As the son of a Leftist radical targeted by the FBI over his opposition to the Vietnam War, I know which side to cheer for.

Since retaking office, Trump has dismissed dozens of officials at the FBI and the Department of Justice. According to The Hill, the administration is “eyeing firing perhaps thousands more in an unprecedented purge.” The earliest targets include officials involved in prosecuting Trump himself, as well as those who caught some 1,500 defendants in a post-Jan. 6 dragnet.

Then there is Kash Patel, the president’s choice to lead the FBI. If confirmed, Patel would join the ranks of other Trumpians leading agencies of which they are deeply skeptical. Among other measures, Patel has mused about shuttering the J. Edgar Hoover Building — the FBI’s headquarters, named for its notoriously lawless and racist first director — and converting it to a “museum of the deep state.”

The building’s 7,000 staffers would fan across the land, under Patel’s plan, solving workaday crimes. As opposed to the kind of highly politicized activity that has turned half of the country against the bureau, not least the use of its vast investigatory powers to corner Trump, seeking to undo his first election.

That project began when the bureau used allegations of “Russian collusion” proffered in the so-called Steele Dossier to launch a wide-ranging investigation into the Trump campaign. Commissioned by the Clinton campaign of 2016, and partially paid for by the Democratic National Committee, the dossier’s claims about Russian collusion were entirely unsubstantiated, as special counsel Robert Mueller revealed in an extensive probe that concluded in 2018.

Nonetheless, the FBI leaked parts of the Steele Dossier, then used the ensuing DC rumors as “evidence” with which to apply for and receive four wide-ranging Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants. This allowed the bureau to spy on the communications of the Trump campaign; one of the FBI attorneys who helped apply for the FISA warrants was later convicted of having altered an email to make it look more incriminating.

Around the same time, Hillary Clinton was also under investigation for having permanently deleted some 31,000 emails that had been subpoenaed by the DOJ in 2014. The FBI investigated Clinton’s illegal destruction of evidence, but in the run up to the 2016 election, it soft-pedaled the matter and declined to recommend prosecution.

Rather than abandon politics-by-probe, the FBI ramped up its anti-Trump efforts four years later, during his second presidential campaign. That’s when the bureau took a leading role in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story in what appears to have been an attempt to control the outcome of the 2020 election. Having come into possession of the laptop 10 months before the New York Post published its first story about it, the FBI verified had its authenticity. Yet it warned social-media platforms to be wary of a Russian disinformation operation involving Hunter. Sure enough, when the Post’s first story appeared, Twitter (now X) and Facebook swiftly throttled it.

The Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol gave rise to another embarrassing episode, combining neglect and imperiousness. There is no excusing the rioters’ actions, and some of those pardoned by Trump upon returning to office undoubtedly committed violent crimes. But the question remains: Why was the US Capitol so poorly defended that day? And why did the Capitol Police Board — consisting of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the architect of the Capitol — deny requests from the Capitol Police to deploy National Guard in anticipation of brewing turmoil?

The answer hinges, in part, on the failure of the FBI to share important intelligence with the Capitol Police. According to Steven A. Sund, then the commander of the Capitol Police, the FBI as early as December 2020 had intelligence indicating that various individuals were actively planning to march into the Capitol and that many of them planned to be armed and ready to use violence. Yet the bureau didn’t alert Sund about this fact, which would likely have led to the authorization of a National Guard deployment.

Then, too, the FBI has to this date failed to comply with congressional requests for basic information, such as how many FBI agents and informants were in the crowd on Jan. 6. As it happens, FBI Agent Steven D’Antuono, who was in charge of the bureau’s Washington, DC, field office that day, had also managed the bureau’s infiltration and entrapment of a ragtag band of right-wing militiamen who, at the urging of undercover FBI handlers, concocted a scheme to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The full extent of FBI manipulation of the suspects only came to light because two of the defendants refused to take plea bargains, went to trial, and were acquitted after proving FBI entrapment.

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago is another reason Trump is coming after the bureau. Accused of illegally hoarding state secrets after leaving office in 2021, Trump was cooperating with officials from the National Archives and Records Administration to return classified documents. The cooperation started early as May 2021 and would continue to the first half of 2022. Nevertheless, the FBI launched a dramatic early-morning raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. A year later, Trump was charged with 37 federal felonies connected to the retention of national security secrets.

At the same time, then-President Joe Biden was also found to have retained and improperly stored classified documents from his time as vice president. Biden’s documents were sitting unguarded in his garage. But there was no FBI raid, nor any discussion of criminal charges. Recall, too, that Hillary Clinton was likewise spared charges over her mishandling of State Department emails.

More from this author

Will the Biden family escape justice?

By Miranda Devine

Despite it all, Trump is now back at the summit of American power. Gone is the naïve showman from reality television. Trump 2.0 is battle-hardened and arrives with a wrecking crew and an aggressive plan to dismantle or weaken the key institutions of America’s unaccountable security state.

This is good and necessary. The FBI has a long and sordid history of framing people; disrupting, misdirecting, and destroying progressive social movements; and blackmailing politicians of any persuasion. As a result, there are many who dislike Trump yet cheer for him — because they dislike the FBI even more.

I understand this impulse. My father, the Marxist scholar Michael Parenti, was a fierce and public opponent of the Vietnam War, and he came under FBI surveillance. He even got a copy of his file. They harassed him, visited our home, bothered my mother. And so, when I read of stunned bureau officials seeking to calm the “fear and angst within the FBI ranks” and vowing to “dig in”, I felt that some little bit of cosmic justice was being done for Dad, who like many radicals of his generation spent years at the sharp end of FBI bullying.

The FBI is reeling from these early blows. But unless Trump and his colleagues are determined and systematic in their efforts, the security apparatus will regroup, shake off the dust, and strike back. We are in the opening rounds of what will be a long and brutal confrontation over the right to enjoy authentic political contestation, rather than a politics stage-managed by men in black.

Progressives who wish to preserve room for real politics, and who know their FBI history, should stand with the Trumpians in this tug-of-war.

It was especially palpable on that night in 2016 at the victory party that wasn’t, her supporters weeping with rage and disbelief as the stage remained empty, the proverbial glass ceiling un-shattered. When Lena Dunham wrote that she felt paralysed by Hillary’s loss, people made fun, but they also saw her point. A plan a lifetime in the making, and this is how it ends? Hillary Clinton did everything right, and Donald Trump did everything ridiculous, and yet: he was the one on the way to the White House.

Of course, this is just one way of thinking about it. The other holds that Hillary was simply a loser — not in the pejorative, Trumpian sense of the word, but in the sense that she was the second-place finisher in a popularity contest for which there was no consolation prize. Hillary was once described by Barack Obama as “likeable enough”, but not enough to win the presidency, and it’s fair to say that she has been more or less obsessed with this ever since. There was the literary autopsy of her failed run for president, aptly titled What Happened; a documentary series, Gutsy, about female success in a sexist culture; the thwarted victory speech repurposed as a Masterclass (in what, one wonders: grudge-holding?). Beneath it all is a palpable bitterness, the 21st-century female politician’s version of Marlon Brandon’s lament from On The Waterfront: I could have been a contender!

And now there is an interview, published in the New York Times ahead of its inclusion in The Fall of Roe, an upcoming book which describes how, “at a moment when women had more power than ever before, the feminist movement suffered one of the greatest political defeats in American history”. The authors are of course referring to the Dobbs decision that left abortion rights in the hands of the states, but they could just as easily be talking about Hillary, who continues to insist that she did not fail, but was failed, by the Democratic Party and its voters. They were the ones who refused to heed her warnings about the threat posed by Trump to abortion rights, to gay rights, to the future of democracy itself; she also fears they are still not listening.

“Most Democrats, most Americans, did not realise we are in an existential struggle for the future of this country,” she says. “This election is existential. I mean, if we don’t make the right decision in this election in our country, we may never have another actual election.” A cynic might point out that this is only the most existential election since the last one, which was the most existential since the last, and so on.

Twenty years ago, on the first Wednesday in November in 2004, I went to use the restroom at work and found a woman my age standing at the sinks, washing her hands and sobbing. I asked if she was okay. “He conceded!” she wailed — the “he” in question being Democratic candidate John Kerry, who had lost the previous day’s election quite unequivocally to the incumbent, George W. Bush.

I thought of this woman on election night in 2016; there seemed to be versions of her everywhere, their features twisted with something wilder and more desperate than mere disappointment. This wasn’t what they wanted, but more than that, it wasn’t what anyone wanted — at least, not anyone they or I knew. Where were these troglodytes pulling the lever for the man who every person in our peer group referred to, groaningly, as “the worst president ever”? Who were they? Did they even exist?

More from this author

Why progressives want to forget George Floyd

By Kat Rosenfield

It is an animating sentiment of today’s political discourse that things have only got worse: that we are in an existential struggle for the future of the country against an unseen, unknown, unknowable evil. Republican voters mill about in flyover country, which might as well be another planet; our elections, rather than a banal exercise in choosing our political representatives, have become a proxy battle for our very lives against these roving hordes. And while nobody has quite come right out and said it, there is a distinct sense — evinced by both the Democratic Party leadership and a politically obsessed media class — that Americans face a binary choice come November. You can vote for Joe Biden for president, or you can vote to destroy democracy.

Meanwhile, the possibility that Trump might win legitimately — that indeed, a hazard of a healthy democracy is that the will of the people, sometimes, is to be governed by a buffoon — has been banished to the realm of the inconceivable, as illuminated by Hillary’s dire warning about what will happen if voters don’t make “the right decision”. Gone is the notion of an election as a question to which there are no wrong answers, only majority rule. Gone, too, is any sense that we ought to preserve equanimity in the event that the majority disagrees with us about which candidate is best for the job. In this paradigm, Republican voters are either wrong, as in error, or wrong, as in evil, but either way, they’ve made a terrible mistake.

It’s hard not to see the current state of the discourse as an obvious outgrowth of an earlier phenomenon that Vox writer Emmet Rensin termed the “smug style” in American liberalism, “predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them”.

It is also hard not to find Hillary’s armchair quarterbacking of the upcoming election a bit rich, considering the source, and particularly when her own smug style is at least partly to blame for getting us into this mess. We all have that highlight reel of cringeworthy moments that runs through our head when we’re awake and anxious at 3am: the verbal fumbles, the jokes that didn’t land, that time a waiter said, “Enjoy your linguini”, and you, an idiot, replied: “You, too!” If I were Hillary Clinton, I would be lying awake at night, wondering how different my life — all our lives — would be, had I never uttered the words, “basket of deplorables”.

But that’s me; the former candidate, on the other hand, seems disinclined toward accepting any culpability for the current state of affairs. Rather, she imagines herself as Cassandra, standing athwart the ignorant public and the ideologically blinkered members of her own party alike, a grandiose notion that appears to have only intensified in the wake of Trump’s conviction. About five minutes after the verdict came in, Hillary took to Instagram to announce the addition of a new product to her merch store: a mug emblazoned with her likeness and the words, “TURNS OUT SHE WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”

Suggested reading

Hillary Clinton still doesn't get it

By Ashley Frawley

Granted, in some ways — and particularly when it comes to the subject of the book — the told-you-sos aren’t entirely unearned. The “shout your abortion” brand of rhetoric that came to dominate the feminist discourse in the pre-Dobbs years now seems, in hindsight, to stem from a delusional level of confidence about the lasting strength of Roe, as well as a total incomprehension of the strategy of the pro-life movement. And if Hillary had won the presidency, who knows? In addition to sparing us the chaos of the Trump administration, not to mention a Supreme Court stacked with Trump’s conservative picks, perhaps she would have motivated her party to finally codify abortion protections into law, rather than letting them dangle forever by the thread of a single court challenge.

But she didn’t win. He did — and Hillary’s bitterness over this fact continues to get in the way of a realistic accounting as to why. The notion of the Republican candidate and Republican voters as something akin to an alien species reveals a bizarre insensibility as to how much Trump’s schtick is rooted not in conservative tradition, but in the aforementioned smug style that is so prevalent on the Left. When Trump takes to social media on Memorial Day and writes “Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country”, he’s playing to the same contempt that had people chuckling alongside Hillary over the “basket of deplorables” line. When Trump stood in front of a crowd and declared the election had been stolen, he was traveling a path that had been thoroughly pre-greased by four years of open speculation that he was working for Russia, which had hacked the voting machines and tipped the election in his favour. Any sneer we can do, Trump can do better, louder and more shamelessly. The difference is not of kind, but degree.

Around the same time Trump first announced his presidential run, a rumour began to circulate that the bathrooms in his residence were outfitted with solid gold toilets. It wasn’t true, but it’s a remarkably vivid metaphor for his impact on American politics. Trump’s aesthetic is tasteless, ostentatious, vulgar; what’s running through the pipes, however, is just the same old shit. And despite the allegedly unprecedented importance of the forthcoming election, it’s hard to exaggerate how painfully familiar it all seems, like a TV show that has long since jumped the shark. We have the same characters, the same plotlines. We even have the same actual lines, as with Hillary’s interview. Alongside the allegedly unprecedented swipes at her fellow Democrats, she has also taken this opportunity to reprise her eternal grudge against James Comey, whom she believes singlehandedly cost her the election when he raised questions about her use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State, just two weeks before Election Day. “[Once] he did that to me,” she says, “the people, the voters who left me, were women. They left me because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect.”

Every time Hillary raises this point — and she’s raised it a lot in the past eight years — I’m struck by how much it sounds like something Donald Trump would say, although he’d probably be more bombastic and throw in a few capitalised, trademark phrases for good measure (Very Unfair!). But the way Hillary talks about patriarchy and sexism is the same way Trump talks about elites and corruption. When she succeeds, it is in spite of these things; but when she loses, it’s because of them, a perfect rhetorical fortress within which her successes are always her doing, while her failures are never her fault.

I’m also struck by the people excluded from this narrative: the ones who were inspired not by her policy positions but by the history-making nature of her candidacy; the ones who checked the box next to her name for no other reason than First Woman President. In other words, the ones who voted for Hillary not in spite of her sex, but because of it.

Nobody likes to admit to being one of these people — I know, I was one of them — but Hillary’s campaign benefited enormously from the symbolic blow it allegedly dealt to the patriarchy, just as a certain number of Trump voters were motivated primarily by the thrill of dealing a slap in the face to smug elites. Indeed, the subtext of Hillary’s loss is not that she, as a woman, was forced to play by a different set of rules than Trump. It’s that he beat her at her own game.

What seems abundantly clear now, a flood of donations pours into Trump’s coffers in response to his conviction, is that this game has only ever been a sideshow, a distraction. That’s all well and good for the Republican candidate, who seems to view the presidency primarily as a vehicle for his own self-aggrandisement; this is his circus, these are his monkeys. But the actual business of policy change is happening elsewhere, and as the Dobbs decision shows, we ignore it at our peril.

All the performative resistance in the world won’t secure abortion rights for future generations of women; for that we need old-fashioned legislation and ballot initiatives, and with them, the cooperation and compromise that living in a divided country requires. The aesthetics of empowerment will never be a substitute for the unglamorous work of crafting policies and knocking on doors and persuading people to support your cause. And true, women have more power now than ever before in history — but the thing about women’s power is the thing about any kind of power. It’s not just about having it, or displaying, but using it.

These were the good old days, especially if you were Hillary Clinton. By 1997, the First Lady of the United States had published It Takes a Village — “a textbook for caring” for America’s children — and followed it up with a conference on “What New Research on the Brain Tells Us About Our Youngest Children”, at which only one neuroscientist spoke and didn’t say anything new. There, she gushed about how experiences during the first three years “can determine whether children will grow up to be peaceful or violent citizens”. Rob Reiner, who had devised a recent national public education campaign (also not a neuroscientist), claimed that what we know about brain development during the first three years of life was “the key to problem-solving at every level of society”.

If only that were the case; if only healing America’s broken electorate had simply been a matter of socially engineering a new one. Instead, in the three decades since, the country’s atomisation continued to fester, compelling Clinton to once again return to the frontline. Eight years (and another book) since Trump ruined her presidential party, this time her weapon of choice is a 3,500-word essay for The Atlantic, in which she laments the rise of “loneliness” and its manipulation “by dark forces that are threatening American democracy”.

Once again showing a stubborn penchant for reducing social problems to biology, Clinton believes that an “epidemic” of “loneliness and isolation” not only explains the rise of the “alt-Right”, but is also infecting American society to its core, threatening citizens’ “personal health and also the health of our democracy”. Turning her “basket of deplorables” into a “basket of the debilitated”, she confirms that America’s political elite is inclined to view the politically dispossessed in two ways: risky or at-risk; swarming or sick; dangerous or disordered.

What this forgets, though, is that treating voters as vulnerable, malign loners rather than disenfranchised political agents is part of the problem. Just as in the Nineties, Clinton seems incapable of reckoning with people as conscious actors. For her, problems are not solved by negotiating with the affected, but by prescribing expensive social programmes that seek to alter their behaviour. Yet being treated as passive recipients of “behaviour change programmes” will backfire unless the political class that Clinton represents addresses the political vacuum once filled by representation and contestation.

Suggested reading

America's new class war

By Michael Lind

No one needs to be reminded of Clinton’s “deplorables” comment, or her warning about the risks posed by “low-information voters”. But few seem to recall the brief stunned moment following Trump’s election win when political pundits and social-media experts were bursting with performative self-reflection (though admittedly not a little emotional incontinence). Maybe we needed to reflect; maybe we needed to listen a little more to the “left behind”. It didn’t take long for soul-searching to be replaced by waves of condemnation towards those “ignorant” voters who were duped by Facebook, Google and Vladimir Putin into allowing the “darkest impulses” of the human psyche out into the light of day.

Like the flick of a switch, this new narrative became “the truth” about 2016. No, no — it was nothing we did. People had been swindled out of doing what was good for them, lured into the deep, frog-dwelling recesses of the internet. It’s not that we failed — it’s that the forces of evil were too powerful. Defeating them became an all-consuming passion. Suppress free speech. Curtail freedoms. All so that the greater good can triumph.

In this narrative, the disenfranchised became both victim and villain: they are duped and they are malign. Neither, however, places any importance on political agency. Clinton’s latest reflection on “loneliness” is only the latest manifestation of this. As she describes, before these voters became dangerous, they were just vulnerable young men, the offspring of broken families in broken communities: “There have always been angry young men alienated from mainstream society and susceptible to the appeal of demagogues and hate-mongers,” she writes. “But modern technology has taken the danger to another level.” And, crucially, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Throwing herself behind the lofty political aim of finding the electorate (adequately vetted) friends, she echoes other campaigners who liken loneliness to obesity and “smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day”. She takes this medicalisation of the problem further, comparing it with the public-health threat presented by HIV/AIDS, arguing that it is time to “sound the alarm”. The rationale here is straightforward: by medicalising loneliness, it can be safely transformed into something much more isolable and soluble than something such as real democratic representation. Indeed, it medicalises democracy as a whole, diagnosing it as infirm and in need of a cure.

Here, the political enemy becomes sick, not an object of hatred but of empathy. “Researchers also say that loneliness can generate anger, resentment, and even paranoia,” she writes. “It diminishes civic engagement and social cohesion, and increases political polarisation and animosity.” She cites the US surgeon general to argue that unless this crisis is addressed, “we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country” — the implication being that voters didn’t distrust Clinton or her ilk; they were just “lonely”.

To this effect, she complains of Steve Bannon’s conspiracy to turn isolated “rootless white males” of the online gaming world into the “shock troops of the alt-right”. But is transforming them into patients-in-waiting and seeking to quarantine their discontents really any better? For Clinton, there is no other choice: “Like many others, I was too slow to see the impact this strategy could have. Now the surgeon general is telling us that social disconnection is not just a problem at the margins… but is in fact an epidemic sweeping the country.” The language of “epidemic” leaves readers with no doubt that this is not a political but medical problem.

What is the treatment? She suggests that governments bring opportunities back to hard-hit areas, stem the need to leave communities to find work, and put the family first — none of which would be disagreeable if it weren’t an excuse for more intervention with the aim of creating the right sorts of citizens. Just as her demonisation of “deplorables” makes her promises to support the same voters ring hollow, treating people as objects of behaviour management techniques is hardly a winning formulation. Across Europe and around the world, people are voting less for the ascendent populists than against the condescending political mainstream that Clinton has come to represent. Every insurgent political movement of the past decade shares one thing in common: its members want to be subjects instead of objects.

Still, there is a kernel of truth here. A growing number of voters in America, and the West more broadly, feel alienated. Today’s society is characterised by ongoing individuation and social fragmentation and a loss of collective projects beyond the self. Union membership has collapsed and what is left of them is just as sceptical of political agency, often expressed through the infantilising rhetoric of health and safety.

More from this author

Neoliberalism killed the liberal dream

By Ashley Frawley

Yet there clearly remains something distinctly sanitising about grouping problems together under the umbrella of health. This is not a phenomenon that can be solved by completing a checklist and finding the appropriate intervention. People are politically dispossessed: more important than the feelings that result from alienation is the disenchantment, political or otherwise, that follows.

In other words, loneliness isn’t the problem, but disenfranchisement. The political sphere has been emptied of all meaning and mainstream politicians are happy to keep it that way, perhaps even longing for the comfortable, stabilising political apathy of the Nineties. For a time when “getting people excited about politics” didn’t involve Steve Bannon, but a “rock the vote” talk at a local high school; when a policy can be marketed with a PowerPoint presentation and people are passive recipients of your charitable interventions.

But they won’t get that. There is no going back. Political frustration will inevitably reappear elsewhere — in conspiracies and populist figures who promise to tell it like it is. Trump had his moment, and most will not be blind to his embarrassing inability to accept a backslide from his presidency. Yet until those in power reckon with the need to see people eye to eye, Trump-like figures and movements will replace him. Trump didn’t cause the circumstances that made him and, at least if Clinton is listened to, those circumstances won’t be changing soon.

This political uncoupling is largely a product of the class system and the skewing of politics towards the priorities of college-educated Americans and wealthy political donors in both parties. This warping is built into the system from the start. Democrat and Republican nominees are chosen in party primaries, whose participants are far more educated and affluent than the average voter. Although the gap is large in both parties, it is particularly pronounced on the Democratic side. As a Brookings study in 2018 showed, Democratic voters are “almost twice as likely as the voting age population in their district to have college degrees or postgraduate study”.

This matters because college-educated voters tend to be more liberal on social issues than less-educated ones. Last year, for instance, 66% of college graduates wanted abortion to be legal in all or most cases, while only 54% of high-school graduates did. Similarly, immigration, which is treated as a “social issue” rather than as a labour market or welfare state one in the US, was seen as a “good thing” by 80% of college graduates, but only by 64% of respondents with “no college”, with twice as many non-college voters (30%) as college graduates (14%) viewing immigration as a “bad thing”.

The influence of big donors in both parties further skews politics from the pragmatic concerns of America’s working-class majority. Wealthy donors, like primary voters, tend to be socially liberal and support free trade, immigration and cuts in government social spending more than the average voter. It’s not hyperbole to conclude that the United States is a nation of communitarians ruled by an oligarchy of libertarians.

This confirms the suspicions of most Americans. In a 2021 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs which asked who benefited from US foreign policy, most respondents answered “large corporations” (92%), “the US government” (90%), “wealthy Americans” (87%), and “the US military” (80%). By and large, they were not mistaken; paranoids can have real enemies. The claim that American political parties and their donors use cultural and social issues to distract from economic topics, in the spirit of divide-and-rule, is not a conspiracy theory; it is manifestly correct. On the progressive side of the political spectrum, where Silicon Valley and Wall Street are major sources of campaign finance, the situation could not be more obvious. Amazon, for example, has viciously fought attempts by its workforce to unionise for years, while simultaneously making $10-million donations to “organisations supporting [racial] justice and equity”.

During the same period, this cynical approach has trickled down into the Democratic party machine. President Biden last week announced a plan to shore up Medicare’s finances by raising taxes on Americans earning more than $400,000 a year. Why $400,000? Because, in 2021, he had pledged not to raise taxes on anyone bringing home less than $400,000. This represented a significant increase from Hillary Clinton’s promise during her 2016 campaign to not raise taxes on anyone making $250,000 or less.

For Clinton (and Bernie Sanders), anyone earning less than $250,000 was “middle-class”. Four years later, Biden nearly doubled the definitional limit — even though, according to the IRS, a household (not an individual) with $400,000 or more of income is in the top 1.8% of US households. Yet Biden’s broad definition has largely gone unquestioned, with mainstream Republicans describing his tax rise for the 1.8% as dangerous “socialism”. A recent Newsweek headline follows the script: “Joe Biden to Raise Taxes for Nearly 2.5 million Americans” — without mentioning that America has a population of 336 million.

Suggested reading

America is showing its age

By Adam Smith

Taken together, then, we can see that affluent, college-educated voters and the donors in both parties are skewing American politics to the Left on social issues and to the Right on economics. This has left a substantial part of the American public unrepresented in our two-party system. Almost six years ago, the political scientist Lee Drutman, then my colleague at New America, the think tank I co-founded, used voting data to show that very few voters were consistent libertarians (socially conservative and economically libertarian), while 40% were in the socially-conservative, economically-progressive category. To put it another way, the libertarians have many donors but almost no voters, while the communitarians are not represented by either mainstream progressives or mainstream conservatives. (Drutman called this group “populist”, but communitarian is now a less pejorative term.)

Over the past decade, the anti-establishment insurgencies of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump appealed to many of these people, particularly working-class voters in industrial states who supported the pro-worker, “bread and butter” politics absent from both parties. Since the 2016 election, however, instead of trying to win back former Trump voters, the Democrats have mostly doubled down on the identity politics and environmentalism favoured by their new, college-educated metropolitan social base. In contrast, with varying degrees of sincerity, Republican politicians, whatever their views of Trump, have tried to appeal to the new working-class voters, many of them former Democrats or independents, who voted for Trump.

The result has been an on-going realignment in the presidential and midterm elections since 2016. Growing numbers of working-class black and Hispanic voters have shifted to the Republican Party, while well-to-do, highly-educated white voters continue to leave the Republicans for the Democrats. These trends refute the standard Democratic narrative that the Republicans are a dying party of authoritarian white nationalists who want to overthrow democracy and re-establish racial segregation. Rather, it reflects an increasing polarisation along class lines, as measured by education. In 2022, the Republicans won more of the non-college vote (55%) than they had in 2016, while the Democratic share was only 43%, something unthinkable in the days of Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson.

Suggested reading

Black gold fuelled the Iraq War

By Helen Thompson

As exiled country-club Republicans seek asylum by joining the Democratic Party, raising its average income and educational attainment, can the Republicans move in the opposite direction and become the party of the multiracial working class? A small but significant minority of Republican policymakers, including Senators Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, is certainly breaking taboos that date back to the Reagan era.

Rubio, for instance, has voiced support for Amazon labour organisers and for organised labour in principle, while Hawley (along with Ted Cruz) voted for a bill opposed by the Biden administration and sponsored by Sanders to provide railroad workers with more paid leave. Vance, meanwhile, has added his voice to this faction, which finds intellectual supporters in both American Affairs and the think tank American Compass. If they succeed, the Republicans would still be a pro-business party, but one that accepts the legitimacy of unions and seeks votes from union members, similar to the GOP under Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

To date, however, these populist Republicans are a minority in their party. Conventional conservative Republicans might be estranged from their traditional big business allies, but this is only because the financial giants have assumed a progressive narrative and the Big Tech companies discriminate against conservatives — rather than because they treat their workers badly. And it seems unlikely this will change soon: the post-Trump Republican leadership seems intent on reverting to something similar to the Reagan-Bush parties, using hot-button culture war issues to win working-class votes and then implementing an economic agenda favoured by business, wealthy donors and libertarian ideologues.

If this isn’t reversed, American politics will return to the pre-2016 status quo: a struggle for office among rival factions of the economic elite which mobilise voters by using identity politics on the Left and a culture war on the Right. An oligarchy of libertarians will continue to rule — and a nation of communitarians will suffer.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that certain folks want to see her run for president — or are terrified that she will. One article by former GOP creative strategist Myra Adams called Mrs Obama the Democrats’ “break-glass-in-case-of-emergency-candidate”, noting that her “limitless” fundraising ability and “winner’s aura” would make her not just a frontrunner in the primary but an uncontested one whom no other Dem would dare challenge. Meanwhile, presented with the prospect of a 2024 Michelle Obama candidacy, one anonymous Right-wing activist gasps: “God help us.”

Luckily for Republicans, God need not be involved; Michelle Obama has been unequivocal about her total lack of desire to run for office, recently saying that it’s the one question she detests above all others.

But, then, the eagerness surrounding the idea has little to do with Obama herself and lots to do with an overall sense that the wives of presidents, at least the Democratic ones, are not just political spouses but political spouses. This is partly to do with Hillary Clinton being the first FLOTUS-turned-aspiring-POTUS, but perhaps more to do with the prevalent (and not necessarily incorrect) sense that women can and should be doing more in the world than standing behind a man, even if that man is the leader of the free world. Gone are your grandmother’s first ladies, baking cookies and hosting social events and carefully choosing their pet projects from a pre-selected list of distinctly feminine causes. Dissolved is the unofficial role of America’s Homemaker-in-Chief.

More from this author

Is Obama sabotaging Biden?

By Kat Rosenfield

Michelle Obama is, indeed, like no other First Lady before her — but this includes the ones who came right before her. Her new book, The Light We Carry, is less a political memoir, than an inspirational guide; certainly it could not be farther in tone or subject matter from Hillary Clinton’s What Happened, a grim post-mortem on her failed 2016 run for President. Over the course of 10 chapters, Obama emphasises communication, connection, and common humanity; she reflects on her role as a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a friend. The whole thing is unmistakably and unabashedly classy, to the point where if Obama recalls any of her predecessors, it’s more Jackie Kennedy than Hillary Clinton: a person without leadership aspirations who nevertheless ends up leading by example.

Michelle Obama’s values and principles are classically liberal, which is to say they’re out of style on the Left — dismissed as respectability politics by people whose preferred political setting is level-11 rage. Publicity seems to nod to current progressive pieties: the blurb promises a look at “issues of race, gender, and visibility”. In it, Obama does occasionally use language that feels borrowed from more polarising authors (the term “black bodies” appears here and there, as if it accidentally wandered into the text from an adjacent book by Ibram X. Kendi), but these elements are far less prominent than one might imagine — or than the media’s insatiable hunger for stories of racialised conflict might make it seem.

The most striking thing about the book is how consciously she veers away from the divisive framing that’s such a hallmark of Left-wing political discourse in 2022. “Most of my earliest memories of being different have nothing to do with being Black,” Obama writes early on in the chapter, “Am I Seen?” Being black did eventually make Obama different, and she does eventually get to this part. But as a child in a largely-black Chicago school, she stood out not for the colour of her skin but her height.

Obama was a tall child. It made her at once hyper-visible and easily dismissed — always in the back row or last in line, owing to the obsession among elementary school teachers with lining up students from shortest to tallest. She describes the moment of dismay she experienced as a high school student watching the cheerleaders tumble across the basketball court and realising that “some of those girls were approximately the size of one of my legs”. (Obama, like her husband, unlike her predecessor, can be very funny.) What’s remarkable here is the relatability. Who among us didn’t experience a moment like this in the throes of puberty: a self-consciousness so heightened that your very existence seemed like an embarrassment too awful to bear?

Suggested reading

Barack Obama was a false hope

By Justin Webb

It’s to Obama’s credit that she gives this credit to her audience: she knows they’ll nod along, recognising their own experiences in hers. This shouldn’t be a significant thing for the memoir of a high-profile Democrat to do — but it is. Operating in a sea of awareness-raising tomes, whose readership is meant to include many if not mostly white women, she is a rare thing: an author who treats those readers charitably rather than with scathing contempt. She gives them the benefit of the doubt, not just that they are capable of empathy, but also that her own experiences are universal enough to empathise with.

If not for the fact that the term has already been coopted to describe a very different sort of ideology, you might even say that Obama’s attitude is inclusivity made manifest: an insistence that humanity recognises humanity, across boundaries, in spite of our differences. “I think the most we can ever do, really, is to walk partway across the bridge toward another person and feel humbled that we get to be there at all,” she writes.

And so this book, against the backdrop of contemporary American politics, does begin to seem like a political legacy of sorts, in spite of itself. It’s impossible not to notice echoes in The Light We Carry of the same pragmatism — and sometimes exasperation — that Barack Obama has exhibited in recent years when critiquing the excesses of the progressive Left. In 2019, the former president made headlines for noting “a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgemental as possible about other people”, before telling them to cut it out.

Suggested reading

The problem with power couples

By Adrian Wooldridge

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re politically woke, and all that stuff — you should get over that quickly,” he said. “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.”

In her final chapter, titled “Going High”, Michelle Obama echoes these sentiments: “We’ve become adept at making noise and congratulating each other for it, but sometimes we forget to do the work,” she writes. “With a three-second investment, you may be creating an impression, but you are not creating change.” The subtext is clear, if unflattering to today’s keyboard warriors: You’re not helping. Calm down. Grow up.

The former president has come in for a not-insignificant amount of criticism over comments like these, denounced by one writer as “yet another needless prescription of acquiescence to a bloc of Americans on the wrong side of history”. It’s a fair bet that his wife, with this book, will invite a similar backlash from people who believe that going high, especially amid the looming threat of another Trump presidency, is a fool’s errand. Some people will even go so far as to create a new projection, a new ghost-self to join the others: Republicans will point to the book’s discussion of race, gender, and obnoxious Fox News commentators as evidence that the former first lady is far woker than she cares to admit, even as progressives who feel called out by the book accuse her of being a crypto-conservative.

But if Michelle Obama believed in going high even amid the outrage and agita of Donald Trump’s first bid for the White House, surely she won’t allow the more radical elements of her own side to drag her down into the mire now.

Like the rest of America’s ruling class, Clinton fears we are hopelessly divided, possibly forever. The media tends to agree. Books and op-eds are churned out, hyping everything from the “polarisation spiral” to predictions of a coming civil war. We are past the point of no return, pundits warn. Apparently even scholars of polarisation are polarised, according to the New York Times. As Tiffany Cross put it on her MSNBC show a few weeks ago: “People keep saying a civil war is coming. I would say a civil war is here. And I don’t mean to be hyperbolic.”

The trouble it is, it is hyperbolic. It’s true that our political and media elites, and those who run corporations and Big Tech companies, are increasingly partisan. But that’s because they have a lot to gain — in terms of money and power — from making Americans hate each other. Nevertheless, despite the billions and billions of dollars being spent trying to divide us, polarisation remains an elite phenomenon. When it comes to the fundamental values this nation was founded on, Americans are much more united than they are divided.

The evidence is everywhere. Last week, for instance, Gallup reported the latest approval rating for interracial marriage between black and white people. The polling company first started asking Americans about their feelings on the subject in 1958, when approval was an abysmal 4%. As of 2022, it stands at 94%, and there is almost no difference between white and non-white respondents. The regional difference has also evaporated. Southern Americans now approve of interracial marriage at the same rate as their eastern, Midwestern, and western neighbours. As recently as 1991, approval for interracial marriage in the south was at just 33%, compared to 54% in the east and 60% in the west. Today, those figures are 93%, 94%, and 97% respectively.

More from this author

The media's betrayal of the poor

By Batya Ungar-Sargon

You could argue that people haven’t become less racist, but simply less willing to admit their racism to pollsters. But even that is a huge leap forward. 93% of Southern Americans want pollsters, and presumably also their neighbours, to believe that they have the same views as the liberals they probably mocked just 20 years ago. Racism has become socially taboo.

Something similar has happened with gay marriage. Approval among Republicans has absolutely soared in recent years — from 16% in 1995 to 55% last year, including 61% of young Republicans. Many believe that at least ten Senate Republicans will join the Democrats in enshrining the right to gay marriage into law. At a time of intense polarisation — when even baby formula divides the house — this is a major feat.

And then there’s abortion, an issue that the media and our politicians assume is hugely divisive. In fact, the vast majority of Americans agree on the major points. They oppose abortion bans and want it to be generally legal in the first trimester, and in cases of rape, incest or where the mother’s health is threatened. On criminal justice, too, there is no longer a partisan divide. In recent years, Republicans have been at the forefront of criminal justice reform. Red states like Oklahoma, Georgia and Idaho have been quietly releasing prisoners and reforming their justice systems for the better part of a decade. Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch has consistently sided with liberal judges in criminal justice cases. And President Trump’s First Step Act released 5,000 black men from prison, although those men seem to be the only ones who took any notice.

Suggested reading

Tribalism has come to the West

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Even when it comes to police brutality, Republicans have been becoming more vocal. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham announced he was seeking proposals to improve policing and combat “racial discrimination regarding the use of force”. Soon after, Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator, introduced a police reform bill — which was later killed by Democrats.

Scott and Graham were joined by none other than the then-leader of the Republican Senate majority, Mitch McConnell, who told reporters in the wake of Floyd’s murder: “We are still wrestling with America’s original sin. It is perfectly clear we are a long way from the finish line.” And at a lunch for Republican senators, Tom Cotton of Arkansas stood up and said: “Young Black men have a very different experience with law enforcement in this nation than white people, and that’s their impression and experience, and we need to be sensitive to that and do all we can to change it.”

Meanwhile, the most vocal Democrats on the subject are those who support progressive prosecutors and bail reform efforts — policies often billed as divisive. But they are not divisive; they are just wildly unpopular — like Republican efforts to ban abortion in all cases. Democrat and Republican Americans alike oppose these measures, especially now, amid a crime wave. Our elites want us to believe these issues divide Americans, but they simply don’t.

The Pew Research Center recently released a study that they claimed showed signs of “partisan hostility” growing. “Growing shares of both Republicans and Democrats say members of the other party are more immoral, dishonest, closed-minded than other Americans,” the study claimed to find. But the questions they asked respondents weren’t about members of the other party as much as they were about the parties themselves, or politicians: “Do you have a favourable or unfavourable opinion of the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party?”; “How well do each of the following phrases describe the Republican or Democrat Party?”; “How much do you like or dislike Republican or Democrat political leaders who…” People aren’t turning on their fellow Americans so much as they are on political parties and leaders.

Suggested reading

America needs to calm down

By Simon Cottee

And it’s not just this study that suggests so; a 2019 study by James Druckman and Matthew Levendusky in Public Opinion Quarterly found that “when answering questions about the other party, individuals think about elites more than voters”. When the elites of the party were separated out from average Americans, the researchers found that on every measure, “respondents are more negative toward the elites of the other party than they are toward voters”. And Anthony Fowler, a professor of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, has done numerous studies that fly in the face of the polarisation narrative, finding that voters are more moderate, more informed by policy, and more willing to change their views than many in power would have you to believe. “To be sure, there are real policy disagreements among Americans,” writes Fowler. “But for every extreme liberal or conservative who agrees with their party on most issues, there are far more people in the middle who think that Nancy Pelosi is too far to the Left and that Mitch McConnell is too far to the Right.”

Every week, I talk to working-class Americans across the country who work with people who disagree with them on politics. They tell me the same thing over and over: we don’t have the luxury of hating co-workers who vote for the other party. We rely on them too much. Party politics just doesn’t matter as much as having a good working relationship. It’s our elites who want us to believe that we are divided, simply because it benefits them.

Suggested reading

How bin Laden won

By Aris Roussinos

It’s clear how this works in politics: if you can convince you constituents that the person you’re running against is a fascist — or a groomer — then the race is over. Because if the choice is you or Hitler, you pretty much have it in the bag. And if you can also convince people that your opponents’ supporters and voters are fascists and deplorables, who cling to their guns and their Bibles and their bigotries, well, who wants to be in that category? Divisiveness in politics is a shortcut — a workaround to actually having to deliver the promises you make your constituents.

Something similar has happened to the mainstream media. With the collapse of the local newspaper industry, a new business model has emerged that is diametrically opposed to the goal of getting the widest circulation. The business incentives of digital media see success in terms of engagement rather than circulation or ad revenue, and the tools of digital media make it possible to target content to specific audiences based on income and zip code. Online publishing software tells you exactly what these audiences are clicking on, how often, and for how long — so you can give readers more and more and more of it. Of course, the most engaged readers online are always the most extreme, which means that our news outlets gain most by catering to them.

Social media companies work in a similar way. The currency there is attention, and the stronger you feel about something, the longer you stay on a page dedicated to it, and the more likely you are to click on an ad. Every time you hate a stranger on the internet, someone makes money.

At a time when the death of Elizabeth II is uniting her nation in grief, it’s hard to watch our own head of state fall into this trap. President Biden — who campaigned on unifying the country, and promised to represent not only those who voted for him but also those who did not — has made a habit of casting his political opponents as extremists. Recently, for instance, he has smeared MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascists” and a threat to democracy. Not exactly the behaviour of a unifier.

The thing that was miraculous about the response to 9/11 was not that Americans united, because we were not divided. It’s that our leaders did: they showed the grace that ordinary Americans show every single day, working alongside each other in nursing homes in Florida and factories in Iowa and construction sites in Minnesota. For once, our leaders were worthy of our support. For once, they were representing us. Today, by contrast, they simply demand that we defend them — to the extend that it means indulging in meaningless fantasies about a looming civil war.

The Miserable Older White Woman emerges from the same blend of old-school misogyny and ageist ugh-mom-ism that brought us first the Wine Mom and then the Karen, in the summer of 2020. In theory, a Karen was a white woman who called the police on black people who were simply minding their own business. In practice, the term started getting used (and is indeed still used) in reference to any woman over the age of 25 who has spoken up, in any context. In the early pandemic days, I was once called “Karen” after asking some teenagers on public transit to put on masks. But anti-maskers also got labelled Karens too, so we can’t win (unless we stay silent).

Who has it in for these women? A significant number of the Twitter accounts piling hate on middle-aged women seem to be controlled by young men who give off incel vibes. They are also angry at young women for rejecting them, and their mothers for not sending their favourite meal down to them that evening in their proverbial basement. What is clear is that these women are an avatar for complaints that span, or defy, the ideological spectrum. The Miserable Older White Woman inspires an intense, if difficult to pin down, political fury. Both progressives and the Right seem to agree that “Liberal white women on antidepressants will be the end of our civilisation”, but the stereotype allows a range of people to channel a variety of frustrations. She’s the 53% of white women who supposedly (but not actually) voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but also the tear-strewn pussy-hat wearer at the Women’s March protesting that election’s outcome.

For the Left, the privileged lady wrangling a prescription for her non-problems can be blamed for all of society’s woes: racism, imperialism, the housing shortage, the cost of living, climate change, perhaps even monkeypox. Her antidepressant usage can be categorised as yet another indulgence she engages in while other people suffer, akin to a day at the spa: “White women live off of Starbucks and antidepressants.” The Left-produced caricature lives in a large suburban house with a rich husband and resents her perfect life: “Excess red wine, antidepressants, free time and money has truly done wonders to boomer white women.” This is a women whose problem is that she has it too good. If she had to deal with the same adversity as everyone else, this would build character, and she’d stop the whinging.

Suggested reading

The sly sexism of the OK Karen meme

By Sarah Ditum

For the Right, the Miserable Older White Woman is the opposition: “Democratic party supporters are self-hating college-educated white women. Basically if you live in an apartment in LA and own four cats, a massive ‘sex toy’ and consume a lot of antidepressants you are a Democratic party voter.” And she is getting her comeuppance for her decades of liberalism. She foolishly bought into the feminist myth that women have brains and should have high-powered careers and look at her now, all alone with her cats, pining for the life she could have had if she’d settled down when still turning heads. If she’d stayed a virgin until marrying Ward Cleaver at 22, she wouldn’t be popping pills of any kind. She’s sad because she’s alone, but don’t feel sorry for her, it’s a misery of her own making. A lesson for young women: get married before you’re middle-aged — and why not to one of the charming young men who spend their days online mocking older women?

And yet critics from the Right also have it in for the Miserable Older White Women who have settled down, but who fail to have either aged into traditionalist matrons or remained chipper 20-somethings. Pratt, of “Welcome to Hell”, more recently made the rounds for introducing Twitter’s cynical masses to the Peach Mom, a comic about the angst of an apparently well-off stay-at-home mom (albeit with side hustles) who despises her husband for doing less of the housework and childcare. The woman behind these evidently autobiographical comics then got widely ridiculed, in part because it is objectively ridiculous to post comics to the internet that bash your spouse, but also because she was a Miserable Older White Woman, unhappy with her lot, but for no good reason. Why wasn’t she grateful that she had a provider husband who also did some housework? (Much was made of the fact that he apparently does childcare when she goes out in the evening to teach yoga, as though the teaching of yoga is an indulgence and not a part-time job.) She should be grateful, was the gist.

But the common ground of why she’s demonised is that she represents liberal modernity, to people across the political spectrum who object to it. The Miserable Older White Woman is a normie, a Hillary not Bernie supporter. An AWFL (“affluent white female liberal”); a Twitter search for that very-online acronym paints a similar picture. Her reaction to Kamala is an enthusiastic yaaas. She posts milquetoast liberal messaging to her Instagram, about Black Lives Mattering and trans rights and abortion rights, but in a cringe way.

Suggested reading

The cruel world of yoga

By Kat Rosenfield

There’s a perception, among her detractors, that liberal modernity has given women of this demographic too much ground, which has made them (as well as everyone else) worse off: “Affirmative action, war on poverty, and the modern feminist movement empowered white women. This newly empowered group remade society in a way that harmed men that couldn’t adapt. This new society is not so great and white women begin taking massive amounts of antidepressants.” Men’s rights activists agree with far-Left advocates for the true marginalised: white women are spoiled pseudo-victims. They are society’s actual most powerful, but imagine themselves oppressed.

Does it all come back to Hillary Clinton? Hillary — per her haters — the privileged complainer. Hillary, the embodiment of the dorky, stodgy mom who does not know how to relax. Unlike other ways of medicating away bad moods, antidepressants have exactly zero reputation for being edgy or fun. Much like you know who. Even Hillary’s supporters faulted her, during the 2016 US presidential campaign, for not appearing to have a good time. (Too young, too attractive, and too fun-loving is also a problem, as a certain Finnish prime minister could attest.) The people who wanted to vote Democrat in 2016 but just couldn’t stomach Hillary are, in their rhetoric, very like those who see a stat on older white women’s antidepressant usage and go: “makes sense.”

Suggested reading

Middle-aged women don't want sex

By Mary Harrington

There’s also cross-ideological consensus that older women have committed the crime of having aged out of hotness. A Reddit theorist suggests older white women are upset because “they’re the most protected and coddled class when they’re young. When their looks fade they stop getting preferential treatment which is hard for most to adjust to.” The thing where “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”, in other words. So, according to their critics, these women used to have too much and are now bitter over a normal existence.

To appear old is, in a sense, to look miserable. Society values women for youth, a fleeting quality, which is enough to make anyone miserable. But there’s also the specific fact that the changes to facial features that happen naturally with age read, on women, as anger. Women sick of being told they seem angry seek Botox — an anti-aging treatment — to remedy the situation. One wonders whether Miserable Older White Women are as miserable as all that, or just look that way, and are disproportionately prescribed antidepressants because their doctors — fallible humans like the rest of us — interpret their ordinary facial expressions as ones of distress. The medical establishment has made stupider mistakes.

Women, particularly housewives, have long been prescribed drugs at a much higher rate than men. One can look at this as society throwing drugs at women to distract them from their situational misery so that they don’t question the situation itself. But one might just as easily see this as a case of men not having access to proper mental health care, or indeed to the drugs that can be used relatively safely to make them less miserable. Are the men who sneer at antidepressant-using women just repulsed, or are they also, perhaps, envious? Do they wish they could be like the women who face somewhat less stigma for going ahead and making an appointment with their GP? Is the Miserable Older White Woman’s crime being miserable, or is it valuing herself enough to do something sensible about it?

Safe. Legal. Rare.

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

Biden's cowardly war on conversion therapy

By Kat Rosenfield

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

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

Suggested reading

Roe v Wade deserves to fall

By Kat Rosenfield

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

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

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

Suggested reading

The media is run by trolls

By Kat Rosenfield

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

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

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

Suggested reading

American feminism has turned its back on women

By Hadley Freeman

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

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

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

But smuggled in amid what Bergstein calls “the fun stuff” is the bloody heart of the film: the white working-class character Penny (Cynthia Rhodes), who has to have an illegal abortion. After being taken to a “butcher” with a “dirty knife” and a “folding table” — Bergstein made sure to included graphic language in the film — she nearly dies, screaming in agony. She doesn’t, but Bergstein had to fight hard to keep the Penny plot in the movie when the studio wanted to remove it: “It had to be in the movie because I could see young women were taking the rights for granted and I wanted to show them what life really could be like in the US.”

They may well be about to find out for themselves. I happen to be in the US this week and waking up to news that a leaked draft shows the US Supreme Court has provisionally voted to overturn Roe v Wade, felt strangely similar to another morning six years ago, when I woke up to learn that Donald Trump was now my president. Suddenly, on both mornings, I was in the land of the unimaginable, a development that was, really, all too foreseeable.

It seems probable that the leak, which will likely be investigated by the FBI, was from a young liberal or conservative clerk working in the court, hoping to excite their bases in the midterms. So reacting to it runs the risk of letting the tail wag the dog: it was done to incite, and incited we all are. And yet. Anyone who cares about women’s rights can’t help but react to it, and getting this confirmed insight into how close American women are to losing their autonomy should shock everyone.

Roe v Wade was always fragile, and, especially in recent years, Republicans have forged an identity out of railing against it. It is stunning to remember now that the party once supported abortion rights, including Gerald Ford and, as governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Justice Harry Blackmun, who was appointed by the unquestionably Republican Richard Nixon, wrote the majority opinion for Roe v Wade. Today, the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court was largely done with the aim of overturning of Roe v Wade. Democrats can and should rail against how nutty the Republican Party has become in the past four decades, especially on social issues like abortion. But they can’t pretend the Republicans ever hid who they are. This has all happened in the open sunlight.

More from this author

The week the trans spell was broken

By Hadley Freeman

And yet, despite that, too many took women’s bodily rights too much for granted for too long. I don’t exclude myself here. I consider myself a full-throated and wised-up supporter of abortion, but I look back on, for example, my admiration for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her stubborn refusal to make way for a younger justice, who would have been appointed by President Obama, and I cringe at my short-sightedness. Yeah, you go, Girlboss! Gimme more of those photos of you working out with your personal trainer! Ginsburg was a remarkable figure, but by working until she died, and thereby allowing Trump to appoint his third justice, she imperilled so many of the rights she fought for, and that is a tragedy.

Focusing more on the pleasing optics of an elderly lady doing press-ups than on the real risks to women’s rights was a decadent position for me to adopt, and America, the richest democracy in the world, has been distracted by too many decadent positions. Six years ago, I thought there could be no clearer proof of this than the 2016 election, when too many self-described lefties proudly disdained voting for Hillary Clinton, insisting there was no difference between her and Trump, even though one grabbed women’s pussies and the other protected them. Women’s rights? Boring, old, annoying. Like Hillary.

Once Trump was elected, I thought this would lead to a resurgence of feminism, and at first it seemed to, with the global Women’s Marches the day after his inauguration. But this nascent wave was soon overtaken by other issues. According to a 2019 survey from a non-partisan group focused on women’s political education, mass shootings, climate change and racial inequality are all of more concern to Gen Z women than abortion access. “A lot of the language I heard was about protecting Roe v Wade. It felt grounded in the Seventies feminist movement. And it felt like, I can’t focus on abortion access if my people are dying,” one 26-year-old female activist told the New York Times in 2020, explaining why she didn’t feel as impassioned about abortion as she did about police brutality. “Women in the Seventies understood very clearly that having control over reproduction is central to women’s ability to determine their own futures, to get the education they want, to have careers. As people got used to having access to abortion — and there’s a false sense that we’ve achieved a measure of equality — that radicalism women had in the early years got lost,” said Joanna Schoen, the author of Abortion after Roe. Abortion rights are seen by young women as a given — which is understandable, since they have been for their entire lives — and also a bit uncool, something associated with their mothers.

Suggested reading

What progressives get wrong about abortion

By Ann Furedi

Institutions that could have helped here instead became blithely distracted. In 2021, the president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood, Alexis McGill Johnson, wrote a hand-wringing editorial about the “harmful choices” made by Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who died in 1966, including the allegation that she was a eugenicist. Sanger’s beliefs remain a matter of debate — while Sanger did support some eugenicist beliefs, her real goal was enabling women to control their fertility — but I’d like to focus on two paragraphs McGill Johnson wrote, because they really give an insight into American feminism’s focus in recent years:

“What we don’t want to be, as an organization, is a Karen. You know Karen: She escalates small confrontations because of her own racial anxiety. She calls the manager. She calls the police. She stands with other white parents to maintain school segregation. And then there are the organizational Karens. The groups who show up, assert themselves, and tell you where to march. Those who pursue freedom and fairness, but also leverage their privilege in ways that are dehumanizing.

“And sometimes, that’s how Planned Parenthood has acted. By privileging whiteness, we’ve contributed to America harming Black women and other women of color. And when we focus too narrowly on ‘women’s health’, we have excluded trans and non-binary people.”

Look, eugenics are bad — no argument from me there. But when an organisation that is supposed to support women uses a blatantly misogynistic term like “Karen”, I’m not convinced it has found that right side of history yet. And when an organisation like Planned Parenthood — PLANNED FREAKING PARENTHOOD — puts the term “women’s health” in sarcastic single quotation marks, and prefaces it with an apology for focusing “too narrowly” on the aforementioned apparently non-existent issue, you know something has gone wrong in American feminism.

Many will disagree, but I find it hard to separate the disintegration of a woman’s right to bodily autonomy in America from the rise of gender ideology and the focus, as Planned Parenthood would put it, on trans and non-binary people. Everyone in America, howsoever they identify, should have rights, and it’s wonderful that the younger generation feels so energised by so many social justice issues. But none of this should have been at the expense of women’s sex-based rights.

Suggested reading

The feminist case against abortion

By Mary Harrington

The right to abortion is specifically about who has control over women’s bodies. How, though, can this be discussed, let alone defended, when too many liberal US politicians and liberal media sites can’t even bring themselves to say the word “woman”, even when covering this issue? “Birthing bodies have the right to freedom,” Representative Francesca Hong, a US Democrat, tweeted early on Tuesday morning, apparently unaware that the bodies being fought over here don’t want to give birth — that’s the point of abortion. Hong made sure to put her pronouns in her Twitter bio, but not the word “woman” in her tweet. The ACLU similarly couldn’t say the dreaded W word in its thoughts on the matter, but, then, what to expect of a once great organisation that insists female athletes should compete against male ones, and whose deputy director for transgender justice tweeted that banning a book he didn’t like “is 100% a hill I will die on”.

Republicans, and more specifically the Christian Right, were keen on crushing access to abortion long before pronouns became a grammatical hill to die on. But by tangling itself up in knots over “birthing bodies” and “cis privilege”, the American Left has made it much harder to talk about women’s rights, and therefore much harder to protect them. Abortion is a women’s issue, and one that needs to be talked about specifically with regards to women, because they are the ones who will die here if Roe v Wade is struck down, and, contrary to gender theory’s teachings, you can’t identify out of that.

Maybe focusing on vaginas and misogyny feels super uncool and smelly and Mum-like to some, but this leak should remind everyone how necessary it still is. Decorating one’s social media bio with zeitgeisty memes and emojis is fun, like being spun around on the dancefloor. But it’s time for American feminism to do the heavy lifting again and carry the watermelon.

It’s not that there hadn’t been things for Leftists to protest. But even as a war raged in Afghanistan and the economy nearly collapsed, in the days before Trump, one generally talked of other things at dinner: Mad Men and Breaking Bad, or sometimes Beyoncé. It was the Golden Age of Television, and it seemed that you only heard about the president at BDS meetings or in garages, where the late Rush Limbaugh was always playing from one radio or another.

Then things became very, very strange. Hillary Clinton was the Democratic frontrunner, even though she was the most hated woman in America (no woman is more disdained than the cuckquean that takes him back). The youth candidate was Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist from the state with the second smallest population.

The Republican field, meanwhile, was a rat-race-style menagerie of over a dozen buffoons, outcasts, and idiots: a Christian brain surgeon, a discount-pizza mogul, an office-supply executive, the producer of The Christmas Candle (21% on Rotten Tomatoes). Jeb Bush was giving out toy turtles at his rallies, calling himself a “joyful tortoise” who would “slow and steady win the race”. Rand Paul was advocating Medicare cuts, saying, “it’s your grandparents’ fault for having too many damn kids”.

And then there was Trump. He was a quintessential American huckster. He was a loud, cartoonish comedian. Obama had been good on TV too, but good for exactly the opposite reasons: he was handsome and charming, but ultimately, a level-headed technocrat following the facts.

Suggested article

Kamala Harris was set up to fail

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Trump was chaotic, intense, irreverent. It was hard to tell what was serious, or how seriously to take him. Of Mexico: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Of the refugee crisis: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” Of his own racism: “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” Of his own power: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

The election, of course, became about women. Obama had been an unequivocal, mainstream feminist; in the August of the election year, he was profiled in a Glamour article titled, “This is What A Feminist Looks Like.” It was a popular T-shirt slogan. And of course, Hillary was supposed to make history as the first female president, a job she’d been groomed for since her days as a Goldwater girl.

But rather than play up his feminist bona fides, Trump went all in: Of a woman who’d won Miss Universe while he owned it: “She was the winner and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.” Of Hillary Clinton: “Well, I think the only card she has is the woman’s card.” Also of Hillary Clinton: “Such a nasty woman.” Also of Hillary Clinton: “Lock her up.” Of women in general: “I cherish women. I want to help women. I’m going to be able to do things for women that no other candidate would be able to do.”

And of course, also of women, as revealed in the Access Hollywood tapes, gloating to Billy Bush in a bus on the way to set: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”.

But Trump won. It was against all efforts (the Clinton campaign flogged a $5 “Woman’s Card”) and against all predictions (the New York Times’s infamous “Hillary Clinton Has a 91% Chance to Win”). The Clinton campaign had been sure she would “break the glass ceiling”, but in the wee hours of November 9, her victory party under the transparent ceiling of the Javits Center in Manhattan turned into a scene of confused despair. The next few days felt surreal; there were calls for recounts. There were petitions for the Electoral College to revolt. My feminist mentors started warning me that a fascist coup was coming, and urging me to stock up on abortion pills.

And then there was the Women’s March.

The day after the election, a retired lawyer in Maui started a Facebook event inviting friends to march on Washington in protest. More pages popped up, for allied marches across the US. Within days, thousands had RSVP’d. Black, Latina, and Arab women were brought onto the leadership. Planned Parenthood became a partner. Indeed, hundreds of organisations became partners. Women coordinated marches in Norway, Canada, Australia, the UK, and France. There was even a march in the smaller European city I was living in at the time, though we were mostly drowned out by PKK protestors across the plaza. All told, half a million protestors descended on D.C. that January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, and three or four million across the country, and up to five million across the globe.

Suggested article

Why are women becoming witches?

By Suzannah Lipscomb

But what was the Women’s March about? When the organisers released a policy platform on January 12, it wasn’t just about so-called women’s issues: it covered reproductive freedom (government-funded reproductive healthcare, HIV/AIDS care and prevention, medically accurate sexually education, and access to affordable abortion and birth control), but also immigration reform, healthcare reform, prison reform, Islamophobia, worker’s rights, and even environmental rights. Borrowing Hillary Clinton’s tagline, the “guiding vision” document for “#WHYWEMARCH” stated that “We believe that Women’s Rights are Human Rights and Human Rights are Women’s Rights”. It also stated that “Gender Justice is Racial Justice is Economic Justice” and that “LGBTQIA Rights are Human Rights”.

As many noted, though, the icon of the Women’s March was far less inclusive: it was the famous “Pussy Hat”. On the one side, there were the bright red MAGA hats; on the other side, there were the hot pink beanies with ears. Even today, you can find nearly a thousand Pussyhats on Etsy.

Every protest movement needs symbols, however cringe those symbols might be. And every protest movement, at an essential level, is symbolic. But perhaps the Women’s March, more than most, was a blurry call to action in pursuit of vague policy goals and in defence of a nebulous “democracy” that, as any reasonable political observer had noticed, had long been incapable, even under Obama, of achieving those aims. As speaker Gloria Steinem said, it was about “working for a democracy in which we are linked as human beings, not ranked by race or gender or class or any other label”. As the actress America Ferrera declaimed from the podium, it was about “saving the soul of our country”.

The Women’s March was supposed to set off a political movement. According to Scarlett Johansson, the tragedy of Trump’s election offered a chance “to get involved with and stay active in our communities. Let this weight not drag you down, but help to get your heels stuck in”. And in a sense, that happened. The next four years were ones of absolutely inescapable political divide. Holidays became unbelievably fraught; campuses were riven; social media became a fiery crucible of political memes, semi-accurate news, and open war. Protest movements were larger and more disruptive than ever — Kavanaugh was protested, George Floyd was avenged; it became normal, even de rigueur, to solicit donations to non-profits from your Instagram.

But did it work? The Trump Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stopped collecting pay data (which the Biden administration has stated it will resume). The Trump Department of Education narrowed the definition of campus sexual harassment and heightened the burden of proof in those cases (a move Biden is expected to undo in April). The Trump Department of Health and Human services implemented a domestic gag rule, preventing clinics receiving Title X family planning funding from offering or issuing referrals for abortions (which has since been reversed by the Biden administration). And in the largest, most enduring blow to the Women’s March agenda, Trump succeeded in installing a conservative majority on the Supreme Court – ironically, aided by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s much-celebrated refusal to retire under Obama. That last Trump achievement is harder to undo.

Suggested article

How Planned Parenthood betrays women

By Suzannah Lipscomb

But did the Women’s March work? Their greatest hope was with the Kavanaugh protests, in many ways a redux of January 21, but one whose failure was harder to deny and thus more painful to endure.

Five years on, those early days seem like a strange dream. The energy and vitriol of the early Trump years have been largely buried, replaced with fatigue and resignation. It’s hard to find a Hillary fan these days, and the word “girlboss” has travelled from the proud “#girlboss” to the caustic mantra “Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss”. The Red Scare podcast has popularised a certain insouciant anti-feminism among fashionable young women. “Trad” Twitter is bigger than ever. The new Sex and the City is more a punchline than a triumph. Kamala Harris, whose approval ratings plummeted to 28% last year, is far from the girl power icon many hoped her to be.

Perhaps the Women’s March was the forerunner to the January 6 insurrection, marking the beginning of a four-year insurrection against reality. The parade of pussyhats was a protest against as-yet imagined evils, and the January 6 insurrection was a coup by an opposition so bumbling as to be borderline imaginary. Ultimately, women’s access to abortion, at least, seems about as delicate as it’s always been; and Americans are surely still ranked by race, class, and gender. Sadly, it seems, the symbol was not enough.

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

Did the New York Times stifle lab leak debate?

By Ashley Rindsberg

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

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

How Fox News conquered America

By James Billot

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

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

Why Wes Anderson loves the New Yorker

By Dorian Lynskey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from this author

America's racial fairytales

By Kat Rosenfield

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

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

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

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

More from this author

How feminism ate itself

By Kat Rosenfield

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

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

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

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

White House staffers, and Obama’s first Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, would ridicule Biden’s repetitious perorations that simply ignored the expert consensus: both the civilian and military chiefs in the Pentagon, backed by leading “think tank” experts, fully agreed with Generals McChrystal and (Dr.) Petraeus. They were the commanders in Afghanistan who believed that progress was accelerating as more and more Afghans were rejecting fanaticism to embrace progress… and the first-class experts agreed with them! Petraeus would soon promulgate his Counterinsurgency manual FM 3-24 ( my review: “counterinsurgency as military malpractice”).

On April 1 2011, when Mazar-i-Sharif demonstrators attacked the UN Assistance Mission, they killed three “Christians” including the female Norwegian colonel Siri Skare. This after President Karzai (yes, him) had denounced a Koran-burning incident in the United States. At no point did Petraeus stop and deplore the Koran burning, nor the murders, or the responsibility of made-in-USA Karzai for the fiasco.

Biden’s Afghanistan problem was that he could not persuade Obama because Obama was already fully persuaded. But as a new President new to Washington, new even to politics Obama simply refused to oppose the Washington consensus of  media-savvy generals, would-be tough think-tankers and CIA-friendly columnists. It all had to wait till Biden himself became President, but by then his Afghanistan policy (evacuate) had become Trump’s and so…

But in 2009, Biden’s other problem was even bigger: one more reason he wanted the US out of Afghanistan (and Iraq) was to focus on China as a rising threat, when very few Americans agreed with him, and none in the White House. At that very time — the worst of the financial crisis — the US was asking the Europeans, Japan and also China to pump up public spending to save the world economy that was falling into a depression. The Europeans were skeptical (“Crisis? What crisis?  Just your Lehman crisis, you fix it”, was the European response). Only the British responded, and the Chinese, who immediately launched Belt and Road, and other projects that deliberately employed tens of thousands with shovels — not just bulldozers. Obama was grateful and the US Treasury Secretary Geithner was ecstatic —it took two years (!) for the Europeans to react, and even then they moved very slowly, and spent very little.

In this climate, Biden was again isolated when he pointed out that China’s helpful public spending included very fast-growing military spending that contradicted its Peaceful Rise policy proclaimed in 2004. Having long chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Biden heard warnings from several experts including the present writer [The Rise of China and the Logic of Strategy Harvard U Press 2012] and more importantly, Kevin Rudd, then Australia’s prime minister, who explained that China’s leaders believed that the fatal “General Crisis of Capitalism” had finally arrived. It had come too late for the USSR but just in time for the PRC to become the world’s most powerful state.

More from this author

America's failed Machiavelli

By Edward Luttwak

When Obama White House aides plaintively asked (the Treasury was more dignified) for fast spending from the PRC, its leaders took it as their licence to assert China’s power in all directions. Of that I received a personal intimation from Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying 傅莹. She had always been a charming lady, but when I met her in Beijing at the height of the 2009 financial crisis she was almost shouting: “America is down! China is up!”. When I later complained to Zheng Bijian author of the Peaceful Rise policy he replied: “Shīkòng de mǎ”, 失控的 — “runaway horses”.

Rudd’s opinion was especially weighty because he was considered pro-Chinese (he happily speaks Chinese and even has a Chinese name, Lù Kèwén). In that year, 2009, Australia published a Defence White Paper that called for a broad coalition to contain China. At the time, India’s PM Singh refused to be diverted from the economy, Japan had its first neutralist government and Washington liked China better than Europe. It was only later that Japan’s 2010 Senkaku incident — which resulted in anti-Japanese riots, border intrusions in the Himalayas, and incidents at sea — changed attitudes. And it was only at the end of 2011 that Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State spoke of rotating out of the Middle East to focus on China, with Susan Rice on Obama’s staff strongly disagreeing… until Xi Jinping ‘s 2015 visit ended all illusions.

Again, as on Afghanistan, Biden’s China policy was anticipated by Trump, who in his own blundering way finally implemented Kevin Rudd’s coalition strategy, meeting Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe even before his inauguration, and India’s Modi as soon as he could, building up the alliances; while his White House staff cut off China from the US technology pipeline, in spite of Silicon Valley’s resistance. So it is only now that Biden can finally implement his 2009 policy — covered in opprobrium because the Afghan army had turned out to be a fraud exactly as he had predicted, leaving him only the cruel choice between sending troops back to Afghanistan or chaotic flight. But on China at least he has full support at home, and in every country around China except for Pakistan — which will not receive one cent more from Biden.

Meritocracy screens job applicants for competence — vaccines save our lives rather than poisoning us because highly trained scientists develop them and other highly trained scientists test and regulate them — but, at the same time, it gives everybody a chance to put their names into the sorting hat.

Yet the meritocratic idea is under assault from all directions: from progressives who denounce it as a tool of white male privilege, right-wingers who dismiss it as an instrument of androgynous cosmopolitan elite and uber-meritocrats at Yale and Harvard who regard it as a “trap” and a “tyranny”.

This assault contains a great deal of foolishness. The history of the rise of meritocracy is a history of the opening up of opportunities to marginalised groups and previous attempts to deconstruct it, most notably with Britain’s comprehensive revolution, have only reinforced class-based inequalities. But it also contains a worrying amount of truth: there is clearly something wrong with a system that means that more than 30% of places at Oxbridge go to students who attend private schools that cater for just 7% of the population, and that America’s thirty-eight elite colleges have more students from the top 1% of the population than from the bottom 60%.

The problem with meritocracy, however, is not its traditional accoutrements of open competition and objective tests, but its corruption by money, family connections and favouritism — a corruption that has, subtly but relentlessly, converted meritocracy from a device that was designed to open up opportunity into a way of preserving class privilege.

Suggested reading

Why the elites have no shame

By Mary Harrington

The term meritocracy was coined by Michael Young in 1958 to describe a new ruling class that was defined by IQ and effort rather than, as with the old ruling class, lineage and noblesse oblige. With the market revolution from the 1980s onwards this new ruling class was reshaped by two profound forces: the marriage of merit and money as the successful found clever ways of passing their educational privileges to their children, and the globalisation of the elite as surging flows of goods, information and, above all, money tied the world together.

This involved not just a “reshaping of the meritocratic idea” but a subversion of it. In the mid-19^th century, reformers such as Macaulay and Trevelyan hoped that open competition would remoralise the political elite by replacing greedy aristocrats with diligent public servants. The marriage of money and merit reintroduced self-seeking to the heart of the establishment. The introduction of open competition was counterbalanced by the creation of a ladder of educational opportunity to link the British establishment with the most obscure village. Globalisation rendered the elite even more distant from the rest of society.

The rise of the “pluto-meritocracy” has been driven by two other developments at the top of society: the children of Michael Young’s meritocrats have learnt how to transmit their privileges to the next generation, either by sending their children to private schools or moving to plush suburbs, and the old rich have started to put more emphasis on academic credentials, recognising that Bertie Wooster was a doomed figure in the world of Google Ideas Conferences and business best sellers. The Economist rich are replacing the Tatler rich and people who don’t realise this risk not just social scorn but economic decline.

There is no better example of the merger of merit and money than the transformation of British public schools since 1980. For the three decades after 1945 the public schools looked as if they would become casualties of the rise of the meritocracy as grammar-school boys took the clubbish old establishment by storm.

Today, once mouldering institutions have reinvented themselves as gleaming merit-factories that mix the offspring of the British elite with the children of the new global rich (more than a third of boarders come from abroad despite the fact that the schools enjoy charitable status because they are supposed to educate children for the British church and state.) Public schools not only produce superb academic results — half of all A and A* grades at A-level in the UK are regularly secured by the 7% of students who are privately educated — but are also outstanding at gilding the academic lily with actors, pop stars and sports heroes (an Old Etonian has won a medal in “sitting down sports” in every Olympic Games since 1992.

Suggested reading

How race politics liberated the elites

By Matthew Crawford

Though public-school products no longer glide into Oxford and Cambridge with their previous ease, thanks to intense pressure from the government to diversify their intake, they are increasingly finding a home in the Ivy League instead, which may well end up making them more successful, as well as more divorced from wider British society.

The marriage of money and merit is literal as much as metaphorical: one of the paradoxes of the feminist revolution is that educated men increasingly marry educated women and then collaborate together to make sure that their children are given every cognitive advantage. This is leading to the reinvention of aristocratic institutions such as dynasties and nepotistic connections in new quasi meritocratic forms.

We have seen the creation of meritocratic dynasties such as the Clintons, Cuomos and Romneys and the United States, and the multiplication of meritocratic power couples such as Michelle and Barack Obama in America, Tony and Cheri Blair in Britain and Francoise Hollande and Segolene Royale in France. We have also seen the production of all-elite children: one of the most depressing rituals of my year is to read the annual Record of Balliol College, Oxford, my alma mater, with its self-satisfied litany of “all Balliol” marriages and “all Balliol” babies.

Assortative mating acts as a powerful multiplier of inequality — and one that has much more impact on the overall tenor of society than the existence of a handful of billionaires. The obvious reason for this is that two university graduates will earn very many multiples of two high-school drop-outs: one American academic study found that if people married each other at random, the overall level of inequality would be much as it was in 1960.

The more subtle reason lies in self-segregation and self-cultivation. High IQ couples tend to gather together in a handful of highly educated cities (London, New York, San Francisco, for example) and in handful of rich neighbourhoods within those cities (Islington in London, Manhattan and Brooklyn in New York). The property prices in these cities are now so inflated that middle-class families are forced to move out, leaving an uneasy mixture of digital Brahmins and service-sector Untouchables.

They can also bring huge resources, both personal and financial, to educating their children, providing them with an enriched vocabulary when they are tiny, surrounding them with Baby-Einstein style learning tools, sending them to the best schools available, scheming them to get them into the best universities and then providing them with free board and lodging as they cycle through a succession of higher educational qualifications, internships and low paying “starter jobs”.

Suggested reading

What gardening taught me about London's liberal elite

By Henry Wismayer

For the most ambitious members of the meritocratic elite no longer content themselves with running national institutions. They aspire to run global ones as well, most obviously in the private sector, but also in universities, philanthropies and multilateral institutions. The further people rise up their professional pyramids the more they interact with their peers around the world, forging, in the process, a common global class, selected and promoted by academic qualifications and linked by an ever thicker web of connections — university and business-school ties; membership of the boards not just of companies but also of charities and arts organisations; business deals and investment flows — all of which are marinated in a common set of attitudes and assumptions.

Globalisation exaggerates many of the meritocracy’s worst tendencies: the belief that you owe your success in life entirely to your own merits combined with distance from the little people. Older elites usually owed their wealth to physical things, particularly property, which, by their nature, bound them to particular places, particularly nation states. Old elites were trained in national universities that taught them that their first obligation was to their own countries. The new elites are trained in self-consciously global institutions, such as business schools that celebrate things like global supply chains and consultancies that force them to spend their twenties and thirties living on aeroplanes and in international hotels. They operate in a world that has no connection with the quotidian concerns of everyday people or, indeed, everyday decency: David Miliband, who abandoned British Labour politics for a lavishly paid job running the International Rescue Committee in New York City, once tweeted a photograph of a very scenic-looking Aspen proclaiming that it was a beautiful place to discuss refugees.

And so it is understandable that there is so much criticism of “meritocracy”, given its current debased form. But throwing the meritocratic baby out with the plutocratic bathwater would be both counter-productive and foolish: counter-productive because removing meritocratic mechanisms such as SAT tests will actually make it easier for rich people to buy their way into universities (a cynical view of what is going on in the United States is that the Anglo-Saxon elites are turning against meritocracy because they are being outcompeted by Asians); dangerous because meritocracy has been one of the keys to the West’s prosperity.

Suggested reading

Stop pretending to be working class

By Julie Bindel

The proper solution to the problem of the corruption of meritocracy is to purify it rather than abandon it. Expunge any remnants of the old world of favouritism (it is astonishing that America’s elite universities still preserve preferences for the children of legacies, who still make up about a quarter of Harvard’s student body). Give academy schools more freedom to select their pupils on the basis of academic promise (it is astonishing that Britain has secondary schools that specialise in the performing arts but not in mathematics). Force private schools to earn their charitable status by giving, say, half their places to poorer children who are selected on the basis of raw ability. Make much more use of standardised tests in selecting people for competitive jobs.

There is nothing wrong with meritocracy that more meritocracy cannot cure — but we need to make sure that we supply that “more” sooner rather than later, before the entire system comes crashing down under the weight of its growing contradictions.

Adrian Wooldridge’s new book, The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, will be published on June 3^rd by Allen Lane.

Then at 11ish and 13ish, we arrived roughly simultaneously at the onset of puberty. Suddenly he was a lot taller than me and, seemingly overnight, noticeably stronger. Any illusions I had about boys and girls being equal in every way died in that moment, along with my title as All-Harrington Arm-Wrestling Champion.

If you’re a woman with a middle-class upbringing and career path, the fact that men are generally stronger than you doesn’t normally make much difference. Chances are you went to a school that discouraged bullying and punished physical violence. You probably now do an office-based job. So why care about arm wrestling?

After all, feminism is, as activist Cheris Kamarae put it, “the radical notion that women are human beings”: that means believing men and women are equal, sexism is bad, and being able to vote is good. What’s not to like?

More from this author

Feminists shouldn't have sex before marriage

By Mary Harrington

If you’re such a woman, you were probably delighted to see Kamala Harris elected as Vice-President of the United States last week. Harris broke new ground for diversity and equality, not just as the first female Vice-President, but as the first black and South Asian one, too. Sure enough, the magazine of the European Parliament, a reliable barometer of bland liberal orthdoxy, hailed Harris’ election as “a remarkable day for democracy and women”.

During her victory speech, Harris herself rejoiced that every little girl watching now “sees that this is a country of possibilities”. She gave a stirring message to “children of our country regardless of your gender”, urging them to “dream with ambition, lead with conviction and see yourselves in a way that others may not simply because they’ve never seen it before”. And while it looks as though it just casually strolled into Harris’ speech as a polite euphemism for the word “sex”, the word “gender” is central to the brand of individualist feminism she now embodies.

Feminists have long argued that “gender” and “sex” are different. Gender encompasses the stereotypes and social expectations governing men and women, while sex is the biological stuff: dangly bits, gestation, hormones and so on. According to this narrative, men and women are basically the same apart from those minor physical details, and it’s mostly ingrained sexist stereotypes that keep women down.

So it’s become a standard feminist pastime to criticise passive or weak female movie characters: think of Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder in Dr No (1962), whose role mostly comprised wearing a bikini and being rescued from peril. Being depicted along such stereotyped lines, we’re told, normalises women’s sexual objectification, keeps women locked into second-class roles and deters us from seeking top jobs. In recent years, Hollywood has stepped up to its feminist duty by replacing these stock roles with strong, active and pugnacious characters, such as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games or Rey in the new Star Wars movies.

The dowager queen and princess of smashing sexist stereotypes are Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, who in 2019 published The Book of Gutsy Women, an anthology of inspiring female pioneers. The Clintons’ “gutsy women” include, for example, Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve in both US Houses of Congress, and Sally Ride, the first American woman to go into space. Let’s call the stereotype-smashing, freedom-chasing school of women’s liberation “Clinton feminism”: it’s a movement of strong female role models and stories about “the first woman to do [stereotypically masculine thing]”. Again: what’s not to like?

Suggested reading

How the Left betrayed feminism

By Sarah Ditum

Back in 2016, of course, Clinton feminists were busy cheering on Hillary Clinton herself, who looked like she might pull off one of the most high-profile “first woman” accolades still unclaimed: President of the United States. Only then it turned out that the new President would not only be another man but – worse – a man whose most famous remark on the subject of women was how he liked to “grab ‘em by the pussy”.

In response to this affront, millions of angry women donned knitted pink “pussy” hats and took to the streets in protest. And the demographic make-up of these marchers reveals something that is routinely swept under the carpet by Clinton feminism: social class. According to one survey, 43% of marchers earned above $75,000 per year – despite only 16% of Americans of either sex earning that amount or more. Meanwhile, 52% were graduates, compared to 35% of American women.

But this wasn’t just some freak of the Women’s March. When it comes to embracing feminism, there’s a well-established gap between working and middle-class women on both sides of the pond. One UK poll from 2018 showed that 31% of middle-class women think of themselves as feminists – a figure which dropped to a mere 20% among working-class women. And the numbers are broadly the same across the US; 16% of women educated to high school level identify themselves as feminist compared to 26% of graduate women. Why is that? Surely feminist liberation and equal opportunities are for all women? Well, kind of. When you look a little closer, it becomes clear that the Clinton feminism of “gender” doesn’t just sweep class under the carpet (or, perhaps, asks the cleaner to do so). It also hides what ‘gender’ refers to: sex.

The relation between class and sex becomes clearer when you remember that chasing workplace equality gets steadily easier the less physical a job is. It’s one thing to demand an equal right to earn hundreds of thousands a year as a lawyer, but there’s no feminist campaign for an equal right to become bin men. And everyone knows why. It’s because waste collection is arduous work, and males are – as I learned aged 11 – almost always stronger than females.

Gruellingly physical jobs are just less appealing, too. You’re bound to fight harder for a crack at the jobs traditionally done by men in your social class if those jobs have titles like “lawyer” rather than “sewage worker” or “bin man”. And even for lawyers, Clinton feminism can only ignore sex so far: what we call the “gender pay gap” is mostly an effect of the brutal fact that smashing the glass ceiling is difficult to combine with having babies. Although this is also easier if you’re rich, because along with doing non-physical jobs wealthy women can subcontract the work of raising babies  – and even, for some, gestating them. Seen from this perspective, the shortfall in working-class women identifying as “feminist” seems justified.

Because inasmuch as it refers to smashing stereotypes and celebrating CEOs and Vice-Presidents, at least in its mainstream usage, the word “feminism” has been colonised by the class interests of a wealthy elite. This minority of women have comprehensively liberated themselves from the constraints of female biology – whether it women’s relative physical weakness or the time constraints imposed by motherhood – and have achieved this at least in part on the backs of poorer women. That is, under Clinton feminism, the richer a woman is, the freer she is.

And it doesn’t stop there. Having freed wealthy women from their own biology, Clinton feminism has set its sights on abolishing biology for everyone – including those women still affected by it. On his inauguration day, Biden signed an executive order obliging federally funded institutions to interpret “sex discrimination” to include “gender identity” in the category “sex”. In other words, it’s now forbidden to discriminate against a woman for being male, if that male identifies as a woman.

From a Clinton feminist point of view, this is self-evidently feminist progress. It’s part of the great feminist project of ending all sexist discrimination – up to and including discrimination against people who identify as women, for not being biologically female.

Suggested reading

Feminism's dangerous new allies

By Julie Bindel

In a way, this is understandable. Katniss Everdeen and her ilk gave a generation of women the impression that men and women are broadly physically similar. And the more middle-class you are, the less opportunity you have to revise that view. If your understanding of male and female physical capabilities was shaped not by family members hauling bins for a living, but high-kicking action movie heroines, the idea of anyone’s choices being limited by something so trivial as “sex assigned at birth” just looks like the kind of bigotry feminism has been fighting since forever.

So an edict that forbids schools from excluding male competitors from all-female athletic competitions, provided they identify as female, may, as the Guardian put it, “offer hope for young trans athletes”. But it also abolishes at the stroke of a Clinton-feminist pen any possibility of fair sporting competition for girls and women. Meanwhile, according to radical feminist campaign group WoLF, it could also end any legal standing for sex segregation in domestic violence shelters or prisons.

This all leaves American supporters of women’s rights in a bit of a bind. Trump may have grabbed ‘em by the pussy, and bragged about it in a repulsive way. But is it really better to be governed by an administration that lacks even The Donald’s (apparent literal) grasp of female anatomy? This probably depends how you look at it.

For just as the perks of Clinton feminism trickle up the class hierarchy, its downsides sink to the bottom. It won’t be Clinton feminists who watch the athletic scholarship that was their only prospect of college funding be swept away by someone who went through male puberty. And it won’t be the Clinton feminists who get locked in prisons that are now effectively mixed-sex.

All but the wealthiest women know that you can’t just legislate biology out of existence. As the losses and indignities resulting from the Clinton feminist effort to do so multiply, outrage will build as well. I suspect we’ll see a feminist mutiny before long – and not the nice polite feminism of women who earn more than $75,000 a year. And I don’t think it will be directed at the patriarchy. It’ll be directed at the selfish elite who stole the women’s movement to feather their own nests, then tried to abolish females in the name of freedom.

“I had a vision of a world without Batman,” he muses. “And it was soooo…. boring.”

Today, the American Left is faced with a similar crisis. Donald Trump is, perhaps needless to say, not Batman. (Much as he might like to think otherwise.) But he is interesting, and for quite some time he’s played an essential role in motivating his opponents to action. After all, there’s no Resistance without a powerful force to throw one’s weight against.

For four years, Democrats and a handful of Republicans have looked forward to Trump’s defeat, and with it, an end to the fight. Only now, with the war won and a new president in office, it seems that nobody wants to let go. Not Donald Trump, who spent the last months of his presidency claiming to have been robbed, fomenting insurrection, and getting himself banned from every social media platform — but not his opponents either.

More from this author

Biden is the white knight women don't need

By Kat Rosenfield

Trump, with his trashy aesthetics, vulgar xenophobia and thin-skinned arrogance, was the perfect villain. We couldn’t have invented a better one if we’d tried (although we occasionally did anyway, embellishing his idiocy until it became the stuff of legend). And while a free and fair election evicted him from the White House, all evidence indicates that he’s still living rent-free in our heads. We’re not done; we’re still so angry. Where is all that pent-up emotion supposed to go?

A look at the cultural landscape suggests a transference is taking place, with the loathing rippling outward to land on anyone Trump-adjacent. The society pages have taken up jeering at the President’s various progeny, particularly Ivanka and Jared, whose impending social death amongst the New York elite is the stuff schadenfreude is made of. “Ivanka Trump apparently thinks she’s going to ride this insurrection out and be president one day,” reads one Vanity Fair headline. At the same time, political activists are intent on hounding Trump’s enablers out of public life; in publishing, a petition to bar anyone in the administration from receiving book contracts is currently amassing signatures.

But more than Trump’s friends and family, it’s the still-active MAGA masses who will bear the brunt of our displaced rage. Imagine Trump being toppled from his presidential pedestal and shattering into a thousand sentient pieces, a scurrying horde of mini-Trumps, all with targets on their backs. The several hundred idiots who stormed the Capitol may have failed to overturn the election, but they’ve given new purpose to a cadre of online progressives who want to play Poirot. An entire community has sprung up, devoted to identifying the rioters foolish enough to attempt a coup unmasked and on camera. The pink-hatted women who marched en masse against Trump in January 2016 have found a new calling this year, honey-trapping the rioters on dating apps and reporting them to the FBI.

Suggested reading

What will the New York Times do when Trump goes?

By Sam Leith

Meanwhile, the Left’s calls to defund the police have fallen abruptly silent; instead, we fantasise about more laws, more cops, more ways to wield our newfound authority against these Trumpist transgressors.The protest movement that defined us last year, the mass national outcry against police impunity and unbridled authoritarianism? As it turns out, these things are only a problem if you’re not the person in power. “I hope he can hear the sirens approaching at this very moment,” tweets a self-described advocate for democracy and social justice after one rioter is identified. Another replies, “I hope he hears nothing; a black SUV pulls up along side him at the grocery parking lot, a bag over his head, and they speed off to an undisclosed location.”

Is this Donald Trump’s legacy? Have those of us who thought we were fighting a monster become one ourselves? Six months ago, progressives marched against police overreach and scolded their fellow citizens for calling the cops on looters. Today, these same people fantasise openly about seeing the MAGA rioters behind bars. Activists who used the public sphere of social media to transform a hashtag campaign into a global movement for justice now celebrate the silencing of their political opponents.

More from this author

Make way for the first female President

By Kat Rosenfield

And journalists, who have spent four years proclaiming their commitment to boldly speaking truth to power, seem to have forgotten that this is still their job, even when that power has been transferred into the hands of someone they prefer. This shift was already apparent in the lead-up to the election: compare the breathless coverage of Trump’s alleged sexual misconduct, from the Access Hollywood tape to the Stormy Daniels scandal, to the general scepticism that greeted Tara Reade’s allegations of sexual assault by Joe Biden; or the gleeful speculation surrounding Trump’s Russia collusion to the poo-pooing of the peculiar contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

But the contrast has been even starker in the months following the election, as some journalists reversed course and decided that they were true patriots after all. Questioning the validity of the election, a favourite pastime back in late 2016, became taboo verging on treason. Faithless electors, once hailed as the great hope for an against-all-odds Hilary Clinton presidency, were now scrutinised as seditionists.

When Trump’s supporters rushed the Capitol, some reporters not only compared it to September 11, but cheered the notion of a Patriot Act-style crackdown on the so-called “domestic terrorists”. Granted, these “terrorists” did not topple any buildings that day, but they did throw an unprecedented tantrum that frightened our lawmakers and got several people killed. Washington Post columnist Max Boot was one of many journalists who called on on our new government overlords to urgently step in: “Biden needs to reinvigorate the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to slow the lies and sedition from Fox and other right-wing broadcasters,” he tweeted. “Or else the terrorism we saw on Jan. 6 may be only the beginning, rather than the end, of the plot against America.”

The fact that this “terrorism” looked less like an organised movement, and more like a group of dogs who unexpectedly, improbably caught the car they were chasing, is irrelevant. In fact, it’s an American tradition: if no genuine plot against the country exists, we can always invent one, cobbled together from scraps to look like something real. A secret Iraqi bunker full of weapons of mass destruction; a secret coup being plotted deep in the bowels of QAnon and Parler.

We have spent four years in a state of energising, symbiotic hatred; we can’t just let it go. Battling Trump gave us a sense of purpose, and in some cases, even a sense of self. Winning, on the other hand, is a dull affair with boring prizes — so much so that many of us are would rather stay where we are, unwilling to declare victory, grinding our defeated opponents into smaller and smaller pieces until there’s nothing left to punish. We are chasing the dragon of outrage just to feel alive again. The fight was what united and defined us. What’s a Resistance warrior to do?

The truth, though, is rather more mundane. Good quality opinion polls are the best — indeed, the only — real datapoint for quantitatively estimating the outcome of an election before it has happened. They’re obviously not perfect, but they’re the best information we have. Whatever you may hear to the contrary, the political betting markets are mainly a measure of the consensus view of politically engaged middle-aged blokes, who in turn calibrate their hunch against… opinion polls.

There are clear incentives for pollsters to get it right — but they aren’t stated often enough. For most of these companies, the political work is a loss-leader, a kind of shop window for how accurate they are so they can make their real money selling brand trackers to McDonalds or whatever. They join in at election time to prove that their method works, that the numbers they give you about your business demonstrably correspond to what the population really thinks. As far as evil masterplans go, pushing an agenda by putting out dodgy election poll numbers is a terrible one — because unlike the pundits, who can couch their analysis in noncommittal theoreticals, you will be found out on election day.

I’ve been closely involved in pollster world for most of the past ten years and have developed a sort of broad brush heuristic for thinking about the polling evidence. First, only pay attention to the good quality pollsters — in most elections, there’s usually a surprising “random pollster that called it right last time” but more often than not they don’t pull off the same trick twice. Second, don’t bet the house on differences of one or two percentage points — presume that even the best pollsters will be a little bit wrong. Third, pay particular attention to the in-house pollster “MRP” models, of which the most robust is from YouGov (where I used to work).

Once you’ve got the big picture of what the data is saying, compare it with the media narrative. This, in betting terms, is where the “value” lies. Given that the polls won’t be exactly right, does the consensus seem overly invested in small poll differences, or insufficiently convinced by large ones? In the turbulent past five years of politics, there have been upsets in both of these directions.

Further reading

What's your vote really worth?

By Tom Chivers

In the UK, the General Election of 2015 was a gruesome event for most pollsters – most had it near-even between Ed Miliband’s Labour and David Cameron’s Tories, but Cameron went on to win an overall majority, thanks to the Labour collapse in Scotland and the Lib Dem collapse in England. It was, at the time, the most-polled election in history, and the media were furious they had given the numbers so much air-time and had missed the real story.

So when the Brexit referendum came around in May 2016, they were determined not to make the same mistake twice. Despite many polls showing a very close race, there was a deeply-held superstition, sustained by the betting markets, financial markets and media, that people would ‘see sense’ at the last moment and vote to Remain (as they had in the Scottish referendum in 2014). In the run up to the Brexit vote I wrote with frustration in The Times, the Guardian and Newsweek about this mysterious overconfidence, and how it wasn’t borne out by the data.

From the same author

Is Donald Trump toast?

By Freddie Sayers

The Trump victory over Hillary Clinton later that year was a strange combination of both effects. The polls were slightly wrong, and some of the state polls very wrong, but overall they showed a close race. Had we purely gone on the data, with the appropriate humility that with such a novel candidate attracting a novel electorate the polls would likely be additionally off, the possibility of a narrow Trump victory across the battleground states should not have seemed remote at all.

Donald Trump is not a novel candidate any more, he’s the President; and there’s certainly nothing novel about Joe Biden. It was a volatile campaign in 2016, with a high number of undecideds and high third party support; 2020 is none of these things. The main technical error in 2016 — higher turnout among demographic groups that don’t normally vote in such number — has now been corrected by most pollsters. The much-quoted ‘shy Trump’ phenomenon remains unproven, and when we spoke to Robert Cahaly, its main advocate, he couldn’t explain convincingly how it could be measured. For it to be a serious effect, you would have expected Trump in 2016 to have overperformed in Democratic areas where it was most shameful to support him, but that is not what happened. Plus, the midterm polls in 2018 were already demonstrably better.

Since the pollsters are collectively terrified of repeating the errors of last presidential cycle, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had over-compensated in their adjustments and we end up finding they have been over-estimating the Trump vote. Nobody wants to be the pollster predicting a massive Biden landslide right now: if there’s any “adjustment of the weights” going on it is more likely to be softening the Biden lead into safer single digits.

Further reading

Of course Trump can win

By Matthew Goodwin

One clear indication of this reverse effect would be if Texas goes blue. Joe Biden doesn’t need to win it, but the polls are tantalisingly close, though moving slightly in Trump’s favour in the final week. In Democrat circles the possibility of winning Texas is mentioned with a whisper, as if to speak it out loud will jinx the possibility. It feels unlikely, like it somehow can’t happen, but the data says it is possible. This would put Biden in historic landslide territory.

More broadly, Biden’s advantage in the polls on election day – a 7-9 point national lead, and apparently ahead in almost all of the battleground states — equates to a much more comfortable margin than Hillary Clinton had. Biden has roughly double the lead in the top battlegrounds, double the national lead and double the favourability advantage of Clinton in 2016. If the same degree of polling error that afflicted 2016 was applied here, Biden would still win comfortably.

All of this is why I believe it is reasonable to expect that Joe Biden will win the election by a comfortable margin, possibly a very big one. Put another way: if Donald Trump does pull off another surprise and wins re-election, fair and square, it would be an astonishing event. It would mean that the mechanism we have relied on for assessing public opinion for decades — a key part of the way governments decide on public policy, most recently on Covid-19 — is fundamentally broken. It would mean we have to rethink the basic epistemic foundation of our public conversation. It would be scintillating — so much so that I wouldn’t give a moment’s thought to those bets I placed on a big Biden victory. There’d be far more important things to worry about.

In recent weeks, the big tech platforms have been trying to clear the underbrush of fake news. This time, the theory goes, we just need to get our message out. After all, Hillary only spent a billion dollars on hers.

What happened — the deep story of an America coming apart — should have been the point of departure for wide-ranging introspection from the losing side, yet from the New York Times down, many have instead become convinced that they alone hold the reins of decency, and that they will be judged by history simply on how well they re-state their class shibboleths to each other.

It is from within this prison of valour that Andrew Marantz conducts his entertaining interviews with the new online Right in Anti-Social: How Online Extremists Broke America — just released in paperback.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of Hillary Rodham Clinton

By Tanya Gold

Marantz is a New Yorker staff writer. (It shows.) From 2011 on, he followed many of the social media outriders who seemed to clear the way for Trump. People like steroid-loving Twitter blowhard Mike Cernovich, who laundered conspiracies about ‘sick Hillary’ into the news cycle; needy semi-cranks like vlogger Laura Loomer; anti-PC-as-performance-art vulgarians like Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes; ballsy bandwagoneers like alt-lite crumpet Lauren Southern; and occasionally real nasties like the anti-Semitic podcaster Mike Enoch, who, in one of history’s great acts of cognitive dissonance, was eventually expelled from his own movement for having a Jewish wife.

By Marantz’s mirror they’re a charmless bunch: vain and along for the ride. A Proud Boy deliberately farts in an elevator. McInnes spoils for a fight. Cernovich sponges off his wife while writing Pick-up Artist blogs. At the DeploraBall, the Trump inauguration party for the alt-ish Right, everyone seems more interested in comparing their Twitter follower counts than in talking politics.

These are the people hotwiring the attention economy, Marantz contends. As he lays out to billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, in a chance meeting in a corridor at the DeploraBall, the idea that the cream always rises is a fiction. Shit floats. And social media is ultimate proof of that.

The implied premise — that racism is a contagion that is taking over America  — is not one Marantz wastes any time questioning. To the New Yorker set, the problem’s obvious: a bunch of yahoos got ahold of Reddit and Twitter accounts. Thus, America’s out of control id can only be contained by pruning the worst elements off the internet, because otherwise ordinary dupes will be dragged ever-rightwards.

Lately, this trope has become its own micro-genre. Who could forget the New York Times’ celebrated Rabbit Hole podcast, in which a young man watches some anti-feminist YouTube videos, then gets into Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, gets a job, does nothing, harms no one, but is saved from his radicalisation by watching yet more YouTube videos — this time of hip young Marxists on ‘BreadTube’ (Communism never being responsible for any historical carnage)?

More from this author

Facebook is radicalising your parents

By Gavin Haynes

In this world view, Trump is portrayed as the ur-yahoo: in 2011, he hijacked the attention economy with the birther slurs, and thus set the verbal and moral template for the likes of Milo Yiannopolous to go for attention above all, to grab the mic and say into it all the dirtiest words they could think of.

But this is only a shallow why. These people also rode in on the currents of social frustration that had been submerged pre-social media. On the opposite side of the aisle, so too did the likes of Alyssa Milano, the often bizarrely hyperbolic Twitter-famous actress who popularised the #MeToo hashtag. Is she just a different kind of attention hijacker?

“Gradually,” Marantz writes, “reluctantly, I admitted to myself that institutions can also have significant upsides… it’s possible for a thing to be uncool and also necessary.” The reluctant censor always cuts such a comi-tragic figure — a bit like Michael Palin’s sympathetic crucifixion administrator in The Life Of Brian. Still, he heads to Reddit HQ, to argue that the platform should delete subreddits like r/TheDonald. But it’s already too late — Cernovich has triggered the libs once too often, and Trump wins.  

The day after the election, Marantz’s Facebook feed is full of people posting the same prescient section from the philosopher Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country. Written in 1998, Rorty claimed that the gap between the masses and the elite was widening, and foresaw a US dictatorship by 2014:

“Something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for. . . . One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion.  All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back.”

Rorty popularised the idea of ‘vocabularies’: that civilisations speak to themselves in a unique argot which structures their consciousness. “Europe did not decide to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry,” Rorty wrote. “Or of socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others.”

Suggested reading

How paranoia drives politics

By Daniel Kalder

Here, society is portrayed as a system that self-hypnotises. Repetition and expansion of ideas bends the possibilities for thought, and so what we prune and what we nurture counts for a lot. The ‘arc of history’ is still a thing in Rorty’s view — but it must be consciously bent by us in a positive direction.

On the back of Rorty’s argument, Marantz would like to say that we shouldn’t be shy of discriminating: there are always better and worse takes. And on that he’s entirely right. But it’s in the words ‘us’ and ‘positive direction’ that the sleight-of-hand lies. Who’s us? What’s positive? Marantz’s DC lawyer friends — whom he finds sat round the living room making their banners to go on the Women’s March — already seem to have their answers.

The problem is that the tussle over elites is seldom about their intellectual horsepower — it’s about their vantage point. In truth, democracy proceeds from something akin to the argument for animal welfare: not ‘can they think?’, but ‘can they feel pain?’

In this regard, one story is particularly striking. The Gateway Pundit is a Trump-loving clickbait blog started by a Midwestern 20-something from his bedroom. But post-2016, they’re invited to send a correspondent to the White House: the barbarians are inside the gates.

Marantz records a confrontation in the briefing room between their correspondent, Lucian Wintrich, and a gang of old school White House hacks, furious at having their turf, and weltaunschung, invaded.

“OK,” she said. “Are you a racist?”
“No, of course not.”
“What are your views when it comes to integration?”
“I’m all for it.”
“Races mingling?”
Wintrich smirked.
“My boyfriend’s Colombian, so we tend to mingle,” he said.

The irony is delicious. Wintrich might be serially incompetent, intellectually inferior, doing little more than wiggling his bum at the ‘elite’, yet he ends up winning the encounter precisely because the old media have never taken the phenomenon of people like him seriously enough to do their homework, and can only react in their own sclerotic vocabulary: daubing everyone with the same Nazi brush.

Suggested reading

Does TV really rule America?

By Justin Webb

Four years on, it’s jarring how little has changed. Establishment political hacks are still regularly baffled to learn that intellectual and political lifeforms exist beyond reforms to Working Tax Credits and the pieties of inclusion. 

Here, the gatekeepers must take their share of the blame. Marantz complains about the Overton Window shifting, yet within a few lines, he’s convinced that Jordan Peterson holding individual rights as cardinal over any form of collectivism is a racist dog whistle: “This is the sort of false equivalence [between collectivisms of the left and right] that would have been staggering just a few years ago.”

Would it? Or is it more staggering that institutionalist journalists have redefined perhaps the core Enlightenment value as a racist dog whistle? Or even that the neologism of the ‘racist dog whistle’ now allows them to claim things without direct evidence? It certainly suggests that any movement of the Overton Window might not all be in one direction; perhaps even that we now have two separate windows. Overton French Doors.

The question of why Peterson has connected with so many remains as uninteresting as why Trump did, or Cernovich does. From start to end of Anti-Social, the answer’s obvious: because half the country is secretly racist and these people give them the cover to express that.  

Suggested reading

The woke have no vision of the future

By John Gray

You might ask which new vocabulary grew up first: the pronoun checks, -isms, phobias and ‘systemic’ iniquities of what is now the establishment Left, or the ‘MSM’-bashing, ‘virtue signal’-despising, ‘SJW’-allergic new online Right? The latter seems the more reactive, in that theirs is a language of negation, of opposing to something already there.

Either way, much as it might be easier to play whack-a-mole censorship, if America is to pull past its present funk, the world of the gatekeepers is first going to have to admit that at least part of the reason that such a gap in the market has opened for the yahoos is because the vocabulary of nice, well-educated New Englanders has accelerated away from the broader population in recent years. Even back at Charlottesvile, “white supremacy” still broadly connoted hoods and crosses. Today, it means Tom Cotton and ill-advised H&M kidswear. “To change how we talk is to change who we are,” Marantz concludes. Quite right.

Strangely enough, in his book taking on the New Left godheads like Rorty, Fools, Frauds & Firebrands, Roger Scruton ends on a similar thought. Scruton argues that a key task of the modern Right is simply to scythe through the often obscure postmodern linguistic trifles of its opponents — that nothing can be solved without first arriving at a common vocabulary.

It is only when we have found again the language that is natural to us that we can answer the great accusations that are constantly thrown at our world from the left.

 And it is only when we have found that language that we can move on from the one-dimensional left/ right, with us/ against us, progressive/ reactionary dichotomies that have so often made rational discussion impossible.

Rorty couldn’t have said it better himself. Or could he?

But their non-historicity being the case, what’s the point of writing about them?

If history teaches us anything it’s that we should expect the unexpected. But history, unlike the news, is something that’s already happened. Historians, unlike journalists, see events in the rearview mirror. As a result, they’re rather prone to deterministic explanations. For instance, there’s the Whig view of history with its narratives of ever-increasing freedom. Marxists, meanwhile, situate historical events within an overarching process of class struggle. Indeed, from millenarians to environmentalists to the friends and foes of the Anglosphere, everyone’s trying to bend the arc of history.

Further reading

The myth of ‘Anglo-America’

By Peter Franklin

They can’t all be right, but they can all be wrong. That’s not just because of the dodgy interpretations they put on historical events, but also the significance they attach to them. Even if a particular development is accurately interpreted, it doesn’t lend much credence to your favoured narrative if it could have easily gone another way. 

Just because we can be certain that something did happen it doesn’t mean that it had to happen. And that’s why alt history is so valuable. If we accept that the past could have followed a different path, then perhaps we won’t be quite so blasé about the future.

The historian E.H. Carr was was not a fan of alt history:

“…one can always play a parlour game with the might-have-beens of history. But they have nothing to do with determinism; for the determinist will only reply that, for these things to have happened, the causes would also have had to be different. Nor have they anything to do with history.”

Of course, being a Marxist, he would say that, wouldn’t he? An ideologically-trammelled thought process is pre-determined by where it starts from. The same, however, cannot be said for what happens outside our heads. That’s why Carr’s contemporary, Hugh Trevor-Roper, believed that one can’t fully understand a period of history without considering all the other ways it might have turned out.

For instance, why didn’t the Roman Empire conquer the German lands beyond the Rhine? A determinist might reach for some geographical explanation — the territory was inhospitable and the locals scary. And yet similar obstacles didn’t stop the the Romans from assimilating Britannia, so why not Germania too?

Well, because three Roman legions were wiped out at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, that’s why — and there was nothing pre-determined about that catastrophe. It required the mother of all ambushes, made possible by the extreme cunning of the German chieftain Arminius and the extreme gullibility of the Roman commander Varus. It could easily not have happened – and thus, untraumatised by such an unexpected and total defeat, the Romans might have extended the northern frontier to the Elbe or beyond.

What would a Romanised Germania have meant for the rest of history? It’s impossible to say, but we can imagine an unRomanised Gaul. The existence of France (and the French language) as we know it today depends on the fact that, two thousand years ago, the Romans conquered Gaul, but not Germania. Had things gone differently, French (and therefore British and therefore American) history would have developed along a very different path.

Further reading

Britain's divisions go way, way back

By Ed West

What this example also tells us is just how much of history depends on the character, abilities and decisions of particular individuals (contrast the ruthless brilliance of Julius Caesar in the case of Gaul with the trusting foolishness of Varus in the case of Germania). There’s something called the great man theory of history. It’s was a 19th Century idea and deeply unfashionable today, but while the individuals who change the course of history aren’t necessarily ‘great’ or, indeed, men — there’s no doubting their existence.

They don’t have to be heroes or villains. In fact, they don’t have to have much authority of any kind. Their impact doesn’t even have to be the result of a deliberate decision. They just have to do the right (wrong) thing in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time. For instance, someone, somewhere, did something that introduced the Covid-19 virus to the human population. Whether that was eating a bowl of bat soup or dropping a test tube in a laboratory we’ll probably never know; but whatever it was, it made all the difference. 

That’s why we can’t leave alt history to the historians alone. While some of them might see merit in exploring counterfactuals, their commitment to academic rigour acts as a constraint upon their speculations. Quite right too, but there’s also a case for letting our imaginations run riot — and for that we need story-tellers.

*

The Plot Against America, is a critically acclaimed TV adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel of the same name. The point of divergence from our actual history comes when the isolationist Charles Lindbergh becomes President in 1940. It’s a warning that no country is immune to tyranny. 

The rise to power of a populist celebrity has obvious contemporary resonances. Too obvious, perhaps. In drawing parallels we shouldn’t overlook differences. I also have my doubts about alt history as wish-fulfilment. Curtis Sittenfeld had a best-seller this year with her novel Rodham — which re-imagines Hillary Clinton’s life and career if she had never married Bill. Amazingly, it turns out that she does better (in politics) without him — which, for a politician so inept in real life that she lost an election to Donald Trump, is stretching credulity.

Another example of alt history as political therapy is Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019). The novel’s setting is 1980s London. But in this version of history, Alan Turing has survived the homophobic persecution of 1950s and, as a result, the progress of technology has been greatly accelerated – with dramatic consequences. For instance, the Argentinians have AI-enhanced Exocet missiles and therefore win the Falklands War. Margaret Thatcher is thus defeated at the next election — by, er, Tony Benn. (Imagine an alt history in which a left-wing writer manages to portray our first female Prime Minister without humiliating her.)

Further reading

Are humans heading for the knacker’s yard?

By Peter Franklin

McEwen also supposes that Turing would have created an artificial, but conscious, mind — and, furthermore, one housed within an artificial, but lifelike, human body. It’s true that Turing and his colleagues really did think that artificial intelligence was within reach; but, genius though he was, he turned out to be colossally wrong about that. A more insightful novel might have explored how — or if — he would have realised his error.

For an ‘alt technology’ novel that does convince, I’d recommend Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). This one’s set in a late 20th century England where medical science has taken a different and disturbing turn. Individuals are cloned and their ‘offspring’ — in effect, their twin siblings — raised in secluded institutions. Eventually, in young adulthood, the clones make a series of compulsory ‘donations’ — the basis of medical treatment for their ‘models’. Just how science and society developed in this direction, we’re never really told. Ishiguro keeps most of the details from us — and what he does reveal comes slowly. In this way, the readers’ experience parallels that of the clones, whose story this is.

In its mannered intimacy, Ishiguro’s prose creates a world as confined and claustrophobic as that imposed upon the protagonists, but without ever hiding the entire universe contained within each and every human being. And thus we’re lead gently by the hand to the story’s devastating conclusion.

Ishiguro’s minimalist approach is one way to do alt history — the other is to go all out and show us events unfolding on an epic scale. Instead of describing one small corner of the altered world, we get the panoramic view. Indeed, we might see the consequences of a point of divergence playing out over decades or even centuries. I’ve previously written about Pavane by Keith Roberts in which the Catholic Church defeats the Reformation and goes on to deliberately slow down the pace of technological change — with justification, perhaps.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick is set in a world in which the Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide America between them. But more than that, the author shows us parallel realities. There is, for instance, a story within the story — a banned book in which the Allies won the war — except not as they did in our timeline.

Further reading

Why we must suppress technological progress

By Peter Franklin

Then there’s the master of the maximalist approach — Harry Turtledove. In his novel How Few Remain (1997) a missing message from General Lee is recovered by the Confederacy (instead of falling into Union hands, as it did in reality). From that small change, the author develops — in lavish detail — a timeline that extends into the 1940s. It’s not just that the South wins the Civil War, but that the two sides (the Confederate States and the rump United States) go on to fight the First and Second World Wars on America soil. By the end of eleventh novel in the series, the North nukes the South and America is finally reunified, sort of.  

*

Fully fictional alt history can therefore go where scholarly investigation can’t. While there’s merit in examining the immediate consequences of a counterfactual, there’s only so far a serious historian can take the speculation. Once you get into second or third order effects, the mounting uncertainties overwhelm academic credibility. The novelist, though, can keep going — perhaps into the far future. 

This allows us to ask an important question, which is whether the underlying forces of history would eventually reassert themselves. Even if certain details were changed, with short-term consequences, would the world end up in much the same place over the longer-term? For the historical determinist the answer is yes. If ‘great men’ like Julius Caesar or Martin Luther had died in infancy, there’d have been other Caesars, other Luthers. As for wars, some of them could have gone the other way, but for how long would that truly matter? Consider the Wars of the Roses, for instance. How many of us today know — or care — which side won?

Further reading

Who do the English think they are?

By Razib Khan

But at this point we need to let science intrude upon the humanities. Chaos theory, for instance, teaches us that tiny differences in starting conditions can create hugely different outcomes. It’s a phenomenon known as the butterfly effect — so-called because, conceivably, the flap of butterfly’s wings on one side of the world could lead to a hurricane on the other. If that seems far fetched, then think about the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs. With the slightest change to its starting trajectory, it would have missed Earth and human history wouldn’t have happened at all. 

The determinists, therefore, have missed something rather big. While the passage of time may erase some events, others are magnified.

A Sound of Thunder is a short story by Ray Bradbury. It’s a sci-fi scenario in which big game hunters travel back in time to shoot dinosaurs. The trip organisers are very careful about not altering the past. For instance, the only animals that get shot are ones that were about to die anyway. Furthermore, the time travellers are told to stick to a special raised platform, so that  they don’t even leave footprints behind. But then on one trip, a hunter panics — he steps off the platform and crushes an insect. When he gets back home, he finds that his carelessness has changed the course history — and not for the better. A fascistic presidential candidate who was all set to lose the election is now the winner. Oops.

That crushed insect, by the way, was a butterfly. 

*

This then is what I think alt history teaches us about real history: not that it is without pattern or meaning, but that it is fragile.

The things that we may regard as progress or count as our achievements, hang by a thread — a sequence of events, anyone of which could have turned out differently.

That’s worth bearing in mind as we congratulate ourselves on our comforts and liberties. That they were gained at all was not inevitable — and nor is their survival.

Whether or not one sees the hand of providence at work in human history, we should never take what we’ve got for granted.

Further reading

Don't call Abingdon ordinary

By Eleanor Parker

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

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

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

More from this author

How the Trumps silence their women

By Tanya Gold

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

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

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

More from this author

Rural Cornwall is right to be anxious

By Tanya Gold

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

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

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

More from this author

The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

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

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

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

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

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

More from this author

Is Prince Harry the new Edward VIII?

By Tanya Gold

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

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

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

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

It was only in 2000, after years of emotive debate, that state lawmakers finally removed the rebel flag from atop the State House. Instead, they raised it as part of a Confederate monument directly in front of the building. It took another 15 years, and a mass shooting by a Confederate-celebrating white supremacist inside a historically black church, for the flag to be taken down completely.

Once every four years, though, South Carolina has the chance to bathe in a more positive limelight. The state’s Republican and Democratic primaries are bellwethers for the directions of their respective parties.

For Republicans, this has manifested in SC voters choosing the eventual Republican nominee in all but one election cycle since 1980. For Democrats, South Carolina has been about showing their candidates can drum up support in the Republican-leaning South.

This means mobilising black voters, who comprise 30% of the state’s population and the majority of SC’s Democrats. Similar demographics face the party across the South, where black voters make up large portions of Democratic voters. The African-American vote has been essential in not ceding the entire south to the Republican Party and critical in other races across the country as well.

More from this author

America's elite is plotting revenge

By Justin Webb

Fortunately for Democrats, black voters have been consistently loyal to the party: well over 80% of African-Americans identify with them; Republican support among black voters remains in the single digits. Unfortunately, however, this loyalty has largely led to the two parties putting minimal effort into courting the black vote. Republicans don’t believe they can win them over (and often because their strategies incorporate dog-whistles and racial appeals to white voters) and Democrats don’t bother courting them because they know black voters have no alternative.

As Elizabeth Warren pointed out in the most recent Democratic debate, “election after election after election, Democrats go to people in the black community and say ‘Boy, we really care about these issues. Racism is terrible, we all want to do something,’” all without offering any “concrete plans” that lead to actual changes.

Warren was bold enough to say what black voters have long known: the Democratic Party takes them for granted. But I predict that a time is coming when the competition for these votes could actually materialise into policy rather than empty rhetoric.

The rapidly shifting primary race is causing renewed focus on the African-American vote. With Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg as the top two finishers in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the previous frontrunner Joe Biden needs a big victory in South Carolina to remain a viable candidate. Biden has essentially abandoned the New Hampshire race to focus on SC, a state he’s long felt confident in winning due to his support from the black political establishment there.

More from this author

The toxic self-hatred of white Democrats

By Justin Webb

Biden does recognise the importance of black voters to Democrats’ prospects; but their support is not a given. He would be wise to bear in mind that this loyalty is coupled with political savvy and pragmatism concerning how to allocate that support. In 2008, black voters did not immediately flock to Barack Obama; it was only when his strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire demonstrated that he could be a viable candidate, that their support switched from Hillary Clinton, the more seasoned Washington insider, to the young black Senator from Illinois.

Now Biden, the establishment candidate of this election cycle, finds himself in a similar situation. After his poor showings in the nation’s first two races, Biden’s national support from black voters has dropped by half in the latest poll. He looks increasingly vulnerable. His opponents have sensed blood in the water, knowing that an upset win in South Carolina could knock Biden out altogether.

Bernie Sanders, for example, is increasingly appealing to young black voters there, who are less tied to the establishment than their parents (it was more progressive, young black voters who were early supporters of Obama in 2008 and Sanders in 2016). Billionaire Tom Steyer, otherwise a second-tier candidate, has been pouring millions of dollars into the state and growing his own connections to the black political establishment.

Even Pete Buttigieg has been attempting to woo black communities in South Carolina, as the beginning of a strategy of turning around his own campaign’s poor showing with the demographic.

But it’s not just the race for the presidential nomination that’s made South Carolina, and the black vote more generally, so important to the Democratic Party in 2020. Nationwide, they are in trouble. Republicans have established a solid majority in the US Senate, achieved a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, and dominate the majority of state legislatures; the GOP even has a chance (though not necessarily a great one) of retaking the House of Representatives. Furthermore, despite impeachment and a flailing foreign policy, Donald Trump has remained a formidable foe for November.

More from this author

How Africa is converting China

By Christopher Rhodes

Meanwhile, a number of competitive Senate and House races, as well as the longer-term trends of migration and changing demographics are shifting the balance between conservative “Red” states and liberal “Blue” states; several formerly solidly Republican strongholds states are becoming “Purple.”

These factors, plus the unpredictability of Donald Trump, mean that virtually everything is up for grabs this year. And the results of the last few years have demonstrated that the Democrats’ chances hinge on the ability to not only maintain black support but to actively galvanise these voters.

After Hillary Clinton narrowly lost to Donald Trump in 2016, there was a bitter and sometimes nasty debate about whether black voters lost Clinton the election through abstention (black turnout in 2016 was measurably lower than in 2012, when Barack Obama was up for re-election). While many other factors came into play (including Clinton losing her own demographic, as more white women voted for Trump than for Clinton), there was a noted “enthusiasm gap” for her among black voters.

This gap largely emerged from Clinton’s inability to answer for policies she vocally supported as First Lady and insufficiently addressed as presidential candidate – welfare reform that increased poverty, a crime bill that sparked an era of mass incarceration, and the labeling of (minority) youth offenders as “super-predators”.

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg, whose self-funded campaign has seen him rise dramatically in the polls, especially among black voters, may succumb to similar baggage due to his support for the NYPD’s racially-discriminatory “stop and frisk” policies that he oversaw when Mayor of New York City and only denounced once he launched his latest presidential bid.

To Hillary Clinton’s past mistakes were added the further tactical errors of relying on an older black establishment while failing to reach younger black voters. Black voters realised that Donald Trump was explicitly appealing to those Confederate flag waving white voters who still attempt to bring out the rebel banner every year in South Carolina since its removal. And many African-Americans were simply not convinced that Clinton was offering an alternative that, in substance rather than rhetoric, was much better.

More from this author

Hillary Clinton's 'Gutsy Women' is an epic of fake humility

By Tanya Gold

By contrast, when Democratic candidate Doug Jones pulled off one of the most profound upsets in recent years by winning a Senate seat in the deep red state of Alabama in 2017, Jones’ almost total support among black voters (96%) and particularly black women (98%), and the high turnout rates among these groups, were the decisive factors in this victory. Black voters, and particularly black women, have also come out strong for Democrats in Virginia, swinging that state blue in recent years.

In short, when black voters are enthusiastic, Democrats can win competitive elections, even in the Republican stronghold of the deep South. When black voters are less motivated to come out in force, Democrats lose. So a party that has taken the black vote for granted can no longer afford to do so.

Democratic politicians seem to be recognising this. For decades, Congress has resisted any consideration of the issue of reparations for slavery as well as “Jim Crow” segregation and other forms of discrimination against black Americans (every year since 1989, the late Representative John Conyers would introduce the bill to create a reparations commission, to no avail). Last year, however, Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave her blessings for the House to hold a highly-publicised hearing on the issue, inviting testimony from experts such as noted public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates (whose highly influential article “The Case for Reparations” had several years earlier revived the public debate over redressing slavery and subsequent racial discrimination) and prompting several presidential candidates to endorse the endeavour.

More generally, the Democratic candidates have been adding some much-needed specificity to their appeals to black voters. Tom Steyer has strongly endorsed reparations for African-Americans. Amy Klobuchar made a point during the most recent debate of calling out voter-suppression efforts in various Republican-controlled states that are “discriminating with surgical precision against African-American voters”.

Bernie Sanders, who continues to approach nearly every issue through the lens of economic justice, is careful to highlight the disproportionate impact economic and legal inequalities have on “African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.” Pete Buttigieg, whose current front-runner status is bound to evaporate if he continues to struggle to gain traction with black voters, has proposed an ambitious set of policies, called the Douglass Plan after famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass. These cover everything from healthcare to education to housing to criminal justice and law enforcement reforms.

Again, these could all fall by the wayside once the election season is over. But given the ways the black vote can make or break elections,  it would be foolish of the Democrats to continue with business as usual. Even Republicans seem to understand this, as noted by Donald Trump’s repeated attempts to peel off black support from Democrats, even at the margins.

And so, on February 29, South Carolina will reshape (and possibly decide) the Democratic race. I still think that Biden will eke out a win there; he knows that the state, and the African American vote, are crucial to Democrats’ chances. As the former Vice President said during a rally in South Carolina as the New Hampshire results were being released:

“Up till now, we haven’t heard from the most committed constituency in the Democratic Party, the African-American community… 99.9%. That’s the percentage of African-American voters who’ve not yet had the chance to vote in America… You can’t be the Democratic nominee, you can’t win a general election as a Democrat unless you have overwhelming support from black and brown voters.”

I think Biden will hold on in SC, but only barely; Bernie Sanders, whose message resonates especially with young black voters, and Tom Steyer, who’s flooded the state with advertisements touting a message of economic growth, racial justice and beating Donald Trump, will most probably come in very close second and third in the race.

South Carolina is the Democratic Party’s first big platform to demonstrate how it will work to earn the black vote. A close result, with several candidates splitting the vote, will show that no wing of the party can take black voter support for granted anymore.

Five years ago, South Carolina finally acknowledged that its Confederate flag was an outdated relic that belonged in a museum rather than a place of prominence in the state’s capital. Later this month, the state may show that unquestioned and unrewarded black support for Democratic Party is also an outdated notion.

It wasn’t just hiring practices: they also put systems in place to ensure that, once established, staff were made to feel that they were welcome, such as workshops led by minority journalists to help straight/white/male journalists avoid common pitfalls, or support groups for BME journalists.

Hiring more journalists from various minorities and listening to them seems pretty obviously a good thing to do. Of course it’s not going to immediately solve every one of the various problems that people of colour, or women, or LGBT people face in the workplace, but it was a start, and not every company I’ve worked for has managed even that.

At one point, though, something pulled me up short. During one meeting about diversity there was a lengthy segment about “implicit bias” — specifically, the implicit bias measured by something called the Implicit Associations Test (IAT) — and how we could reduce it in ourselves. That startled me, because — nerd that I am — I knew about the IAT’s troubled history.

That history is in my mind at the moment because a large new study is out about the IAT, and more specifically interventions intended to reduce our bias. And it tells us, I think, that sometimes there is a tension between activism and reporting.

More from this author

Could the Cummings nerd army fix broken Britain?

By Tom Chivers

It is hardly controversial to say that unconscious biases affect our judgment. It would be amazing if that weren’t true about biases against minorities; that there aren’t subconscious ways in which we treat people from other groups differently from those in our own group. “People might be racist in subtle ways of which they are unaware” should not be a surprising statement; after all, there is evidence showing that people are less likely to hire job applicants or accept tenants with stereotypical black-sounding names than they are ones with stereotypical white-sounding names.

The IAT, when it was introduced more than two decades ago, promised to offer a way of measuring that unconscious bias. It involves a simple test. In the classic “measuring racial bias” version, you sit down at a computer and, on screen, a series of images and words pop up. If you see a positive word like “happy”, you press “i”; if you see a negative one like “pain”, you press “e”. And if you see a picture of a black person, you press “i”; if you see a white person, you press “e”. Then the categories are swapped around (same button for white person as positive word, etc). And the computer measures your reaction times.

Your implicit bias score is the algorithmic product of those reaction times — how long it takes to associate white faces with good words and black faces with good words, and vice versa. You can have a slight, moderate, or strong “preference for white faces over black faces”, or less commonly for black faces over white. Most people, including a sizeable minority of black people, record a bias towards white faces, because they take a tenth of a second or so longer to press the button when black faces and good words are combined.

The IAT became a phenomenon. Tens of millions of people have taken the test at Harvard’s website. Hillary Clinton namechecked “implicit bias” in one of her debates with Donald Trump in 2016. Malcolm Gladwell mentions it in his bestseller Blink. It was described as a “revolution” in social psychology. Its proponents said that it could detect hidden racism even among people who honestly believed themselves to be egalitarians — that it had been “shown, reliably and repeatedly, to predict discriminatory behavior that was observed in the research”. And, of course, many organisations sprang up to offer diversity training to firms (such as my former employers) who wanted to reduce their employees’ implicit bias.

There was, however, a problem. Or more than one, but they became one big problem: it doesn’t work. For the full story you really (really) ought to go and read Jesse Singal’s long and splendid 2017 piece at New York Magazine, which documents the ways in which so much of it unravelled. But there were really two main issues, I think.

Suggested reading

The insidious racism of the Left

By Giles Fraser

First, if you test someone with the IAT, they get a score. But if they take it again later, their score is likely to be very different. It has a low “test-retest reliability”. The lower a measure’s test-retest reliability, the more random and uninformative it is. The IAT’s score is about halfway between “perfect” and “completely useless”, so it’s not utterly without value, but it’s well below the standards of most measures: where the IAT scores about 0.55 on a scale of 0 to 1, a depression-diagnosing questionnaire, for instance, scores about 0.86, and that’s about the minimum requirement for most psychological evaluation tests.

As Singal says in his piece, “If a depression test … has the tendency to tell people they’re severely depressed and at risk of suicidal ideation on Monday, but essentially free of depression on Tuesday, that’s not a useful test.”

But perhaps more damningly, the IAT does not do what it says it does. It is meant to detect secret racism among people who claim — or believe themselves — to be non-racist. But it turns out that people who score higher on the IAT are not, in fact, significantly more likely to discriminate against black people than people who score lower.

Even the proponents of the test now acknowledge that it should not be used to diagnose racism — or a tendency “to engage in discrimination” — in individuals, although they say that there is still a use for it for examining implicit bias when aggregated across large groups. In short, people we would call “racist”, under most reasonable definitions of the word, do not score higher on the IAT than people who we would not.

The trouble is, that news does not seem to have managed to make it to employers. Facebook offers in-house implicit bias training. So do Google, and Starbucks, and many other places, including my own former workplace.

More from this author

Why Corbynistas can never admit they're wrong

By Tom Chivers

That’s where this latest study I mentioned comes in. It was a major meta-analysis, with 87,000 subjects across 492 individual studies. It was carried out by one of the original proponents of the IAT, Brian Nosek, an excellent and careful scientist. It was pre-registered, so it couldn’t p-hack its way to the results it wanted. These are all good reasons to trust it.

And it found that corporate training to reduce your implicit bias has only a weak effect on your actual implicit bias score, and no effect on your actual behaviour. If this is right, then millions of pounds and countless man-hours have been wasted on diversity training programmes that have zero impact. (Some people even suggest — with some empirical support — that they have the opposite effect of worsening implicit bias, because you’re reminding people of negative stereotypes and thus reinforcing them. But the new study didn’t find that.)

Why — in the face of all these problems — is the notion of implicit bias so sticky, then? Why is it something we all know about, and which companies still spend vast resources trying to eradicate?

Partly, I think, it’s just an intuitive idea. It is true that we are biased, implicitly. The specific “implicit bias” measure might be unhelpful, but still, we do have unconscious race- and gender-based biases. So we hear “implicit bias” and think “obviously true thing” without bothering to check the details.

But perhaps more importantly, I think it is because it is hard to argue against without looking like a horrible racist. Look at this piece: see how I spent the first several paragraphs establishing that I am totally in favour of measures to improve workplace diversity. That’s the rhetorical price that needs to be paid in order to then say “but this specific thing here, which purports to help with that, doesn’t work”. That’s because we don’t tend to think in terms of single, specific arguments; we work with a great messy agglomeration of interconnected thought-stuff which signals tribal loyalties.

Suggested reading

How not to be a white anti-racist

By David Swift

If I don’t pay that price, if I leap right in and say “diversity training is a waste of time”, you’ll immediately lump me in with a certain kind of Right-wing anti-wokeness writer and (reasonably) ignore the actual argument I’m making, because I’m obviously not trying to persuade: I’m just trying to shock you and get a cheer from My Side.

This makes writing about the science of these topics immensely tricky. If I write something about, say, innate sex differences in interests, and whether they affect women’s participation in STEM careers, the conclusions I come to might be right or wrong, but they should be based purely on my assessment of the science. But whatever those conclusions are will inevitably lead people to make assumptions about my political views, because the tribal lines on that issue are so well-defined. Admitting that the whole concept of implicit bias is probably irretrievably flawed just sounds like you’re saying you don’t think racism is a problem in the workplace. It should be a simple question of trying to say true things, but instead it’s seen as flying a flag of allegiance.

I suspect a lot of people reading this will think that this is getting worse, that we all have to be super-woke now in everything we write and that science journalism is becoming a branch of social justice activism. I don’t think that’s fair. Sometimes, when I read pieces like this one blaming “whiteness” for the growth in opioid deaths and firearm suicides in the US, I do wonder; but I suspect that every generation had its shibboleths and hard-to-declare truths, and scientists and everyone else had to work within the political confines of the time.

Scott Alexander calls this “Kolmogorov complicity”, after the great Soviet scientist who carefully never said anything that would offend the Politburo and concentrated on the scientific truths he could discover without getting thrown into a gulag. (Getting cancelled might be bad, but the Soviets had it worse.)

Still. At least, now, we can probably say without great fear of being burnt at the stake like Giordano Bruno that the IAT is no use as a predictor of racism, and that corporate measures to reduce implicit bias are largely useless. Except – hang on! I just took the test myself, and was found to have “little to no automatic preference between White people and Black people”! So I’m much less racist than you. Scratch everything I just said: all hail the IAT. Just don’t make me take it again.

The goals are unclear. Do we want equal pay and equality of caring responsibilities — my dull Generation X ideal — or do we want a revolution that will, among other things, abolish all prejudice, and many men?

Two new books poke the swamp and lead me to the conclusion: we aren’t really at war.  We are, rather, in furious agreement with each other.

The first is The Book of Gutsy Women: Favourite Stories of Courage and Resilience by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton. It is an epic made of fake humility, for these are feminists of the most important kind. It is a 442-page homage to “brave, resilient women”, including Mary Beard, whom AA Gill called too ugly for television, and Greta Thunberg, for obvious reasons. Ellen DeGeneres is included because she makes Hillary laugh, and because some people, including Hillary, think that celebrity endorsement doesn’t make feminism look ridiculous, but they are all wrong. Consider, for instance, Angelina Jolie and various drooling male politicians failing to stop rape in war. They didn’t stop rape in war because they were busy staring at Angelina Jolie, who was also the reason they turned up.

Suggested reading

Could Boris save his party?

By Tanya Gold

Mostly though, it is about female pioneers; it is possible that DeGeneres was the first ever person to make Hillary laugh. And, if you can bear the earnest and repetitive prose in Gutsy Women, a world of female humiliation almost emerges from its pages, because it often sounds anaesthetised. The female Clintons are attacked so often for being both Clintons and female, their writing seems designed entirely to pre-empt attacks, which is a tragedy. They have produced a glassy and humourless plea for justice, and that is interesting by default. You could call it the book of multiple Hillary Clintons, all brave, all wronged, reflected back at her.

There are nurses and inventors and minor politicians who suffered because they were women but endured anyway – as she did. It is the book of them, and of herself and, because of that, it is a minor masterpiece by mistake.

It is also Chelsea’s manifesto to the future, since it is clearly designed for the generation who will be, when she inevitably runs for the presidency, her constituency. It is garnished with respectful wokeness; it is filled with minorities, as it should be, and, since Hillary and Chelsea have met so many of their living heroes, Gutsy Women sometimes reads like a gossip column written for the female masters of Oxford colleges plus Angelina Jolie who did not stop war rape and instead made Maleficent 2: Mistress of Evil.

Suggested reading

Why the Cornish must accept the tourists

By Tanya Gold

“Decades after her place in history was secured,” Hillary writes, “Rosa [Parks] came to Washington to sit with me at the 1999 State of the Union”. From bus to Hillary Clinton’s side: this self-importance may irritate you. But, as we learnt in 2016, the alternative to this kind of feminism — which is probably the most effective kind, since it can potentially legislate, and what else matters? — is worse. It is Donald Trump, the fish-faced enemy of the people, and the loss of everything feminists dreamed of. Against that, Twitter and knitted vaginas don’t have a prayer. Politics is about seducing your enemy. At least Hillary and Chelsea know that.

Gutsy Women doesn’t tell you anything that you could not learn from Wikipedia; even so, these are stories worth knowing and it is a fallacy of the age that you should reject truth if you do not like the mouth that it is spoken from. I am bored with telling people that just because the Daily Mail prints something, it is not automatically a lie. The same is true of the Clinton women. When they write, “Ensuring the rights, opportunities and full participation of women and girls remains a big piece of the unfinished business of the twenty-first century,” they are correct. They are irritating, and they are correct.

Which brings me to Meghan’s Daum’s fabulously titled The Problem with Everything: My journey through the new culture wars. Daum is, superficially, very different from the Clintons. They are sense and sensibility, poverty and largesse. But as I read Daum’s prose grumbles, I thought: they are not so very different. It is the presentation — the pitch of the wail — that is different.

Suggested reading

Why bad romance can't survive #MeToo

By Tanya Gold

Daum is a novelist, and The Problem with Everything is head-banging memoir; memoir being the perfect genre for neurotics. As it opens, she leaves her marriage and returns to New York, the city of her youth, to see Clinton lose the 2016 election.  Clinton’s fall mirrors her own.

The internet — the crucible of madness — is destroying her mind, as she tries to replace her husband with the so-called “intellectual dark web”, a group who exist to prod the “woke autocracy” and question their certainties. All these women have suffered from the internet. When we look back, we will view this period of the technological revolution as the time we lost our minds. I hope that it is temporary.  If it isn’t, we are lost.

Daum finds that she hates fourth-wave feminists — the screamers, the weepers, the women who cannot call a taxi when a date goes bad. They imagine themselves violated instead and seek to make the bad date responsible for every man who ever hurt a woman, which is a mad and pointless solidarity.

Daum screams instead for nuance, which is both typical of a modern polemic, and very funny, because she is as baffled as they are. Her dislike is not terribly convincing; it lives only at the edges. She begins her narrative as a liberal and she ends it as a liberal; everything else is grumbling. The woke, meanwhile, emerge as idealistic and traumatised. It is really the diary of an internet-themed panic attack, and on the internet, you hate everyone. That is normal. That is healthy.

This memoir is about ageing; just as the very different responses to #MeToo were largely generational. Older women, who suffered a thousand misogynistic wounds and loved their armour because, if you wear it long enough you cannot imagine yourself without it, often insulted the younger supporters, because they were not prepared to tolerate what they had tolerated. To me, this is internalised misogyny, the common cold of the feminist body because most of us catch it; we tolerated it, so why can’t you?

Suggested reading

The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

Of course, the fourth wave are irritating; they are supposed to be irritating. They are young and grammatically incontinent, and they pretend to be certain about everything, because they aren’t. Of course, the pendulum has swung too far. It had to, or it would not have swung at all. #MeToo was a correction to a system which smashed women’s dreams and impoverished them — the facts are all there in Gutsy Women, under the glassy prose — and it was always going to be painful.

The truth is that it is becoming less acceptable to crush women with their gender, or minorities with their status; it is becoming clear that Hillary was, actually, right all along. It was her turn to be president; and it is our turn to be paid the same as men and not be groped at the office unless we wish to be.

Why should a feminist revolution be perfect? It is a screaming pile of internalised rage and fear — can Daum not read the fear in young feminists, can she not allow them to be wrong? — and as long as the correction corrects itself, and it will, we will have made progress. I wish Daum had more faith in that. I wish Hillary could grumble more. She has lost the gift of rage. Daum, meanwhile, has lost the gift of hope.

Suggested reading

Boris has a dream

By Tanya Gold

So, here are three writers of imperfect feminist propaganda, which have more in common than you would think if you read their precis; or four if you include the Clinton’s “collaborator”, who probably wrote most of the book, which is, whatever feminist wave you surf, hilarious. Feminism should not seek perfection, but allies. That is clear from these unhappy books. When it reaches for perfection, it fails.

Dignity: seeking respect in back row America is one of those books. It helps that it’s written by a photographer, Chris Arnade, so the people he talks to actually do stare out from the pages. It helps as well that its subject is small-town America, so every post-industrial vista is haunting but somehow – to most British eyes – intensely glamorous.

The backdrop for Dignity is a kind of film-set noir. Rotting buildings hide under huge skies. Everywhere there are empty roads, petrol stations and McDonald’s restaurants and sinister looking clapboard churches, and in amongst all this rotting infrastructure: broken people. Often sad, spaced out on cheap drugs, but afflicted too by fits of the giggles, by shyness, by coyness, by the ability to jump in the air to bring life to some desiccated corrugated-iron strewn yard; even sometimes a haughty hauteur that says, “fuck you, I’m gonna be ok.”

Suggested reading

Books that unveil the beauty in life's bleakness

By Jenny McCartney

But they are not going to be ok. This is not a sentimental journey. It’s a deeply unsettling examination of the pathology of what Donald Trump referred to in his inauguration speech as ‘American carnage’.

At the time, that phrase seemed so coarse, so jarring. Didn’t even George W. Bush turn to Hillary Clinton and say, “that was some weird shit”? Didn’t everyone who smelled nice from sea to shining sea raise his or her eyes to the skies and wonder what The Donald was smoking?

Well: hello polite America. This is what he meant.

Not all of the poor in this book are his people – indeed, most of them have probably never voted – but plenty of them, particularly the white people, understand very clearly that Trump was talking to them. On the day of that speech, Chris Arnade is in a strip club in Ohio. There are no customers.

“The dancers are playing Pokémon Go on their phones while the owner listens to Trump’s acceptance speech on hers.”

He asks the owner (he describes her as “in her sixties, blunt and bitter”) whether she likes Trump’s speech. “Hell yes I do,” she replies. “Something has to change. This country is broken. No decent jobs….. the world is just going to the shitter.”

In nearby Cleveland, in a bar: a similar conversation. Jo-Jo has been dismantling cars in a nearby junkyard.

“That dude is crazy,” he says of Trump. “He talks shit .. Shit that if I said I would get into trouble.  But the man is rich so he can say what he wants.”

Arnade asks, “you like him?”

“I guess you can call me a Trump man. I like him because he’s going to make America great again, like he says. Right now guys like me who work for the minimum wage are getting screwed.”

Suggested reading

What's powering populism?

By Salena Zito

Arnade writes, “as the bar fills up others are unabashed in their views, celebratory, giddy to have Trump addressing their concerns and talking their language. That everyone hates Trump makes them more confident, further cementing the feeling that they are members of an exclusive club …. A man yells ‘You get them Donald. They been getting us forever!’”

And so they have. Although, actually, not quite forever. The great calamity of poverty in modern America is not the material distance between the comfortable and the struggling. It is the social, the spiritual distance – and the fact that the upper middle classes (to use the British terminology) have stolen everything – all the stuff that’s nice and all the ladders to get to it.

Dignity serves as an excellent practical primer before, for academic sustenance, you might turn to the work of Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, whose book Dream Hoarders has outlined in painful detail how the top 20% in America lives insulated from, well, everything that’s in Dignity.

They never meet these people. They never see the places they live. And – this is the kicker, and the reason why the poor warm to Trump – they abhor them. Hillary Clinton was only able to say “we came out of the White House dead broke” because she literally doesn’t see the people in Dignity, who are actually dead broke. They are dead to her. They are un-people. Sexists. Racists. Folks to be stuffed in the dustbin named “deplorables”.

Suggested reading

Why do we fetishise the poverty memoir?

By Douglas Murray

And now the party is doing it all again. Dear old Joe Biden was taken to task in recent days for boasting about how well he got on with racist segregationist Senators when he first got to Capitol Hill in the 1970s. And yes, racism is awful and does matter. But in the same speech to Wall St backers he said something I found much more shocking: he also talked about how much the lives of the rich would have to change in a fairer America. To summarise: not one jot.

“The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done,” said Biden. “We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished.”

“No one’s standard of living will change,” said Biden. “Nothing would fundamentally change.”

The genius of the folks in Dignity is that, although they don’t grasp the nuances of politics, they already knew that before Joe said it. They know that modern America wants to motor on and leave them ever further behind. When Trump is gone, they’ll not even have the illusion left that anyone cares.

Worse: as well as being blamed for their own uselessness by the Clinton mob and the whole of polite society, they are tricked by modern life into a wretched sense of self-loathing. America, even as it becomes an aristocracy quite similar to Edwardian Britain – with all the upper class people marrying each other, taking the majority of places at decent universities, and ensuring no real social progress for those underneath – still uses the lexicon of meritocracy, suggesting to the poor that all of this is their fault.

Arnade nails it with almost the last words of the book: “We have said that education is the way out of pain and the way to success, implying that those who don’t make it are dumb, or lazy, or stupid. This has ensured that all those at the bottom, black, white, gay, straight, men and women, are guaranteed to feel excluded, rejected, and most of all, humiliated.”

Will anyone take any notice? Probably not. But for a brief moment, in these pages, an awful wrong is righted. Respect is restored to those from whom it should never have been robbed.

On both sides of the Atlantic, though, the argument is identical: the views of the educated, urban few represent “the future”, while the less-educated, rural or town-based many are pining for the past. It is standard political framing designed to marginalise one’s political adversaries.

Further reading

The moral confusion of MeToo

By UnHerd contributors

The positioning presumes the primacy of a certain set of values: those belonging to the Open. To be Open is to be ‘open-minded’. It is to be open towards new places, new cultures, and new experiences that are not part of the American tradition. It is to be open to ethnic cuisine, say, or valuing foreign travel over domestic tourism.

It is broadly accepting of free trade or large-scale immigration. And most contentiously – more so in America than in Britain – it refers to valuing non-traditional sexual partnerships, behaviours, or identities as highly as the marital, man-woman relationship. To be for these things is to be Open; to be suspicious or opposed to them is to be Closed.

But how do things look from the other side of the fence? How do things look to those deemed to have Closed minds (those thought to be on the wrong side of the argument)?

Well, the defenders of traditional sexual behaviour say that they, in fact, are the ones who are Open – Open to real human flourishing. They are Closed only to the social challenges of unwed motherhood, to the creation of broken families through divorce, and to the declining birthrates that social subsidy and the honouring of non-traditional norms often bring.

Similarly, those suspicious of mass migration could also say they are Open – Open to strong communities built on shared values; they are Closed only to the dissolution of such communities and Closed to the local authorities’ insistence they suppress their values or safety in order to make the newcomers feel more secure. To not treat their concerns as having equal weight is to be Closed to them. It’s hard to get more Closed than to call these people “deplorables” as Mrs Clinton did.

Where the hypocrisy of the Opens is particularly clear, is on the subject of religion. Traditional Christianity is one of the things most strongly disfavoured by the Open few in America. Non-belief is much higher among people who live in large metropolitan areas, especially in places like Seattle and San Franciscowhich are home to the industries touted as the archetypes of the “new economy”. This non-belief is not neutral in its politics: over two-thirdsof those who practice no religion voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

These voters hold a remarkably cold view of traditional Christians. The cross-partisan Voter Study Group’ Summer 2017 pollasked respondents to rate how they feel about selected groups on a 100-point scale, 0 being “very cold” and 100 being “very warm”. There were 42% of Clinton voters who rated “evangelical Christians” between 0 and 24; the total rose to 46% of  people who said they were “very liberal”.

This is 60% higher than the number of Trump voters who gave “immigrants” or “gays and lesbians” similar scores, and more than four times higher than the number of Trump voters who said they felt this coldly towards blacks or Hispanics.

Yet it is the Trump voters who are labelled as racist, homophobic, bigoted, and sexist, while the Clinton voters are Open to “moving forward”.

Tens of millions of Americans think going forward into Clinton’s future would push them backwards. Traditional Christians wonder whether they would be allowed to practice their faith, or even express their views on sexual morality in public. Factory workers wonder if there will be any good jobs left as manufacturing goes overseas or is made unprofitable by climate change-focused regulations and practices.

These people have heard nothing yet to suggest that those on the Open side of the debate are Open to their views of the good life. Inevitably, these voters are increasingly proving Closed to Clinton and her ilk and very Open to anyone who vocally takes their side – hence, Trump.

That’s the trouble with such binary political classifications and rhetoric. They can exaggerate and intensify honest disagreements.

Winston Churchill famously over-reached with incendiary words in 1945, when he said Labour would have to set up “some form of Gestapo”, if it won the election. Politicians ratchet up the rhetoric and leave no room for nuance. Anything to win the argument. But it’s precisely that refusal to understand human motivation that has brought us to this political precipice.

Open vs Closed, Forward vs Backward – both are merely one side’s partisan characterisation of our current political debate. What is really at stake, though, is the type of society we will built together, and what place (if any) traditional values, social roles, and jobs will have in it.

Those who genuinely desire an “open” system should think deeply about these questions, rather than presuming that theirs are the values, jobs, and preferences which are the only ones worth empowering and honoring. For it is by being closed to other possibilities that they are opening the door to something else that could be much worse.

Further reading

The centre-left will never defeat European populism if it fails to first understand it

By Henry Olsen

However, in a brave and brilliant column for the Guardian he doesn’t go after the easy targets, but for the cultural elite he’s theoretically part of:

“Back in 2016, it was briefly fashionable to feign interest in at least some of the places that voted for Brexit and Trump and argue that people with so-called progressive politics ought to think about their problems. But in some quarters, the ‘in’ thing is now a sour, dismissive attitude to millions of people and their supposed complaints. The underlying worldview is simple: whatever the economic context, one part of society is seen as racist, stupid, nostalgic, and brimming with senseless emotion, while another is logical, enlightened and forward-thinking and, despite the fact that the era of alleged rationalism that has now been overturned brought us such disasters as the Iraq war and a huge economic crash, the modern nightmare boils down to the fact that the first group are suddenly in charge.”

Of course, the idea that the cultural outgroup is now running the show is absurd. In Britain, both the governing party and the main opposition party are dominated by members of Parliament who campaigned to stay in the EU. As for the EU itself, the Euro-establishment is firmly in control – both at a federal and a national level.

As for America, the Trump administration is a government of billionaires acting for billionaires.

Beyond politics, every locus of power and influence, whether in business, finance, the arts, academia, the media, and so on, is controlled by exactly the same kind of people as before.

In that respect, nothing has changed.

Which is why the elites have been able to drop their “feigned interest” in the people and places that dared to vote contrary to wishes of the establishment.

As for “senseless emotion”, that’s a rather dangerous thread to be pulling on. Consider the metropolitan liberals who dealt Theresa May a near-fatal blow in the 2017 general election. By depriving her of a majority they greatly increased the vulnerability of a remain-voting Prime minister to Brexit hardliners; and by handing Jeremy Corbyn a moral victory, they greatly weakened the position of moderates in the Labour Party.

Of course, they were fully entitled to express their rage over Brexit at the ballot box – but the practical consequences leave them in a weak position to accuse others of irrationality. (Ditto the sentimentalists who picked the worst possible candidate to take on Donald Trump in 2016.)

Clothed in fashionable garb, even the uttermost lunacy can go about in polite society. In various guises from Marxism to social Darwinism to Freudian psychoanalysis, there’s always been a lot of that in progressive circles. At the current moment in time, Harris sees the prejudices of the elites dressed up in the liberal optimism of Steven Pinker:

“The Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has just published Enlightenment Now, a doorstep-sized statement of the case for ‘reason, science, humanism and progress’ against what he calls ‘progressophobia.’”

Therefore, if populists are making headway it is because they have fooled ignorant progessophobes:

“Pinker’s book evokes the same liberal misanthropy now swirling around Brexit. ‘Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options, but basic facts,’ he says. And woe betide anyone who publicly questions the idea that progress is continuing apace, and no fundamental rethinks are required. ‘I believe that the media and intelligentsia were complicit in populists’ depiction of modern western nations as so unjust and dysfunctional that nothing short of a radical lurch could improve them,’ he says, seemingly ignoring the fact that 10 years after the crash there is still rather a lot of injustice and dysfunction around.”

As I’ve said before, the ‘New Optimists’ get a lot of things right. Across the world we do indeed see massive progress against poverty, disease, illiteracy and all manner of other ills. Though most of that comes from the global deployment of advances that the West made decades ago, we should be grateful for it.

Recommended reading

The moral confusion of MeToo

By Peter Franklin

But if the rest of the world is catching up with us, it’s also because we’ve had at least a generation of standing still – and for many people, going backwards:

“It may fly in the face of the boundless optimism proffered by Pinker, but in a lot of these places, in terms of basic security and a collective belief in the future, life was probably better 40 or 50 years ago.”

Advances like smartphones don’t even begin to make up for the collapse of family, community and the dignity of a respected role in life.

Despite visible symptoms like the opioid epidemic in the US, the liberal elites just can’t admit that something is terribly wrong – let alone do anything about it.

“In Britain and elsewhere, the liberal left has still not found the language to speak to that sense of loss. Even now, a lot of the people who feel it see Brexit as the better of two options: the continuation of the way things were before, or a chance to at least upturn the tables, bring decision-making much closer to home and somehow start again.”

“I feel your pain”, said the first and only President Clinton.

“Feel mine!” say his liberal successors.

And now look at them all fawning over Donald Trump, the foul-mouthed, pussy-grabbing pagan president.

And be filled with righteous contempt; file this love-in under ‘evangelicals doing what evangelicals always do’ … and move on to more interesting topics?

The world has tended to. But brilliantly and thoughtfully, in the audio documentary and in articles across this site, the mapping of a more subtle view of the white evangelicals’ love for Trump has begun.

It needs to be said loud and clear: white American evangelical Christians are not all hypocrites. Again and again, in my many years reporting around the USA for the BBC, I met evangelicals who were not just decent people but committed to helping and loving those around them. I had no personal brief for them – I am an atheist – but in soup kitchens, in prisons, in places where most Americans do not go, I met them and talked to them and came to admire them. They believe things and live by them and those values led them to pull the lever for Trump and, mostly, not regret it.

Faith, after all, is about belonging and culture as much as actual religious prescriptions and proscriptions.   Sometimes, indeed, it is about little else.   On the other things: the actual teaching on abortion, or homosexuality, or the right balance of distributional justice, some evangelical Americans have very strong views, but it’s their sense of community – of ties to one another – that create the strongest feelings.

So with that in mind let us revisit 2016.  Was it so strange or hypocritical for white evangelicals to vote as they did?  As Michael Wear – a former adviser to Barack Obama on faith – says in the documentary, they found in Donald Trump a candidate, “who was not cut from their cloth but who nevertheless insisted that he was the one to protect them that he’d be a bully for them.”

And boy they felt they needed a bully. It is difficult to over-emphasise the degree of dripping disdain that trendy metrosexual citizen-of-nowhere America has for these rubes. The smugness of the liberal elite who have been telling Americans what they can and cannot say, what they can and cannot believe, how their bathrooms should be labelled, how their lives should be led; that smugness is matched only by condescension. In news coverage from the main networks. In comedy shows. In academic commentary.

They felt they were done for if Clinton won. Nothing they valued would be valued any more.

The one thing every evangelical knew (and it was true) was that a new Supreme Court Justice needed to be chosen, and probably a second as well before the end of an eight-year presidential term.  This would (will) alter the balance of the court and as such it would change the social mores of the nation. Perhaps forever.  In these terms, 2016 just wasn’t a difficult choice.  In fact I slightly differ with those in the documentary who express surprise that the religiously literate Hillary Clinton did not do more to woo white evangelicals.  I think, deep in the heart of her soulless, joyless, data-driven campaign, they knew these voters were lost. Even those who had voted Democrat as recently as 2012. As Michael Wear points out in the documentary:

“Barack Obama won 26 or 27% [of white evangelicals] in 2008; he won 23% in 2012 as the first major candidate to support gay marriage after the Catholic Church had accused him of a war on religion …. Hillary Clinton won 7 points less which accounts for millions of votes.”

What made the difference between 2012 and 2016? It was the Supreme Court: that single fact that candidate Trump promised to appoint a conservative justice was enough to swing it for a huge number of evangelicals.  They felt – quite rightly I think – that they were about to be cut out of the place where all the long-term decisions are made that reflect America’s sense of itself. Justice Scalia, the conservative whose death caused the vacancy, had been their spokesman. He had often lost, but as Peggy Noonan of the Wall St Journal had noted:

“With his fierce dissents Scalia helped people accept decisions with which they disagreed. At least our view is spoken. At least it’s respected by someone.”

Flattening, or being ready to flatten your opponents is never a good look in a democracy. It can come back to bite you.  As it did with Trump. Arguably it did in the UK with immigration concerns too quickly conflated with racism and dismissed as such.

But having made the mistake, do the Democrats have the intellectual and political flexibility to learn from the catastrophe of 2016? Or do they just wait? Sitting it out, assuming that demography is still on their side.

An alternative view

White evangelicals can't be reading the same Bible as me. I'm ashamed they voted for Trump.

By Chine McDonald

The second of those options is deeply dangerous.   On a trip to Texas last year I was struck by how vocal many Hispanic people were about why they had not voted for Hillary Clinton, or had done so with misgivings. Almost always those misgivings were about social liberalism. Hispanics are indeed the coming wave in American politics – they may well make up 30% of the population by 2050 – and one day that wave will break. But how? Can anyone be sure about how these people will vote? Demography is unclear destiny.

So how about good old compromise? Big church stuff. Run firebrand socialists in San Francisco but keep the gun-friendly candidates in Montana. Find a presidential candidate who can knit them together. And Bob – and Billy Joe – is your uncle.

Ah: would that it were so simple.  The problem is so much deeper than running from the centre. You have to be there. You have to walk the walk. And that walk needs to appeal not just to the white evangelicals but more widely to others who feel that America is leaving them behind.

I sat on a porch last year in the tiny Texas town of Luling, famous locally for its watermelon pip spitting competition.   Luling was once the toughest town in Texas, made rich by railways, then by oil, but now left behind by both. And what comes next? Nothing.   The modern economy and the media outlets that reflect modern values are all based miles from Luling. There is huge wealth in America and huge energy but none of it is coming to Luling or a thousand towns like it.  For me it’s the biggest question in modern American politics: how do you knit together a nation in an age where nothing needs to be local.

Answering that question – or having a go – will take the Democrats back to the people of Luling and they’ll hoover up some evangelicals on the way. Repent! Atone! And, in 2020 or 2024, win…

Justin Webb contributed to UnHerd's first audio documentary

Audiocast: Is our news industry undermining the West?

By Tim Montgomerie

Why would this group of Christian believers throw their support behind him? And why didn’t other religious groups do the same?

Our new documentary, Believers in Trump, hears from evangelicals who champion Trump’s presidency, those who abhor it, and from a handful of the uncomfortable millions who tolerate his place in the White House because he delivers on a couple of issues close to their hearts.

This note summaries the key reasons why white evangelicals supported Trump.

He‘s not Hillary

We met with Greg Smith of Pew Research Center, who told us of open questions asked in 2016 to establish the reasons for their support for Trump: “One third of all white evangelical voters that we talked to back in 2016 said that the main reason they support Donald Trump for President is that he is not Hillary Clinton.”

Their vitriol for her is intense, and very different to the impression we in Europe had gained. Her history with her husband’s Presidency, her email thing, all of that. But the two main reasons were that she made no effort to engage with them and she insisted on a pro-abortion campaign.

Michael Wear, author of Reclaiming Hope and a former Obama staffer, says she could have been the most religiously literate Democrat candidate in a generation but blew it. The “deplorables” comment (video below) was the tip of the iceberg. He says she made no attempt to engage with this statistically significant base (26% of the votes cast in the 2016 election were by white evangelicals):

“She could have gone to a Christian college and given a speech about the complexities of religious freedom in the 21st century. She could have given a speech about her lifelong passion for adoption and how that matched with the faith community and particularly with evangelicals but there was no outreach. No interviews with major Christian publications…. not bringing on a faith staffer – someone to reach out to religious communities – until late in the campaign and so it just wasn’t there. It wasn’t, when they looked at key populations when they looked at what they thought was important in running a presidential campaign, religion did not figure into that calculation.”

He promised and delivered a social conservative on the Supreme Court

Justice Scalia died in the same year as Barack Obama’s successor was to be decided and the Republican-controlled Senate made it clear that they would not let the outgoing president choose a liberal justice to replace the Supreme Court’s most conservative member. Composition of the USA’s highest court, which had been politically polarising since 1973’s Roe vs Wade ruling, became central to the presidential election.

Professor Joe Loconte, who does not support the Trump presidency said:

“Much of it boils down to the Supreme Court and the idea that now so much of the cultural debates, cultural fights we’re having are going to be decided in the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, Christian conservatives have kind of bought into that narrative and so getting “the right court nominee” – a Neil Gorsuch in this case, someone who will defend the original intent of the constitution, this became a crucial bellwether moment for evangelicals because they knew they weren’t going to get a good nominee from Clinton of course and it seemed that Trump was going to be willing to appoint that nominee.”

And when evangelicals talk about the Supreme Court…

…they mean access to religious freedom, which many interpret to be the tension between holding religious beliefs about same-sex marriage or transgender expressions which are at odds with the social and even legal mainstream.

…But they mostly mean abortion.

We spoke to Tim Goeglein, Vice President at Focus on the Family and former aide to George W Bush:

“In 1973 our Supreme Court legalized and some would say imposed abortion, legal in all nine months up to and including the birth of the child in the Roe versus Wade decision. This in large numbers brought American evangelicals into the public square.”

From being a rather separatist cohort for much of the 20th century, the 1970s brought white evangelicals out of the woodwork. According to Jim Wallis of Sojourners, the black evangelicals had been in the public square ahead of them:

“Remember the black churches were at the core of the civil rights movement. Without the infrastructure of the black churches there wouldn’t have been a civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist preacher not just a civil rights leader…The most holistic expression of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in America is always been from the black churches, always. Not white evangelicals, always black churches.

But it took Roe vs Wade to get this group onto the frontline. And now, almost 40 years after Jerry Falwell founded Moral Majority, his son is a regular in the White House and commonly held to be a close adviser to the President. It only took a generation to bring this group from active disengagement to being the voting segment which holds so much power.

He protects their way of life

In his rhetoric on immigration, security and the Middle East, Trump plays not only to the white evangelical base but to the flyover community more broadly. Millions of people live in the states which many decision-makers see only from the sky as they fly from coast to coast for meetings and vacations with fellow elites. Hillary was firmly placed with those elites, as far as our interviewees were concerned.

But for the people described so beautifully in JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which recounts life in dysfunctional white working-class Kentucky, who worshipped two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America, Trump has delivered. To be fair, all the white evangelicals we spoke to were professional middle-class people. Unlike the families described in Hillbilly Elegy, they weren’t routinely posting bail for family members, using food stamps or visiting relatives in rehab. But the flyover states are bigger than just one demographic. There are plenty of God-fearing, nation-loving, hardworking, plain speaking Americans of all classes in that middle strip of the USA.

What they have in common is that they have been unheard for too long and when they chose to make themselves heard, not only did they tip the electoral balance, but they took the rest of the world by surprise – because we hadn’t been listening.

In his travel bans and his rhetoric about Muslims, Trump plays to the fear held by many white evangelicals that their religious hold on the nation is at risk. They fear not only for their physical security – survivalists prepare for terror attacks now, as well as the earthquakes and tornadoes for which they’ve always had drills – but for their spiritual safety. ‘What if we’re over-run by people trying to turn us away from the Lord?’ The anti-immigration narrative holds an additional layer of fear for many.

Make no mistake, not every white evangelical who voted Trump admires his record. Politically, of course, he doesn’t have a record, which is part of the attraction for an electorate bored and disillusioned by years of the same old campaign trail promises, rarely delivered. But he does have a clear and consistent track record of behaviour, and it’s not attractive to many people, especially socially conservative Christians who value faithful marriage and abhor vulgar talk.

There’s a very uncomfortable resignation among many of these voters; people are holding their nose and tolerating an aggressive, insensitive President for four or even eight years in the hope and even expectation of lifelong appointments to the Supreme Court. Even when it means, as it did for some of the parents we heard from, that they struggle to justify to their daughters why they voted for a man they wouldn’t want as a role model for their sons.

It’s a very UnHerd story. Here are a bunch of people – far more than you’d think – who hold some beliefs very deeply, and feel very strongly that their elected leaders don’t understand them. Between them, they were able to buck what they believed to be the liberal secular trend, and turn a nation in a different direction.

How far that will take them, and where they’ll get to, is another story. But the tale of how and why they decided to take the path is worth studying.

All articles in this series are being tagged by “Believers in Trump”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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