye on Gove’s bookshelf, both published by the London-based Arktos publishing house, Europe’s leading disseminator of radical right-wing political thought, the most interesting by far is Archaeofuturism, a collection of essays from the late 1990s republished in book format. Writing at the same time as liberal ideologues were declaring the End of History and politicians were assuring their voters that globalisation would bring with it an endless period of global harmony and prosperity, Faye posited a pessimistic worldview of what is now startling immediacy.

By the year 2020, he claimed, as a result of the inherent fragility created by a globalised financial and political system, civilisation would buckle under a cascading set of interlinked crises. Waves of pandemics, of political disorder and state collapse in the Middle East and Africa, of global financial crashes and ecological degradation would rebound off each other, escalating the pressures upon the international system to the point that the world of the late 20^th century would become impossible to sustain.

In Faye’s words, “a series of ‘dramatic lines’ are drawing near: like the tributaries of a river, and will converge in perfect unision at the breaking point (between 2010 and 2020), plunging the world into chaos. From this chaos- which will be extremely painful on a global scale- a new order can emerge based on a worldview, Archaeofuturism, understood as the idea for the world of the post-catastrophic age.”

Writing before the 9/11 attacks, the last global financial crash, the bloody cycle of wars precipitated by the Arab Spring and the COVID pandemic, Faye’s concern over what he termed the “convergence of catastrophes,” seemed as outlandish and unfashionable then as it now does topical. Yet since the beginning of this century, a greater awareness of what is known as global catastrophic risk has begun to creep into mainstream strategic thought, mostly with climate change in the foreground and Faye’s other fears placed as second order consequences.

The 2007 Age of Consequences  paper, issued jointly by the Centre for International and Strategic Studies and American Centre for New American Security thinktanks, echoed Faye’s apocalyptic warnings in almost every respect, warning that severe climate change would lead to the forced movement of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people from the worst-affected areas, the collapse of liberal democracy in the rest of the world as a consequence, the unchecked spread of pandemics and jihadist terrorism, and the outbreak of wars within and between states as the global order collapses.

In this scenario, the report warns, “nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature.”

Furthermore, the report echoes Faye by warning of such “a dramatically new global paradigm that it is virtually impossible to contemplate all the aspects of national and international life that would be inevitably affected. As one participant noted, “unchecked climate change equals the world depicted by Mad Max, only hotter, with no beaches, and perhaps with even more chaos.”

While such a characterization may seem extreme, a careful and thorough examination of all the many potential consequences associated with global climate change is profoundly disquieting. The collapse and chaos associated with extreme climate change futures would destabilize virtually every aspect of modern life. The only comparable experience for many in the group was considering what the aftermath of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange might have entailed during the height of the Cold War.”

More from this author

What Boris Johnson could learn from Emmanuel Macron

By Aris Roussinos

Only last year, a major Australian forecast warned that an apocalyptic near-future was at this point almost inevitable, describing its research as “a glimpse into a world of “outright chaos” on a path to the end of human civilisation and modern society as we have known it, in which the challenges to global security are simply overwhelming and political panic becomes the norm.”

Predictions equally dire as Faye’s have been made in less colourful language though with no less alarming conclusions by the medium-term strategic forecasts of the Ministry of Defence and by the Pentagon, all of which make for unsettling reading.

The European Union, similarly, links climate change to a cascading set of global security challenges , severely threatening both the global and European order. In its 2016 Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign And Security Policy, the overarching mission paper for the continental bloc’s approach to the near future, the EU’s strategists assert that:

“We live in times of existential crisis, within and beyond the European Union. Our Union is under threat. Our European project, which has brought unprecedented peace, prosperity and democracy, is being questioned. To the east, the European security order has been violated, while terrorism and violence plague North Africa and the Middle East, as well as Europe itself. Economic growth is yet to outpace demography in parts of Africa, security tensions in Asia are mounting, while climate change causes further disruption.”

Only last week, Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister, the Sociology professor Piotr Glinski, took to a two-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to warn that the COVID crisis was a glimpse into a future of civilisational collapse, explicitly likening the modern West to the late Roman Empire.

While the date Faye settled upon for the apocalypse is a decade or two in advance of these more sober warnings, his doomy vision of the medium-term future, is, unfortunately for us, worried over at the highest levels of British, American and European strategic thought.

But perhaps more interesting, not least for its presence on the bookshelf of such a senior British government minister, is Faye’s proposed solution, the Archaeofuturism of the book’s title. Likely influenced by the American political theorist Samuel P. Huntington, Faye unconvincingly suggests the current global system world will coalesce into distinct civilisational blocs: a Chinese-dominated one, a greater North America, a sub-Saharan African bloc, “a Euro-Siberian unit,” a greater Islamic world and a vaguely defined Pacific bloc for the rest.

Once this is achieved, the scene is set for the total reordering of global civilisation, according to “a revolutionary model based on a self-centred and inegalitarian world economy, which may be imposed upon us by historical events, but which it would be wise to foresee and plan for in advance”.

Noting, as is now a commonplace opinion, that “the utopia of ‘development’ open to ten billion people is environmentally unsustainable,” Faye proposes a system of jaw-dropping global re-ordering, worth quoting at length:

“First off, most of humanity would revert to a pre-technological subsistence economy based on agriculture and the crafts, with a neo-medieval demographic structure… Communitarian and tribal life would reassert its rights… Even in industrialised countries- India, Russia, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Argentina, etc- a significant portion of the population could return to live according to this archaic socio-economic model.”

Secondly, Faye asserts: “A minority percentage of humanity would continue to live according to the techno-scientific economic model based on ongoing innovation by establishing a ‘global exchange network’ of about a billion people.”

“Finally”, he notes, “these vast neo-archaic economic blocs would be centred upon a continental or multi-continental plan, with basically no mutual exchange between them. Only the techno-scientific portion of humanity would have access to the global exchange. This two-tier world economy thus combines archaism and futurism. The techno-scientific portion of humanity would have no right to intervene in the affairs of the neo-medieval communities that form the majority of the population, nor — most importantly — would it in any way be obliged to ‘help’ them.”

In a short story at the end of the book, Faye paints a vivid if outlandish picture of this proposed future, where a small, global technocratic global elite pursues rapid technological and scientific advances, while the majority of the world’s population lives in subsistence farming communities at a level of technology broadly equivalent to that of the Dark Ages.

Developing his ideas further in the wildly imaginative series of short science fiction tales which make up his follow-up work Archaeofuturism 2.0, Faye’s vision darkens. Some societies can survive, for a time, by fending off the encroaching chaos and maintaining the rudimentary technology of the early 20^th century. But, over time, the darkness settles and mankind is destroyed utterly.

The excellent academic introduction to Faye’s life and work by Stephane Francois in the recent Key Thinkers of the Radical Right notes that Archaeofuturism entails “the dismissal of modernity, born from the Enlightenment, and conservatism, since modernity shows signs of fracture and conservatism leads to nothing.” Summarizing Faye’s vision, Francois notes that:

“To avoid civilisational and ecological collapse, he proposes putting in place an authoritarian regime under the auspices of a “born chief,” a dictator defined as a providential man who knows how to set his peoples in motion, and protects his peoples’ identity and ancestry.”

Suggested reading

How apocalyptic is now?

By John Gray

It is perhaps partly for this reason that Faye’s work has proved so popular with Ukraine’s extreme right-wing Azov Movement, an armed brigade fighting Russia in the contested regions of the country’s east as part of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, which also provides policing functions — both officially, with the state’s blessing, and unofficially, as a competitor to the state — in the cities of Ukraine’s western heartlands.

Last year, shortly after Faye’s death, I interviewed Azov’s international secretary Olenya Somenyaka in the group’s headquarters just off Kyiv’s famous, central Maidan Square. Surrounded by bookcases filled with the works of the esoteric ultra-right writers currently undergoing a revival among disaffected Western conservatives, Semenyaka emphasised how central Faye’s work was in developing her worldview. In the world according to Somenyaka and Azov, Ukraine will play a starring role as a springboard for the reconquest of Europe from what she viewed as a collapsing liberal order, and lead the continent into a neo-pagan, Archaeofuturist dawn.

Presumably it is due to their unexpected popularity with a powerful armed force and challenge to liberal democracy in Ukraine that Faye’s works secured a place on Michael Gove’s bookshelf. Their placing next to an academic work on modern Ukraine would seem to indicate the politician’s interest in the country’s social and political development, laudable given the deployment of British soldiers there.

Indeed, Faye’s darkest warnings are echoed in British parliamentary politics only by the Green Party, one of whose most senior figures, the University of East Anglia’s professor of Philosophy and Extinction Rebellion spokesman Rupert Read, warns that: “We need to think about what comes after the likely collapse of this civilisation and plan accordingly. There are of course many sub-possibilities within this possible future, and some of them are very ugly. The successor civilisation could, for instance, be largely a reign of brutal warlordism. We have to try to do what we can to prepare our descendants for survival and for one of the better sub-possibilities.”

But even if we accept the proposition that Guardian columnists have the right to determine what books may and may not be read, it is unclear that Faye’s works deserve a place on their Index of forbidden knowledge. On the contrary, it is an encouraging sign that our senior politicians are reading obscure and outlandish works of political thought, given the times in which we live.

For good or ill, we are living in a springtime of ideologies, Gramsci’s “time of monsters”, where strange and unlikely political creeds proliferate on Twitter like sexual identities on Tumblr. Whatever the likelihood of our societies soon emulating Faye’s Archaeofuturistic vision — and it is presumably very unlikely — it is equally unlikely that we will return to the world of the near past.

The post-war global order enabled by American hegemony has gone, and will never return. The dominant category of books on Gove’s shelves, the autobiographies of American centrist politicians, represent a world as lost and irretrievable as the biographies of Europe’s absolute monarchs would have seemed exactly one century ago.

If we accept, as post-liberals as well as thinkers of far-left and far-right do, that the ideology of liberalism has exhausted itself, broken by its weak correspondence to reality, then we must accept that some successor ideology will eventually appear to replace it. Whatever that ideology will be, it most probably already exists, like Communism a century ago, as an obscure fringe belief waiting for a crisis in which to assert itself.

In the United States, discussions over the merits of Catholic Integralism are raging through mainstream conservatism, despite the minuscule likelihood of the American state reordering itself in such a direction. In Britain as well as continental Europe, citizens have been slaughtered by adherents of Salafi Jihadism, another radical challenge to liberal beliefs which posits itself as a successor ideology.

The merits and challenges posed by fringe ideologies such as these, rather than the petty concerns of party competition, are the grand matter of political thought, and it is reassuring rather than disturbing that our elected representatives are alert to them.

Some of the shrillest Twitter analysts of Gove’s bookshelves have spent years agitating for the political success of devotees of a murderous 20th century fringe ideology, itself now jettisoned on the wreckage of history. The radical left-wing publisher Verso — as far to the left of centrist thought as Faye is to the right, though more socially acceptable — has published all manner of strange and unlikely manifestos in recent years, from demanding the abolition of the family  to asserting that we can live in a world of endless growth and consumption derived from mining asteroids.

Both ideas are absurd, but while we can be grateful that the last election saw their advocates firmly shunted away from political power, neither book should be banned, only considered on its own merits and then ridiculed. The existence of eccentric works like these is, however, broadly positive, in that it shows people are giving serious consideration to what should replace the intellectual and political framework dying all around us.

We should be pleased that our political representatives are reading offbeat ideas, not necessarily because they believe them, but because they represent the strange intellectual and political ferment of the early 21^st century. The idea that There Is No Alternative to the neoliberal consensus is long gone. There are, if anything, too many alternatives, and they represent a future as dangerous as it is exciting.

As well as reading Faye, Gove and other British politicians should be investigating a wide variety of radical thinkers of left and right, from the post-anarchist work of Murray Bookchin to the idiosyncratic Marxist cultural criticism of Mark Fisher, the Catholic critiques of liberal democracy of Patrick Deneen and Ryszard Legutko, the rejection of modernity wrought in fiction by Michel Houellebecq and Paul Kingsnorth, and whatever other responses to what we can call the crisis of the 21^st century are now circulating in the marketplace of ideas. After all, as Faye himself archly notes in Archaeofuturism, “modernity already belongs to a past that is over.”