Trump’s presidency has now entered its most dangerous phase. With little left to lose after an earth-shaking midterm wipeout, he is released from political restraint. He has accepted the result with apparent grace, dismissing the fact that the elections were a referendum on his presidency with the assertion that he was not on the ballot — an amusing claim, since he spent the campaign saying the opposite. The mood in the party is somber. The Florida governor Ron de Santis, mooted as a presidential candidate, has described the results as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans”. No doubt rightly, given its impact on prices at the pump, the vice-president JD Vance — also looking to his future — has averred “the reason we lost is the war”. They and many others are pointing the finger at Trump, but he may not care. 

In control of the House and Senate, the triumphant Democrats can launch as many legal challenges as they like. They can block legislation, launch investigations into his crimes and impeach him, but he retains the presidential veto, and the supreme master of the attention economy will not be out of the limelight for long. An adventure in Cuba would be a welcome distraction, and he may yet trigger a greater cataclysm in the Gulf. Trump’s second administration is the experimental refutation of liberal legalism. Post-Trump America is not a constitutional republic but an illiberal democracy, the triumph of politics and executive power over law and procedure.

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John Gray: liberal civilisation is finished

By John Gray

Those who believe Trump shares a mindset with the world’s leading tyrants are mistaken. Neither the Russian nor the Chinese leader displays his all-consuming narcissism. Putin is an archetypal creature of the Soviet system, a cold-eyed killer schooled in the art of survival. Xi is a suspicious autocrat possessed by the insecurity of his position. Putin’s aggression combines self-preservation — his own survival inseparable from that of his regime — with a neo-tsarist vision of a mystical “Russian realm” targeted for destruction by the West. Xi’s “Chinese dream” is the project of making China into the global hegemon and an unapologetic affirmation of Chinese civilization.  

Embodying nothing except his own emptiness and venality, Trump is the ideal dupe for these flinty tyrants. Possibly he fears Putin as the possessor of kompromat of some sort — there must be many possibilities — and he has certainly done business with the regime. But if Trump is behaving like a Russian asset, it is not because he was recruited as a Manchurian candidate in Moscow 40 years ago. Putin never expected Trump to become president (any more than Trump did himself) and seems to view him with bemused contempt. Trump sees the Russian dictator through the lens of his ideal self-image as strongman and admires him as a model of how to use state power to accumulate personal wealth. 

Those who speak of the Putinisation of America can point to undeniable parallels. Putin is a master of vranyo, the Bolshevik practice of telling lies that both speaker and audience know perfectly well are falsehoods — as when he denied that the “little green men” invading Crimea in 2014 were Russian troops. The goal is not persuasion but domination: by imposing a narrative that is transparently false, the very idea of a domain of facts independent of power is undermined. With his incoherent boasting — claiming to have “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability, then justifying a resumption of the war to destroy it — Trump also asserts power over facts. The difference is that Putin knows he is lying, whereas in Trump’s moment-by-moment solipsism, truth has no meaning.

For his critics, Trump is the kingpin of a Putin-style kleptocracy. It is true that his second administration has seen the presidency monetized to an unprecedented degree. Diplomacy has become a rent-seeking family business. Insider trading has been normalized. In August of this year, the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) launched a premier data feed allowing Wall Street banks and high-frequency trading firms access to his market-moving Truth Social posts milliseconds before they become available to the public, with subscribers paying a hundred thousand dollars a month for the service. 

By the time they leave office, Trump, his family and acolytes will have amassed immense riches. Likewise, Putin’s extraction of capital from Russia’s economy has, by some estimates, made him richer than Elon Musk. Yet wealth and government interact differently in Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America. Under Trump, the US is ruled by a variant of capitalism in which the state is used as a means of corporate enrichment at the expense of America’s strategic interests. In Russia’s version of state capitalism, corporate influence is curbed when it threatens the state itself. The same is true in China.

When Russia’s richest oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, became involved in opposition politics and negotiations to sell part of his oil company, Yukos, to American firms, he was arrested at gunpoint on his private jet, sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian penal colony and Yukos bankrupted. When the CEO of the Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, criticized China’s financial regulators, he was taken out of circulation and his business empire dismantled. In contrast, the Trump administration authorized the export of high-end computer chips of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia for export to China. During Xi’s visit to Washington, Trump bent the knee in more than one sense. He reportedly pitched the Chinese leader regarding purchases of American military technology, violating decades-long commitments to Taiwan and other allies. He prioritized corporate gain over national security and America’s standing in the world.

Trump’s “transactional” diplomacy consists of the exchange of American power for promises of private gain. The settlement of the Ukraine war being brokered by Trump’s special envoys, his son in law, Jared Kushner, and the real estate investor Steve Witfkoff, follows this playbook. A multibillion-dollar deal to acquire the international holdings of Lukoil, Russia’s largest remaining private oil company, has apparently been discussed, along with reopening the Nord Stream pipeline, blown up in September 2022. Elon Musk’s Space X — on Trump’s instructions, according to Musk — imposed speed limits on Starshield, which allowed Ukraine to intercept Russian drone and missile attacks. Sanctions have been paused, and Trump has called more than once for Zelensky’s removal. 

Trump’s aim is full-scale economic détente with Russia, which he believes will realize large profits for him and his coterie. Very likely he and they will benefit, but there is something spectral about the fabulous wealth envisioned in these sordid machinations. Why should Putin respect the terms of any deal? The “energy ceasefire” Trump believed he had agreed with him was flouted within hours. Much of Trump’s chicanery is based on fantasies — the reverse of realpolitik. If Ukraine is being sold out, it may be for next to nothing. 

Lured by dreams of financial gain, Trump has torn up whatever remained of an American-led “rules-based” order. This is more than the much-discussed passing of a unipolar order. American power is imploding, with the post-Cold-War leviathan now a floundering, flailing behemoth. Rather than an “unreliable friend”, the US seems closer to the enemies of the countries that depended on it for their security. Yet there can be no assurance that America’s new strategic partners will keep their end of the deal. When they met in St Petersburg in October, Witkoff praised Putin as a “humanitarian” for releasing an American prisoner captured in eastern Ukraine in April 2022. Such a toadying eulogy may be understandable. For the US, Yalta 2.0 may yield little more than the prisoner’s release. The presumed exchange is that Russia ends its support for Iran while the US forces Ukraine to surrender; but America has no way of ensuring Russia’s compliance, let alone that of China or Iran.

The Iran debacle itself began with a whim that set in motion a fateful escalation. The illusory prospect of another Venezuela-style coup, semi-magical in its flawless operational execution, was irresistible. What Trump described in March as “a little excursion” has been a forced march to strategic defeat. The result of decapitating the Iranian leadership has been to install a military dictatorship more repressive than the decaying theocracy it replaced. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has become a permanent threat to the Strait of Hormuz. The pre-war status quo, in which it was an open international waterway, is irrecoverable. 

This was not unforeseen. Similar bombing campaigns have been war-gamed many times, with similar results. As Barbara Tuchman showed in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984), history is not so much a catalog of error as a succession of follies whose consequences can be known in advance. 

However the war develops, America has forfeited its position in the Middle East. Over the past months, its bases in the Gulf and Iraq have been disabled and its armories depleted. Tens of billions of dollars have been expended using costly missiles against cheaper and more quickly replaceable drones. Iran’s partner in the “Axis of Resistance”, the Houthis have turned another vital waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, into a high-risk corridor, while launching a deadly wave of strikes on Saudi airports and refineries.The Gulf monarchies are constructs of European colonialism propped up by American security guarantees that have proved effectively worthless. It cannot be long before regime change comes to the Kingdom, weakened by festering rivalries within the House of Saud since Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz Carlton coup in November 2017. How could the debt-laden US withstand the collapse of the petrodollar, which channeled Saudi oil revenues into an AI-led stock market bubble already showing signs of bursting? 

Another “short, intensive” bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear and energy facilities, which seemed to be prefigured in the “limited” American strikes on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz early this week, would only postpone a further American retreat. Trump’s curtailing aid to Israel has been seen as reducing the likelihood of a resumption of the war. But Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump may still think they can “finish the job”.  

Iran’s economy is being slowly strangled by the American naval embargo that is blocking its seaborne oil exports. Yet the regime retains the capacity to devastate the Gulf’s energy production, causing acute shortages of diesel — the fuel on which the global economy runs — and irreplaceable agricultural chemicals. Undersea cables and data centers could also be attacked. The true Iranian nuclear option is disabling water and desalination plants. Weaponizing its geography, with its mountainous streams, inland rivers and lakes, Iran could wreak an enormous civilian catastrophe in the desert kingdoms of its Gulf enemies. 

At a global level, a species of total war is already underway. In the delirium of the Western mind, Gaza has been singled out as a unique catastrophe, but the reach of the battlefield into civilian life is practically universal. In Ukraine, Putin’s relentless bombardment destroys schools and scientific academies and cuts off electricity and water, aiming to render Kyiv uninhabitable and drive out millions of desperate refugees. Across Europe, Russia is orchestrating assassination, arson and cyber-strikes, together with drone strikes that could easily spiral into mass casualty events.  

The Baltic and Nordic states have fortified their defenses, but most European countries seem paralyzed. Poland — the most militarily prepared — is in the throes of constitutional crisis. Emmanuel Macron’s technocratic centrism has reached its endgame. Teetering on the edge of default, the Fifth Republic is rehearsing the upheaval that will come when Marine Le Pen enters the Élysée Palace — as must now be likely — and Jean-Luc Mélenchon mobilizes an insurrection against her. “Cost-of living” rioting and looting has spread to Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland and Albania, among other countries. It is hard to envision the French banlieues and AfD strongholds in former East Germany accepting the cost of deploying European troops indefinitely in Ukraine. Nor is it clear that Europe could afford to forgo the billions of euros’ worth of oil and gas it buys from Russia (which help Putin fund the war). A European solution is a mirage, and for all the heroic resourcefulness of its struggle, Ukraine cannot go it alone. Unless Zelensky’s supporters in Washington can somehow tie Trump’s hands, the logic of the situation is a brutal partition.

In America, Trump’s rise was a by-product of the neo-liberal cult of globalization. It was not simply an increase in inequality that stoked “populist” revolt. Whole sections of society were denied any productive role. Capital was exported and manufacturing offshored, labor imported and communities abandoned. With their workless families, drug habits and short lives, the human detritus of American industry could be safely left to molder on their reservations. Yet post-industrial decline has now affected much of the middle class. Occupations and career structures have melted into air. Neoliberal economics was the enterprise of re-engineering capitalism without a bourgeoisie, and the hollowing out of middle-class life has continued under Trump’s corporate kleptocracy. There was bound to be a countermovement from the Left. New York mayor Zohran Mandami’s “democratic socialism” is not a movement of organized labor. Like Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zack Polanski’s movements, it is a bourgeois populism, varnishing the status anxieties of heavily-indebted graduates and downwardly-mobile professionals with high-rent progressive causes. Incubated in campus seminaries of anti-Western orthodoxy, Mamdani’s leftism is set to be a deciding force in Democratic politics. 

A sea change is underway in the Republicans as well. As he limbers up for a presidential campaign in 2028, JD Vance is cultivating the same nativist constituency that is the audience of Tucker Carlson — aside from Trump, America’s most accomplished demagogue. A devil’s brew of anti-Semitism, historical revisionism and conspiracy theory is shaping up as the ruling ideology of the MAGA Right. As in Europe, the old center ground no longer exists. 

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Where is Trump’s heir?

By B. Duncan Moench

The midterm clean sweep was a repudiation of Trump more than an endorsement of the Democrats. The winners included Dr Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan, US Senate) and Dr Abdul Hamawy (New Jersey, US House), Egyptian-born Muslims closely aligned with the progressive wing of the Democrats who campaigned strongly against the war. Foreign policy positions that used to be bipartisan are being questioned and rejected in both parties. Europeans who are still invested in the notion that the Trump era is an unfortunate anomaly would be wise to think again. Nothing is further from reality than a reversion to Nikki Haley-style interventionism. It is not fantastical to see the US becoming the first advanced post-Western state and joining Russia in a China-led Eurasian bloc. 

That does not mean such a concert of powers would be stable. If a trilateral summit between Xi, Putin and Trump is held at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Shenzhen scheduled for later this month, their exchanges may well come to nothing. In some ways this looks less like February 1945 and more like the run-up to August 1914. Now as then, great powers are engaged in wars for control of natural resources against a background of tangled and shifting alliances. With multiple players and no one in charge, miscalculation by any of them could bring disaster on all. 

Another future is possible, however. Rather than drifting towards another Great War, we may be entering an era of peace. A curious kind of peace, to be sure, accompanied by unending bloodshed. Proxy wars and urban terrorism will rage unabated. War and peace will, in effect, be one and the same. The West will cease to exist as a geopolitical or civilizational bloc. But joining forces with its adversaries will fuel another stock market boom, and what neo-Marxian theorists fondly call “late capitalism” will enjoy a new lease of life. Having used the neoliberal interlude to build a mercantilist juggernaut, China will re-establish globalization in a dirigiste form that entrenches its economic primacy, with Russia exploited as a vassal state. A certain equilibrium will prevail, underpinned by the shared interests of transnational ruling classes.

Then again, none of this may come to pass. The future may not be advancing authoritarianism but accelerating disintegration. If Taiwan is not easily absorbed, Xi’s autocracy may be overthrown, and China could revert to disunity of a kind recurrent in its history. Putin might be toppled by war-weary oligarchs, only to be replaced by a more extreme anti-Western despot ruling a nuclear-armed Muscovy surrounded by breakaway fiefdoms. The United States may fragment, with enclaves of anarchic high-tech vitality booming alongside wastelands of poverty and desolation, presided over by an enfeebled federal government.

But of one thing we can be certain. Donald Trump has brought Western hegemony to a close. A world-historical figure as much as Napoleon or Mao, the founder of MAGA has ushered in a post-American age.

When he was re-elected in 2024, Trump promised to bring down prices; instead, he raised them with his tariffs and his ill-fated war in Iran. The inflation rate, which had been running at 3% when he took office, is now approaching 4%. No wonder Trump’s Republican Party suffered a crushing defeat in Tuesday’s mid-term elections, in large part due to the nation’s worsening cost-of-living crisis. This week, even his own past supporters turned on him.

But the cost-of-living crisis that is reshaping American politics is not confined to the US, nor is it likely to go away soon. The UK is facing similar inflationary pressures. The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) now expects this year’s inflation rate to average out at 3.1%, up from the March forecast of 2.3%. It expects inflation to peak next year at 3.8% before settling down for a year-long average of 3.4% — a full 1.4% above its March forecast. 

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Inflation is here to stay

By Justin H. Vassallo

Much of the discussion surrounding the current inflation spike focuses on the impact of Trump’s war on the price of energy. The assumption is therefore that the high prices are temporary. The OBR assumes that by 2028, the UK inflation rate will be close to the Bank of England’s 2% target once again, making this inflation shock transitory. Ahead of the mid-term elections, Trump made much the same argument: that the price surge will prove fleeting.

Unfortunately, we’ve heard this before. The word “transitory” doesn’t have great currency among economists these days. The original inflation surge of 2021 was initially waved off by central bankers as a brief aberration, but here we are, in the sixth year of above-target inflation that we keep hearing is about to come down. Other than during a brief period in 2024, inflation has not returned to the 2% target Western central banks have set for it. 

In fact, since last spring inflation has been on a steady upward march — a trend we cannot attribute merely to the energy shock caused by the Iran war. In Britain, the European Union, America, Canada and Japan alike, the core inflation rate — which strips out energy and food prices to try and capture underlying pressures — has been stubbornly above target. At some point, you have to ask: when does this stop being temporary?

It appears there is something more than just an energy shock driving up inflation. For a while now, some economists who study the economic impact of climate change have been predicting that the inflation rate will move permanently higher. We may now be in the foothills of what could turn out to be higher peaks.

It had long been assumed that a gradual alteration in climate would over time affect the global economy, with countries such as Canada actually benefiting (from longer growing seasons) and poor tropical countries losing out. But we’re now seeing that the increased incidence and severity of extreme weather events is having a greater impact. Such events hit countries such as Canada harder, since there is so much more infrastructure and hence capital to be damaged or destroyed. In 2023, a summer of wildfires in Canada made it impossible for people to work in agriculture, forestry and mining in affected regions, while rail transportation had to be suspended, further hindering economic activity. As a result of smoke forcing citizens across large swathes of the country to stay indoors, there was an economic contraction that knocked the country’s per capita income back 1.3% that year.

The problem isn’t limited to Canada. Since the Sixties, the average annual number of extreme weather events has risen sevenfold. In the past few years, they’ve begun to take an unprecedented toll: of the 10 costliest extreme-weather events on record in the US, six occurred in the last decade. In Europe, this was seven. In Canada, nine out of 10 of the most costly years insurance companies have ever had to bear have taken place since 2011. These events do the most economic harm in the nations with the most capital to destroy: in 2023, four-fifths of the economic damage due to extreme weather occurred in developed countries. Not only are these catastrophes damaging property and infrastructure, they are raising insurance costs, which ultimately works its way into prices. 

On top of this, rising food prices due to poor harvests resulting from drought, storms or flood damage are driving food inflation. The reason beef prices in America have risen so fast is that a persistent drought, attributed in large measure to higher temperatures, has depleted the US beef herd. President Trump may say climate change is a hoax but such declarations can’t stop prices rising. And the rising cost of food has an outsized influence on voters’ perception of inflation. 

Similarly, while the surge in electricity prices has been attributed to such things as Britain’s gas-dependent pricing system or the excessive demand of data centers in the US, the truth is that energy bills are rising largely because of the costs involved in strengthening infrastructure against harsher weather. One study estimates that electricity bills could rise by as much as 25% in the US to cover these impacts. In that vein, Avanti West Coast rail recently had to pay British customers £20 million in refunds for delays caused this summer, mainly because the current train tracks were not built for such temperatures. Higher running costs will, of course be passed on to customers.

Since December 2019, there has been a relentless pressure on climate-sensitive price categories. US consumer prices have risen by 29%, but home insurance has risen by 37%, electricity prices by 43%  and food prices by 35%. Similarly, in the UK over the same period, consumer prices have risen 33% but food prices have risen 38%. Such pressure raises the latent inflation rate. The result is that when exogenous shocks such as the recent oil spike occur, their effects are amplified. In his testimony to the Treasury Committee in September, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey and his colleagues said that climate change is causing greater volatility in supply shocks and that, over time, the subsequent pressure on inflation will be more upwards than downwards. 

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Why the West is getting poorer

By John Rapley

To make matters worse, higher inflation will be structural, not cyclical — which is to say the normal approach of central banks, of raising interest rates to reduce demand, won’t work. Assuming interest rates remain permanently higher, that will ultimately affect the pricing of other asset markets. 

Take the property market. Benjamin Keys, an expert on the financial risks of climate change at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, suggests that falling house prices are being obscured by countervailing cyclical trends. Though rising storm risks have sharply lowered prices in parts of Florida, the Covid real-estate boom and the trend of boomers retiring to warmer climates have helped to soften overall price declines. Keys argues that unlike earlier falls in asset prices — which were caused by cyclical bubbles that, once burst, eliminated excesses in the economy and put markets back on a sustainable path — such re-pricing will occur for as long as climate change progresses. This permanently higher inflation rate is a feature of something I call the “Icarus effect”: that economic growth triggers a set of ecological, social and political changes which raise the cost of further growth, ultimately slowing it down. 

Though the UK Chancellor John Healey may not be a climate denier like President Trump, he has joined many other Western governments in walking back some of Britain’s Net-Zero commitments in order to lower prices for consumers. Yet while this could reduce costs in the short term, it will aggravate the underlying problem. By trying to reduce inflation, Western governments could inadvertently entrench it.

Not that the trivial is undeserving of serious attention. Alongside a shared interest in the primal and the religious, Berger and Dillard each had things to say about the trivial. They make us wonder if events as momentous as the US elections of 2016 and 2024 and everything calamitous that followed from them — let alone what might still, as they say in America, be coming down the pike — involved, to a not trivial extent, contesting ideas of the trivial.

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Bob Dylan has no philosophy

By Geoff Dyer

In her memoir An American Childhood (1987), Dillard recalls how she and a group of other young girls at school were “vigilantes of the trivial”. She’s referring to matters of fashion but no phrase better describes the habits of thought-policing, constant jeopardy and apprehension that underwrote — and undermined — the cultural politics of the American Left over the last dozen or so years. This over-zealous policing was undertaken, as so often in the past, in the name of an entirely worthy cause: social justice. In America, though, this lofty aim co-existed — until Luigi Mangione burst into the debate with a vengeance — with a widespread if grudging acceptance of the idea that healthcare is run on a for-profit basis. Take the case of Joseph Heller who, in No Laughing Matter, tells the story of a long illness and extremely costly recovery. Through sheer inadvertence, as Martin Amis observed, Heller failed to pay a $20 premium which would have meant he got an extra $40,000 of health coverage. “He minds about that,” Amis continues, “but he doesn’t mind about the system” — a system in which, as he succinctly puts it, “you are getting charged for every Kleenex”.

The only concern more ultimate than illness is the least desirable prognosis, death, but in recent years much of the Left — and I think the repetition here is useful — left not just opponents but allies exposed to a creeping ideological infection whereby every little infraction of a constantly updated code (Dillard refers to herself and friends as “enforcers of a code”) risked exposure to the full force of unwritten laws. For every triumph and vindication — the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, most obviously — there was a collateral sentence of undue severity for some relatively trivial offense. Often this sentence was the opposite of lifetime imprisonment without the possibility of parole: indefinite expulsion, and the sentence could never be appealed because the perps were rarely tried. Across American campuses and institutions Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was effectively being re-staged, in real time, in contemporary dress. There’s no shortage of books — Woke Racism by the fearless John McWhorter, The War on the West by Douglas Murray, Unwanted Advances by the ferociously brilliant Laura Kipnis — documenting the absurdities and excesses of this extended moment. Inappropriate jokes, infelicities of language, slips of cultural etiquette, were punished while huge threats were underway, collective resistance to them weakened by the politics of outraged identity. Some issues sailed east across the Atlantic more successfully than others. Micro-aggressions were not such a big deal in Britain where actual aggro and old-school bovver are never more than a head-butt away. Charges of cultural appropriation also proved tricky since many of us — Peter Blake, most famously — could not be persuaded that our Saturday afternoons, our cultural heritage, had not been enriched by the magnificent Kendo Nagasaki.

Meanwhile, like a game show offering ever-escalating prize money, an addictive competition was underway to see who could be most quickly and severely offended, often vicariously, on someone else’s behalf. Ostensibly a weapon of the Left, identity politics helped to do the Right’s work, splintering what are actually shared interests and goals into competing factions of the variously aggrieved. Consciousness raising is a good thing, always, but militant doses of this variant were often consciousness lowering.

The absurdity of much of what was happening went beyond the satirical reach of Tom Wolfe in the Seventies. The prosecutorial dragnet of critical race theory was all the more irresistible because, while it was couched in the idioms of academic rigor, it had — as John McWhorter has repeatedly pointed out — many of the qualities of a cult. While Wolfe had reported hilariously on precursor fads in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers (1970), Karl Popper had pre-diagnosed the condition in 1962, in Conjectures and Refutations. He was referring specifically to Marxism and psychoanalysis, but critical race theory had the similar “effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still ‘un-analyzed’ and crying aloud for treatment.”

The irony is that the various courses of treatment could easily serve as a distraction from the larger condition to which they were a justified response. That seems to be changing. So although the BBC — of all places — recently published an article about bare nails as an expression of white supremacy, it was quickly withdrawn. During the years when so much fiddling of this kind had been going on, however, Rome, or its contemporary manifestations in Ukraine and Gaza, were busily burning. Broadening the focus beyond armed conflict to include climate change, swathes of the world were literally on fire. And the blaze continues.

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The summer of Idiossey

By Geoff Dyer

Which brings us to the other part of the triviality wars. In the Nineties, a Dutch TV crew took what was by then a well-trodden pilgrimage route — I had taken it myself in the Eighties — to make a film about Berger at his home in the village of Quincy. At one point Berger is asked if he has become more religious and conservative with age. I have transcribed his answer here, with minor edits, but do please try to watch A Touch of Grace on YouTube, from about 28 minutes 44 seconds in, as he reflects on the global triumph of the free economy:

“This system, for the first time in human history, judges and makes decisions about what is happening to our entire planet by the criterion of only one value, which is the value of increasing profit. And this is of a fanaticism by which the so-called fanatics in other parts of the world are really complex, tolerant, nuanced people, the most fanatical of them even. Because this is the absolute fanaticism, and it is a fanaticism of such triviality if one thinks about the needs and the structure of the human spirit, that everything is judged only by this one criterion… What this does is produce colossal injustice [Berger concludes with increasing passion] and against that injustice I feel more militant than ever.”

This was filmed before 9/11, before the advent of ISIS, so it’s necessary to amend what Berger says about tolerant, nuanced people. That aside, to claim that he has been proved right is an understatement. The twice-elected American President is someone who only understands the deal, who recognizes no currency or morality other than profit. The price paid for this, in oil, in land, in maiming and lives, in injustice, is, to him… trivial.

By the time this little article is published, the American midterms will be fast approaching. They may offer encouragement, but the choice is not between competing forms of the trivial. As Berger put it in a poem published more than 60 years ago, we:

go backwards or forwards
There are two directions
But not two sides.

In his speech to the European Parliament last month, Carney kept planting (metaphorical) trees. He described how First World War Canadian lieutenant Leslie Miller had gathered acorns from a scorched French battlefield, smuggled them back home to Ontario, and planted them. In time, they grew into a fine oak forest. A century later, grafts from those oaks were replanted in France. “A profound circle of renewal was completed,” Carney told MEPs. 

Now, Carney wants to graft a Canadian maple onto the European family tree. Today, he is hosting European Union leaders in Montreal, in the hope of establishing how Canada can become the union’s first ever “associate member”. But the bloc may just drop the offered title entirely, after major pushback from EU members who don’t want Canada formally in their club.

Carney is attempting to pull off a monumental act of historical reverse engineering — one that would see the New World returning to the shores of the Old. Finding itself in President Trump’s crosshairs, Canada is trying to pivot from being America’s dependent northern brother to Europe’s long-lost child returning home. “It is my strong personal view that the international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe,” Carney has predicted.

The problem is that this reunion will not work out. While their roots intertwine, Canada’s relationship with Europe faces hard geographic, economic and cultural ceilings that cannot be overcome by mere treaties and titles. Canada is a non-native species on European soil.

Carney takes every opportunity to remind Canadians of their British and French “founding peoples”, even persuading King Charles to travel to Ottawa to open Parliament last year (Carney’s brother is the chief operating officer at Kensington Palace). Yet despite the current feud with President Trump, Canadians have far more in common with Americans. Our European ancestors, who threw caution to the wind and boarded ships bound for Canada, chose to leave the Old World behind for a reason: to seize individual and economic opportunity. To escape wars, class divides, and poverty. To build a new and different society.

What, then, is Carney hoping to get out of the EU? He has vowed to double non-US exports in the next decade and wants Europe to be a bigger trading partner, claiming the continent is even more economically enticing than China. He is particularly interested in European defense technology: Canada has inked a Canada-EU Security and Defense Partnership, and chosen German-Norwegian shipbuilder TKMS to build it a fleet of 12 new submarines. There’s also been talk of Canada joining an EU-Canada Digital Trade Agreement, Erasmus+ (the EU’s education program that allows students to study abroad), and Horizon Europe (the bloc’s funding program for research and innovation). There are rumors that Canada is aligning with Europe on AI regulations, pension investment, competition watchdogs, forest fire water bombers, and undersea telecommunications cables; it is also said to be taking part in the EU space program. But, most importantly, Canada has joined the European Broadcasting Union, clinching a spot in Eurovision and the chance to introduce the rest of the world to Inuit throat singing.

The Europeans, in turn, are interested in Canada’s critical minerals (lithium, graphite, and nickel), energy (liquefied natural gas, hydrogen), and the Canadian Arctic. A deepened Canadian partnership would make Europe less reliant on China’s rare earth deposits, America’s technology, and Russia’s oil. “Canada is truly the most European of the non-European countries,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, asserted during her State of the Union address in June. In September, she extended the associate member invite to Carney, whom she calls “dear Mark”. As she landed in Montreal today, the German politician signaled she hasn’t given up on granting Canada the new title, standing in defiance of many of her European colleagues.

The Canadian government views EU associate membership as its best chance of diversifying away from the US. (This is after Carney walked out of American trade deal negotiations in the eleventh hour because, as he put it, Canada’s sovereignty was being stolen.) Europhile Canadians see Europeans as kindred spirits equally devoted to democratic institutions, large social safety nets, and the defense of Ukraine. They dream about the possibility of greater freedom to live, study and work across Europe.

Those opposed to EU membership, however, are wary of Europe’s anemic economic growth, lack of technological innovation, and aging population, as well as its strict data rules, agri-food standards, and energy regulations. They fear that joining the EU could result in more migrants at our borders, as well as Canada having to send roughly 1% of its economic output to Brussels. They say that rather than surrendering our sovereignty to the Americans, we’d just be surrendering it to the Europeans. “We will never be the 51st US state. And we will never be the 28th EU state,” Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre told his supporters.

According to recent polling, around 81% of Canadians want closer integration with the EU, while remaining outside of the union. But Canadian support for closer integration falls to 49% when the prospect of EU membership is raised. The consensus is clear: Canadians want to have a closer relationship with Europe, but they do not want to become Europeans. 

This tension is evident in the difficulty the Canadian government has had describing the new “associate member” relationship — are we just dating, or getting married? The relationship is now up in the air, as members appear prepared to vote against the associate member designation. “We’ve definitely put the cart before the horse,” admitted one European diplomat. “Nobody really knows what it means,” said another. “The good news is it doesn’t matter about specific names or nomenclature,” said a visibly perturbed Carney responding earlier this week. “What matters is the difference that it will make to lives of Canadians.”

Talks around Canada’s new membership status have seen Germany, France, Italy and Greece push back. They don’t feel consulted. They are frustrated that Canada is receiving “association without accession”, reaping European rewards without meeting the standard requirements to gain membership.

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The obstacles to Canada’s European romance are numerous. On the economic front, 72.5% of Canada’s exports are sent to the US; the entire EU currently takes a measly 5.5%. In addition, 85% of Canada’s energy is sent to America. In a single month, Canada exports more to Oklahoma than Germany, more to Kentucky than France, and more to New Jersey than Italy.

Then there are the societal barriers. It is admittedly difficult to pinpoint a distinct Canadian culture: in many ways, Canada is already its own often dysfunctional union. A vast country of 10 provinces, three territories and two official languages is home to far North Inuit, Quebecker maple-syrup makers, Newfoundland fishermen, Albertan cowboys and everyone in between. Add to that the vexing interprovincial trade barriers that cost our country $200 billion a year, and it becomes clear we have our own issues getting along among ourselves.

Yet a shared Canadian culture does exist, and it is plainly different from Europe’s. Our ancestors left behind most of the Old World’s traditions, bloody revolutionary battles, and class hierarchies. We are a young country of just 159 years old. We are more individualistic. Our work often defines our lives. Living in the second-largest nation in the world, we spread out across our vast landscape. We live in larger homes and drive bigger cars: for 16 years straight, the Ford F-150 truck has been the best-selling vehicle in Canada. Then there’s the fact that within Canada, hundreds of Indigenous nations increasingly practice self-governance. Our nation is undeniably “un-European”.

While we hate to admit it, we share much with and depend on Americans more than anyone else. Two-thirds of Canadians live within 100 kilometers of the American border. The US covers 60% of the budget for our Arctic defense radar stations. English Canadians consume almost exclusively American arts and entertainment: in 2023, only 3.3% of our total box office revenue came from Canadian films. 

Currently, 56% of Canadians say they have more in common with European nations than the US. But the hostile American president has completely muddied the polls. Remove Trump from the equation and far more Canadians would agree they have more in common with Americans than Europeans. In the end, Carney’s best intentions, buttressed by globalization, technology and emotion, simply cannot trump geography, history and culture. As much as Canadians might want it to, Europe cannot fill Canada’s America-sized hole.

Prime Minister Carney keeps a map of his grandparents’ Irish hometown of Aughagower on his desk in Ottawa. He says it acts as a friendly reminder of where he came from. But that’s just it. The reality is Europe is where Canada came from, not where it is going.

But now, all the Russian tourists are gone and the border traffic has ground to a halt. The Allegro train no longer runs. Finnish media recently called Imatra “the emptying city”. Its sprawling Tsar Outlet Village, which once catered to Russian shoppers, is deserted. Imatra’s economy, already reeling from the pandemic, is seriously ailing. The city has an unemployment rate of 16.4%, well above the national rate of just under 12%. And South Karelia is said to be losing an estimated €1 million in tourism revenue each day.

Many residents say it’s a worthwhile sacrifice. The border with Russia has been closed since late 2023, when the Finnish government accused Russia of weaponizing migrants by sending waves of asylum seekers into Finland. Helsinki claimed this was retaliation for the Nordic country’s decision to join Nato earlier that year, a choice made in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Finnish government responded by closing the entire 1,340-kilometer border and announcing the construction of a 200-kilometer border fence. The forbidding metal barrier was finished last month, but the beefing up of security continues. On Monday, the Finnish government announced that it was procuring one million anti-personnel landmines for the border, following a decision by Helsinki and other regional capitals to withdraw from a humanitarian UN treaty banning their use.

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The border region’s economic decline and rapid militarization are emblematic of the entire Nordic region’s radically changed approach to relations with Russia and the United States. During the Cold War and to a lesser extent after it, Finland and Sweden managed relations with Moscow through a combination of pragmatic diplomacy, deterrence, and trade. Today, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both diplomacy and trade have been severely downgraded. These two Nordic nations, which touted an enlightened neutrality during the Cold War and maintained good relations with both the Soviet Union and the West, have recently joined Nato. Meanwhile, New Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCAs) signed with Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, have given the US armed forces “unimpeded access” to 47 military bases across the region, some of them perilously close to the Russian border. Sweden and Finland are even weakening their long-standing taboo on nuclear weapons.

As the region’s security order has undergone an accelerated Americanization, Nordic societies have also increasingly been remade in America’s image. They have become more militarized, more hawkish and more hostile to diplomacy, while their once-robust social welfare states have been gutted and inequality has soared. In Finland, there has even been a marked increase in homelessness. Many say the deteriorating quality of life is a small price to pay in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But others warn that the Nordic countries have surrendered their sovereignty to an unpredictable United States, which has left them weaker and more exposed — rather than more secure.

Overt dependence on the United States would have been unimaginable not so long ago. During the Cold War, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen saw neutrality as a natural state for his country, a function of both its geography and its history of wars with Russia. Neutrality, Kekkonen said, “is not the product of abstract thought nor is it imported from elsewhere: it has grown out of the soil of Finnish history”. Finland’s neutral position was articulated in the preamble to the 1948 Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, which emphasized the country’s desire “to remain outside the conflicts of the great powers”.

Complicating matters, however, was the fact that the same agreement also contained a military-consultation clause: if an adversary like Germany were to launch an attack on the USSR from Finnish soil, then Finland was expected to consult with Moscow about a response. The clause was politically sensitive, as it would permit the Soviets to exert diplomatic pressure on Helsinki. Indeed, Atlanticist critics have characterized Finland’s Cold War neutrality as quasi-neutrality, one that supposedly cloaked deference to the Kremlin in neutral garb. There is even a pejorative word for it: “Finlandisation”. And yet, Finland’s foreign policy was also effective. It kept the peace, and by the Eighties, Finland was one of the richest countries by per-capita income in the world, exceeding both Britain and France. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Finland lost one of its most important trading partners. The effect was immediate and devastating: Finnish economists call the ensuing crisis “The Great Depression of the Nineties”.

Sweden embraced neutrality much earlier, following a succession of wars with Russia, particularly the devastating 1808-9 Finnish War that saw a defeated Sweden lose more than a third of its territory. The country’s longstanding doctrine was “non-alignment in peace, so as to maintain neutrality in war”. Indeed, non-alignment was part of Sweden’s nation-branding as a “moral superpower”, which supporters saw as a “cherished model for the world” ripe for emulation. During the Cold War, the policy was best embodied in the figure of Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme. The late premier, who was assassinated in 1986, presided over what Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn has called “a radical independent internationalism”. Over the years, Palme was photographed chomping on cigars with Fidel Castro, protested the war in Vietnam (prompting the US to recall its ambassador on two occasions), and likened the 1972 American bombing of Hanoi to “Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, and Treblinka”.

While Finland’s and Sweden’s decisions to join Nato may have looked like an abrupt decision made entirely in response to the war in Ukraine, Euro-Atlantic integration had actually been a long, gradual process that started soon after the 1991 Soviet collapse. Finland’s choice to purchase 64 McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 hornet fighter jets from the US in the early Nineties was a critical turning point. Finland and Sweden joined the Partnership for Peace program in 1994, and began participating in military exercises with Nato. The next year, Finland and Sweden joined the EU, unofficially ending their neutrality. Throughout the early 2000s, both countries supplied troops to Nato-led combat and stabilization missions, including in Afghanistan and Kosovo. These steps laid the groundwork for their rapid accession to Nato. All that was required was a trigger that could convert public opinion to Atlanticism en masse, and Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine provided it. Nato accession was presented as the only response to the shock of the Ukraine war, and with no alternatives discussed and the public afraid, the final push towards membership was made with a conspicuous lack of debate.

But Nato accession was just the start. Some commentators, including former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö, say the recent defense agreements have been even more pivotal than Sweden’s and Finland’s decisions to join Nato. The surge in DCAs actually began shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion, with Norway. In 2021, Oslo and Washington signed an “SDCA”, or Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement, which eventually gave US forces and contractors “unimpeded access” to 12 military bases. After the Russian invasion, the SDCA with Norway served as a template for the entire region. In December 2023, the US signed new DCAs with Finland, Sweden and Denmark, bringing the total number of Nordic military bases granting unimpeded access to the US military to 47. The DCAs also authorize the US to take “necessary and proportionate measures” to protect US forces “within or in the immediate vicinity of” said bases, meaning they give US military personnel and military police power over local civilians in and around these locations. In addition, they grant the US exclusive control over who enters specified military facilities, construction rights to build on Nordic soil, and jurisdiction over crimes committed by American soldiers.

The DCAs have not passed without controversy. In 2022, the top military and civilian prosecution authorities in Norway expressed concern that the Americans’ threat perception might differ from that of Norway’s. Some fear that US forces might therefore drag the country into a confrontation without its consent. Others worry that an enhanced American military presence in Nordic countries would make them obvious targets in a war between the US and Russia. These concerns grew more acute after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, when American allies in the Middle East found themselves on the receiving end of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Meanwhile, analysts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have warned that a US decision to deploy missiles to Nordic bases close to Russian assets could provoke a situation akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The agreements were signed with an initial duration of 10 years. Researcher Joel Linnainmäki, at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs, notes that this 10-year duration “somewhat cushions against political turbulence in the transatlantic relationship”. The DCAs were drawn up at a time of both deteriorating regional security and uncertainty over trans-Atlantic security guarantees. With the specter of Donald Trump omnipresent, the Nordic states sought stronger bilateral defense relations with the US outside of Nato. The DCAs also reflect the belief that even the Nordics’ accession to Nato is insufficient to counter the Russian threat.

“The underlying idea has been that Nato alone is ultimately not enough,” Markku Kangaspuro, professor and research director at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, tells me. “Rather, the commitment of the United States is indispensable for a military deterrent that, in the final analysis, rests on nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, Sweden and Finland are doing away with their long-standing aversion to nuclear weapons, another dramatic transformation. During the Cold War, Finland championed disarmament and nonproliferation, hosting the first US-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Helsinki from 1969 to 1972. Over in Stockholm, Prime Minister Palme joined a 25,000-strong anti-nuclear protest in 1983; demonstrators formed a four-mile human chain linking the American and Soviet embassies to protest against the planned deployment of 108 American missiles in Western Europe. The Stockholm protest was part of that year’s Europe-wide demonstrations against the stationing of US “Euromissiles” on the continent, which drew up to five million people.

The mass mobilization of the Eighties contrasts with the comparative silence that reigns today. In June, Finland lifted its blanket ban on nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Energy Act, on the books since 1987, had criminalized the import, transport, and possession of nuclear weapons on Finnish soil; amendments passed this summer have lifted those prohibitions. Kangaspuro tells me: “Finland is now signaling in many ways that its priority is no longer to promote international control and limitation of nuclear weapons, or nuclear disarmament, as it has done until now.” While there was political opposition to the decision and some small protests, it did not prompt demonstrations of the kind seen during the Cold War.

Similar changes have been floated in neighboring Sweden. Earlier this year, Defense Minister Pål Jonson said that Sweden should consider allowing nuclear weapons to be deployed on its territory in wartime. It was a pronounced shift from even just a few years prior, when both then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and conservative leader Ulf Kristersson agreed that Sweden’s decision to join Nato should not change its prohibition on nuclear weapons on Swedish soil. Earlier this year, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were also among the first countries to join France’s Forward Nuclear Deterrence Initiative, while Finland became a member in mid-December last year. The war in Ukraine and Trump’s unpredictability have again made the unthinkable thinkable.

Meanwhile, Nordic countries have dramatically increased their defense spending in recent years. Sweden, Norway and Denmark have more than doubled their spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while Finland has nearly doubled it. In Finland, the government has tied brutal austerity measures in part to wartime necessity. Campaigning in 2023, Riikka Purra, the chair of the nationalist Finns Party and current minister of finance, declared culture “a luxury service, which unfortunately costs too much money in present-day Finland”. As the Nordic countries have adopted a more US-dependent security policy, their economies have also grown to resemble the American one. The marketization of education and health care, rising inequality, and beefed-up military budgets are bringing once strong welfare states more in line with American free-market orthodoxy.

The Atlanticization of the Nordic states’ security policies occurred in tandem with the liberalization of their economies, and with direct and indirect influence from the United States. As Swedish historian Jenny Andersson describes it, during the late Sixties, the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF) began to “actively promote international neoliberal ideas”, with the aim of changing attitudes towards the welfare state within Swedish society. Meanwhile, the neoconservative Swedish think tank Timbro, founded in 1978, “was directly modeled on the American Heritage foundation”. In 1982, SAF director Sture Eskilsson initiated the Market Economic Alternative for Sweden (MAS), adopted from the Heritage Foundation’s own Mandate for Leadership, a vast policy program prepared for Ronald Reagan’s administration during the early Eighties. One of the activists for MAS was Sweden’s uber-Atlanticist former Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who was a young MP at the time. In Finland, meanwhile, the adoption of economic liberalism was directly tied to the notion of “joining the West” — liberalization and free markets were always bound up with geopolitical alignment with Nato.

Today, between Trump’s demand that Europe spend more on its own defense and the threat of war with Russia, Nordic social welfare is being squeezed out of existence. The remnants of Cold War Nordic distinctiveness in both security and the economy are disappearing. These nations are gambling that all the breakneck changes are worth it. But by allowing the US armed forces unimpeded access to their military bases, the Nordic countries have sacrificed some of their sovereignty in pursuit of security. This has been presented to the public as an unambiguous good, with little discussion of the risks. But in tethering their fates to Washington’s whims, Nordic nations have reduced their own ability to act autonomously and painted a target on their own backs.

Never mind, let’s set out in a playful mood, beginning with a question from a Guardian quiz: “What’s the link: Nevada; Arcadia; Saxon; Azure…?” If you’re having trouble, I can help you out by adding a fifth item: “X  Æ A-Xii”.

Has that extra item given the game away? We’ve all glimpsed “Lil X”, as his nursery pals call him. He was the adorable imp, the one Elon brought to the Oval Office that day and who was chattering away in his own world, picking his nose, while Donnie was mouthing big-boy strategies. You see, the answer to my quiz question is that these are all names of Elon Musk’s children.

Wasn’t that Oval moment touching? Doesn’t every glowing dad think of taking the kid to the office — not just to show him or her off or to prove how domestic and human he is, but to let the toddler smell the office and know that POWER is more than the hum of business machines and the dismissal of minions. 

At the latest count, Elon Reeve Musk, aged 55, had 14 children. Though he is not shy about admitting there might be more. Indeed, he’s a naughty boy proud about how many others there could be, hiding behind that curtain, waiting to jump out and goose their dad. After all, a guy can’t keep count of everything — you wouldn’t expect Musk off the top of his cloudy head to know to the nearest 10,000 just how many people he rendered unemployed in his DOGE crusade. Nor that various estimates put the number of deaths caused by the withdrawal of USAID at sort of 640,000. Musk counted zero.

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Of course, most of those unlucky 640,000 were far away — if you’re weak on geography, just think of it as “out of sight”. We are accustomed to that tradition now. Strangers are dying all the time. It’s an elementary aspect of strangeness. Nothing personal. 

It’s the “nothing personal” that upsets me. The best thing about Elon is the silly-kid angle. To see him playing with Lil X reminded me that we seldom see Donnie with Barron (and I worry about Barron) sharing a hot dog at a ball game or playing chess together. And indeed, chess tells you a lot about Elon. He used to play. I bet he’s pretty good, yet easily wiped out by masters. Like Garry Kasparov resigning against Deep Blue back in 1997. So Elon has said chess is over. It’s just a matter of so many finite moves. No point in playing. That must be hard for a smart four-year-old who dreams of mating dad. And hard for Elon who does seem to aspire to being four.

That age has so little shame or doubt in being selfish — and selfishness is necessary because it’s total (as in totalitarianism). Perhaps that’s why Elon is in his element playing with children? It’s being with grown-ups that makes him sweat. So he’d go to Mars where he could jump two-and-a-half times higher than here. Have you ever considered what diminished gravity might do for elongation?  

So spare us those snarky know-alls marveling at how a genius couldn’t keep his fly zipped. (No one has ever said Elon enjoys the sex. It’s just a progressive duty for him.) Instead, what one has to recognize in Elon is the populating generosity, the sacrificial impulse prepared to give up his own brain cells, his vital bodily fluids and 20 minutes now and then with a view to spreading genius as if it was manure.

Remember, folks, this Elon is 55 and promulgating his eyes out for science, for the future, for America. He’s being horny for posterity — excuse my language, but if you’ve ever sexed with anyone that old you know this is no joke, and in his steadfast duty of impregnation Elon is wearing himself ragged. For us. For civilization. For peanuts. And now, he has been appointed to co-lead a project to examine the future conduct of war. 

Like a child playing with toy soldiers, Musk wants an army of mini-mes. And when it comes to armies, he knows sufficient principles of engineering to understand discipline and marching in step. That’s all that works if the infants begin to get the idea that in his natural forgetfulness they don’t matter individually. And Elon is so famous that he could hardly go anywhere without raising clouds of awe and contempt. How could such a dad take you out for a burger and a movie? As if a kid doesn’t prefer his father being just one of the great crowd of dingbat dads. Imagine how hard it is to be the child of the richest man on earth without succumbing to a fatal lassitude, a catastrophic carelessness, or even some whispered thought of revenge. 

But Elon doesn’t know how many children he has had. He’s open to being open-minded — and he enjoys a joke or two about his affect sometimes seeming vacant. But his apparent indifference can be read as a kind of universal paternalism along the lines of: “Imagine me as the father of all children… Et cetera.” You know where that loftiness is headed. Et cetera isn’t just a boasting allusion to the X that Musk owns, it’s a computer’s vision of delicious series.

Amid all the mysteries that await our far-away future, there will be the uncertainty over whether Elon was an actual, breathing human being, or something less provable but more enduring — an idea? A fiction? A commercial?

Of course, there was no way we were ever going to get Elon to Mars (and he had talked about that happening in the next 10 years — by which time he would have been set for Medicare). So try to think of an alternative scenario: suppose Elon was to reveal that instead of going to Mars he is already from there. How did he get here? By magic, by religion, by being beamed up, or just garden-variety AI. Was he sent as a torment or a tease? Your call. 

You see, I think I’ve worked it out: he is not one of us. The silly kid is really an alien, like a savior sent to reclaim us. I’d prefer him in full-length sackcloth robes, sandals or barefoot, sermonizing on the mount and in the malls, doing tactful miracles on talk shows. He grows a beard, his hair goes white, he mouths the blather of salvation — you know that routine. You thought this ministry had gone out of fashion, but Elon can bring it back, as our revered hermit surrounded by children, with that daft smile pinned on his face. Yet if you look behind the empty eyes, you may wonder if he isn’t anticipating some assassin, one of his own, who holds a knife as bright as the sleekest Tesla Cybercab.

I warned you, I could end up sounding crazy. But these days, what excuse is left for trusting sanity?

But these risks, while worthy of focus in themselves, carry with them a deeper question. AI, like printing and writing before it, is the kind of technology that shapes the evolution of civilizations. In turn, how well societies adapt to those changes depends on the existing cultural landscape, including deep assumptions about human nature, the relationship between mind and body, and how society functions.

Here, concerns with AI safety throw the differences into sharp relief. While Trump dismisses safety concerns, the major AI companies increasingly agree on the need for safety. However, it remains to be seen whether this extends beyond rhetoric to a willingness to curb their own competitiveness. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s concern with ensuring China does not surge ahead may be honest — but it also provides a convenient reason not to follow through on slowing down frontier development. If China will build its own AGI anyway, better that a US firm gets there first. It might bring on the apocalypse, but at least it will be an American apocalypse rather than Armageddon with Chinese Characteristics.

Trump’s dismissiveness towards safety concerns seems to be in tension with the AI companies’ approach of calling for a slowdown that, for game theoretic reasons, they cannot implement just yet. But they both reflect a general modern Western concern with freedom from constraint. In the labs’ case this is often accompanied by messianic visions of AGI just beyond the horizon — a silicon savior which will achieve miracles ranging from eliminating pestilence to generating limitless material abundance. This is a vision of unbridled progress enabled by free competition and innovation, guided by the utopian visions of individual technologists but directed towards universal benefit.

A different version of this is represented by Trump and the deepening relationship between Big Tech and political power. On one level this is apparent in the entourage of tech leaders who accompanied Trump to China and attended this week’s summit. On another, it is manifest in the visions of technologists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, their personal ties (volatile as those can be) with figures in the Trump administration, and, in the case of Thiel, the provision of AI as an instrument of law enforcement and military power. These are far from visions of universal benefit, instead being centered on national supremacy — a will to power channeled through transformative technology. This is the counterpart to utopian liberalism and the contemporary form of the Nietzschean impulse, channeling the drive for self-actualization into the strongman leader rather than pushing it as a universal objective.

Both visions have a common origin traceable through the Enlightenment and Christianity. This is a faith in the ability of the mind, expressed in the self, to operate independently of the body — and ultimately a desire to free it from physical constraints. Our society is one in which professional and personal existence is increasingly online, in which the work of the mind is elevated over that of the body, in which we express ourselves through self-applied identity labels dislocated from our biology, in which we are beginning to demand the right for our minds to choose when and how to end the existence of our bodies. This is fed by an economic culture of maximal choice — self-actualization through consumption. It should not come as a surprise that the contemporary West’s vision of AI is one of disembodied agents who reason and communicate solely via language and apparently require nothing else to become superintelligent. Pure, unconstrained digital selves.

Meanwhile, in China, they build robots as well as LLMs. Of course, the Americans do too, but the robots are far fewer. China has become a world leader in the field, giving it a major advantage in pursuing embodied AI — a potential path to AGI made that much more plausible by the fact that a robot-borne program can interact directly with the physical world. The Chinese government has pursued a systematic AI strategy for a decade and has done so as part of a wider focus on developing “new quality productive forces”, foundational technologies enabling a fourth industrial revolution. This is accompanied by a drive for energy security and electrification as well as comprehensive frameworks for AI governance — that is, the pursuit of policies across economy and society that enable the deployment and diffusion of artificial intelligence. The CCP has emphasized safety since the beginning, and identified early on that the requirements for AI would vary significantly depending on its application to areas as diverse as security and surveillance, manufacturing, infrastructure, law, healthcare, and care for the elderly. It has regulated accordingly, tailoring rules to each sector (including a remarkably robust and not unironic concern for consumer privacy). China’s companies face ruthless domestic competition, but also operate in a society which leapt from industrialization to digitalization in decades rather than centuries. They release their models earlier in development than their American counterparts, but do so in a country in which the Party-state is able to enforce and manage safety concerns in a way Washington cannot.

The CCP intends that China leads the world in AI, but does so in a way which maintains domestic and international stability. The promise of leadership, in the CCP’s view, will be realized not by the individual breakthroughs of a genius techno-utopian or the company he runs but by deploying the technology across manufacturing, healthcare, administration, and surveillance. Xi and his colleagues grasp that while LLMs (and other AI models) might appear to us as disembodied minds, key to the control of their development is control of the physical stuff that allows them to exist, right down to the minerals that go into the chips. And they understand that there is an opportunity to lead by providing the rest of the world with open-weight models and the international initiatives and regulatory frameworks to govern their use. It has been China that has offered a Global AI Governance Initiative, hosts the World AI Conference on governance, and engages in extensive AI and data governance agreements across the Global South.

None of this eliminates the potential risks of losing control. But it does mean that China is significantly better placed to mitigate them, and to respond effectively should they occur. None of the above, equally, mean that Chinese AI is inherently more benign. To the contrary, under the watch of the CCP it enhances an already pervasive surveillance machine, enables more efficient repression and pre-emptive action against potential dissenters, and grants the CCP a potent means to control the flow of information through Chinese society and beyond. On the plus side, in a world of Chinese AI we may well be less likely to all die at the hands of MechaHitler.

Just as self-actualization-through-technology, Nietzschean or utopian, has its conceptual roots in the West’s intellectual heritage, so this alternative vision of AI — an all-of-society enhancement that is context-specific, regulatorily-iterative, embodied, and safely controlled — has its roots in China’s. It is the kind of approach one might expect from a civilization whose philosophy has emphasized a continuous relationship between the mental and the physical, the mutual influence of society and the wider cosmos, and the complexity of the web of factors that influence individual behavior. Such principles lie behind ideas ranging from traditional Chinese medicine to Confucian moral self-cultivation, emphasizing propensity and interconnectedness over determinism and separation.

As with Western thought, this tradition has optimistic and pessimistic flavors. The countercultural impulse of the Daoist sage to retreat into the mountains and be at one with the way of the cosmos is the sibling of the Legalist statesman’s understanding that his enemies are best destroyed by comprehensively targeting the intricate network of economic, demographic, political, and military factors on which their rule depends. The Confucian conviction that all humans can improve themselves through practicing the correct rituals finds its counterpart in the Maoist awareness that those forced to repeat the same behaviors can be “brainwashed”.

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So there is much to fret over, regardless of who drives the direction of AI. Ultimately, it is hard to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that this technology may well spell the end for the societies we in the West consider ideal. For many decades, if not centuries, our societies have seen rapid technological change, but never in that period have we been confronted by a technology with quite so much transformative power over how we receive information, how we communicate, and how we relate to others and ourselves. Writing and the printing press were technologies which, through interaction with economic shifts as profound as the emergence of a merchant class or the newfound sustainability of cities, enabled the thorough and often bloody transformation of political systems. Such technologies define the development of human civilization for centuries thereafter.

Printing emerged far earlier in China, and did so into a society that had developed many of the trappings of early modern European states centuries beforehand, from bureaucratic government to standing armies. But for us in the West, the arrival of printing caused immense disruption, ushering our societies out of feudalism and into an era of mass literacy that made liberal democracy possible. AI now appears to be a similarly transformative technology, and is swiftly being embedded in the bureaucracy, in the military, and across a corporate sector over which the government has little control. The institutions of Western democracies are ill-equipped to deal with such a radical shift in the creation, control, and distribution of information and the new centers of authority it is creating.

In contrast, China has developed its economy and institutions alongside the emergence and proliferation of digital technologies. It has also done so at a time when advances in science and technology tend towards an emphasis on complexity, messiness, and unpredictability. Contemporary scientific understandings of evolution or the relationship between mind and body, for instance, are entirely at odds with the mind-body dualism of the Enlightenment. A philosophy that worked for a world of steam and printing — discreet manipulable objects and Newtonian physics — is not necessarily up to the messier challenges of silicon and neural networks. A society whose systems of thought are predisposed to understand humanity and the world in a way which complements the science underpinning modern technology is surely likely to adapt to that technology more effectively — and implement it more effectively too. CCP-sponsored AI might very well wish to read the contents of your mind, but a brain-computer interface designed by Xunzi would perhaps be less likely to assume that one can straightforwardly transfer the mind’s contents to a machine with no ill effects than would one designed by Descartes.

For these reasons, it is likely to be China that ultimately better adapts to an AI-enabled world. It is not that China and the West are incommensurably different, nor that they do not face analogous challenges with these new technologies. It is simply that adaptation is an evolutionary process, and in evolution success depends not on perfection but on being marginally better suited to one’s conditions than the competition. China’s approach is much more orientated to the complexity of this technology, and unlike the US, China is building an architecture designed to facilitate the spread of its own vision. America risks failing to anticipate the profound domestic challenges AI is catalyzing, while China gains an international reputation as the more responsible AI superpower.

We should take this prospect extremely seriously. Of course, we must worry about US-China strategic competition, from the economic challenge of supply-chain interdependence to the escalation risks posed by two superpowers increasingly reliant on military AI. But we must also think about culture, and what might enable us to better adapt. This is especially pressing for those of us outside America and China. We face two alternatives — the apogee of unconstrained self-actualization or efficient, holistic security. Or, for the more pessimistic, MechaHitler or MechaMao.

Thus 11 September, 2001, that dire shock whose collision momentum irresistibly knocked us out of reality as we had understood it — perhaps because we had failed to understand it accurately — and into something terrifying, agonizing, unformed. Maybe Pearl Harbor felt like this, at least to isolationist homebodies who ignored developments in Poland and Manchuria; the American Civil War, calamity though it was, had telegraphed itself for years; sad John Quincy Adams intuited its approach though he died before it came.

And then the little child got a stomach ache; the bomb went off; the South seceded and a pair of hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers. At first we were bewildered. We could not understand “why they hate us”. But in its own time, the new reality grew distinct. It was necessarily grimmer than the old, because we were at war with shadowy murderers to whom we had paid too little attention.

If this were a happier essay, I would write that the shock improved our comprehension of the world, but that isn’t so. Not long after we invaded Iraq in 2003, to confiscate imaginary weapons of mass destruction and punish Saddam Hussein for 9/11, with which he had absolutely nothing to do, the Iraqis whom we were impoverishing, torturing and shooting very naturally began killing ever more of us and each other. In 2004, I was in California’s Imperial Valley, a poorish, agricultural, fairly pro-military place, when I heard people say: “We liberated them, but they don’t appreciate it. We’re trying to help them, but they’re mean.” And why had the 9/11 hijackers been mean? Well, “they hated us for our freedoms.”

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We the Americans (never mind the politicos who got us into this) were the little children who maybe or maybe not should have known better, and 11 September was the ant poison left over from the Cold War. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, that was a vicious atrocity; hence we were right and just to support the Afghan resistance. However, we should not have collaborated with the Saudis on bankrolling, arming and letting loose Islamic extremism. We thought we could stir up the Mujahideen to bleed the “Evil Empire” — which they did — Roger, Wilco, over and out! — but what then? Spent, the Russians withdrew in 1989, while we rested on our laurels.

Right then, when the Afghans were still grateful to Reagan and the CIA, we could have spent a pittance on mosques, hospitals, running water and girls’ schools, and maybe helped to build peace. In Yemen, I have seen schools and clinics labeled “A GIFT FROM THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY”. In 2002, at least (I have not been back since), the Yemenis remembered those gifts. They did not hate the Europeans as they hated us. As for us, buttoning up our wallets, we walked away from the Afghan warlords we had enabled. Once the power vacuum grew literally murderous, the Taliban sprang up, promising to replace robberies, kidnappings and rapes with a literalist Muslim society — an awfully persuasive response to the atheists who had burned women alive and drowned “reactionary feudal elements” in Marxist-Leninist cesspools. What tune were we whistling then? The Afghans had served our turn, so about them we no longer cared a rat’s ass. Now we could crow about a “peace dividend”.

***

Osama bin Laden was a brave and effective Mujahid. Maybe he took our money, or possibly he sucked entirely on Saudiya’s tit. When did leaving him alone with his toys and zealots become imprudent? This ordinary citizen cannot say. But once he commenced uttering explicit threats, meanwhile appearing implicated in terrorist acts, why wasn’t he stopped? Much has been written about the cavalier indifference of the Bush administration, which preferred to look for excuses to “take out” Saddam. The intelligence community itself blamed “the wall” imposed by Congress in the Seventies, after revelations of FBI-CIA collusion in various abuses, including widespread illegal surveillance of American citizens. This partition between spookish entities, we are plausibly told, prevented FBI and CIA cadres from sharing enough information to “connect the dots” and stop the hijackers in time. As the 9/11 report told it, “the wall” now “regulated the manner in which such information could be shared from the intelligence side of the house to the criminal side. These procedures were almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied.” So down came “the wall,” and, to the government’s credit, I will say that there have been no 9/11-sized attacks on American soil since 2001.

Of course, thousands of Middle Eastern civilians have been killed to further that outcome. How many died for no good reason? How many were justifiably tortured? (My answer is none, because I disbelieve that torture is ever justified. But in my magisterial objectivity let me now quote a “CIA veteran” from the other side, circa October 2001: “A lot of people are saying we need someone at the agency who can pull fingernails out… The only question then is, do you want to have CIA people in the room?”.) How many suitcases of hundred-dollar bills have passed out of oversight? What cost have we paid in civil liberties to achieve our tenuous tranquility? I remember the so-called PATRIOT Act, one of whose provisions was that librarians must on request turn over a list of books checked out by a specific patron, and then keep secret from him or her that the list has gone to the government. Ah, freedom; oh, democracy! We citizens gave in and gave up; we left PATRIOTic tricks up to our protectors, because by definition they knew best. But did they? Has the War on Terror been making us more or less safe?

This August, I was reporting from Kuwait, where I found significant hatred of America and Israel. Our stupid, vicious bully of a President goes on exacerbating Muslim hostility with his Iran war, which in Kuwait has increased food prices and triggered retaliatory Iranian drone casualties to people and infrastructure. One man told me that while he did not support Iran “even 1%”, he stood against America “more than a thousand percent.” His position requires a fairly lofty will-to-hate. That is why I see another 11 September coming. Maybe this time it will entail swarms of drones. Meanwhile, we go on making enemies and strengthening their accusations against us. I guess that’s the American way.

As the 11 September report admitted: “Coalition warfare also requires coalition policies on what to do with enemy captives. Allegations that the United States,” to take just one instance, “abused prisoners… make it harder” — who would have thought it? — “to build the diplomatic, political and military alliances the government will need.”

The victims of 9/11  were innocent, and their murderers evil. I am grateful to the intelligence community for killing the killers. As for the waterboarders and blithely careless shooters and detonators (doubtless they are still at it in some “black site”), how can they not make war into a perpetual motion machine? We citizens never know what well-intentioned cruelties they are up to today and tomorrow. And how can we imagine what we cannot see? From Yemen I remember rectangular windows and round windows like kaleidoscopes of multicolored glass, and, in the old city of Shibam in Hadramawt, a cluster of gingerbread or halvah blocks very occasionally ornamented with satellite dishes. My friends and neighbors will likely never go to Yemen. If they ever hear that we dropped a Predator drone over there, that will mean as much to them as learning that we did something classified on Saturn.

The US, we are told, has a representative government. Abe Lincoln called himself our servant, as well he might. Although King Donald takes furious exception, our representatives are supposed to be temporary servants. (Just wait until he makes terrorism great again in his illegal third term!) In Congress and the judiciary branch, decisions made on our behalf are least supposed to be public. As for the executive branch, its purpose, wrote John Adams, is to do whatever must be done with secrecy and dispatch. Obviously, when the Twin Towers fell, the American masses remained in and of themselves unqualified to decide how to react. How many could have distinguished Iran from Iraq, or located Yemen on a world map? How many could say that Saddam was or was not a 9/11 kingpin? So the chief executive decided for America: get Iraq! I do wish he had worked with other world leaders to map out al-Qaeda targets, instead of dragooning his “coalition” into an unjust war based on a lie.

As for his war with Afghanistan, was it effective? Did it gain its purpose? With our military out, and the Taliban inevitably as strong or stronger than before — Americans go on disbelieving in their populist appeal — I can’t exactly applaud Bush’s victory. But maybe we killed a lot of bad guys, and not so many good guys as to create more bad guys than before we started. How can I know? Doubtless he’s proud of his accomplishment.

***

Yes, we Americans remain blind to Yemen, though even an ill-educated ISIS cadre may possess an excellent visual understanding of his sector of Target America; thanks to the internet he might even have soared up the 405 past the Getty Center, exiting at Mulholland Drive to ascend the green coastal hills and then roll down across stone canyons and round the moist green hills with the San Fernando Valley below; there are the enemy’s white houses; perhaps he hates the more expensive ones most; let’s say that he sees Los Angeles as we cannot see Hadramawt, but does he see us, the ones whom he would kill? I remember chatting with some Talibs about Americans. That was how I learned that we are all prostitutes, gang bangers, homeless addicts, perverts pornography addicts; because these men had all worked in the United States, and therefore thought that they knew us; of course the only work they could get was pumping gas in the red light district, selling cheap liquor to alcoholics or manning the counters of “adult” bookstores. No wonder they had a bad notion of us. And no wonder, too, that my neighbors can’t tell a Talib from a Shi’ite from a Sikh. (“Come on, Bill; they’re all ragheads!”) What turban-wearers do they ever see on their screens but America-hating evildoers?

Again I propose that we set aside a fraction of what we burn on surveillance and drone strikes, and spend it on what will benefit people, and make them friendlier toward us. After years of careless carnage and brutality, it will take more years to soften their hearts. But why not build schools? If the Islamists blow them up, build them again. The locals will take eventual note of who seems to be addressing their interests. Otherwise we can “shock and awe”, but then what? We believe in our own kindness, so why not convince them of the same?

At home, meanwhile, we are now proving the Talibs right by spreading libels about non-white, non-Christian immigrants. Texas politicos fulminate about clearing their state of Muslims. Well, then, why shouldn’t Muslim countries cleanse themselves of American military bases?

I wish, here, that American Muslim organizations would more clearly distance themselves from extremists. I wish there could be a place (or, as post-9/11 Americans would say, “a safe place”) for Muslims and non-Muslims to meet, possibly to share food or practice calligraphy (illuminated Qurans are some of the most beautiful works I have ever seen). You see, I am a lucky man. I can wish away without responsibilities, and keep blaming others.

***

The UK has endured a heartbreaking number of high- and low-level terrorist attacks. From my possibly outsider perspective, it seems that many Muslim immigrants have integrated into British society sufficiently to live anonymously, but not enough to feel accepted. Perhaps it is like that in the Algerian neighborhoods of France, the petri-dishes of Belgium and Germany.

My conclusion — an impractical one in my country now that the Bigot-in-Chief is deporting people right and left — is that immigration ought to be managed mindfully. It should benefit both the hosts and the new arrivals. In a better America, a municipality with a shortage of workers might bid to take, say, 1,000 people, in exchange for infrastructure grants or tax breaks. If the new arrivals are Muslim, then an organization such as the Committee on American-Islamic Relations (which somebody in Texas has pronounced terrorist; for my part I am fond of it and its members) could arrange a meet-and-greet, perhaps with some church volunteers, to teach the respective parties that in our country women can wear short skirts (or have sex with other women) and that no one should be forced or tricked into consuming pork and alcohol. Whenever I go to a foreign place, I feel more at ease once I have found a big brother or big sister to teach me the local mores and help me make friends. Why wouldn’t a new immigrant feel the same?

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Meanwhile, one thing I can do right now (as can you) is to reach out to those who seem “other” or even positively alien, before their feelings of rejection render them isolated and estranged. It is the grinding little quotidian incivilities that irritate us into resentment.

Consider the possibilities. We could close our borders, abandon our global capitalist empire to China and Russia and devolve into an autarky. Without cheap imported plastics, rare earths for their cell phones and a committed export market, even the most radical Trumpeter Swans might grow disgruntled then. Or we could isolate and surveil immigrants in hopes of precipitating out the haters. My suspicion is that this treatment would defeat its own purpose. (In 2004, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, 70 to 90% of Iraqi detainees “had been arrested by mistake.”) Or, thirdly, we could welcome them into our community and treat them according to the Golden Rule. Which of these would be easiest, cheapest and kindest?

***

The Pentagon Papers proved that American Presidents were willing to escalate an ever-more-obviously unwinnable war in Vietnam to look tough in elections. As for our 9/11 goon squad — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and that bunch — it might despite warnings from the intelligence community have truly believed that Iraq was behind the attacks Or, perhaps, they simply felt impelled to “do something”, with Iraq already on the “to do” list. Who can say? The executive branch’s necessary Adamsonian qualities of secrecy and dispatch protected it from oversight and embarrassment long enough for Bush II to steer the country into disaster and then step down without fear of punishment.

One of the most serious deficiencies of our rotating representative system is that any chief executive’s theory of foreign policy can suddenly be contradicted and undone by his successor. Just consider the sharp transition from Carter to Reagan, or Clinton to Bush II. And so, returning to the matter of the Afghan Mujahideen, who drove out the Soviets in 1989, we can if we like blame Bush I, who as a former CIA supremo should have understood the necessity for maintaining ties with his proxies and their weapons;.ut we could also point a finger at Clinton, in whose time Afghanistan grew more volatile — why didn’t he re-engage with the people who were still our friends? (A year before 9/11, the Talibs were still in my hearing expressing gratitude to America.) Did anybody in Washington care?

It would be lovely had there been some sage at State and Defense to assure us: “We’ve been following this issue ever since we ramped up the Mujahideen in 1979. Here is how events have evolved, and so our current national interest can be served as follows…” But with the Soviets beaten, and still more so with the collapse of their system in 1991-92, Afghanistan became irrelevant, which is another way of saying that our Afghan policy was ultimately incoherent, like our current Venezuela policy (kidnap the head of state, blow up random fishing boats) or our Iran policy (threaten, bomb, declare victory and repeat).

Our Vietnam policy continued until the Pentagon Papers got leaked. Then it finally began to founder. If and when we are ever relieved of President Trump, some new politician can end the Iran war, or else continue it in some way that is the same only different; then my neighbors will be satisfied, and forget all about it. But the Iranians, Turks, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Omanis, Qataris and Emirates will not forget. Someday we’ll wonder why they hate us.

This has attracted the attention of President Trump and his Chief Scientific Advisor, Michael Kratsios, who comes from a private-sector background. They see an opportunity to wrest control of science from the bureaucracy — or perhaps even what MAGA loyalists might describe as the “priesthood” of experts who protect the science community at the expense of public well-being.

The travails of Dr Fauci, therefore, are part of a wider struggle. There is a broader, civilization-level conflict going on, one that was best articulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1964 when he said: “The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers; he’s one who asks the right questions.”

Not long ago, anyone who said there was water on the moon was deemed a nutcase. Thanks to data gathered via India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission of 2008, and Nasa’s LCROSS mission of 2009, we know that there are some 600 billion kg of water ice in the moon’s polar regions — a discovery that bodes well for both manned and unmanned missions. In 2020, Nasa’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed the existence of water molecules in the sunlit regions as well.

The heretical discoveries range from space to the mundane matters of daily life. For instance, we used to think that ulcers were caused by spicy food and stress. Then, in 1979, Dr Robin Warren and Dr Barry Marshall, both Australian scientists, showed evidence that ulcers were caused by bacteria. The idea was heavily ridiculed, because almost every other scientist had accepted the dogma that no microorganism could possibly survive in human stomach acid. The opposition was so fierce that, for the sake of humanity, Marshall offered himself up as a rat lab by drinking broth made from a patient’s gastritis. First, he became violently ill from the H. pylori bacteria it contained, as he knew he would; then, he cured himself with antibiotics, proving that a peptic ulcer was the product of the bacterium. This discovery has saved millions from unnecessary surgeries and lifelong peptic ulcer disease. Today we know that the condition of the microbiome, the gut, is fundamental to our overall flourishing, and that our bodies are host to countless microorganisms capable of both inflicting profound illness and sustaining our happiness and health.

Science, in other words, is full of orthodoxies waiting to be overturned — which is exactly what Trump and Kratsios are aiming to do. The White House science strategy is a ruthless overhaul, upending traditional funding models and clearing out the legacy leadership that has long governed the scientific community: not only government bodies, but also institutions, such as universities, that are funded by the government. Naturally, many in the scientific establishment are horrified, given their animus for Trump and their hostility toward government meddling in science. But others are thrilled, because the new strategy released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is the most radical overhaul of the US federal research enterprise since the Second World War. It breaks the old guard’s control over who gets funding, what gets funded, and how science “should” progress.

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Instead, it calls for funding individuals rather than institutions such as universities, no matter how garlanded. In other words, scientific investigators no longer need to be blessed by the scientific bureaucracy to qualify for funding. Marshall would have been funded a lot sooner had this approach been in place.

The OSTP is also gunning for the peer review system, via which scientific work is slowly and ceremoniously reviewed by other scientists. This approach is often inimical to radical new thinkers, but it has been maintained by universities for decades. Now individual agency reviewers can unilaterally advance unconventional and high-risk, high-reward proposals that traditional academic panels, mindful of existing scientific consensus, would probably reject. Federal money will now flow to “Focused Research Organizations”, which address well-defined problems over a deliberately short lifespan. (Note the contrast with the ancient and bloated university sector.) The roadmap will also enable faster delivery of grant money and, when appropriate, longer timeframes for researchers to get on with their work without having to apply for further funding. How much discovery has been blocked, even unconsciously, by an old guard whose livelihood and parent institutions benefited from scientific stasis?

But the government is not the only source of scientific funding. In fact, the private sector funds a significant proportion of university science. The question remains: how much of the science community has ignored ideas because of ego, or because their cash flows from sponsors would have been adversely affected by the new discovery? Peer reviewers are unlikely to admit that a new idea is right if it proves that their own life’s work is wrong. Some say the peer-review system is independent, but in the case of Fauci, who led the National Institutes of Health’s massive grant-giving process for 38 years, it seems scientists everywhere believed that publishing anything that ran counter to his views might well cause their funding to dry up.

Kratsios is also coming for the academic journals, another form of gatekeeper. From 1951, Robert Maxwell transformed the old peer-review system, which had been quaint and collaborative, into a multibillion-dollar commercial industry, starting with Pergamon Press. This forced journals and libraries to pay subscription fees to remain up to date. The academics, who had been doing this work for free, were now paid. Peer review prestige thus became commodified and monopolized, and the research itself became expensive to access. Kratsios, in response, is trying to cut the flow of taxpayer dollars to these journals.

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As for Trump, he wants the credit for being the president who tore down those gates and the gatekeepers, and for enabling a new era of scientific discovery, one that will be led by free thinkers rather than bureaucrats. The OSTP is therefore pushing many scientists out of the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control. It is also limiting federal funds to the old academic institutions.

Central to the new strategy is the “Genesis Mission”, which is commonly described as the Manhattan Project of our generation. Just as the US, in the Second World War, sought to gain control of the atom and the atom bomb through the Manhattan Project, today the White House seeks to enable artificial intelligence to solve the greatest problems facing humanity, from health to energy. The core of the Genesis Mission is the “American Science and Security Platform”, which aims to consolidate the government’s massive supercomputing resources and its diverse research and experimental facilities. These facilities include the seventeen national labs, like Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. These labs house immense bodies of work that their scientists have quietly accumulated over many decades.

We must remember that much of the research has been so highly classified that scientists could not share data within some of these labs, or across them, let alone with private researchers. The White House says this work is a public good paid for with taxpayer money and that all qualified scientists should be able to access it, especially since the old guard have either been wrong or are holding back innovations that would benefit the public.

The White House is also implying that the old-guard scientists have been using the “Classified” label as a “Keep Out” sign for too long. The Genesis Mission calls for all this data to be digitized, standardized, and made AI-ready so it can be shared and studied by both government and private scientists. By feeding many decades of extraordinarily valuable data to AI, the thinking goes, researchers can break open scientific silos and connect the dots between complex biological, chemical, and physical interactions.

In other words, the White House is saying America will go “open-source” in a controlled environment. The US won’t share everything with the world, but it will share it amongst a much broader pool of scientists. This modern Manhattan Project is designed to create an explosion in collaboration.

The most ambitious aspect of the strategy is to allow AI to run labs directly, testing new hypotheses, generating predictive models, and designing and executing new experiments. Science will thus no longer depend on the views or whims of individual scientists or gatekeepers. Science will become autonomous, self-driving, and continuously iterating, operating at a speed that it is impossible for human researchers to replicate.

The era of scientists pipetting chemicals or adjusting lasers or working directly with lab rats, then, is over. AI and robotics will automate both the decision-making and the physical actions. All this takes energy — and the US has some catching-up to do. A new nuclear power plant for example, used to require $30bn and thirty years of regulatory approvals. In May 2025, the White House gave small American nuclear firms the deadline of 4 July, 2026, America’s 250th anniversary, to “go critical” with small modular reactors using new technologies. Four firms made it. The US is now scaling up the nuclear energy needed to power the data centers and AI essential to the project of a Golden Age. Even now, AI is solving mathematical equations that were hitherto unsolvable — which will make for faster scientific progress. For example, nuclear fusion used to be perennially “50 years away”. It is advancing quickly now that AI and supercomputing are reshaping the boundaries of math and physics. The AlphaFold team won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for unlocking a decades-old puzzle of folding proteins, revolutionizing how scientists approach disease and drug discovery. Today the same AI-led transformation is happening across science.

The White House also seems determined to demonstrate that Dr Fauci was not the only scientist who prioritized cash flow and business interests over health outcomes. Back in April 2025, Kratsios made an intriguing claim while addressing a gathering of technologists. He said: “We are capable of so much more. Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.” It turns out that he was quoting President William McKinley in 1901. That was the era of electricity. What does “annihilating distance and manipulating time“ mean today? What clandestine research, observers wondered, was Kratsios referring to? It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that, at the same time as the administration aggressively declassifies so much material across various agencies, it has also decided to nullify many government non-disclosure agreements — ensuring whistleblowers can come forward without risking their status, pensions, and possibly more.

We need to be prepared for what scientists call “ontological shocks”. These are the profound psychological or cognitive disturbances that can occur when a person or a society encounters new information that breaks their fundamental understanding of reality. All the talk in the AI community is that AI is about to revolutionize both maths and physics. This needn’t be scary: humanity’s worldview has collapsed many times before — be that in the Copernican Revolution, or when Darwin revealed his Theory of Evolution. And each of these collapses has been to our benefit. Of course, it will be different, more difficult this time: humanity has never had to contend with an intelligence that is so much greater than its own. No one knows what AI will optimize for. After all, we’ve programmed it for efficiency and profitability, but not for human connection. It’s been trained on the internet, a place that doesn’t represent the best of human intent or human thinking. Are we ready for the consequences of AI and the new approach to science that it will bring? It took three generations for humanity to adjust to Galileo’s worldview. Can we be sure to adjust any faster? Indeed, should we? Will new truths be more reliable than the old ones?

The White House, however, says humanity is entering a new “Golden Age”.  Science is making extraordinary new discoveries almost daily, rendering old dogma obsolete. Many in the scientific establishment fear obsolescence. Sensing the barbarians at the gate, they fear a scientific dark age brought on by government intervention. But the old order had to end, as it always does — and given the advent of AI, superfast computation, and potentially explosive declassification, its destruction might not take long.

It transpired that the former Breitbart News journalist, 41, had missed an immigration appointment in July; according to a rather gloating tweet by the Department of Homeland Security, he had entered the US legally in 2019 but had outstayed the terms of his visa. A disheveled-looking Yiannopoulos, to whom time has perhaps not been kind, mean-mugged the camera in an accompanying photograph. With barely disguised smugness, the department wrote: “We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP [Customs and Border Protection] Home App.” Yiannopoulos may have seen himself as above the category of illegal immigrants he’d spent his career despising; in the end, he was treated just as indecorously as the rest of them. To pour further salt in the wound, the post encouraged other would-be immigrants to seek “the right legal way to live the American dream”; for Yiannopoulos, it appeared, that dream was very much over.

How had this happened? The British agitator’s rise and fall from 2014 was the life-cycle of the alt-Right distilled in one man: he went from shouty grub to poisonous rockstar to a husk tangled in the web of the movement which by now had become the establishment. He had made many enemies on his rise from Telegraph journalist to alt-Right superstar, racking up public feuds with, among many, Ben Shapiro (a “less professionally successful version of me”), the comedian Leslie Jones (he called her “spectacularly unappealing” in a rant that saw him booted off Twitter in 2016), and fellow internet outlaw Azealia Banks, who he had once represented at his refuge-of-the-cancelled talent agency Tarantula Management before a spectacular spat which culminated in Banks presciently threatening: “LMAO now shut up before i call ICE on you and get you deported you filthy migrant”. Yet none of these former sparring partners ultimately did him in. No, the final clobber was delivered by Yiannopoulos’s fellow conservative media darling and former pal Laura Loomer, who claimed his scalp by telling X that she’d snitched about his immigration status to the authorities. 

The pair fell out when Yiannopoulos accused her of having sexually harassed a young male aide during her congressional campaign in 2020 (which Loomer denies). Baby Jane-worthy barbs culminated in Loomer claiming he “was a demonic force” who had called for her assassination and threatened to “throw my bulldog off the balcony”. Now that pooch can sleep soundly in the knowledge that its loving pawrent, whom Yiannopoulos also smeared as Trump’s alleged mistress, shopped this very naughty boy to “Daddy” (as Yiannopoulos called the President). In a final blow that was not a grain of pettiness short of a nanny-nanny-boo-boo, Loomer wrote of the increasingly anti-Israel Yiannopoulos: “Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace.” Revenge, served ICE-cold.

The problem with being the Mean Girl of social media — Yiannopoulos has spent years shooting poison darts from the perch of his feared and revered @nero X account — is that the ancient texts have a habit of coming back to haunt you. On Friday the poster AG Hamilton unearthed a gem from the archives: a tweet from last year in which Yiannopoulos joked about the “etiquette” of masturbating at the sight of an ICE raid. It was one of the many approving things he’d said about the agency since it began its crackdown at the start of Trump’s second term; in the end, he looked a wanker indeed. 

It’s tempting to see the saga of Yiannopoulos as that of a juggernaut who ran out of road, an open-and-shut case of poetic justice meted against a hateful gobshite. But in truth his rise and fall is more interesting than that: his flamboyant career ultimately indicates the broader health of the alt-Right. In 2016 Breitbart’s star writer, bylined only as “Milo”, embarked on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour of US college campuses — the ragebaiting debate format which would later be imitated by the Turning Point speaker Charlie Kirk. His boss Steve Bannon had just defected to run the Trump campaign; the tour was a victory lap for the mainstreaming of ironic hard-Right populism, whose many viral moments thrilled crowds like Nero’s Roman candles.

At Rutgers University in New Jersey, student libs smeared fake blood on their faces and chanted “Black lives matter!”; right on cue, the Milo fans responded: “Trump, Trump, Trump!” At DePaul in Chicago, no-platformers stormed the stage and grabbed the mic; hundreds of supporters then marched on the university president’s office. This gave him plenty of set-ups for stylish jabs — when one black student said she’d been “silenced for 200 years”, he quipped that she looked remarkably young. At UC Irvine in California, he arrived on stage in a “stunning burqa thot outfit”; protesters were handed dummies. The Breitbart write-up included a “get the look” postscript: “Combat boots by Diesel, $175. Sunglasses by Gucci, $225. Fishnet stockings: model’s own.”

These stunts were bellwethers for the pyrrhic culture wars of Woke 1, in which expressing heterodox opinions bore the same moral penalty as mass murder. Punchlines could be seeded by simply being outrageous enough. You could set your watch to audiences’ objections — the mantras they’d repeat, the pompous debate-society tactics they’d employ. This was something Kirk would come to leverage in his own campus debates, with liberal opponents never seeming to grasp that by engaging with him at all (or trying to no-platform him) they’d already stepped on the booby-trap. This is also the “gotcha” choreography of today’s X, where the nastiest comeback wins; for all this week’s sniping from poasters delighted at Yiannopoulos’s downfall, it bears remembering that this was a format which he created. In many ways his enemies on the Left and Right were doomed to speak in his language. 

But the Regina George of the alt-Right was always going to be burned in the end. The heyday of the Dangerous Faggot tour — in many ways Yiannopoulos’s apogee — was followed only a year later by those pedophilia comments which would see him booted from the line-up at CPAC and dropped from his $250,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster. He also resigned from Breitbart. His career since 2017 has been a shadow of its former glory, as Trumpism’s one-time favorite court jester settled into life as a fringe internet figure, converted to Catholicism, renounced his homosexuality and worked on Kanye West’s turkey of a presidential campaign (it has been suggested that Yiannopoulos was en route to Ye’s New Orleans concert when he was arrested). Being in the wilderness was rough; in 2019 he complained that “microscopic [Telegram] followings like 20k are not going to sustain people like me” and that “I can’t put food on the table”, describing himself as a “social media refugee”. 

Having toured the country as a “faggot”, his new life as a “100% sodomy-free… ex-gay” was a particularly inglorious chapter. He reported that he had come to regret “mainstreaming homosexuality in the Republican Party”, and was seemingly doing penance by hawking statues of the Virgin Mary on a Christian teleshopping channel — and by announcing plans to open a conversion-therapy clinic in Florida. Yet he has never quite managed to convince in his new ultra-trad packaging. In a manner which must infuriate him, his arrest was digested by X as a scrumptious chapter in a classically gay internet saga, with snark from George Santos (“I’m the new Alfa [sic] Gay conservative in town”) and others (“Grindr profile vs IRL” read one caption comparing images of Yiannopoulos in his bleach-blond prime and in last week’s dour mugshot). 

As things stand he’s back in Britain and back on X — and being relatively good-humored about his deportation. But his reputation as a rebellious princeling will be difficult to salvage now that he has, in the words of Musk, “become meme” by being hoisted by his own pro-ICE petard. It seems unlikely that he will fade away entirely. X is behaving like a classroom of children whose naughtiest constituent has been sent outside: they simply cannot wait to see what happens when he comes back. And with Reform and Restore looking to sweep the next election, now is perhaps a favorable time for the prodigal son to return. Yiannopoulos has carved out a distinctly Yank brand — noisy rabble-rousing may prove terribly impolite in the stuffy halls of Westminster — but this may help him at a time when British politics seems to be mutating into something more brash and populist. What happens in America has ripples in Britain, and Tommy Robinson’s recent ascent — the far-Right activist has spoken at the Oxford Union and gained elite international backing from figures including Elon Musk — suggests greater appetite than ever for the previously unsavory fringe. 

What is certain is that this embarrassing chapter will not convince Yiannopoulos himself of his own inadequacy. It is said that when Nero hesitated to knife himself to death, he cried: “What an artist dies in me!”, so convinced was he still of his extraordinary talent. Two millennia later, his X namesake and comparable braggart is surviving the latest of several political suicides, brought low by a system for which he was the greatest cheerleader. Any other flower would wilt in the heat of such crushing irony; this weed looks sure to find a way.

Why was Iran attacked with scarce and expensive BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles — costing around $3 million each — rather than ordinary gravity bombs dropped by fighter-bombers? Accuracy cannot be the answer: with so-called “JDAM” guidance kits, regular bombs become very accurate indeed, and they are still simple enough to be mass-produced cheaply.

Nevertheless, US forces had launched 850 Tomahawk missiles against Iran by 27 March this year, amounting to almost half the country’s global stockpile, though the Pentagon has since announced a huge $22.9 billion contract for more Tomahawks. Air-launched AGM-158 missiles, some of whose models can fly up to 1,000 miles, and which cost as much as $1.6 million apiece, were also used, along with Army’s Precision Strike Missiles are yet more expensive.

What makes these missiles so costly is their great virtue: they are all so-called “stand-off” weapons, which can safely be launched hundreds of miles from their targets. This means an attacker’s aircraft can remain outside enemy air space, where they could be exposed to detection by radars, and then to interception by air-defense fighters and surface-to-air missiles. There is simply no way of producing such missiles cheaply. They need powerful rocket propulsion and complicated electronic guidance to fly such vast distances and hit their targets successfully.

All this is very straightforward, and hardly a novel development in the evolution of warfare. As early as 1940, Winston Churchill’s seemingly instinctive understanding of the technology meant that Britain famously had 22 “Chain Home” early-warning radars along its southern and eastern coasts. Without them, RAF fighter pilots would have had to rely on chance encounters with German aircraft, and could not possibly have resisted the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.

From there, the bombing of Germany itself was soon enabled by the war’s greatest British invention: the “cavity magnetron” that made airborne radars effective. Herman Göring, the monstrous but highly intelligent head of the Luftwaffe, quickly recognized it as a decisive technological advance, one condemning German bombers to defeat. That is when he stopped opposing the very first “stand-off” weapons: the V1 and V2 missiles, launched from the Continent, the first fiendishly difficult to stop and the second unstoppable without surface-to-air missiles.

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Yet unlike Britain in the Forties, Iran today has no effective radar detection or tracking network. Its badly outdated radars are easily deceived by the advanced electronic countermeasures installed in every US combat aircraft. Otherwise, they are simply destroyed by anti-radiation missiles or blinded with barrage jamming.

Moreover, even if US aircraft arriving to bomb Iran were somehow detected and tracked, the Islamic Republic has no effective way of shooting them down. Its combat aircraft are badly outdated, encompassing, among other things, some ancient Chinese fighters; French Mirages flown from Iraq on the eve of the 1991 war; and a number of highly celebrated but in fact grotesque homemade modifications of the US F-5, which entered service half a century ago. Iran does, perhaps, still have a few once-powerful F-14 Tomcats — but none of these aircraft could survive an encounter with the US Air Force’s powerful F-15 fighter-bombers.

Nor can Iran’s forces shoot down US aircraft with surface-to-air missiles. Its few extremely old US-made Hawk anti-aircraft missiles are thoroughly outdated, and their wiring is seemingly very palatable to rats. Iran also has some Russian anti-aircraft missiles, acquired recently but dating back to Soviet times. They were well-engineered during the Cold War and would potentially be very capable even now — if, that is, they had not long since been left behind by US and Israeli electronic countermeasures. This crippling shortcoming also applies to Iranian attempts to update Soviet-era anti-aircraft missiles, and to efforts to develop homegrown alternatives. That leaves so-called “MANPADS”: small, shoulder-launched missiles, and which can sometimes work at extremely short range.

Though they are greatly celebrated by the regime as colossal technological achievements, Iran’s anti-aircraft missiles, and the rest of its air defenses, are so ineffectual that despite flying several thousand sorties over the country, including right over Tehran, the US has lost only two aircraft, both to Russian-made MANPADS. The Israeli air force, for its part, has lost no manned aircraft whatsoever. It did admittedly lose a Hermes 900 unmanned reconnaissance drone — promptly recovered and publicly displayed in Tehran amid self-congratulatory festivities from the Revolutionary Guards, which only revealed their inability to defend the country against the attacks they had provoked.

The broad meaning of all these details is easily summarized: because of Iran’s backward air defenses, there was no real need to use scarce and expensive “stand-off” weapons to target the country. Normal gravity bombs with cheap guidance kits would have been sufficient to do the job — with the notable exception of Ayatollah Khamenei’s deep-underground command headquarters. For that, Israel relied on the world’s most advanced air-launched weapon, its own Blue Sparrow, which flies straight up through the atmosphere before descending to its target with extreme precision and tremendous kinetic force.

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Nor, of course, are the implications here limited to Iran and the Gulf. Having needlessly used so many stand-off missiles to target Iran, US inventories are worryingly low in the event of the “Chinese contingency”: the invasion of Taiwan that Xi Jinping, unlike his predecessors, refuses to rule out. Any Chinese assault might start with subversion, with the activation of Chinese agents in Taiwan’s armed forces, but amphibious landings would have to follow — against which Tomahawk missiles would be the prime US weapon, alongside local anti-ship missiles.

But having examined all these technical details, we nonetheless arrive at something else entirely, a much more intractable problem than any munitions shortage could ever be: a fundamental change in the entire American attitude to war, which I described as “post-heroic” as far back as the Nineties when its first signs emerged.

This amounts to a truly drastic shift. What started with a proper striving to limit the casualties of war by every means possible — starting with prudent statecraft to avoid war in the first place, and extending to prudent tactics — has now devolved into the current predicament: whereby the US must spend billions on extremely elaborate stand-off missiles so as to further reduce risks to its pilots, which were already very low to begin with, against the vainglorious and incompetent Iranian enemy.

The risks of flying over Iran are evidently so low that they are almost comparable to the everyday risks that ordinary passengers face on some lesser Third World airlines, some of which I could not avoid using on a regular basis to reach my Amazonian ranch (not without some trepidation, amid habitual delays, frequent cancellations, and several very hard landings, only one of which ended in a veritable crash).

Nor is the drastic decline in the tolerance of combat risks by the Pentagon chiefs — and even more by the White House — limited to the US Air Force. From the start of the current round of fighting, at least 4,000 82nd Airborne troops, and some 6,000 Marines, arrived at American bases in the Gulf. They could have physically secured the desert islands and islets in the Persian Gulf all the way through the Straits of Hormuz, preventing expedient mine-laying and rocket attacks by Revolutionary Guards. They represent the Islamic Republic’s only remaining threats to the traffic of oil tankers, liquified natural-gas vessels and fertilizer bulk-carriers that affect the world economy, because every one of Iran’s warships and submarines were sunk when the conflict began.

In the event, the White House was so frightened by the possibility of even minimal combat casualties that it made no attempt to keep the Gulf secure and the Straits open, thus allowing Iran to claim victory even to this day. To an extent, then, we should be thankful for the Air Force’s reliance on expensive stand-off weapons: at least it prevented the White House from imposing some abrupt and unilateral ceasefire, merely because a handful of pilots were lost.

It might be tempting to attribute America’s drastic post-heroic turn, in which it was preceded long ago by almost all its Nato allies, to Donald Trump’s dismal performance as a war leader.

To begin with, he refused to explain why the war had to be fought, even in a few grammatical phrases read before the TV cameras. From there, he abruptly accepted a ceasefire justified by a very dubious “memorandum of understanding”, concocted by his war-averse and frankly isolationist vice president; his son-in-law; his favorite wheeler-dealer Steve Witkoff; and Pakistan’s practiced deceivers, who rightly view Americans as easy marks, having obtained billions in aid to allow US trucks to reach Afghanistan while at the same time supporting the Taliban.

Then Trump abruptly reverted to fighting, again without any explanation. Again, that would have required the immense sacrifice of reading four or five grammatical phases before the TV cameras. But, most unfortunately, America’s “post-heroic” turn cannot be blamed on the easiest target; if it were really all Trump’s fault, I could not have predicted that historic transformation in a series of lengthy Foreign Affairs articles decades ago.

After excluding any straightforward political explanations, and ruling out a sudden upsurge of pacifism — that perfectly coherent humanistic creed which has never prevented a single war — I was left with biology: specifically the fall in female fertility, which had already declined to 2.2 in 1994 and is now down to 1.57, well below the 2.1 replacement level.

That, in turn, means that very few families now have more than one boy, or girl for that matter, making each one too precious to sacrifice. In case anyone is in a hurry to move on to other things, viewing the refusal to fight wars as a solution rather than a problem, there is that other effect of the baby shortage: the biological decrepitude of the entire nation as it relentlessly ages. That, it goes without saying, is a challenge that no amount of Tomahawks can correct, and which our rulers absolutely refuse to address.

Most people don’t make such remarks simply because they’re stupid. If the government threatened to drive a motorway through their back garden, they would wise up on the planning laws quickly enough. They come up with such clichés because they don’t know much about politics, for the reason that the kind of politics we practice doesn’t seem to know much about them. The country, like much of the rest of the world, is gripped by a profound crisis of legitimacy. Great swathes of the population no longer have the faintest trust in its political institutions. It’s as though the passengers on a train greeted an announcement that they were approaching their destination with hoots of derision and snickers of skepticism. Politicians are about as popular as pimps. As far as institutions go, a lot of people still admire the Royal Family; but this is partly because the royals don’t really impinge on their daily lives, as politics is supposed to do. The fact that royalty does nothing of importance is one of the major reasons it stays in power. Most citizens see no more point in abolishing it than in ridding humanity of Morris dancing or the Yeomen of the Guard. There’s no harm in adding a few useless decorations to your domicile.

Widespread disaffection can lead to political revolution, were it not that people are sometimes too disaffected to be revolutionary. Astonishingly, however, a third of Britons told a recent survey that capitalism had failed and that a communist revolution was necessary. Or so The Times reports. It’s hard to believe that it’s true. A quarter of those polled declared themselves open to supporting enemies of the state like Russia and Iran, which is to say that the bespectacled bank clerk opposite you on the Tube train might well be a fifth columnist. The prospect of a collapse of legitimacy is why Edmund Burke appealed in the wake of the French Revolution for government by popular consent. This is one reason why he was a Whig and not a Tory. Power must respect the values and customs of the populace. Governing classes in Burke’s view survive only by engaging the affections of their inferiors, and a loveless sovereignty is politically bankrupt. India must be ruled with due respect to its indigenous culture, not with the ham-fisted brutality of the stereotypical imperialist.

Nations in Burke’s view aren’t primarily governed by laws, but by a set of affinities and tacit understandings between rulers and ruled. What holds them together is more cultural than political. If colonies like America can associate being subordinate to the Crown with their own civil rights, the more perfect will be their obedience. The only firm seat of authority, Burke declares, “lies in the minds, affections and interests of the people”. If this fails, and the common people take to the streets, then of course you unleash on them the full force of your repressive powers. There’s always a coercive fist within the consensual glove. But to unleash your powers is to risk an even more drastic loss of legitimacy. It’s better on the whole to woo your citizens than to shoot them down. Governments who do the latter have won and lost at the same time.

Cynicism about the political class isn’t quite such bad news for the Establishment as it might appear. People don’t live by politics alone, even when they trust and admire their politicians. The dull inertia of everyday life may be enough to keep them from tearing up the cobblestones. Most of them spend most of their time simply trying to keep their heads above water. What absorbs their attention isn’t the break-up of the social contract but the price of bacon. This is one way in which economics takes precedence over politics. What Marx calls the economic base is what Americans call the bottom line. A certain amount of economic pain has a distracting effect which may benefit the guardians of the system, whereas too much of it poses a threat to them. Even so, regular visitors to Davos may console themselves with the thought that revolutions only occur when people can glimpse an alternative to what they have now which strikes them as both feasible and desirable. If the problem isn’t simply a specific political regime but politics as such, this isn’t likely to happen. In the view of a disillusioned populace, even Lenin would simply be more of the same.

“They’re all the same” and similar sentiments may not be true, but the impulse behind them is surely authentic. People are right to be cynical about politics; it’s just that a lot of them are cynical for the wrong reasons. If the political sphere can’t bring genuine change, it’s largely because it’s severely constrained by the banks, major corporations, domestic bureaucracies and international capitalist institutions. In this sense, globalization breeds an erosion of political trust at the national level. The same is true of geopolitics, which forces political states into crippling amounts of expenditure while underfunding the institutions that ordinary people rely on. Besides, capitalism is the fastest-changing system in human history, which can make political promises hard to keep. Politics shrinks to a cramped arena in which room for maneuver is drastically curtailed. Nations become agents of forces they can’t control. The Britain that once ruled the world is now ruled by it.

There’s a false solution to the widespread prejudice against politics, which is to make a politics out of it. This is known as populism, which is currently sweeping the globe. You can denounce international set-ups while being bound hand and foot to the global corporations, and cheer for the Common Man while supporting the world-wide financial markets which are pushing him toward the breadline. You can even make a fortune on those markets yourself, while blaming immigrants for the social damage which such financial forces wreak. You can castigate elites in the name of the common people while stashing away millions of pounds or billions of dollars yourself and owning a large number of posh houses. You can also speak out for some ordinary people by demanding an end to immigration, while not speaking out for others who demand better health care and a decent standard of living. A figure who represents the whole of this hypocrisy is currently king of the world, able to change the rules of international football with a flick of his fingers. Pretty soon he’ll be setting the menu at McDonald’s. We’re in danger of a return to absolutism, when politics was a matter of the monarch’s will.

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If “They’re all the same” is the mantra of the disillusioned citizen, what are the most common words spoken by politicians? “To be clear.” “I’ve been very clear from the outset.” “Kemi has always been clear about our policy on…” This is curious, because it suggests that people consider obscurantism to be the major vice of politicians, which surely isn’t true. They may be distrusted, thought to break their promises, spout a lot of garbage or be paid too much for doing too little, but not to obscure their meaning. They may lie from time to time, but they usually do so lucidly. Some of their deceptions are wonderfully transparent. Besides, clarity can be overrated. Part of the fun of everyday life lies in its ambiguity, as with the notice “Refuse To Be Put in This Basket”, the meaning of which varies according to which syllable of “Refuse” you stress. I pointed out many years ago that the instruction “Dogs Must Be Carried”, sometimes found on escalators in Underground stations, might be thought to exclude those who approach the escalator without a canine in tow. There’s an apocryphal story about the rockstar Bono opening a concert with an appeal for starving children. Clapping his hands, he says: “Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.” “Well stop fucking doing it, then,” someone in the audience shouts in mock-indignation.

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One of the finest ambiguities in the English language is built into Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove. Kate Croy and Merton Densher are a young couple in love but without the means to marry. They befriend a fabulously rich young American woman, Milly Theale, whom they discover to be terminally ill. Kate persuades Densher to pay court to Milly, who has fallen in love with him, so that Milly and Densher may marry and Densher may inherit Milly’s wealth when she dies. In an extraordinary twist in the narrative, Milly is told on her death bed of the plot against her, but bequeaths her fortune to Densher even so. The result of this act of forgiveness causes him such deep remorse, as well as such love for Milly’s memory, that he refuses to accept the bequest, and he and Kate part forever.

A question, however, lingers. Milly’s generous act breaks up Kate and Densher’s relationship as surely as might a bout of sexual infidelity. But did Milly foresee this consequence? Is that why she left Densher her money? Is her forgiveness a devious act of aggression? And is Densher’s penalty for deceiving her to be besotted with a corpse for the rest of his life? As often in James, the issue is undecidable. We shall never know whether Milly was saint or schemer. Life, as Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks, is like a rough ground, not a sheet of pure ice. Clarity is only occasionally to be attained. It’s there for the most part in the discourse of politicians. But sometimes they’re lying even so.

And so Pedro told Tony his life story: his rustic childhood in Villa Clara, his polio diagnosis, his days in Havana, his stint as a lector in a cigar factory, reading adventure novels to the cigar rollers. Pedro also told Tony about the greatness of the United States. One day, sitting on the porch, Tony made a promise to his grandfather: when he grew up, he would “lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba”.

Even after Little Tony had become US Secretary of State Marco Antonio Rubio, he never forgot that promise. In his memoir An American Son (2012), in which he reminisces about that Miami porch, he describes Pedro as his “tutor”. And it seems he is still trying to make him proud. Since January, the Trump administration has been closing in on Cuba. It has tightened its embargo and sent the US navy to circle the island like a shiver of sharks. The US Justice Department has also indicted former leader Raúl Castro for murder. As always, the Cuban people are bearing the brunt of the US campaign of maximum pressure. Blackouts take place daily, and food and medicine are hard to come by. And as always, the pinchos grandes are comfortable in their fortified mansions, with their back-up generators and well-stocked fridges.

Against this dramatic backdrop, rumors abound that the US will invade. “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years,” Trump mused back in May, “and it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So, I would be happy to do it.” Rubio’s message has been much the same of late. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to change the trajectory of Cuba,” he said, “as long as these people are in charge.”

Whether this is fighting talk or just bluff is anyone’s guess. Given the Iranian quagmire, Trump and Rubio might choose instead to play the long game with Cuba. “What we’re trying to teach them is there are no escape valves,” Rubio told Axios last week. “One of the things we’ve lost in American foreign policy is the concept of patience and persistence. My level of confidence is that when this administration is over, at a minimum, Cuba will be on an irreversible glide path toward a different future.” The future Rubio envisions is pretty clear: he wants to bring down the communist leadership and privatize the economy. And he is prepared to wait. It’s difficult, however, to imagine Cuba resisting for that much longer. 

For Trump, getting the better of Cuba is a crucial part of his Donroe Doctrine. After getting rid of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, he wants to further US dominance in the Southern Hemisphere. Despite its tiny size, Cuba carries huge symbolic significance. It was the outpost of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and today is a Chinese ally. American presidents since John F. Kennedy have tried to oust the communist regime. Not one has even come close. To pull it off would be legacy-defining. After Trump’s humiliating climbdown in Iran, he needs a win to restore his tough-guy image — and Cuba makes for easy prey.

For Rubio, however, this is personal. He has been harboring a grudge against Cuba’s leaders since childhood, biding his time. Dale tiempo al tiempo, as the Latin American proverb goes. Give time to time. Now, at last, he may be nearing his grand finale. In a video message in Spanish to the Cuban people, Rubio promised “a new path between the US and a new Cuba”. He added, “The only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control your country.” 

Their country is also Rubio’s, although he has never set foot there. He was born in Miami in 1971, 12 years after the revolution which saw Fidel Castro sweep into power in Havana. Castro promised to free the island from the rule of Fulgencio Batista, a military strongman backed by the US. But it soon became obvious that Castro had no interest in democracy. In 1961, he came out as a Marxist-Leninist and aligned with the Soviet Union. Between 1959 and 1973, more than 600,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States. Castro called them gusanos (worms). They called themselves exiles. The vast majority settled in Miami, congregating south of downtown in a cheap neighborhood now known as Little Havana. Soon there were Cuban eateries and Cuban barber shops and Cuban jewelry stores. Castro’s kid sister, who hated him, even opened a pharmacy there.

Rubio grew up not far from Little Havana. Although he lived between the ages of eight and 13 in Las Vegas, where his father worked as a hotel bartender, he is a true product of Cuban Miami. He liked to tell people that his parents fled Cuba in 1959, the year of the revolution. This origin story fueled his rise in the Republican Party of Florida and later in national politics. In 2009, during his run for the Senate, he tweeted: “Thank you USA for welcoming my parents 50 years ago.” Two years later, Rubio told an interviewer that “the direction we’re going in Washington, DC, would make us more like the rest of the world, and not like the exceptional nation that my parents found when they came here from Cuba in 1959.”

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Except that’s not quite how it happened. In 2011, two American reporters, Manuel Roig-Franzia and Alex Leary, broke a big scoop: Rubio’s parents had actually settled in Miami in 1956, three years before the revolution. At the time, Castro was in Mexico plotting the revolution. This means the Rubios left Cuba in search of the American dream, rather than to escape communism. In Miami’s exile community, pre-Castro economic migrants are derided as verduleros (vegetable street vendors).

One can guess why Rubio preferred to say his parents arrived in 1959: it surely made for a better, neater story. Critics who insisted he lied purely for “political gain” were missing the point. His attempt at self-mythology tells us a lot about how he sees himself and his political mission. It seems Rubio has internalized his community’s history. Three years naturally makes a big difference to journalists, but I imagine they make little psychological difference to a Cuban kid growing up in Miami.

“Look, that’s not the way it was discussed in our family or by many people in the exile community,” Rubio explained after the story broke in 2011. “It’s more about the loss of their home country.” In the minds of Cuban exiles, their native island is akin to the promised land. “Next year in Havana!” is a popular slogan in Miami, a riff on the Jewish phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem!”, pronounced during Passover.

Besides, Rubio’s grandfather, Pedro, did leave Cuba after Castro’s takeover. He had actually first moved to the US in 1956 to be closer to his daughters, according to Roig-Franzia’s 2012 biography of Rubio. But after the revolution he moved back to the island. He struggled to make a living in the US and didn’t want to be a burden to his family. At the time, there was still hope that something positive would come out of the revolution. Pedro even found a decent job as a clerk in a government ministry. But he couldn’t stand the oppressive atmosphere. Soon, he was back in Miami.

Immediately after the revolution, Cuban exiles began plotting ways to reverse it. Young Rubio wasn’t the first to dream of toppling Castro. As early as 1960, the US government had set out its Cuba policy in a secret memo: “to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US.” How would it do that exactly? “Covert action.” And who would carry that out? Cuban exiles, for the most part.

The opening shot in the contrarrevolución came in 1961, when the US landed 1,500 Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba. Castro’s forces were ready for them and struck back hard. The only chance of success would have been for the US to provide air support. President Kennedy refused, and the invasion was defeated. But the exiles, and the CIA, never stopped plotting to take down Castro. Through the decades, Miami buzzed with intrigue. 

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Werner Herzog: the future of truth

By Theo Zenou

Rubio came of age in this feverish urban swamp. At home or in his car, he would tune in to Radio Mambi or WQBA, which broadcast round the clock about the evils of Castro and the heroism of the exiles. This time, the master plan would work out, this was the one. Next year in Havana! Business deals and secret plots were hatched at corner tables at restaurants like Versailles or the Tropical. And violence was never far away, as journalist Ann Louise Bardach reveals in her 2004 book Cuba Confidential. Hardline exiles targeted anyone deemed too soft. Dialogueros, who supported negotiations with the Cuban government, were traitors. And there was only one way to deal with traitors: with a bullet to la cabeza. Between 1973 and 1976, anti-Castro groups carried out more than 100 attacks in South Florida. The exile banker Bernardo Benes told Bardach that “Miami is like Guatemala”. Benes lived in constant fear for his life after brokering a deal in 1978 that freed 3,600 political prisoners from Castro’s jails. “No one is interested in free speech in Dade County. Only in Havana.”

The exile community was hierarchical. The Rubios, who had working-class jobs and went out for pancakes every Sunday morning, were nowhere near the top. El jefe was the late Jorge Mas Canosa, the billionaire founder of the Cuban American National Foundation. His statue now overlooks Miami Beach. He was a power broker who spoke like a heavy in a Forties film noir. Once, when lobbying a congressman, he reportedly said: “If you cooperate with me you get the honey. Otherwise, I hit you with the jar.” Another heavyweight exile was Rafael Díaz-Balart, former brother-in-law of Fidel. At the turn of the century, two of his sons went into politics and were elected to the US Congress. In Little Havana, they were hailed as the chosen ones, destined to free their homeland. 

Yet it was a young campaign volunteer who would reach the top. By now, people called him Marco. After graduating from law school in Miami, Rubio set his sights on a political career. At 34, he became the speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. Five years later, a US senator. And at 53, Secretary of State. Among ambitious Cuban-Americans, he was never the most likely to find himself in this position. Others were richer, better connected. And yet here he is. A talented, hungry politician with a killer instinct. 

Now comes his biggest political test yet. Rubio has long been seen as the archetypal Republican hawk. His idol is Ronald Reagan. Growing up, he writes in his memoir, his grandfather Pedro would tell him: “America must be a strong country.” That belief in American exceptionalism motivates Rubio as much as his hostility towards the Cuban regime. To be sure, US leaders shouldn’t conduct foreign policy based on desires of revenge. And if they are the children of immigrants, they shouldn’t import their parents’ feuds. But this isn’t the case here: Rubio’s feud with Cuba is also America’s feud. The island nation remains a hub in the anti-American axis. 

When Rubio was 13 and still went as Tony, his grandfather Pedro was admitted into hospital. He didn’t have long. Tony was at his bedside throughout, and as Pedro died he took his hand. “I swore I would do something with my life and make him proud,” Rubio wrote in his memoir. Decades later, he is in the unique position to vanquish one of America’s oldest foes, and avenge his family. Will he succeed?

But with the Trump versus the Mullahs show, nothing is guaranteed. Earlier this month, the International Maritime Organization affirmed the right to freedom of navigation for shipping. But it did so in a very IMO way — formally and a bit pointlessly — prompting Sal Mercogliano, a professor of maritime history, to respond: “Doesn’t do crap. You have to impose freedom of navigation with military force.” In the meantime, the situation for the seafarers who remain in the Strait is perilous — mines, drones, shallow waters — with militias and pirates among the dangers for those who choose to take a different route.

The blunt truth is that no nation has enough seapower to police the ocean. Back in 2010, I went to sea for five weeks on the container ship Maersk Kendal. It was research for my book about international shipping, Ninety Percent of Everything — so named as 90% of, well, everything you own arrives to you on a ship just like it. The mostly Filipino seafarers would greet me each morning with “SSDD, Miss Rose”. Same shit, different day. Now they will probably say, “Different shit, every day.” But even then, they were contending with Somali piracy, which was in full flow. China, the US and a combined EU taskforce had ships patrolling the ocean, but as one admiral told me, the ocean is so huge, it was like having a single police car for all of Western Europe. 

When Kendal passed through the Indian Ocean, I was uncomfortably aware that 544 seafarers were being held hostage not far away, just off Somalia. Everyone knew where they were: it’s tricky to hide a ship in the age of satellites and drones. I wondered at the time whether 544 bus drivers or 544 airline pilots being held hostage would get as little attention. But that was naive. The sea is different. You can do things at sea that you can’t do on land. By 2012, Somali piracy had been tamed. At shipping conferences you will hear that this was done by “best management practices” — zig-zagging and such — but that is nonsense. It was because ships started carrying armed guards. 

This is the shocking thing about these multimillion pound ships with their multimillion pound loads of oil and containers. They are unarmed. In 2010, the only protection we had on Maersk Kendal was a dummy on the poop deck — as if the Somali skiffs would turn back if they thought there were 22 people on board, not 21 — and a crew member standing on the bridge wings with binoculars. 

In Hormuz, ships have no protection either. They are easy prey. With the Western navies preoccupied, the Somalis have opportunistically reappeared in the Arabian Sea and western Indian Ocean and now hold hostage four ships and 67 seafarers. The pirates have issued a £3 million demand for the release of MT Honour 25 and released a chilling photo of the crew sitting on the floor of the bridge, with masked pirates and AK-47s as a backdrop.

When Honour 25 was first taken hostage, one of its crew managed to send a voice note to his family in Karachi, Pakistan. His son Muzammil Ahmed Ansari told Al Jazeera what his father, 53-year-old Mehmood, had managed to say. “He said, ‘We are hijacked, reach out to the company, to people, to the government.’ He said there were pirates on the ship, all armed. He panicked, but he said, ‘Don’t worry, ask the government to deal with it.’”

That was in May. Mehmood is still a hostage. Chirag Bahri, who was held hostage by Somali pirates for nearly eight months in 2010, is not surprised Somali pirates have surged. “They are criminals and they want easy money.” With Trump’s catastrophic war against Iran taking all the attention, pirates have taken advantage of the distraction. 

Suggested reading

Hormuz: Iran’s dire Strait

By Peter Frankopan

If that weren’t enough, the Houthis, a Yemeni militia, popped up again after months of peace, threatening Saudi Arabia-linked ships that pass through the Red Sea. They don’t even have to actually attack: the threat is enough. Already container giants such as the French firm CMA-CGM have told ships to seek shelter, and have canceled transits through Suez. Suddenly if you’re a group or a state with a grievance, maritime chokepoints are a fashionable lever to pull. The Ukrainians are now attacking what they call Russia-linked ships in the Black Sea, although many ships do not carry Russians. 

The broader picture is that the Gulf is static and hardly anything is moving. Now the Suez Canal is risky again, as is Bab-el-Mandeb strait, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. These all make up the main highways of cargo movements. Where are ships supposed to go? The long way round, probably. It hasn’t yet come to that, but when the Houthis last issued shipping threats, ships began to travel around Africa instead. It’s longer — by 10 to 14 days — and more expensive, but the premiums that insurance companies insist on increasing in war wouldn’t apply and your ship could probably arrive at its destination with both crew and cargo intact. 

Meanwhile it’s the seafarers — the truck drivers of the sea — who suffer most. On 11 July, marine engineer Herambh Karmarkar, a 30-year-old man from Pune, wrote to his family in India: “Our ship has safely crossed.” His ship, the Cyprus-flagged CFS Galaxy, was making its way out of the Strait using the Oman route: this way hugs the Omani coastline and is supposedly protected by the US, though it is very difficult to find out what this protection actually consists of. Herambh was wrong. Hours later, Iranians attacked his ship, probably to terrify other ships into taking the northern route near Iran, and paying for the privilege. Herambh was killed.

A glance at the Recent Incidents section on the UK Maritime Operations Centre (UKMTO) website confirms this sort of thing is now routine: Attack 8 August. Attack 7 August. Another attack 5 August. The UKMTO is careful to report when all crew are safe, but still, the media usually report that ships are being attacked. What if we rephrased it? Civilians are being attacked. Ships do not drive themselves, and although a couple of ships have recently been abandoned, about 6,000 seafarers — who are, remember, civilians — are still stuck on their stationary ships, because stopped ships still need maintenance. And they are targets. 

How many seafarers have already been killed in this war? Currently the estimate is 17 non-Iranians. Iranians, meanwhile, say they have lost 44 men, including 16 fishermen. If the category of seafarers were to include naval personnel, the number is much higher: when the US nuclear submarine USS Charlotte torpedoed the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in early March, 104 sailors were killed, according to Iran. 

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How shipowners are getting rich off Hormuz

By Rose George

But we expect naval personnel to die in a war. That’s what they signed up for. There is no such commitment in merchant seafarer contracts. Of course merchant seafarers can fight: during the First and Second World Wars, the merchant navy lost more personnel than the Royal Navy, proportionately, and showed astonishing bravery. But in the modern world, merchant seafarers are civilians, and they should get protection. The broader picture, though, is that the proportion of civilian deaths in conflict has been rising for decades. In 2024 alone, according to the UN Human Rights Office, civilian conflict deaths rose 40% globally. So perhaps the deaths of the men who are bringing you your gasoline and cornflakes should be acceptable. You would think so, given how long it took the media to start noticing that ships attacked by drones and missiles had people on them. 

The latest surge in violence means most transit attempts have stopped. Figures from the maritime intelligence agency Windward AI show 11 inbound transits and seven outbound, a tiny fraction of the pre-war 140 or so transits a day. However, there are now credible reports of companies offering huge financial incentives for crews willing to undertake a transit. Before the latest attacks, the Sinkor Group, the world’s largest operator of supertankers, offered seafarers six months’ salary for one round trip. Other companies are adding 60 days’ salary to what should be a 30-day round trip. 

So has Hormuz changed shipping? Shipping faces constant crises and usually bounces back. But it is hard to see that happening now. For a start, dark transits are way more common than they were before this war began. Russian ships were always good at going dark: this means switching off their AIS (automatic information system), or flying a false flag or inputting false data about their cargo or destination. Now everyone is at it. Since the Houthis decided to threaten Saudi Arabian ships, Saudi ships carrying oil from Yanbu, the port at the end of the Saudi oil pipeline, have gone missing from ship tracking sites: eight turned back, reported Lloyds List, but 11 went dark.

This won’t affect consumers, necessarily — the oil will still be transported, and so will the iPhones and Lego bricks and Toyotas and sugar. But it will affect life at sea. Not everyone at sea is a criminal, but there is no better place to be a criminal than at sea.

Well, of course not, you are saying — don’t be silly; don’t be absurd! How were we responsible, or able to intervene in that beautifully calculated slaughter? It was just a movie, spasms on a screen, in another realm. The motel called itself Fairvale in northern California. Try looking that up. It doesn’t exist.

But I can’t help wondering whether watching from the dark has groomed us in our cold-blooded helplessness. Is it that in preferring to watch, we have felt the advancing grip of our distance, or apathy?

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Does America deserve a happy ending?

By David Thomson

***

It was the summer of 2026 — so hot in so many places, with the water running low — but there was a chill in the air.

This is how it felt. On some mornings you could say, it can’t be long now. In every amiable Fairvale we told ourselves the writing was on the wall. His approval ratings were slipping down, in the mid thirties by then. His iron support was turning rusty. His people were growing bored with him. So many were feeling short of money while he kept boasting of how rich and golden he was. His crucial gift, his energy, was on the blink.

The best year we’ve ever had! He said.

Wait for the next election, we promised ourselves, and see the joyous return to order. Is that what you said to your children, in your shower, or to yourself? As if all the spilled water and blood could be coaxed back in the bottle, and the screwtop made tight again. The way things always worked in the past.

After all, how could the greatest nation on Earth (that phrase is copyrighted, but I’ll take a chance with it) sit back and let a monster of greed and self-glory run amok? How could we not see that he was a champion in the contest for the worst ever, reliable only in being wrong about everything, a leader who hated us (because we were not him — the gravest offense in the gaze of Narcissus)? How could we stand living with him when our one protection was not a court or a congress but his constant incompetence?

No one could deny much of this. We had had time enough to get to know him. Hadn’t we voted for him twice? Hadn’t that made our idiocy clear? Wasn’t that a glimpse of our apathy, just sitting in the dark watching it all happen? Saying there’s nothing I can do.

In that summer of 2026 there was a lassitude, as if it was hard for us to get up out of our seats in the dark. We were so accustomed to whatever went on, like people in a theater watching the movie play, and knowing that some machine was grinding it out so that there was no point in crying “Stop!” or intervening. You see, no matter how profoundly the spasms on the screen may move us — and we have had lovely moments; remember Fred Astaire — still we cannot get into the picture and dance with Fred. We are only onlookers when maybe we went into the dark and took our seats hoping we were significant.

So we would be alright again (never mind great) — because to be alright is so sweet, and a chance to relax. The most annoying thing he had done was simply to block the alright and the have a nice day. He had killed ease and relaxing. He had imposed a suppressed nervous breakdown on all of us, a mixture of dismay and exhaustion, a broad daylight darkness that was always there as our phone — that faithful screen — broke the news and our hearts every day.

So lassitude set in, and we told ourselves to make the best of things before he was over, before proper transmission was resumed. And sometimes we were a little wry and fatalistic — irony can be rather cute, and it passes the time — as if to admit we knew, beyond reality and metaphor, how we were truly in the dark.

And it was part of that dark that the forces on our side could seem fragile or achingly tired. So many of us were reduced to “unsubscribe” just to be free of the daily plea of candidates who wanted a mere but constant $3, our signature, or a hundred stallions (with a matching grant for oats and the blacksmith), to maintain the fight that had to be fought. There was a decline in the number of people who turned out for more protest marches, and even marches themselves stopped happening. After all, it was a hot summer and there was allure in going to the beach and watching the endless ocean. A worry had arisen, who knew if it might be the last beach of your life? It was the summer of The Odyssey, but we stayed home.

Home was not going well, however. The organization of the opposition party — our people? — was reported in disarray. The party, the official set-up, had funding troubles. Candidates were abandoned because dead bodies and ideas had been sniffed out in their closets. The possible leaders (those who might be a new HE!) were measured in their drawbacks. And in the anxiety to win whatever contest it would be, we realized that so many suitors to Penelope were actually unsuited — because they were gay, female, black, old, young, radical, alive. Was there not one person, halfway photogenic and vacant, who could be reckoned charismatic enough to fit the bill? “How can anyone be charismatic yet vacant?” you ask. We’re getting there.

Hadn’t Joe Biden once slipped a notch or two past cognition — past being able to admit that he was no longer equipped to be our leader? Vacancy is a tricky thing. How was our opposition and vitality to get over that fatal failure, and face itself in the mirror as fit to be on a screen delivering the speeches?

***

How was any Fairvale to digest the whispered rumor that our defining laws — the documents of the great project — were like a cheese with so many holes. It was not just a matter of repeating the adage that democracy was the best of all the worst forms of government. Was it a matter of understanding that our electoral system was poised for corruption, interference and all the injunctions and dead ends that would nullify a fair election? Was it possible that the foundational principles of American originality were humbug?

More than that, wasn’t it likely that he — under pressure — would see that his only move was to declare some state of emergency. With a court that would back him up, as was its habit, or in an emergency so complete that the court itself might be retired?

There were Fairvales that said this was impossible, or ought not to be allowed — or what are we meant to do? In Fairvale the majority opinion was that it would prefer not to. Prefer not to do what? Whatever. The lassitude overlapped with a premonition of defeat or concession. Some said the protest marches are beside the point. The only thing that would impede the monstrousness was a general strike. What is that? It is a time when some kind of “everyone” takes to the street, abandons their role in the economy, and sits down on the ground to block the intersections in traffic, business and social media presence.

“You mean I have to get up and not sit down?” we ask. “I can’t stay seated in the dark? I have to take the chance that I will be seized and beaten by uniforms, that I may be arrested and put in hideous cells? That’s not very nice.”

But it may need to be done in such numbers that the arrests make their own jam of bodies as they become more than all the ICE camps can contain.

By then, or even a little sooner, he may have addressed the nation, and said he had the answer — hasn’t he always had the answers so that we were supposed to ignore the science of questions? But what he needs is an ultimate state of emergency, one that trumps all the others. A United States of Emergency. And he is not always an idiot. So he may come to the sad conclusion. “That’s what they’re telling me,” he’ll say (he can do gravity in his lamentation sing-song voice) “that the best thing about a war in a shithole desert region is that you can drop a big one without the damage getting out of hand.” Do you believe he has the grace, the charity and forgetfulness, that would hold back from that? That would prefer not to? Having to decide is a big gamble.

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Meet America's MAGA exiles

By James Billot

Yes, you’re right, you can smell satire in the morning, like napalm. I’m playing at Apocalypse – and that movie genre is more popular than ever. (We can kill millions now that it’s only CGI; aren’t you nostalgic for Michael Corleone telling Robert Duvall they could kill anyone?). So summon your last courage in taking on the gamble of saying it won’t really happen, will it? Isn’t it pretty to think so?

If that amounts to realism, or madness (at the end, we won’t know one from the other), it may be clear that since 1945 at least we have been playing a game called Distractions. It has amounted to a steady face off between those who have and those who have not, between a handful and the multitudes. Or even him against all of us. I know, it’s sort of Marx Brothers that the American project should come down to a God against the rest of us. Christopher Nolan guessed it: the gods are coming home for a finale.

In our rising dismay, we don’t have to go to the movies. The big shows are out there all around us, with simple punchy titles, like Epstein or Iran. They have all been blockbusters for a weekend or two, before they get edged out for the next coming attraction, that might be Warming, or AI, or … the latest comedy? I’ll predict, it’s Arizona getting 40% less water. Let’s call it Dry.

Of course, this is fantasy, a noir romance. It could have its weekend. But the desert is waiting and watching our show. It knows it has always prevailed.

***

“Let me get this straight. Are we talking a movie or a series?”

“We’re still open at this point.”

“Open makes me nervous.”

“These are unsettling times. Christian Bale is interested in playing the producer.”

“The guy who’s putting the show together?”

“And we open it just as Trump goes into retirement.”

“This is farce, noir farce? Help me with the concept.”

“We’re saying screwball disaster.”

“And the producer, our guy, he’s having a breakdown?”

“When he has the time. Being on deadline keeps him busy.”

“Tell me about that.”

“It’s high comedy with a shot of horror. Or vice versa. We’re going to fit Olivia Wilde in.”

“Who does she play?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll cook up a girl.”

“I don’t believe I’m sitting here talking about this.”

“Got it. That’s why we want Seth Rogen playing you.”

“You’re sure Trump would do this? He looks so tired now.”

“For a ton of money he’ll do it. He wants to keep his movie going. You know how many twenties there are in a ton?”

“He’ll want script approval?”

“Know what he said — he can make you laugh — he said, ‘Makes no difference. I never follow the script.’ ”

“How many is it, in a ton?”

“Nine hundred and eighteen thou.”

“I am seeing it as a movie.”

“How so?”

“You can’t do the end of the world as a series. Not if you want to be renewed. That’s 18 mill?”

“He’s cheap at that price…”

***

The President may not have been serious about the lettuce tariff, but he is serious about tariffs in general. “Tariff,” he once said, “is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” They are the one-size-fits-all economic policy tool of his administration.  

After he menaced Mexican salad, Trump turned his attention to a far more serious parasite — the EU, which he once described as having been created to “rip off America”. Again, he threatened new tariffs, only this time he was not joking. The trigger was a decision by the European Commission to impose two fines on Google totaling $1 billion. The Europeans accused Google of failing to comply with the Digital Markets Act, which forces US tech giants to open up their proprietary ecosystems to competition. Google was prioritizing its own search engine over others. This was not a one-off. The Europeans are messing heavily with the business models of lots of the US tech giants, not just Google. There is another European law, the Digital Services Act, which forces platforms like Facebook and X to moderate their social media content. 

All of this has wound up the American President. In retaliation, Trump wants to impose his new tariff on Europe “at the earliest possible moment”, arguing that the EU is robbing US companies of their legitimate profits. I don’t think this is a bluff. Unlike when he imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs, existing US trade law allows him to do this. It could take up to a year, but this time US law will be on his side.  

When the US Supreme Court struck down Trump’s Liberation Day tariff regime in February, the Europeans got a bit overexcited. Some assumed it was a decision against tariffs in general. That was not the case. The Supreme Court declared the legal basis on which Trump had based his Liberation Day tariffs as null and void. But Trump has other legal avenues open to him. 

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The American disaster

By Jonathan Sumption

Immediately after the ruling, the Trump administration made two decisions. The first was to implement a temporary regime that allowed the President to impose tariffs of up to 15%, no questions asked, for up to 150 days. That meant the old tariffs would continue for a few more months. That deadline has now expired. The second was to launch an investigation under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against practically all countries in the world. The idea was to resurrect the old tariff regime — one for one — under a new legal cloak. 

Section 301 is a formal, tried-and-tested procedure. The actual investigation, however, was absurd. The US accused nearly every other country in the world of failing to match its own human rights standards with respect to imports of goods produced by forced labor. It is quite something to behold the US accusing Norway of not respecting the highest human rights standards. Rarely before has Section 301 been applied so cynically: the human rights accusations were just a front to resurrect the old, defunct tariff structure. 

Still, I believe it will pass the legal test anyway because of the separation of powers under US law. It is not the role of a court to decide whether a foreign trading practice is illegal. The courts decide whether the decision followed due process. 

From now on, Section 301 will be the legal basis for all of Trump’s tariff policies. That means if he wants to impose heavy tariffs on the EU in response to the fines on Google, he could do so — perfectly legally — by early next year. The EU may drag this out a bit, but I would be surprised if the US legal system ended up siding with the EU on this matter.  

When the Supreme Court ruled in February against the Liberation Day tariffs, the average US tariff was about 15%. It has come down a bit since but will now creep up again as the tariff regime hits. In the two-and-a-half years Trump has left in office, I expect average tariffs to rise to above 15%. Trump will always find ways to impose new tariffs, like the one he threatened last week.  

Have the tariffs made world trade any fairer? Have they contributed to a reduction in global trade imbalances? Absolutely not. But they are not without effect. The most important is that they are raising around $200-300 billion per year in revenue for the US Treasury. Tariffs are, formally, a tax on US consumers; but exporters from other countries are paying indirectly. The value of Japanese cars sold in the US fell by 24.7% in May last year, compared to the previous year. Yet the number of Japanese cars sold was down only by 3.9%. So the Japanese car companies took a hit on their profits.  

Companies that refused to cut export prices have seen a fall in sales. Among these are the Chinese online retailers Shein and Temu, both of which specialize in small items that were once exempt from tariffs. They could post their tiny packages to America because of the so-called de minimis rules — a tariff exemption for goods below a certain price. The week after Trump imposed his tariffs, and ended the de minimis exemptions, Shein observed a 23% fall in its US revenue compared with the preceding week. During the course of 2025, the Chinese trade surplus against the US fell by one third. 

So the tariffs did have an effect. But only on the bilateral US-China trade balance. Globally, trade imbalances are still rising. The Chinese have diverted trade from the US to the EU. As a result, the EU’s trade deficit with China increased dramatically. In first six months of this year, it was up by 23.9%.

The EU, in turn, is considering imitating Trump by imposing a tariff to protect European industries from Chinese competition. Remember the European outrage when Trump did this? Trump had a better case back then than the Europeans do now. The US runs a large trade deficit against the rest of the world, whereas the EU runs a persistent surplus. If the EU were to take a tougher stance on trade with China, I would expect China to react by cutting down on European imports and restricting sales to European companies whose supply chains depend on China. Last week, China extended the list of European companies earmarked for export controls to include Rheinmetall, the German defense producer. If we end up with a tit-for-tat trade war, the world will be worse off. 

Macroeconomists have long warned us not to focus on bilateral trade balances, but instead to think globally. Trump cares about nothing other than bilateral trade balances. It suits the dealmaker in him. But if we become like him, and the Chinese keep on doing what they have been doing, it will be a lose-lose game for the world. 

The EU would end up as the biggest loser of all. This is because the EU, like China, runs trade surpluses; as global trade falls, it will hit the surplus countries more than deficit countries. At the same time, the EU is reliant on Chinese imports for its supply chains, for example in the car industry. A trade war would be a double-whammy: tariffs on European products, and supply shortage of badly needed Chinese rare earths and semiconductors.

A year ago, Trump and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, agreed a trade deal at Trump’s golf retreat in Turnberry, Scotland. It was an embarrassing moment for von der Leyen, as the deal was entirely dictated by Trump. The EU agreed to cancel all the tariffs it had previously imposed on the US, including a 10% car tariff, and accepted that the US would impose a blanket 15% tariff on all imports from Europe, and a 50% tariff on steel and aluminum. If Trump ends up slapping a new Section 301 tariff on the EU, even that deal would be off. The tariffs would rise. The EU would retaliate. Everybody would be in a trade war.

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Where’s the economic strategy, Andy?

By Wolfgang Münchau

When one also takes into account the rise in oil prices resulting from Trump’s escalating war against Iran, as well as the rise in public debt throughout the West, it is not hard to imagine a global financial crisis resulting from this mess.   

During the Covid pandemic, Trump suggested that chloroquine phosphate — the anti-parasite medication used for fish tanks — could work against the Covid virus. (I wonder whether he had been watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding.) The President himself was wise enough not to take it, but others did. At least one man died. Tariffs are the chloroquine phosphate of the economic world, and they too come with serious side effects. 

I expect Trump will get away with it, again. That’s because the US is less integrated into Chinese-sourced supply chains than the EU, and it is better at absorbing shocks. My advice for trade officials, and chemistry buffs: don’t try this at home. Let Trump be Trump.  

Britain considered the issue less decisively than Sweden in December 2024, when the Conservative MP Richard Holden introduced a Bill prohibiting marriage between first cousins. Although he cited genetic risks and coercion, his more original argument drew on conclusions reached separately by the anthropologists Joseph Henrich and Jack Goody: cousin marriage helps preserve clan power by keeping property, loyalty and opportunity within the extended family.

Holden was opposed by Iqbal Mohamed, the independent Muslim MP for Dewsbury and Batley, who argued that prohibition would stigmatize minorities and prove difficult to enforce. Education, genetic screening and protection against forced marriage were preferable. Yet Mohamed also acknowledged the institution’s economic logic: cousin marriage strengthened family bonds and put families on a “more secure financial foothold”.

The two MPs were describing the same institution from opposite ends: Holden emphasizing the power the clan exercises over its members, Mohamed the protection it offers. Where governments are weak or indifferent, the extended family can become bank, welfare office, employment agency and court of appeal. But protection has a price. People who depend on the family cannot easily defy it. 

The liberal response to this issue tends to stop at individual consent. Are two adults entitled to marry? Are minorities being stigmatized? These are necessary questions, but they can obscure the distribution of power within which consent is exercised. Multiculturalism is acutely conscious of injuries inflicted on minorities while often reticent about systems of authority exercised within minority cultures. 

On the face of it, cousin marriage has little to do with Middle Eastern investments in the Shard, Canary Wharf or Manhattan office blocks. Still less do they appear connected to the Trump family’s increasingly intimate business relations with the dynasties of the Gulf. Yet they belong to the same structural landscape: a form of social organization resting upon blood, marriage, personal knowledge and reciprocal loyalty. This is very different from the other kind of social organization, more common in the West, which assigns property and authority to artificial persons — courts, universities, offices, companies and states — that exist independently of the mortal individuals temporarily occupying them.

Such distinctions can be traced back to the Middle Ages. Western modernity, following its millennium-long gestation within the Catholic Church, depended not upon abolishing the family but upon creating institutions powerful enough to compete with it. Goody, writing as an anthropologist specializing in kinship, and Henrich, drawing much later on comparative psychology and cultural evolution, arrived independently at versions of this argument. Both suggest implicitly that Max Weber’s celebrated account of the Protestant ethic and the emergence of capitalism begins much too late.

Weber explained the rise of capitalism partly through the moral psychology of ascetic Protestantism. Calvinists, uncertain of their salvation, looked for evidence of election in disciplined work, sobriety and accumulation. His argument is illuminating, but Protestantism encouraged capitalist behavior only because Latin Christendom had already constructed the institutional base upon which capitalism could build. Antwerp had become Europe’s leading commercial center under Catholic Habsburg rule before Protestant Amsterdam absorbed much of its displaced trade, capital and expertise. Venice, Genoa and Florence were wealthy long before the Reformation.

The more fundamental institutional revolution was Catholic. From late antiquity onwards, the Western Church attacked many of the reproductive arrangements through which kin groups preserved property and power. Its marriage program — arguably the most far-reaching exercise of social engineering in history — prohibited polygyny, concubinage, divorce, adoption and remarriage, as well as unions within widening circles of blood and affinity. In 517, for example, the Synod of Epaone in Burgundy decreed that unions with first and second cousins were incestuous and henceforth forbidden, along with marriage to stepmothers, widows of brothers, sisters-in-law and aunts by marriage. The prohibition was extended to the seventh degree by Pope Gregory III in 732, and reaffirmed throughout the medieval period, although enforcement was uneven. The prohibition was later reduced to kinship of the fourth degree.

The Church’s stated reasons were scriptural and theological. Marriage created “one flesh”, and the incest prohibitions were held to protect the sacramental purity of marriage. But the institutional effect was also material. By restricting heirs, remarriage and the means by which lineages recovered property, the Church made it easier for wealth to pass into monasteries, bishoprics and charitable endowments. In his seminal work The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (1983), Goody argued that this was no accidental by-product. By the Reformation, the Church and its affiliates had become the largest landholders in Germany and doubtless much of northern Europe. 

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The consequences, intended or otherwise, were revolutionary. Marriage restrictions weakened large kinship groupings. They encouraged smaller households, unions outside the lineage, voluntary associations and trust between unrelated people. In The WEIRDest People in the World (2020), Henrich argues that populations subjected most intensively to the Church’s rules gradually became more individualistic and more disposed to trust strangers. The Church did not merely preach universal brotherhood; it interfered with the institutions that made family the principal source of social identity. It broke the clan in order to save the individual soul.

But weakening kinship created a new problem. If property, authority and memory were no longer transmitted exclusively through blood, where could social continuity reside? The answer was the corporation, an originally ecclesiastical structure later secularized and appropriated by business. An abbey survived its abbots; a bishopric its bishops. Masters and students passed through Oxbridge, but the university and its colleges remained. Kings died, but the Crown endured. Offices, endowments and obligations acquired an existence independent of the bodies temporarily administering them. 

While promising eternity to believers’ souls, the Church created an earthly analogue of eternity in law. The corporation was an immortal body, distinct from the mortal governors, shareholders and employees composing it. Property could belong not merely to a proprietor and his heirs but to an institution that never died — the “dead hand” of mortmain. Protestantism may have supplied capitalism with Weber’s “this-worldly asceticism”. But it was Catholic canon law that supplied the indispensable legal fiction of corporate personality. Eternity, a diminishing expectation with the growth of religious skepticism, migrated from heaven to Companies House and Wall Street. 

The theological ancestry of the modern company is curiously neglected in conventional accounts of secularization. As I used to explain to my students, Jesus Christ was, in this structural sense, the original president of Coca-Cola and of every other corporation operating under Western law. The Enlightenment did not simply expel religion and leave autonomous reason in its place. It inherited legal and metaphysical inventions developed over many centuries by the Latin Church.

The contrast with Islamic societies is stark, though it is not a contrast between commercial sophistication and backwardness. Muslim jurists developed complex rules governing trade, credit, inheritance, partnership and charitable endowments, sustaining commercial networks from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean when much of northern Europe remained economically primitive. But Islamic law did not develop corporate personhood in the same expansive and adaptable form as Latin canon law. The waqf (Islamic trust) could preserve property for generations, but its purposes were fixed by its founder. Commercial partnerships remained tied to particular individuals and might dissolve when a partner died, whereupon his share passed among prescribed heirs, often fragmenting the estate.

Nor did Islamic law generally challenge endogamous marriage. Cousins are absent from the prohibited degrees enumerated in the Qur’an which also expressly mentions cousin categories among those permitted to the Prophet. In many Arab societies, marriage to a father’s brother’s daughter became especially valued, a practice seen by critics as a way of circumventing female rights of inheritance. Studies have generally placed consanguineous marriage at roughly two-fifths to more than half of all unions in Saudi Arabia, although rates vary by region and have declined in some younger and urban populations. Combined with inheritance rules, such marriages retain property and obligations within the extended family and reinforce lineage solidarity.

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A related contrast appears in legal culture. Western justice came to revere the idea of depersonalized justice symbolized by the blindfold statue of Lady Justice holding a balance: abstract rules applied without regard to the litigants’ identities. Lawrence Rosen’s studies of Moroccan courts describe a different philosophy. The qadi assesses reputation and character, and seeks a settlement that restores workable relationships between contending parties. His authority lies not simply in imposing a rule from above but in knowing how the parties stand within a web of obligations. The relevant distinction is between trust vested in procedure and trust vested in personal knowledge.

The Western achievement was not moral superiority but the institutionalization of mistrust, nourished by the doctrine of original sin. Because human beings were assumed to be greedy, partial and mortal, offices and procedures were constructed to constrain and outlast them. Authority belonged — at least theoretically — to the office rather than the office-holder or their family. Official rules made nepotism harder: appointments could be challenged, accounts audited and conflicts exposed. While the West never eradicated favoritism, it forced favoritism to disguise itself.

It is here that Gulf sovereign wealth funds enter the picture. A sovereign fund, such as Norway’s, is supposed to embody depersonalized capitalism: professionally managed, globally diversified and capable of yielding revenue across generations. Yet in a Gulf monarchy it may also operate as an investment arm of the ruling establishment — simultaneously national treasury, investment company, diplomatic instrument and development agency. Its assets belong nominally to the state, but senior princes appoint managers, determine strategic priorities and use investments to cultivate relationships abroad. A decision may be commercially rational while also serving diplomacy, prestige and dynastic security. 

The results are visible across Western cityscapes. Qatar’s fund owns Harrods and the Shard, jointly controls Canary Wharf Group and holds a substantial stake in Heathrow. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund owns Newcastle United and has invested in Lucid, Uber and a multitude of technology and entertainment ventures. It also supplied $2 billion to Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners even after an internal advisory panel reportedly raised objections. Qatari and Emirati funds initially invested about $200 million each; in 2024 Qatar’s investment authority and Abu Dhabi-based Lunate supplied a further $1.5 billion between them.

There is nothing inherently sinister about Arab ownership of Western property. American private-equity firms, Russian oligarchs, European luxury conglomerates and British pension funds do not acquire moral purity merely by being Western. Gulf funds employ highly trained professionals and seek financial returns. Petrodollar capital, however, emerges from political systems in which personal confidence, dynastic authority, discretion, patronage and reciprocal obligation remain central to governance. Its influence lies not only in formal ownership but in the field of access, gratitude and dependency surrounding it. 

The Khaldunian paradigm is helpful here. Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century North African historian and political theorist, understood political power as arising from asabiyya — group feeling, or clannish solidarity. A ruling house governs because its members possess a cohesion unavailable to more fragmented populations. In time, luxury and dependence weaken that solidarity, exposing the dynasty to replacement by a tougher group arriving from the margins. 

Far from escaping this logic, the Gulf monarchies have modernized it. Oil revenues allow ruling families to transform lineage solidarity into ministries, sovereign wealth funds, global portfolios and high-tech security services. Kinship has not disappeared into the anonymized structures of the bureaucratic state; bureaucracy has become an instrument through which dynastic cohesion operates internationally. The Gulf sovereign wealth fund is Asabiyya Inc. 

Patrimonial capital becomes especially potent when it encounters Western elites predisposed to behave in like fashion. Kushner’s Affinity Partners offers the clearest example. After serving in Donald Trump’s White House, where he played a central role in Middle Eastern policy, Kushner obtained billions in commitments from Gulf sovereign funds. 

The scandal does not depend upon proving a crude exchange of policy for payment. It lies in the blurring of public and private realms. A president’s son-in-law conducts diplomacy with hereditary rulers and then receives capital from funds answerable to those ruling establishments. Public service creates private relationships; private relationships produce commercial opportunity; commercial interests shadow future public policy. The form may be corporate, but the substance is courtly. 

With Trump’s return to power, the overlap between his family’s businesses, diplomatic connections and political authority has become ever more conspicuous. Sons, sons-in-law, golf buddies, property developers, cryptocurrency promoters and Gulf princes inhabit the same web of transactions. The problem is larger than corruption in its prosecutable form. Bribery law assumes a reasonably clear distinction between public office and private gain. Today, that very distinction is being eroded, bringing about what could be described as “re-feudalisation”. Under feudal arrangements, government was personal: land, jurisdiction, family alliance and military obligation formed a single web. A favorite might simultaneously be ambassador, financier and beneficiary of royal patronage. The sovereign’s household was not neatly separable from government.

The modern state emerged by extracting office from the household. Treasury funds ceased, in theory, to be the ruler’s private money, while diplomats and civil servants served an institution rather than a family. These principles were never perfectly realized. But hypocrisy — the tribute vice pays to virtue — acknowledged the institutional ideal: nepotism had to be concealed because public and private interests were understood to be different.

Constitutional government still depends upon offices whose purposes cannot be privately inherited, purchased or repaid. It requires decision-makers capable of distinguishing friendship from duty, and national resources from family assets. Once that separation collapses, elections may mask continuity, but real power reverts to a pre-modern feudal order.

The Swedish ban on cousin marriage concerns much more than an uncomfortable minority custom. It asks whether liberal societies can discuss the institutional consequences of kinship without subjecting families to ethnic prejudice or romanticizing national culture. Cousin marriage endures because it performs vital economic and political work: it concentrates trust within the lineage. Prohibition alone cannot dissolve that structure. People will not abandon the protections of kinship merely because the state declares them undesirable; the state must demonstrate that its institutions are worthy of trust.

The medieval Church’s marriage prohibitions redirected trust outwards, towards voluntary associations and the artificial persons of the abbey, city and state. The modern West was built through that long and incomplete transition from blood to office, household property to corporate property, and personal rule to institutional authority. Today, that movement appears to be going into reverse. Citizens are invited to regard cousin marriage solely as a private choice while presidents convert public office into family opportunity. Governments speak the language of transparency while courting funds that combine national wealth with dynastic power. The artificial persons created to restrain kinship — the state and the corporation — are being reoccupied by kin-based households.

Sweden has outlawed the marriage of first cousins. The more difficult task is preventing the return of government by aunts and uncles, cousins, sons, sons-in-law and their cronies.

De Tocqueville thought that there was no real risk of presidential despotism. This was because the federal government was obliged to share power with the component states of the Union; and because even at the federal level the president had to share power with a representative Congress. There was, however, an important reservation. The checks and balances of the Constitution only worked because the federal executive had very few domestic functions. The president’s role was limited to the conduct of foreign affairs and commanding the armed forces. His office therefore provided little scope for would-be despots. In 1832, the writer pointed out, the federal payroll comprised just 12,000 civilian officials, as opposed to 138,000 in France at the same date. In any democracy, De Tocqueville argued, the risk of despotism is directly proportionate to the degree of control exercised by the executive over its internal affairs.

Since De Tocqueville wrote, events have combined to falsify his grounds for optimism. The federal government, and therefore the president who directs it, now has functions encompassing most aspects of public welfare. Its 12,000 civilian employees of 1832 have grown to two million in 2025, in addition to another million employees of the individual states, many of whom are employed in federal programs. In the same period, federal government expenditure has increased from an estimated 0.02% of GDP to 23%, dwarfing the expenditure of the individual states. This is a pattern common to all modern democracies. At the time of the census of 1851, the United Kingdom employed just 1,628 civil servants, as against 560,000 now. At the end of the 19th century, government expenditure in European countries stood at about a tenth of GDP on average, as opposed to just under half today. Even these figures do not capture the whole picture. Until relatively recently, the main limitation on the power of governments was their ignorance. The German sociologist Max Weber defined bureaucracy as “domination through knowledge”. That domination has been greatly increased by modern techniques of information gathering, storage and retrieval.

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Article II of the US Constitution concentrates all executive power in the president’s hands. He has an electoral mandate independent of Congress. He hires and fires all federal agents and employees. All of them are answerable to him. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. He nominates all federal judges, subject to Senate confirmation. He is not answerable to Congress for the way that he uses these powers, except by way of impeachment, and only then for treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Since a decision by the Supreme Court in 2024, the president has also been constitutionally immune from criminal liability for acts done in his public capacity.

These awesome powers are characteristic of presidential systems, and the only other region where presidential democracies have been the norm is Latin America. Every Latin American country has adopted the US constitutional model, with greater or lesser variants. And every one of them has at some points in its history experienced the subversion of its democracy by its president or the usurpation of presidential powers by a military dictator. The only significant European country to have a presidential system comparable to the US is France. The constitution of the Fifth French Republic was created for a relatively benign strongman, General de Gaulle, but the French presidency may well in 2027 fall into the hands of a markedly less benign strongman of the extreme Left or Right.

The great German-American constitutional scholar Karl Loewenstein observed that the success of the American presidential model was due to factors unique to the United States: its historical prosperity, its relative freedom from external threats, its political culture. These things had, as he put it, “converted an intrinsically absurd constitutional mechanism into a cherished national myth”. When transplanted to a less privileged environment, Loewentein pointed out that the American model has almost always failed. His emphasis on the moral and physical environment of democracies was an important insight. After all, the moral and physical environment may change. All democratic constitutions, whether formal and legal like that of the USA, or informal and political like Britain’s, are vulnerable to the collapse of the basic cultural norms on which democracies depend. When this happens, the formal institutional framework usually survives. There are elections, legislatures, courts and so on in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But the rule of law and substance of democratic accountability have gone, replaced by a brutal autocratic reality.

Hence the historic significance of Donald Trump. There is a tendency to suggest that Trump is a by-product of American democratic politics, difficult, perhaps, to accommodate within traditional political categories, but nothing like the totalitarian tyrants of the 20th century. This view is fundamentally mistaken. Trump exhibits the three classic symptoms of the totalitarian mind: a personal cult around a charismatic leader; the total identification of the state with himself; and a refusal to accept the legitimacy of any opposition or dissent. He has dismantled the checks and balances of the world’s oldest and most formal constitution in an astonishingly short time. By now, the examples are all too familiar: the bogus claims to emergency powers, part of the classic toolkit of despots the world over; the deployment of ICE’s paramilitaries on the streets of American cities; the attempt to impose taxes (in the shape of tariffs) by executive order; the brazen corruption. He has also conformed to the pattern observable throughout history — that sooner or later the authoritarian rulers of powerful states become international predators.

The core principle of the rule of law is that the state has no power to coerce anyone other than in accordance with public and settled rules of law applicable generally, and not just at the discretion of the ruler. That principle has been directly violated by presidential directions not to enforce mandatory legislation of which the president disapproves, such as the laws against international bribery, or mandatory congressional appropriation of funds to things like education or foreign aid. Trump’s identification of the state with himself and his war on dissent have led him to vindictive attacks on any prominent voice which opposes him, attacks which directly violate the basic principles of the rule of law. We have seen the use of public authority to pursue private vendettas against those have crossed him, including two Democrat governors, a mayor of Chicago, various retired generals, a former director of the FBI, a former director of the CIA, law firms who acted for his enemies, various universities whose teaching staff do not see the world as he does, and just about anyone who worked on Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election or Jack Smith’s investigation of the Capitol riots of 6 January, 2021. Some of these acts have been stopped by the courts, provoking from the President a stream of vulgar abuse against the judges responsible. These things follow a pattern that exposes Donald Trump’s systematic unwillingness to be constrained by the rules that mark the difference between a democratic chief executive and a tyrant.

It is easy to say, as we observe these things, that the current constitutional problems of the United States are all down to the megalomania of one individual. But that is to underestimate the gravity of the situation. The real problem is that this unlikely figure represents something very attractive for many Americans. They were not deceived when they elected him in 2016, let alone 2024. Trump made no secret of his plans and his impatience with democratic constraints during the campaign. Yet half of American voters voted for him. On current polling, at least a third of the electorate would vote for him again if it was not for the two-term limit. There is, however, no two-term limit for voters. The people who want to confer supreme executive power on someone like Trump will still be around in future presidential elections. The critical question, therefore, is not why Trump behaves as he does, but why so many Americans applaud him.

All mature societies are divided by differences of interest and opinion, some of which are fundamental. A liberal democracy can only survive if these differences are transcended by our common acceptance of the legitimacy of the decision-making process, even when we disagree with the outcome. This calls for cultural values which do not come naturally to human beings. You have to care more about ensuring that the decision-making process works, than about “winning” on any particular issue. It requires a large measure of political sensitivity, tolerance and cooperative empathy among both politicians and citizens. It requires conventions about how even lawful powers will be exercised so as to avoid capricious, vindictive or oppressive decisions. Above all, it requires people to treat political opponents as fellow-citizens with whom they disagree, and not as enemies to be trashed or prosecuted. In the United States, the polarization of opinion has meant that people have lost their common respect for the decision-making process if it yields results that they do not like, as it inevitably will from time to time. Without that, people who are disappointed with democratic governments spontaneously turn to more authoritarian regimes.

The origin of the current polarization of opinion in the United States lies not with the Right but with the Left. The liberal consensus of the Sixties and Seventies approached the political process with a high degree of entitlement, and achieved a considerable measure of control over the courts, executive agencies, universities and other cultural institutions. Liberals used this cultural control to move into intolerant identity politics and critical theory, and to promote social and cultural policies for which there was no consensus in the population at large. They treated alternative opinions as lacking legitimacy and therefore unworthy of notice. The word “deplorables”, which may have cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election, sums up this attitude perfectly.

The Right-wing backlash, however, has been a great deal worse than the liberal arrogance which provoked it. Today it is the Republican Party which has an invincible sense of entitlement. Hence its irrational rage against Presidents Clinton and Obama, its persistent constitutional obstructiveness under both of them, and its ruthless use of voter suppression and gerrymandering to disenfranchise Democrats. Hence also the refusal to accept adverse election results on the basis of invented allegations of fraud. These things have happened because the MAGA movement, which today dominates the Republican Party, is not prepared to accept the legitimacy of any political views but its own. The result has been to junk the political culture that made the Constitution workable.

We can see this process unfolding in Congress’s abandonment of its traditional role as a bipartisan guardian of the Constitution. A good example is the willingness of the relevant Senate committees to confirm the parade of stooges and crackpots that Trump nominated to major federal offices in his second term, people who would swiftly have been shown the door in an earlier era. Perhaps the low point of Congressional partisanship came with the refusal of the Republican majority on the Judiciary Committee to schedule confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Obama’s last Supreme Court nomination until his term ended so that his Republican successor could fill the vacancy instead. The same people then accelerated the hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, the last appointment of Trump’s first term, so as to get it confirmed before he left office. There was nothing unlawful about any of this, but it illustrates the ease with which even the most carefully designed democracy can be subverted once the underlying spirit has gone. The result has been the most partisan Supreme Court since the Thirties, and arguably since the 1850s.

The delegitimization of political opponents can be seen at its crudest in the current issues about redistricting and voter suppression. Redistricting, otherwise known as gerrymandering, is a device used to dilute the votes of one’s political opponents. It has been described as a way of enabling incumbent lawmakers to pick their electors instead of the other way round. In Rucho v Common Cause (2019), the Republican-appointed majority the Supreme Court held that there was nothing unlawful about overtly partisan redistricting. I believe that the only other country in the world which expressly allows the practice is the Pacific republic of Micronesia (population: 100,000). In June 2025, Trump persuaded the Republican majority in the Texas state legislature to redraw their congressional districts so as to artificially eliminate five serving Democrat representatives and replace them with Republicans. Other States with incumbent Democrat majorities responded by redistricting to create extra Democrat seats at the expense of Republicans. In some states, such as California and Virginia, these changes were approved in state-wide referenda. Recently, Republican lawmakers in Indiana, who had resisted the partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts, were deselected in the Republican primaries in favor of Trump-backed candidates committed to allowing the gerrymandering to go ahead.

What are the lessons of all this for the United Kingdom? There are important institutional differences between the United States and Britain. Britain, like most European democracies, has a parliamentary system, and parliamentary systems are better at dispersing power than presidential systems. The British prime minister and his government are daily answerable to the House of Commons for everything that they do. Their hold on power lasts only as long as they retain the confidence of the House. A would-be despot in our system would have to carry many more people with him to succeed. Boris Johnson was the leader of a party with a large overall majority in the House of Commons, but was nevertheless unable to find enough supporters among them to remain in power. In Britain, judges are appointed by a non-political Judicial Appointment Commission. The executive therefore cannot stuff the judiciary with its ideological supporters. In Britain, meanwhile, the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies are fixed at prescribed intervals by a non-political Boundary Commission. Election expenses are limited by law. The courts are vigilant in challenging ministers who exceed their legal powers or use them for illegitimate purposes, and they act a great deal faster than the federal courts in the US. Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament and escape parliamentary scrutiny of his negotiations with the European Union was quashed in judicial proceedings which lasted less than two months from their commencement to the Supreme Court’s judgment.

All of this means that, under the current law, our institutions are better equipped to resist the despotic tendencies of democratic politics than those of the United States. Even so, Britain’s institutional defenses against despotism have some serious weaknesses. The first is that under our constitutional settlement it is impossible to entrench any of the legal protections against the establishment of a British despotism. The statutory provisions about electoral boundaries, electoral expenses or judicial appointment could be swept away by legislation by a majority of one in each house of Parliament, or after a year in the House of Commons alone. There are substantial advantages in our unwritten political constitution, which has enabled us to adapt to radical social and political changes in our society that would have broken most written constitutions. But we have to recognize that a greater exposure to the threat of totalitarian takeover is the price for these advantages.

The second institutional weakness is that like the American Congress the House of Commons is elected from single-member constituencies on the first-past-the-post system. No political party has achieved a majority of the national vote in the UK since 1935. The effect of FPTP is artificially to increase the impact of electoral swings. This will normally give the largest party an overall majority in the Commons, even if it lacks one in the electorate at large. In a two-party system such as we had until recently, it has been a valuable source of stability. In a multiparty system, as ours is now becoming, the effect is intensely destabilizing. The largest of seven parties may have a quite small proportion of the popular vote. The present government has one of the largest overall parliamentary majorities since the war, with only a third of the popular vote. No government has ever before enjoyed an absolute majority in Parliament on such a small proportion of the national vote. In local authority elections, insurgent parties have sometimes achieved large majorities of council seats on small proportions of the vote. Such parties can capture the House of Commons, too, without the need to negotiate coalitions that might restrain their exercise of power. It is worth remembering that, albeit under a very different political system, Hitler became Chancellor of a minority government on just 37% of the popular vote in the general election of 1932, the last free election to be held in Germany before the war. In Britain, less than that percentage can capture not just the highest office in government but an overall majority in the House of Commons.

Thirdly, the leaders of the three traditional UK-wide parties are no longer chosen by their MPs: unless someone can contrive to be the only candidate. Normally, they are chosen by their grassroots members. This has been a very significant change. MPs are there to represent the public interest. It is in their personal interest to appeal to a much broader spectrum of opinion than just their own base, if they want to be re-elected anyway. Most grassroots members look at the world differently. Their parties are no longer the mass movements they once were. Their membership rolls are small, and consist mainly of enthusiasts who congregate at the outer edges of the political spectrum. They are interested in no one’s opinion but their own. The result is that party leaders — and therefore potential prime ministers — are chosen by very small groups of activists who are unrepresentative of those who vote for their party, let alone the electorate at large. Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss were the natural products of that process. In a system where the endorsement of a political party is a precondition for election, this is a promising scenario for a would-be despot.

Again, the United States is a warning. Candidates for the presidency and Congress are selected in primaries, which are usually closed: in other words. limited to a party’s registered supporters. And like their British equivalents, these people are generally activists at the outer edge of the political spectrum. This has enabled Donald Trump to arrange the deselection of sitting Republican Congressmen who cross him or who show any tendency to independent judgment, replacing them with candidates endorsed by himself. This has happened recently in Texas, Kentucky and Louisiana, and the effect has been to reduce the Congressional majority to a servile loyalty to one man, at a time when he is becoming unpopular in the nation at large. This not only could happen here but it does. In November 2019, Boris Johnson personally purged 21 members of his own party who did not share his vision of Britain’s relations with the European Union, refusing to allow them to stand as Conservatives at the general election and thus ensuring that they lost their seats.

It is, however, a mistake to concentrate exclusively on institutional barriers to despotic government. The United States has succumbed to despotic politics in spite of having a carefully written constitution expressed to be “the supreme law of the land”, and despite boasting a strong tradition of judicial and legislative independence. The recent history not just of the United States but of other democracies, such as Poland and Hungary, shows that even with a written constitution institutional barriers to despotism are permeable. The executive branch of the state is so powerful in the modern world that it can swamp any system of checks and balances if its directors are prepared to be sufficiently ruthless. Ultimately no democracy, however robust its institutional framework, can resist the collapse of the cultural values on which democracy depends.

The main problem faced by modern democracies is common to the United States and Britain and indeed to most of Europe. Public expectations of the state are so high that no state can possibly satisfy them. Either the state is incapable of satisfying them full stop  — or else it can satisfy them only at the expense of other equally important expectations. No policy area arouses higher expectations than the economy. People expect their lot to improve, generation by generation. We have got used to the idea of ever-increasing prosperity, because that has been our experience since the Second World War. But historically there have been very few societies and very few periods of history in which economic growth has been sustained for more than a short period, say two or three generations. Governments can create the conditions for economic expansion. They can refrain from wealth-destroying policies. But they cannot actually generate prosperity. Yet people’s voting choices tend to be based on the assumption that they can, and that economic misfortune is necessarily the responsibility of government.

This matters because, historically, democracies have always been heavily dependent on economic good fortune. Western democracy was born in the 19th century, in an age of creative optimism, economic expansion and Western domination of the world. This is particularly relevant to the current state of the US. The country has enjoyed a great deal of economic good fortune. The indications are that this may be coming to an end. Looking at the US economy as a whole, it is in good shape by international standards. Its growth rate is impressive too. The problem is that most earners have not experienced the benefits. Middle class and blue-collar incomes were traditionally based on extraction, agriculture and manufacturing. These sectors were labor-intensive activities calling for many different skill levels, and were therefore relatively efficient distributors of the benefits of American prosperity. But they have experienced little real growth since the Eighties. Technological innovation is essential to growth, but it is disruptive, altering the distribution of wealth in favor of the innovators. American productivity has for some decades been generated mainly by a few dynamic sectors of the economy, such as the tech industries and financial services, which employ relatively small numbers of intellectually gifted people. The benefits are increasingly concentrated in the hands of these elites. This is reflected in high levels of graduate unemployment among young people who have tried to make their careers in other fields. Older skills have become redundant or displaced by competition from low-wage economies. In the longer term, then, the outlook is bleak, as the American technological lead over countries like China and India shortens and in some areas disappears altogether. We are already seeing this in areas like AI and electric vehicles.

I illustrate these points by reference to the United States, which is probably the extreme example. But this is not just an American issue. In Britain, the most dynamic sectors of the economy are financial services, which account for about a tenth of GDP; digital services including AI which account for another 7%; and the technically advanced areas of manufacturing. These are also sectors whose prosperity disproportionately benefits an educational and technocratic elite.

Economic frustration has a lot to do with declining belief in democracy and rising support for authoritarian alternatives. The Pew Research Institute has been tracking confidence in democracy internationally for some 30 years. Its surveys suggest that in most Western countries, a majority of people are dissatisfied with democracy. The figure is 62% in the United States. In France, Italy, Spain and Greece, the proportion is significantly higher. In Britain, it is 51%. The same surveys establish an exact relationship between dissatisfaction with democracy and economic pessimism.

One of the more striking electoral trends in Western democracies has been the high levels of support for authoritarian parties among the young, who for obvious reasons are those mainly affected by the closing out of economic opportunities. Studies of the US presidential election of 2024 suggest that 56% of American men under 30, and 40% of American women in the same age group, voted for Trump. This was a substantial increase on the 2016 election, even though Trump’s autocratic tendencies had become more obvious in the meantime. In Britain, surveys of opinion, such as those published in 2020 by the Bennett Institute in Cambridge, or in 2023 by the Open Society Foundation, all suggest that disillusionment with democracy is strongest among younger citizens. They are much more dissatisfied than their elders were at the same stage in life, and the situation is getting worse. Nor again, are Britain and the United States alone. In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is the most popular party among voters under the age of 35.

In the life of any political community, the shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe which began in 1914 and ended in 1945. That crisis was characterized by a resort to autocracy across much of the continent. Britain, the United States and France escaped that fate, but in all three countries, there were powerful authoritarian movements of Left and Right that drew their strength mainly from economic misfortune. When people are disappointed, they blame “the system”, the “deep state” or the whole class of democratic politicians. They lash out, spontaneously turning to strongmen, and kidding themselves that strongmen get things done. All this is consistent with the historically high levels of electoral support for authoritarian figures such as Marine Le Pen, the leading lights of Alternativ für Deutschland, and (until recently) Viktor Orban, all of them, incidentally, politicians for whom Trump has expressed admiration.

Political polarization, which has done so much to undermine constitutional values in the United States, has not gone as far in Britain. But it is a phenomenon of growing importance. In recent years the issue which has done most to undermine constitutional values in Britain in recent years is Brexit. The referendum created a sense of entitlement in the majority which inhibited compromise and invited absolute outcomes. This was the mentality summed up in the oft-repeated statement that “the British people” had voted to leave the EU. In fact, just over half of the British people voted to leave the EU. The statement implied what many people said out loud, that the 48% who voted to stay were not for this purpose to be regarded as part of the British people and did not count. The effect was to delegitimize the views of nearly half the population who had voted to remain and wanted to retain a closer relationship with the EU even while leaving its institutions. There are obvious parallels with the attempt of the MAGA movement in the United States to delegitimize the views about immigration, tariffs or foreign relations of the 49% of the electorate who voted Democrat in the 2024 election. In Britain, this attitude reached the outer limits of hyperbole in September 2019 when the Attorney General (of all people) told the House of Commons that having voted to frustrate the government’s plans for the hardest possible form of Brexit, the Commons had “no moral right to sit”. This approach encouraged a more authoritarian style of government, characterized by the Conservative purges of November 2019; the manipulation of the procedures of the House of Commons to silence opposition; and ultimately the attempt to prorogue Parliament at a critical point in negotiations with the European Union.

I have dwelt a little on Brexit not to rake over the embers of old quarrels, but because it is the extreme example of polarization in modern British politics, and the most significant single cause of the decline of a shared political culture. It fragmented our political world, cutting across party lines, sundering the four nations of the United Kingdom and dividing us by class, by region, by economic status and by generation. It split families and alienated friends, something reflected at a trivial level in polls which suggest that a surprisingly large proportion of the population would object if their children dated someone on the other side of the political divide. This has had a continuing impact on our politics, because Brexit was not just a policy. It was the badge of a certain outlook on the political world, reflected in many other areas of political controversy, not least immigration and climate change. In the recent local elections, we witnessed the steep decline of the center as voters migrated to the outer edge of the political spectrum. Like American voters, they lashed out at the inability of governments to deliver a better life.

Many of them are protesting, like the MAGA faithful, against the whole political process and the whole class of politicians. Donald Trump essentially stands for a rejection of deliberative politics because it gets in the way of the kind of decisive outcomes that he and his supporters favor. Those who think like this rarely reflect on how dangerous it is. Politics is the essential mechanism of the democratic state. You cannot have democracy without politics, or politics without politicians. Those who reject politics are really rejecting democracy itself. Their position almost inevitably involves a resort to authoritarian forms of government.

Unfortunately, those who lash out against the political process are not entirely mistaken. There are major issues in our world that democracy has historically proved unable to address: because the electoral cost is too high. Climate change is probably the most obvious example. Across the world, democratic electors reject measures designed to deal with climate change because they almost always involve reducing consumption or raising its cost. The effect is to pass on the problem in aggravated form to the next generation. There are other examples. We cannot resolve the high cost of housing in Britain without loosening planning and environmental controls to which existing home-owners are understandably attached. Almost any attempt to reform the funding of old-age pensions and care at a time of increasing longevity risks an electoral backlash from the beneficiaries of the current system, who are numerous and who vote more diligently than any other group. It is no coincidence that many of these dilemmas of the democratic state involve conflicts between the interests of different generations. It is the young who will suffer most if we fail to deal with climate change. It is the young who cannot get onto the housing ladder until they are middle-aged and often not even then. It is the young whose taxes support the cost of old-age provision. It is the young who are unable to find jobs in a stagnant economy. It should be no surprise that it is the young who are most disenchanted with democracy.

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How Britain lost control

By Jonathan Sumption

Democracy has a natural tendency to create interest groups for whom the preservation of their current advantages — or the acquisition of new ones — are the dominant factors in their political choices. Political philosophers from Aristotle to Montesquieu have observed that a harmonious society requires what they have called “virtue”. What they meant by virtue was an ability to put common interests above personal ones. In a democracy, though, this kind of virtue is almost impossible to achieve. It is asking a lot to expect people to look beyond their own interest at the broader interests of society, and to future problems that may not materialize until after their deaths. Historically, it has never happened. But the political cost of voting exclusively according to our current material interests has never been as high as it is now. The inability of democracies to adopt unwelcome measures in response to critical issues is likely, in the long run, to lead to a much more autocratic model of government.

Democracy is fragile. Its history in the West has been relatively brief — barely a century and a half. The default condition of mankind has always been some form of autocracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which has published a “Democracy Index” since 2006, reckons that only 25 of the 167 countries covered, encompassing 6.6% of the world’s population, ranked as full democracies. Even before Trump’s second term, the United States was not one of them. It ranked only as a “flawed democracy”, thus putting it in the same category as fragmented countries like South Africa and unstable ones like most of South America. Today, most of the world’s population lives under authoritarian regimes of one kind or another. Britain and the countries of Western Europe still rank as full democracies. Unfortunately, though, we cannot take it for granted that they still will be there in the next generation.

This essay was adapted from the St George’s House Annual Lecture, delivered at St George’s Chapel Windsor on Tuesday 14 July 2026.

Donald Trump’s election victory in 2024 should have taught everyone that what has come to be known as “lawfare” — using legal processes to weaken political opponents — doesn’t work politically. But it seems few heeded the warning. Only last week, a similar attempt to bar Marine Le Pen from running in next year’s presidential elections failed after a French appeals court reduced the length of the ban. This is not the end of her legal battles, but it is certain now that she will be a candidate and her popularity remains undimmed.

There are other examples: in Romania, the supreme court banned the far-Right leader Călin Georgescu from taking part in the 2024 presidential elections. In Germany, the CDU wants to deprive Björn Höcke, one of the most high-profile politicians of the far-Right Alternative for Germany, of his fundamental right to vote and stand for elections. In the Netherlands, they went after Geert Wilders. It’s happening everywhere, again and again.

They have learned nothing. Trump bounced back from his legal battles and won the election. Le Pen will be a candidate. It is too early to make any predictions about the next French presidential election. But we can at this point safely conclude that the technocratic coup against Le Pen has failed. It will now be up to the voters to decide. This was not supposed to happen.

The case of Nigel Farage in the UK falls into the same category, though the details differ. Unlike Trump or Le Pen, the Reform UK leader faces neither criminal charges nor a police investigation. Instead, he was being investigated by the House of Commons Committee on Standards after breaching rules by failing to declare a gift. It would almost certainly have recommended a suspension which could have triggered a recall petition. If 10% of voters had signed it, a by-election would automatically have followed.

But by resigning his seat, Farage has short-circuited the procedure that could have led to his removal. If he wins, he may still face an investigation when he returns, though the House of Commons would, at that point, probably not be so stupid as to suspend him, if only to avoid the absurd spectacle of two by-elections in the same constituency within a few weeks of each other.

The media plays an important role in the political campaign against Farage. And its pursuit of Farage is deeply reminiscent of the one against Trump in the two years preceding the 2024 election. Ultimately, though, Trump walked away from his legal troubles and an assassin’s bullet. Farage walked away from a plane crash, and I suspect he will survive the slings and arrows of the British press as well as the onslaught of Count Binface’s jokes. British politics is full of entertaining stunts. But the idea that the Tory, Labour, Green and Lib Dem voters of Clacton will unite and support the bin man is absurd. What does it tell voters about how seriously politics is being taken by the establishment?

What, too, does it tell us about the media’s motivations? I suspect they’re mainly selfish ones. The legacy media owes its existence to closed-shop access arrangements such as the political lobby in the UK, or the White House press corps. In Germany, exclusive access to politicians is organized by a journalists’ club, which organizes all government press conferences. If Friedrich Merz wants to talk to the media, he has to knock on their door. And in the US, legacy media has been one of the biggest losers from the Trump administration. They lost their exclusive access to administration officials as the Trump administration opened up to bloggers and influencers.

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Populist leaders do not respect the press cartel. They are creatures of social media. If Farage were to become prime minister, he could decide to discard the political lobby altogether in Westminster. He could instruct his arts minister to allow foreign media organizations take control of UK newspapers and private broadcasters. Without much effort, he could finish them off in a single term. Even if British voters were to get rid of Farage after one term, his successors would almost surely not resurrect the old system. Even if a candidate of the Left in the US were to succeed Trump in early 2029, I would not expect that person to waste political capital on resurrecting long defunct journalist lobbies. Time moves on, and priorities change. No wonder the fourth estate is panicking.

And as consumers of news, we should speak out if the media pack is out for blood, or, as the Germans say, are chasing a pig through the village. This is what is happening to Farage. Sometimes it works: the media successfully got rid of Boris Johnson by persuading gullible Tory MPs to commit electoral suicide and ditch the leader who won them a landslide victory. They dispensed with Keir Starmer in similar circumstances.

I doubt, though, that the campaign against Farage will succeed, because Farage, unlike Johnson and Starmer before him, is in control of his party. His voters don’t care about politically constructed criminal cases or donations. They care about the things that affect them.

And they are right that many politicians simply don’t seem to care about the things that affect them. Yesterday’s men simply cling to mistakes of the past, refusing to learn from them. Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump should have been a cautionary tale. Instead of pursuing him through the courts, the Democrats should have focused on their own campaign, and considered whether Joe Biden was fit to run while there was still an opportunity to find an alternative candidate. But no, the Democrats figured they had it in the bag — just as they did back in 2016. Overconfidence and wishful thinking play a big role in the demise of the center. I see the same mindset again in the UK campaign to rejoin the EU. The Rejoiners are clinging on to the same old failed strategies that sunk the Remain campaign — a false assessment of the economic significance of the single market.

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Farage's Clacton reckoning

By Simon Heffer

In Germany, the centrist parties that now want to ban the AfD should similarly reflect on why such attempts failed in the past. In 2017, the constitutional court struck what appeared to be a rock-solid case against the Right-wing extremist NPD. Unlike the centrists, though, the AfD learned from the episode and has taken precautions to protect itself against a ban. The chances of a ban are practically zero. And yet, the Left clings on to the same old failing ideas again and again.

Lack of reflection and critical self-examination has a become a defining characteristic of the political center worldwide. And all the while, the center-right, which has traditionally been stronger than the center-left in Europe, is losing support. By creating perma-coalitions with the center-left, they are driving more and more voters to the extremes. They do what they always did. Exactly as Talleyrand said.

The way to solve the political problem is to attempt to address the underlying problems such as deindustrialization and low productivity. Yet centrist policy agendas are full of displacement activities. So instead of focusing on fixing what lies beneath their broken economy, the British establishment is rooting for a man with a bin for a face. Should that strategy fail, if you want to dignify it with such a term, they might even resort to the ultimate, and most desperate, trick to keep Farage out of power — proportional representation. The experience of European countries has been that cynical changes in electoral systems backfire against those who initiate them. The simple reason is that voters, as a group, are not stupid.

Just as Talleyrand’s famous phrase described the failure of the House of Bourbon, it explains the demise of the age of multilateral globalization, the age that the EU represented so fittingly. Rather than confronting economic and political failures that have driven voters elsewhere, politicians simply return to their familiar tactics. Multilateralism is dying not because it was bound to fail, but because its proponents never learned, and never forgot.

And we all know what happened to the Bourbons.

Yet responsible progressives and populists seeking a more restrained foreign policy would do well to study the sources of his success: how he was able to advance his expansive foreign-policy vision through the great vicissitudes of the past three decades, even as his own party’s base turned against foreign interventionism. A more restrained foreign policy won’t succeed unless the restrainers master Graham’s arts.

Graham — a son of the working class, who raised his teenaged sister after their parents died young — had an overabundance of what the ancient Greeks called phronesis: the practical wisdom essential to effective political activity. Politics is an art of prudence, of making practical judgments, adding allies, and compromising wherever possible — while putting up a fight when absolutely necessary. Principle and ideas matter, but the practicing politician can’t, and shouldn’t, hold himself to the same standards as the philosopher or even the journalist.

Graham understood this. Maybe he understood it a little too well, but in the final analysis, he got closer to the truth of politics than did most of his enemies.

Nowhere was this more apparent than his response to the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Like many others in the Republican establishment, Graham initially balked at the former New York developer and reality-TV barker’s bid to take over the party of Lincoln. “If we nominate Trump,” he warned on social media during the 2016 GOP primary, “we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”

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Once Trump became inevitable, Graham made his peace. And thereafter, he remained doggedly loyal, championing most of the president’s domestic issues and rising to his personal defense in the face of the underhanded lawfare that bedeviled Trump for the better part of a decade. Graham came around forcefully in recognizing the Russiagate hoax for what it was and resisted the first impeachment attempt over Trump’s “perfect” Ukraine phone call (remember that?). The South Carolinian also understood Trump’s almost-compulsive need to vent — to have somebody around to shoot the shit with. And he made himself constantly available, over the phone and on the golf course.

Graham’s loyalty and personal warmth paid dividends and gathered compound interest, which he would then cash out when it came time to promote his pet causes. He could disagree with Trump — over his Syria withdrawal, the Afghan drawdown, and the Ukraine war — without blowing up the relationship. And during the second term, his proximity allowed him to push for the hawks’ holy grail: a full-on war with Iran.

To note all this isn’t to endorse the substance of any of these policies. But Graham’s record tends to vindicate those inside the Trump administration — many of them opposed to the late senator’s agenda — who wish restrainers in Congress could be a bit more strategic. The likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie dynamited their Trump ties over antiwar principle; Graham went to the afterlife having gotten his Iran war.

Beyond his masterful management of Trump, Graham was also a consummate legislator of the old-school, Tip O’Neill variety: clubby, compromising, and surprisingly willing to break with the Right when a measure served the national interest (by his lights). For example, he backed the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act, aimed at bolstering the domestic semiconductor industry, as well as the 2022 bipartisan gun-safety bill. Such across-the-aisle efforts didn’t endear him to the small-government faithful, and he earned his 59% lifetime score from the keepers of Republican orthodoxy at Heritage Action. But bipartisanship built up political capital on the Hill that he could expend elsewhere.

Like the best of modern lawmakers, moreover, Graham was a master at directing oodles of federal development cash to his home state. Visit his X account, and you’ll see most of his feed devoted to showcasing the bacon he brought home as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee: a Coast Guard base in Charleston, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility (also in Charleston), a federal grant to replace 18 bridges across the Palmetto State, and on and on. It’s true that Graham was a beneficiary of Israel Lobby and defense-industry largess. But he likely wouldn’t get re-elected if it weren’t for his relentless developmentalism (or pork-barrel politics, if you must).

Even as he relished congressional wheeling-and-dealing, Graham could be ferocious in a fight. For my money, his single best moment as a lawmaker came during the 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As the holes in rape accuser Christine Blasey Ford’s account were widening in public view, Graham publicly excoriated the Democrats who’d used her in a quest to destroy Kavanaugh.

“What you wanna do is destroy this guy’s life, hold his seat open, and hope you win in 2020,” Graham said, his body and voice shaking. “You’ve said that, not me.… I would never do to [Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor] what you’ve done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.” The oration is well worth watching in full. To me, it was the decisive pivot that made Kavanaugh’s eventual confirmation possible.

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Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Graham stood for a comprehensive account of why American power is good, and what its exercise on the world stage is meant for. His worldview was, as one writer for Responsible Statecraft has noted, essentially that of an old Cold Warrior: unbending support of proxies and allies against larger nation-state adversaries, the passionate if hypocritical and uneven promotion of democracy abroad.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that worldview lost its coherence and salience. The sheer hyperactivity to which it gave rise over the past quarter-century drove Washington into more than one quagmire, dissipating American power and corroding its domestic foundations. Graham-ism has now reached its apotheosis in Trump’s Persian Gulf War III, which has forced the president to choose between prolonged economic pain or an embarrassing quick exit.

Yet the lesson for the restraint camp — my camp, as it should be clear — is that we need some larger moral vision or story, a plausible substitute for Graham-ism. “Get out of everywhere all at once” is no more credible or responsible than his “Fight everyone, everywhere, all at once.” I’m not sure we have such a substitute on hand. Likewise, if Graham overestimated the reserves of American power, I sometimes worry that the restraint camp underestimates them. The passing from the stage of the likes of Graham and Sen. Mitch McConnell provides an opening for developing such ideas and translating them into political action.

Graham’s Senate career offers a template for the sort of practical wisdom the task requires. He was as wise as a serpent, if too far from the innocence of a dove.

However, a better assessment would have understood the Ankara summit as Nato returning to its roots. In recent months, the theme of Nato reverting to its original Cold War purpose — European deterrence and defense — has been advanced by the Trump administration. The idea was rolled out in February as “Nato 3.0” and is the brainchild of Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, a restrainer who advocates for limiting military interventionism and who has therefore been maligned by the liberal Atlanticist set and reportedly spied on by Israel. As Colby describes it, Nato 3.0 is not an abandonment of Nato but rather “a return to and validation of its foundational purpose”. In other words, “make Nato great again” by ensuring Europeans pour billions into defense industrial production and technological innovation so they can take care of their own conventional (non-nuclear) defense. 

At this year’s summit, I witnessed the transition to Nato 3.0 in real time. The Trump administration surely regards Europe’s acceptance of its shift in policy and philosophy as a major foreign policy “win”. Multiple senior Nato officials spoke of the need to build “a stronger Europe in a stronger Nato”, and repeatedly recited figures testifying to leaps in European defense spending in accordance with Trumpian demands. One senior Nato official spoke of the “simultaneity problem” — the Trump administration’s concern about a scenario in which the US military would be forced to fight multiple major conflicts at once, which he described as the reason “why Europeans are stepping up and taking more responsibility for their own defense”. Whatever their distaste for Trump’s bullying rhetoric, it was clear that Nato officials and allies are now taking the Trump administration’s words very seriously.

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A few weeks ahead of the summit, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed Colby at the Nato defense ministerial meeting in Brussels, tying Nato 3.0 to Washington’s demands that allies raise defense spending. “That’s what defense spending commitments are all about,” he said, “transforming Nato into a real military alliance that’s focused on hard power and real deterrence, a Nato 3.0 modeled on the Nato 1.0 that won the Cold War.” During the same meeting, Hegseth gave trans-Atlantic allies an ultimatum. Going forward, he said, American Nato dues would be contingent on allies meeting their own defense spending targets. “Where other allies do not spend with urgency, our dues contributions will go down,” he warned. He also told allies to expect a review of their progress in six months. If insufficient strides had been made by then, the US would spend less on Nato. This threat contributed to a sense of elevated fear in Ankara. It wasn’t an entirely irrational one either: the Trump administration is dramatically scaling back its involvement in other multilateral institutions. In January, the United States withdrew from 31 UN entities and is currently withholding around $4 billion in mandatory UN dues.

To understand “Nato 3.0”, it’s essential to understand the alliance’s evolution. Nato’s founding was rooted in Cold War ideological and military competition with the Soviet Union. As such, Nato 1.0 was a firmly Right-wing organization, one interested above all in strengthening American dominion over Europe and confronting the Soviet threat. But it also had several other functions, among them spreading the gospel of free markets and crushing internal Left-wing subversion. The North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 established the military alliance and outlined Nato “values”; the pact promised “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. From the very beginning, not all members lived up to the pompous rhetoric. Founding member state Portugal was then ruled by dictator Antonio Salazar, whose one-party regime Estado Novo, or New State, employed a menacing secret police and outlawed all opposition parties; the dictatorship’s “new” name was an irony, as according to Tom Gallagher, the puritanical Salazar “manifested the true reactionary’s horror of change”. 

The United States was often the alliance’s biggest proponent of working with unsavory regimes, pushing for Franco’s Spain to become a member of Nato with overwhelming support in Congress and the Senate. The US saw Francoist Spain as an ideal ally owing to its “strategic location and furiously anti-communist sentiment”. When some European member states objected to admitting Franco’s regime into the alliance, the United States signed the Pact of Madrid with Spain in 1953, furnishing the dictatorship with aid and allowing the US to build military bases on Spanish soil. French colonial Algeria was also an original part of Nato, with Article 5 extending to the colonized country where systematic torture and concentration camps were used to subdue the population. Meanwhile some former Nazis from West Germany’s supposedly “clean Wehrmacht” — the alliance shamelessly propagated the myth that Wehrmacht officers fought honorably during the Second World War — were also integrated into the pact, with some rising to Nato’s senior leadership. In the face of the Soviet threat, there could be no enemies to the Right.

Nato 2.0 covered a period we might describe as the “long Nineties” and was characterized by End-of-History hubris and excess: rapacious eastward expansion, self-aggrandizing rhetoric about liberal values, and zealous out-of-area operations. Nato’s “out-of-area” actions — operations undertaken beyond the territorial limits of member states — undermined its claim to be a “purely defensive alliance”. As “humanitarian” operations, their results ranged from mixed to disastrous. While the 1999 Nato bombing of Yugoslavia forced Serbian security forces from Kosovo, it did not bring down President Slobodan Milošević; he wouldn’t fall until a contested election several months later. Indeed, Milošević’s own Minister of Information during the bombing, Aleksandar Vučić, has been leader of Serbia in some form for 14 years, and his regime employs Serbian nationalist rhetoric barely distinguishable from that of his former boss. In 2011, Nato intervened in Libya with even more catastrophic results: though sold to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect civilians, the real goal was regime change, with the removal of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi judged a strategic imperative worth many Libyan lives. In the end, a report from Harvard’s Belfer Center determined that “Nato’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold”. Nato 2.0 also included the Great War on Terror, which meant the emergence of non-state actors as a new threat; costly cross-border operations and occupations ensued. If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.

The summit in Ankara was the alliance’s response to Trumpian demands for a Nato 3.0: a scaled back, “Europe-led” pact that doesn’t rely on the United States as the guarantor of Europe’s conventional defense. As such, the summit kicked off with a grandiose Defense Industry Forum, where Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte repeatedly invoked the term “defense industrial revolution”. The event was an opportunity for Turkey to hawk its indigenous defense industry wares, but it was also an opportunity for Europe. As one official from a European defense ministry wryly put it to me, the forum allowed allies to make a big show of complying with Trumpian dictates to spend more on their defense.

Just to drive the point home, President Zelensky gave a speech at the event likening the current revolution in drone technology to the invention of missiles. He described Ukraine as a reluctant defense industrial powerhouse forged in war and asserted that it should therefore be admitted to Nato. In other characteristically immoderate statements, the Defense Industry Forum was widely touted as a success. A Nato official confirmed that “at least” $50 billion in new defense deals were announced at the forum; among them were $40 billion worth of investment in counter-drone capabilities and multi-country initiatives for the continued militarization of space. The pivot to Nato 3.0 would appear to be well underway.

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Turkey is perhaps the model Nato 3.0 ally, which makes its hosting of the first summit of this new chapter richly appropriate. Though Turkey has contributed to Nato 2.0 peacekeeping missions and interventions in places like Kosovo and Bosnia, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, like Trump, has no time for liberal internationalist pieties. Like Trump, he would like to see Nato stripped bare to its raw essentials of defense and security, ditching democracy promotion and the dissemination of “Western values”. Turkey has the second largest army in Nato and a burgeoning defense industrial base: Turkish defense and aviation exports broke records last year, exceeding $10 billion. All of this has won admiration from Trump. Throughout the summit, Trump repeatedly praised Erdoğan, calling him “really a great man”, “a great leader”, and “a strong person”. Trump’s affinity with Erdoğan suggests that what is most valued in Nato 3.0 is a capacity for deterrence and defense; democratic deficiencies are of little concern in an ally that is seen to be pulling its weight.  

Despite the notable absence of liberal rhetoric in Ankara, elements of Nato 2.0 remain for now, including the tradition of the annual summit. During the Cold War, Nato held just 10 summits. Today, it holds a wildly expensive summit every year. Last year’s one in The Hague reportedly cost about €1 million per minute, with some media reporting that it was the most expensive meeting in the alliance’s history. Preparations for this year’s summit reportedly cost €235 million. In addition to being expensive, international relations scholar Patrick Porter believes that annual summits present risks. “The curse of regular summitry…wasn’t a feature of Cold War Nato,” he tells me. “There are these relentless opportunities for trouble and mischief and misunderstanding.” It’s a critique now shared by some other allies. While Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte told journalists in Ankara that the next summit will be in Albania, he would not confirm that it would happen next year.

Whatever the similarities between Nato 3.0 and Nato 1.0, there are also a few striking differences. Nato once justified itself with the Cold War platitudes of prosperity and liberty. This was propaganda to be sure, but it was still integral to winning an ideological battle that once divided the world. Now, the rhetoric of prosperity and freedom has been replaced with the cold, uninspiring promise of “security” — a nebulous, constantly expanding concept emblematic of an ideology that has lost the ability to excite or be believed, and must now rely on coercion, censorship and repression to get its way. While Nato holds a lavish summit each year and member states ramp up spending for a “defense industrial revolution”, people living in allied countries are being told they must endure brutal cuts to health care, education, and social welfare to pay for it all. Alliance boosters like to boast that Nato “protects one billion people”. If it does, it does so at a steep cost.

But the Democratic establishment should only take so much heart in this. A quirk of history has kept the mayor of New York from seeking the presidency. However, the Democratic establishment is every bit as frail as the GOP establishment was a decade ago, and Mamdani-backed candidates won a string of remarkable victories in New York’s congressional and state primaries in late June. 

Today, the Democratic establishment is finding the bottom the Republican old guard reached in the 2010s, just before a fading reality TV star romped through the primaries and proceeded to remake the party in his own image. Chuck Schumer and his ilk are almost as limp as Jeb Bush was in 2016, when he promised a shock-and-awe campaign but was humiliated on debate stage after debate stage. The odds are better, right now, of Schumer becoming the Senate Majority Leader in 2027 than of him surviving a primary in his own state in 2028. 

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Trump and Mamdani are chummy because Trump understands, intuitively, that the Democratic Socialist, immigrant Muslim represents the Left version of himself. The two men may agree on nothing politically, but they know what it is like to confront the full wrath of their respective parties’ establishments. They carry battle scars from slaying scions of political dynasties that were once very popular (Bush, Cuomo), and they know the feeling of winning nominations while party elites withhold endorsements. Trump, of course, is the Republican Party elite now, while Mamdani, only six months in office, is a generational star who still can’t get more than a grudging acknowledgment from Schumer, or Hakeem Jeffries, who is probably going to be the House Speaker next year.

But Jeffries and Schumer, for different reasons, represent a political approach that is fast falling out of vogue. Schumer is 75, and his kitschy, cable TV hucksterism and Israel-cheerleading is alienating to a vast majority of voters under the age of 40. Jeffries is much younger and may well have a future leading the Democrats, yet his own style has failed to resonate with the party’s base. He is not revered like Nancy Pelosi. Very few Democrats beyond the members of his caucus are excited for him to lead the House. His own Israel boosterism has made him the target of young progressives, and rank-and-file voters still feel that he hasn’t aggressively confronted Trump enough. 

It is easy to forget that the base of the Democratic Party was once much more comfortable with its establishment wing. Bernie Sanders could not win the Democratic nomination because, for all the ways party apparatchiks and the DNC might have foiled him, he never won over enough voters to overcome Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. Ten years ago, many Democrats liked the former First Lady and Secretary of State. She was not a great political talent, but enough voters in the primaries didn’t want to take a chance on a socialist senator from Vermont.

That era is gone. No true frontrunner exists for the 2028 Democratic nomination. No Clinton or Obama can tip the scales. If Kamala Harris wants to run, she’ll have to get in the muck with everyone else and hope she can survive a grueling primary season. The establishment was desperate to coronate Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama helped engineer Biden’s 2020 victory, convincing the center-Left candidates in the field to drop out and consolidate against Sanders. The establishment won’t have that power, in this election cycle. 

Socialist candidates can win today because there are no more effective Red Scares and fewer and fewer voters remember the Soviet Union. Democratic Socialists are economic populists, and there is a growing share of the Democratic electorate that responds to this messaging. Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America undertakes actual political organizing — the sort Obama abandoned once he became president — and its candidates benefit from an establishment that decided it wasn’t worth the effort to knock on doors or pass out leaflets in the streets. DSA is filling a void. The party elites are only now understanding how threatened they are.

This doesn’t mean DSA is taking over the Democratic Party tomorrow. Members of its ranks still espouse fringe views around defunding the police and abolishing prisons. So far, there is little evidence DSA can win in districts with large numbers of independent or Republican voters. That was Trump’s original magic — to cross over, to create a coalition. But maybe, someday, the socialists can. After Mamdani, who can say what’s not possible? 

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At the minimum, the far-Left is going to rack up more victories in Democratic primaries. Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the DNC, proclaimed recently that Leftists and socialists who “hate the Democratic Party” should not “run for our nomination.” “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers,” Harrison posted on X. “Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” It was a laughable statement — not only because Harrison was the DNC chair who hoped to deceive the American people over Biden’s fitness to seek another term, but because it revealed a belief in a politics that effectively no longer exists. There are no Democratic Party “volunteers,” nor truly any “infrastructure.” Candidates are responsible for recruiting their own volunteers and building out their own get-out-the-vote operations. The DNC can, on certain national campaigns and the presidential race, assist, but the Democratic Party in America — like the Republican Party — is effectively a shell organization, a ballot line that anyone, with enough effort, can occupy. 

That’s how Mamdani became the Democratic mayor of New York City and Trump became the Republican president of the United States. This is not a parliamentary democracy. Parties do not select candidates, control lists, or charge membership fees. Party lifers like Harrison sometimes like to pretend they do this, or that they have a right to say what a “Democrat” is. At some point, a Trump-like contender will subvert the Democratic Party at mass scale. There isn’t much to head off this possibility; it isn’t like there’s an all-powerful shadow establishment that can rally behind one candidate and squelch the powerful insurgent. Mamdani proved, at the local level, that overcoming this opposition is possible with enough charisma and organization. And his victory shouldn’t be undersold because it was in one city: if New York City were a standalone state, it would be one of the 15 largest, close in size to Virginia. Sanders, were he running in New York City, might have even won were he ten years younger or a bit more palatable. 

Either way, men like Harrison, Schumer, and Jeffries will have to adjust to the new order. They will not control the destiny of the Democrats much longer. The clock is ticking.

Yes, Donald Trump may have personally intervened with Fifa to get Folarin Balogun, America’s star striker, an exception on the red card he’d earned in the previous match. But having Daddy Warbucks pull strings for your side can take an athletic effort only so far: in the end, Belgium won the game 4-1. Money and power cannot buy a World Cup. Qatar is a partial exception, but even in the case of the 2022 competition, the team got nowhere close to holding the World Cup trophy over their heads while confetti streamed down.

Corruption in Fifa, much less professional soccer, is hardly new. For years, if not decades, rumors swirled around top Italian club Juventus’s strange habit of winning games at the last minute on highly suspicious penalty decisions — suspicions vindicated by the Calciopoli refereeing scandal that, in 2006, got the club stripped of titles and relegated. 

Put aside the fact that Balogun’s red card was indeed dubious. The same could be said of numerous others, Francesco Totti’s red card against South Korea in 2002 being perhaps the most ludicrous. The injustice of the card is not the point. World Cup history is full of calls far worse, against teams with far greater chances of actually winning the competition, from countries who care infinitely more about the sport than the US, which after last night’s defeat will almost certainly return to treating football as a secondary concern. 

What made Trump’s effort to overturn Balogun’s suspension different is what it reveals about the nature of American political life. Bending the rules — and even outright cheating — is often deemed acceptable as long as it benefits “our side”. Part of American folklore is the belief that the country represents the “last best hope of earth” — a phrase that politicians of both parties still deploy, few realizing they’re borrowing from Abraham Lincoln. 

The 16th president was a man nearly everyone in the establishment still agrees represents the greatest of the American ethos. Yet Lincoln too — just like Trump — bent the rules to get his desired result. When the Southern states expressed their desire to leave the Union, Lincoln maintained that they had no such right, even though the foundational premise of the American liberal tradition is governance based on consent. To this day, that element of the Civil War remains underplayed; to even touch it risks ostracism. We are told that Lincoln used the legal mechanisms available to him to make his side, our side, prevail, and the arc of history bent toward “justice”. But who decides what “justice” really is, and therefore when the established rules and norms are acceptable to break? Those in power, obviously.

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Had Balogun matched his earlier form in the tournament and the US had won instead of Belgium, Trump’s maneuvering to clear the deck for his return would have become the story of the World Cup. In typical Trumpian fashion, he would have made a story completely unrelated to him — the US is finally good at soccer! — about him. There’s no such thing as bad press, as Trump’s notoriously ruthless consigliere Roy Cohn taught him. It’s a sentiment the President hasn’t ridden just to fame and fortune, but to two of the strangest presidential terms and some of the oddest cultural milestones in the republic’s history.

Alongside hosting MMA fights on the White House lawn, Trump must now add to his résumé exposing the truly bipartisan nature of American enthusiasm for corruption. When it was announced that Balogun’s red card was rescinded, the notoriously kneejerk Left pundits, who have made entire careers out of reflexively condemning everything the man does, all of a sudden flipped on a dime and said, more or less: in this one case, corruption and arm-twisting behind the scenes was good. Why? Because it made our side better off. Our tribe — in this case the US national team — had a better chance of winning. 

In a culture that glorifies winning and encourages its members to see the stakes of not only elections, but competitions for college admission or job placement, as existential contests that validate one’s identity, sport is the only place where shared identity is still allowed. Studies have shown that when a fan’s team wins, their testosterone spikes; researchers famously measured the effect in fans after basketball and World Cup matches. Conversely, when their team loses, cortisol surges as though the loss were personal. This occurs, psychologically speaking, because fans’ nervous systems unconsciously treat the objects of their affection not just as extensions of their own identity but, literally, as their own high-stakes competition. So, when American Leftists and other commentators suggested, as Cenk Uygur did on X over the weekend, that Trump’s corruption might be okay in this one particular instance, they were revealing how American politicos — both Right and Left — actually think. 

Put aside debates about Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was “stolen”. If you actually spend time around Democratic Party diehards, they, just like their counterparts in the GOP, will openly express admiration for cheating if it’s used to the “right” ends. Lyndon Johnson, possibly the Democratic Party’s greatest-ever legislative architect after Franklin Roosevelt, is lovingly rumored to have instructed his staff to spread rumors that an opponent had sex with farm animals simply to “make him deny it” in the press. JFK’s father flooded the 1960 primaries with vote-buying efforts, only to have Kennedy joke about the electoral purchases himself, reading from a fake telegram from his father. “Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary,” it said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”

The Democrats are not alone in bending the rules in their favor. Late-20th century political operative Lee Atwater was as notorious as he was admired for his dirty-tricks campaigns against Democratic opponents. Atwater’s legacy is nearly always spoken of positively by GOP operatives. When Atwater rode the infamous “weekend prison pass” attack against Michael Dukakis — outsourcing a brutal ad to a nominally independent group, so the Bush campaign could maintain plausible deniability  — he showed us the future of America’s political present. A place where nearly every YouTube feed in the country is flooded with attacks that recklessly try to recreate some version of Atwater’s one-dimensional tarring of his Democratic rival.

But Atwater — like LBJ, JFK and, lest we forget, Tammany Hall before him — was loved by his tribe because he carried out his dirty tricks for “our” side. Presuming, of course, you have an active dog in the political race. And while more Americans than ever are disgusted with both parties, nearly everyone watching the red, white and blue on the field at the World Cup still feels the primitive pull of the national tribe.

In America, when rule-breaking delivers our tribe a win, our objection evaporates. That reflex, not Trump’s phone call, is the genuinely American thing on display. As for Belgium, they shouldn’t just have complained to the press, they should have flat-out threatened to refuse to take the field. Rule-bending for the powerful — and a public that never mobilizes to stop it — is the new American face of world football, already on full display.

But here is the thing about sport that politics can only envy. The game has a court of final appeal that no president can phone. Trump proved he could bend Fifa to his will. But he couldn’t bend the ball. Ninety minutes after the greatest rule-bending intervention in World Cup history, the beneficiary’s team was down 4-1, its goalkeeper face-down in the Seattle turf, consumed with shame, and the entire apparatus of executive pressure had ultimately purchased nothing whatsoever. The sports gods audited the books and issued their correction. Ball don’t lie.

American politics, however, has no such auditor. No ball and no net. Only the next election to be bent by whichever tribe holds the whip and a public — Right and Left — that has quietly agreed to measure every violation by a single standard. Did it help us win? 

While much has been written about the rise of populism from the American perspective, what we are witnessing in the United States is part of a global phenomenon.

Just months before Americans first elected Trump, the British public voted to leave the European Union, a move that had practically no support among media, academic, and political elites. The Populism in Power database shows an approximately fivefold increase in the number of populist leaders and parties ruling over democracies between 1990 and 2019. 

An analysis of six major democracies — the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, France, and Canada — reveals a significant decline in support for traditional center-Left and center-Right parties, dropping from about three-quarters of the vote share in 2000 to just over half in 2024.

Latin America is also seeing one of its perennial populist waves, and populism is even making inroads into Asia. Ruling elites even in nondemocracies, such as Putin’s Russia, are adopting aspects of populist rhetoric as legitimization strategies. 

Beyond how we feel about any particular candidate or party, perhaps the political question of our time is whether we should embrace or reject this trend. Approaching this topic from a social science background, my inclination is to first look for data. Practically all of it points to the lesson that countries should avoid populist leaders if they want to maintain freedom and achieve economic growth. How do we know this? Ideally, you’d have randomized experiments where you assign some countries to be ruled by populists and others by normal leaders. 

Since we can’t do that, we have to go by theory and observation. When theory and observational outcomes point in the same direction, then we might think we know something about the world, though it depends on the plausibility of the theory and the strength of the relevant correlations. There have never been randomized controlled trials establishing that smoking causes lung cancer, but I would bet my life that it does. 

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Before we even begin on this topic, however, the first thing we have to do is ask: what even is populism? The political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser settle on the definition of “a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This seems like it would lead to a lot of debates. Was President Barack Obama a populist because he talked about rich people and the working class? Did he present each class as “homogenous” enough and did he do enough to declare them “antagonistic”? Maybe you can make a case that every major politician this side of retired US Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is populist according to this definition.

In practical terms, however, when scholars make lists of populist leaders, they basically agree on who qualifies, and examples come from the Right and the Left, which means we can’t tell a simple story of political bias. Trump, former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and former Bolivian President Evo Morales all count, no matter who you ask. Standard definitions of populism are fuzzy and create edge cases, and often disagree with one another, but this is a common issue in politics, and one can say similar things about concepts like democracy and nationalism. 

“I know it when I see it” can be fine as a standard in social and political analysis. There is definitely an essence that Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, currently in US custody, share, which former US President Joe Biden and current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz do not. Since analysts agree on who populists are, we can undertake observational studies and see whether such leaders being in power is associated with worse outcomes. Perhaps the most comprehensive paper to do this is “Populist Leaders and the Economy”, published in the American Economic Review, arguably the most respected journal in economics. The authors found that between 1990 and 2020, a country being ruled by a populist is associated with a 10% lower GDP after 15 years relative to a reasonable counterfactual.

Left-wing populists do worse, which is not surprising, given that they have a deeply flawed understanding of economics. So ideology as traditionally understood matters a lot, but populist rule still has its own independent negative effect. 

What about non-economic indicators? Here the news seems to be even worse. In a report for the Tony Blair Institute, journalists Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk investigated the period from 1990 to 2018. Populists over that time degraded checks and balances, and were four times more likely than other leaders to preside over democratic backsliding. In fact, of the breakdowns of democracy that the world has seen since the end of the Cold War, excluding those involving foreign interference or in countries with a GDP per capita of less than $1,000 a year, two-thirds occurred under populist leaders. Such leaders were also bad for freedom of the press and civil liberties. Perhaps most remarkable of all: 40% of populist leaders ended up charged with corruption. This is despite the fact that they often try to stack institutions in their own favor. 

When The Economist made a list of countries with the highest ratio of negative to positive years of growth between 1950 and 2023, the top eight were Libya, Argentina, Syria, Iraq, Chad, Congo, Sudan, and Venezuela. As I’ve previously written, “This is not a list anyone wants to be on. That’s six countries in Africa and the Middle East that have experienced civil wars, and two Latin American nations that did it to themselves through Leftist economic policies.” Venezuela and Argentina have mostly been democratic throughout this time period, without suffering anything close to the level of intrastate violence seen in the other nations on that list. Interestingly, most communist countries have shown a better ability to correct their issues than Venezuela and Argentina. Populist democratic socialism seems to be an unusually good way to keep a country economically dysfunctional in the long term, since communist regimes usually end up collapsing like they did in Eastern Europe or reforming as China and Vietnam have. Of course, when they don’t do either of these things — think North Korea and Cuba — their outcomes are worse than what you get with any form of populism even in the long term. 

Another data point is what has happened in the UK since Brexit. Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom and his coauthors found that by 2025, simulations based on the performance of comparable countries indicate that GDP per capita was 6% to 8% lower in the UK than it would have otherwise been, with investment down 12% to 18%. Firms that were most exposed to European markets were hardest hit. The UK was at about the tenth percentile for growth among the 33 other countries analyzed since the second quarter of 2016. The authors note that their paper likely underestimates harms, since the countries they compare the UK to were themselves hit by Brexit, making the one that actually left the EU look better by comparison. Brexit did not involve the victory of a populist leader, but it was a shock that caused the enactment of a major populist policy, one that had practically no support among traditional elites. The results look similar in kind to what we get when publics elect populists into office.

That’s the empirical evidence. What about theory? It’s much easier to come up with a plausible story of why populism would be bad than one showing why it would be good. Let’s say you believe that elites have made a lot of mistakes. They are self-dealing and corrupt, the media is lazy and has a Left-wing bias, and intellectuals write to impress one another and are cut off from reality. That can all be true. The question is why anyone would think that a leader whose only claim to power is a direct connection to a mass audience would be better. Or that the kinds of people such a leader should be expected to mobilize would be preferable to old elites.

Experts who abuse their authority to push a political agenda should certainly be held to account. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that gatekeepers are usually right. There is a general tendency to focus too much on the man-bites-dog cases, such as claims made by credentialed elites that trans women have no advantage over biological women in athletic competitions, or that the US is a white supremacist nation. Most of the time, media and academic elites are gatekeeping views that are clearly false and often harmful. Among these, to take a handful of examples of beliefs promoted or given a respectful hearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most successful podcast in the country, are the following ideas: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV doesn’t cause AIDS; there were advanced human civilizations that predated those accepted by archaeologists and historians; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; Covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination. 

You might oppose elites on completely reasonable grounds, but creating a political culture in which expertise is rejected as a general matter leads to a decline in intellectual and moral standards, as we’ve seen happen in populist movements across the world. 

Sometimes, the elites of a country truly are bad enough to justify grabbing onto almost any alternative. We have seen this in the case of Argentina. It is the one nation that has such a deep history of populism that populists themselves became the establishment. And we have seen the results: a country that, in the early 20th century, was as wealthy as major European powers is now no longer even in the category of advanced nations. So President Javier Milei comes along as a populist with a libertarian agenda, and is probably worth supporting. Even though he is surrounded by the kinds of scandals that dog other populist leaders, the combination of his sensible economic views and the degree to which Argentine elites have failed makes this an unusual case. Populism usually being bad doesn’t mean it is always a negative, and we have to exercise judgment in individual cases. 

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More typical than Milei is someone like Trump, whose critique of the establishment of his country is that they are too pro-market and globalist. While Milei slashes tariffs, Trump enacts new ones and goes beyond any previous president in taking ownership stakes in major corporations. Even if Trump enacts more sensible economic policies than his opponents on average, that has to be balanced against the costs of higher levels of corruption and institutional decay, along with generally opening up the government to cranks, from anti-vaxxers to nativists who believe that America belongs to white Christians alone.

Populist movements don’t simply reduce the power of elites, but raise the status and influence of a new group of people. Ten years ago, it would have been rational to criticize The New York Times for getting things wrong and to not worry too much about what conspiracy theorist personalities were saying. Today, the Joe Rogan Experience and other low-quality sources of information have influence comparable to that of the mainstream media. Independent journalist Nick Shirley’s video on Somalis in Minnesota ended up having major policy consequences, leading the Trump administration to open investigations and begin a crackdown on illegal immigrants in Minneapolis. This made little sense as a policy matter, since Shirley’s shoddy reporting had nothing to do with the immigration status of people living in that state, and few Somalis are here illegally. But this is the kind of policy-by-word association you get under populist rule.

The fact that alternative media and influencers are increasingly powerful means that you now have to apply a more critical eye to their beliefs and behaviors. Is US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. more or less important than the American Medical Association? The latter might still matter more in the long run. But their power levels are at least in the same ballpark. Same thing if you are weighing the virtues and flaws of The Wall Street Journal versus political commentator Tucker Carlson, or Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel versus the American Civil Liberties Union. Conservatives could once laugh off these comparisons, adopting the argument that the establishment had more power so its flaws are the only ones that matter — ironic, given conservatives’ hatred of these types of arguments when made by postmodernists. One can imagine them adopting the mantra: “misinformation is poor journalism plus power.” But we’re not in that world anymore, and sometimes populism achieves so much success that its figures must be judged by the same standards we once applied to organic elites. 

We have now arrived at that moment. And the historical record is clear. Whatever problems your country is facing, populist parties and candidates are rarely the answer.

This essay was adapted from the author’s book, Kakistocracy: Why populism ends in disaster, published July 7 by Broadside Books.

Donald Trump was made for America 250. The looks, the flair, the beguiling mix of arrogance and fun — the 47th president is his country in flabby flesh and bone. In his own clumsy way, Trump seems to grasp this too, nestling into the festivities like a hot dog in a bun. Liberal columnists might be right about its crassness, but cage fighting on the White House lawn feels as suited to this birthday as Johnny Cash and Kojak were to the bicentennial in 1976. “We’ve never reached so high,” as Trump proclaimed last month. “This is our heritage.” America’s heritage, perhaps, but what of Trump’s own?

We know, by now, of his Scottish mother. Yet even after a decade as ringmaster of the national circus, the President’s other side, his German side, is far less familiar. Unlike Joe Biden with his Irishness, Trump rarely mentions it. Though his paternal grandfather came to America from the Rhineland, his family long denied the Teutonic connection. Its most famous manifestation remains essentially negative, when liberal comedians revived the family surname to mockingly call him “Drumpf”. Still, while Trump might seem the most American of men, he, like his country today, couldn’t exist without its German ancestry, with the community so deeply rooted in the republic’s soul that the two are now inseparable.

Germans have been coming to the New World since before the US existed. Across the 17th century, as Europe tumbled into sectarian slaughter, thousands headed west; Mennonites and Amish gasping for free religious air. It’s later, though, that German America truly took root. In the 40 years from 1850, some five million Germans made the Atlantic crossing, and almost as soon as they arrived set about transforming their New World home. As one German-American activist pointedly claimed in 1874, his countrymen’s presence heralded the “improvement” of national life.

This confidence was partly economic. Unlike the Irish or Italians — destitute, illiterate, condemned to years in rat-hole tenements — German Americans were generally richer and more educated. Most were farmers, dodging the East Coast slums and traveling west with the republic, founding towns like Oldenburg, Indiana, and Dutzow, Missouri, and Germantowns almost everywhere. Like many of their countrymen, my wife’s family chose the rich soil of Wisconsin, but an ethnic map of the nation today shows a German plurality stretching across a dozen states and 1,000 heartland counties, an unbroken chain from Philadelphia to Oregon.

Their spread was largely welcomed. Linguistically, culturally and ethnically closer to their Anglo compatriots than the classic Ellis Islander, they were accepted far more readily. As early as 1858, Abraham Lincoln reassured Chicago Germans that they were “like the blood of the blood of the Founders”. To be sure, tensions existed. Prim WASP clergymen, sober in more ways than one, dreaded the rise of “lager bier”. Yet compared with the Irish (“foreign barbarians”), let alone the Chinese (“degraded and inferior”), German Americans were generally accepted into what Victorian Social Darwinists blithely called the “Anglo-Teutonic” race.

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It’s tempting, here, to talk of “assimilation” — but that isn’t quite right. German Americans were doubtless accepted faster than other settlers. Ironically, though, and especially given their wealth, numbers and vast geographic reach, that helped them shape habits without anyone really noticing. At Trump’s cage fight, after all, punters were offered that “All-American” staple: hot dogs. Like the hamburger, however, frankfurters first arrived in the cookbooks of German migrants.

It wasn’t just their food that morphed the mainstream. Almost uniquely among migrants, German Americans developed their own architectural vernacular, and Milwaukee would be their Florence. Wisconsin’s biggest city, around one-in-three residents were German natives in 1860. They came — why else? — to brew. Ice from the Milwaukee River kept their lager cool, while docks on Lake Michigan made it easy to export. Brands like Pabst and Miller rapidly turned Milwaukee into “Brew City” and its streetscape into the most Teutonic in America. Even now, after years of deindustrialization, Milwaukee’s churches look German, and its downtown offices too, and the mansions sigh for Saxony. The city hall, finished in 1895, might have lumbered to the Midwest from Hamburg, its square squat tower, complete with beer-stein sculptures, primed for a post-binge brawl.

This urban landscape has become America’s too. The gables, the timbering, the sharp roofs and curved arches — you can find them on main streets everywhere, not just in Fredericksburg, Texas, or Over-the-Rhine, Ohio, but in regions that received far smaller German flows. Then there’s how these places feel. Take Von Trier, a historic beer hall not far from Milwaukee city hall. As you enter, you’ll hear the growl of conversation, and the numbing clunk of glasses. Waitresses bustle past, carrying beer jugs and half-eaten plates of pretzels. The atmosphere is homely, convivial, a place to drink but also eat and talk, distinct from both brandy-soaked colonial taverns and the modern English pub. No, Von Trier is impeccably Teutonic — just like almost every bar in America.

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This boldness was matched elsewhere. If some Italians rejected the strictures of mainstream America — the mafia was called cosa nostra (“our thing”) precisely to obscure it — Germans instead shaped New World morals to their taste. “May German diligence, steadfastness, and loyalty continue to be the hallmarks of the German element in the United States”, said one pamphlet from 1899, “and imprint themselves ever more indelibly upon the American national character!”

Indeed, probably the most enduring German contribution is how they balanced work and play. Until the mid-19th century, Anglo-America largely followed the Puritan Sabbath, with its devotion to family and faith. Germans, whether Catholic or Lutheran, were more relaxed. They built bandstands and picnic grounds everywhere they went, and Milwaukee became known as the “German Athens” for its proliferation of social clubs. Gambling was also popular. My in-laws have spent hours trying to teach me Sheepshead, a bewildering Bavarian card game now played wherever Wisconsinites meet. Taken together, anyway, the German Sonntagsspaziergang (“Sunday outing”) soon became an American staple — and this helped inform what the good life truly meant. To quote James Truslow Adams, the historian who in 1931 coined the phrase “American Dream”, “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone”. That fullness would hardly have been possible without the distinctly German, distinctly American, waltz between toil and joy.

Trump himself was surely shaped by these ideas. Whatever his actual business acumen, he’s clearly proud of his success, once crowing that he’d “never lost” in life. A lifetime of dealmaking was never for the glory of God: but for pleasures of the flesh. Those private jets and endless rounds of golf are at bottom aspirational, with the President promising his voters that “you’re not gonna know where to spend all that money”. It hasn’t quite turned out that way — but in his blend of labor, leisure and over-weaning pride, Trump is as German American as an Independence Day hot dog.

That raises an obvious question: if even the commander-in-chief was forged by German America, why is he indifferent to his background? There’s an equally obvious answer: two world wars and a torrent of anti-German feeling. Things were particularly hysterical when America fought the Kaiser from 1917. Germans were spat at in the street and their dachshunds pelted with rocks. Books were banned, plays pulled, and sauerkraut rechristened “liberty cabbage”. The Second World War saw less trouble, but German Americans were nonetheless prodded into quiet. Schools closed and presses shuttered and several Germantowns changed their names. Surnames also changed, from Müller to Miller, Schmidt to Smith. Drumpf to Trump, too, with Donald’s landlord father pretending he was Swedish to avoid awkwardness with Jewish tenants.

If this implies the end of German America was merely a function of 20th-century disasters, I’d suggest a more subtle dynamic. Closeness to the Anglo, after all, is what gave the Germans strength. But when the moment came, that same closeness ensured assimilation was both rapid and near total — far more total than groups that struggled. According to the 2020 census, some 45 million citizens claim German heritage, among white Americans second only to English. Where, though, is German America today? Where is its Rocky, its Seinfeld, even its Big Fat Greek Wedding? Where are its songs, its stories? Where, come to that, are its politicians? Forget Biden’s plastic Irishness: Barack Obama has half-seriously adopted the Emerald Isle too, while everyone from Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders exploits their ethnic backgrounds for political ends. Not so Trump, who echoed the Swedish story as late as 2016, and whose German-American Day comments feel like an afterthought, focusing more on defense spending than any ancestral affection.

Yet to borrow Wren’s epitaph, if you seek German America, simply look around you. In fundamental ways, the modern United States was made by red-faced Rhenish farmers and hard-nosed Saxon brewers. And whatever the undoubted achievements of other migrant groups, in movies, music or sport, their self-conscious othering means their mores are less likely to spread. Think again of food. Unlike the trusty hot dog, bagels, gyros and pizza retain a vaguely hyphenated air, something true of some Americans themselves. Reacting, perhaps, to a legacy of WASP stereotyping, Larry David still plays up his neurosis, while Martin Scorsese makes mob flicks five decades from his first. The point of these clichés isn’t their veracity — but that they guarantee a certain distance from the American mainstream, limiting their ability to shape the deeper, embedded culture.

This matters, not least in appreciating the contours of American life over recent decades. The relative cultural silence of heartland America — those flyover counties where Germans most gathered — doesn’t preclude power. Trump’s rise since 2016 certainly suggests as much, even before you recall that the country will down the equivalent of 22 Reflecting Pools of (mostly) “lager beer” this 4 July. The same principles also offer lessons for the future. It’s tempting, particularly on the Right, to see the spread of new music or food as outriders of more thoroughgoing shifts in American life. But using German America and its European cousins as a guide suggests this link is far from straightforward. It’s certainly true that 21st-century immigration will sway the national experience. Yet just as The Godfather didn’t fundamentally alter the tenor of the American Dream, it’s unlikely that Yemeni coffee or Hispanic rap will either.

The opposite, in a sense, is true as well. Think again to those early German settlers. The Amish still live much like their bearded forebears, planting and praying in the Pennsylvania soil. Yet if they, almost uniquely among German Americans, preserve their tongue and customs, centuries in the New World have left few indelible traces. In other words, and as the mass of German migrants belatedly learned, the ultimate mark of influence is to be drowned in the American tide.

In the summer of 1776, just a few weeks after the Thirteen Colonies had declared their independence, George Washington was in New York, preparing for the first and biggest fight of the Revolutionary War. His army was about to face more than 30,000 British troops — the largest enemy fleet ever to reach American shores. He inspected fortifications, monitored British movements on Staten Island, and rallied his men. But, on 19 August, as New York braced itself for battle, Washington put aside his military maps and turned his attention to Mount Vernon, his plantation in Virginia.

That evening, he wrote a long letter to his estate manager, instructing him to design a new garden filled with trees and shrubs from the American forest. With the chaos of cannons and blood looming, the commander-in-chief thought of soaring white pines and tulip trees, alabaster dogwood and stately red cedars. Only American native species should be used, he insisted. As the young nation faced its first military confrontation in the name of liberty, Washington decided that Mount Vernon was to be an American garden where English trees were not allowed to claw their roots in the soil. It was Washington’s horticultural declaration of independence.

This week, the United States celebrates its 250th birthday. There will be flyovers, airshows, historical re-enactments, military parades, concerts, exhibitions and street parties. The Founding Fathers will be quoted, misinterpreted and used for political gain — as they have been for decades. Yet amid the celebrations, there is a very important aspect of these men, in particular the first four presidents, that has largely been forgotten: their love for the natural world.

As Washington’s letter so vividly implies, he grasped the importance of nature for the country’s identity and future. Certainly not everything the Founders did was great — not least given their fields and gardens were tended and cultivated by enslaved workers — but if American conservatives wish to invoke their writings and legacy, they might benefit from taking a broader view of their beliefs.

The Founding Fathers’ vegetable plots, ornamental plants, landscapes and forests played a crucial role in America’s struggle for national identity. Golden cornfields and endless rows of cotton became symbols of America’s economic independence from Britain; towering trees became a reflection of a strong and vigorous nation; native species were imbued with patriotism and proudly planted in gardens. Even political language drew on the natural world: with the Tree of Liberty the most potent example. Indeed, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison all agreed that agriculture should be the foundation of the new republic. In 1787, Jefferson wrote that “our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural”, while Washington dreamed of an agrarian society where “our Swords and Spears have given place to the plough share and pruning hook”. Madison thought agriculture the “surest basis of our national happiness, dignity and independence”, quipping that they were “worshippers of Ceres”, the Roman goddess of agriculture.

These were not abstract ideas; the Founders eagerly experimented with crop rotation, soil improvement and new farming methods. Jefferson famously designed the mold board of a plow and with the help of his enslaved workers grew 125 different varieties of fruit trees and 330 varieties of vegetables and herbs, constantly testing new varieties. “The greatest service which can be rendered any country,” he wrote, “is to add an useful plant to its culture.” And today it is almost unimaginable that Washington refused a third presidential term because he wished to return to his fields and gardens. Most Americans expected him to remain in office for life. Instead, he demurred, longing for Mount Vernon’s fields and gardens. Washington was also the first to collect farm dung in a specifically designed building. They were all, in fact, obsessed with manure. Adams experimented extensively, mixing dung with mud, lime and seaweed — and when he was the American minister in London, he even visited a manure heap on the outskirts of the city. While other diplomats rushed powdered and bejeweled through the corridors of St James’s Palace, Adams carefully poked through the stinking pile and clearly didn’t mind the muck on his hands. He noted its ingredients, and triumphantly concluded that it was “not equal to mine”.

To modern readers, this might seem an odd obsession. But it was key to a larger political vision. While agriculture provided the livelihood for most Americans, the Founding Fathers also believed that independent farmers with small self-sufficient farms would be the guardians of liberty. Seemingly mundane tasks such as collecting manure, planting seeds, plowing and improving soils were therefore political acts and elemental parts of nation-building. The more prosperous farmers there were, Madison argued, “the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself”.

But there was a geopolitical element to their obsession with nature, too — reaching beyond their shores and freighted with the idea of national identity. Jefferson, in particular, was motivated by this as he took umbrage against what was known as the “degeneracy theory”. Most famously advanced by the French naturalist Comte du Buffon, this theory posited that the New World was inferior to the Old World: American plants, animals and even people were believed to be smaller, weaker and less vigorous than their European counterparts.

They all “shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky & unprolific land”, Buffon claimed. As these theories spread, the natural world of the United States became a metaphor for its political and cultural significance — or insignificance — depending on your viewpoint. Jefferson, naturally, was irked. And if size was Buffon’s measure of superiority, then Jefferson reasoned he only needed to prove that everything was larger and stronger in the New World. He immersed himself in natural history books, collected measurements of American wildlife, and asked correspondents across the country to provide data on the largest specimens they could find.

As part of his campaign to debunk the idea of American degeneracy, he arrived in Paris, in 1784, bearing an “uncommonly large panther skin” in his luggage. He likewise boasted to Buffon that the Scandinavian reindeer “could walk under the belly of our moose” and eventually arranged for an enormous moose from Vermont to be shipped across the Atlantic to prove his point. America’s flora and fauna were enlisted in a patriotic campaign to demonstrate the strength of the republic. Later, as president, Jefferson even briefly kept two live grizzly bears on the grounds of the White House. Under the banner of “the-bigger-the-better”, Jefferson used the size of animals and trees to prove his point — perhaps the one measure of greatness that President Trump would agree with. Yet where Jefferson sought grandeur in forests, wildlife and landscapes, Trump prefers monumental architecture, gold leaf and spectacle.

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Following the end of the War of Independence, in 1783, the former colonies had to mature from being a war alliance to being a united nation. The Constitution bound them together politically and legally, but nature provided a transcendent feeling of nationhood, a shared sense of belonging. What previous generations had regarded as a hostile wilderness gradually became an object of national pride. The vast forests, expansive rivers and dramatic mountains became expressions of a singularly American character. The continent’s scale suggested strength and possibility; its wildness was the embodiment of a nation that had freed itself from the shackles of tyranny. Landscape had a political value. And in 1791, Jefferson asked the artist John Trumbull to paint Virginia’s Natural Bridge, so that he could present “to the world this singular landscape, which otherwise some bungling European will misrepresent”.

The return of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark from their expedition across the continent to the Pacific coast in 1806 reinforced these ideas. Primeval forests, vast plains, spectacular waterfalls — all became symbols of national greatness. Americans were convinced that the Rockies were more commanding than the Alps and that the Potomac rivaled the Rhine. John Adams dismissed the Thames as “but a rivulet” compared with the majestic Hudson, while Abigail Adams believed that nature possessed “greater magnificence and sublimity in America than in any part of Europe”.

Besides, America’s landscapes were untainted by centuries of monarchy and despotism. Where Europe’s antiquity became associated with tyranny and corruption, the American wilderness represented freedom and renewal. Why should they admire “the temples which Roman robbers have reared”, wrote the poet Charles Fenno Hoffman, when America’s nature was untouched by the blood of tyrants?  This connection between patriotism and nature remains visible in America’s national mythology. The nation’s hearts are filled with pride as they sing the songs of their beloved landscapes. As “America the Beautiful” describes it: the “amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!” Or “From the mountains, to the prairies, / To the oceans, white with foam”, in “God Bless America”.

It is ironic, then, that the Trump administration, a fervent advocate of bigger-is-better politics, is introducing environmental policies which include major rollbacks of federal regulations, withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and proposed draconian cuts to the National Park Service. While Republicans frequently refer to the Founders in defense of limited government or gun control, they rarely acknowledge that one of them is also the forgotten father of American environmentalism: James Madison. In 1818, Madison delivered a widely published speech to the Albemarle Agricultural Society, which places him at the vanguard of American forest and soil conservation. In this speech, Madison warned about the destructive effect of deforestation and large-scale tobacco cultivation on the environment, challenging the assumption that nature “can be made subservient to the use of man”. At Montpelier, his plantation in Virginia, he even protected a part of the woodlands: the first American politician to preserve a forest.

Though Madison’s speech is largely forgotten today, it deserves recognition as one of the founding documents of the United States. It offers a reminder, as America celebrates its 250th birthday, that the Founders’ vision extended beyond political institutions and the Constitution. They believed that the republic depended not only on laws and liberty — but also on healthy soils, productive farms, thriving forests, and a respect for the natural world. Jefferson held this deeply, expressing it in a letter to Madison in 1789. “The earth,” he wrote, “belongs in usufruct to the living”. No generation possesses the right to exhaust or permanently diminish what it has inherited, and each receives the Earth from its predecessors and holds it in trust for those who follow. “The dead have neither powers nor rights over it”, Jefferson explained, “the earth belongs to each of these generations, during its course, fully, and in their own right. The 2d. generation receives it clear of the debts and incumberances [sic] of the 1st. the 3d of the 2d. and so on.” It is an idea that resonates as strongly today as it did at the founding of the republic, whatever the sitting president might claim.

Next month, Americans mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence from the British Empire. Although the present US Constitution was written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and first implemented in 1789, during the anniversary celebrations this summer we can expect to hear widespread encomia to the genius of the Constitution as well as of the eloquence of Thomas Jefferson’s preamble to the declaration.

Don’t believe it. While it was a milestone for its era, the US Constitution is deeply flawed. The most successful contemporary democracies have learned from America’s mistakes in designing their own, more recent national constitutions. Pious American patriots sometimes say that “the Founders built better than they knew.” In reality, the Founders botched the job.

Consider two current controversies, over President Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House to build an official ballroom; and the Supreme Court’s involvement in partisan congressional redistricting in Virginia. In a country with a well-written constitution, neither would be a subject of controversy, because lines of authority would be well-delineated and unambiguous.

Can a president of the United States, a temporary occupant of the executive mansion, command upon a whim that much of it be demolished and rebuilt, on the basis of a design he alone has approved, with private, rather than public, funding? Surely, this is the kind of technical question that a well-written constitution would clarify. Congress authorized and funded the last extensive renovation of the White House under President Harry Truman, and under laws passed by Congress, major renovations are supposed to be reviewed and authorized in advance by the National Capital Planning Commission, or NCPC, and other agencies.

But Trump ordered the demolition of much of the White House before he sought approval from the NCPC, which he obtained only later, after a federal judge intervened to block construction and after he had stacked the commission with loyal appointees. The attempt of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress to belatedly fund the ongoing destruction has run afoul of parliamentary rules that govern what can be included in a funding bill under the procedure of budget reconciliation.

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Either the Constitution allows a current president to unilaterally reshape the buildings and landscape of Washington, DC, on his own authority — or it doesn’t. If Trump does have the constitutional authority to destroy a third of the White House on his own initiative, can a future President Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris demolish the Washington Monument and replace it?

Progressive Democrats as well as Right-wing Republicans make extreme claims about the location of authority under the Constitution — when it suits them. After Virginian voters, in a referendum on April 21, approved a plan by Virginia Democrats to gerrymander or rig congressional districts to lock in a Democratic majority in the state’s delegation to the US House of Representatives, the state’s high court struck down the measure as illegal because it didn’t follow proper procedures to amend the state constitution. The federal Supreme Court unanimously refused to review and possibly overturn the Virginia state supreme court’s decision.

Each of these cases illustrates a major design defect of the American federal constitution: the separation of powers, in the case of the White House ballroom; and America’s unique system of federalism, in the case of the Virginia gerrymandering case.

The Founders, bless their hearts, believed in the quaint 18th-century theory that safeguarding democracy and civil liberty required that executive, legislative, and judicial powers be allocated to different, independent, co-equal government branches. The theory was mistaken. We know it was mistaken because Britain and the other major English-speaking countries — Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — all have parliamentary systems, in which executive powers are wielded by the prime minister, a member of the legislature, with the British monarch serving as a ceremonial figurehead.

If the Founders had been right about the separation of powers, then Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand should be undemocratic, illiberal regimes dominated by an all-powerful legislative dictatorship. Indeed, in defiance of the theory of the American founding, most other democracies in the world today have parliamentary or hybrid systems, rather than American-style presidential systems based on the separation of powers. The Founders, though undoubtedly great practical statesmen, were wrong on this fundamental point.

To make matters worse, as the political scientist Juan Linz argued, liberty and democracy tend to be in greater danger in presidential systems, rather than in parliamentary systems. The reason is that the separately elected president can claim equal authority with the legislature, and in a constitutional deadlock, he or she is more likely to command the loyalty of the armed forces and internal security services. Conversely, the only way that a legislature in a presidential system can remove an independently elected president is impeachment.

In a parliamentary system, prime ministers can fall from power when their parliamentary party or coalition loses the majority. And between elections, they can be dumped by their fellow legislators, with a vote of no confidence or similar measure, whereupon they once again become mere ordinary members of parliament, if they do not resign from politics. Just ask Keir Starmer. This model renders impeachments of prime ministers unnecessary.

The separation of powers in presidential systems, then, is more likely to cause breakdowns of democracy than to prevent them. On Jan. 6, 2021, after Trump falsely claimed that the election had been stolen by Joe Biden, MAGA supporters seeking to thwart the ratification of the Electoral College results ransacked the US Capitol and forced members of Congress to flee to safety. On Jan. 8, 2023, after another Right-wing populist, Jair Bolsonaro, lost the presidency of Brazil to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, supporters of Bolsonaro broke into and damaged the Brazilian presidential palace, the legislative chambers, and the high court, in the part of the capital of Brasilia known as — what else? — the Plaza of the Three Powers.

In contrast, when the party of another right-wing Populist, Viktor Orbán, was reduced to a minority in the Hungarian parliament on April 10 of this year, Orban graciously resigned as prime minister. In Hungary’s parliamentary system, he had no alternative. He could not claim to be the sole tribune of the Hungarian people, as he had never been directly elected, only chosen by his party when it held a legislative majority.

To be sure, there have been prime ministers who have become dictators in effect, like India’s Indira Gandhi, who ruled by authoritarian methods during the 21-month emergency of 1975-1977. But in 1977, Gandhi lost her own seat in parliament in an electoral backlash only to be re-elected and serve as prime minister again from 1980 to 1984.

In Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister from 2003 to 2014, was able to deepen his authoritarian rule only after he became president under a new Turkish constitution that converted Turkey’s parliamentary system to a presidential system.  Thanks, American Founders!

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American-style presidentialism, then, in other countries as well as the United States, encourages power grabs by chief executives, checked only by impeachments by the legislature and judicial rulings that a president might ignore (“John Marshall has made his decision,” as Andrew Jackson famously said when the high court displeased him, “now let him enforce it!”).

While the separation of powers is a constitutional crisis waiting to happen, the federal system inherited from America’s wise and enlightened Founders is simply a mess. Under the constitution of 1787, the authority of the states and their citizens is supposed to be protected from the federal government by two methods — a clear division of authority between state and federal governments, and the representation of the states as distinct corporate bodies, each with two Senators who initially were chosen by state legislatures. Since the founding, both of these parts of the American constitution have broken down.

Instead of a clear-cut allocation of different responsibilities to state and federal governments in a two-layer cake, we have something like a Streusel swirl, in which federal, state, and local authorities in particular areas are blended and intertwined. Much of the blending is the result of federal funding of state and local programs, including hybrid federal-state programs like Medicaid. The federal Department of Transportation, for example, pays in part for local bike trails and pedestrian walkways, in addition to federal interstate highways.

The reason is simple. When advocates for a policy can’t win at the level of the city council or state legislature, they often find allies in Congress to fund or mandate their favored program, federalism be damned. Interest groups on the Right as well the Left are willing to shop among levels of government until they find one that will do what they want. In the name of states’ rights, anti-abortion conservatives demanded that the Supreme Court return abortion policy to the states, and succeeded when  the Court repealed Roe v. Wade in 2022. Meanwhile, pressured by deep-pocketed tech investors, the Trump administration has sought a federal ban on state regulation of AI. When it comes to federalism in the United States, the working theory of both parties and all factions is that whatever level of government they and their allies control has the authority to carry out the policy they want.

The second protection for the states built into the US Constitution — the election of two senators from every state — lost its purpose long ago. Originally, US senators were elected by state legislatures, on the theory that they represented states as political entities. But the 17th Amendment in 1913 wrecked the structure by requiring that US senators, like representatives, be elected directly by citizens.

But while congressional districts that send representatives to the House are revised after every census, reflecting population growth and sometimes partisan gerrymandering, the rule that each state has two senators, regardless of its population, is part of America’s defective constitution and can’t be altered. The result is that the Senate is the most grotesquely malapportioned legislative chamber in any country in the world. A voter in Wyoming, which has around 590,000 residents, has 66 times the political influence in the Senate as California, with its 39 million residents. The genius of the American constitution!

Would foreign leaders drafting a democratic constitution today in any country think, “Let’s copy the US Constitution and create a bicameral system in which the population ratios in one branch of the legislature can be as uneven as 66 to one”? Would a constitutional convention in a newly democratic Iran or China choose a presidential system in which an independently elected president, unchecked by the legislature, could plunge the country into a foreign war or tear down or build national monuments in the national capital with private money and without legislative authorization? No, they wouldn’t. Rational founders in the 21st century would conclude that democratic stability and continuity are likely to be more secure under a parliamentary regime than in an American-style presidential system.

Madison, Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, and the other members of the Constitutional convention of 1787 were patriotic, brave, well-informed, thoughtful, and public-spirited. These were unquestionably great men. Unfortunately, in looking for models for self-government on a national scale, they only had the examples of ancient, medieval, and modern city-states, leagues, and the proto-parliamentary British monarchy. With the few precedents at their disposal, and given the need to compromise to hold the shaky union together, the drafters of the US Constitution did the best they could at the time. But they screwed up. It’s time that Americans admit it.

When the latest but probably not last Iran war started on 28 February 2026, the first victims, for once, were not innocent bystanders but rather Iran’s rulers and executioners, the supreme dictator Ali Khamenei; the Chief of the General Staff and head of Iran’s armed forces, General Abdolrahim Mousavi; the Minister of Defense, Aziz Nasirzadeh; the head of military research & development, Hossein Jabal Amelian; his predecessor Brigadier General Reza Mozaffari Nia, Esmail Khatib, the Minister of Intelligence; his deputy for Israel affairs, Yahya Hosseini Panjaki; some other officials, and also the private citizen Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Ali Khamenei but utterly unqualified for the emphatically non-hereditary supreme leader position. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen nor heard since the bombing, and is certainly mutilated if still alive.

Iran’s furious response to this mass decapitation was the launch of ballistic missiles — not just against Israel and US bases in the region but also against mere bystanders. Of the 1,471 launched missiles from the start on 28 February until 20 April, some 650 were aimed at Israel, 563 landed in the territory of the United Arab Emirates that has long helped Iran’s wrecked economy, 265 landed in Kuwait, where some US aircraft are based but which has always aided Iran, 215 attacked Qatar, which shares its vast natural gas field with Iran, a country that Qatar has never harmed, 194 struck Bahrain, the main regional base of the US Navy, and 135 were aimed at Saudi Arabia, in spite of its complete neutrality.

Iran’s very primitive missiles have been much less lethal than the German V2s of 1944 — some 3,225 of which killed more than 7,000 people in England and Belgium — but with their huge mass of metal they inflicted much property damage even if their warheads did not explode. The older and more abundant Kheibar Shekan weighs 17 metric tons with its 750kg warhead, the newer and larger Khorramshahr weighs close to 20 tons and delivers multiple warheads weighing up to 1,500kg.

What Iran achieved with its 650 missiles aimed at Israel was to damage many buildings and kill 27 civilians and one off-duty IDF soldier, though some 3,000 more were injured across the country, some of them seriously.

While Iran attacked civilians with its very inaccurate missiles, both the US and Israel relied on extreme precision to destroy underground missile assembly plants, detected missile launchers, rocket fuel depots and mixing plants. This entire subterranean industry was the result of many years of very high spending, largely funded by the diversion of the funds urgently needed to provide water supplies for Iran’s second city Mashad, historic Yazd and other cities but for Tehran above all, which may even have to be evacuated, according to Iran’s only elected leader, president Masoud Pezeshkian.

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The dam-building and water supply budgets were not enough, so the nation-wide electrical generation funds were also diverted to the Revolutionary Guards’ missile industries, and also the funding needed to pipe the country’s unlimited natural gas supplies to every city. As a result, last winter and into March when the war started, horribly polluting mazout, residual oil, had to be burned to keep Tehran’s people from freezing, because neither electrical nor gas heating was sufficient in the winter months, even with global warming.

The regime was thus on the edge of systemic failure on the eve of the war, but has now been saved by the way the war was fought — and not fought. The mass decapitation of 28 February allowed surviving Revolutionary Guards officers to take over in Tehran, very much as the SS did in Berlin after Hitler’s death on 30 April 1945, eagerly killing anyone who wanted to surrender until Russian troops arrived two days later.

But this time no troops were approaching Tehran, truly mission impossible because of geography alone if nothing else. Nobody in his right mind could contemplate an advance over 800 miles of desert and mountains on the only road from the Bandar Abbas on the Gulf coast to Tehran, with its 13 million people. If only a tenth still support the regime — that many are salaried in the army, police, part-time militia, Revolutionary Guards and the Bonyad foundations that own much of the economy — it would be enough to start a long season of urban warfare.

No such invasion plan had even been suggested by anyone, so there was no justification for the pre-emptive “boots on the ground” hysteria loudly manifest from isolationist backwaters and White House Vice Presidential staffers alike. As it turned out, however, the hysteria generated by wholly imaginary invasion plans had very real consequences, which in fact determined the outcome of the war till this day.

To understand how fears over a non-event brought about a veritable defeat, one must return to the other military action that occurred just before the start of the bombing, on 28 February. This already seems a long time ago, because everybody in the White House would have laughed at the suggestion that President Trump would ever come to terms with the Revolutionary Guards. Some 3,000 paratroopers of the rapid-response force of the 82 airborne division were sent to the Gulf, to join the 5,000 Marines of the 11th and 31st Marine expeditionary units already there.

They were more than enough to counter the entirely predictable — and predicted — Revolutionary Guard response to the bombing, which was to try to stop the flow of tankers and bulk carriers delivering crude oil, liquefied natural gas and fertilizer down the narrow seaways in the mostly shallow Persian Gulf from Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and — partly — from Saudi Arabia, which can send half its oil by pipeline to the Red Sea, and the United Arab Emirates, which has a pipeline to the Indian ocean for half its oil.

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The Revolutionary Guards and Iran’s navy could not attack the tankers and bulk carriers with their warships, armed motorboats or submarines, all of which were efficiently sunk soon after the bombing started. But they could endanger navigation by dropping sea mines from any traditional dhow or fishing vessel, and even by attacking passing tankers with their anti-tank missiles. That would be enough to cause insurance companies to suspend their coverage, thereby stopping Persian Gulf supplies to the world economy.

That is where the airborne troops and Marines could be highly effective. With ample helicopter transport to take up positions for hours or days on uninhabited Persian Gulf islands and deserted coastal tracts to secure nearby navigable channels, and with strong tactical air support only minutes away to minimize combat risks, they were fully capable of defeating any interfering enemy forces.

By sending them into action, the US could have denied any oil shipments from Iran’s oil terminal at Kharg Island and from lesser terminals at Qeshm and Jask on the Indian Ocean beyond the Gulf, thus cutting off most of Iran’s oil export revenues. At the same time, those ground and air forces could minimize any interference with the tankers and fertilizer bulk carriers transiting from Iraq, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia into the Indian Ocean, minimizing the war’s impact on global commodity markets.

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu had asked only for assured resupplies of aerial munitions when it came to the pre-emptive bombing of Iran’s ballistic missiles, hoping to avoid the danger of an all-out attack that could overwhelm Israel’s defenses. He was surprised and pleased by Trump’s decision to join in and take command of the offensive. He did not pause to consider the possibility that he was forming an alliance with a weaker power, which would let him down.

By then, 28 February 2026, a total of 1,150 Israeli soldiers and local security officers had been killed since the war started on October 7, 2023, the equivalent of 39,100 dead US soldiers given the 1:34 population ratio.

Netanyahu, who was widely unpopular even before the war, was politically unaffected by the loss of more than 1,000 soldiers, but 1,150 killed in action — let alone 39,100 — would have quickly ended the Trump presidency via a fast impeachment with enough Republican votes, among vast coast-to coast mass protests. In other words, Netanyahu’s exclusive reliance on his personal dialogues with Trump, which left Israel’s Foreign Ministry and Intelligence a mere bystander, blinded him to the great change that had transformed the United States into a post-heroic country, no more willing to engage in combat than our NATO allies. Nor is it a political or even a cultural transformation that might be undone by strong leadership, but rather the unavoidable consequence of the collapse in female fertility, now down to 1.6. It means that very few American families have two or more boys, such that one might fall in combat without the family’s extinction. Almost every US combatant is now a “Private Ryan”.

That is why a prudent opposition to more wars in pursuit of quixotic aims — such as the 2003 Iraq war that I testified against before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seeing no chance of bringing democracy to Baghdad, and the Afghan war to modernize unwilling populations — has been transformed into a “boots on the ground” psychosis. Also present within the White House, it equates small-scale and short-lived commando actions with another endless war, nullifying the tremendous strength of US air power, allowing the Revolutionary Guards to win with very few fighters and very few small boats.

So this war fought by an irresolute President has not only allowed America’s worst enemies to come out the winners in spite of their utterly disastrous national policies, primitive missile engineering and clumsy military operations, but has also degraded US military strength down to European levels, because troops that cannot be risked in combat even for great gains are of little military value.

If the essence of MAGA could be distilled into a single evening, then last night’s UFC Freedom 250 at the White House would be it. Part military parade, part sporting spectacle and part internet fever dream, the MMA fights on the South Lawn marked both America’s 250th birthday and Donald Trump’s 80th. Here, as tens of thousands of Trump supporters descended on DC, was the clearest sign yet of red America stamping its authority in the country’s bluest enclave. Six years ago, on January 6, they had come uninvited to one of the cathedrals of American democracy. Now, they were here by invitation of the state itself.

For those who weren’t offered a ringside seat alongside Trump and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) chief executive, Dana White, there was always the Ellipse: a 52-acre park just south of the White House, to watch the action on giant screens. Passing vendors hawking Trump t-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as “Suck It Up, Buttercup” and “It’s No Mistake, Snowflake”, I shuffled through concentric circles of security to enter the promised land. Moments after walking in, a nearby fan put his friend in a chokehold. The friend’s protestations about losing consciousness went unnoticed until a DEA agent was forced to intervene. “Save it for later,” he warned them.

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As I walked around the park, it felt like I had stumbled into a MAGA beauty pageant: out were the traditional red MAGA caps (although there were still a few), in were t-shirts reading “red, white and badass” and “so long, autopen Joe”. Others were decked out in Freedom 250 merch, the Trump-aligned group tasked with organizing patriotic celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday. Nearly everyone I spoke to had flown in for the event, from states as far as Oklahoma, Ohio, and Arizona, to catch a glimpse of their favorite fighters — and favorite president.

The fights did not begin until after 8pm, leaving fans to entertain themselves for a few hours. Some queued to test their strength on a punch machine, placing bets on who would land the biggest score. Others climbed into a makeshift ring for photographs or played commentator from behind a mock broadcast desk. But most were content to mill about near the jumbo screens, watching soldiers from different divisions wrestle each other inside the octagon until the real fights began.

It was a surreal scene, not least because the park was topped-and-tailed by two of the nation’s most recognizable landmarks. At one end stood the Washington Monument. At the other loomed the star-spangled “Claw” — a 92-foot-tall, 154-foot-wide, 600-ton spider-like structure through which the White House was just visible in the distance. Built at a reported cost of $60 million and involving seven federal agencies and more than 700 subcontractors, the Claw would serve as the home of the first live professional sporting event ever staged at the White House.

Was it a partisan political event too? No, insisted White in the weeks leading up to the event, declaring that UFC Freedom 250 would be a celebration of all things American. And what better way to mark the occasion than with fighters vomiting by the Ellipse, motorbikers backflipping in front of the White House, and a bald eagle soaring over the heads of thousands of red-blooded, fight-loving patriots?

Such scenes may not have been what John Adams and Benjamin Franklin envisioned when they signed the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago. Nor is it likely that William Howard Taft imagined his newly built Oval Office would one day serve as the staging area for a UFC walkout onto the White House South Lawn. To liberals, the event was a gaudy symptom of a late-stage idiocracy. To conservatives, it was a triumphant showing of America’s (and by extension, MAGA’s) cultural might.

Occasionally, Trump chants rippled through the crowd, with one group singing happy birthday to the President. One man, wearing a red MAGA hat and a t-shirt reading “Freedom in the front, party in the back” told me that only Trump would be able to put on an event like this. “We owe him, man,” he said. “Literally no other president would put on a show like this.” Unprompted, he proceeded to chug his beer, most of which went down his shirt, before screaming: “Trump 2028 and beyond! WOO!”

If there were any Democrats in our midst, they were certainly not forthcoming about it. This was no place for a bien-pensant liberal. After all, the event happened at the President’s direction, outside his official residence, and on his birthday. Having been met with a chorus of boos at last week’s Knicks game in New York, he was now back on friendlier ground, with the loudest cheers of the night erupting as he emerged from the White House.

As he walked out of the Oval Office alongside White, the President initially appeared rather wan. His movements were slow and his facial expression barely changed. But it soon became clear that this was an affectation: this was the emperor’s show, and it was unbecoming to display any emotion to the masses. Stepping out onto the South Portico, he stood for a moment to soak in the crowd’s adulation before saluting skyward as military planes flew above.

For all that this event was a show of Trumpian grandeur, there was also something unmistakably American about it. Loud, self-assured, and impossible to ignore, it read as a global hegemon flexing its cultural muscle, while corporate America staged its own parallel spectacle around the “Claw”: red, white and blue lights cutting into the night sky, giant Ram trucks suspended overhead, and a Meta booth promoting its new AI glasses. Never guilty of letting a good business opportunity go to waste, the Trump Organization also commemorated the event with “Freedom 250”-themed silver and gold coins featuring Trump’s face. Some of the coins cost as much as  $12,000. For better or worse, it was difficult to imagine any other country staging something quite like it.

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By James Billot

This was my first UFC event. Until now, my relationship with “extreme” sports had rarely gone further than a Christmas skate at Central Park. But I was enthralled by the world I had just entered into. Over the course of the evening, I learned that there were eight different ways to choke an opponent into submission, and 12 different ways to break their arm. “It’s all about avoiding lay and pray,” Nick Willey, a former MMA fighter who now competes as a bareknuckle boxer, advised me. “If you get grappled down to the ground, you’re in big trouble.”

The fights themselves were thrilling, with the biggest upset of the night coming shortly after midnight. American Justin Gaethje stunned Ilia Topuria in a brutal 20-minute contest that left the champion’s face looking like a half-deflated football. Gaethje entered the bout as a heavy underdog, only to overwhelm Topuria with a relentless barrage of punches and leg kicks, claiming the lightweight belt in the process. “Never fuck with a real American!” screamed a nearby fan, pumping his fist into the air in triumph.

In keeping with the other fighters, Gaethje then climbed out of the octagon to shake the hand of the President, who commended the fighter on an excellent bout. The scene had an air of a modern-day Coliseum, with the crowd’s roar subsiding into a kind of ritual hush after the violence properly dispensed. Now, Trump could proceed to his next engagement as a satisfied octogenarian, boarding a flight to Geneva to finalize America’s deal with Iran.

In some ways, UFC Freedom 250 represented the worst aspects of American culture: the snobbery of the liberals who sniped from afar, the crassness of the MAGA movement, the shameless commercialism of US business, and the infiltration of politics into all corners of everyday life. Every rational instinct told me the event was silly, ludicrous, and absurd.

But here’s my confession: I enjoyed every minute of it. Perhaps the fighting awakened something more primitive in me. Or perhaps I was simply swept up in the enthusiasm of the night. More likely though, it was the surrender of all pretense to seriousness. Looking out across the crowd — a 20-foot beer snake, fake UFC belts, a giant inflatable fighting glove, and animated debates over Hokit’s technical prowess — I realized everyone was simply having fun. There wasn’t much more to it than that.

What this looked like to the rest of the world lies in the eye of the beholder. Was it a triumph of American spectacle, or a self-inflicted blow to the country’s cultural prestige? As one fan summed it up as we left in the early hours: “Bro, sometimes the best moments in life come when you’re getting punched in the face.”

For Eric Mina, a YouTuber based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the appropriate response is awe. “Look at all the things he’s accomplished!” he says. “He’s not trying to make a buck. He wants to be an interplanetary species and he’s actually going forward and doing it. That’s not the normal type of thinking that people have. They think: personal gain. He’s thinking bigger than that. So yes, he’s going to seem like he’s from another world.”

What’s interesting about these assessments is that as hyperbolic as they may be, they’re not entirely wrong. Elon Musk is indeed in a separate category from the other 2,700 or so billionaires on the planet in many respects. One is quite simply that he is the richest of all of them. Indeed, on Friday, following the stock market debut of his company SpaceX, he became the world’s first trillionaire. According to the Informa Connect Academy, which tracks the fortunes of the bariatrically wealthy, there are others on track to follow: the Indian tycoon Gautam Adani, the Indonesian mining magnate Prajogo Pangestu, the French luxury boss, Bernard Arnault, etc. But as with landing on Mars, one feels that being first is what counts.

But Musk is “a different type of billionaire” in other senses too. One is the fact that his power is not merely financial. His portfolio of interests cuts across technology, energy, transportation, space, communications, biotech and, of course, politics. As of 2020, SpaceX has provided Nasa’s taxi service to the International Space Station. It is, as Musk reminded Joe Rogan in an interview last year, in the business of intercontinental ballistic missiles. “I invest in apocalyptic technologies, didn’t you know?” Then there are his Starlink satellites, which provide internet access to over 12 million subscribers worldwide including in remote and war-stricken areas such as Ukraine. There is his Neuralink project, promising a brain-human interface. And there is X, formerly Twitter, which, despite a mass exodus of users since Musk’s takeover, remains the world’s most popular news site, a data source for his Grok large-language model, and a megaphone for Musk’s political views — bought with the express intention to destroy parts of the public realm that he didn’t personally like, or which conflicted with his own ambitions.

For Guido Alfani, an economic historian at the University of Bocconi in Milan, this is all highly unusual from a world historical perspective. Alfani is the author of a history of the super-rich from antiquity to the tech age, Midas to Musk, if you will, entitled As Gods Among Men. He examines the power and influence of figures such as Alan Rufus, who commanded a fortune equivalent to £130 billion back in 11th-century England, and the Gilded Age banker J.P. Morgan whose cash reserves were so vast, he was able to save America from a disastrous bank-run during the 1907 Knickerbocker Crisis. Alfani has no qualms in asserting that Musk is the richest person ever to have lived.

“Historically speaking, today’s super-rich are not only much wealthier in absolute terms but in relative terms too,” Alfani tells me. “If you compare Elon Musk’s wealth to the wealth of the median household in the US today, it is a much greater difference than, say, the difference between Cosimo de Medici and the average Florentine household in the mid-15th century.”

The main reason for this is to do with globalization. Travel, and therefore trade, he explains, used to be really difficult. The wealth of the Medicis was geographically contained to the area around Florence with some limited trade overseas. Today, economic activity takes place on a global scale, which means more markets, more customers, more rewards. One way to look at that would be, in the past, every village had a rich person. Now we all live in one supersized global village, we all share the same rich people and they are accordingly supersized. (We share the same village idiots, too).

So, according to Alfani, the emergence of a figure like Musk isn’t so surprising. The arc of history bends towards the rich becoming much richer with only occasional ruptures: the Black Death, say, or the Second World War. Musk is only the latest, digital-age iteration of the trend and, he presumably hopes, its continuation: “I’m going to colonize Mars,” he is reported as saying in Walter Isaacson’s hagiography. “My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.”

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Indeed, it is precisely this multiplanetary ambition that guided the $1.77 trillion valuation of SpaceX. Musk has become a trillionaire not because of what he has done but because of what he promises to do. As seasoned Musk-skeptic Brett Arends has noted, SpaceX actually loses about $2 million per hour; the only part of it that brings in proper revenue is Starlink, which basically amounts to a fancy mobile phone provider. So why the $1.77 trillion valuation? Well the SpaceX prospectus has promised investors “the establishment of a lunar economy and interplanetary industrialization… space tourism and cargo transport to the Moon… in-orbit manufacturing, passenger transport to the Moon, passenger and cargo transport to Mars, energy production on the Moon and Mars, manufacturing capabilities on the Moon and Mars, and asteroid mining.” Arends isn’t convinced, pointing out that “the company plans to target markets that may not even exist using technologies it does not have”.

Still, whatever doubts and misgivings remain, it’s hard seriously to maintain that Musk isn’t also an extremely impressive entrepreneur. There are, indeed, libraries worth of content parsing his teachings (“Always break down problems into their fundamental truths and reason from there”). Whether through his obsessive attention to detail or through mythmaking genius, Musk has, after all risen to the top of the dominance hierarchy of the age. However, what concerns Alfani is that in all past eras, there were more constraints on the men who managed this. “In the Medieval and early modern period, well into the 19th century, there was much more of a divide between the political power of the nobility and the economic power of the commercial class,” he says. “There has always been a suspicion of the rich getting involved in politics. That suspicion still exists — but it’s exceptionally weak compared to the past.”

Nor did any figure of the past enjoy anything like the veneration that Musk inspires — such craven abasement, such we-are-not-worthy sycophancy. As Wil Waldon, a space enthusiast who presents the Elon Musk Podcast tells me: “There are people who — no matter what Elon does — they are going to follow him to the ends of the Earth. They would die for this guy. They think he can do no wrong.” He has had experience of this first hand. Waldon’s primary interests are space and cars; Musk is extremely consequential in both industries, but Waldon’s interest in him is downstream of his interest in engineering. But should he suggest on his podcast that SpaceX engineers such as William Gerstenmaier and Mark Juncosa maybe deserve a little more credit; or that the Tesla Cyber Truck is less than a work of aesthetic bliss, he will be “destroyed in the comments”.

Again, this kind of thing is new, says Alfani. In the Gilded Age through to the Roaring Twenties, there was gossip, speculation, fictions about figures like John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. “But there was nothing like the same tendency to consider these people as superheroes or as models to be followed. This is new. And this connects to the fact that we’re more willing than at any other point in history to accept their direct involvement in politics.”

Alfani dates his own interest in the subject back to 1994, when Silvio Berlusconi, then Italy’s richest man, was elected prime minister. “At the time, this was unprecedented in a Western democracy,” he says. Now, the idea of the extremely wealthy becoming either directly involved in politics as candidates (see Trump) or indirectly as cheerleaders (see Musk) has come to seem banal. Indeed, the average wealth of American gubernatorial and mayoral candidates has been rising for years. Of the many factors that cost Rishi Sunak the 2024 General Election, his being a centimillionaire by marriage was fairly low down on the list.

Should this concern the rest of us? Well, according to Oxfam, 60% of humanity has grown poorer since the Covid year of 2020, while the billionaire class has become 34% richer. The five richest men more than doubled their earnings in this period, adding $464 billion to their wealth. It’s no surprise that anti-billionaire politics is proving increasingly salient. The recent launch of the Global Justice Fund by the star French economist Thomas Piketty and others — proposing a global wealth tax of 20% on billionaires — is one attempt to try to move from mere handwringing to a plan of action.

Ingrid Robeyns, a philosopher based at the University of Utrecht who has spent years studying the ethics of extreme wealth, believes we need to go much further. In her book Limitarianism, she makes many arguments against extreme wealth: it’s catastrophic for the environment; it engenders corruption; and, indeed, it’s not much good for the rich themselves. Musk doesn’t exactly seem a model of contentment, does he? But one of the simplest arguments is quite simply that such disparities of wealth are not fair. “There’s a deep philosophical argument that it is morally undeserved,” Robeyns says, because so much of what determines whether someone becomes extremely rich — not rich but extremely rich — are matters of luck,” she says. “Luck can never be a basis for moral reward.”

Our ancestors were arguably more clear-sighted about the connection between wealth and luck. It’s right there in the word “fortune”. In the past, wealth was more likely to be inherited rather than earned — a luck of birth. Actually, that’s still often the case: around one third of the Forbes billionaires are heirs. However, of the so-called “self-made” billionaires, there is still a widespread perception that their fortunes are natural byproducts of their ingenuity. “He is the ultimate example of meritocracy,” one Musk fan had insisted to me. “He started with nothing. Now he has multiple empires.”

Robeyns has little time for such arguments. “The distribution of income and wealth isn’t just the result of what individuals do, but also of our institutions. It’s to do with how we organize markets. Technology markets are winner-takes-all markets. But we’ve also seen a shift in the political economy that makes it much easier for them to accumulate their fortunes. The ideology legitimizes their actions.”

Nor does she buy the argument that without Musk, we would be collectively impoverished, without electric cars and spaceships. “The thing to ask is: what are all the companies that would have flourished if Musk had not built Tesla?” Musk has, for example, spent billions lobbying against an entirely practical and logical high-speed train link between Los Angeles and San Francisco and in favor of his own Hyperloop project — which, rather like the idea of mining asteroids, remains in the realm of ludicrous science fiction.

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The aspect of this that concerns Robeyns most, however, is this ease with which financial power can be turned into political power. “Musk paid $44 billion to buy his own private social media platform, he financed it through selling his own shares, and he is using that platform in various ways to undermine democracy,” she says. “If you believe in the principle of political equality, you need to build very solid walls between the world of finance and the sphere of democracy.”

I try to put these arguments to Musk’s cheerleaders. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are having none of it. “The whole trillionaire thing? What does that matter?” says Mina. “Anyone can be a trillionaire if you can push the stock up that high.” Anyone!

Barney Whiter, a former accountant who now runs a personal finance site called The Escape Artist, and a Musk superfan, feels that Musk’s achievements speak for themselves. “No one has rolled the dice as many times as him and every time he rolls a six.” Dice? Doesn’t that suggest that luck plays a role? He doesn’t think so. “Have you seen the videos of the Falcon coming into land?” He begins to laugh. “You don’t have to be an engineer to see that as a mindblowing feat without parallel in history. Nasa has outsourced its entire space program to one guy. It’s comparable to the US military hiring someone else to run the army!”

Isn’t that worrying? Some guy? An entire space program? And how has he felt about Musk’s interventions into British politics? Musk has boosted the far-Right hooligan Tommy Robinson and the ultranationalist Restore Britain Party. As English towns were trashed after the Southport riots, and more recently following the Belfast and Southampton attacks, Musk has fanned the flames, spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, tweeting “civil war is inevitable” and attacking Keir Starmer.

Whiter thought all that was brilliant. “I mean, dude. Yeah. Elon Musk is facing down the UK Prime Minister. He’s completely unafraid of the head of state of a G7 country!”

Whatever one thinks of Starmer, he is, in the end, beholden to the British public. Musk is a foreign billionaire beholden to no one but his shareholders. The Harvard historian Jill Lepore coined the term Muskism to describe his peculiarly apocalyptic worldview, which coalesced when he was growing up with an abusive father in Apartheid South Africa. Muskism is “an extreme, extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock prices are driven less by earnings than by fantasies from science fiction”, Lepore has argued. It is clearly a huge part of his image. Musk has consistently positioned himself as a character from a Marvel comic or Star Trek.

At the same time, he is well versed in geek lore which just happens to be the lore of the internet. He jokes, he memes, he positions himself on the side of fun. He commands the village square. But another way that he is in tune with the internet is the way that despite his stratospheric wealth and success, he positions himself as an outsider, an underdog, a victim. This is how John Stringer of the Tesla fanclub sees him, anyway — as a victim of unfair discrimination and criticism. “The Biden administration has attacked him. It snubbed him. They didn’t even invite him to the EV summit in 2021!” The fact that Musk makes billions from government contracts doesn’t change the assessment. Musk is, in his eyes, doing the government — all of us — a favor. “His companies are doing the most for humanity out of any companies on the planet. People think of him as the richest person in the world… But I have that history with him.”

There are others, though, who feel a little moderation is due. Waldon began to feel misgivings around 2018, the year of the infamous “pedo” case, and now says that he is deeply conflicted. “He always posted a lot and generally the tone was aspirational. It was about this lovely collective of humanity moving to this better place. Recently he has been pushing more of an agenda. Some people love the rage. Personally? I just want the old Elon back.”

A Musk superfan would say, but he is saving humanity! He’s taking us to space! Robeyns directs my attention to a meme Musk shared which depicts armed guards holding back a crowd of desperate, apparently non-white humans as animals board an “Ark of Space”. “‘Starship takes beings of Earth to Mars’, was Musk’s caption.

It was a joke. But as so often with Musk, maybe it also wasn’t a joke. “When he talks about what’s he’s doing for ‘all of us’, who is this all of us?” asks Robeyns. “The rhetoric that he’s spreading on X is not about all of us as equals.”

But his admirers don’t seem to see themselves as his equal. They see themselves as his inferiors. They see all of us as his inferiors. And they’re happy with that; happy merely to live on the same planet as such a God. I ask Whiter if he takes inspiration from Musk in his own life. “No,” he responds testily. “He’s a genius. I’m not a genius. It’s like a dog comparing itself to a human.”

And yet Musk is a human too. A peculiar human. A gifted human. But in the end, a flawed human operating in a flawed system, just like any of us. And the system that has granted him his ridiculous wealth is, after all, not some natural state of affairs. It is a manmade thing, an arbitrary game, a collective fiction, and its rules could just as easily be remade any way we can imagine.