We were slinking through the edge of the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river swamp in the United States. It’s about an hour and a half west of New Orleans, Louisiana, where the French Quarter had been restless the night before, with partying tourists and jazz bands. I’d heard Pierre Part (population: 3,000) was about as Cajun as you could get; that it was the most French-speaking town in the US outside a village in Maine. And so that’s where I’d headed.

Out here on the water, the landscape reminded me a bit of the Florida Everglades: an overgrown, labyrinthine place for die-hards and outlaws. A last frontier feeling. This was a place for people who wanted to chart their own course in some downright hostile conditions. I’d come to Pierre Part to meet a couple who’d decided that their American dream was to live part-time in a one-room wooden houseboat on a swamp.

Keith motored us around town a bit, passing porches, docks, weathered houses set close to the water. Pierre Part was essentially an island — a long stretch of high ground surrounded by wetlands. Tara pointed out landmarks. Her grandparents’ house. The street where her stepmom grew up, and her parents before her, and their parents before them. It felt like moving through her family photo album. “This is the end of the road,” Tara said as I looked at the last house on the bank. Everything from here was by boat.

For a stretch it was nothing but open water, brown and opaque. A faint stagnant odor came off the surface. Along the shore, the cypress trees blurred into a solid brown-green wall until little dark cuts began to show. “We call ’em a bayou run,” Keith hollered. “There’s a maze of ’em, just like trails in a forest.” He steered left into a narrow channel. It felt a little mysterious, a separate ecosystem that could only be accessed through local Cajun knowledge. Here and there houseboats appeared along the bank. 

In the distance, I noticed a man sitting on the small porch of a grey cabin. “Who are you, and what are you doing on our houseboat?” Tara called out. She had this fantastic accent, a Southern drawl with a touch of French that carried a playful ease. 

“I’m the boogeyman!” The man smiled. 

Tara burst out laughing. “That’s my dad,” she said. “He’s 82.”

We floated closer. Tara climbed up to tie the rope around the porch post. Her father looked no older than 60 — lean and upright in a faded denim shirt and cap. 

“How are you doing, sir?” I asked.

“I’m doing,” he said, reaching out his hand for a shake. “Carlis Goday.” In his Cajun accent, the weight landed on the second syllables.

“The man without a car, Car-less. Last name’s Go-day. If you can’t go nights, you go days.”

Tara gave me a little tour of the house, which looked no bigger than 250 square feet. “This is the kitchen.” She pointed to the propane four-burner stove in one corner, a single counter opposite, and a roll-out grill wedged between. “Keith does all the outside cooking, I do the inside. We haul this grill out onto the porch just to give us more room in here.” The rest of the room was simple: a bunk bed, a futon folded into a couch, life jackets, tools. Fishing gear in organized piles. A flatscreen TV and an enclosed bathroom with a toilet were the only luxuries. A small sign nailed to the wall read BORN TO FISH, FORCED TO WORK.

Come summer, Keith told me, the bayou turned into a playground: waterskiing, hydrosliding, wake-boarding, swimming in clear pockets before the water thickened to pea green. “The snapping turtles you gotta be wary of, they can really bite,” Tara warned. 

“We’ve got a swimming spot we love, even with alligators everywhere.” She smiled at my wide eyes, as if living a few feet above alligators was the most natural thing in the world. “The bigger alligators are usually shy,” Keith added. “The smaller ones, you can get closer to, but they won’t mess with people. They like swimming up to our dock when we’re cleaning fish or frogs. But out here they don’t really bother us. I think they had maybe two deaths in Louisiana since, I don’t know… hundreds of years.”

***

The Cajun story didn’t start in Louisiana. It began along the coast of the rugged western edge of France, a Celtic stronghold of sailors and pirates who started crossing the Atlantic in the early 1600s, settling in what was then the young French colony of Acadia and is today Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, Canada. Here, the Acadians lived the way they always had: close to the water, close to family, close to the Catholic church. They turned salty tidal marshes into farmland, wove their own clothing from flax, and — stubbornly — made a living 3,000 miles from home. 

But it wasn’t to be. Acadia was in turbulent territory. The Acadians wanted to remain neutral between Britain and France, but when the British defeated the French, the Acadians were pushed to swear allegiance to the British Crown. They refused: their loyalty was to God, not to European empires. That defiance came at a cost, and in 1755, the British forced them out in what became known as the Great Expulsion. Villages were torched, families torn apart, thousands deported. Many died from disease and starvation. No documents written by Acadians during this period have ever been discovered, and so the expulsion remains as much myth as heritage to the people of Louisiana (who love both myth and heritage).

Some Acadians ended up back in France, some scattered through the British colonies, and others drifted to the Caribbean. Those who came to Louisiana — still a French colony in those days — found something familiar. The prairies and swamps reminded them of home, only warmer. Difficult enough to live on that few bothered them and fertile enough to survive, especially with the help of Native nations like the Chitimacha, Atakapa, and Houma living along the Gulf Coast.

Cajun French includes many Native-derived loanwords — even the term bayou, from the Choctaw word bayuk (“small stream”). In time, the groups began to intermarry, encouraged by proximity and shared hardships, and Cajun food developed from indigenous smoking methods, ways of preservation, and seasonings. The Cajun staple filé powder, made from ground sassafras leaves, comes from the cooking traditions of the Choctaw and related Gulf Coast tribes.

The story of black influence in the bayou runs just as deep. Many enslaved Africans sought refuge in the wilderness, forming Maroon communities hidden along the swamps. Some of them lived independently; others mingled with Native tribes and Cajun settlers. Gumbo’s okra-thickened broth has African roots, a stew of cultures that’s simmered for hundreds of years. As time passed, Acadian slurred into Cajun. But the backbone of the culture stayed the same: make your own way, stay close to your people, adapt to whatever the land throws at you.

***

Carlis Goday wasn’t born on the bayou. 

“I was raised in the French Quarter in my younger years,” he was telling me as we stood around on the deck.

“What do you think it’ll be like in 20 years out here?” I asked him. “You think it’ll stay the same?” 

“No, no.” Carlis said it with vehemence and without hesitation. “Things are changing too much. Too much erosion.”

Hurricanes were tearing up so much that there was nothing left to hold the land together but tree roots, while they pulled in salt water that killed off grasses, hastening the decline. 

“Everything’s going,” he said. “Everything’s washing away. But this” — he pointed down at the water beneath the porch — “This was built when they put in some oil rigs back here.”

“Oil rigs?”

“Most of the man-made canals were from the oil companies,” Tara explained, cut as inroads for drilling rigs and pipelines, as well as drainage. “That’s the big industry out here, oil and gas.”

Big enough to employ them both. Keith did maintenance for offshore platforms, Tara was a materials coordinator. It seemed like they had things figured out: one foot in the swamp, the other in capitalism, providing the financial security that let them live by the rhythms of the natural world. A yin and yang approach.

***

Keith trolled slowly, deeper in, scanning through tree trunks to the left of us. Things got quiet, and he looked serious for the first time, like he’d switched into survivor mode.

“Hoping to go find a big nutria rat to show you,” I heard him say.

“Nutria rat?”

“Very invasive around here. They tear up a lot of these marshlands. They’ll eat all the roots of the vegetation, dig holes in levee systems. A lot of people trap ’em for the tails. Certain times of the year you can trap the nutrias, and they’ll give you $6 a tail.”

“It’s a government program,” Tara added.

“We actually shot a few last weekend — and we ate ’em.”

“You eat ’em?” I said, probably failing to hide my shock.

“They’re actually a very clean meat. They’re vegetarian.”

“How many pounds are they?”

“Oh, they can get five pounds to probably up to 20.”

“They’re like midsize dogs?” The image in my head wasn’t getting any prettier.

Keith laughed. “I’m-a show you some in a few minutes — you’re gonna see. New York, they don’t have anything on us in rats.”

The boat slowed, the motor humming just enough to push us along. “They hear the motor and take off running,” Keith said, scanning the shallows. “But a lot of times if you just kind of creep up on ’em, they’ll sit in the lilies or in the marsh and eat grass.”

Suddenly Keith’s posture shifted. He cut the motor and reached for the rifle on the floor of the boat in one swift motion, chambered a round without taking his eyes off the forest, and raised the barrel. A click. Then the sharp crack of gunfire split the quiet, echoing through the trees.

“Oh, I heard it,” Tara said. “That was a good shot.”

The motor coughed back to life, the boat gliding towards the bank. Keith hopped out and slipped into the undergrowth. I followed. He must have been 100 feet away from shore when he finally crouched down to the ground. Then he straightened, pulling up a long, limp brown body by its slick 10-inch tail.

He was holding a wet, shaggy nutria, its long orange teeth jutting like chisels. Its webbed feet dangled in the air, black claws curled tight at the ends. Something between a beaver and a rat, and ugly as sin.

“That’s a small one,” Keith said, raising it high for Tara to see. “My friend calls ’em swamp bunnies.”

“And that’s part of the dinner menu tonight, right?”

“Would you like to try?”

“I mean, if you’re doing it… when in Rome.”

“We could try frying it,” Tara suggested.

“Ah…” Keith considered it for a moment. “I think a nutria stew would be awesome.”

***

I’ve often heard people say that America has no culture, and I think that claim couldn’t be more off. Sure, America doesn’t have one neat, homogeneous culture — it’s too mixed, too big, too complicated for that. What it does have is a whole host of cultures sprinkled across its vast and beautiful geography. That’s the true gift of this country: you can choose the life you want to live, in the culture that feels right to you.

And the beauty is that so much of America still stands with its arms open. If you show up somewhere as an outsider, and take the time to respect how people live there — not trying to change them, not trying to prove that where you’re from does things better — you’re usually met with real warmth. Come in curious, ask questions, listen more than you talk, and try to understand where people are coming from, and wow, it’s a beautiful thing.

For Keith and Tara, I was realizing that it was the unpredictability of life out here on the bayou that’d become the attraction. Keith had told me the biggest threat of living here was the storms — hurricanes blowing 160 miles an hour for hours on end, floods rising fast and rolling through without mercy. Looking out at the still water all around us — the soft wind rustling the moss in slow sways, chorus frogs peeping from the banks — it occurred to me that the risk of living here was that one moment, the place gives you peace, but the next it could strip everything away. 

I try my best to see things from the perspective of the people I’m meeting up with, because I’m always curious how others see the world. Out here, I could feel the comfort that comes from knowing your immediate survival doesn’t depend on supply chains or policies but on your own skills and relationships. Keith and Tara were as connected to their food source as you can get. Swamp-to-table cuisine. 

“So, say the grid goes down,” I said. “Everything stops — no cell coverage. You guys are fine out here?”

“Yeah,” Tara said, no hesitation.

“We’re gonna be fantastic,” Keith said, a wide smile spreading across his face.

“Fuel and clean water would be the tough ones to get, though?”

Keith glanced at Tara, as if checking that they were on the same page. “Yeah, but there’s ways to get clean water. We’d boil it all day long if we got to.”

“And how many rounds of ammo at the house?” Tara asked.

“Ooh . . .” he paused, trying not to look too pleased with himself. “Eighteen thousand rounds, maybe.”

“You’re getting ready for something, Keith?” I asked with a grin.

“Always,” Tara cut in, laughing.

Keith didn’t answer me on the fuel question since, of course, without fuel, all of this stopped: the motorboat, the cooking stove, the backup generator. It’s romantic to imagine making it in the wild on our own — and Keith and Tara could do better than most. But the truth is, we’re all dependent on civilization; it’s just a question of degree. 

“What do you guys feel about the rest of the country out here?” I asked.

“I watch no news. None,” Keith said. He sounded proud. Defiant. 

Tara leaned forward with a small laugh. “We haven’t watched the news in years.”

“I used to keep up a little bit,” Keith said, “and it would just upset me so much to see all the stuff going on. So I was like, ‘You know what? I’m a lot happier, honestly, not keeping up with it.’ ’Cause how much positive stuff do you see in the news?”

“Nothing,” Tara said quickly.

“So this is what we do” — he looked around — “and we enjoy our lives doing it. And if we’re not here, we’re doing stuff with our families. For Christmas, you’re probably looking at 60 to 70 of just my family. People like to get together here. You do a crawfish boil, and you just tell everybody, and they bring a dish, and everybody just has a great time.”

***

Soon the houses came back into view. I spotted Carlis sprawled on the dock napping. Afternoon sunlight warmed the wooden planks, the soft whistle of a cardinal carrying across the water.

“I got you a treat,” Keith said, dropping the nutria at his father-in-law’s feet. “You want some nutria stew?”

Tara set a heavy iron pot on the stove, rice and onion sizzling as Keith busied himself with the day’s catch. Carlis lifted a bottle: homemade wine, wild muscadine from the swamp, generations of craft bottled inside, stretching all the way back to his ancestors in France.

“Tara, can you bring me that gut bucket in the back?” Keith called out. “The white one we found earlier?”

Tara wrinkled her nose and looked at me. “I know, that sounds so gross, huh?”

Carlis cracked the bottle of muscadine open and tipped it forward, the deep red liquid glugging heavily into a white Styrofoam cup. He lifted it under his nose and breathed deep. “Aah. Tolé, ça c’est bon!”

A little Bordeaux in the bayou, I thought.

“Do you feel the Cajun culture’s under threat at all?” I asked as he took a slow sip of the wine.

“We’re losing it,” he said. His face tightened at the thought.

“Back when I was little, just this area here, I’d say 100% of the kids spoke French. Nowadays, you’re lucky if you get 25% to 30%. Just like my grandkids. They understand it, but they never wanted to talk it.”

“But you spoke it ’cause your parents made you speak it, right?”

“They didn’t make me — that’s all we had. French was my first language. In school, they made us quit talking French.”

“So the US school system didn’t want any French being spoken at all?”

He shook his head. “And then just lately, the last few years, they started with French immersion — teaching French.” 

“Language is like a tidal wave,” I said to Carlis. “It’s hard to go against.” 

That was how it went, the pendulum swinging from pushing out French influence to embracing it again. Starting in the late 1800s, you could see the pressure to make Louisiana less French in all kinds of small, telling ways — French street names anglicized, public institutions phasing out the language. Catholic parishes were reorganized, some priests replaced with English-speaking clergy. And yet, for all the pressure to “Americanize”, the culture held on. Children still spoke French at home, even if they were punished at school for it. Music carried the language when conversation couldn’t. Recipes traveled from grandmother to grandchild. What survived did so stubbornly, underground at times, until the Sixties, when the cultural revival movements — Cajun music festivals, immersion programs, the creation of a state agency for Francophone Affairs — began bringing the language and traditions back into the everyday. But the reality is that kids will speak the language that’s cool with their friends, the language of the TikTok videos that they’re watching.

Over in the kitchen corner, Tara lifted the black pot’s lid as the stew roared, a rush of steam and bubbling, rich and heavy. She leaned into the cloud, breathing deep, satisfied.

Plates in hand, we stepped outside to eat in the open air. I lifted a forkful. “All right,” I announced, almost ceremonially. “My first nutria.” 

I was on my toes. Food can be such a big part of identity that the rejection of a meal can seem like the rejection of a culture. I took a big bite and chewed on it for a moment. It wasn’t bad. Earthy, dense, close to rabbit or dark chicken meat.

“It’s like nothing I’ve had before, to be honest,” I said. “Texture’s like…” I hesitated. “Gummy. A lot of flavor. It’s got some kick to it, right?”

Keith leaned closer. “Big question is — would you eat it?”

I smiled, swallowing. “If I was out here, yeah.”

They both laughed.

***

This is an edited excerpt from Your Fellow Americans by Peter Santenello. Copyright 2026 © by Peter Santenello. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

It must also be one of the most journalistically picked-over places in Britain. Reporters have been taking the train here from the capital for years, stopping locals on the street to probe and poll their views; dissect their prejudices; stack their takes. White, deprived and elderly, it has become a stand-in for the large hinterland of Britain so remote from our elites. For some, the attention has become maddening. “Over the past few years we have become a joke and a cliche because of Nigel Farage,” says Sarah Elizabeth Cox, who is drinking a glass of JD Wetherspoons wine as her son snoozes in a buggy parked at the table. “I now say I’m from Clacton for my sins.”

Now, Farage is preparing to take a stand here against the establishment, or at least against a former BBC comedian wearing a bin on his head. If Britain has any unifying institutions left, Spoons must be one. Could I, sitting in the pub from sun-up till closing, plumb a little deeper than the psephologists?

When the Royal Hotel was built, it stood alone on a clifftop. Clacton-on-Sea was just an idea then. For a long time, perhaps forever, the area had been nothing but farmland out on the Essex coast. But then, in 1886, the land was bought up by Peter Bruff, a bearded Victorian engineer, who set about building railways and rerouting steamers and diverting capital flows to justify the construction of a new town. His ambitions were high. It would have, Bruff declared, “no slums or any object that could offend the eye”. The lowest type of London daytripper — “men, women and children who only seem to enjoy themselves when revelling in drink and obscenity” — ought to be discouraged from visiting.

Today, much of what was the Royal Hotel is occupied by the Moon and Starfish. Yet sitting in the garden just after 11am, Cox doesn’t want to talk about the pub’s most famous visitor. In fact, she wants to talk about everything but Farage. She wants to talk about Clacton’s problems, and once she starts it’s seemingly hard for her to stop. There is a huge issue with homelessness, she says. Like so many other English seaside towns, the deprived and the lost wash up here in search of help but end up freezing in tents all throughout the winter. Cox’s mortgage has become extortionate, more than her rent had been in London. Potholes are cracking open everywhere. Fires keep breaking out. Train prices render commuting impossible, even to nearby Colchester. She is angry with a broken social settlement that has allowed places such as Clacton to rot. “It is one of the abandoned seaside towns,” she says. “I love living here but I feel sorry for the young people.”

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Clacton has the highest proportion of economically inactive people in Britain. Jaywick, a ramshackle settlement on Clacton’s western border, is the most deprived place in England. What went wrong? The classic account is that once British holidaymakers were lured to Southern Europe by bargain flights, the seaside towns, deprived of tourists, began to slump. It is notable that at the last general election, Reform UK took three such areas among their five seats — Skegness, Great Yarmouth and Clacton.

But as I wander through the pub, everyone I speak to is happy to be there — resident and daytripper alike. They praise a community feel that, perhaps, they think remains stronger here than elsewhere in Britain. Margaret Clayton and Shirley Sizer have come on an over-sixties group outing from Cambridgeshire. Margaret has been coming here since childhood, when she used to visit with her Salvation Army Sunday school. It hasn’t changed much, she says.

Jean and Terry Williams moved down from London 40-odd years ago. They were married in East Ham, East London, but decided they had to leave when their son went to school and, according to Jean, his class swelled with Indian children who could not speak English. There was no time to teach the native pupils, she says, because they had to provide language tuition for the migrants. That was not a problem in Clacton.

But the Essex coast is not immune to England’s demographic shifts. Jean and Terry describe a local street that, to their eyes, is starting to look like Beirut. Terry thinks many of the vape and kebab shops must be money-laundering operations. Jean is relieved their son is in his forties and that she therefore has no need to worry about the ethnic composition of the schools. They have fled one wave of migration, but are being met here by another.

It is the bright peak of the day and the octogenarian couple are drinking in the garden, their skin wrinkled and puckered by decades of seaside living. They like it here, and bat away any suggestion that its population is too old. People need a place to retire, don’t they? Both plan to vote for Farage, despite his recent travails. “Personally, I don’t mind him,” says Jean. “I think all politicians are the same. I’m not being rude, but they’re all crooks. I’m not going to vote for tin man.”

Her attitude is typical. If they’re all crooks, why single out Farage? A grinning man with a missing front tooth, twisting a £20 note furiously below the table, tells me hasn’t followed the story closely but that Nigel is the bollocks and can keep his £5 million for all he cares. “Did he just pocket it and fuck off?” he laughs. “He’s one of us then.”

The man is angry that immigrants arriving on small boats are housed immediately, fed and watered in three-star establishments across the country. He was recently sectioned and then placed into supported accommodation in Clacton, he says, but then kicked out when he was arrested for “something stupid”. Now the council won’t help him.

He is also archetypal of a category of man that can be found at every asylum protest across Britain: unmoored, his life dissolving around him. Then he takes a call on a tiny black mobile, one small enough that it might be smuggled into prison in a cavity, and excuses himself.

I retreat back into the pub, which is as dim and cool as a cave. Tim Martin, who founded and owns JD Wetherspoons, has attempted to construct his empire along the guidelines detailed by George Orwell in 1946. The clientele must consist of regulars, there for the conversation as much as the beer; the architecture should be “uncompromisingly Victorian”; no radio should drown out conversation. Orwell’s preferred pub name was Moon Under Water, hence Clacton’s maritime twist: Moon and Starfish.

And as in the fictional Moon Under Water, the punters do seem to know each other. Around lunchtime, a group of auld fellas congregate around two tables in front of where I am sitting for what seems a regular meeting. People shout greetings across the room. World Cup bunting zig-zags across the ceiling, while England flags are draped from the bar and over a window. There are paintings of ships on the wall and little brass portholes cut into the walls. It is as if we are all visiting the home of a retired admiral with a mania for vexillology.

The lunch crowd gathers, eats, and departs rapidly. For many of Clacton’s older residents, Spoons is effectively just a cut-price restaurant. I watch an old woman in a wheelchair defeat a popadom the size of her head. Beside me, a man and two women in floral dresses are laying into Farage: the by-election is a farce, a waste of money, and he may be forced to stand again anyway. They would like Count Binface to win, but are concerned he’ll have to remove his headgear in Parliament.

Later, I find Paul, back out in the garden. He isn’t a fan of Farage either. “I don’t think he’s done fuck all for Clacton,” he says. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the by-election is that Farage is a constituency MP at all. Nobody I meet makes any connection between their Member of Parliament and local issues. They like him because they want to cut migration, or they oppose him because they do not. Their views do not seem to be shifting either. Farage is baked in.

Paul is drinking Guinness and holding a spindly silver vape that looks like an alien hookah. Until a few years ago, he lived in Brentwood, in London’s eastern commuter orbit. He worked in construction, breaking tarmac. But Brentwood got too posh for him and, for reasons he does not specify, he doesn’t work anymore. But he had an opportunity to move near the sea and he took it.

“Honestly, I spoke to a copper a while ago,” Paul says, “I said, “is Clacton really bad?” He said it’s no worse than any other seaside town. Every single place has its bad people. I’ve never had any trouble.” Paul normally does not vote, but next month he plans to support Count Binface. “Mate,” he says, “if I had one million I’d be set for life and this fucker got…”

For years, Clactonology has described the place as “weary” or “divided”, even as residents have been held to really be the most powerful people in Britain. The most significant work in the canon was written a little over a decade ago by Matthew Parris, the former Tory MP and Times columnist. Clacton-on-Sea, he claimed, was going nowhere. “This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlor Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.”

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UKIP — then standing Douglas Carswell in a by-election here — was a natural fit for such a place, Parris concluded. “Somebody has to represent the static caravans and holiday villages, and the people and places that for no fault of their own are not getting where a 21st-century Britain needs to be going.” The Conservative Party had to abandon the voters of such places, were they not to be dragged down themselves.

His words caused such a furor that UKIP began quoting Parris on their leaflets. But today, 2014 feels like a foreign country. After Brexit and Trump, with Marine Le Pen permitted to stand for the French presidency and the AfD leading the polls in Germany, it is hard to imagine anyone dismissing all-our-yesterdays Britain quite so blithely.

Seagulls wheel and bank over left-over lunches as a new crowd materializes, alongside a bouncer in a white shirt. As it grows dark, I speak to Dave, a neat man with silver hair, who bemoans the unfair reputations of Clacton and Jaywick. He lived and worked in London all his life, before retiring from the civil service to see out his days here. “Living in Clacton is like living in the old East End of London,” he tells me. “People chat to you. These days in London, people won’t even look you in the eye. Here, people stop and chat to you when you walk the dog.”

Dave is amiable and relaxed, smoking a cigarette in the summer air. But he seems angry at the state of Britain. “One phrase I hate,” he says, “is when people say, “I’m entitled to this.”” Benefit claimants feel entitled to money; migrants feel entitled to free housing. He would like Farage to crack down on both.

Though JD Wetherspoon pubs don’t show football, as a rule, they seem to make an exception for the World Cup. And at 8pm, Belgium kicks off against Spain. I sit next to a 20-something window fitter, who thinks Clacton is run down with few opportunities for people his age. He doesn’t like Farage, but will vote for him if the alternative is a man dressed as a bin, for whom he evinces a deep contempt. The crowd is different, now, the punters markedly younger. A clutch of men in tight jeans holding little bottles of beer has formed by the bar. When I leave, shortly after midnight, the pub is almost empty; near me just a few teenagers remain, drinking shots and playing a garage track from a phone.

A Friday in the Moon and Starfish, then, is spent mainly with people who came here from London. They relocated for the cheaper cost of living and the clear air and also, in many cases, for somewhere that is still overwhelmingly white British. They are attempting, consciously or otherwise, to recreate a community that used to dominate much of the capital, along with the pie and mash shops that cluster round the pub.

But this is the end of the line for white flight. You cannot move further east than Clacton-on-Sea. You cannot move anywhere poorer than Jaywick. For those who seek greater ethnic homogeneity, there is only one other option left: to fight. That makes the Clacton by-election essentially meaningless. It is a circus. Farage is almost certain to win, risking only mockery in his campaign against Count Binface. What is more significant is the rage pulsating throughout this town, this country. That will remain, and it will decide our future. All-our-yesterdays Britain will have its revenge.

That said, an increasing number of Londoners have decided to live on the water. The Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, made headlines recently when it emerged that he may have failed to pay council tax on his houseboat, moored in East London. People may think Polanski is a typical canal-dweller — and, to some extent, they’d be right. But, on closer inspection, the social constellation on London’s waterways is infinitely more complex.

The capital’s canals have become a strange kind of borderland, part of London, certainly, but nonetheless different from the hyper-corporatized, surveilled cityscape that surrounds them. Perhaps that’s because they were never meant to be lived on. The Victorian canals — which make up most of our manmade waterways — were built by an exploited, maligned class of laborers known as “navvies”, who somehow executed one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects in British history, practically by hand. The navvies toiled, died in their hundreds, so that the canals could transport freight. But then the railways came, and the motorways (also built by navvies) which usurped the canals. They became vestigial, which, with some exceptions, tends to make infrastructure more interesting in the long run.

Today, the canals are busier than at any other time in their history, which would’ve been hard to imagine back in the mid-20th century, when, particularly in big cities, they tended to be filled with shopping-trolleys and associated with crime. 20 years ago, walking along the Hertford Union or Regent’s canal towards Hackney would’ve felt sketchy in a way it no longer does. Back then, canals even had their own serial killers: in London, John Sweeney (“The Canal Killer”) dismembered a sex worker and threw her remains into the Regent’s; in Manchester so many bodies were hauled onto the unlit towpath that a paranoid city had to invent a serial killer via urban legend — “the Manchester pusher”.

In time, though, the canals started becoming associated with boaters rather than corpses. The number of boats on London’s canals increased dramatically during the austerity years since 2012. The bends of the canals make watery loopholes and, if you walk the capital’s towpaths, you’ll speak to people who want to live “off grid”, or in some way escape the manacles of city life, while continuing to benefit from it. These people tend to dislike the Canal & River Trust (CRT).

Unless you’re reading this afloat, the CRT is probably the largest charity that’s never occurred to you. According to the Charity Commission, in 2024 their total income was over £237 million. About half of that comes from property holdings; the CRT has roughly a billion pounds in long-term investment assets. They used to be a government body called British Waterways and, when they broke away in 2012, it amounted to the largest ever transfer of UK state assets into a charity. Now they’re tasked with maintaining the canals, which are expensive, and overseeing its boaters, who can be too.

There are two types of boat dwellers on London’s waterways: “continuous cruisers,” who buy a boat, then pay the CRT a license to use the waterways, provided they move a vague distance (which not everyone does) every two weeks; and people with permanent moorings. In London, permanent moorings can set you back up to £15,000 per year in prime locations, so the majority choose the former category and it’s up to the CRT to make sure they’re keeping to the rules.

“The CRT, for whatever reason, have decided that they don’t want to have this community of boaters living on the canals,” says Jack Saville, a spokesperson for the National Bargee Travellers Association (NBTA), a member-led organisation set up to lobby for the legal rights of continuous cruisers.

The NBTA are unsettled by a 2025 CRT report titled “The Future of Licensing” which, among other things, recommends using compulsory trackers to monitor difficult boaters in congested areas. It also argues the CRT needs the power to employ “reasonable force as a last resort when removing a boat subject to a Court order.”

Saville thinks the rules are fine as they are — but the CRT fears they’re too ambiguous, and that there’s a need to clarify, in official terms, what it means to be a boater, particularly a continuous cruiser. I spent a few days in London trying to clarify this same question in non-official terms. What I found relates right back to my earlier point about the freedoms and unfreedoms of city life. It’s a hideaway, populated by people who wanted to escape things: the housing crisis, or the system, or an expected life. In some cases, they escaped only to find themselves escaping even more things, whether an increased license fee, or a faulty engine, or that bane of London boaters: “The Beneficiary.”

***

Jonesy has always tried to do things differently. He’s hitchhiked the UK, even went a year without a phone. As such, he’s a fairly typical young boater who enjoys building saunas and smoking weed and using his hands. Jonesy took to the waterways four years ago, but didn’t hear about The Beneficiary until last summer. By then, even the CRT were aware of The Beneficiary and sent out a community wide email warning people about him.

It turned out The Beneficiary isn’t an official title — it’s just the odd name someone calls themselves. Going by the CRT’s email, he was “a black male, aged approximately 40-50 years old, short hair with a top knot”, and who “may be in possession of a stolen boat”. Not everyone who exits the urban societal bargain can re-enter quite the same way. According to rumor, which travels fast on the canals, The Beneficiary was the sort of guy who took too many psychedelics in his twenties and later lost his mind.

Jonesy says The Beneficiary had been hurling bricks through the windows of narrowboats and, if the broken window wasn’t addressed within a week, he’d steal the boat and repaint it. Someone told Jonesy that The Beneficiary had stolen the wrong boat, and a posse had been assembled to attack him. No one I spoke with is sure exactly what happened there. According to Jonesy, The Beneficiary now lives in a tent somewhere in Hackney. A number of boats also burned that summer, one in a suspected arson attack — it was a strange time.

If you could create a personality compass for the canals, with “peaceful-gnarly” on the x axis and “good-bad” on the y, tranquil hippies like Jonesy would be somewhere in the middle, and The Beneficiary in the bottom right (“gnarly, bad”). As for the top right corner you’d find the “gnarly, good” Vince. The Beneficiary wouldn’t have gotten far with one of Vince’s boats. “Even if you disarm the tracker,” Vince explains, nursing a tinny, “I’ll send three boys that way, three boys that way!” I like Vince, who flips boats for cash, and has the distinctive, snuffling swagger of a party bloke. I encountered him on the Lee, a canalized river near to Haggerston station.

Algerian Chaoui music plays out of a Bose speaker on the table while we chat shit — literally, in some cases; Vince tells me about the “shatamaran”, who used to float around the canals collecting toilet waste for 20 quid. Apparently the shatamaran-man would always be wasted, always be covered in shit, and always try to embrace upon greeting. “He tells me, ‘put the money in my wife’s account’”, Vince recalls, laughing, “I say, ‘YOU’RE MARRIED?!’”  Vince, by contrast, is not married. He’s a quarter Indian and keeps a portrait of an ancient Raj-era dignitary which he pretends is his great uncle. “That’s got me in so many girls’ knickers it’s unbelievable.”

Like other boaters, Vince has a strong sense of solidarity. He grew up “poor as fuck”, with nefarious friends. One of his boats, which he’d previously fitted with speakers and ferried to carnival, is being turned into a traveling gallery. A photographer by trade, Vince wants to use it to exhibit photography by impoverished East London kids, ferry it across the city and repeat the process with their West London counterparts. Vince has noticed the potential of the canals, as a non-place where culture can be mobile. He also has the tenacity of poverty but the free spirit of a posh girl. “When I became a teenager,” he explains, “I started dating posh girls… these people have no boundaries, I wanted to start thinking like them.”

There are posh girls on the canals too, girls like Octavia Sheepshanks, 32, moved onto the water to take up a bucolic romance. I encounter Sheepshanks on the Little Venice towpath, which cleaves London in two. On one side there are the boutique shops and high-end houses of Warwick Avenue; on the other is the Westway, and the traveler community who live underneath, just five minutes from their local pub, which backs on to Grenfell. Speaking abstractly, you’d find Sheepshanks (“peaceful, good”) in the top-left corner of the compass.

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After sinking about 20 grand on a 38-foot boat called The Yan Tan Tethera, she was supposed to navigate her way up to Cambridge and moor next to her boyfriend. But life has a way of unraveling, and now she’s weathering her first winter on the water alone, drafting a romantic fantasy novel called The Chronochasm.

Sheepshanks moved onto the water for love but stayed for the freedom it grants her. When she first became aquatic, she found a nest of coots under a neighboring boat and everyday a seagull would swoop down, pick up one of the chicks and smash it on a nearby roof. It was traumatic. At boarding school, she recalls, the girls used to hide spiders in her bed. Animals meet on the towpath too.

Octavia does not keep a pet, though maritime animals are common on the canals, especially cats. They venture onto the towpath at night, communing while their owners are asleep. There are dogs too, the largest probably being Baloo, the 92-kilo Central Asian Shepherd who lives with John, a Polish man who floats around East London selling diesel.

Thinking of The Beneficiary, I ask Sheepshanks if she feels safe living alone as a woman on the canals. She answers that she does. She did once arrive home to find a man asleep under her engine cover, but he turned out to be quite apologetic and nice. As most boaters will tell you, you’re much more likely to encounter people illegally renting an Airbnb along the towpath than you are to be robbed. It took me about 45 minutes before I bumped into an Austrian couple renting out a boat which didn’t have a permanent mooring (a cash grab the CRT has tried to police but lacks sufficient resources to do so). Often, boaters don’t like tourists because they don’t know what they’re doing. They also moan about the expensive wide-beams which are too broad for the locks; sometimes people call the locks “twat filters”.

No one moans about Ali, who, as both peaceful and gnarly, somehow sits outside the canal compass. He’s known as the “unofficial mayor” of his stretch of Little Venice. He’s a strange, quiet man who speaks to the fire and was jailed, according to him, in four different countries. “Everything is relative,” he says, “everyone is a victim of his own circumstances, there is no criminal in this world.” In summer, Ali grew strawberries from the roof of his boat and a little girl would always run up and pick them on her way back from school, her grandfather shouting in Greek for her to leave the boats alone and return to the city, where the bargain holds.

One sign announces that Charlburians are “NOT TOO POSH TO PROTEST”. That isn’t true: the demonstration is specifically not a protest, but a “Vance Not Welcome party”: that’s why its organizers, the Stop Trump Coalition (STC), brought the cake. Immaculate dogs saunter obediently on leads as their owners chat. (I overhear one person suggesting that this caucus should be called “Labradors Against Vance”.) A passing Volvo estate car toots its horn.

This is an omnicause demonstration: some fly Palestine flags, while others attend on behalf of the climate, “courtesy”, migrants and Ukraine. All these myopic single-issue angers converge in the figure of Vance. “This is a man whose regime is authoritarian,” says Jake Atkinson, a speaker from the STC. “They are abducting people off the streets in the US and deporting them without any due process. They are funding and arming a genocide in Gaza and they are rolling back support for a free Ukraine.”

But it’s not just Vance’s politics that have angered locals. Last Sunday, his 19-car motorcade thundered into Dean — a sleepy, 12-house hamlet where the former British prime minister David Cameron lives — after having spent the previous weekend with David Lammy at Chevening, the Foreign Secretary’s grace and favor country house. He rented Dean Manor from lightbulb millionaire Johnny Hornby and his wife Pippa (who apologized “for the circus” on a local WhatsApp group seen by the Telegraph). George Osborne arranged the rental for him. There, Vance duly set up an itinerant court, to which he summoned the likes of Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage, and Thomas Skinner — the ex-Apprentice star, acclaimed for eating sloppily patriotic breakfasts and saying “Bosh”.

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“People have not been able to use footpaths, have been stopped, asked for their contact details and social media — that’s a real intrusion,” complains Juliette Crisp, who moved to the area in the Eighties. The entire hamlet was “secured” last weekend, as checkpoints were hastily erected at both road entrances, while sweaty police officers rushed to block all nearby tracks and footpaths. A British policeman, whose job it was to move traffic cones back and forth by the south checkpoint, told me that he was averaging 12,000 steps a day within the same small patch of road. A few Americans, presumably Secret Service agents, perambulated in civvies and wiry sunglasses.

One local farmer posted on Charlbury Forum to say that 14 sheep grazing near Dean had disappeared. Soon, Charlbury was rife with speculation: a gate left open, or something darker? The sheep seem to have been found. Elsewhere, Clarkson’s Farm star Kaleb Cooper’s tractor was stuck behind the vice presidential convoy in Chipping Norton as it started to rain. “[If] he just drove around in a VW Polo,” he wrote on Instagram, “nobody would know who he was.”

Charlburians are used to this level of attention. In the last three weeks alone, they’ve hosted the former vice president Kamala Harris — who stayed at The Bull pub for Eve (daughter of Steve) Jobs’s wedding — and the Wilderness Festival. If there’s any truth to the oft-used moniker “sleepy”, it’s that Charlburians have spent the last few decades with their eyes wedged open by cocktail sticks, teased with small plates and matcha lattes and desperate for a rest.

This being the land of black labs and Ukraine flags, some kind of demonstration against Vance was inevitable. Here, Vance’s treatment of President Zelensky is deemed unforgivable. In Spelsbury, one woman told me that she hoped to “give Vance the kind of welcome he gave Zelensky”. But when I asked one of the demonstrators whether that’s what she hoped to do, she said: “No. We’re far too middle class for that.” His comments about the UK also wound up the demonstrators. Since becoming Vice President, he has called the UK “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” and “the first truly Islamist country” with nuclear weapons. Georgia, 23, accuses him of “hypocrisy”: to go around “slagging us off, and now he’s on holiday here”.

Many of the demonstrators belong to what is called the Pastoral Bourgeoisie — a class of comfortably middle-class, cottage-dwelling, Coalition-nostalgics, who work locally or from home, or are in semi-retirement. They are cakeists, unwilling to countenance lower migration despite being proprietorial over their own neighborhood. Theirs is a retrograde liberalism that’s left them trapped in a sort-of glitching VR headset jammed in a Sunday Times Property Supplement in the Summer of 2022. That was their heyday: they’d seen off the pandemic in leafy good cheer, and the nation still considered their values (honesty, integrity, courtesy) important enough to vanquish Boris Johnson. Next up, JD Vance. “I am just incandescent at the thought of Vance dumping himself on my countryside,” says Jude, a 60-year-old man. “People [here] might look old and crusty and wrinkly, but they value courtesy, morals.” Jake Atkinson tells me that Vance is guilty of “egregious abuses of power that don’t agree with British values”.

It’s unsurprising, then, that so many wealthy Democrats have moved here since Trump’s re-election last November. Charlbury sits in what estate agents call “The Golden Triangle”, the bit of countryside between Burford and Chipping Norton, where the proliferation of country clubs, good restaurants, and passable coffee means it’s been dubbed “The English Hamptons”. Plum Fenton, director of Savills’ country house team in the Cotswolds, told me that there had been an increase in dollar-based transactions since then, while David Henderson, who works in their residential department, said that many of these buyers have been coming from Democratic strongholds — though as yet they don’t have data on this.

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Ellen DeGeneres is certainly the most famous of these newly landed “Yanks on the Wold”, and she decided to move here the day after Trump was re-elected. She bought Kitesbridge Farm at the end of 2024 for £15 million, made considerable renovations, and then sold it to move elsewhere since she “needed a home that had a horse facility and pastures for them”. Once again, though, she’s escaped MAGA-dom after reportedly taking an urgent holiday whilst Vance is in the area.

In his 1971 book The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner writes that “America, here [in the Old World] had imaginative advantages, being unencumbered by the worldliness with which Europe had learned to inhabit the European world”. In looking at the UK, they have a radical idealism — oft-misguided — which cuts through the lumbering, skeptical fatalism of worldly Europe. Thus wealthy Democrats, liberated from their homeland’s tyranny, ignore the UK’s present disorder and see a liberal idyll where a center-left government came to power on the back of a landslide. So too can Vance believe that within the caricatured “Yookay” of the online Right — a lawless world of failed multiculturalism — there’s still something worth salvaging.

“It’s what they imagine England looks like,” says Charlbury’s vicar Fergus Butler-Gallie — a land of yellow oolitic sandstone and Hobbitish Cotswolds vernacular. As far back as 1929, American industrialist Henry Ford imagined such a Cotswolds: he imported a cottage from Chedworth which he rebuilt at Greenfield Village in Michigan, a museum that sought to preserve the old world as it was swept away by Ford’s innovations. But his buying agent knew the cottage wasn’t what Ford wanted, and so he made several modifications to make it look how Ford had imagined it would. The Times observed how the villagers “viewed the whole proceeding with disfavor, not unmixed with indignation. In common with most rural parishes, Chedworth suffers from a scarcity of houses, new ones are so costly to build as to put them beyond the reach of the ordinary man.”

Today, rich Americans are similarly shielded from local issues. The outskirts Charlbury are more This Country than Country Life. Hidden beneath a veneer of wealth, some 30 families attend the local food bank, and Butler-Gallie tells me that the church helps pay for their school uniforms and heating bills. Charlbury once had a prosperous gloving industry, and was the center of a booming agricultural region. (I drove past more signs reading “STOP THE FAMILY FARM TAX” than telling Vance to leave). Now it has tourism and the silly rich. “Americans? I love them,” says Peter Cowley, an 85-year-old parking attendant at Diddly Squat farm shop. “They’re generous. They spend. They tip well.” They are necessary. In Henry James’s novel Portrait of a Lady, a chronicle of Americans in Europe, Ralph Touchett tells Isabel Archer that “there is no romance here but what you may have brought with you”. But in the Cotswolds there is: for it’s the romance that sells.

It was an otherwise quiet afternoon in Kentish suburbia. In a woods tucked away from the Barratt Homes and play park, I stood in a bite suit, pressed against a tree, as my old friend Jason shouted instructions at Trigger — his “ak47 on a leash”. On command, Trigger switched from belly-rubbed playfulness to locked-jaw aggression and then back again in an instant. This, Jason assured me, is controlled ferocity, not wanton aggression. Most of the time, he said, Trigger could end a situation without even needing to bite.

One challenge with working dogs is teaching them to retrieve small objects without swallowing. “Once they get used to copper pipes, you move them on to keys and then finally to bullets,” Jase explains, placing a bullet in Trigger’s titanium teeth. “Don’t get me wrong,” Jase says, “they do look good, and the bite does hurt.” He smiles, setting down his joint to pry open Trigger’s mouth. “But it’s also for the protection of the dog.”

Jason started buying, training and trading dogs back in 2020, after serving three years in prison for possession with intent to supply. He got the idea from a mentor inside, who offered him the old line from Mark Twain: “If you do something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” “I told him that’s why I sold drugs,” Jase jokes, but was encouraged by these words to start a business selling XL Bullies.

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In bold black lettering, Jase has his old Bully logo tattooed on the back of his hand. But by late 2021, sensing a shift in attitudes towards the dogs and oversaturation in the market, he changed the business name and shifted to working breeds. “The Bully game,” he explains, “stopped being about the confirmation of the breed — proper build, temperament, and genetics — and became more about rare coat colors.” He wasn’t surprised when XL Bullies were banned last year. But also thinks this sort of legislation is pointless. After all, as Jason’s own story attests, those so inclined to own dangerous dogs will simply create hybrids or switch to new breeds.

Trigger, then, is a highly trained animal with a certificate in KNPV: the Dutch program for training police dogs. The Netherlands has a long history of producing elite working dogs, and KNPV is regarded as the gold standard — with police, security, and military forces worldwide seeking dogs from the program. Jase himself is in talks with a sheriff’s department in Texas to sell on some of his well-trained pups.

Such trans-Atlantic connections aren’t typical in Ashford: the town Jase and I grew up in. It’s not the poorest place in the country, but it’s hardly thriving. Like much of Kent’s former patchwork economy, it faced a “late and steep” process of de-industrialization; and Britain’s broader shift to a service-based economy has left Ashford a provincial non-place — a transport-link feeding London. Those who can escape via education and a job in The City do, while those who stay behind contend with cultural and economic depreciation. Skilled manual work exists, but the idea of a well-paid job embedded in the local community feels, to many, unrealistic — or at least lacking in prestige.

Dead high streets and busy job centers are a fixture of provincial England. Which makes one wonder, if Ashford can breed extremes of despondency, how many more Jase’s might exist across the country? Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the highest rates of fatal dog attacks and illegal dog fighting — grim proxies for social decay — are recorded in our most deprived former industrial heartlands: in Yorkshire, Merseyside, South Wales, Greater Manchester, and the West Midlands.

Often enough, owning high-drive dogs, with bloodsport origin, is used to elevate status while signaling an affiliation with a nonconformist subculture. In recent years, dangerous dogs have become stylized commodities that signal hyper-masculine bravado and criminal chic on social media. But at its best, taming dangerous dogs is a way of experiencing risk and developing the self while making a living; and the lines between garish signaling and self-development aren’t always clear.

XL Bullies were the gateway drug to life as professional dogmen for a few of my hometown friends. And Ashford is hardly exceptional. Jase works with dogs full-time, while another friend, Conor, breeds pocket bullies and trains Dutch herders, alongside his day job as a groundworker. Both participate in trials and title events across the country — where handlers demonstrate their dogs’ skills for certification and cash prizes.

As well as training protection dogs in KNPV, Jase makes money from litters (he gets “stud rights” for the pick of the best dog) and runs a parallel business training domestic pets in obedience and corrective behavior. Untrained Malinois pups, he tells me, sell for a few hundred dollars while the highest price he’s fetched for a trained dog was $5,000 — a domestic protection sale to a Belgium breeder. The protection dog business is lucrative and growing, with trained dogs becoming a must-have for A-listers and high-net-worth individuals. Some dogs are sold for as much as $250,000.

Interestingly, owners of domestic protection dogs are disproportionately female. Many women, often with experiences of stalking or domestic abuse, are drawn to the “ultimate confidence” a personal protection dog provides. Jase isn’t surprised. “It’s not like walking around with a knife or a gun,” he says, “you can’t get pulled over, but you’re safe at all times.”

“If I ever got in trouble,” Jase says, touching the wood of a park bench, “having my dog activate without advancing can shut down or deter most situations without him even having to bite.” He cited rising violent crime rates, an inability to police the border, and increases in sexual assaults, stabbings, robberies — “all sorts, all over London” — as justification for more citizens to invest in a dog like Trigger. Leviathan loses his monopoly on violence when he fails to protect his subjects.

Despite the lingering trappings of his past — like the habitual weed smoking, and ankle tag for firearm charges on his leg — Jase was keen to impress on me the safety, legitimacy, and family friendly aspect of the protection dog business. Nonetheless, even after he showed me videos of his two-year-old daughter holding Trigger on the leash, with himself as the “decoy” in the bite suit, I was reluctant to suit up myself.

But after he was called off my arm (“Los” for let go), Trigger didn’t show the least interest in me. “When all that energy gets channeled into an outlet,” Jase says, “you have a stable dog, but when you have high-drive dogs that are sitting indoors and not doing nothing, they get bored and frustrated… Every dog has a purpose,” he finished, “but people have tried to domesticate them too much.”

There’s a video on Jase’s Instagram overlaid with dance music. Clad in an all-black bite suit, he holds a replica submachine gun inside a shot-up American bus, parked in a field in Kent. Caravans and Heras fencing frame the background as a Malinois leaps through the bus window from an assault course outside, latching onto Jase’s bicep before hitting the floor. Jase spins around, pointing the gun at the dog, which writhes like a piranha on his arm.

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This cartoonishly Snatch-esque exhibition — complete with guns, caravans, dogs, balaclavas, and a backing track — is in a sense, just boys with dangerous toys in a (bite-)suit of organized production. Even from behind a screen, the adrenaline and carnival excitement — along with the social capital gained from playing the villain and demonstrating virility — are palpably seductive, and surely an essential part of the pursuit’s attraction.

But the same could be said for any kind of military practice, extreme sport, or martial art; all often serve as a methadone for wayward young men on a joyride through life without direction. Each answers a deeper need to assert something more fundamental about one’s worth, especially pertinent as industrial forms of identity have been eroded and status for non-university-educated men feels increasingly out of reach. In provincial towns where purpose and status are in dwindling supply, the delinquent need for structure is a more pressing problem than its bourgeois opposite: the metrosexual yearning for mud.

High-drive dogs kept in unsuitable environments have defined the pattern of attacks in recent years — an apt metaphor for men in post-industrial communities drawn to dangerous animals. Despite recent legislative interventions, this demand for dogs that project strength — whether as weapons, symbols, or protectors — has far from disappeared. As Jase suggests, the law has its limits. In places without clear pathways to success new status dogs will emerge. And the latest have “bites like lions”.

Today, the parliament is electing former professional footballer Mikheil Kavelashvili as Georgia’s new president, and the protestors aren’t happy. Kavelashvili is a former member of the incumbent pro-Kremlin Georgian Dream party (though now ostensibly an independent) and a strong proponent of the “Global War Party” conspiracy that the West is driving Georgia into conflict with Russia. Worse, he is also a co-author of the controversial “foreign agents” bill that forced organisations receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as agents of foreign influence.

But what most irks the protesters is the fact that he has no degree. “He’s a fool without even a university diploma,” is the phrase I hear over and over. The Soviet reverence for education lingers, a Georgian friend explains. That he was once a professional sportsman (albeit not a very good one) is irrelevant. “My Grandad voted for Georgian Dream,” says Georgi, a young activist handing out flyers, “but now he feels betrayed because they elected this idiot.”

Kavelashvili is known to be a puppet; he is easily controllable by the ruling Georgian Dream party and by Bidzina Ivanishvili (known generally as Bidzina), Georgia’s richest oligarch, former prime minister, founder of Georgian Dream and the man who runs the country. But there are so many who would do Bidzina’s bidding, surely, they could find a puppet with a university diploma? I ask

“That’s the point,” Georgi answers. “Bidzina wants to humiliate society. He is a true authoritarian. The message is simple: I’ll elect my horse, and you’ll suck it up.”

***

Recent events in Georgia are grimly familiar. The general election in October saw the pro-Kremlin Georgian Dream win 53.9% of the vote (with 37.7% for the opposition coalition).

The opposition, and international observers, accused Georgian Dream of electoral fraud. Georgian NGO, The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy reported “serious (electoral) violations”, including “intimidation, ballot stuffing, multiple voting, unprecedented levels of voter bribery and expulsion of observers from polling stations”. Other accusations included violence in polling stations, suppression of media, intimidation of opposition voters, compromised voter privacy and so on. The central election commission carried out a partial recount involving about 12% of polling stations and 14% of votes but claimed there wasn’t “a significant change to previously announced official results”. 

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, whom Georgian Dream had previously endorsed but is now firmly anti-government and pro-Western, had declared that the opposition coalition was set to win. “European Georgia is winning with 52% despite attempts to rig elections and without votes from the diaspora,” she tweeted.

Things are so febrile because the election was about far more than just who governs Georgia. It was a test of the country’s democratic health as it sought — theoretically, as far as Georgian Dream was concerned — to join the EU. Brussels had previously warned Tbilisi that a free and fair election was essential to continue its trajectory to membership; it also warned that any fraud could lead to the revocation of Georgia’s visa-free regime within the Schengen Zone.

The government chose fraud. The European Commission said that it could not recommend opening membership talks for the EU “unless Georgia reverts the current course of action which jeopardises its EU path”. Tens of thousands duly hit onto the streets. The Georgian interior minister announced the purchase of several new water cannons in anticipation of more protests over coming weeks.

The government refuses to back down. Nor will the protestors, who believe they are facing a simple choice. In early November, the former prime minister and current opposition leader Giorgi Gakharia laid out the essence of things. “In Georgia, we are connected to Europe through democracy, and to Russia through autocracy,” he told me. “These elections are so important because they are about the clash between the European or Russian orientation of the country, and therefore between these two different political paths.”

Across eastern Europe, the central foreign policy problem (and, given its penetration of their politics, often domestic problem) for many states is Russia. For those who want a better future the choice is exactly what Gakharia laid out: on the one hand, Europe, democracy, and strategic partnerships with the United States; on the other, a future of Kremlin-controlled governments that hoard power, enrich their leaders, and kowtow to Vladimir Putin.

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One evening, a few days after Syrian rebels overthrew Bashar al-Assad, I saw a man on Rustaveli, waving the independent Syria flag. “This flag is a token of solidarity between us and the Syrian people,” he told me. “Syrians fought for 12 years to get rid of a brutal dictator backed by the same enemy who seeks to subjugate us here: the regime of Vladimir Putin.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. In 2008, Russian troops rolled into Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions. They have squatted there ever since. But during the election campaign Bidzina said that Georgia provoked the conflict and should apologise to Russia. For a country’s de facto leader to blame his own people for their invasion by a more powerful neighbour is perhaps the most sinister form of political self-abasement I have encountered.

The people were predictably outraged. Georgian Dream tried to row back on the statement, but the damage was done. And the comments were instructive because they show the world the influence Putin has even when he doesn’t invade or kill: he turns leaders into toadies, as surely as he seeks to turn nations into colonies.

And it’s all done under the threat of force. “If you don’t vote for us, the Russians will invade. Georgia will become another Ukraine” was another Georgian Dream election pitch. Exercise freedom of choice and Russia will hurt you: the threat wasn’t even veiled.

Just over a month after the election, on 28 November, the government announced that it had “decided not to bring up the issue of joining the European Union on the agenda until the end of 2028”. Until then, protests had been generally calm but at that point they erupted, largely due to provocation from violent riot police, which, like all enforcement arms of an authoritarian state, also began to target journalists.

In the Marriott hotel media centre on Rustaveli, I met Alexander Keshelashvili from the independent Georgian Online publication Publica. He was covering the protests on the night of 28 November, just after the government made its historic announcement. Things were tense but peaceful. He was standing by the side of a building with a few other journalists when a mob of police ran towards them. He felt someone grab him and drag him to the police lines. Then around six to eight of them formed a circle around him and began to beat him. They didn’t even tell him he was under arrest; they just punched and kicked him.

“At first, I thought it was a mistake. I was shouting, ‘I’m a journalist,’ but I heard some bad words regarding my profession, so I knew they had targeted me deliberately.” Alexander was taken to hospital where he was told he had signs of concussion, as well as that the police had broken his nose in several places, for which he needed surgery.

The parallels with Ukraine’s 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution are hard to ignore; and when I spoke to Georgians they agreed. That revolution also began when a pro-Kremlin government (led by President Viktor Yanukovych) decided to turn away from the EU and towards Moscow after Yanukovych reneged on his promise to sign the EU accession agreement and chose instead to join Putin’s Customs Union. The people came onto the streets and did not leave until Yanukovych had fled to Russia.

Walking around Rustaveli, echoes of Maidan were everywhere. Activist civil society is blooming just as it was in Ukraine a decade ago. Protestors are coming together to get organised. Legal assistance is provided to those arrested, first aid facilities are set up.

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In truth, anything the protestors can do to increase their collective potency is now a necessity. Just as the Yanukovych government did during the Ukraine’s EuroMaidan Revolution, Bidzina’s government has hired gangs of thugs known as “Titushky” to intimidate and beat up protestors. People were eager to show me videos of them attacking protestors, often women. One evening, I saw a row of home-made shields by the side of the road — planks of wood with handles nailed into them, amateurish parodies of riot police shields — for people to defend themselves the next time the police got violent.

The Titushky have spawned a reaction. One young activist, Tornike Mskhiladze, has set up an anti-Titushky group. “Tbilisi is really small. I know five of the Titushky. Methadone addicts with criminal convictions. After doing this work, police will wipe their convictions. I know how fucked up their lives are. They are the scum of the earth, like the worst people you can imagine. And they beat up women and the press,” he told me.

People, he explained, had begun to feel unsafe at the protests even though they were protesting peacefully. “So I started asking around: who wants to defend our citizens because our police are now working with criminals. We must defend ourselves with our bare hands. Many people joined me. It was spontaneous. It wasn’t like I created a group or anything.”

Shame is an important tool of opposition here. As I walked up to a street protest one evening I saw the police congregating by their vans, almost all wore masks — it was striking sight in a country still theoretically a democracy.

Georgi explained it to me. “In the beginning when police were beating the protestors opposition media would discover their identities from video footage and then go to their parents’ house and ask their mothers what they thought of their sons beating their fellow citizens. Their mothers would often start crying and wailing that their sons would never do this. After that, the police started wearing masks.”

It’s clear that that protestors will not be intimidated off the streets. But the question remains: where does this all go politically? To try to answer it I speak to Giga Bokeria, the leader of the opposition Federalists Party, and a man who likes to chain smoke and discuss Winston Churchill. “I want to be clear,” he says, puffing away. “When we talk about the moving toward the EU here, we are not talking about it as an institution only. It’s about an overall civilisational choice.”

This is why, he explains, the protests intensified after 28 November. “For one month the protests were purely about elections. After the [EU] statement all the fears about Georgian Dream, which were clear to some, but maybe not so clear to others, or they didn’t want it to see it, were confirmed.”

This includes many Georgian Dream supporters, who didn’t think the government would turn away from the EU. Now they are out on the streets. “You have to understand,” he says, “that for Bidzina it’s not about four years in power, it’s about eternity in power for the status quo that he creates. And for that he needs to break the will of society.”

Will the government get more violent? Could they start open firing on the people? Most Georgians I know dismiss this. This is not Ukraine or Russia, is the response I get. Bokeria, though, is more circumspect. “I can’t exclude that unfortunately. And it’s good you mentioned Maidan. There are a lot of parallels. It’s not led by any political group; indeed, it’s completely decentralised, but now we see first signs of self-organisation: every day different groups organise demonstration in different locations, and they coordinate themselves.”

He continues: “Now, I didn’t mention Maidan because government propaganda is referencing it to frighten people, to make them think that if they continue to resist there will be bloodshed and that it will be followed by war from Russia. But it’s our duty as citizens of this country to do what we can to defend our sovereignty and individual liberty.”

Beyond that, though, is the inescapable engine of geopolitics. Georgia sits at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is a transit hub for trade and energy between Europe and Asia, while its position along the Black Sea and proximity to Russia, Turkey, and the Middle East further amplify its importance. If you want to counter Russian influence in the Caucasus region, you need Tbilisi. Conversely, if Russia can erode its democratic institutions, it gains greater leverage over the entire region.

The lesson of Georgia is as clear and unignorable as that of Ukraine. You can never be Putin’s ally: you either stand up to him or become his serf. Georgia as well as Ukraine, as well as Israel and Taiwan, are all now frontlines of the West. Their people are battling to uphold the systems we built. We help them in their fight, for our sakes as much as theirs.