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.

The same logic underpins the government’s more speculative effort, also announced on Wednesday, to create, via a partnership with Rolls Royce, a generation of small, modular reactors (SMRs). Britain’s extraordinarily high energy prices — some of the most expensive in the world — risk making our decarbonization efforts a losing battle. These investments in nuclear power, expensive though they might be, are unequivocally preferable to our current situation.

If we do not make better use of nuclear fission, we will fail in our ambitious and perhaps foolhardy attempt to reach Net Zero status by 2050. At some point, we might ourselves pull the plug, as it were, on this quixotic endeavor. In April, Tony Blair warned that the Net Zero push was, in its current form, “doomed to fail”. Voters, he said, “feel they’re being asked to make financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle when they know the impact on global emissions is minimal”. Ask too much of voters, in other words, and they will punish the politicians who are driving down their living standards. They will fling out the baby as well as the tepid bathwater. In pragmatic spirit, Blair’s research institute called for acceptance of the temporary use of fossil fuels, and for the deployment of carbon-capture and other mitigation measures — as well as for the use of SMRs.

Naturally, Blair’s intervention incurred strong reactions. Critics of Net Zero were glad to see that a prominent figure of the center-left had, at least partially, conceded to their arguments. Committed supporters of Net Zero saw it as a betrayal and another example of Blair being a closeted Right-winger. Internal Labour voices were apoplectic that their former leader decided to air his opinion on the eve of some particularly painful local elections.

But polling is on Blair’s side, with 59% of the public prioritizing economic growth over net-zero policies. There is a shift among the elites, too, or at least the beginnings of one. Respectable voices have gradually become more openly skeptical of Net Zero. Paul Johnson, the former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, called for an “honest conversation about Net Zero” as early as 2023. Dieter Helm, professor of economic policy at Oxford and a former senior government advisor, has heavily criticized the rollout of wind power and the offshoring of emissions via deindustrialization. Javier Blas, probably the best-known energy and commodities columnist, has called for “electricity realism”. JP Morgan analyst Michael Cembalest, via his annual energy reviews, highlights the challenges of electrification.

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Unlike Blair, these voices have not called for grand pivots to new technologies. Instead, they are asking that Net Zero be seen as what it is: a form of austerity, and not a catalyst for growth.

One thing these elite voices share is incredulity at the claims of Net Zero advocates. The first claim is that renewables from wind and solar energy are cheap, even as their subsidized entry into the electricity mix correlates with the rise of British energy bills.

The second claim, that “green jobs” can revitalize Britain’s industrial base, is falling to pieces. Steel mills and chemical refineries are closing, but they are not being replaced with gigafactories and electric vehicle plants.

Thirdly, there is the assertion that we can be a global leader and make a substantial change to emissions. But it is blindingly obvious our policies do not have any effect whatsoever on global emissions, which reach new records being set every year.

This disillusionment goes beyond Britain. Mark Carney is a staunch advocate of Net Zero, yet he nonetheless kicked off his premiership of Canada by scrapping the unpopular 2019 consumer carbon tax. The Trump administration, unlike the Democrats it ousted, is uninterested in the whole venture of Net Zero.

The truth is that the much vaunted “energy transition” is only a portion of the global energy story. We have heard ad nauseam about the growth of solar photovoltaics and batteries. We hear less about the fact that coal, declared dead by Boris Johnson at COP 26 in 2021, is generating electricity at record levels globally. Chinese coal mine production reached record highs in late 2024.

To the extent coal has declined, it has been replaced by another hydrocarbon, natural gas. Japanese banks and corporations, at the government’s behest, have been among the largest funders of liquefied natural gas infrastructure. In terms of final energy consumption, we are the same fossil fuel civilization we were at the start of the millennium.

Faced with increased pressure, advocates of Net Zero argue that the problem is the underlying electricity pricing system. Net Zero advocates argue that fossil fuels set the day-ahead price of electricity 98% of the time, compared to 58% of the time in Europe, and that this is the main thing pushing up bills.

This implies — falsely — that intermittents are setting prices on the continent. Even in Denmark, where wind is over 50% of the generation, intermittents do not set prices, because they are never meeting all demand. Instead, prices are often set by reliable hydroelectric and nuclear plants, assets Britain does not have in abundance. When factoring in subsidies, renewable prices are usually higher than those for gas. Gas wholesale prices have also been increased artificially by carbon costs, which consistently represent over 20% of gas wholesale prices.

This is detrimental to the government’s overriding aim to electrify transport and heating.

Gas costs are also increased by the sheer number of renewables coming onto the grid, which leads to lower utilization. The capacity factor of combined cycle gas turbines in Britain has declined from 71% in 2008 to 33% in 2023, leading investors to cancel new gas plants.

All this adds up to an increasingly convoluted energy system. The renewables buildout has given us more electricity generation capacity, at least in theory, than ever. But because of its intermittent nature, it is supplying less electricity to a country with declining electricity demand, all for a higher price.

Questions of whether this painful transition is being done well or not are perhaps less important than asking what it is all for. It is now clear that British carbon reductions have no bearing on global emissions. If Britain’s sum contribution is to deindustrialize while emissions increase globally, is our example really transferable to others?

One important question here is the extent to which the Net Zero economy is significant or desirable. Successive governments have promised an explosion of green jobs, but my research tells a different story. Looking at the government’s estimates, I found that manufacturing related to wind turbines and solar panels represented £2 billion in annual turnover in 2022, which is rather less than the £5 billion turnover in biscuit production and the £3 billion opportunity in fish and crustacean processing.

What if we widen the net? In 2022, “green” manufacturing, including hybrid vehicles and energy-efficient light bulbs, had a total turnover of £19 billion, 3% of the £650 billion turnover of British manufacturing. Alarmingly, manufacturing, green or not, has experienced next to no growth since 2006, when accounting for inflation.

All but the most devotedly neoliberal analysts would agree that Britain needs a strong manufacturing sector. But, as things stand, British industrial growth is contingent on that same growth being “green”. This has had a deleterious effect on certain sub-sectors. Take the gas boiler market, of which Britain has Europe’s most valuable. The Government seems intent on replacing gas boilers with heat pumps.

Or take Britain’s two largest goods exports: petrol-powered cars and internal combustion engines. These are set to be banned by 2030. At the best of times, we should be skeptical of governments that pursue industrial policy by coercing consumer choices. This is especially when governments do not even prioritize their countries’ industrial strengths. The threatened closure of the Scunthorpe steel mill by its Chinese owners, and its hurried re-opening by a Government whose energy policies had contributed to the closure, is a case in point. To keep the plant alive, the government even secured a ship’s worth of coking coal.

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So what is to be done? Blair’s recommendations are essentially a series of technological Hail Marys: AI, carbon capture, fusion energy, space-based solar arrays that can continuously produce energy, and solar radiation management (SRM). The latter is a catch-all term for techniques that will reflect sunlight into space, such as injecting reflective aerosol particles into the stratosphere. In essence, it is a call to take control of the climate through terraforming.

This is not climate denialism; rather, it is the view that the best way to deal with climate change is to actually reengineer the climate. For the many elites whose number one issue in Britain is economic growth, this is a far more compelling vision than the material austerity advocated for by Miliband, or the more explicit calls for degrowth from academics like Kate Raworth.

The problem is that when a 20-year strategy begins to fail, there is little scope to reverse course quickly. The government, and any aspiring opposition, now faces the prospect of undoing the debacle.

Unfortunately for them, there are few pathways to quickly alleviate the problem of high prices. Even if the government shifts against Net Zero austerity, the coal plants have already been blown up. Still, in an optimistic scenario, natural gas exploration could be expanded in the North Sea, and fracking could be allowed to develop in Lancashire and Lincolnshire. Despite gloomy estimations of the size of potential reserves, investment into further exploration could be spurred by lower taxes.

The counterproductive carbon taxes on electricity generation also need to be cut. When the government’s stated plan is to electrify everything, placing a hefty tax on wholesale electricity costs makes little sense.

One temptation will be to subsidize either producers or households at the expense of the other. The government could induce a recession by placing big bills on consumers to shield steel mills and refineries from high prices. Or they could wave goodbye to heavy industry and give consumers a temporary respite. With consumers braying and producers dropping like flies, politicians will be in an unenviable position determining who gets preferenced.

Instead, the Government is considering another way to reduce costs: switching to zonal pricing. In basic terms, this means splitting Britain into a handful of regions, with their energy prices reflecting their local generation mix. The argument is that this will reduce network costs and make prices much cheaper in areas of abundant renewables, particularly Scotland.

However, such a project is fraught with uncertainty and faces near-blanket opposition from renewable generators, manufacturers, and most utilities. The strongest argument made for zonal pricing seems not to be that it will make our energy cheap, but that it is the one policy move that will limit the ever-increasing costs of our convoluted grid.

While Scotland, a peripheral part of the broader economy with very little heavy industry, might benefit, prices in the South East would be likely to rise. This is alarming, since 75% of data center capacity is based in London and the South East. With data centers expected to be a growing share of total electricity consumption, zonal pricing is at the very least risky.

More broadly, a complicating factor for Britain’s energy situation is that it is only one of many strategic problems faced by policymakers. The global trading system is benefiting east Asian producers at the expense of Western manufacturers. Western attempts to rectify this, such as with tariffs, are contributing to further disruption. There is a lack of housing affordability. There is demographic aging, and the favorite tonic for labor shortages, mass immigration, is proving financially counterproductive and politically ruinous.

With so many red lights flashing, spending political capital and administrative bandwidth on fixing the mess of British energy is easier said than done. Perhaps most importantly, the state’s capacity to implement significant reforms, or build complex infrastructure on time and without eye-watering expense, is failing. As a result, even sensible suggestions like more nuclear fission plants are fraught with danger. South Korea’s state-run nuclear corporation KHNP has shown that it is possible to build this decades-old technology quickly and at a reasonable cost, not just in Korea but in the United Arab Emirates.

So while Miliband doubles down on Net Zero and Blair dreams of terraforming, what can energy realists do? The immediate task of reducing prices and balancing the needs of producers and households looks daunting.

First, we need to move away from hard deadlines on massively reducing emissions. We also need to move away from directing industry and consumer choices via hard bans on established technologies like gas boilers and internal combustion engines.

There is a significant appetite in the policy world for nuclear power. In recent years, fusion has become a hyped-up technology. But the energy density of fission is already by orders of magnitude greater than that of any other modern energy source. The dangers are overblown, and the current supply chain is sufficient to supply the world’s reactors for hundreds of years. Reusing spent fuel via breeder reactors makes fission effectively renewable.

While small modular reactors are promising, large reactors are already being built at scale in Korea and China at an impressive speed. Alongside the Centre for British Progress, I have laid out a plan for building 200 terawatt hours of annual nuclear generation capacity, or 50% of total generation, by 2040.

Nuclear power offers zero emissions, and any new plants could have lifespans approaching 80 and 100 years. Britain’s internal capacity to build the plants is limited, but it would be possible to set up a joint venture with South Korean firms. Dedicated researchers are already mapping out the regulatory barriers we need to target to get plants built quickly.

Fission has challenges in terms of financing, and SMRs, while promising, are not proven. But fission is nevertheless a route to cheap clean power that has already been demonstrated elsewhere. Miliband’s material austerity is becoming increasingly untenable to elites, and Blair’s technological solutions are aspirational. In the meantime, the government is left to mitigate the costly consequences of its failed policy.

We rarely think about what it means to assign towns or neighbourhoods to the bottom of our moral geography; but those who live in them often feel ashamed, not because they have committed any wrong but because they know they are seen as lesser beings. They report feeling small and powerless, with their behaviour “painfully scrutinised and negatively evaluated”. Sadness, depression and a sense of isolation can often follow. The effect on the self can be devastating.

Curiously, this kind of humiliation becomes possible only when a society has, in its ideology, transcended ideas of natural difference, and convinced its citizens that they are due equal rights and dignity. For instance, when women and non-white people demanded equal rights and dignity, they rightly began to push back against the everyday slights and humiliations visited on them by dominant groups, who found shaming people on the basis of their gender or race increasingly frowned upon. 

In the great era of post-war social democracy, something similar began to happen in the case of social class. In the most wince-inducing scene of The Remains of the Day, set in the Thirties, the butler — Stevens, whose life goal is to serve his master with complete devotion and professionalism — is humiliated by the patrician friend of Lord Darlington who wants to demonstrate the lower class’s ignorance of global affairs and therefore the error of permitting them to have a vote. Yet, despite our own embarrassment and rising sense of outrage, the butler, played in the film by Anthony Hopkins, did not seem to feel the humiliation — because he accepted implicitly that he was of a lower social order and should not be expected to know these things.

Social shaming is by no means confined to the lower orders, whom today we refer to with terms such as disadvantaged communities and the precariat. In fact, shaming is a general phenomenon of stratified society, although its effect is much more apparent in some.

A survey of Australians we commissioned for our new book, The Privileged Few, found that half of young adults admit to having felt ashamed about where they grew up, the school they attended, or their parents’ employment. Shame is a strong emotion to admit too, even in an anonymised survey. We found that parents in households with children are much more likely to admit to feelings of shame than those in households without children, perhaps because adolescents feel shame more intensely than adults and memories of emotional wounds fade as one grows older. In our follow-up focus groups, some made poignant comments about how, as children, they thought they were normal until someone denigrated their suburb or their school or even their father’s low-status job.

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The side effect of this shaming is worryingly that people lower down the hierarchy say they conceal where they live or where they went to school, either by lying or becoming evasive when asked. One of our informants spoke of how “people would cringe when I mentioned the… suburb I came from, so sometimes I’d pick another suburb, so they don’t cringe”. Another said that when he mentioned his state school to a partner at the accounting firm where he works, “he visibly recoiled… He looked at me differently.”

In 2012, Owen Jones published Chavs, a powerful polemic against the demonisation of the working class, or at least the element of it characterised by the media and some politicians as “feckless, criminalised and ignorant”. But the extremes of condescension, scorn and even disgust directed at “chavs” should be understood within a broader distribution of “microaggressions” up and down the social scale and manifesting in feelings of embarrassment, humiliation, resentment, guilt, envy, arrogance and contempt. Unlike debates over the microaggressions of race and gender that have dominated the public domain in recent years, the microaggressions of class are often ignored. Yet they seethe beneath the surface, erupting at times when the privileges enjoyed by elites become too brazen, too egregious — justas they did during the pandemic. 

As the Covid virus spread in the early months of 2020, and London began to shut down, wealthy families fled the city for their sanctuaries in the country. Others took to their yachts or flew to Caribbean islands. Estate agents fielded inquiries from the super-rich for “mansions with bunkers”. Newspaper stories reporting the flight of the rich attracted a torrent of bitter and cynical comments from the public. 

We argue in our book that relations among those up and down the social scale are fraught with emotional effort and inner turmoil. Informants for our study (in “egalitarian” Australia) admitted that they pay more attention and respect to people they believe are wealthy or influential. Some look up to them even though they don’t want to and it goes against the grain of their moral code. One conceded that if someone pointed out a billionaire at a party then “I think you may afford them a bit more respect”. These comments were made bashfully, as if looking up to the rich and powerful went against some inner principle or entailed a small sacrifice of dignity.

At the other end of the spectrum, some from a higher position in the hierarchy may want to be respectful and congenial in their relations with those below, but risk being seen as condescending, disrespectful or unduly familiar. While one spoke of levelling-up by changing the way she speaks and carries herself in the presence of a higher status person, another, who had attended an elite school, commented that the adjustment can work the other way so that “you might come down a notch or two”. But he has also discovered that the gulf between the elites and the rest sometimes takes the form of disdain from below: “You get on really well with somebody and then they ask you that dreaded question ‘Where do you live? What school do you go to?’ And the instant you say it, their face drops.”

We are not suggesting an equivalence between disdain from above and disdain from below. The face drop does not have the social power of the cringe. As Kathryn Abrams observed, “a war of disgusts is one that those less socially privileged are unlikely to win”.

These injuries of social class are often felt most painfully in the schoolyard, among children yet to learn the rules of social inhibition or, indeed, respect for difference. In schools, interactions among students and between students and teachers are beset by the everyday slights and humiliations associated with social and economic difference. Yet the language of class, once a powerful tool serving the interests of equality and dignity, has fallen out of fashion. The words to parry the microaggressions of class are absent.

If you speak to 11-year-olds, they can call out sexism and racism, even ageism, but when it comes to discrimination or vilification on the basis of class or social status they are dumbstruck. Those students who intend to remain in the state system after primary school are often shamed by those whose parents are sending them to elite private schools. Public schools are “shit”, said one. How does an 11-year-old respond? With an explanation of the social benefits of the public education system? Or with an epithet such as “snob”, which has little rhetorical power in the neoliberal area of “choice” and getting ahead by whatever means possible. The absence of a language of class politics — as opposed to a vibrant language of gender and racial politics — means that shaming on the basis of social status or the school one goes to is taken in as personal wound rather than as an expression of social division.

Students at elite private schools in Britain as elsewhere are taught to assume the superiority of their position. As one graduate observed: “I joined Westminster School [in London] for sixth form. On my first day we were given a talk by the headmaster, who told us: “You are the crème de la crème of this country. Sitting around you are future leaders. Don’t you forget it.”

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These schools aim to imbue the offspring of the elite with certain higher moral and spiritual qualities, a process known as consecration, sanctifying these students as beyond the ordinary and moulding them into objects of power and influence; in short, elite. They are taught the dispositions of ease, confidence and entitlement appropriate to a world of privilege. 

The uncomfortable conclusion we draw is that elite privilege is best viewed as a set of everyday practices that sorts and reproduces social strata. Studying the alchemy of how privilege is done, whereby elites seek and are granted exclusive benefits, suggests that the privileges bestowed on elites are not a by-product of wealth but an organising principle used to enforce social difference. In the end, it is our collective compliance that makes elite privilege so deeply entrenched and “natural”, even though it is responsible for so many harms: economic harms, civic harms, and psychic harms, not least the everyday system of shaming and humiliation that is characteristic of a society of privilege. 

Still, it’s a dangerous game for the elites because shaming can congeal into resentment, a political anger that can break through in unpredictable ways. A political class that not only lacks an understanding of the problems of class demonisation but actively seeks to participate in it is doomed to face the reckoning of a vengeful electorate.

But I want to say a few things for the record.

When Hillary Clinton, from sheer paranoia, set up her own private server to conduct business as secretary of state, the FBI naturally took an interest. I worked for many years in a classified environment. If I had done anything similar, I’d be writing this from my austere prison cell. But Clinton wasn’t me. She belonged to a different class. The FBI rapped her knuckles gently, called her out as a bad example, but refused to prosecute.

When Joe Biden mishandled classified documents in an apparently egregious manner, he attracted the attention of a special prosecutor. The ensuing investigation proved without a doubt that Biden had violated the law. If I had done the same thing, and stashed government secrets in my garage near my trusty Rav4, I would never see the light of day again. But again, I’m not Biden. He belongs to a special class. The prosecutor’s report admitted Biden’s guilt but refused to prosecute because the president of the United States, leader of the free world, was too old and dotty to be held accountable.

Then there’s Trump. The New York State district attorney, Alvin Bragg, is a Democrat with powerful political motives to bring down the likely Republican nominee. That should be a scandal but, in the ethical muddle of our age, it seemingly isn’t. The actual charges concocted by Bragg against Trump I leave for the legal experts to parse. None of them rose to the level of Clinton’s server or Biden’s garage sale of secrets. But Trump is the monster that haunts the nightmares of the privileged class. He must be prosecuted in multiple times and places, convicted, fined hundreds of millions, imprisoned, annihilated, pulverised.

The whole process stinks of desperation. If the progressive elites who run the Biden administration felt confident they could defeat Trump at the polls, we would hear Homeric laughter ringing from the White House and its pet organs in the news media. But Biden is terribly unpopular, even among his base. America’s elites fear and mistrust the American voter. They have lost faith in democracy, a system that in 2016 delivered the power of the presidency to the monstrous Trump, and they dream of a rising class of Platonic guardians, people exactly like themselves, with the right pedigree, the right opinions, the right manners, who rule not because they have won an electoral lottery but in perpetuity, as a reward for their superior virtue.

Convicting Trump as a political insurance policy brings us a step closer to a fatal turning point in American history. This country, Abraham Lincoln said, was founded on a proposition: that all are created equal. That proposition has liberated millions from within and attracted millions more from abroad. For most of us, it meant little more than being left alone by the cops and the structures of power. But for others, evidently, there was an expectation of utopia, of perfectly proportional equality in every dimension and transaction, that has failed to materialise. Dismayed, the progressive elites have turned their backs on representative democracy and now seek an aristocracy of virtue. The forms will remain the same but the substance, with a wink and a nudge, will respect caste and breeding.

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Can this really happen? To an alarming extent, it already has. A single monolithic class controls most of the key institutions of American life. Between a high official at the State Department or the FBI, an executive at Google or Nike, and an editor at the New York Times or NPR, the difference is scarcely noticeable. Conformity in word and gesture is mandatory. And these people have persuaded themselves that contemporary society is too complex for the public to navigate safely. Given the madness of social media, the prevalence of fake news and disinformation, the appeal to simple minds of post-truth populists like Trump — given all the chaos, there’s a need for stern measures. Information must be controlled. Prominent dissenters must be cowed into silence if they wish to keep their jobs. The cops must go after the populists and haul them off to prison.

In the present case, however, such tactics may backfire. It is remarkable to note how much of Trump’s popularity is a function of the intemperance of his enemies. After his defeat in 2020, Trump drifted downward in a semi-quiescent state. The announcement of his candidacy for the 2024 Republican nomination wasn’t greeted with wild enthusiasm. This exhausting reality show had been cancelled for a reason. Few were begging for a new season.

Then Biden sent the FBI to Mar-a-Lago, and the whole dynamic of the race changed. Trump was once again the centre of attention, the master of ceremonies, as he had been in 2016, and no one else could get a word in edgewise. His Republican opponents felt obligated to stand behind him. Trump crushed them without difficulty in the primaries. So it boiled down to a choice between Trump and Biden – and the latter is perceived by the public to be an inarticulate failed president, ageing badly, whose minions are attempting to cheat their way into another presidential term. A wistful nostalgia for the Trump years now permeates a large segment of the population.

Conviction could boost this trend by another level of magnitude. Trump is no longer Trump: he has been transformed into a living symbol of the progressive elites’ abuse of power and contempt for the principle of equality. The MAGA faithful are beside themselves with rage – but rank-and-file Republicans, who have always been ambivalent about Trump, are just as livid. Ordinary voters who lack strong political inclinations can recognise in Trump’s persecutors the traits of the class enemy. Many who embrace the American tradition of rule of law may overcome their distaste for Trump the person and align themselves with Trump the symbol. The political consequences for Biden would then be the opposite of what was intended by that first raid at Mar-a-Lago: devastating defeat.

I don’t give a hoot about Trump, but I care a lot about my country. I find elite pretensions to be a kind of self-deluded nihilism: they are not as smart or as capable as they imagine, and they are willing to bring down the temple of democracy so long as it buries their enemies. An Ivy League education has apparently bestowed on them no understanding of history — no clue of how hard it is to fix a nation once it has been broken.

Imprisoning political opponents is what the Putins and the Castros do. It shouldn’t be allowed to stand here — it isn’t who we are or have ever been. As our Founders understood, the aristocratic principle invariably fails because the aristocrats are unworthy. Outside the courthouse, after his conviction, Trump said that the true verdict would be delivered by the American people on Election Day. I can only hope that he’s right.

If all this chatter feels eerily familiar, that’s because it is. Our current “polycrisis” comes on the heels of a global pandemic, which was itself preceded by the post-2008 financial crisis, which overlapped with the post-9/11 global terrorism crisis, on top of other more localised “crises”, such as Brexit and Europe’s migrant crisis. Look back at the past two decades, and one could easily conclude that the world has been mired in a state of quasi-permanent state of crisis — or, as analysts and dictionaries are fond of putting, a “permacrisis”.

So perhaps Permacrisis is the perfect title for a new book by former Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, co-authored with Mohamed El-Erian, president of Queens’ College and former chief economic adviser at Allianz, and Michael Spence, professor of management at Stanford University. “What makes this period feel unusual,” they write, “is the multidimensional nature and sheer intensity and complexity of the economic transformations swirling around us… [Challenges such as war, inflation and climate change] show no signs of abating — only accelerating. That’s what happens in a permacrisis.”

On the face of it, this analysis might appear uncontroversial, even trivially obvious. No one would question the notion that there are a lot of crises going on in the world at any given time. But one might also argue that this has always been the case — especially from the perspective of the billions living in the Global South. It therefore seems reasonable to ask: is this obsessive use of the word “crisis” simply an acknowledgement of a uniquely bad situation? Or is there more at play here?

Even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, several critical scholars had suggested that, in recent decades, crisis had become a “method of government” in which “every natural disaster, every economic crisis, every military conflict and every terrorist attack is systematically exploited by governments to radicalise and accelerate the transformation of economies, social systems and state apparatuses”. In her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explored the idea of “disaster capitalism” — the notion that, in moments of public fear and disorientation, it is easier to re-engineer societies.

Taking such analyses one step further, one might argue that the contemporary narrative of permanent crisis or emergency represents a qualitative shift in “crisis as a mode of government” — one which is no longer limited to the exploitation of crises, but is based on the constant evoking of crisis itself, if not the actual manufacturing of crises. In such a system, “crisis” no longer represents a deviation from the norm; it is the norm, the default starting point for all politics. This of course raises a paradox. In her book Anti-Crisis, the anthropologist Janet Roitman notes that “evoking crisis entails reference to a norm because it requires a comparative state for judgement: crisis compared to what?”. Its use today, however, implies an endless condition in which crisis has itself become the norm. Thus, as Roitman asks: “can one speak of a state of enduring crisis? Is this not an oxymoron?”

In this sense, the normalisation of the concept of permacrisis could be understood as a response to the loss of legitimacy and authority by Western ruling elites. Unable to generate societal consensus or hegemony, in either material or ideological terms, and increasingly threatened by the rise of new global powers, first and foremost China, they are forced to rely on increasingly repressive and militaristic measures — both domestically and abroad — in order to remain in power and stifle any challenges to their authority. Hence the need for a more or less permanent state of crisis capable of justifying such measures — in other words, permacrisis.

What are the main characteristics of this “new normal” of enduring crisis? First and foremost, a generalised acceptance of the idea that we can no longer afford to organise our societies around a stable set of rules, norms and laws. Rather, the constant stream of new threats — terrorism, disease, war, natural disasters — means that we must be constantly ready to rapidly adapt to an ever-changing scenario of permanent instability. This, in turn, also means that we can no longer afford the nuanced public debates and complexities of parliamentary politics usually associated with Western liberal democracies; governments need to be able to enforce decisions with swiftness and efficiency. Thus Western leaders today explicitly link our age of permacrisis to the need to restrict online free speech in the name of the struggle against “mis/disinformation” — which often happens to be anything that contradicts the official narrative.

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Permacrisis also means that any form of medium-term planning, any vision for the future — either on an individual or collective level, the latter having been, historically, the main driver of social progress — is futile: focused instead on the fight against the “enemy” of the moment, a never-ending crisis means being stuck in a perpetual present. Besides, reality, we are told, is just too complex and unpredictable to hope to shape it according to any form of collective will.

This represents a radical shift from the way the notion of crisis has been defined until now. Historically, “crisis” has often been associated with the idea of opportunity and even progress. Permacrisis represents the contemporary inversion of this conception, as it precludes any idea of further progress, denoting instead a permanently difficult, or worsening, situation — one which can never be solved, but only managed. At its heart, this narrative, even though it appears to be solution-focused and future-oriented, is in fact implicitly nihilistic and depoliticising, since it implies that the world is doomed no matter what we do.

In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman spoke about the “futility thesis” — the rejection of political action due to a fatalistic belief that the problems we face are so big that any attempt at solving them will inevitably result in failure. The flipside to this doomerist, apocalyptic streak is particularly evident in the debate around climate change and the wider ecological crisis: the dominant narrative implies that anything is justified in order to “save the planet”, including all manner of authoritarian interventions. After all, if the very survival of life on Earth is at stake, surely we can’t allow the complexities of democratic debate and deliberation to stand in the way of doing what’s needed? Indeed, it is no coincidence that proponents of permacrisis insist on the fact that the global nature of many crises means that these can only be solved at the global level — namely, by transferring more and more power to supranational organisations such as the European Union and the World Health Organization.

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Permacrisis is a case in point. Aside from the usual boilerplate solutions that we’ve been hearing at least since 2008 — the need to harness the digital revolution to boost productivity; better economic management; a more “equitable” approach to policymaking — the authors dedicate a great deal of the book’s focus on the need for “a new framework for managing globalisation and the global order”. This means that countries have to rethink “traditional assumptions about nation state sovereignty” and be ready to “give up a little autonomy” — an extraordinary claim if we consider that many of the problems that we are experiencing in the West can be ascribed precisely to the erosion of sovereignty and democracy and the rise of unaccountable international and supranational organisations beholden to private and corporate interests.

Just as revealing are the authors’ proposals for reforming the international system. They argue that we don’t need new institutions, but that we should rather focus on reforming the existing Western-led institutions — the G20, the IMF, the World Bank, etc. — in order to make them more democratic and more representative of non-Western powers, primarily China. What they conveniently forget to mention is that this is precisely the kind of reform that China and other countries have been demanding for more than a decade, only to be systematically ignored by the West, and that it is the latter, led by the US, that has adopted an aggressive anti-China policy. This is why non-Western countries, under the umbrella of the China-led Brics bloc, are now spearheading the construction of their own set of international institutions.

Yet calling for “a more cooperative global order” under the guise of the permacrisis, without even mentioning the reasons for the current fracturing of the global order — namely America’s desperate attempt to preserve its declining global hegemony — is disingenuous at best. Even more importantly, it highlights a fundamental feature of the permacrisis: the fact that it is a specifically Western phenomenon.

For ultimately, aside from being a “method of government”, permacrisis neatly encapsulates the panic of Western elites: it is their global order, their dominant position in the global food chain, that is under threat. What to Brown and his fellow authors feels like an existential crisis — the terminal decline of the Western-dominated “international rules-based order” — is seen by much of the non-Western world as an opportunity. This is why the Brics bloc doesn’t subscribe to the doomerist permacrisis narrative — not because they don’t recognise the challenges facing the planet, but because they don’t view the current juncture as the end of the world. Rather, they view it as the birth of a new one.

In some ways, this picture is accurate: a geopolitical competition really is in the process of boiling over into open confrontation. But it’s also fundamentally shallow and misleading. When it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but becoming more alike, with both superpowers converging on the same not-yet-fully-realised system of technocratic-managerial governance.

This system, described by James Burnham and George Orwell as “managerialism”, is the product of a new class of professional managers bound together by a shared self-interest in the expansion of technical and mass organisations, the further proliferation of managers, and the drawing of society into the meddling embrace of managerial expertise. At its heart is a conviction that all things — even the complexity of society and Man himself — can be understood, managed and controlled like a machine with sufficient scientific technique.

It was managerialism that emerged as the true winner of the 20th century’s ideological battles. As Orwell prophesied in 1945: “Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.” China is just a bit further down the path towards this same totalitarian future. The West is following.

To get a sense of but one aspect of this ongoing convergence, we should travel back to Fengqiao (“Maple Bridge”), once a picturesque little township in China’s Zhejiang province. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his officials like to muse wistfully about the pleasures of the “Fengqiao experience” (枫桥经验), but I’m afraid it is not a tourism package. Rather, in the Sixties, Fengqiao distinguished itself as a model town in the eyes of Mao Zedong. While usually Communist Party thugs had to go around identifying and rounding up “reactionary elements”, in Fengqiao the people handled it themselves: “Not one person [had to be] rounded up, and still the vast majority of enemies were dealt with,” as a report from the town informed Mao.

Here at last was a true example of the “dictatorship of the masses” that Mao hoped to establish. Mao encouraged the party to learn from the experience of Fengqiao, and in doing so planted a seed that would take root in the hard soil of the CCP imagination: a dream of a population so thoroughly conditioned by Chinese socialism that someday it would practically manage itself.

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Today, Xi has revitalised and modernised this idea by marrying it to newly available tools: those of the digital revolution. Traditional methods of Fengqiao-style social mass monitoring and control, also known as “social governance”, have been combined with internet-wide mobilisation and a vast digital surveillance apparatus.

The jewel in the crown of this approach is intended to be China’s blossoming social-credit system. The system intends to assign each person, company or organisation a unique aggregated “social credit” score. This is much like a financial credit score: based on observed behaviour and other “risk factors”, the score can be adjusted up or down to designate an individual or business as more or less “trustworthy” or “untrustworthy”. Those with higher scores are rewarded with escalating perks, such as priority access to travel, loans, housing, higher education or even healthcare. Those with lower scores face escalating punishments, such as losing access to the financial system, being prohibited from buying luxury goods or real estate, or having their children denied admission to certain schools and universities.

Importantly, the system is deliberately social in nature. Those with low scores are publicly listed and shamed online or on public billboards; even some dating apps have trialled incorporating social-credit scores. Most significantly, since having too many relationships with low-scoring people risks lowering one’s own ranking, people avoid associating with the “discredited” at all, accelerating their progressive unpersoning by society. The goal of this gamification of the mind is to create a “New Man” to fit into its managerial machine; this is always and everywhere the inexorable object of managerialism’s obsession with control.

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Such social engineering has already been effective. I vividly recall, for example, how, when I visited China as late as the 2000s or mid-2010s, everyone used to jaywalk to cross the street. It was simply a fact of life, a cultural constant seemingly ingrained by who knew how many centuries of the Chinese peasantry’s wonderfully incorrigible pragmatism. Today, nobody jaywalks (at least in the city), because if you do, your identity is captured by a facial recognition camera, your face, name and ID number are plastered on a billboard of shame next to the intersection, and a fine is sent to your bank. All those centuries of evolved cultural attitudes have been successfully overwritten by only a few years of conditioning by the machine.

This is not a million miles away from what is happening in so-called Western liberal democracies. In June, the British bank Coutts closed the account of Nigel Farage without explanation. Farage was subsequently refused service by 10 other banks. Internal “reputational risk” documents obtained by Farage soon after showed Coutts’s reasoning for “exiting” him from his account: he had been found to no longer be “compatible with Coutts, given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation”. The terrible sins listed on Farage’s rap sheet included: being friends with Donald Trump and unvaccinated tennis champion Novak Djokovic; campaigning for Brexit; being “anti-Net Zero”; being “seen as xenophobic and racist”; and having been a “fascist” when he was a schoolboy, according to some second-hand rumours.

In this case, caught red-handed “debanking” a prominent and savvy politician for political reasons, the bank was forced to apologise and some of its top officials to resign. Such consequences are an exception to the rule, however. Debanking has in recent years become increasingly routine practice across the West; in the US, mere days after the Farage scandal, JP Morgan Chase shuttered the accounts of anti-vaccine proponent Dr Joseph Mercola, as well as his business’s CEO, CFO, their spouses and all of their children. Farage says he has begun assembling a “very large database” of potentially thousands of similar cases from the UK alone.

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Much debanking is politically motivated. Most memorably, Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts and seize the assets of the truckers protesting his destructive vaccine mandates and demagoguery. Yet banks are not the only ones involved; online payment platforms have joined in too. GoFundMe, for instance, seized money donated to the truckers through its platform. PayPal, meanwhile, in one of the more symbolic instances of its prolific debanking habit, cut off the Free Speech Union for promoting “intolerance”. PayPal also attempted to slip language into its user agreement allowing it to confiscate $2,500 from users each time they spread “misinformation” or said or did anything “harmful” or “objectionable” (all defined at PayPal’s “sole discretion”).

Why is this happening? Why would private banks and other businesses force out paying customers like this? Because it is in their interest to do so if they want to survive and thrive, and indeed they have little choice. These banks are not really fully “private actors” — they are part of the managerial economy in a budding managerial party-state much like China’s, where an oligarchic elite class seeks to preserve its rule. Critically, there can be no neutral institutions in a party-state. The party-state’s enemies are the institution’s enemies, or the institution is an enemy of the party-state (which is not a profitable position to be in). This is what “reputational risk” really means: the risk of appearing to be on the wrong side of the party line.

In a society as digitised as ours, control over digital transactions means surveillance and control over nearly everything. When someone is debanked — and then inevitably blacklisted from all other banks — they are cut off from participation in almost every aspect of modern life. They will have no easy way to receive pay from a job; they cannot buy property and may not even be able to rent. They will be unable to purchase almost any digital service and, increasingly, will be prevented from buying everyday goods offline as well. Once the ongoing war on cash is won, they will be well and truly screwed. Debanking therefore serves as an extremely effective means to isolate and silence a targeted person or group, quickly breaking any presence and influence they may have once had within society. Which is, of course, the point.

This appears to be a lesson taken directly from the Chinese method of dealing with dissidents. Indeed, the West’s managerial elite seem to have concluded that they now have the tools and latitude to begin implementing a Chinese-style social credit system here. Although not yet anywhere near as comprehensive, this nascent system shares the same fundamental characteristics: using public-private coordination and “social governance” to collapse any distinction between public and private life, thereby greatly raising the risks for public non-conformity and dissent from the narrative. Utopia is doubtless just around the corner.

In fact, we can see transparent steps towards the construction of something like a social credit system in the now widespread use of such innovations as ESG (environmental, social, and governance) scores. Major financial institutions wield them to vocally conform to specific social and ideological practices required to access capital. Similar NGO-led scoring schemes such as the Corporate Equality Index and UK-based Diversity Champions programme also threaten those businesses that fail to conform with “reputational risk” blackmail and de-platforming.

How far might this all go? While the powerful realm of financial flows is today’s focus, there is no reason to think that, on the current trajectory, the same dynamics won’t eventually be applied to every other sector of our economy and society. We shouldn’t be surprised if someday soon apartment leases come with ideological morality clauses, airlines unite to ban customers with the wrong beliefs from travelling, or people find themselves evicted from their insurance policies for speaking out of turn online. This will simply be the behaviour of a hardening managerialism seeking stability through mechanistic control over all the details of life.

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New technologies such as AI and, especially, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will only continue to make this kind of granular control easier. A few months ago, an American man found himself completely shut out of his digitally controlled “smart home” by Amazon after a delivery driver accused his doorbell of saying something racist. Why would Amazon bother to do this? Because they can; and so, under a managerial regime, they must. As our managers find that every day it feels easier and easier to “solve” problematic people with the click of a button, they will not be able to resist hitting that button, hard and often.

Such is the very Weltanschauung — the whole way of seeing and believing — of the managerial mind. As more and more powerful technology comes within the grasp of the managerial machine, its grip will only continue to tighten. For, as C.S. Lewis understood, “each new power won by man is a power over man as well”.

Today, as Orwell predicted, the great super-states struggle for possession of the earth. But for all past speculation that the 21st century would be defined by a “clash of civilisations”, there is now only one, smothering form of modern civilisation that has stretched itself across the face of the globe, its multiple personalities vying for imperial supremacy. In the West, progressive managerialism softly strangled democracy to death over a century of manipulation, hollowed it out, and now wears its skin. In the East, the imported virus of communist managerialism wiped out a once-great civilisation in a river of blood, then crystalised into the cold, hard machine that now rules the lands of China.

This is the truth behind why China and the West, for all their proclaimed differences, share the same managerial hubris, are tempted by the same growing technological powers, and are sheltering the same elite insecurities and delusions. Even as they roil and clash, they are converging on the same destiny: the same socially engineered submission of everything human, real and free to technocratic nihilism and the false reality of an all-encompassing machine-government — to a total techno-state.

***

This essay is an extract from a longer piece on The Upheaval.

In his review of a 1993 book on the history of masculinity by one E. Anthony Rotundo, Christopher Lasch writes that boys “challenged each other to spontaneous feats of daring and agility, acted out stories of heroic adventure and collaborated in the enforcement of an informal code of honour that stressed courage, loyalty and stoic endurance of pain”.

Such patterns of self-directed activity persisted into young adulthood in informal associations such as debate societies. “The clash of wits between friends recalled the physical combat of loyal playfellows in boyhood… mixing affection with attack.” Such associations could serve as a substitute for college. “We educated each other by criticising and laughing at each other,” one informant recalled.

But by the end of the 19th century, such autonomous organisations of young men were fading away. “Education was increasingly confined to the classroom, agonistic rivalry to the playing field. Formal pedagogy replaced spontaneous play and self-culture.”

Lasch continues: “The expansion of extracurricular activities, at every level of the school system, reflected the expansion of pedagogical authority over young people formerly left to their own devices. The dead hand of the educator reached deep into childhood, redesigning life as a “learning experience”.

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This was part of a larger pattern in which previously unsupervised domains of life were subject to systematic study and control. The domains of women were no less subject to this process. It was an era that saw the birth of home economics, sexology, the academic study of childhood development, social work, and professionalised training in the new sciences of pedagogy. The intimate and the spontaneous became subject to therapeutic mediation in the service of various social goods.

If the “life-world” means the background patterns of life that are taken for granted, within which one can dwell unmolested, here was a new determination to leave nothing taken for granted, nothing unstudied. What this meant in practice was the colonisation of the life-world by organised expertise, corresponding to institutional money and power.

Life under these conditions feels a bit off — like the opposite of vitality. One’s own powers of making sense of the world are somehow disqualified. These are powers that develop naturally through action in the world. As the legitimacy and confidence of common sense is eroded, the field of meaningful action that is open to an individual seems also to shrink. Action is reduced to making choices from a menu of presented options, as in shopping, as opposed to a generative activity by which some mental conception of one’s own is brought forward into the shared world. The shared world is already saturated. It is fully known and mastered; your task is merely to get yourself properly aligned to it.

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Some of us chafe against this, and I believe this is the subterranean source of an ornery political energy that we call populism. Populism often states its opposition to power in epistemic terms, as sceptical hostility to experts. What gets lost in all the screeching is that the basic impulse at work here is a positive one.

Lasch writes that the new patterns of administered life at the turn of the century were experienced by many as “subjection to routines that drained the joy out of work and play and wrapped everything in a smothering self-consciousness”.

Taking issue with the interpretation offered by Rotundo, Lasch wrote: “Surely it was this feeling of suffocation, much more than the need to prove something about masculinity, that explains the idealisation of the strenuous life at the turn of the century: the attraction of imperialism and war, the longing for wide open spaces, the new interest in the primitive and exotic, the nostalgia for simplicity and lost innocence.”

Those restless adventurers of Teddy Roosevelt’s time had no idea how far the colonisation of the lifeworld had yet to progress. With Covid, we acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert-like supervision into every domain of life.

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But I think it would be a mistake to focus only on such episodes of heavy-handedness. In his book, Little Platoons, Matt Feeney details the workings of institutions that cluster around the family and feed off it, turning our most intimate loyalties to bureaucratic purposes while reshaping parents and children alike into compliant drones. To take one example, the college admissions process in America has extended its poisonous reach deep into childhood (apparently it starts with getting into the right pre-school) for the upper-middle class, requiring children and parents to collaborate in the crafting of a particular kind of self — one that will appeal to admission officers.

“Holistic admissions” downplay grades and test scores to make room for intangibles, so it is the whole person that is laid bare to the scrutiny of bureaucrats steeped in the moral vapours of their own professional formation. They sift through stacks of applications seeking people who have demonstrated… what, exactly? To begin with, a willingness to shape themselves to send whatever signals are wanted by those with power over them. To know what is wanted takes a certain intelligence. At stake is the question of whether Johnny will be able to afford his own house one day. Thus is the professional managerial class (PMC) formed into a posture of complaisance.

But nobody likes to think of himself as a cipher. The young man’s (or woman’s) complaisance is overlaid with a compensating view of himself, made available to him by the simple fact of his having passed the gatekeeping: he adopts an identity centred on his smartness or knowledgeableness. The content of the knowledge that marks one as part of the PMC consists of the organised expertise through which money and power extend their dominion. They do so by seeking out those remaining pockets of the lifeworld where unselfconscious, vernacular practices may persist. Such un-mined pockets offer opportunity for further systemisation and profit — if they can be brought into the fold of expert-like supervision. “There’s an app for that.”

In certain red-pillish-tending pockets of the PMC, there seems to be a growing awareness of and unease with their role as agents of this push. The shakiness of various systems of organised expertise, and the enforced character of the “consensus” that they are used to anchor, has grown more apparent as the system flails against populist challenge. This can lead to nagging questions of a cui bono nature, which may reflect on the young man’s identity as a “knowledge worker” (to use a term from a more innocent time when these ideological structures were more secure). If we may put this in the vernacular: the young man may begin to feel that his bullshit job is not only parasitical on the real economy, it is part of a system of social control that is basically anti-human. In retrospect, the long process of sitting in school (against his own nature), forming himself into something pleasing to those college admissions officers, may take on a different look: it was a process of paying for the privilege of making himself an instrument of power. This is serious alienation.

Lasch rebuked Rotundo for injecting the question of gender into his discussion of vitalism, which Lasch insisted was a unisex, human response to the over-administration of every aspect of life. “The rationalisation of daily life had similarly depressing effects on women, even though it was often held up as the means of their emancipation from domestic drudgery.” (For a compelling brain-centred account of why this emancipation from household labour can induce depression, see the psychologist Kelly Lambert’s work on “effort-driven rewards”.)

The imperial presumptions of moral-therapeutic supervision are more advanced today than they were in Roosevelt’s time, and Lasch is surely right that you don’t need to look on the contemporary landscape with a hyper-vigilant concern for emasculation to see that the human spirit is in danger of being smothered to death, for men and women both.

But in fact, the therapeutic para-state is today staffed disproportionately by women and routinely addresses its expectations to us in gendered terms, sometimes casting dissent from the programme as an expression of toxic masculinity. So it is to be expected that such dissent will likewise make the legitimacy of the male a thematic concern. To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in a sexual holy war, but the sexual holy war is interested in you.

Daily life is shot through with an ambient pedagogical project that works to create the modern subject, a creature who internalises the social discipline required by the modern state. In one of his choicest formulations, Michel Foucault referred to “the minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics”. They are found in corporate HR, the Office of Student Life in universities, mandatory “Relationships and Sexual Health Education” in schools, lifestyle magazines and countless other sites of adjustment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71% of human resources managers are women. In the University of California system, to take one example, 70% of non-academic staff are women, and in American universities generally, the ratio of administrators to faculty has nearly doubled since 1990. Sixty-seven percent of those who hold a journalism degree are women. In psychology, female graduate students outnumber males by about three to one, and have done so for more than a decade. Seventy-seven percent of sociology majors are women, and women have received about two-thirds of all masters degrees since the early Eighties. If the norm-setting, psyche-tending, world-describing, and narrative-generating professions are staffed predominantly by women, does anything follow from this fact?

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It does if you grant that there are such things as male norms and female norms, as social psychology indicates there are, and if you further grant that this difference must show up in the flavour of institutional life. Jonathan Haidt says that among women you get “a different kind of conflict. There is a greater emphasis on what someone said which hurt someone else, even if unintentionally. There is a greater tendency to respond to an offence by mobilising social resources to ostracise the alleged offender.” This concern with offence, which tends to maintain social cohesion, also tends to come detached from the question whether the hurtful thing said was true or not.

This introduces an element of arbitrariness, an invitation to caprice. Notice that in this dynamic, a “hurt” may be attributed, a victim identified, as an act of aggression against the putative offender. The great majority of women do not seek power within an institution under the banner of woke activism. But most of those who do seek power in this way are women, Richard Hanania observes. More broadly, due to important asymmetries between male and female modes of conflict, “women’s tears win in the marketplace of ideas”. Such winning often results in the further extension of bureaucratic supervision into realms where harms might be found.

I believe one reason the feminine mode of competition has become so prominent in institutions is that it is in harmony with our overarching political frame. Earlier I referred to a particular kind of “modern subject” that is required by the modern state. Who is this character? We get some insight from a recent article by the political theorist Mark Shiffman. He offers a re-interpretation of the “state of nature” myths that ground the liberal doctrine of rights, turning its basic logic upside down. In doing so, he casts a clarifying light on the present: “It is not the case that because [by nature] we have rights to protect we are potential victims of their violation. Rather, the myths cast human beings in the position of victims and deploy the rhetoric of rights to capture this sense of violation in a way that simultaneously points to what we ought to hope for from the modern state…. Liberalism is premised from its mythic beginnings upon victimhood.”

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If I may extrapolate from Shiffman’s argument: unless you can identify with some “vulnerable population”, you are not a full citizen. (Allyship would seem to express an anxious recognition of this fact.) That is, you are not the type of subject upon whom the authority of the state rests. Such is the underlying logic of Leviathan, fully realised only with the advent of the civil rights regime of protected classes. This logic has lately achieved a kind of totality in its reach, precisely because it has devolved from the state proper. It is expressed in the vigilance in detecting harm that holds sway in the public and private bureaucracies that make up a kind of sprawling para-state. These take on the task of cultivating and managing the “identities” that serve as markers of oppression in designated client groups, requiring moral orthopaedics for all.

Today’s Leviathan conceives its subjects as fragile beings afloat in a field of incipient traumas. Such a governing entity will look with suspicion on the unsupervised play of boys who “challenged each other to spontaneous feats of daring and agility, acted out stories of heroic adventure and collaborated in the enforcement of an informal code of honour that stressed courage, loyalty and stoic endurance of pain”.

That is not at all what is wanted.

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What is at stake here is the conditions for the possibility of achieving adulthood, for men and women both. The process of development from childhood to adulthood requires departure from the safety of parental protection and affirmation, through confrontation with hard reality. It is through such confrontation that a person escapes the solipsism of unearned self-esteem, enters the world of objective standards, and begins to develop competence in some field of endeavour.

If it is to be an adequate response to the forces of infantilisation, today’s vitalism will have to go beyond the boyish rebellion of the online Right and articulate a positive picture of what it means to be an adult. Even, dare we say, what it means to be a man.

Whatever else it means, being a responsible man today would seem to involve a tricky double task: to be respectful and protective of women in private, and to confidently disregard women’s tears in public. This would be made easier if women — the silent majority of them who probably value self-reliance — did likewise, forming an alliance with men against a metastasising force of moral orthopaedics that diminishes us all.

This week, he spoke to Mary Harrington at the UnHerd Club about populism, Tucker Carlson, and how to swerve the next big catastrophe. Below is an edited transcript.

Mary Harrington: Peter, tell us the thesis behind your fascinating new book.

Peter Turchin: Ever since the ancient Greek historian Polybius wrote about how the Roman Empire was able to grow quite so relentlessly, people have also tried to explain why societies collapse.

There are many different theories, but the only way to adjudicate is with mathematical modelling. First of all, you translate those theories into mathematical language, so that the predictions follow inevitably from their premises. Then you bring on lots of data to work out which theory best fits the reality.

My colleagues and I are currently working on building a large historical database — our “Crisis DB” — in which we log incidents when past societies got into a state of crisis. What we have found is that all complex societies in the past 5,000 years have experienced an integrative phase, when peace and order reigned — and then an inevitable descent into an “end times”.

I hope that, with all this information, eventually we will make it possible for society to escape this cycle. But why do these end times happen at all? One common theme that we see over and over again, in all of the different routes to crisis, is a condition that we call “elite overproduction”.

Let me explain what I mean by that. First of all, who are the elites? Put simply, they are neither good people or bad people, they are simply a small proportion of the population who concentrate social power in their hands — whether that’s in the military, economic, political, or ideological sphere. In medieval times, the elites were the military nobility of England or France, for example; or in Imperial China, they were the class of mandarins. In the United States, where I live, simply put, it’s the proverbial 1%.

Of course, it’s all a bit more complicated than that. Complex human societies are organised as pyramids, and so there are different levels of elites; the 0.1% rule within the one-percenters, and so on. There are no sharp boundaries necessarily, unless you live in a society like medieval France, where legally you were either nobility or a peasant.

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The next big question is how are elites produced and reproduced? They’re reproduced by ambitious young people, or, to use the technical term, “elite aspirants”, who want to gain positions of power. Elite overproduction occurs when, during some historical periods, we get too many elite aspirants for the slowly changing number of power positions. That creates intense competition, and while some competition is very helpful and good, excessive competition is harmful as it corrodes the social norms and institutions of the society.

When you have huge numbers of losers in this game, a proportion of frustrated elites will decide to break the rules. We saw that very clearly in the 2016 US presidential election. At that point, the number of candidates in the Republican primaries was the largest in history.

Disgruntled elite-wannabes are far more threatening to societal stability than disgruntled workers. In England during the Middle Ages, there was a huge peasant uprising led by Wat Tyler. And what happened? A small group of armoured knights on horseback destroyed them without raising so much as a sweat, because non-elites are not organised. As long as the state is strong and the elites are unified, they can keep a lid on popular discontent.

MH: In the book, you use the arresting phrase “the iron law of oligarchy” to describe why we end up producing too many elites. Once you have a bunch of people in charge of the levers of power and money, they will start funnelling resources towards themselves because they can.

PT: Exactly. What we see in the historical record is that all complex societies go through periods of good times, maybe a century or so long on average, and then periods of disintegration. During the good times, after a couple of generations, the elites get used to the fact that life is good and stable, and that’s when the iron law of oligarchy kicks in. The elites are very strongly tempted to convert their power into goodies for themselves — and if there’s nothing stopping them, that’s what they do. They basically reconfigure the economy in a way that depresses the wages of workers and creates a “wealth pump” that funnels riches directly to the owners and managers of corporations.

MH: You’ve described this happening under Thatcher and Reagan, after several decades of the post-war consensus.

PT: Precisely. Those elites in the US and the UK had 30 glorious years. But by the late Seventies, they started getting selfish. That’s when we began to see the separation between worker productivity and worker compensation. And immediately — within another 30 years — the numbers of uber-rich people exploded in the United States. The number of decamillionaires, those with $10 million or more, increased tenfold from the Eighties to 2010.

That’s the wealth pump at work. And that’s what drives one part of elite overproduction in the US, which is the overproduction of wealthy people who try to become candidates for political office. That’s one of the reasons why the cost of campaigning for political office has completely exploded.

MH: You say in End Times that “America is in a revolutionary situation”. In your view, is it too late to avert the predicted crisis?

PT: We are in crisis, but it’s not too late to avert the worst outcomes. I’m not a collapsologist. The possibility of a social revolution in the US seems to me outlandish. But the Ancien Régime nobility in France could not imagine that in 1789 they would be put under the guillotine, just as antebellum Americans could not imagine a bloody war that would leave 600,000 dead. It is typical that we cannot fully see the possible nastiness of a situation before it unfurls.

We have close to 200 cases of societal crisis right now, and the majority are fairly severe — some leading to outright collapse. But there are also maybe 10-15% of cases where the elites pull together and, cooperating with the rest of the population, they find the right mix of reforms and avoid the worst outcomes. For example, in the mid-19th century, the British Empire was the only large European state that was not affected by a revolution. Of course, there were bad moments, like the Peterloo massacre, but there was no civil war. That’s partly because a group of social elites got together and convinced the rest of their number of the need to reform.

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MH: What about elite dissidents today? In your book, you give a fictionalised example of a young, far-Left, woke, upper-middle class revolutionary who wants to smash the system from within. She joins Antifa, the autonomous anti-fascist movement, and wants to abolish the police — even if that makes life worse for the working class. But is she really a revolutionary at all if none of her opinions have any resonance with the working class?

PT: She is a failed revolutionary, clearly, because she cannot harness popular discontent. In fact, it’s the populists on both the Left and the Right who resonate far more with the working class in the United States.

Antifa is really quite ineffectual, except at beating up Right-wing extremists and smashing things. That’s why Jane, this character in my book, grows disenchanted after some years in the Antifa movement because it’s not going anywhere. She then realises that the way to get ahead in the US, if you want to have a revolution, is through the legal channels because the state is very strong. I am Russian, and I can tell you that nothing like a Bolshevik Party is possible in the US. We don’t want a violent revolution, really. Instead, people on both the Left and Right work their way through the structures of power.

MH: Do you think the elites who want to abolish the police are genuine believers?

PT: Yes. Antifa is fairly secretive, and for good reason, because they don’t want to be penetrated by the FBI. So let’s look back 50 years, at the Marxist militant group the Weatherman Underground, because many of those people have now written memoirs, and we have a pretty good idea of what motivated them. They were clearly fighting against what they saw as an unjust American society, where the poor went hungry and where minorities and women were oppressed. They had a genuine cause — but they were completely unrealistic about their ability to start a revolution. And so they started blowing up monuments, killing people, all because they wanted to trigger the outpouring of popular anger against the elites.

But there was no popular anger at that time. This was before the wealth pump got turned on: American workers were doing very well, and every new generation was doing better than the previous one, so they were completely turned off by these wannabe revolutionaries. Just because somebody is a revolutionary doesn’t mean that they are going to be a successful revolutionary.

MH: You say in your book that the Republicans are on their way to becoming a revolutionary party. And, as we saw with Brexit and long before that — with the repeal of the Corn Laws — that alliances between political elites and a disaffected working class are often somewhat cynical. Is revolution more likely to come from the Right? 

PT: We have to remember that there’s not just one counter-elite party; they’re all splintered. It is a constant struggle between the different radical groups. That’s why, in the US, we have Left-wing populists and Right-wing populists who cannot work together, even though Bernie Sanders sometimes says things that are identical to Republican Senator J.D. Vance.

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MH: In your book, you note that Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News commentator, represents a kind of lightning rod for some of these dissident forces on the conservative side, and that he actually has quite a coherent ideology. You also say that Rupert Murdoch appears to care more about his bottom line than about the interests of his class. So why did he fire Carlson?

PT: Well, I’m not a Freudian psychologist, but let me reconstruct what I think happened. Rupert Murdoch, who really does care about his bottom line, is embedded in a network of like-minded, wealthy people, and he must have been growing tired of them carping on for years about Tucker Carlson and how he is undermining their interests. Finally, Murdoch broke and fired him. It’s not a matter of money — they’re still paying his salary — they just wanted to shut him up.

MH: In cases where the elite view is in conflict with the popular view, do the elites always win?

PT: The great political scientist Martin Gilens conducted some fascinating research into the legislation passed through Congress. He found that 90% of the American population had zero effect on the actual legislation that passed — zilch, nada. Their technique was not fine enough to distinguish between the final 10 percentiles, but they suspect that it’s really the 1% who drives everything. This is why I argue in my book that the US is not a democracy anymore, it’s a plutocracy.

MH: Did those liberal democratic norms ever do anything in the first place? What’s the point of democracy at all?

PT: Democracy works — just look at the quality of life in Denmark and other socially democratic Nordic countries. Of course, it’s all comparative: autocracies are even more dysfunctional than democracies. But even the US plutocracy has, in the past, been capable of pro-social action. During the progressive era, reformist American elites persuaded and browbeat their cohort into passing the New Deal reforms, which essentially shut down the wealth pump for three glorious decades.

MH: Can you envision a coalition in the present day with the capacity to hold the elites to account — and perhaps even frighten them into shutting off the wealth pump?

PT: Let me first say that I am completely non-partisan, and regularly criticise both the Republicans and Democrats. I think that the populist factions, both on the Left and the Right, often talk a good talk, but they have not yet delivered.

There was an American populist party in the 1890s, which never won elections but did put pressure on the establishment at a time of political tension. Riots and insurrections were becoming more frequent. By the early Twenties, it seemed to many that America had reached a revolutionary moment, especially with the Soviet Union presenting an alternative model to the US system. The first Red Scare broke out in 1921, when a segment of American elites were convinced that a Bolshevik Revolution was imminent.

It was this combination of internal and external pressures that propelled Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reforms. He must have realised, like the Russian tsar Alexander II before him, that you either make reforms from above or you end up having revolution from below.

MH: The entire thesis of your book is that we have always had elites — and, in fact, the important thing is not to get rid of them, but to hold their feet to the fire to make sure they’re behaving. But it’s my observation that the current reigning elite is overtly anti-hierarchical, and that we must get rid of hierarchies, wherever there are, wherever they exist. Where do you stand on the sacred values of anti-hierarchicalism?

PT: For 95% of our evolutionary history, we humans lived in small-scale societies, which were very egalitarian — unusually egalitarian — when you compare us to the great apes, for example. The first elites appeared about 7,500 years ago, in chiefdoms. My argument is that a large-scale society can only function in a reasonable way if we have hierarchies of managers and administrators, because we are not ants. We cannot deal without elites. Elites are necessary because, without them, we wouldn’t be able to cooperate and coordinate in large numbers.

But let’s separate their managerial needs from huge differences in wealth. In principle — and, in fact, in history — many elites who start at the beginning of those integrative eras, they’re fairly unselfish. They live quite modestly. Just think about Republican Rome and the senator class: they were just farmers that were somewhat a little bit wealthier than the citizens. The economic differences were quite minimal.

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In principle, it is possible to have elites and have them act in procedural manners. But it is like riding a bicycle: you have to balance all the time. So in order to keep elites from acting in selfish ways, there have to be constraints on them. Democratic institutions provide a set of such constraints, but they have to be supplemented — by other things that we have not yet evolved. Because, inevitably, even democratic society gets into a situation where inequalities start to grow.

My main point is that we can separate the managerial parts of the elites from their accumulating huge wealth and unfettered power.

MH: But what do you make of this societal insistence that we must abolish all hierarchy?

PT: Okay, you want to abolish hierarchies? First, pay yourself the same salary as the median worker in your 500 Fortune company. Put your money where your mouth is.

The former are happy to have a set of cartoon cut-out villains to rail against: incels and misogynists who openly talk about their hatred of women; racists who unabashedly use racial slurs and claim that black people are genetically inferior; anonymous trolls who openly invoke Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust as examples to be emulated. These online villains, for their part, are more than happy to be given attention, and want nothing more than to be known as consummate outsiders; scary barbarians just waiting for a chance to pillage all the norms that liberal society holds dear.

As it happens, though, this sort of thing is mostly theatre. Far from being outsiders and outcasts, these dissidents are not so much enemies of liberal society as its products. Like the “Dirtbag Left” that once gathered around Bernie Sanders and had notions of upending capitalism only to meekly be reabsorbed into the machine they purported to fight, the average edgy Hitler worshipper on Twitter is far less scary than he tries to appear. If John Steinbeck said that the US would never be fertile grounds for socialism because every American worker considered himself merely a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, then one can add today that our online world mostly consists of temporarily embarrassed middle-class liberals.

A recent storm of drama and division within the online “vitalist” movement illustrates this well, and in a humorous fashion to boot. Vitalism, for the uninitiated, refers to an extremely heterogeneous collection of tendencies and idiosyncratic personalities, loosely affiliated with the Right and Donald Trump. This affiliation with the 46th president, however, is strictly one-way: while many vitalists would like to attach themselves to the “Trump movement” in some fashion, it seems very doubtful that Trump actually wants them or even knows that they exist.

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The intellectual tendencies that make up the vitalist movement are broad —in some cases openly nonsensical — and it is probably fair to say that they have very little broad electoral appeal. What they do say runs the gamut from various oddball interpretations of Nietzschean philosophy and a veneration of scantily clad male underwear models to talking about black criminality and how we live in a “longhouse gynocracy”. In general, this is mostly a subculture concerned with edginess and self-referential jargon. Some people are only there to shitpost; others hope to market their own personal “brand” to make money from the sale of protein powders or podcast subscriptions. And finally, a few truly foolish souls clearly hope to use their online notoriety as a springboard into legitimate politics.

One of the leading voices within this subculture — a person going by the non-de plume of Bronze Age Pervert — recently had details about his real identity posted online by a rival within these online spaces. BAP, it turned out, was actually a Yale academic from a fairly well-to-do background, with many connections inside what Donald Trump would probably deride as “the swamp”. Unfortunately for his online stans, however, he was also Jewish.

Normally, a person being Jewish is hardly cause for scandal or even concern, and certainly not an online civil war. In an online environment where people openly praise Hitler, however, that sort of factual reveal is pretty awkward. Indeed, BAP himself clearly had a habit of playing with fire here, posting tweets such as “I’m an Aryan supremacist and believe in the extermination of hundreds of millions”, all to loud cheering from his many fans.

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To the shock of absolutely nobody, however, it turns out that the Nazi Germany fandom still has something of an antisemitism problem, even in 2023. The result is that many of his former fans feeling legitimately betrayed, while other, more loyal fans have been fighting a bitter battle to try to explain why the online racist movement can’t afford to judge people merely based on their ethnic background, because groups of people are really just made up of individuals that can be good or bad. Imagine that.

Now, this all might reasonably lead someone to how this could all happen. What sort of appeal would an online space obsessed with “naming the Jew” — a forum that is often genuinely distrustful of and disgusted by Jewish people — even have for a Yale-educated Jewish man from a well-to-do and academically successful family? The answer to this question is quite simple: there is very little new in the contradictions surfacing on the online Right, because all of them have happened before — on the Left.

For the Left, the 2010s saw a massive cohort of “overproduced elites” turn towards the ideologies of socialism, communism, and social democracy in huge numbers. People graduated from first and second-tier universities only to find no jobs waiting for them in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In response, they turned toward Left-wing organisations and forcibly colonised them. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was an incredibly sleepy fossil of an organisation until Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign and the victory of Donald Trump, when it was inundated by tens of thousands of young, almost entirely college-educated radicals. In the UK, Labour was flooded by the same sort of people through Momentum, and they catapulted Jeremy Corbyn from the sidelines to party leadership, much to his own surprise.

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Of course, this would end in disaster. Bernie Sanders was reabsorbed into the Democratic party machine, and the DSA mostly devolved into infighting, as the ambitious simply saw it as a convenient ladder by which they could secure a sinecure inside the Democratic party. Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, presided over a massive loss of working-class support, leaving the “real actual communists” furious with the racist “gammon” workers they had spent the last few years pretending to care about. This was a movement driven by the insecurities, needs and demands of people with academic backgrounds whose promised place inside the economy had suddenly disappeared, and they latched onto communism and socialism as their lifeline back into the middle class.

The ongoing drama surrounding Bronze Age Pervert and his cohort is, in this sense, just a slightly absurd rethread of this story. Bernie Sanders lost in 2016 and Donald Trump won, but the middle-class jobs for the scions of academia did not return. And so, many of them flocked to “racism” as the new frontier as “socialism” collapsed in on itself; in certain cases, such as that of occasional art critic Anna Khachiyan and part-time actress Dasha Nekrasova from the popular podcast Red Scare, the transition from vaguely scary Left-wing aesthetics to vaguely “based” Right-wing aesthetics has essentially been seamless — a slick brand update that kept the Patreon payments flowing.

To put this controversy in exceedingly simple terms: where once the workers of Britain and America felt that their cause and movement was being shamelessly usurped by people who weren’t workers and didn’t care about them, today racists and antisemites in both Britain and America are mad that their own racist and antisemitic spaces are being usurped by self-interested outsiders, some of whom are quite literally Jews. And they’re not actually wrong. Like a horde of hermit crabs in search of new shells, Western society’s inability to absorb the huge amount of surplus “leaders” and middle-class “elites” it has produced has led to them looking wherever they can for flags, causes and movements to usurp, all in the hope of the pay cheque (and social status) they felt that they were owed.

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Should we sympathise with legitimate fans of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler who feel as if they’ve been robbed of their own movement, their own “safe space” away from the ever-present threat of Jewish domination? Maybe not. But to borrow from that famous line in The Big Lebowski, one can say what one will about the tenets of National Socialism — to them it’s an ethos. To the overproduced scions of a disappearing Western middle class, by contrast, racism is mostly just a branding device, an angle for a podcast, a lunch ticket, a mask. The cause itself, the ideology, worker’s rights, naming the Jews — none of it really matters in the end.

These people have worn many masks before, and they will wear more masks in the future, until liberal society recognises them for who they are and finally gives them the only thing they really care about: a white-collar email job, ideally one that carries a little prestige and can be performed remotely.

The pretext was the publication of Matthew Goodwin’s Values, Voice, and Virtue, which argues that Britain is now ruled by a class of university-educated, urban-dwelling, liberal cosmopolitans, heedlessly imposing their luxury beliefs about race, gender, and Gary Lineker upon everybody else. While working-class people are supposed to be fondling their Union Jacks lovingly, worrying about mass immigration and looking baffled when you call them “cis”, Britain’s institutions have allegedly been captured by a bunch of Oxbridge-educated she/her types who equate any disagreement with fascism, and who are gripped with existential dread whenever they glance at their post-Brexit blue passports on their way to the Italian lakes.

I’ve had many brushes with exactly this type of horror show, and I agree that they are overrepresented in certain sectors, such as academia and NGOs. Still, I am not sure I agree that the ranks of the elite are brimming with them generally. And neither does Goodwin, at least sometimes. In his book, he alternates between the safety of a relatively banal motte (our institutions are dominated by the professional-managerial class), and the exhilaration of a much more controversial bailey (our institutions throng with radical progressives, calling for compulsory pronoun rounds and telling anyone who dislikes mass immigration that they’re a Nazi).

In a more sober moment, Goodwin acknowledges that “these radical progressives are a smaller group within the new elite”. Much of the time, though, he equates the radical part with the elite whole. In The Sun, for instance, he writes that: “Routinely, the New Elite demand things which signal their status to other elites, such as open borders, a relaxed approach to dealing with the small boats, or the sexualisation of children, which they will not have to suffer the effects of themselves.” In his book, meanwhile, he writes that “By portraying their political opponents as an assortment of fascists, racists and close-minded reactionaries, the new elite seek to shut down the conversation and exclude them altogether”.

Whatever the new elite is, I’m probably a member of it. I went to Oxford and then made a career out of talking about whether the external world really exists independently of the mind or not, so I don’t think there is any way out for me on this. The majority of my university contemporaries are now at the peak of successful and lucrative senior careers. To my knowledge, only one person from my college year group is unemployed — and that’s Dominic Cummings. The idea that any of these people sit around performatively extolling the joys of open borders or the sexualisation of children to each other is simply not true.

Today, most of them work long hours in finance, business, the civil service, or the law. They earn large amounts of money, live in nice houses cleaned by other people, and send their children to private schools. They aren’t on Twitter; they don’t have the time or inclination. They are often cultural philistines and rarely talk about politics. They are as baffled as most of the rest of the country about the ideological capture of major institutions, and just as disconcerted.

Back at university, in the early Nineties, most of these people were not protesting the poll tax or joining Greenpeace. They were drinking pints until they were sick, watching Neighbours all day in the JCR, and taking movement instructions from the jukebox (sit down for “Sit Down”, jump around for “Jump Around”). Lads from up North were pretending to be Liam Gallagher; boys from the South were evenly split between Damon Albarn and Sebastian Flyte. There were hardly any girls, and their (our) sexual activity was obsessed over pruriently. Activist types were roundly laughed at, ambitious types decried as hacks. Most people were moral relativists but couldn’t say why. The Bosnian war was raging and I don’t recall a single conversation about it. The only newspaper columnist I regularly read was Mystic Meg.

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Thatcherism was on the way out and New Labour on the way in. As Goodwin notes, there was also a “depoliticisation” as Right and Left alternatives merged. If the neoliberalism of those years did anything for my peers, it loosened the bonds of group identity but put nothing else in their place. It made every kind of serious political effort something to be laughed at. This political and moral apathy, I think, is still the dominant tendency of the liberal elite in the UK, accompanied by an ironising and distancing humour gained from watching too much Fantasy Football League or Never Mind the Buzzcocks at a formative age.

It is not that neoliberalism made the new elite woke, then, but that most of them never really had an overt politics at all. The middle-aged, middle-class version of British masculinity inherited from that period dictates that there’s something faintly embarrassing about being seen to care strongly about any sociocultural issues, let alone anything as fraught as race, immigration or gender identity. This version of the elite is not anti-tradition — it just doesn’t positively value it. It is not, as Goodwin claims, particularly “supportive of abortion, homosexuality, casual sex, prostitution, divorce, gender equality and immigration”, but rather mostly indifferent. And it is not intolerant of political disagreements; it’s just that people don’t really have them at dinner parties.

Still, many of our institutions were captured by a small number of radicals nonetheless. And this happened partly because the elites running the institutions didn’t have a clue how to stand up to the incoming wave of moral cant, guilt-tripping, and bullying from younger and differently socialised generations. On what firm ground might they have stood in order to see this off? They don’t have a political vocabulary with which to counter the wild rhetoric, and nor do they have the convictions or earnestness to make it stick. What they do have is a suppressed sense of guilt for being so rich, a vague fear that they might make the wrong joke, and a fervent hope that the moralising will stop soon so they can talk about the football or cricket instead. Many of them also have children who lecture them about social justice. They can’t stand up to them either.

In other words, I think it’s simply wrong to imply that the majority of the liberal elite are now rampantly woke. The culture wars don’t need any more stoking. When it comes to traditional working-class values, assuming there still are any, most of the elite are in no man’s land, not enemy trenches. Their political inarticulacy has made the organisations they run ripe for power grabs but they are not directly waging any war.

These days, it’s commonplace to see garlanded technocrats such as Mario Draghi leaving office in shame. The decay of liberal elites has been the central political narrative of the last decade across the West. Surely, then, the time is ripe for a populist upsurge?

And yet, while a handful of insurgent leaders and parties have reached top office promising to shake up the liberal establishment, the first wave of populist and anti-establishment governments of the 21^st century has so far shown itself utterly incapable of replacing liberal elites. Tragically or otherwise, the recent ousting of Boris Johnson is the perfect example. Thanks to Brexit, Johnson had the strongest mandate of any British leader in the last half a century. To the disappointment of many, however, the incompetence of his cabinet reproduced the same vices of the elites he aimed to supplant — elites to which, it must be said, he always himself belonged.

But for all its charming British idiosyncrasies, Johnson’s rise and ignominious fall is not a drama specific to the UK but a defining feature of the first populist wave. Under this label, we can classify a diverse range of anti-establishment forces and leaders which rose to power in the period from 2014 to 2022, whether Donald Trump, Syriza, or the coalition government between the Movimento 5 Stelle and La Lega. These movements all represented different ideas and varying degrees of claimed distance from liberal power brokers, but they all campaigned under the slogan of taking power from the elites and giving it back to the people, promises they all singularly failed to achieve.

The promise and virtue of anti-establishment forces lay in their capacity to build their strength by gathering support from aggrieved sectors of the working and middle classes who felt the system was failing them. They introduced topics to the public agenda that were excluded from political debate. The new communication techniques introduced by populists disrupted traditional political parties. This ensured populist coalitions were successful election-winning machines, but governing effectively was an entirely different story. Perhaps one of the most significant traits populist governments share is that absolutely none of them actually fulfilled their pledge of rebuilding their nations anew.

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The constraints of real-life governance will always water down any promise of revolutionary change. Nevertheless, the problem with that recent wave of anti-establishment governments is not that the reforms they implemented fell short, but that such reforms never even began. The first thing Trump did was to suspend the TPP and the TTIP agreements, but then his government failed to present a programme to re-industrialise America. Boris Johnson eventually got Brexit done, but his real merit was preventing Brexit from being actively undone by technocratic liberal activists. Leftist Syriza passionately campaigned against EU austerity measures but, in the end, surrendered before a humiliating memorandum imposed by the Troika. Overall, almost no remarkable policy change was delivered by any of the numerous anti-establishment governments that took office during the past 10 years.

This is because these new forces were always weaker than hysterical liberal pundits wanted us to believe. To begin with, populist platforms have often been unwieldy coalitions of the disenchanted, united around a charismatic leader and common contempt for liberal elites. Their leaders have often been excellent communicators — especially compared with the boring centrist grey men — but they rarely had deep ideas of their own. If populist governments did not deliver meaningful change, that is partly because they didn’t know what exactly they wanted to do once in power. Political opportunism may get you into office, but it can’t reform a country.

Without a clear set of ideas, populists had a hard time framing social events in ways that could break with traditional political allegiances. And once in power, sooner or later, they all withdrew to their original  ideological safe space. When BLM protests erupted around the country, Trump took a traditional Republican stand, invoking “law and order”, though until then, a central part of his discourse relied on a strong mistrust of the deep state and the security apparatus. On the Left, we have seen how Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Podemos sided once and again with the liberal centre to “Stop Fascism”. For a brief moment, it seemed possible that Boris Johnson would unleash the sovereign power of the British state towards reindustrialisation and finally lead the Tories from under Thatcher’s shadow.

Despite their use of disruptive communication and reliance on mobilised grassroots, the platforms that enthroned populist leaders were ultimately all too similar to the traditional electoral machines they aimed to confront. In the case of Johnson or Trump, they used conventional parties with almost no internal reform. Regardless of the lack of clear vision at the top, populist platforms lacked a competent, reliable line of middle-ranking officials able to translate the orders of the command staff to the tailored demands of everyday politics. History teaches us that reliable bureaucracies are the backbone of good governance. Every visionary start-up leader needs a bunch of boring Excel drones, but the boring work of government was never quite to the populist, crowd-pleasing taste of Johnson, Trump, or Salvini.

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So, during their time in office, they often combined chaos and poor governance with the tendency to delegate their day-to-day responsibilities to individuals linked to the old political elites — their purported opponents. The introduction of technocratic figures with no interest in implementing the changes populists promised sucked out all transformative energy those governments might have possessed. They were like the barbarian Mongols or Manchus who conquered the Chinese empire: after some initial disruption of the system, they surrendered their hard-won power to the old mandarins. Of course, the difference is that the successful barbarian king could lop the heads of bureaucrats if they found them obstructing the advance of the new order; today, the old establishment successfully used the incompetence of populist governments to take them down. The crown changed heads, but sovereign power never changed hands.

Trapped by the system’s institutional inertia, anti-establishment governments focused on what they did best, attacking the establishment, but not on remedying its errors. Criticising the elites is both a necessary task and an enormously satisfying one. But voters who gave their confidence to anti-establishment leaders expected something more than just seeing liberal elites being owned on Twitter. They expected reformers that would govern well on their behalf, changing the functions of the state in their image. While liberals caricature populist supporters as ignorant bigots, what actually feeds anti-establishment sentiment has always been the search for a point of anchorage in a time of turmoil and the hope of good governance. And no matter how whiny and annoying they can be, elites can still, it turns out, perform far better than common citizens in the task of governance.

The endurance of liberal regimes always lay in their capacity to inoffensively integrate external pressures and to prevent any attempt to implement structural change. That’s because, as with any other successful social system, liberal regimes are sustained not only by their front-line political backers but also by an entrenched network of interests and social organisations operating outside the formal structures of governance. That network acts as a para-state, with power inside and outside the state neutralising any possible threat. That is where social elites play their essential role in sustaining even a failing system’s capacity for survival.

Any political movement aiming to deliver reforms and break with the constraints of decaying liberal systems will therefore require something more than just winning elections and producing viral memes. After gaining office, the executive action of the government will need to be supported by an external solid social coalition. This means that an alternative network of civil society organisations must have already been built, incorporating unions, intellectuals, businesses, communities, churches. This will equip the new elites with the tools to finally reform broken Western societies, while also safely accommodating elements of the old establishment without keeping them in the driver’s seat.

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But in the meantime, the discontent that populist movements represented isn’t going away. In this state of permanent crisis, we will keep witnessing continuous social eruptions with strong anti-elitist sentiments: just wait for this winter when European voters leave their freezing homes to warm up the streets. Some of the new anti-establishment forces will try to recycle the old, failed populist form. Turbocharged with fiery rhetoric but incompetent at dealing with the most trivial tasks of governance, they will likely meet the same end.

Others, however, will learn the lessons of the previous populist wave and go beyond the outdated formula. This has been the historical pattern of past anti-establishment movements, from Chartism to Socialism; from the völkisch movement to the German Conservative Revolution; from the Russian revolution of 1905 to 1917; from the dispersed groups of American populism and the victims of the Great Depression to the coalition that brought the New Deal. In all of these, we can see the historical tendency to evolve from disorganised eruptions to disciplined structures, maturing from a general intuition about what is not working in our society to nuanced theories and complex doctrines, from the enfant terrible to visionary leaders and effective organisers.

Any well-functioning society still needs elites, no matter how bad they are. Populist revolts have removed the veil of liberal decadence, and our political systems have reached a point of no return. But inchoate populist rage is not enough. Whoever aspires to bring real change to Western nations must first work to build an elite class fit for the hard task of governance. As Boris learned, any fool can win power: the hard task is to wield it.

Triumphalism and horror abound, but both responses are a distraction. While it is difficult to predict exactly what Musk will do with Twitter (he has announced his intention to soften content moderation and make the algorithm open-source, but only time can tell on both), what his purchase represents is considerably clearer: it is a major flashpoint in the shift from a centralised culture of public elites to a more decentralised, chaotic, and devolved world.

In this context, debates about free speech and accountability miss the point. There was nowhere near this much panic when Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013. Nor, for that matter, do people worry about the fact that Warner Bros Discovery owns CNN or that Comcast owns MSNBC. So why all the hoopla about Musk?

There are two reasons for the excitement. The first is related to Musk himself: his perceived character and affiliations. Elite media and progressive circles tend to regard him as more dangerous than Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos not because he is richer or more powerful, but because he is more culturally aligned with various deplorables, from crypto-bros to MAGA-heads to Joe Rogan.

This perception helps to explain the fretting over Musk’s claim to be a “free speech absolutist”, which human rights groups have warned could usher in a torrent of online hate. But whether or not you think unrestricted free speech is a good thing, it is unlikely to be put into practice. There is widespread agreement that unmoderated public forums are completely unmanageable due to trolling and abuse, and any administrator of any social media platform will have to engage in some filtering or censoring. The worry is about what kinds of speech he will and won’t let through.

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The second reason relates to Twitter’s tenuous role in preserving an established national elite in an age in which the very idea of such an elite is dying. Twitter has in recent years, just like the internet itself,  bifurcated into two broad strata: a national “overculture” of elites — academic, celebrity, political, or journalistic — and a more shadowy, disparate “underculture” of often-pseudonymous hoi polloi, who increasingly define themselves in opposition to the traditional elites.

For many years now, the undercultures of Reddit, 4chan, and other online forums have made the idea of a respectable, professionalised online discourse more difficult to maintain. And the ability of the underculture to mobilise masses of anonymous users to push against the elevated voices of the overculture has shaken the established media culture to the bone.

This dynamic was on display last week in the conflict between Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz and the formerly anonymous Libs of TikTok Twitter account. The landscape of the battle was an indication of the overculture’s weakening position. When an anonymous account holds enough influence to not only merit mention by the Post but rally an online army against the journalist who exposed her, the elites have lost a great deal of the power that makes them elite.

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Twitter, perhaps unwisely, made the bifurcation explicit when it introduced the Verified tag on accounts — the infamous “blue tick” letting users know that “an account of public interest is authentic”. In practice, the blue tick has become a pejorative marker to those who see Twitter as having catered to their more prestigious users while blithely censoring unverified users. (Disclosure: I am a verified Twitter user.) Blueticks, in turn, have to face the rage and mockery of the unverified hordes, proving that notability is no guarantee of respect. Some of the most successful of them, such Elon Musk and Donald Trump, have gained huge followings by railing against the very class to which they belong.

For an elite like Musk to disavow the overculture is tremendously dispiriting, even traitorous, to his fellow elites, and that is why his purchase of Twitter has provoked so much consternation. In an earlier age, the concentrated force of media, academic, and corporate elites could have overpowered Musk’s takeover bid. Enough of the players would have known each other that it would have been possible to close ranks to defend the overculture by expelling Musk from its ranks and declaring him toxic to all. Today, however, Musk has been able to pose as an anti-establishment figure in the vein of Trump, thereby gaining the backing of the underculture simply by seeming to be opposed to elites. That backing has been sufficient to leave any overculture objections in the dust.

Twitter has been paralysed for years. Some critics have attacked Twitter for not capitalising on its tremendous prestige, but these attacks downplay the immense difficulty of the company’s position. Twitter tried to be a voice for both the overculture and the underculture simultaneously, letting the two intermingle. That made Twitter uniquely valuable for forging connections that were not possible on Facebook or Reddit, but it also made it sclerotic. It was impossible to please both cultures. When Musk blathers on about free speech, what he is truly saying is, “Twitter has favored the elites too much; I will not do that.” That does not equate to more free speech, only to a different alignment.

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If Musk immediately lets Donald Trump back on Twitter (and Trump returns), that by itself will be seen as a flashpoint in today’s culture wars. Media elites have long complained of Twitter not doing enough to stamp out abuse and assorted wrong opinions. Letting Trump back on the platform will be shorthand for giving the middle finger not to those who hate Trump but to those who fought so hard to get him off in the first place. Yet the irony is that Twitter only banned Trump on January 8, 2021, by which point he had already used the service to win the White House and demagogue his way through the presidency. Like NBC and CNN, Twitter turned on Trump only after he had successfully exploited their platform. It was yet another example of Twitter following rather than leading, unable to please its wide and insufficiently-cloistered constituencies.

Musk will face the same problems. Though he owes little to the overculture at this point, keeping the underculture happy will not be trivial. He is not a Trump who can throw red meat to his base — he will instead have to balance between underculture sects which, once they perceive the elite to be sufficiently marginalised, will start turning on each other. Musk will doubtless decide that such wars aren’t worth his time. If that happens, the future of Twitter may not look so different from its past and present: a stagnant purgatory, albeit one with fewer blueticks.

Bombs are not raining down on our cities; instead, what we are experiencing is the psychological weaponisation of war — and its exploitation as a tool of indoctrination and statecraft in the hands of the establishment.

The Ukraine crisis is undoubtedly a tragedy, but it is merely the latest in a series of geopolitical events stretching back at least 20 years in which the media coverage has been biased, one-sided, and ideological. All of these instances — Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Afghanistan Withdrawal — were riddled with “structural information traps” that we ignored at our peril.

With each of these conflicts, the coverage gets worse, and the traps become ever more luring and incendiary. In each case, a narrative is constructed and transposed over the reporting, reinforced by sensationalist imagery that could rationalise an intervention and perhaps military action. But none compares to Ukraine. Here, we have witnessed the media of the Free World disseminating dishonest or otherwise uncritical coverage, fake news, Ukrainian disinformation, and propaganda aimed at conditioning the public to internalise the establishment’s Manichean narrative of a deranged madman’s random war of aggression.

Not only has the Ukraine coverage been highly charged, morally self-righteous, and plainly political, it actively demands a collective suspension of disbelief as it cultivates and redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation. Some, such as the former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have irresponsibly vilified the entire Russian population. Others, such as The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, have begun to senselessly demonise prescient realist American academics for daring to shed light on Russia’s basic national security interests and the possibility of a confrontation if they go unrecognised.

So far as the Western legacy media is concerned, we really do live in the post-historical age Francis Fukuyama triumphantly proclaimed in 1989, with liberal internationalism the only acceptable paradigm through which to understand the world. Alternative views are now tantamount to championing tyranny. In each instance, the dictator comes to personify internationally Hegel’s thymotic, if savage, primitive man — the inhumane antithesis of the “last man” —  fighting maniacally against liberal democracy, the march of modernity, and progress itself. Assad, Ghaddafi, the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin all fit this archetype as reactionary actors par excellence necessitating a holy alliance to confront and civilise.

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Such a melioristic framing of international politics justifies and indeed privileges a Manichean narrative of good and evil. In this context, rationality itself is bound to the good, defined as effective conformity with liberal hegemony.

This is how the permanent members of the ruling class view the world. The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, has made the enlightening observation that the years-brewing war in Ukraine was a result of Putin simply becoming “unhinged”, suggesting he might be suffering from neurological problems. Not to be outdone, Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the Iraq War and the ill-advised 2008 Bucharest declaration (which affirmed Nato’s “open door” towards Ukraine and therefore helped to spark this most recent conflict), bemoaned Putin’s “delusional rendering of history” and “erratic” behaviour.

Perhaps, given the profound crisis of meaning in the West and the gap in solidarity and social cohesion, we should not be surprised. Living under the conditions of rootlessness, spiritual emptiness, and angst, every crisis is an opportunity for mythopoesis. Tragedy is reborn, and we are easily enthralled by the periodic cycles of worship and hero-making. Our faith in the cult of expertise, meanwhile, blinds and lulls us to the potential dangers of such black and white thinking.

As good Straussians, American neoconservatives were among the first to intuit this fact: that owing to disenchantment and the dissolution of our “sacred canopy”, the myth — or the Platonic “noble lie” — can be used to strengthen the Regime. Through their co-option, they would ensure the inherent power of the “noble lie” would be harnessed to regularly generate casus belli for global liberal imperialism. After all, what better unifying force than the “grand American project” of war to energise one’s desire for national greatness and the need for the regimentation of life in a disordered, chaotic Zeitgeist. Led by America, the grand mission of the Anglosphere would therefore have to be “to advance civilisation itself”. Not to mention, heroes also need villains, and it does help that in the Ukrainian archetype, ‘evil’ is not an intangible virus but can be personified onto an ‘other’ — in this case, Vladimir Putin.

This is the fake, performative, and internationalist nationalism of the American elite class: they use emotional triggers to rally the people behind the flag of the state in the name of lofty humanitarian causes which mask their own self-importance and narcissistic greatness. In fact, the systematic and periodic milking of tragedy to sow mass hysteria and manufacture support for the liberal imperium and its rulers has become the modus operandi in Washington. The consequence is not only further empowerment of the martial state, but also the enabling and even the ennobling of America’s war machine.

But so what? So what if our information ecosystem in the West is substantively flawed and prejudiced? Is this kind of systemic information bias, unbalanced coverage, and outright favouritism not endemic to all culture-complexes, prevalent also across state-run media in China, Iran, and Russia? The answer is certainly yes, but with an important qualification: the latter are not liberal democracies.

Some might say the foreign policy hawks have not learned from their catastrophic regime-change wars in the Middle East. But they have. They learned the importance of narrative control and information warfare targeting domestic audiences: consolidating the media, tightening their hold on information, marginalising the few investigative journalists that remain, and nullifying scepticism as examples of appeasement or Putinism. Undoubtedly, the situation seriously endangers civil liberties and freedom of thought in the Anglosphere, undermining the very foundation of Western democracy.

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But wedded to a disturbing, yet ascendant, neo-McCarthyism, the homogenisation of the Western media environment could ultimately prove more ominous than simple government censorship à la North Korea or Iran. At its core, the phenomenon aims to condition public opinion into “correct” acceptable speech patterns in the service of the “noble lie” — using the good heart of most ordinary citizens and their repulsion at human suffering as bait.

This noxious development, unless fully defanged and neutralised, could yet tear the very fabric of Western society, unleashing the dystopia of internalised totalitarianism, wherein the public-private boundaries disappear and citizens — even informed ones — can hardly distinguish between planted or socially-reinforced information and their own views. In such a world, the only choice is to virtue signal and self-censor.

Gone unchecked, it could amount to mass indoctrination around key national security questions and spell the end of democracy — in spirit if not procedurally. This is the ultimate fog of war.

Despite their litany of failures, the lesson drawn by the foreign policy establishment from their calamitous interventionism under the banner of democracy and freedom (“democratism“) was not to abandon their evangelical crusades for empire and to affirm restraint, moderation, and prudence. It was, instead, a desire not to be caught in the lie, as they were with their patently false claim about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To achieve this, the military-industrial-congressional complex and the professional-managerial class that runs it had to dominate a new battlespace: information. Not for foreign audiences, in which Western intelligence has had a long track record, but to domesticate, intellectually sterilise, and effectively neutralise their own citizens.

To guarantee the continuation of its globalist misadventurism, the establishment had to control and limit the political discourse at home. It has done so largely in two ways. The first was to claim monopoly over ‘truth’, and to discredit anyone who might not go along with the endorsed narrative by doubting their patriotism and brandishing them as appeasers, apologists, and/or outright traitors. The second was to ensure a total consolidation of national security narratives — so that even when instances of falsehood and misinformation are discovered, this would not receive much exposure but be shunned to the darkest corners of the internet.

Any war is a tragedy. We should work to de-escalate and see it end in Ukraine. But there are always at least two sides to a conflict: two agendas, not counting the designs of external actors. War does not occur in a vacuum. It often betrays (and is the culmination of) a long history of grievances and distrust.

Having claimed over 14,000 lives since 2014, the conflict in Ukraine is not about Vladimir Putin and his character but realpolitik, national interest, and great power rivalry. Countries have genuine security interests, some of them existential. They have real red lines.

“No Russian leader could stand idly by,” Putin told William Burns, now the director of the CIA, and accept Nato membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus, or allow Western weapons systems into these countries. As one of American greatest strategists and the architect of “containment” against the Soviet Union, George Kennan’s reaction to the Clinton administration’s insistence on Nato’s enlargement is particularly telling: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

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Almost 25 years on, such sober-minded analysis is increasingly rare. And this sidelining of neutral, dispassionate scrutiny in the Russo-Ukrainian War is particularly alarming because this is not America’s war. The North Atlantic has little vital geostrategic interest in Ukraine other than in trying to avoid a refugee or energy crisis. Yet many in Washington, London, or Brussels have goaded and encouraged, and are now revelling in, the conflict — convinced as they are that an extended quagmire there could become the kind of vulnerability for Russia that Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union, a malignant tumour metastasising to the whole of the Russian body politic and instigating regime change.

While diehards may desire a West-East clash packaged under the tired rubric of Democracy versus Autocracy to prove their machismo, the situation in Ukraine is boiling over — and it is still early days. Things are about to get far more dreadful. Ukraine is a small state neighbouring a great power, a historical buffer and bridge between Russia and the West. “To Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country,” wrote Henry Kissinger in 2014. “Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus,”. The sooner we heed and accept this fact, the sooner we can sensibly gauge the situation as is and review our commitment critically.

Statesmanship is the art of not letting emotions drive policy. Sentimentality is the enemy of reason, all sense of proportion, and limits: in short, it kills realism and breeds wishful thinking. Such utopianism is senseless and dangerous: it will prolong the conflict and get lots of innocent civilians needlessly killed. Meanwhile, fomenting false hope in the public domain could further fan the flames of war, entangling Europe and the US in a confrontation with nuclear Russia — an Armageddon the tale of which we will likely not live to tell.

War is not sports-betting, where one can feel good about siding with the underdog from the comfort of a couch or a bar. It is geopolitics in its most visceral, existential form: wagers have real costs involving human lives, and they are settled only with power and political will.

The point is that this tragedy was entirely predictable and avoidable. We invited (if not compelled) conflict with our politics of intrigue and meddling in Eastern Europe, our disregard for Moscow’s security interests, and our moral grandstanding over items like Nato’s eastward expansion, Ukrainian neutrality, and demilitarisation. Any seasoned diplomat of the Cold War would be left utterly mystified. This was and remains political and strategic malpractice.

The question now is whether we want to put millions of Ukrainian lives in jeopardy simply to keep it as a Western Bulwark on Russia’s frontier and a dagger at Moscow’s throat. The Russo-Ukrainian War must be condemned and brought to an end using diplomacy, but the West must accept a degree of culpability for leading the Ukrainians “down the primrose path” and egging on their showdown with their giant neighbour to the east. Any attempt to escalate and prolong this conflict by giving false hope to the Ukrainian people with tough rhetoric, moralistic bluster, lethal arms, and economic sanctions, the brunt of which will be felt by civilians on both sides, is irresponsible and callous. It would only ensure more death and suffering.

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As former US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor contended in a recent television interview: “I see no reason why we should fight with the Russians over something that they have been talking about for years, [and] we simply chose to ignore… We will not send our forces to fight, but we are urging Ukrainians to die pointlessly in a fight they can’t win. We’re going to create a far greater humanitarian crisis than anything you’ve ever seen if it doesn’t stop.” Only this time, our liberal conceit and messianic delusion could potentially spiral a regional conflict into a global maelstrom that would exterminate humanity in a nuclear apocalypse.

The road to hell, as the wise aphorism has it, is paved with good intentions. Unless we course-correct now, we could soon find ourselves in a Huxleyan Brave New World that exploits the illusion of freedom while normalising the sophistic manipulation of public discourse to manufacture consent around the establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy.

When all roads lead to interventionism and war, pause, think, and consider how we got to where we are. Ask yourself who designed this dystopian city of lies and to what purpose — before it is too late.

Take the podcaster, Joe Rogan, whose viewership is an order of magnitude higher than primetime television and has repeatedly been the subject of controversy and attempts at censorship. If Joe Rogan had lived in North Korea or the Soviet Union, his problems would no doubt stem from the government and the lack of forbearance of people such as Kim Jong-un or Nikita Khrushchev.

In the democratic United States, however, Rogan’s problem is quite different: The Joe Rogan Show has been subject to open threats of strike action by the employees at Spotify, which distributes his podcast. Their principal demand is to be handed editorial oversight over the podcast, with the power to veto what Rogan says or does.

This campaign was bolstered by an open letter signed by 270 “experts” concerned by his “history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the Covid-19 pandemic”. Interestingly, the list of signatories was not populated by people actually working in virology or vaccine research. Many of those who signed were nurses or students, others were general practitioners, a few were dentists, and at least one was a licensed marriage and family therapist.

It’s a bizarre situation: a call to censorship justified by the incapability of non-experts to handle a subject like vaccine research is then inundated with people who by the same metric should themselves be disqualified from having an opinion. But, ultimately, that’s the point — this was not a list of 270 of experts in the field, but rather a list of 270 of people from the expert class.

These class dynamics are hardly very subtle. Take Greta Thunberg, whose claim to fame, to put it pithily, is the fact that she refuses to go to school. While many of us can probably empathise with this desire, there is something strange about a person who hasn’t even finished high school acting like she belongs to a group of people who justify their rule through technocratic language.

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But while Greta may not really have much of a formal education, she does have rich parents, and a slew of contacts in the international NGO world. It would be foolish to think that the mere act of having a PhD would allow you to countermand someone like Greta Thunberg, even though the echelon she occupies openly ridicules the vast hordes of “deplorables” for the high crime of only having a high school diploma.

Like medieval nobles claiming a right to rule based on being a superior breed, and then openly practising inbreeding, our current elites rarely live up to their own hype. Often, the experts are stupid and wrong, sometimes to an almost comical degree. And yet they persist in trying to convince us that they deserve to rule us, and get mightily upset whenever someone dares to challenge their power. Their fixation with Joe Rogan is not hard to understand through this lens.

The investor Warren Buffet famously said: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Today we can describe the political sphere with a modified version of this: there’s class war, all right, but it’s the expert class making war, and it’s not at all clear that they’re actually winning. Of course, the state plays its role here, but it’s difficult to shake the impression that it lags behind the enthusiasm and radicalism of the expert class — the students, professors, journalists and people whose work consists of writing and answering emails.

Perhaps the recent news that Sweden is forming a ”Psychological Defence Agency” in order to “safeguard democratic society” and “the free formation of opinion” gives us a sense of where the West is heading. The Swedish situation is actually far more subtle — even contradictory — than it first appears. Myndigheten för Psykologiskt Försvar (MpF) didn’t really make much of a splash in Sweden when it was announced. It was, perhaps surprisingly to any foreign observers, not even lazily condemned as a step towards 1984 or a Brave New World.

By now, everyone in Sweden is quite used to new government agencies being launched left, right and centre. If it follows in the tracks of the new agency for gender equality, which quickly devolved into a dysfunctional mess boasting more employee turnover and workplace-related sickness than an infantry brigade in World War I, the MpF is likely to become a glorified jobs programme for academic graduates, with no clear mission and an utterly broken work environment, filled with backbiting and petty office politics. In Sweden, government agencies are where political movements go to die.

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We can see this in the cultural revolution experienced by the country in the mid 2010s around the issue of migration. From 2015 to 2018, the entire Swedish expert class closed ranks, mobilised every single institution they controlled, and joined with the state in an attempt to combat “misinformation” and prevent wrongthink on the topic of immigration.

For almost a decade, the topic of immigration was transformed from one of actual material politics to one of  “competing narratives”. The idea that immigration had costs and drawbacks was reduced to a mere story, a narrative being sold by the Sweden Democrats. If the experts came together, and simply enforced the spread of a different story, anti-immigration populism could be defeated in detail.

This never came to pass, because unlike how things work in the minds of the expert class, reality isn’t just a “story”. If criminality is on the rise in your neighbourhood, and everyone knows that the criminals are newly arrived migrants, plucky attempts to fabricate rosy narratives will probably fall flat. But, as the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail; for most members of our “expert class”, managing the “discourse” is exactly what they are trained to do.

These agonised contortions are on full display in the United States and elsewhere on a variety of topics, from the status of the 2020 election to Covid vaccines to trans issues. Just as in Sweden in 2015, our expert class is beleaguered, desperately looking for something to stem the tide of wrongthink and rebellion from the people below them. And just as Sweden saw an exploding “alternative media” scene as a response to attempts to control the media narrative, the American experts are battling the uncomfortable fact that Joe Rogan has far more viewers than any of the channels they control.

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To illustrate just how difficult the situation is, consider the fact that something uncomfortably close to half of America currently thinks the 2020 election was not legitimate. This is a “narrative” of events that has been fought ferociously by every prestige institution in America, not to mention the state itself. And yet, all of that has failed to move the needle. Even the most frenzied attempts to control the narrative — such as the Swedish crime prevention agency engaging in a decade-long struggle to prevent anyone from researching whether certain crimes such as gang-rape displayed a similar skew along ethnic lines as in countries such as Germany — seemed to do nothing.

So while the Swedish announcement of an official state agency designed to carry on these sorts of battles might seem fairly dystopian at first blush, this is only even happening because these battles kept being lost. Again, to borrow from Warren Buffet: there’s class warfare going on, all right. But are the experts currently winning?

From my Scandinavian vantage point, it doesn’t look like victory is forthcoming. In Sweden, the activist veterans of our mostly failed cultural revolution against the ignorant deplorables are now rapidly being retired — the lucky ones shuffled off to various bureaucratic cubbyholes; the unlucky ones forced to get (horror of horrors!) real jobs.

But as with most things today, the situation is quite different abroad. In the United States, there are no peace talks forthcoming anytime soon. The desperate struggle between the expert class and those they purport to rule is likely to become even more feverish in the years ahead. For unlike the opinions and advice offered by today’s experts, which tend to be as dishonest and contradictory as any old Soviet decree, open class conflicts have a tendency to stick around.

But even in Augustine’s time, the idea was old. He was following in the footsteps of the early Christians, who, we learn in the Acts of the Apostles, “owned all things communally”, and “sold their properties and possessions, and distributed to everyone, according as anyone had need.” David Bentley Hart (whose translation of The New Testament I use here) cannot but conclude that “the early Christians were communists”.

Except, of course, that they were not — not in our shallow sense of the word. For Christianity was so much more than a political revolution; it caused a tectonic shift in the mind. Like any major religion worth its salt, Christianity involved taming the power-hungry, self-assertive, greedy animals that humans, by their nature, are. Yet it went one step further and offered the highest prize to those at nature’s losing end: the meek, the wounded, the vulnerable, the unfortunate. And since so much in the human world revolves around material wealth, the religion’s founders struck at its source: our acquisitive instincts.

You really want to be perfect? Jesus Christ recommends a life of utter destitution: “Go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you shall have a treasury in the heavens, and come follow me.” The result was a religion so “radical”, as Hart calls it, that it was impossible to put into practice in the real world. There was only one Christian, Nietzsche quipped, and he died on the cross. To be a true Christian must be unbearable.

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But Christianity didn’t have to be put into practice to have an impact on the world — trying was enough. By trying hard to be Christians (even without ever succeeding), people in the West and elsewhere have, in time, brought forth a major anthropological revolution: a new way of seeing the world and humanity, a new ethical vocabulary, an enhanced and expanded individual subjectivity. And there was something remarkably dynamic about this new subjectivity — one never content with itself, never at ease, always on the move, always having to navigate a perilous inner landscape: temptation, sin, guilt, dread of eternal damnation, remorse, repentance, state of grace.

Not that Christians were much better beings than others. They could be just as bloody as the heathens, if not worse. But they were always thinking about what a better humanity would be like. And in the process, they were taught to seriously distrust “this world,” and to stay away from its “traps”. Above all, they were sensitised against material wealth.

So, when the Industrial Revolution (which was all about material wealth and how to multiply it) came to pass, many Christians recognised it for what it was, and found themselves equipped to deal with it. Capitalism was a wonderful thing, they thought, except that it went against what the Gospels had taught, by fundamentally favouring the wealthy and the strong, the self-assertive and the unscrupulous, at the expense of the poor and the weak and the humble. And to oppress the latter was to hurt Christ personally: “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

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That’s why, from John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy all the way to Pope Francis, from that brand of British Labourism that was dubbed “more Methodist than Marxist” to the Social Gospel in the US, from Italy’s cattocomunismo to “liberation theology” in Latin America, there has always been a serious concern, among reflecting Christians, about the damage that the incessant pursuit of material wealth can do to the soul. The wealthier we become, the poorer our spiritual health.

All this is not — or should not have been — surprising. What is more surprising, perhaps, was that even overtly atheist rejections of capitalism — of the “religion-is-the-opiate-of-the-people” variety — were similarly informed by a vigorous Judeo-Christian social vision. For here, too, the rejection of capitalism was done on behalf of its victims: the poor and the powerless, “the least of these my brothers.” For all their anti-religious rhetoric, Marx and Engels’s works make for excellent theological reading. The radical solution they proposed — overthrowing the wealthy and the powerful, enthroning the poor and the downtrodden in their place — is not very different, in its spirit, from the one we find in Christianity, where, you may recall, God has “chosen the destitute within the cosmos,” and offered them his Kingdom.

By the 19th century, then, the ethics, social vision, and philosophical vocabulary of Christianity were simply inescapable for anyone in the business of thinking. No matter what theories one hatched, however secular or un-Christian, one had to employ Christian categories, assumptions, and patterns of thought. Even to attack Christianity itself, one had to resort to Christian language, as Tom Holland has explained in these pages. That fact, of course, can be seen as a great victory for Christianity, if one achieved on the cusp of death.

Communism as an actual political system may have been a failure of historic proportions, but that does not mean that the idea has lost its appeal. Not only do today’s enthusiasts seem to ignore everything about the first attempt’s abject failure in the Soviet Union and elsewhere; they are also, for the most part, blissfully ignorant of the distinctly Christian sound of much of what they say. Elite schools seem particularly good at teaching this kind of ignorance. Secular or even noisily atheistic academics recycle a social vision that has been at the core of the Christian message for some two millennia: a commitment to the victims of any forms of injustice and oppression, to the poor, the weak, and the humiliated — “the least of these.” Their ethical language, too, is radically Christian, centered as it is on guilt and an irrepressible need for repentance, remorse, and reparation.

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“Privilege” is the new name of the original sin of old: you are born with it, no matter what you do or say or think, you will always remain “privileged,” and will pass your condition on to others. The much derided woke apology seems just another reiteration of the Christian confession: admit that you have sinned in thought, word and deed, say that you are unworthy and show contrition, promise that you will change your ways, and you will be forgiven. If the zealots had it their way, the implementation of this parodic Christianity, centred obsessively as it is on purity, guilt and repentance, accompanied by an incessant hunt for reprobates, and an orgy of punishment and exclusion, would make Calvin’s fundamentalist Geneva look like a pretty lowkey operation.

But perhaps I’m being naïve. What if this is just another trick the elites use to preserve the status quo, maintain their privileges, and get rid of their potential competitors? People in power have always done that, no matter what religion, ideology and political philosophy they have employed in the process. It’s no accident that this woke brand of radicalism flourishes especially in the Ivy League environment, where students have the means and the leisure to play professional revolutionary. Those at community colleges are too busy just trying to stay afloat.

The space within which the elites now operate has, after decades of intense globalisation, become more crowded than ever. Since the more people get in, the more competitive it gets, to move ahead one needs to get inventive. By adopting such a radical rhetoric and instantiating themselves as the exclusive representatives of the underprivileged — or even their most trusted spokespersons — these trust-fund revolutionaries hope to get a competitive advantage on the political market. “I am already representing the downtrodden, all of them, and brilliantly. There is no role for you to play, so step aside. Holier and way more revolutionary than thou.”

However, in so doing, they resort to an ideology steeped in Christian values and language — rather than, say, to social Darwinism, which would be a far more accurate representation of what they are doing, and would come more naturally to them. They may despise Christianity with a passion, but they cannot do without it. And that’s another Christian victory, if a posthumous one.

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For, as far as Christianity itself is concerned, this is not life but a form of death. For something to exist socially, it needs to be named by its name. Indeed, this is no ordinary death, but a degrading, humiliating, highly embarrassing one. Here Christianity is used and abused and then casually discarded. But, then again, this is only too fitting, because that’s precisely what makes it such a Christian death; Christianity’s founder died the most humiliating death imaginable in the ancient world, so bad it was reserved only for slaves and social pariahs.

To complicate things even further, at the other extreme of the political spectrum, Christianity is in no better shape. True, on the far Right it is acknowledged and proclaimed, ever more loudly and more perfunctorily. Christ’s name is everywhere: used shamelessly by politicians as a rhetorical device, political slogan, and dirty trick. Here Christ is emptied of any meaning, glued to the car’s bumper, and left there to rot. That’s another way Christianity is dying — and quite another story.

Over the last two millennia, Christianity has died countless deaths like this. Which is perhaps only appropriate for a religion predicated on death — one that has chosen a cruel execution method as its symbol. In the end, it must be death that has given it such a tremendous vitality. For “unless the grain of wheat falling to the ground dies, it remains alone; but if it die it bears plenteous fruit.” Christianity’s victory lies always in defeat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back then Diana — always channeling the popular mood — called him “the boy wonder”, “killer Wales”, and “the great white hope”. She laughed at his medals; she said he’d never succeed his mother. When he tried to pray before bedtime, she’d hit him on the head, and shriek. This was the man’s wife. Imagine what Kelvin Mackenzie’s Sun was saying about him.

Not just the Sun in the Eighties. In more recent times, Charles has been described as a prat, a terrible prat, a dangerous prat, ill-advised, idiotic, the “puppet of sinister gurus”, dismal, a “sower of division and contention”, and “way too grand” — and that’s one article in the Spectator.

Foreigners found this legal national blood sport irresistible too. They joined the hunt. Charles, chuckled a New York Times editorial in 1994, existed for the world’s “amusement”. Perhaps the blackest day for him that year was when the Italian press reduced all those titles to… “Il Tampaccino”. Being embarrassed for the primitivity of your sexploits by a nation that invented a sophisticated cinematic genre called ‘commedia sexy all’italiana’ would have pushed lesser Royalty over the edge. Not the heir apparent. Nor England. Letting the world ridicule our Prince was the one post-war export drive that actually seemed to work.

Other Royal Charlies had it better, didn’t they? A swift release from his troubles on the scaffold. A convenient hiding place in an oak tree. Ours has endured life as a dangling, slow-twirling, impossible to miss piñata. It would be human to feel sorry for him, if he didn’t feel so sorry for himself.

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Centrism always fails

By Will Lloyd

Even his mother baited him. “Charles is hopeless” was her crushing verdict. “Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king,” Shakespeare makes Richard II claim. Well, with Charles, the rough sea tried. And tried.

Now that sea is washing out at long last. Finally, Charles is respected, admired, and — most shockingly of all — listened to. His balm is pristine again. It’s not the crown he possesses. Rather it’s an apparently merited authority, derived less from his birthright than from the time-weathered correctness of his views on composting.

This week, whether addressing the G20 in Rome, or handshaking dignitaries at COP26, the Prince has been accorded the kind of fulsome respect that he lavishes on the plants at Highgrove. A sedulous, loving attention. Why?

Since 1970 the Prince has issued warnings about climate change. Unlike his jet-age father, he had no faith in a technological future. He rhapsodised about bees and gazed into hedges. He wanted to protect the elephants and conserve the Botswana Bushmen, seeing them in approximately the same way. He experimented with vegetarian diets when the only other person in beef-dripping England to do so was Morrissey. “At the beginning everyone thought he was crackers… They wrote him off completely,” his biographer Penny Junor told the Washington Post. “He’s been saying these things for 50 years, but the world has caught up to Charles hasn’t it? He’s certainly not a crank.” Even Donald Trump admitted a few years ago that he “totally listened” to Prince Charles’s eco-views.

While he waited for his mother to abdicate, Charles yearned to do the right thing. He did this through thoughts, not actions. Winston Churchill told the Queen in a letter that Charles, at the age of two, was “young to think so much”. At a luncheon, Edwina Mountbatten told the eight-year-old Charles that he shouldn’t pluck the stalks out of strawberries. He should hoist the fruit up by the stems and roll them in sugar. Moments later his cousin Pamela Hicks observed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad.” Charles’s entire outlook can be reduced to this desire to put stalks back on strawberries. “All I want to do,” he once dolefully told Jonathan Dimbleby, “is to help other people.”

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He believed this desire to save and serve was sharpened on the grindstone of reality, rather than the unintended consequence of an artificial upbringing. “I have come to realise,” he wrote in 2002, “that my entire life has been so far motivated by a desire to heal — to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soul; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind and body, and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame.” Modernity could be escaped and replaced with… him, in a temple, lighting a flame. More alluring, I suppose, than cutting the ribbon on yet another community centre.

On and on he went like this for decades. The self-image was radical: Red Shelley in an Anderson & Sheppard blazer. He referred to himself, his ex-private secretary Mark Bolland said, “as a ‘dissident’ working against the prevailing political consensus”. All that dissent was collected inside a two-volume, 1,012-page treasury of speeches and remarks, retailing for over £320, illustrated with his own watercolours, and bound in stiff bottle green buckram, published in 2015. These heavy volumes appear designed to trouble the shelves of libraries, not their readers. What they reveal, once multiple introductions, glosses, prefaces, preludials, throat-clearings, and fanfares have been macheted through, is a vehement man hostile to the world as it is.

Charles never changes. But the world always does. When he was born in 1948, wars and revolutions had levelled everything. There was a ‘Great Compression’; inequality was suppressed, by accident, bloodletting, and design. For 30 years there were high taxes, good novels, middle-class successes, and an operational meritocracy.

By the Nineties, Tory politicians in Britain could dream of a “classless” society. Charles was most-lambasted in this midlife period, not merely because of the “War of the Waleses”, but because this socially democratic mood made the monarchy itself look ridiculous. “Who knows what fate will produce?” Diana said, ominously, at the time.

Fate dispatched her, then produced a vastly more unequal world. Meritocracy calcified into an aristocracy. It treats national and international institutions as outdoor relief for its favoured families. After Iraq, the financial crisis, and 2016, this elite, viewed from below, began to look like an Ancien Régime. With their fabulous wealth, estates, yachts, villas, servants, and elaborate sex lives, this class resembles the Windsors, just with stronger chins.

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Charles looks at ease with them all. Being admired by Jeff Bezos; being hailed by the Prime Minister as a “prophet without honour”. Hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio. Drinking with Bill Gates, whose ratio of wealth to the average US citizen is roughly the same as the richest Roman aristocrats to the plebs in 400 AD. How right it looked. Those who have taken the glitziest prizes from industrial civilisation now, like Charles, believe it is sick.

So the dissident Prince is accepted at last. A fairytale to replace the old one, about the Princess dying in a tunnel. He believed he had waged a guerrilla war against scientific expertise all his life. Now it agrees with him about hedges and bees, so he gives it his blessing. Typically, his victory is Pyrrhic. All it has taken for Charles to be vindicated is the prospect of the near-term extinction of the human race.

The first step towards an understanding of the political dimensions of magic, then, is to remember that Harry Potter has as much to do with real magic as the Mel Brooks movie Young Frankenstein has to do with real science. Dion Fortune, one of the 20th century’s leading theoreticians of magic (and a crackerjack practitioner), is a better source of insight here. She defined magic as the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will. That definition is trickier than it looks. Whose consciousness? Whose will? Those are crucial questions, and they are political in nature.

Let’s start with a straightforward example. At some point during the last 24 hours you probably saw an advertisement for fizzy brown sugar water. That’s not what the ad called it, of course, and that distraction — think of it as a spell of invisibility — is an important part of the sorcery we’re discussing. Notice that the ad didn’t try to convince you of the alleged merits of the syrupy goo it was pushing at you, nor did it aim anything else at your rational mind.

No, the ad deployed imagery meant to set off emotional reactions that have nothing to do with the product. Here’s a group of people on a billboard. They’re young, they’re attractive, they look healthy, they’re wearing clothes that tell you they have plenty of money, they’re having a great time, and they’re all clutching cans of fizzy brown sugar water. If I tried to convince you that guzzling the contents of one of those cans will make you young, attractive, and the rest of it, you’d roll your eyes. Yet that’s the message the deep levels of your mind absorb, and your behaviour shifts in response. In magical terms, the ad cast a spell on you: that is, it caused change in your consciousness in accordance with the advertiser’s will.

This works because the rational mind is a thin veneer on the surface of a standard primate nervous system. Scratch that veneer, and you’ll find all the raw biological cravings and vague associative thinking that most people in industrial societies like to pretend they’ve outgrown. Repeated exposure to a spell — that is, a set of emotionally charged images and words designed in accordance with the rules of magic — punches straight through the veneer and speaks to the archaic primate-mind underneath it. Unless you’re aware of the effect and adjust for it, the images affect you, and you reach for that can of fizzy brown sugar water, even though you know perfectly well that the only thing you’ll get from it is tooth decay.

This kind of sorcery is pervasive in today’s industrial societies. Back in 1984, in his brilliant book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano pointed out that most countries in the industrial world had discarded the jackboots and armbands of old-fashioned authoritarianism for subtler methods of social control rooted in magic. The industrial nations of the world, he argued, were “magician states” in which most people are kept disenfranchised and passive by manipulative images and slogans projected by the mass media. It’s a persuasive analysis and does much to explain the nature of power in modern societies.

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Not all of the magic that surrounds us, after all, focuses on goals as straightforwardly mercenary as the example just discussed. Consider the vacuous slogans brandished by the three most recent presidents of the United States: “Yes We Can”, “Make America Great Again”, “Build Back Better”. All three incantations are meant to manipulate voters using the same kind of magic applied by manufacturers of fizzy brown sugar water. They target a different set of emotions, those that work on the contrast between dreams of a better future and the increasingly miserable conditions of life in today’s America, but they use the same strategy of exploiting non-rational emotions to market an unappealing product.

Widespread as it is, this approach to magic is far from omnipotent. Sometimes it fails because the spell is badly designed: Hillary Clinton’s impressively clueless slogan “I’m With Her” flopped, for example, because she lacked the charisma to make the prospect of identifying with her appeal to the emotions of enough voters. Sometimes it fails because a competing spell is stronger: “I’m With Her” also had to contend with Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, which drew on much more powerful emotional drives.

Yet the mass-produced sorcery of advertising suffers from another critical weakness. No two people have exactly the same structures and content in the deep places of their mind, and their responses to magic varies unpredictably. Advertisers try to get around this by targeting a handful of simple biological drives linked to sex, safety, and status, which are common to all social primates and affect most people in something like the same way. Magic aimed at these drives, using suitably crass stimuli, tends to be successful enough to push products and sway elections, and so long as that’s all that matters, no more focused magic is needed.

But pushing products and swaying elections is not always enough. Here we need to draw a distinction between the political class of a society — the people who have a significant and privileged voice in public decisions — and the rest of the population. The political class is always a minority, and often a very small minority, however enthusiastically it may wrap itself in rhetoric of majority rule. Its hold on power depends on its ability to come up with reasonably effective responses to pressing social problems. So long as it fulfils this problem-solving function, the rest of the population shrugs and goes on with life.

Suggested reading

2020: the year the elites failed upwards

By Jacob Siegel

Now and then, however, the political class of a society fails to address the most pressing problems of the time. Sometimes this is a matter of simple incompetence, but more often it happens because those problems are caused by policies that benefit the political class, which the political class is unwilling to abandon. Arnold Toynbee, whose 12-volume opus A Study of History explored this process in detail, coined a neat turn of phrase to describe the change. He terms a political class that is still fulfilling its problem-solving function a creative minority; when it abandons that function, it becomes a dominant minority, and the society it manages tips into decline.

Certain social phenomena reliably show up whenever a political class loses the ability or the desire to solve the most pressing problems of its era, and tries to cling to power anyway. The one that’s relevant to our present purpose is that in such an era, magic explodes in popularity — and the kind of magic that becomes popular is the kind that individuals practise on themselves, using rituals, meditations, affirmations, and other traditional occult tools to change their behaviour and affect how other people respond to them. Look at a period when personal magical practice flourishes and you’ll find that era dominated by a failing elite in charge of a society full of problems that are not being addressed.

In the United States, for example, occultism had its first golden age between the end of the Civil War and the Roaring Twenties. During those years the robber barons of Wall Street treated the federal government as their wholly owned subsidiary and the majority of the population knew from hard experience that their concerns would go unheard and their needs unmet. That helped drive a widespread interest in magical workings of all kinds, ranging from rootwork spells for prosperity to magical lodge initiations aimed at higher states of consciousness. When the Great Depression and the New Deal brought that era of blatant kleptocracy to a close, interest in magic and occultism dropped off sharply.

Thereafter, magic stayed unfashionable until the late Sixties, when the managerial aristocracy that rules the United States today started treating the issues that mattered to most people as annoyances to be brushed aside. A second golden age of American magic followed promptly, partly drawn from the legacy of older American occultism and partly inspired by half-understood imports from other culture. Yes, it’s still ongoing. Magic will thrive in the United States despite the fulminations of rationalists until the managerial state either learns how to listen to the people it claims the right to lead, or has the levers of power wrenched from its hands.

Suggested reading

How race politics liberated the elites

By Matthew B Crawford

Two significant social forces drive the rise of magic in a society ruled by a failing political class: one affecting the population as a whole, the other affecting the political class. Among the underprivileged majority, magic becomes popular because it offers a way of bettering your life when all other options have been slammed shut. Even when you can’t change anything else, after all, you can change your consciousness in accordance with your own will.

That has several advantages. First, using magic allows you to evade the effects of sorceries directed at you by institutions controlled by the political class, so that you can pursue your own goals rather than being subservient to theirs. Second, because human consciousness isn’t as tightly confined to the insides of individual skulls as currently fashionable philosophies like to claim, changes in your consciousness can affect how other people react to you, and that offers various avenues for improving your own life. Third, magic — like its more respectable twin, religion — also offers the possibility of attuning consciousness to sources of energy and meaning that transcend humanity. Discussing these sources and their implications would take us far afield from the present theme, but the higher and deeper dimensions of occult tradition are central enough to magic that it’s worth acknowledging them here.

So the underprivileged have good reasons to embrace magic. So do the overprivileged. Here the problem is simply that no political class wants to face the reality of its own decadence. Central to the self-image of every political class is the notion that its members deserve their privilege by some combination of practical competence and moral virtue. Even — or especially — when this isn’t actually the case, members of the political class base their identities on the idea that they are the good people, the capable and compassionate people, whose wealth and privilege are nothing more than they deserve. Magic, in turn, is one of the ways they prop up that illusion.

Some of the spells in question are charmingly simple. It’s standard practice, for example, for a dominant minority to pretend to fill their ostensible role as society’s problem-solvers by going through the motions of solving problems, choosing for this purpose problems that matter to no one outside the political class itself. (The antics of today’s corporate wokesters offer plenty of examples here.) Yet this sort of expedient rarely does an adequate job of shielding members of a decadent political class from an uncomfortable awareness of their own failure, and so the overprivileged — like the underprivileged — turn to individual magical practice.

Suggested reading

Why the elites have no shame

By Mary Harrington

American society today offers a bumper crop of examples. Consider the various forms of watered-down Buddhism, carefully stripped of the robust moral self-examination and ascetic habits that play such important roles in traditional Buddhist teaching, which are marketed so assiduously to corporate clients as non-chemical tranquillisers. Consider the cult of positive thinking so neatly eviscerated by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-Sided, which serves the function of convincing the comfortable that all is well with the world, especially when it’s not. There are plenty of other examples, from weekend-workshop shamanism to the more lucrative ends of goddess spirituality and the New Age movement.

It’s easy to make fun of the embarrassing features of these social phenomena, but they serve a serious purpose. Most members of the political class in today’s America would be appalled if they let themselves realise just what the policies they support have inflicted on working people and the poor. Half a century ago, it bears remembering, a family of four in the United States with one working class income could afford a home, three square meals a day, and all the other necessities of life, with a little left over for luxuries now and then. Today a family of four in the United States with one working class income is probably living on the street.

That immense shift, which plunged tens of millions of people into poverty and misery, did not happen by accident. It was the direct result of policies enthusiastically embraced and promoted by the American political class: the offshoring of America’s industries, the tacit encouragement of mass illegal immigration to drive down wages and working conditions, and the metastatic growth of government regulations that crushed small business for the benefit of huge multinational corporations, among others. That is a thought that the American political class cannot allow itself to think. Magic — the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will — is an essential tool for keeping that realisation at bay.

That said, there are definite drawbacks to a set of practices that encourage the dominant minority of a society to bumble blithely along, convinced that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, while the society they govern plunges down the steep slope of decline around them. It bears remembering that magic was practiced with great enthusiasm by the overprivileged and underprivileged alike in France in the decades leading up to 1789, Russia in the decades before 1917, and Germany in the decades that led up to 1933. I think most of us remember what happened thereafter in each of these cases.

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

Twilight of the American Left

By Park Macdougald

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

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

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

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

Further reading

How a 1990s book predicted 2020

By Ed West

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

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

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

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

Further reading

Judith Butler's toxic nonsense

By Sam Leith

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

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

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

One of the frustrating aspects about my job as an academic is that I have little time to read. It’s a funny thing to say, but between teaching, administration and writing research articles for obscure journals, there are not many hours left in the day to actually sit down with a book.

This is especially problematic in my area of research, which includes populism, Brexit, Europe and anything that can be lumped under the header ‘political volatility’. There is simply too much to read. Trump, the 2016 referendum, the rise of national populism in Europe and the looming 2020 election in the US not only triggered a tsunami of public interest but also a rapidly growing pile of books.

This is one reason why non-fiction sales have been surging in recent years, easily eclipsing fiction: non-fiction audiobook sales are also growing. It is also why we have seen a parallel explosion in research monographs and articles on the same topics. Plug ‘populism’ into Google Scholar and since 2016 alone there are more than 37,000 entries. Stick ‘Trump’ in and there are already more than 100,000. All of this is why I find myself trying to relax on holiday while reading books that are way too serious, dark and close to ‘work’.

More from this author

How Farage outflanked everyone

By Matthew Goodwin

Before getting to my picks, I wanted to say that I have both enjoyed and learned a lot from several books that tell us much about the current era of volatility. Many were well ahead of the curve.

Justin Gest’s The New Minority (2016), through meticulous research and interviews with hundreds of voters, tells us much about the appeal of populism among the white working-class in both the UK and the US. In some ways, it is a reboot of Christopher Husbands’ Racial Exclusionism and the City (1983), a classic on why people were drawn to the earlier National Front, especially in the East End of London.

Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift (2018), which explores how demographic change is reshaping the world around us, is one of the most important books to be published in recent years. I have also revisited Karen Stenner’s The Authoritarian Dynamic (2005) – which predicted the populist surge and shows why it is unlikely to disappear any time soon – and looked ahead with Ivan Krastev’s After Europe (2017), a realistic take on the many challenges that are facing the European Union.

Suggested reading

Why has the diversity debate left white working-class boys behind?

By Jenny McCartney

When thinking about how we react to populism, and how our political cultures are changing, I have also enjoyed Mark Lilla’s short book on identity politics, Once and Future Liberal (2018), in which he argues that many on the Left are losing their way and focusing far more on what separates people when they should be talking about what brings them together. This should be read, in my view, alongside Francis Fukuyama’s Identity (2018), which makes similar points.

I also learned a lot from Bradley Campbell’s and Jason Manning’s The Rise of Victimhood Culture (2018), alongside Jon Haidt’s and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), both of which point to worrying developments in our wider culture that look set to increase rather than curb populism and polarisation.

And I’d recommend a few books from across the spectrum that explore how deeper shifts laid a foundation long ago for our current era of political turbulence, including Robert Putnam’s Our Kids (2015), which explores educational divides; Paul Morland’s The Human Tide (2019), which like Eric Kaufmann’s book looks at demography; Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (2012), which shows how America society was fragmenting long before Trump; and Cultural Backlash (2019) by Norris and Inglehart, a book that explores how conflicts over values lie behind the populist turn.

Suggested reading

Victimhood culture will tear us apart

By Jenny McCartney

But this year I enjoyed three books in particular, not necessarily because I agreed with them, but because I found them stimulating.

If you buy the argument that a key faultline today and in the future is geographic – between big cities and the periphery – then you should read the polemical Twilight of the Elites (2019) by the French geographer Christophe Guilluy. In this book the author, who has already made a name for himself by writing about ‘periphery France’, or ‘forgotten France’, takes aim at the big cities (the ‘new citadels’) but also the bourgeois bohemians (‘BoBos’) who appear more interested in sharing hashtags and preaching about the wonders of diversity than delivering serious economic reform and controlling the winds of globalisation.

Twilight of the Elites extends some of Guilluy’s earlier arguments to discuss how supposedly ‘open’ cities are actually not that open at all, how the economic system is rigged against those who have been pushed out of the new citadels and how immigration is now part of the mix. Guilluy, I suspect, would not have been the least bit surprised by the eruption of the yellow vest protests in France.

Suggested reading

Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

Another book that explores where liberals went wrong is Patrick Deenan’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018), which made it onto Barack Obama’s summer reading list last year. It’s not an easy book to read but, like Guilluy’s, it does ask good questions. Deenan’s central thesis is that liberalism has ‘failed’ because it has been so successful:

A political philosophy that was launched to foster greater equity, defend a pluralist tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty, in practice generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation and undermines freedom.

Liberals, he argues, have failed to reflect seriously on how the many contradictions within their creed have alienated citizens and cleared the path for the likes of Trump (though he wrote much of the book before the 2016 election).

Why Liberalism Failed is better on diagnosing where liberalism went wrong than pointing to where we should head next. It talks about the need to sustain things that are often lost through liberalism’s individualistic society – like social bonds and culture – through “forms of self-governance that arise from shared civic participation”. It’s all pretty vague. The call is for a return to the politics of virtue and for the creation of “civic polis life”. But it’s still worth a read for the diagnosis if not the proposed course of action.

Suggested reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

My final pick is much stronger when it comes to thinking through how we might actually respond to some of these social challenges, one of which is our rapidly ageing societies. If you buy the argument that one reason why we are witnessing all of this political turbulence is because of unprecedented rates of demographic change, then I would recommend one book that asks us not to think about why we are here but rather where we are going in the future.

As Camilla Cavendish points out in Extra Time: 10 Lessons for an Ageing World (2019), by next year, and for the first time in history, there will be more people on the planet over 65 than under 5. More grandparents than children. Our ageing societies not only reflect the fact that we are all living longer but also that many of us are having fewer children. There are now 83 countries where fertility rates are below the ‘replacement rate’, while sub-Saharan Africa will see its population quadruple to 4 billion people by 2100, with Nigeria most likely overtaking America as the world’s third most populous country.

We really have not even begun to think seriously about how these shifts will impact on our societies and politics. As Cavendish writes:

Shrinking populations will soon alter the balance of power between countries, and change the politics of immigration. Longevity is bringing back multi-generational households and creating age-diverse workforces. A dramatically changing ratio of older to younger people will force governments to rewrite the social contract … We are not ready.

Though she does not explore it directly, it seems likely to me that one of the more immediate beneficiaries of these changes will be populist politics. One of the peculiarities of our modern age is that many of the nation states that are most strongly opposed to immigration – including some of those in Eastern Europe or Japan – also happen to be the very same ageing states that are going to need it the most. Without large-scale demographic change it is hard to see how these societies will raise the tax revenue and human resource that will be required to care for rapidly ageing populations. Technology will help but perhaps not as much as people think.

Either way, the good news is that Cavendish is full of ideas about how to meet this challenge – from giving free accommodation to university students in exchange for their help with elderly co-residents, to how each of us, as we get older, can find what the Japanese call ‘ikigai’ (a reason for being that gets us to jump out of bed each morning). We can only hope that somebody out there is listening to her suggestions.

But is it?

Usain Bolt is certainly the fastest over 100 or 200 metres, but if he and his fellow sprinters were to compete in a major marathon, they wouldn’t stand a chance of winning. In 2016, it was reported that Bolt had never run a mile (in one go) – let alone 26 of them (plus 385 yards). At the middle and long distances, the top names change, and also the body types. Distance runners have long, lean muscles rather than thick ones, their wiry frames built more for stamina than explosive speed.

Suggested reading

How cricket ran out of time

By Jon Hotten

The most dramatic shift in competitiveness comes in the ultra running events – i.e. any race longer than a marathon. These include ‘conventional ultramarathons’ such as the IAAF-recognised 100km race, but also jaw-droppingly extreme events like the Montane Spine Race, which stretches 268 miles along the Pennines from Edale in Derbyshire to Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish Borders.

In these supreme challenges of endurance, women are competitive against men. Earlier this year, the remarkable Jasmin Paris completed the course in 83 hours, 12 minutes and 23 seconds – smashing the previous record of just over 95 hours.

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Who’s best at what is often a matter of time. From the less than 10 seconds of the 100 metres to the gruelling day-upon-day of the Spine Race, different people excel at different timescales. And not just in running.

It’s a subject that Malcolm Gladwell explores in two brilliant episodes (here and here) of his Revisionist History podcast. His particular focus is on America’s Law School Admission Test. The LSAT is a standardised exam that determines whether you get into law school – and also which law school. Needless to say, the most prestigious institutions take their pick from the highest-scoring candidates. And, of course, it’s the cream of the crop that get the plum jobs after graduating.

The podcast features a speech by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in which he said that he only chose clerks from the top law schools because it was the surest way of not making a hiring mistake. The kicker was that his remarks were made at a law school that did not fall within this highest echelon; yet far from reacting with hostility, his audience laughed along merrily.

So an awful lot rides on one’s LSAT score. But what exactly does it measure? Well, you can see for yourself in the current sample paper. It doesn’t test legal knowledge, but rather reading comprehension and logical reasoning. There are five sections – including three sets of multiple choice questions used to calculate each candidate’s overall score. There’s also an unscored ‘writing sample’ (essay) section, which can be used by two schools as a supplementary means of assessment.

The fifth section is also multiple choice – but instead of being used to assess the candidate in any way, the results are used to assess experimental questions for use in future exams. The examiners use the results to ensure that the LSAT is an effective measure of aptitude for law school students. Eliminating bias is a further objective. For instance, a question on which there was a significant gap in performance between male and female candidates would be rejected for future use.

And yet, Gladwell argues, the LSAT is biased – towards those who can blast through the questions at speed. Each section has to be completed in a strict 35 minute time slot. Therefore it doesn’t just measure comprehension and reasoning, but rapid comprehension and reasoning.

Suggested reading

Which experts should we trust?

By Peter Franklin

This wouldn’t matter if a test that gave people more time to think produced much the same ranking of candidates. But what if time made all the difference?

It certainly does when it comes to physical challenges like running, and we can see a similar pattern in purely intellectual activities.

Gladwell gives the example of chess, which at the top level has an international ranking system established through competition. In a standard chess game, players have 90 minutes in which to complete their first 40 moves and 30 minutes for the rest of the game. However, there are various gradations of fast chess, in which players have much less time to make their moves. This changes the rankings significantly. The best player in the world in standard chess is not the best player in ‘blitz chess’ or ‘bullet chess’.

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In his 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes two modes of thought: “system 1”, which is instantaneous and instinctual and “system 2”, which is considered and calculating. One doesn’t have to limit oneself to that particular dichotomy to see that time gives us the space to deploy mental abilities that can’t be hurried. For instance, time to think gives the top chess players the ability to mentally picture the branching permutations of how a game might develop multiple moves ahead.

Of course, most things in life are not like chess. Being unconstrained by the rules and logic of a gamified environment, they’re immensely more complicated. But that makes time to think all the more important. Human beings are capable of all sorts of things beyond the split second and the unforgiving minute – like empathy, insight, creativity, inspiration. We’d all be lost without them, but especially those in positions of power and responsibility who have to deal with a bigger slice of life’s complexity than anyone else.

And yet the means by which we select our elites are biased towards quick thinkers not deep thinkers. The LSAT is hardly alone in perpetuating ‘fast privilege’. Similar against-the-clock methods can be found everywhere from IQ tests to civil service examinations.

And it’s not just pure aptitude testing either. In theory, our universities test students on their knowledge of whatever subject they’re studying. But what manner of knowledge: profound or superficial?

Oxford University’s Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) degree has been described by Andy Beckett in The Guardian as the “degree that runs Britain” – because so many members of the political and media elites are PPE graduates. There’s a very long list of them here, which includes David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch and Ann Widdecombe.

PPE students are required to ingest knowledge across a broad front and regurgitate it in the form of frequent essays, tutorial performances and exams. But though no soft option, it is a degree for generalists not specialists – and thus an all-too-fitting preparation for UK politics. David Willetts, another PPE graduate, describes British political life as “an endless recreation of the PPE essay crisis.”

Suggested reading

The problem with political journalism

By Peter Franklin

Writing about his book Bluffocracy (co-authored with Andrew Greenway), James Ball argues that Britain has “become a nation run by people whose knowledge extends a mile wide but an inch deep.” A reshuffle is always a good time to see their bluffing skills in action. Politicians walk into new jobs, pick up an unfamiliar ministerial brief and proceed to talk about it in parliamentary debates and media interviews as if they were life-long authorities on the subject.

Journalistic attempts to expose their lack of knowledge are usually thwarted because the interviewers are bluffing too – resorting to easily deflected gotcha questions, instead of deeper conversations that might reveal something important about what our politicians think (or don’t think).

Last week, Yascha Mounk floated the theory that the real problem with PPE and similar Oxbridge degrees is that they reward students for making deliberately counterintuitive arguments:

“…ambitious students at Oxbridge are taught to go for a First by doing something extraordinary. 

“And by far the easiest way of doing something ‘extraordinary’ is to make a spirited case for a counterintuitive (and probably wrong) conclusion.

“This pedagogical tradition is responsible for (or perhaps stems from) a lot of the best things about Britain… It’s why British commentators are rarely boring…”

However, he thinks it also encourages “influential people – including writers and politicians – and especially writers turned politicians” to make “fun cases for irresponsible positions”. Which, he suggests, is one reason why we’re facing the prospect of a no deal Brexit.

Mounk concedes his theory is “probably wrong” and, ironically, itself an example of making a clever argument for a wacky proposition. However, the serious point that can be made is that the quality most valued in our highflyers is the ability to assimilate as much information as possible in as little time as possible – and then reapply it with maximum speed and agility.

Whether it’s the debating society tricks pulled by our politicians, or the “delivery at pace” expected of our civil servants, or the ‘hot takes’ extracted from our journalists, or the frenetic workload of the corporate lawyer, what recruiters are looking for is processing capacity not understanding.

*

In the wake of the global financial crisis, many books were written in an attempt to understand what went wrong. One of the best was A Call for Judgement by Amar Bhide. The argument is encapsulated in his Harvard Business Review essay, The Judgement Deficit – in which he says that while the decentralised, entreprising nature of capitalism saw off the centralising tendencies of state socialism, it then fell victim to a new kind of self-imposed centralisation:

“…one that is the work not of old-fashioned autocrats, committees, or rule books but of statistical models and algorithms. These mechanistic decision-making technologies have value under certain circumstances, but when misused or overused they can be every bit as dysfunctional as a Muscovite politburo. “

The most spectacular example is what happened to the financial sector:

“A host of lending officers used to make boots-on-the-ground, case-by-case examinations of borrowers’ creditworthiness. Unfortunately, those individuals were replaced by a small number of very similar statistical models created by financial wizards and disseminated by Wall Street firms, rating agencies, and government-sponsored mortgage lenders. This centralization and robotization of credit flourished as banks were freed from many regulatory limits on their activities and regulators embraced top-down, mechanistic capital requirements. The result was an epic financial crisis and the near-collapse of the global economy. “

It’s not that IT replaced all the people – humans are still an essential component of even the most advanced corporate systems. However, they have allowed a huge amount of previously human judgement to be automated and therefore centralised. A bigger proportion of the decisions that matter can be concentrated at the highest levels of management – allowing the financial rewards for such work to be concentrated there too.

A corporate operation that shifts the balance to IT-mediated systems as opposed to distributed decision-making by experienced human workers is also easier to scale-up. This allows markets to become increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer, larger companies – meaning even more money for those at the top. It also means that corporate growth can be achieved by exploiting monopoly effects rather than investing in product improvement, which of course is bad for innovation.

Suggested reading

Why low interest rates poison the economy

By Peter Franklin

Innovators, though, are disruptive of centralised systems – which is another reason to select the knowledge class elite on their ability to think fast, not deep.

I realise I’m painting a picture of them as cogs in a machine, which isn’t entirely fair. These are highly able individuals and some of the most able – e.g. those recruited into top law firms, consultancies, financial institutions and tech companies – are very well rewarded. They’re also made to work punishing hours – a reflection of their scarcity value and the desire of a corporate system to get the most out of its most expensively purchased components.

What’s true of the business world has a parallel in politics – only in this context the centre hoards power for its own sake, not to maximise profit and executive pay. In theory, a government minister should be in a position to think deeply about the policies they’re responsible for, drawing upon the expertise of their civil servants and the experience of frontline workers. Armed with such knowledge they’d then be in a position to pursue meaningful reforms.

But anyone who’s seen government from the inside could tell you that’s not how it works at all. The purpose of most ministers is not to exercise judgement on any significant matter but to process and communicate decisions made in Downing Street and the Treasury – if only by rubber stamping the mechanistic actions of whatever slice of the civil service hierarchy he or she nominally oversees.

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How university re-establishes hierarchy

By Peter Franklin

Of course, no centralised system of control is ever so perfect as not to need running repairs and work arounds. There’s always a demand for those who can improvise solutions when things don’t run according to plan and where local circumstances present unanticipated challenges. Dealing with such situations requires both judgement and creativity – but only in service of the system. Those most capable of it rise through its ranks; until, that is, they mess up irredeemably – at which point they can provide one final service: as a scapegoat for the failings of the system itself.

*

The crying shame of the way we select our elites is that our finest, most fertile, minds are being wasted. They’re either sidelined because they don’t excel at tests of quick thinking, or because they can think both fast and deep, but are kept too busy by the systems they serve to ever think the disruptive thoughts that they’re capable of.

Sometimes an independently-minded individual does break lose – defying the selectors to follow their own paths. The tech pioneers who dropped out of college to start-up disruptive enterprises are a classic example. The irony though, is that some of the companies they founded have become monsters – corporate behemoths exercising super-centralised control not only over their own business, but ours too.

Neoliberalism was meant to set the market free – and yet, despite the IT revolution, this is an era of stagnant wages, growth and productivity. In seeking an explanation, we should start at the gateways of the knowledge economy.

One comprised voters in and connected to the military, who supported President Petro Poroshenko in his determination to pursue the conflict with pro-Russian rebels. A second group was concentrated around the westernmost city of Lviv, a region long-distinguished by its Ukrainian nationalism. The surprise was the third group. Ukraine’s diaspora in western countries, including the US and the UK, expressed a marked preference – albeit on a turnout of less than 1% – for Poroshenko both in the first round, where Zelenskiy topped a list of more than 40 candidates, and in the second-round run-off.

Several reasons can be hazarded as to why. As a group, Ukrainian nationals abroad are among those who benefited most from Ukraine’s decisive westward orientation under Poroshenko, and from his achievement in negotiating visa-free travel with the European Union. This formed a prominent plank of his campaign, even though it was of little relevance to those many Ukrainians who cannot afford to travel.

Expats may also have found Poroshenko’s vision of a monocultural Ukraine, summed up in his slogan “army, language, faith”, more compelling than it was for those living with Ukraine’s rather grittier day-to-day reality.

Suggested reading

Will the West ever understand Ukraine?

By Rodric Braithwaite

There may also have been a class element. At a gathering of Ukrainian expats in London to watch the first-round results come in, there was a distinct wariness about Zelenskiy, bordering on condescension. Their fear was that their (lesser educated) compatriots had fallen under the spell of a political ingenue and showman. They knew better. Here was quite a recent diaspora – recent enough to have retained the right to vote – that was demonstrably out of touch with the mood back home.

It could be argued that such a gap in itself might not matter; after all, the diaspora electorate makes up a tiny minority (around 3% in this case) of the whole. But that is only one side of the story. The other is that expats – who tend to be cosmopolitan, articulate, and to hold very decided political views about their homeland – can determine how the interests of their stay-at-home compatriots are viewed abroad, and may come to influence, even dictate, how they are addressed.

The lobbying power of a diaspora to sway a particular aspect of another country’s foreign policy should not be underestimated. Nor does it tend to end well. Recent – and not so recent – experience would suggest that when a government comes to rely disproportionately on diaspora voices, it can badly misjudge the situation and fall into costly mistakes.

Suggested reading

The most dangerous thing about meritocracy

By Peter Franklin

How, for instance, did President George W. Bush and the neo-cons in his administration come to be convinced that toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq would be a “cakewalk” (the term used by Donald Rumsfeld’s associate, the former US diplomat Kenneth Adelman) and that Iraqis would throng the streets to welcome allied Western troops in something akin to a replay of the liberation of Paris? A large part of the answer boils down to one name: Ahmad Chalabi, the well-to-do émigré Iraqi who fronted the grandly-named Iraqi National Congress spearheading opposition to Saddam Hussein.

Chalabi had the ear of influential members of the US Congress; his group received generous funding from the US administration, and Chalabi himself was ubiquitous in the run-up to the Iraq war, when he was seen by the US and the UK as the person to lead post-Saddam Iraq. The informer known as “Curveball”, who supplied the crucial last-minute (and wrong) intelligence on Iraq’s biological weapons was related to a Chalabi aide.

How come, it might be asked, did the views of a group of exiles come to enjoy so much more credibility in the corridors of power in Washington and London than, for instance, the assessments of UN weapons inspectors or western diplomats or experts on Iraq? The answer in part comes down to wishful thinking in the Bush administration. But recent diasporas can also be very seductive: they seem plugged into their home country, they have a mission, they tend to speak our language, and they have figured out how to get heard.

Something similar applies to the Syrian exile groups who lobbied for direct US and UK military intervention to remove Bashar al-Assad from power. Their efforts to secure direct UK military intervention were thwarted when MPs narrowly rejected the Cameron government’s call for military action in August 2013 – and this had a knock-on effect in Paris and Washington. But they carried on their lobbying undeterred, and they were hardly left empty-handed.

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What the Syrian strikes tell us about herd mentality

By Michael Burleigh

The UK might not have launched air raids or deploy regular troops, but it did send special forces and it did supply funds, including to the White Helmets rescue service. The opposition exiles also dominated the media space with the help of an initially tiny operation with an authoritative name – the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights – which also received taxpayers’ money. Until very recently, theirs was the view of the Syria conflict that prevailed in the UK and the US.

UK-Russia relations are another area where opposition exiles have made an impact. Through the early 2000s, wealthy Russian exiles in the UK waged a highly effective propaganda war against the new President, Vladimir Putin. A leading light was Boris Berezovsky, who used much of his money and his serpentine charm to wheedle his way into the corridors of power. He bought in the expert services of the Bell Pottinger PR agency, and underwrote the Chechen separatist cause, which gained a following from Vanessa Redgrave and other luminaries of the left-wing arts world.

He has been followed, rather more discreetly, by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with his astutely named foundation, Open Russia. It is easy to blame the frosty relations between the UK and Russia over the best part of 20 years on Kremlin-ordered crimes on British soil. But the creation of such a generally hostile climate owes much to the activities of these moneyed exiles.

Suggested reading

Who's afraid of the big bad Russian bear?

By Michael Burleigh

There are good reasons – and bad – why individual exiles and diaspora groups come to wield influence in their new countries. They tend to be highly articulate; they have a cause and they can claim direct knowledge of countries and situations that governments and politicians know they lack. How accurate or up-to-date a grasp they have of the sentiment in their homeland, however, may be another matter, as the breakdown of the Ukraine vote shows.

It may also help to explain something else. Given that Ukraine had just held an election that was the model of probity and a vindication of the values the West claims to represent, the congratulations sent to the victor by the UK and other EU countries seemed inexplicably lukewarm. Was this, in part, because these governments had been influenced by the wariness among their elite expat friends, rather than the sense of hope on the ground?

Zelenskiy has not yet been inaugurated, so it is far too early for any assessment of his merits. But the divergence in the vote should serve as a warning. What happens in Ukraine, as anywhere else, needs to be seen by foreign governments in the light of their own judgement and their own evidence, not filtered through a diaspora lens. Of course expats deserve a voice in their new country. Just because their voice may be louder and more impassioned, however, does not mean it should be allowed to drown out the rest.

“The term properly refers to a specific kind of American elite, mostly from the Northeast, mostly high-church Protestants, concentrated in a few cities (Boston, Philadelphia, New York, plus some Midwestern and Californian outposts), generally associated with the Republican Party (with occasional defectors like F.D.R.), who dominated a particular set of fields (academia, finance, foreign policy) and shared the code of service and piety and manners that defined the elder Bush’s career.”

So, what we’re talking about is a ‘born-to-rule’ social elite – not so much the wasps of the American hive as the queen bees (only male, of course).

Suggested reading

America: the birth of two nations

By Peter Franklin

Arguably the late George HW Bush was the last WASP President (his son, George W Bush, being too Texan to qualify). In a previous column, Douthat not only mourned the passing of Bush Senior, but also expressed a degree of regret for the decline of the WASP establishment. This being the social media age, his intent was interpreted in the worst possible way – “as a paean to white privilege, even a brief for white supremacy”.

That’s not what he meant at all. In fact, he says that the diversification of America’s elites is both “good and necessary”. However, in his view, that does not mean that the same applies to meritocracy:

“…ideals of diversity and meritocracy are two different ways of shaping an elite, which can advance together but which are just as often separable, or even in tension with each other… And I would separate them. “

He goes on to argue that the newly diversified upper class was “unwise to abandon an aristocratic self-conception in favor of a meritocratic one”.

I don’t think he gives a convincing account of how diversity – or just plain old-fashioned fairness – can advance without what he calls a “meritocratic organising theory”. Is he really suggesting that the hopes and ambitions of the outsider should depend on the special favour of the insider? After all, we can’t all be Meghan Markle.

He’s also on shaky ground when talking about the “sense of duty, self-restraint and noblesse oblige that WASPs at their best displayed”.

The words “at their best” are doing an awful lot of work there. Yes, one can discern a tradition of duty in various aristocratic histories, but one can also discern a record of snobbery, exploitation and violence.

However, when it comes to the self-defeating tendencies in the meritocratic model, Douthat is spot on:

“…meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders — so that instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.”

The British parallels are obvious. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the government of the UK became ever more meritocratic (and democratic), but also ever more centralised, with power sucked out of the “provinces” and into Westminster and Whitehall. The disempowerment of the great industrial cities has had an especially deleterious effect. But because of the increasing diversity of the individuals pulling the strings from London, the geographical imbalance of power was legitimated.

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By Phillip Blond

Another excellent point is that an aristocratic elite at least knows what it is. A meritocratic elite, on the other hand assumes that it has earned, not inherited its privilege. In the socially mobile decades of the 20th century – the era of ‘room at the top’ – when the professional and managerial classes were rapidly expanding, that was very often true. Indeed, one of the reasons for the end of the aristocratic order was that there weren’t enough of the old elite to fill the positions available in the new elite.

That era of expanding opportunity is over. Today, the graduates (as they invariably are) starting out on the choicest career paths are increasingly likely to be the children of those who did the same a generation ago. Most of them will have grown up with every expectation that they’d go to university, and the benefit of a private or good state school education. By one mechanism or another, a good position in the meritocracy is now substantially inherited.

Obviously the new elite is much bigger and, to some extent, more diverse than the old elite – but, crucially, it doesn’t recognise its own privilege. In using its position of power to arrange matters to its advantage, it has little sympathy for those who feel left out. In theory, the benefits of the globalised, liberal order are open to everyone, so no one has cause to complain.

Suggested reading

America: the birth of two nations

By Munira Mirza

With little sense of its own identity, the not-so-meritocratic elite lacks the ability to see itself as others might see it. If you don’t understand that you’re on the inside, then you won’t realise that there’s an outside. Furthermore, if you don’t recognise how your privilege is perpetuated, then the idea that it could, one day, be interrupted won’t occur to you.

In Britain and America, the old establishment had an understanding of its vulnerability and adapted through political reform. The most dangerous thing about the new establishment is that it takes its continued existence for granted.

Populists are portrayed as ruthless manipulators of public opinion but when it comes to the charge that some groups really are being left behind and left out they are on strong ground. To really make sense of their appeal we need to look less at the populists and a lot more at our own political systems. As we argue in a new book, National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, co-authored with Roger Eatwell, we need to step back to consider how democracy has evolved and how two specific features have become increasingly visible to citizens, and central to explaining the appeal of populism: rule by an elite and technocratic few, and a growing representation gap.

Further reading

Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

Ever since the birth of democracy in Ancient Greece, many thinkers have been wary of people power and deeply suspicious of majoritarian rule. This tradition of a more ‘elitist’ conception of democracy has created room for populists who promise to speak for the people, who they argue have been neglected, even held in contempt, by self-serving and distant elites.

A desire to marginalise the masses can be traced from thinkers in Ancient Greece through to debates about the American Constitution and into new fears about people power that followed the rise of charismatic demagogues in Europe. And it continued well into the post-war period, with the anti-communist hysteria in the US, latent sympathy for Nazism in West Germany or support for the populist Poujadists in 1950s France confirming to many that the people ultimately could not be trusted to make sound decisions.

The tendency to want to side-line citizens was also partly fuelled by the rise of ‘elite theory’ in the US in the 1950s, which essentially argued that the essence of a stable democracy was not so much the mass participation of citizens, but rather rule by competing and enlightened elites. Apathy, in essence, might not be such a bad thing.

And this fed too into the post-war rise of international ‘governance’ structures and the gradual diffusion of power away from democratically-elected governments to transnational organisations, non-elected ‘expert’ policymakers and lobbyists. As democracies entered the twenty-first century, supporters of this approach contended that the transfer of power to more remote transnational bodies was necessary because complex issues like economic globalisation or the refugee crisis called for decisions to be made above the nation-state. The answer was ‘more globalisation, not less’, to paraphrase Tony Blair.

Further reading

Would Frank Field fit in? The test we should apply to any new party

By Peter Franklin

Opponents, meanwhile, saw these distant and amorphous structures as fostering liberal cosmopolitan agendas that had been sanctioned neither by national governments or the people. One example came in 1974 when Jean Rey, ex-president of the European Commission, warned that he would “deplore a situation in which the policy of this great country should be left to housewives. It should be decided instead by trained and informed people”.

Another came when voters were asked to return to the polls following awkward referendum results, or when the now President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, noted:

“We decree something, then float it and wait some time to see what happens. If no clamour occurs and no big fuss follows, because most people do not grasp what had been decided, we continue step by step, until the point of no return is reached.”

This suspicion has similarly been reflected in reactions to the vote for Brexit, the populist revolt in Italy and Trump’s rebellion in America.

Further reading

Why has the diversity debate left white working-class boys behind?

By Jenny McCartney

Those who argue against giving the people a say over their nation’s membership of the EU, who actively seek to discredit the referendum, or who essentially call for the people to vote again and again and again until they make the right decision would have much in common with Plato who suggested that a “good decision is based on knowledge and not on number”. He warned that tyranny can arise naturally from democracy and contrasted this with rule by an ascetic elite of “philosopher kings” who were trained to promote the communal good. The only thing is that very few people today genuinely seem interested in the communal good.

Populism is also thriving, at least in part, because of how this longer tradition is today being exacerbated by a second feature, namely a growing representation gap between different groups in society. Certainly, there have been some major achievements in recent years. If you look at legislatures in America, Britain or France then you will see record numbers of women and ethnic minorities in the corridors of power. This should be applauded. But when it comes to others in society, who have also been the most likely to vote for national populists ­– the working-class and non-graduates – it is an entirely different story.

Further reading

Elitist Britain is a closed shop

By Paul Embery

Consider just a few statistics. In Britain, by 2017 the percentage of MPs who had experience of manual jobs had sunk to an all-time low of 3% while the percentage who have only ever worked in politics reached an all-time high of 18% – nearly one in five.

In the US, in 2014, it was revealed that, for the first time in history, more than half of those who had been elected to Congress were millionaires (with equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans). Yet it is education and not income that is playing the more important role. As scholars like Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille have shown, since the 1980s the number of degree-holding ministers in Western Europe, many of whom have gone on to postgraduate study, has increased dramatically. As those with advanced qualifications have acquired more representation and power, governments have over time become more empathetic toward their desires and shaped more around ‘cosmopolitan standards’.

During President Obama’s second term, for example, whereas 93% of House Members and 99% of Senators held bachelor degrees this compared to a national average of only 32%. Of the fifteen ministers in Merkel’s third cabinet, fourteen held a Master’s degree, nine had a PhD, seven had worked at universities and two had been professors. In France, many of political and media elites are still drawn from the same prestigious Grandes Écoles while in Britain academics James Tilley and Geoffrey Evans have documented a growing discrepancy between Labour politicians and their working-class supporters.

The representation gap would matter less if these groups thought broadly alike about key issues. But they do not. In both the US and Europe researchers have shown how the growing divide has fuelled an ‘exclusion bias’, skewing the policy-making process towards the better educated and typically more affluent ‘haves’ and away from the less well educated and less secure ‘have nots’.

Further reading

How the Third Way lost its way

By Bill Galston

One recent review of pre-Trump policies in the US by the scholar Larry Bartels concluded that across a range of issues the views of the left behind were often ‘utterly irrelevant’. Others, like Nicholas Carnes, have similarly shown how policies have been far more generous to the haves than they would have been had politicians come from the same mix of classes and backgrounds as the people they represent. And we wonder why many of them have been drawn to populist mavericks who argue that they are getting a bad deal.

In Europe, the divide has become even more visible because of the way in which new and more divisive issues like immigration and European integration have risen up the agenda. Chatham House recently found that while 57% of elites across Europe felt that immigration had been good for their respective country only 25% of voters felt the same way. Political, business and media elites were far more likely to feel they had benefitted from being in the EU, to back further integration and support refugees and the role of Islam in Europe.

“Citizens must have the feeling that they count”, argue Bovens and Wille, “that their voices are heard, and that they are able to impact policy. In a diploma democracy the well-educated voice resonates much more strongly at the ballot box; in deliberative sessions and expert meetings; in parliaments and cabinets”.

Further reading

No, Britain is not over-run with fascists or racists or bigots...

By Paul Embery

What is now clear is that large numbers of people with lower levels of education or socially conservative values feel that that they do not count, that they do not have a seat at the table. Indeed, it is telling that shortly before the Brexit referendum in 2016 nearly half of Britain’s working-class agreed with the statement that “people like me have no say in government”, while shortly before Trump large numbers of whites without degrees felt the same. The writing was on the wall and it was not inaccurate.

But it would also be a mistake to look only at politics. As organisations in Britain like the Sutton Trust have argued for a while, the representation gap extends across much of Britain’s social, economic and media life, with graduates – and Oxbridge graduates in particular – being far more prominent among the ranks of BRIT, Oscar and BAFTA winners, and a wide range of media and business professions.

Amid the rise of this “diploma democracy”, the less well educated are not only less trusting of government and more likely to feel excluded from politics, but are also being left out of large swathes of our national cultural life. It is because of statistics like these that Bovens and Wille argue that Plato’s dream of a meritocratic polity has more or less been realised. Yet whereas Plato’s idealised ruling class was an ascetic brotherhood working for the common good in small city states, today’s rulers are increasingly cosmopolitan, insular and at times self-serving.

Further reading

Why the Open vs Closed debate is so deplorable

By Henry Olsen

None of this has been lost on citizens. Last week, it was widely reported that amid the ongoing Brexit negotiations people who live outside of Britain in other EU member states had become more positive about EU membership than at any other point since 1983. Yet much of the coverage missed another set of statistics that lay hidden in the report. When given the statement “My voice counts in the EU”, on average only 48% of people across the EU agreed while the figure tumbled to 32% in Britain, 24% in Italy and just 16% in Greece. Public support for the EU may well be stronger outside of Britain but the same worries about a lack of voice and distant elites that united many Leave voters are widely felt.

The academic E.E. Schattschneider once observed that a key risk that faces democracies is that they become dominated by the privileged and ignore the less well off. “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent”, he wrote. Today, the heavenly chorus might sing with a middle-class accent, but its members are now holding degree certificates.

Those who frame national populism as an irrational outburst of protest politics would do well to reflect on this. Populists and their supporters are right to point to these problems. The question that faces us now is what are we going to do about it? One pragmatic reply might be to create more room for deliberation and input from across society through devolution, the roll-out of citizens initiatives or making greater use of referendums at the local level.

More from this author

Can social democracy survive?

By Matthew Goodwin

The vote for Brexit, for example, could have been used to spark a meaningful discussion among citizens about political reform  – how to get more workers and non-graduates into the corridors of power, whether out-dated institutions like the House of Lords should be replaced with an accountable and transparent second chamber, whether local or regional representatives should be selected by lottery, and whether we should think harder about eligibility and running for office.

Such initiatives would not necessarily halt populism, as countries like Switzerland with its long tradition of direct democracy, show. But proactively implementing a suite of packages now might at least go some way to addressing the belief, held by millions, that despite living within representative democracies they are not really being listened to by increasingly distant elites.

Matthew Goodwin is co-author of National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, published on October 25 by Penguin.

Well, perhaps not –  if you listen to some of the populists themselves. Steve Hilton, previously a key advisor to David Cameron, is one of them, and he has emerged in recent years as an increasingly consequential figure as a result of his weekly American television programme, The Next Revolution. His latest book, Positive Populism, presents a compelling argument for such a revolt, and gives American populists a solid agenda with which to launch their effort.

Hilton emigrated to the US in 2012 and his book is addressed to his new countrymen, advising Americans how to take their country back and reclaim power. While the book is sprinkled with specifically American references, to the Declaration of Independence and the Statue of Liberty, for example, its powerful analysis is rooted in something that transcends national identity. Hilton’s populism is about understanding people in all their facets, as workers and as consumers, but most importantly as parents, neighbours, and friends.

Further reading

Why I helped Trump kill the old Republican Party

By Frank Buckley

Populism is gaining strength across the Western world precisely because the elites who rule us no longer view us in those roles, or in that way. Hilton’s book decries Western elites for viewing people as things to be moved about for their benefit. That is what underlies their commitment to free markets, free trade, and free movement of peoples. Modern elites know what ancient patricians and medieval aristocrats knew: if the people can be denied political power, those who have domination of financial and intellectual power can rule without restraint for their own selfish benefit. That is why the elites prefer rule by international institutions which are not directly elected by the people, such as the EU or the UN. And that, according to Hilton, is why the Davos set must be dethroned.

Hilton’s populism is profoundly egalitarian. It rests on the idea that all of us deserve a shot at living decent lives in decent communities. That’s why he contends that economic security should trump aggregate economic growth as a political value and, if providing for the former reduces the latter, then so be it.

It’s also why he dedicates nearly a third of the book to reinvigorating local communities, not normally something attributed to populist demands. Hilton understands what many in the elites don’t, that populism is at heart a demand for self-determination and human dignity. That requires economic and political reforms so that real power rests with the many, not with the few.

This emphasis allows populism to strike back at the heart of the argument that it is inherently anti-democratic. In the ancient world, the many would often strike back at the few by centralising power in a monarch with sufficient power and military strength to destroy the power of the landed few.

Further reading

Adventures in Trumpland

By Ian Birrell

Elites echo this ancient concern by alleging that populists will entrench themselves in power by controlling the media and suppressing political disagreement. That’s the essence of their claims about Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Poland’s PiS party, and is also regularly part of the vitriol levied against President Trump.

Hilton considers this to be a canard.  He makes the case for restrictions on migration and trade, especially trade with China. He rightly sees China as the true anti-democratic force in the modern world, and his most radical proposal is for the US to place an economic embargo on China, eliminating all trade with and investment in the Middle Kingdom.

But his strong commitment to decentralising government power, by giving states and cities more exclusive power to govern and by giving individuals more market power to shop for government-funded services, shows that defeating the few does not go hand in hand with enslaving the many. In fact, true populism requires exactly the opposite.

Hilton buttresses his argument with personal examples. He is the child of Hungarian refugees who fled Communism during the Cold War. He has seen close hand what tyrants can do – they have killed his family’s friends who sought freedom and stripped his grandmother of her job to punish her for her daughter’s flight. Giving any government such power is anathema to him, and the fact that such a government might be nominally ‘populist’ does not change the underlying evil it would represent.

Further reading

What the Right gets wrong when the Left goes nuts

By Peter Franklin

As a native-born American, I found some of Hilton’s recommendations and beliefs politically naïve. The American Right is defined by an interpretation of the American Revolution that resists the exercise of all government power, not simply an elite-dominated centralised power. The American Left, meanwhile, remains wedded to the view that private power is suspect, and that only government provision of services can ensure that all people are treated equally.

Against these twin legacies, it is extremely difficult to see how contemporary American politics can embrace his agenda, especially his call for universal, government-funded health care delivered entirely by private actors. Such a move would slaughter both parties’ sacred cows, and those cows are precious enough that neither party will willingly sacrifice them in a bi-partisan compromise.

But it’s entirely possible Hilton sees that. His television show is not called The Next Revolution for nothing. It may very well be that electing a populist president is not enough. Americans may have to revolt against both established parties and create a new one to really take back control of their lives. If so, count me in – and Hilton’s book would be a great foundation for that new party’s platform.

From the same author

A culture war the Founding Fathers couldn't foresee

By Henry Olsen