For a brief moment, the great and the good of the realm, bejeweled and decked out in ermine, were at the mercy of a rabble of farmers from Essex and Kent. Over in Hertfordshire, while Wat Tyler was marching up the Thames to London, the townsfolk of St Albans ransacked the archive of the abbey, searching for a charter of liberties which they claimed had been given to them many centuries earlier by King Offa of Mercia. These rebels in 1381 were looking back to a time as far removed from them as they are now from us. The English have long memories.

Do those memories still stir? Modern socialists certainly hope so. If we in England are ever finally going to have the revolution that’s evaded us for so long, then history, radical history, will be our guide. We might never have had a grand theorist, a Gramsci or an Althusser, but our Marxists more than made up for it in the history department. There was a golden generation of E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm. In fact, the last outstanding member of this school, the medievalist Chris Wickham, died only last week. Another of our finest Marxist minds, Rodney Hilton, shaped how we think about the Peasants’ Revolt. Over half a century after it was published, Bond Men Made Free still makes for exhilarating reading.

The elites had squeezed their peasants many times before; but now, with Parliament’s new poll tax, they squeezed too hard, inviting a reaction. That reaction was swift and bloody. It quickly became about much more than tax: the rebels demanded the end of serfdom, the redistribution of wealth, and the lives of many of the king’s counselors. (To the boy-king Richard II himself they remained deferential.) Today you can still see the mummified head of Simon Sudbury, Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury, in a cubbyhole at the church in the Suffolk town that bears his name. You can look into the eye-holes in his skull and imagine what expressions they might have worn on each of the eight swings of the axe. Here, then, is a monument to the Peasants’ Revolt. It was a freak episode when everything stood on its head, and the masses enjoyed a brief and bloody respite before returning, not by choice, to the grinding cruelty of everyday life.

Tyler is so feted by the Left today because he is the best medieval hero they can hope for. What, after all, could they do with Alfred the Great or Richard the Lionheart? The fact they’re both monarchs is bad enough — but an “Anglo-Saxon” and a crusader? Such figures used to be harmlessly apolitical, but few things are allowed to be apolitical today. They represent a kind of Englishness that makes progressives feel uneasy. Tyler, about whom we know almost nothing, works better as an icon: a put-upon everyman, devoting himself to the class struggle. Tyler is a tragic figure, too, stabbed in the back by the Lord Mayor of London at Smithfield, a suitably bourgeois villain.

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And so Thomas Paine exclaimed, in a footnote to The Rights of Man, that Wat Tyler’s fame will “outlive” the falsehoods spread by more disparaging historians. If the barons who obtained Magna Carta from King John “merited a monument to be erected at Runnymede”, Paine added, then “Tyler merited one in Smithfield”. Two centuries later, Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn unveiled a plaque commemorating the heroes of 1381 at the Highbury Barn pub — the site of the moated home of the Lord Treasurer Sir Robert Hales, “Hob the Robber”, which the rebels burned to the ground while delivering him to the same fate as Archbishop Sudbury.

And on it goes. The Uprising, Paul Greengrass’s new film on the Revolt, is a jumbled-up medley of English socialist themes. It was marketed briefly, in America but not in Britain, as a Robin Hood origin story, as if that is something anyone was asking for: The Death of Robin Hood, released earlier this year, was a box office bomb. Here Rodney Hilton’s hand is again at work: for Hilton famously argued that the fictional Robin Hood might have been a mascot of sorts of the rebels in 1381. It is tantalizing that the first surviving reference to him in English literature comes from only a few years earlier. The popular image of Robin Hood — that he “stole from the rich to give to the poor” — is, however, of a later vintage, and it has been convincingly claimed that the medieval audience for Robin Hood was most likely the well-to-do, rather than the resentful downtrodden.

The film’s politics are even messier than its history. Robin Hood is, of course, a symbol of Midland (or, in some versions of the story, Northern) disaffection. The Peasants’ Revolt, on the other hand, was really a south-eastern affair. There was, it is true, some tumult in York, but this was to do with local concerns. Greengrass is alert to this, and makes a strained modern parallel. It is, he says, a “very English rebellion story”, taking place in “all the big Brexit places”, chiefly today’s Reform UK heartlands of Kent and Essex. Tyler, this late-medieval Che Guevara, is also often presented as a forerunner to Nigel Farage. And though it was Thatcher’s enemies who, in an inspired bit of demagoguery, brought “poll tax” back into political discourse, there was, perhaps, a proto-Thatcherite complexion to the Rising of 1381: “Essex Man” telling the taxman to bugger off.

Andrew Garfield, the film’s star, describes The Uprising as a “Rorschach test”: and the same goes for the Peasants’ Revolt as a whole. There is no proto-Thatcherism in his version of the story: he wants billionaires to watch it and to be “scared shitless”. The closest to this type of politics in the film itself is a shouty John Ball, the radical preacher, played by Jamie Bell with hints of Gary Stevenson. “Surrender to the rage”, he says, “and it will set you free”. For one of the great heroes of English socialism — William Morris wrote a book about him — and utterer of the much-loved ditty, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”, Ball in The Uprising is surprisingly unsympathetic. He appears as a religious fanatic. At one point during his rantings and ravings, Garfield’s laconic ploughman asks him, “Where’s God in any of this?”; it is reminiscent of “You ain’t no Muslim bruv”. And yet, by the film’s end, the ploughman seems to have come round to Ball’s (and indeed Garfield’s) way of thinking. Entirely fictitiously, the Lord Mayor of London, Tyler’s killer at Smithfield, gets his just desserts; and as the ploughman is roughing up the boy-king Richard II in the final scene, he drops his erstwhile royalism and says, “no kings”. Confusing the politics further, Tom Hollander’s oleaginous Hales at one point makes a Clintonian allusion to “deplorables”.

The Uprising isn’t the only piece of media to emerge lately about the Peasants’ Revolt. Fortunately, Doom Painting, a new novel that vividly fictionalizes the June days of 1381, is less anxious to find contemporary resonances in the late-medieval past. Its author, A.K. Blakemore, is more willing to let the story speak for itself, and so deals better with its many complexities. Her language recalls that of Langland and Chaucer, and is leavened with playful anachronisms. She has spent much time, as anyone should, playing around with the People of 1381 database, putting flesh on the bones of names which appear as lightning bolts in the records of 1381. There is a patriotic thread in her narrative; Thomas Baker, who sets off the whole Revolt early on, is a ruddy-faced Englishman and proud to be so, “volunteer[ing] himself as a synecdoche” for the whole country. “The angels come down blessing”, the book says, “not from heaven, but from Essex!” Tyler, for his part, is gruff and worldly, a manic-depressive charmer, tormented by his experiences fighting the French, and — what motivates him more than anything — that feeling that it was all for nothing.

Tyler is on a high for most of Doom Painting — he is “Christ re-fucking born” — and his sweaty, adrenaline frenzy is infectious. The novel captures the sheer fun of revolting, the kind of fun that teenagers seem to currently be having across France. There is a scene when Tyler and Ball peer outside the window and see a “gang of raw-boned youths” playing with an effigy of Archbishop Sudbury, “laughing as they take turns to grab hold of the noosed neck and mime fucking the limp dolly from behind”. “What could be holier”, says Ball, “than the laughter of children?” These are tragic words: we all know that the boys won’t get much more than these “few summer days of gaiety”. Unlike in The Uprising, where the rebellion is continued via a forest guerrilla, the historical Revolt was crushed almost immediately. John Ball was hung, drawn, and quartered at St Albans in July, in the presence of the king. When Richard II did at last get his comeuppance, it was at the hands of his nobles in 1399 — the sorts of people, court flatterers, schemers, and usurpers, whom the peasants had perceived as their main enemy all along. One of the reasons for the Peasants’ Revolt’s hold on the English socialist imagination is that it was an utter failure.

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It’s fun until it isn’t, as Tyler and Ball learned the hard way. And if Hales, Sudbury, and the tax-collectors make the rebels easy to get behind, the socialist folk heroes are “problematic” in their own right. Contemporary chronicles make clear that the London rioting involved attacks on Flemish prostitutes and weavers. Chaucer, in “The Nun’s Priest Tale”, says that “Jakke Straw and his meynee. / Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrill / Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille…” It is interesting that both Doom Painting and The Uprising, faced with this problem, adopt more or less the same strategy: to distinguish between their rebels, the good ones with pure motives, and the violent, unruly London mob. “They are of the belief” — Tyler seems to roll his eyes as he recites this hammy line in The Uprising — “that Flemish merchants are stealing their jobs”. He says this as though it is an uncouth and untrue notion: and all of a sudden our rebel is a bien pensant. In Doom Painting, meanwhile, one of the good guys is killed by Londoners while trying to intervene on behalf of a Flemish family. This, in a historical novel that is hardly light on fact, seems to be pure fiction. Is it too much to bear, for Wat Tyler’s latter-day admirers, that he probably didn’t care about London’s community of Flemish immigrants, and perhaps even thought that they had it coming? Our long memories are also selective. Like the St Albans rebels in 1381, we tend to know what we are looking for.

That leaves one more question: why now, in 2026, have two unconnected fictionalizations of 1381 appeared? The Uprising, as its confused politics suggest, doesn’t seem to know what connects us with the situation endured by 14th-century peasants. The epilogue to Doom Painting lamely offers up something about hereditary peers in the House of Lords — hastily conceding that, as of Spring 2026, there is not even any longer such a thing. The truth is that there is no obvious reason for the Peasants’ Revolt to be especially “timely” today. There is the specter of plague, on which both Doom Painting and The Uprising place great importance. But to compare Covid with the Black Death seems inapt.

I suspect it boils down to the fact that “Eat the Rich” stories are the flavor of the month, and the Peasants’ Revolt is England’s ultimate “eat the rich” story. Still, it is a propitious time for all things medieval, as the success of the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum makes clear. Nobody seriously tries to make that “timely”. And when they try — as Andy Burnham wanly did — they miserably fail. In both cases, 1066 and 1381, it’s the drama, not the politics, that’s timeless.

Both treasures have played their part in the “soft power” of cultural diplomacy. The Mona Lisa was loaned to the United States in 1963, following a state visit to France by President Kennedy. The story goes that his wife Jackie so charmed de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, André Malraux, that he agreed to the loan as a goodwill gesture. De Gaulle’s view is not known, but he probably saw this as a harmless sop to the Americans at a time when relations between the two countries were strained.

As for the Bayeux Tapestry, the idea of a loan was first mooted at a summit in 2018 between President Macron and Theresa May, two years after Brexit. Macron, too, was looking for a symbolic gesture of goodwill in troubled times. Knowing that the Bayeux Museum was scheduled to close for renovation, one of his officials, who recounted the story to me, came up with the idea in the small hours of the morning.

In both cases, there were protests from curators and the public about the risks of moving these precious-but-fragile works. A petition was duly launched against the loan of the Tapestry in July 2025. Macron, like Malraux before him, overruled the objections in the cause of diplomacy. Given the vicissitudes the Tapestry has suffered over the many centuries, it seems likely to survive this one too — and will continue to inform Anglo-French conversations about national identity.

Amazingly little is known about the first four centuries of the Tapestry’s history. It was originally assumed to have been commissioned, and even stitched, by William the Conqueror’s wife Matilda. In France, indeed, it was often referred to as “La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde”. That theory is long discredited. It is now believed to have been commissioned by William’s brother-in-law Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, who was also, as Duke of Kent, his main administrator in England. Even so, we still do not know when it ended up in Bayeux. The first record appears in a cathedral inventory in 1476. When the building was ransacked by Protestants in 1562, it survived, perhaps because it was hidden in a chest.

Yet it would be in the 18th century that the Tapestry began to excite wider historical interest, sparking arguments about its “identity” that would rumble on into modern times. In the 1740s, the scholar-monk Bernard de Monfaucon commissioned a draftsman to do a copy, publishing the results in a volume entitled Monuments of the French Monarchy, making the Tapestry known to a wider public. On the far side of the Channel, meanwhile, antiquarian William Stuckley, best known for his work on Stonehenge, claimed the Tapestry was stylistically a British not a French artifact.

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Despite all this, the Tapestry remained obscure. It survived two close shaves during the Revolution. The first was in 1792, when fears of an English invasion prompted local patriots to form the Calvados Battalion of volunteers. Searching to cover the weapons and provisions in their wagons, someone suggested the old hanging in the cathedral. Luckily, a local administrator stepped in to prevent this. Two years later, some zealous local citizens had the bright idea of cutting it up to decorate a float for a Republican parade. They were stopped by a member of the Revolution’s newly created Commission for Arts.

It would, however, be Napoleon who fully embraced the Tapestry as a political symbol for the first time. In 1803, huge numbers of troops assembled at Boulogne for an invasion of the British Isles. To bolster propaganda for the scheme, Napoleon had the Tapestry displayed for two months at the Louvre. An official newspaper reported the next day that, during his visit to see the Tapestry, Napoleon asked a question about the scene with the comet: supposedly predicting King Harold’s doom. In a footnote, the paper also carried the story that a comet had been sighted recently near Dover. Unfortunately for Napoleon, this portended nothing. The invasion was abandoned. The Tapestry returned to Bayeux.

Yet the artwork’s potency would hardly diminish. Over the next decades, after all, the Tapestry moved from being a local relic to a French national treasure. Across the Channel, meanwhile, a member of the British Society of Antiquaries, Charles Stothard, was dispatched to France to make a detailed drawing of the entire work. Years later, after his death, two fragments cut off from the Tapestry were found in his belongings, and his unfortunate widow was accused of the crime. On the upside, his drawings provide the only record of the Tapestry before some 19th-century restorations.

Still, that did not stop Stothard’s drawings from being engraved and published, providing the Tapestry’s first ever full color reproduction in the 1820s. Especially after railways made Normandy more accessible, it became a major tourist attraction. It was now moved for display from the cathedral to the Hôtel de Ville. The poet Robert Southey complained he had had to queue to see it. Views differed: Constable thought it was “almost as bad a Mexican painting”; Ruskin was hugely admiring; Dickens thought it the work of “feeble amateurs”; Tennyson was inspired by it to write his verse drama Harold in 1876.

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All the while, it attracted scholars, who used the Tapestry to debate the impact of the Normans. One example is J.H Round, an Oxford historian who used the work to argue that the Conquest had replaced England’s Anglo-Saxon social structures with feudalism. Tellingly, Tennyson’s Harold is a brave freedom fighter, embracing High Victorianism to rail against the Norman yoke.

Interpretations of the Tapestry took a new turn from the 1870s when, thanks to the display of the hand-colored photographic reproduction of the Tapestry at the South Kensington Museum — now the V&A — it was reimagined as a proto-feminist work. In her book The Queens of England, popular writer Agnes Strickland celebrated the women who had created the Tapestry. Others retorted that women might have made it, but lacked the imagination to have designed it. As one male academic snootily commented: “I suppose I am not expected to take any serious notice of some amusing remarks made by Miss Agnes Strickland”.

Comments like these did not deter Elizabeth Wardle. A friend of William Morris and a talented embroiderer herself, she conceived the idea of producing a copy of the Tapestry. Setting up an Embroidery School at Leek in Staffordshire, she gathered a team of 37 embroiderers to produce a copy, working from the South Kensington photographs. The replica was unveiled in Leek in 1886 and became celebrated enough to travel the country, as well as to Europe and America. It was even taken to Windsor for a day, though Queen Victoria was not impressed. Finally, the replica was finally bought by Reading Museum. It has been there ever since — despite occasional attempts by Leek to get it back, according to one local, on the grounds that it was the town’s “Elgin Marbles”.

The contested history of the Tapestry took a final and unexpected turn in the Second World War. The more fanatical Nazis were obsessed with the idea of racial purity and the search for the origins of the true Aryan race. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, saw his men as new Teutonic Knights, and in 1935 set up Ahnenerbe (“Ancestral Research”) to investigate the origins of the master race. It became interested in the Bayeux Tapestry because, since the Normans were originally descended from Vikings, they could be interpreted as “Nordic”. After Hitler’s conquest of France in 1940, when an invasion of England was planned, the Tapestry was viewed as an example of warlike Aryans defeating effete Saxons (who, of course, could themselves be seen as Nordic).

What saved the Tapestry from Himmler’s designs was that the Nazis were as bureaucratic as they were demented. Occupied France was technically controlled by the Wehrmacht, putting the Tapestry under the authority of the Kunstschutz (“Art Protection Squad”): a body which respected the Hague Convention and protected national works of art. As for Himmler’s pseudo-researchers, they had no rights to the Tapestry unless they could first re-define it as non-French, which would remove it from army protection.

Aware of the dangers posed by the Ahnenerbe, the aristocratic head of the Kunstschutz prepared to move the Tapestry to safekeeping. But a mole in the unit revealed his plan, and a team of SS “experts” arrived in June 1941 to photograph the Tapestry for research, just another example of the intriguing relationship between physical studies of the masterpiece and the ideological exploitation of it. For the rest of the war, Ahnenerbe “experts” pored over their photographs, preparing a huge volume to prove the Tapestry’s Aryan identity. The work as a celebration of Nordic supremacism was even the subject of a broadcast by Lord Haw Haw.

In the end, it wouldn’t matter. After the D-Day landings, Himmler ordered the Tapestry transported back to Germany, but Resistance fighters got there first, capturing the Louvre, where the work had since been transferred from Normandy, a few days before Paris was liberated. In December 1944, for the first time since Napoleon, the Tapestry was displayed at the Louvre. Then it returned to Bayeux, where it has been ever since.

Having survived Huguenot iconoclasts, revolutionary enthusiasts and crazed Nazis, the Tapestry will surely survive this new journey, watched over by its curators. There is no chance that a latter-day Charles Stothard will be able to snip off a few threads. On the other hand, whether the Tapestry will fulfill its role in soft-power diplomacy is another matter. Mona Lisa’s smile was not enough to prevent such a dramatic collapse of Franco-American relations that de Gaulle broke with Nato in 1966. Let us hope the Bayeux Tapestry proves more successful in its mission.

There are other stories to be told of those fateful events and their lasting impacts on England and the English. A string of rebellions lasted well into the 1070s, but one-by-one the English earls were crushed, imprisoned or executed — until only one great Englishman, Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, remained after throwing in his lot with William. Taxes were imposed on the defeated natives to pay off the Conqueror’s armies. But the old English nobility weren’t simply removed from positions of power; even their culture was destroyed. Churches and cathedrals were torn down and rebuilt in the new Norman style, as if to obliterate the visible face of the English past from its skylines and townscapes. Ancient relations between lords and their dependent farmers were severed, never to be rebuilt. The landscape was militarized by the construction of hundreds of motte-and-bailey castles. The “Harrying of the North” in 1069-70, which modern scholars have labeled a genocide, depopulated and “wasted” the country north of York.

The most significant English document of this — or any — period is Domesday Book, even if, like the Bayeux Tapestry, it’s told by the conquering Normans. It is a survey of all English lands south of the River Tees, listed for each county by the tenant-in-chief, often the king himself, who enjoyed its revenues and was responsible for raising armies from its fighting men and collecting taxes for the king. The idea of the survey was conceived by William in 1085, in the 20th year of his rule over the English, after hearing rumors of a planned invasion from across the North Sea. He sent to Normandy for a great defensive force, to be billeted on English towns and villages, but he had to find the cash and materiel with which to pay and feed them. Therefore, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded:

“…Then, at the midwinter, was the king in Gloucester with his council […] Then he sent his men over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out how many hundreds of hides were in the shire, what land the king himself had, and what stock upon the land; or, what dues he ought to have by the year from the shire.”

It seems extraordinary that, just seven months after William sent his Inquisitors out into the countryside, at Lammastide of 1086 they were able to present to him the results of this immense national data-gathering exercise at Old Sarum, the Iron Age fort near Salisbury where he had built a stronghold inside the old defenses. Returns from the survey were checked by moderators; claims and disputes were allowed and given formal legal recognition. The English bureaucratic state was born, and Domesday Book records the internal workings of this stupendous machinery of the ultra-efficient Norman state.

The resulting text allows us to encounter the peasant castes — sokemen, villeins, bordars, cottars and slaves — who lived on, worked for and rendered goods to their lords in thousands of manors across 34 counties. The surveyors counted cows, horses, sheep and pigs, plows and oxen; measured woodlands, pastures and meadows, calculated cash renders and recorded crushing labor dues. Their returns were subsequently compiled in the nearly 900 vellum folios of the Exchequer volumes that later became known as Domesday Book: England’s national asset register. As the 12th-century royal treasurer Richard FitzNeal wrote:

“The natives call this book Domesday, that is, the day of judgement. This is a metaphor: for just as no judgement of that final severe and terrible trial can be evaded by any subterfuge, so when any controversy arises in the kingdom concerning the matters contained in the book, and recourse is made to the book, its word cannot be denied or set aside without penalty.”

The judgments of King William’s Domesday surveyors echo down the ages. The wholesale theft of land by just 200 Norman barons, from some 5,000 Anglo-Saxon thegns, locked England onto a pathway of feudal hierarchy. Domesday Book‘s pages record the depredations of a new class of king’s men, tax farmers and sheriffs, raking off profits from fines, sub-letting lands for cash and engineering land grabs for themselves. The rights formerly enjoyed by England’s free peasants were taken from them. From that time on, English law was constructed on the rights of great landowners and on a form of social apartheid.

Domesday Book also recorded how England’s fields, meadows, woodland and livestock had been administered and apportioned in the decades before the Conquest. So, it gives us a tangible sense of the sophistication and wealth of late Anglo-Saxon England — indeed, Domesday Book’s entries could not have been compiled in just seven months had William’s native predecessors not already held such detailed knowledge of its people and communities, some of it documented in charters accumulated over centuries; much of it oral, passed from one generation to the next by a community’s elders. Anglo-Saxon society was steeped in customary traditions of territorial lordship: land held in return for renders of consumable produce, military and domestic service and loyalty. Its resources were well-mapped by a literate, canny royal administration. Rights of patronage and protection worked up and down the complex social hierarchy of caste and kinship: everyone knew where they belonged, and to whom they owed their services and privileges. Twenty years after Hastings, the great survey of England shows how these rights were either terminated with extreme prejudice in the aftermath of Hastings and subsequent rebellions — or else redrawn over time, very much to the disadvantage of the natives. England’s free farmers — the sokemen, liberi homines and radknights (the various regional names for a superior sort of peasant or minor squire) —were largely demoted to the status of villeins; their holdings diminished or reallocated to the new king’s followers, their free status denied. In Domesday Book. Harold, England’s last Anglo-Saxon king, was cast as a mere usurping earl — just another dispossessed lord, his estates now belonging to the new king or his barons.

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Above all, the legacy of the Norman Conquest is told in the landscape, in its open fields and clustered villages, motte and bailey castles, Norman churches and cathedrals: ordered; controlled; taxable; stable; enduring… till Domesday. The vast majority of the 13,000 or so places named in Domesday Book still exist — indeed, a Domesday name-check is an ironic badge of honor, a historical cachet for our provincial towns and villages. Domesday gives the English a sense of deep-time continuity with their past; and the names it records take us further back to the beyond of Domesday, for the origins of each featured place lie in the pre-Norman centuries of the great Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Wessex and Mercia, Northumbria, East Anglia and Kent. They name the topographic features that mattered — the shapes of hills, the characters of rivers, the wild beasts of field and woods; they name farms and farmers, the places where rivers might be crossed by ferry or ford or where a night’s rest and fodder might be had. Their survival shows that even the imposition of a new power in the land cannot erase an entire culture.

Nevertheless, between them, the Bayeux Tapestry and Domesday Book offered later tyrants a playbook: steal a country’s assets and sell or rent some of them back to the previous owners; render their culture decadent and antiquated; erase it; lower their status and impose a new language on them. Pretend that nothing has changed; legitimize your rule by delegitimizing the ancient regime.

The English landscape was built by communities working the land. They constructed their world at walking pace and, in decoding the story of the most profound events in English history, the modern traveler to that half-foreign land — the England of a thousand years ago — must tread those same paths, as I have done. With Domesday Book in hand, I walked many of the same paths trodden or ridden by William’s surveyors.  Often, I would walk through a wood that had been managed continuously through those centuries, cross a river at a ford that has been in constant use for far longer; navigate by line of sight using the tower or spire of a church that stood before William’s armies crossed the Channel.

In over one thousand miles of travels on foot, I came to know as much about England today as I did about the England of a millennium ago. Communities are resilient. Forty generations separate us from those days, but the memories of ten centenarians, strung end to end, would take us back there. Some of what I found — fields and woods for the most part empty of people; bijou cottages with names like The Old Post Office, The Old Forge, the Old School house, in villages where the lanes are empty and there are no shops or schools or forges — showed how communities have been transformed. But I was deeply struck by the realization of how recently so much of that change has happened. I became engrossed by the detail and richness of the late 19th-century Kelly’s County Directories — a sort of Victorian Domesday — in which villages and small towns come alive with their police constables and station masters, their squires and vicars, farriers and carpenters, smiths, schoolmasters and seamstresses.

When my grandparents were born, the relations and geographies set out by Domesday Book still largely existed: parish council and agricultural laborer; Inn and smithy’s forge; roads, lanes and trackways linking church, manor and marketplace. These were self-sustaining communities steeped in time’s preserving liquor. The Domesday counties survived almost intact until 1974; the shire hundreds were still used as administrative and electoral units well into the 19th century. Domesday boroughs like Old Sarum, long since depopulated, were returning members to parliament until the Great Reform Act of 1832.

In Northamptonshire, I walked through a village in whose Kelly’s pages my great-grandfather appears as a wheelwright; another where the church in which I was christened holds four generations of my family and whose name, Crick, predates even Anglo-Saxon England; and yet another in whose medieval manor the ancestors of George Washington lived.

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In Worcestershire I visited Droitwich, England’s oldest continuous industrial settlement, where salt has been continuously extracted from brine springs since the Iron Age. Here Domesday records the interests of more than 40 manorial lords who enjoyed financial interests in the salt trade. Here, too, it records some of the activities of the dastardly Sheriff Urse d’Abetôt who owned rights to a virgate (30 acres) of land in Droitwich which rendered 25 sesters or bushels of salt annually but, according to the Domesday entry, he had “oppressed the men to such an extent that now they cannot render the salt”.  Beneath the grim legacy of industrialization in the West Midlands, documented by writers from William Cobbett to J.B. Priestley, I found in the pages of a late Anglo-Saxon text the artisans — predecessors of the navvies, potters, colliers and forge-masters of the age of steam — who had mended plows, baked bread, repaired shoes and fashioned carts ten centuries ago in those same places.

In Kent, Domesday tells of ancient landholding rights and territorial institutions — the lathes — which show how rights to woodland and grazing for pigs in the High Weald were enjoyed by manors as far away as Minster-in-Thanet, more than forty miles away. In Lincolnshire, I found myself looking at the shape of a distinctive hill whose Old English name, Hōh, described the shape of a human heel. I found that the fen-edge town of Bourne had once belonged in part to the Anglo-Saxon lord named Hereward — the legendary rebel hero. In Norfolk, I was shown a church whose walls were painted with late 11th-century murals, in which Christ appears short-haired and clean-shaven — a good Norman. In Yorkshire, the devastating consequences of the Harrying of the North, the best documented episode of genocide in English history, were clear from the hundreds of manors listed as “waste” in 1086. But here also were the place-name remnants of an earlier colonization, in the Scandinavian Thorpes and Danbys whose warrior farmers had made a better fist of integrating with the natives than their Norman counterparts.

England’s ancient institutions — legal and fiscal — interweave the overriding interests of Domesday’s great landowners against commoners and peasant farmers with threads of Norman piety and logic, the centralizing efficiency of the Exchequer, and a profound knowledge of England’s hierarchies of landscape and community: its parishes and townships, hundreds and shires, boroughs and great estates. Domesday’s legacies are, like the English landscape, a complex palimpsest of tensions played out through war and peace, plague and fire, reform and revolution. England is the land of the book; and the book of the land. Each generation adds, will add, a new chapter; but they can’t erase all that has been written before.

It is difficult today to think of any comparable figure, not least another historian: a scholar who, as well as producing a number of innovative essays, wrote a series of major mass-market history books alongside vast amounts of politically engaged journalism, all while communing with politicians and members of the cultural and intellectual elite. Yet Hobsbawm managed it, along the way offering a vital window onto the momentous, world-changing developments of the past two-and-a-half centuries, structuring how millions see both the past and, often, the future too.

And yet, as I discovered while reading his books again over recent months, set against the standard of contemporary historical writing they are also curious works. The historical blockbuster of the 2020s is likely to be a work of narrative writing, focusing on the texture as well as the structure of life in the past. If not the story of a single individual or of a small group, it will nonetheless be extensively peopled, peppered with quotes from diaries or journals, and all hanging on a dense web of narrative. 

Not so the Ages books. The Age of Revolution, for instance, starts not with people but with an analysis of the “agrarian problem” of the late 18th century. “From the point of view of agrarian property relations,” we read only a few pages in, “we may divide Europe — or rather the economic complex whose center lay in Western Europe — into three large segments.” And on it goes: hardly barnstorming stuff, even if it is written in Hobsbawm’s distinctively crisp and limpid prose and sprinkled throughout with wonderfully telling details (a page later we are quoted a Russian advert selling “three coachmen, well-trained and very presentable, and also two girls, aged 18 and 15, both of good appearance”).

As Emile Chabal writes in his superb new intellectual biography of Hobsbawm, “this was pedagogy of the old-school fashioned lecture hall, in which a man stands on a podium and explains what the audience should think”. Driven not by narrative or chronology, the Ages books are instead works of deep synthetic and analytical scholarship, written from an Olympian height rather than the perspective of the common man or woman. There are, of course, risks in such a style, not least a seeming lack of intellectual or epistemological humility, carrying as it does the distinct whiff of omniscience. But, Chabal notes, in the hands of a master historian like Hobsbawm, it can be intoxicating. The reader, he writes, approaches the books “searching for explanation but left in awe of [Hobsbawm’s] encyclopedic knowledge”.

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By John Merrick

If there were a model for this sort of historical writing, it was provided by the Annales school of French historians, particularly its leading figure, Fernand Braudel. Clustered around an eponymous journal, this set of postwar historians pioneered writing over what they called the longue durée, privileging deep structures such as climate or geography, or the broader forces of economic and political change, over what they contemptuously termed “event-based history”. 

In Hobsbawm’s case, of course, there was another influence too: Marxism. A lifelong Marxist, Hobsbawm would tell an interviewer in 1985 that those like him who were influenced by Marx will always be “interested in the large-scale totalizing history”. “The basic Marxist question”, he added, is how “culture, ideology, politics and so on” fit in with the economic development of a society. What is key, in other words, is interconnection, or the question of how each of the constituent parts of history fit together into what Hobsbawm likened to a “web”, as opposed to a single unidirectional “thread”. 

If his Marxism helped give shape to his historical writing, it would also become one of the most contentious aspects of his life and work. Even those with only a passing familiarity with Hobsbawm’s work will know that he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from his undergraduate days at Cambridge to the party’s dissolution following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Trailed through much of his life by the security services, on his death in 2012, at the age of 95, he attracted the ire of the kind of anti-communist who, like those Japanese soldiers in the jungles of South East Asia, were seemingly unaware that the Cold War was over and that their side had won. As A.N. Wilson (quite wrongly) predicted in the Daily Mail: “Hobsbawm himself will sink without a trace. His books will not be read in the future. They are little better than propaganda”. Wilson even went so far as to accuse Hobsbawm of being a possible “traitor” like his Cambridge near-contemporaries Philby and Blunt. Michael Gove, for his part, went further still. At the 2008 Conservative Party Conference Gove declared: “only when Hobsbawm weeps hot tears for a life spent serving an ideology of wickedness will he ever be worth listening to.”

Even those who came to praise him seemed uncomfortable with Hobsbawm’s politics. Tristram Hunt, while celebrating “the breadth of his work and the reach of his intellect”, could regard him only as a slightly neutered “Enlightenment giant”, while his official biographer, Richard Evans, passed over in a slightly embarrassed manner the extent and nature of Hobsbawm’s radical commitments. This is particularly apparent in Evans’s treatment of 1956, the annus horribilis for communist parties worldwide, when the dual shock of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” and the Hungarian Revolution, brutally suppressed by Soviet troops after 12 days, led to mass resignations and public recriminations. Unlike many of his contemporaries, not least his fellow historian E.P. Thompson, Hobsbawm chose to remain in the CPGB, a decision he would be repeatedly asked to account for later.

Evans, explaining Hobsbawm’s decision, emphasizes that his “loyalty was not so much to the Communist Party as to the cause of socialism in general”, a position driven by his childhood in Thirties Berlin. Which rather seems to leave the question begging. Chabal, on the other hand, tackles it head-on. For Chabal, Hobsbawm was what the French would call an “intellectual engagé”: a committed intellectual. He was, Chabal writes, “a communist, and, from the age of about fourteen, communism acted as the guiding thread for his life and work”. Unless we understand this fundamental aspect of his life, we will not be able to appreciate either Hobsbawm’s work or what endures of his contemporary appeal.

Of course, Evans wasn’t wrong in tracing Hobsbawm’s communism to his upbringing. Born in 1917 in Alexandria, then part of the British protectorate of Egypt, to a father from the East End of London and an Austrian mother, Hobsbawm’s early years were spent as a member of the secular Viennese Jewish middle class, albeit one constantly on the verge of tipping into poverty and destitution. He would later recall his sense of “embarrassment” at being given an old second-hand bike, its frame visibly bent, as a gift by his mother, as well as at his threadbare shoes which barely withstood the harsh Central European winters. Although he makes little of it, it seems clear that this sharp early awareness of material privation was pivotal in the early development of his political commitments.

After his parents died young, the 14-year-old Eric moved to Berlin to live with an aunt and uncle. As he would later stress, there were few better places to be a politicized teenager. “The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist,” he wrote in his autobiography Interesting Times, “or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy.” Published when he was 85, the book is a curiously impersonal document, but the sections on the death throes of the Weimar Republic hum with life. It is there that we hear of his first exposure to mass communist demonstrations in the twilight of German democracy, and how Hobsbawm learned of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor as he walked his sister home from school.

Soon after, Eric was moved again, this time to the apparent calm of North London, before he went up to Cambridge, where he read history. Hobsbawm chose the subject, he says, mainly because he was good at it, though there must have been something of the young communist in the decision too. After all, the materiality of history is both the key to understanding the world — and to changing it.

Never an organizer, Hobsbawm’s political commitments remained primarily intellectual even after he joined the CPGB, brief forays into the world of political protest notwithstanding. This limitation is something he was long aware of. His teenage diaries are filled with an ecstatic, even quasi-sexual, longing to throw himself into the cause. He wanted, he wrote, to “dive” into Marxism, to “love it, both sensually and yet spiritually, like one loves a woman”, to “melt into it like a snowflake in the snow”. It is tempting to read a lot, perhaps too much, into the overwrought private scribblings of a pubescent boy. But within them is a glimpse into the Janus-faced nature of his political self. Marxism, Hobsbawm was sure, could provide him with the key to unlock the meaning and working of the world, but he was instinctively aware of the limitations of his faith in the cause. As a bookish and awkward young man, he could never live the revolution like the working-class KPD toughs he saw in Berlin.

This, too, may hint at why Hobsbawm was able to weather the turbulence of 1956 more easily than his peers. If his political engagement was lived predominantly via the mind — “we were communists in the way in which, in other places, we should have read each other poetry,” he wrote in an autobiographical story while at Cambridge — that was in marked contrast to someone like Raphael Samuel, another pioneering historian whose apprenticeship was served in the Party. In his memoir-cum-study of the culture of communism, Samuel writes of his family, steeped in the cultures of the Left. Both his mother, the composer Minna Keal, and his uncle, the historian Chimen Abramsky, were party members, as were many other members of his family, and much of his childhood was spent engaging in party activities. Samuel even became, he writes, “a kind of juvenile commissar of the family”. 

For Samuel, in other words, communism was then both a mental and a bodily form of commitment. It was the intellectual sea in which he swam, but also the lifeworld in which he was formed. So when Soviet T-54s rolled into Budapest, and the crisis came, Samuel experienced it as a profound and destabilizing break. He threw himself into the New Left, editing Universities and Left Review and later New Left Review. As the intensity of the New Left dissipated, however, Samuel found it increasingly difficult to continue as he had. Not long after, he would move to Ireland and had a nervous breakdown — the long-delayed after-effects, perhaps, of 1956. 

Yet Hobsbawm, from what we know, suffered nothing so drastic. Could this mix of commitment and detachment have served to keep him in the fold? It certainly helped that he had a hinterland beyond the expectations of the CPGB to fall back on. Cambridge opened Hobsbawm to the taste of real intellectual excitement, but it was also where, as Tony Judt later wrote, he “began his lifelong ascent into the British elite”. Judt’s comment is not without merit, even if it has the distinct tang of vinegar. For it was at Cambridge that Hobsbawm joined the elite debating society, the Apostles, whose other members included Wittgenstein, Forster, Keynes and the Cambridge spies. Later, in the Eighties, Hobsbawm would become a member of the exclusive Athenaeum Club, while in 1998 he was honored with appointment to the Order of the Companions of Honor. If, because of his communism, Hobsbawm was always something of an outsider, then he was very much an insider’s outsider.

Yet Cambridge offered more than simply a passage into the upper echelons of British society. In fact, as Chabal notes, much of the next few decades of Hobsbawm’s life can be read as an attempt to return to the intense intellectual atmosphere of the interwar Cambridge Left. We can see this, for instance, in the way he threw himself into the Communist Party Historians Group in the decade after 1946. This group, which would gather in the inauspicious surroundings of the Garibaldi restaurant in Clerkenwell, or in the Marx House nearby, would come to include some of the most celebrated British historians of the 20th century: Thompson, Samuel, Christopher Hill, and Rodney Hilton, who, alongside Hobsbawm, redefined what was until then a rather stuffy subject dominated by aloof political narratives. That all of these historians were incubated not only in the CPGB, but over meatballs and plonk at Garibaldi’s, is surely testament to the intellectual ferment of postwar British communism.

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The Historians Group would, however, be another victim of the Hungarian Revolution and its aftermath. Over the next six months, many of its most able members left the party. Yet in a strange twist, Chabal suggests that whatever the emotional effects of the dissolution of the Historians Group, in the long run it may actually have helped Hobsbawm’s career. As Chabal explains, Hobsbawm was always a “highly effective networker”; more than that, he was something far more easily recognized today than in mid-century: an “academic entrepreneur”. Possessed of a hard-nosed commercial instinct, throughout his career he had a strong sense of who his intended audience was. Not just other academics, or even communist converts, Hobsbawm wanted to write for a wide general readership. This aim was only heightened by the dissolution of his close party network.

As universities increased their intake through the Sixties and Seventies, and with a burgeoning middle class with new consumer appetites to satisfy, there arose a massively increased audience for serious works of non-fiction. Hobsbawm, with his genius for simplifying complex processes and an encyclopedic knowledge of 19th-century history, as well as his terse English prose and his keen sense of the market, was perfectly positioned. Between 1970 and 1990, Hobsbawm’s books earned around £20,000 a year on average in royalties in today’s terms. On top of that came ever-larger advances for his work and royalties on foreign editions. Not only did these years see Hobsbawm become a very well paid writer, they also allowed him to bring Marxism to the masses like never before.

There was, however, a tension between the cosmopolitan writer and the committed intellectual. Then again, his was a life of contradictions: Hobsbawm was the loyal party man who wrote sympathetically of peasant revolutionaries; the aficionado of jazz who castigated the deadening effects of mass culture; the refined intellectual who helped open up the study of working-class organization. His communism, however, was the guiding thread throughout. Yet it also poses problems for us in receiving his work today. What, for one thing, does it mean to be a writer who was publicly committed to a cause that’s now more-or-less extinct? More than that, how should we, in our hyperpolitical age, when political causes are backed and discarded at the click of a button, understand someone who dedicated their life to a political project that ended in failure — or worse?

It certainly helps that he wrote so well. Avoiding the kind of jargon that can easily overwhelm even the most lucid Marxist writing, history under Hobsbawm’s pen begins to take on a new clarity and sense of movement. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Age of Extremes, a book which in many ways was a very personal attempt to account for his faith in the cause of communism as a world-historical force. The book presents a riveting picture of the 20th-century “age of catastrophe”, framed on either side by the Great War and the fall of the Berlin Wall and punctuated in the middle by the horrors of the Forties. What adds power to this framing is the centrality of the communist experiment. The vital fact of the short 20th century was that there existed an organized alternative to capitalism, even if it wasn’t in the end a more appealing one. And the defeat of that grand experiment, in Hobsbawm’s hands, turns the story of the century into a tragedy. There is no liberal triumphalism of the kind that became so dominant in the Nineties here.

Today, as Lea Ypi writes in a searching recent essay, the status of the Soviet Union in public memory is still not settled. For those who remain committed to the political project of socialism, neither of the dominant stories we are told about the history of actually existing communism are particularly satisfying. “On the one hand,” she writes, “we have the liberal account in which communism was a totalitarian disaster from start to finish, and every emancipatory aspiration of the twentieth century was an early sign of the catastrophe to come. On the other hand we have the defensive view that state socialism was a deformation or betrayal of a model that is thought to remain philosophically intact.” We could add to that the Govian mode we saw earlier, which would force anyone who wishes to make the world anew to account for the sins of those who came before. What we need instead, Ypi insists, is a new form of narrative, one which can reopen “the past as morally contested rather than closing it off as nothing more than the slaughter bench of history”. 

One model for this can be provided, I would argue, by the work of Eric Hobsbawm. As he wrote in the famous final lines of Age of Extremes:

“We do not know where we are going. We only know that history has brought us to this point and—if readers share the argument of this book—why. However, one thing is plain. If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.”

The past cannot be a dead weight around our necks. But, just as vital, it cannot be forgotten either. The darkness that Hobsbawm predicted in 1994 seems ever closer.

Yet history, for much of the contemporary Left, is merely one moral disaster after another. This is Ypi’s “slaughter bench of history”. When the Left writes history, it is often done in the denunciatory mode, as a kind of a morality play, where good guys are set against bad guys, and which is hamfistedly shaped by contemporary concerns. Or, on the other hand, it is a simplistic “red thread” kind of history: a tale of Left-wing heroes meant merely to invigorate the faithful. 

Of course, there is much value in this form of history, when it is done well. But, as Hobsbawm and Chabal both know, history can also teach us where we’re going. It can give us the tools to understand the world around us, and perhaps even to begin to change it. The retreat to the small, and the jettisoning of grand metanarratives of the kind that Hobsbawm excelled at, has reduced our understanding of who we are. As Hobsbawm wrote in the late Eighties, in a letter to a doctoral student:

“I am not particularly interested in ‘reconstructing a narrative in which gender, ‘race’, sexuality and subjectivity are central rather than adjuncts to the [grand narrative].’ …Anyway the sort of history you propose is not my kind of history, I don’t think it is Marx’[s] ‘kind’ either… In my view, the project you are engaged in is just another symptom of the retreat of [the] Left.”

We can forgive, perhaps, the cranky tone in which this letter was written, if not his often-curt dismissals of feminist history. But his diagnosis of the retreat to identity as a symptom of a historic defeat feels especially acute today. 

How, then, in the wake of the Left’s historic defeat, can one begin to rebuild a shared collective project of emancipation? History does not offer easy answers. Then again, nor does the fragmentation of the past into a series of seemingly discrete moments, not least when the public status of historical memory is more unsure than ever. As Hobsbawm noted: “the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century.” And if, as the old cliché goes, those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it, then what amounts to the wholesale destruction of the link between history and the present goes far further still. “Most young men and women at the century’s end,” Hobsbawm continued, “grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in”, producing the spread of “an absolute a-social individualism”. Against this, historians must be “chroniclers, remembrancers and compilers”. To do so means being the kind of engaged historians who can make sense of the mess of the historical record. They must, in short, be like Eric Hobsbawm.

Yet, those of us who would wish to write the kind of wide-angled history that can once again ask the big questions of our past and our future cannot simply replicate the work of writers like Hobsbawm. The historical moment for that has passed. We need new histories. But the questions he asked must once more take center stage: what forces have shaped the present moment, bringing us to where we are today? And what tools can we find in them to remake the world in a fairer and just manner? In this, there is still much to learn.

“The fairy tale,” wrote Walter Benjamin in 1936, “…is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind.” You don’t need an academic to see ancient fears of predators and strangers in the woods, bundled together in stories like “Little Red Riding Hood”. But what academia can do is begin to date these narratives. This has allowed us to trace “Little Red Riding Hood”, and its close variants like “The Wolf And The Seven Kids”, back at least 2,000 years to the Eastern Mediterranean. From there, it spread through the Roman world into Europe, down the Red Sea into East Africa, and along the Silk Road to East Asia, to be told again and again, what must be millions of times a day. Modern academia can also help identify patterns: like the fact a hominid-like wild man from the Himalayan Yeti, to the Australian Yowie, to the Scandinavia troll or the Old English woodwose — exists in practically every culture.

This is eerie given what we now know. The idea that these could be the faintest of imprints of lost hominids has crept into plausibility as our understanding of humanity’s deepest past has changed. The first Neanderthal remains were only discovered in Germany in 1856, and only in the last 20 years have new remains and a revolution in genomics revolutionized our understanding of ancient humanity. The familiar graphic of humanity’s evolutionary lineage — first a chimp on all fours, before rising over his stooped hairy predecessors a man standing tall — has collapsed into a final group photo before an abrupt extinction of other hominids that left sapiens alone on Earth.

It’s now clear that we shared Earth with at least four other branches of the genus homo — with which we interbred. This startling discovery was made as recently as 2010. These were the Neanderthals in Europe; the Denisovans in Asia, only discovered in 2008 from a single finger bone, and of which only a dozen remains have since been found; and two ghost populations in Africa inferred from modeling. This revelation — that we were a wider humanity, a species with sub-species — has been accompanied by breakthroughs in archeology. This began in 2003, after yet more hominids were found in South East Asia, and which overlapped with early man. One such individual, the hobbit-sized Homo Florenesis in Indonesia, caught the world’s imagination with his diminutive size.

More to the point, these archeological developments have transformed our knowledge of Neanderthals. They were more “human” than we realized: using fire, smoking hides, distilling birch tar, wearing jewelry, ritually burying their dead, even practicing a kind of primitive dentistry — closer to many old folktales than to apes. At a distance, it would have been hard to tell them apart wearing furs and ponchos. But there were giveaways. They were a bit bigger than us, their eyes around a fifth larger under a ridged forehead, with little chin, and they were probably light skinned: unlike our own ancestors. It would have been an unsettling mirror.

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The shadow of Pax Romana

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How long were we together? Paleoanthropologists divide human history between anatomically modern humans, who emerged around 300,000 years ago, and behaviorally modern humans showing signs of art, symbolic thinking and sophisticated tool-making — gradually building up over 150,000 to 50,000 years ago. Drawing on fragments and hypotheses, we can only ever date fuzzily in deep history: with margins for error spanning tens of thousands of years. But we can deduce from our anatomically modern history that we shared the world with other humanities for nine tenths of our existence.

How constant our contacts were with the African ghost populations we simply cannot say. Perhaps habitual. Maybe fleeting. But of the Eurasian humanities, this would not have been a constant contact: Neanderthals and Denisovans were occupying vast territories as yet unexplored by sapiens. But there was contact in frontier zones like the Levant, where we know that Neanderthals interbred with sapiens: both from dating our DNA, and from the burial of a 140,000-year-old half-Neanderthal child, some 90,000 years before Europe was systematically colonized by sapiens. That colonization, as caves like Grotte Mandrin in France make clear, was not a single obliterating wave — but a 12,000-year period of overlap between Neanderthals and ourselves made up of successive expeditions.

Our ancestors, then, for perhaps most of our behavioral modernity, needed to be aware of Neanderthals. But can we faintly remember them? This requires us to date their disparition. The French archeologist Ludovic Slimak writes hauntingly about the archeological record — “Neanderthals are there and then they are no longer there” — some 40,000 years ago. There is something unsettling sensing their final encounter with sapiens settling Europe sifting through tens of thousands of ancient flints. We see the Neanderthals’ distinctive tool-knapping technique: each slightly different, as if following the rock, compared to the brutal and identical sharpness of the humans, indistinguishable from the slopes of Levant to the Rhone valleys. This is what an encounter with a super intelligence looks like, and it is unnerving as we face our own at the dawn of AI.

“Neanderthals were not a civilization,” writes Slimak. “They were hundreds of civilizations collapsing like dominoes.” Never very numerous, destabilized perhaps by the ferocious temperature oscillations of the late Ice Age, Slimak believes Neanderthals were broken up into small groups and outcompeted by us in a way instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with modern colonization. Their last possible traces — not bones, but those distinctive flints — can be found in the two furthest corners of the continent: above the Arctic circle in the Urals plateau, and in the caves of Gibraltar, some 29,000 years ago. The same fate awaited the Denisovans, and perhaps the hobbits of Flores.

But do we in the faintest way in our stories remember them? This begs the question of how long can we remember anything. Here, recent research by Professor Patrick Nunn in The Edge of Memory is revelatory. Our world has changed enormously since behavioral modernity. We not only live in an empty world but a drowned world, one utterly reshaped by massive coastal flooding from the end of the Ice Age. Yet Nunn has documented 21 Aboriginal stories which recount exact locations off coastal Australia there is no way modern inhabitants could have known about. From vanished islands to marshes and land bridges — not least the one to Tasmania — these memories of what must have been sudden and shocking sea-level rises can be dated to between 7,500 to 12,000 years ago.

But we do not have to go all the way to Australia to find ancient memories. Nunn’s recent research has concentrated on the west of the British Isles, where countless examples of old Cornish, Welsh and Irish storytelling, like tales of the lost land of Lyonesse, recall vanished coastlines stretching out into the Channel and Atlantic. Our geological research has now caught up with the storytelling. These were not, as the archaeologist Osbert Crawford first suggested, the fantasies of “the dreamy Celt”. Rather, the geological record suggests a faint memory of the traumatic loss of the Ice Age coastline — with some tales being able to pinpoint bits of the Scilly Isles lost some 9,000 years ago.

Intriguingly, in the East of England, where the loss of the vast plains of Doggerland stretching towards Germany was even more dramatic, there are next to no folk tales of lost lands, despite fishermen for centuries picking up mammoth tusks and tree trunks deep out at sea. Historical genetics gives us the answer why: while the population in those western regions are largely the descendants of those living there during those cataclysmic sea-level rises, those on England’s eastern coastline were largely replaced by Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Danes in the Dark Ages.

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Don't let ancient languages die

By Georgy Kantor

The edge of memory when it comes to events seems nowhere close to 20,000 years ago — and far short of the last traces of the Neanderthals. But there might be another explanation for our ancestors’ fascination with wild men, ogres and giants: their encounters with the fossil record. Because if you have never seen a woolly mammoth or a gigantic extinct cave bear — let alone a dinosaur — and you dig one up and try to arrange it, what comes out looks rather like a monstrous giant.

In her brilliant book The First Fossil Hunters, Professor Adrienne Mayor compares fossil deposits to Ancient Greek and Roman accounts of the discoveries of gigantic bones and heroic skeletons. In so doing, she shows that these finds convinced our ancestors that there had once been a time of giants. During what she calls the “bone rush” of the 7th and 5th centuries BC, the Spartans found the massive remains of their hero Orestes while the Athenians dug up Theseus and gigantic bones attributed to Ajax in spots we can now pinpoint as rich with fossil deposits. Not only did the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius gather chambers of wonders of gigantic bones — which must have been fossils — they also gave instructions on how to bury giants’ bodies that suddenly were exposed in what we know are rich deposits.

We now know, in other words, that the temples of the ancient Mediterranean were in fact full of the kinds of tusks and bones that you might today find in the Natural History Museum. Not only is moving giant bones mentioned in the Epic Cycle about the Trojan War — where Trojan seers prophesied the Greeks could only win if they found the bones of the hero Pelops, whose giant shoulder blade they promptly dug up — there is clearly a fossilized skull, depicted as the beast of Troy, on a 6th-century BC Corinthian vase. These assumptions lingered, as a drumbeat for belief in the background, until modern archeology offered an alternative. And we have extensive evidence of this: from Herodotus and Pausnias inspecting curious bones, to Boccaccio watching Sicilian peasants dig out the skeleton of a giant in 1371, to the important paleontological discoveries made in Chinese drugstores selling “dragon bones” in the 19th century. But if our hominid stories are only fantasies from bones, why the specifics and persistence of Yetis, Yowies and wild men?

Flores in Indonesia is the island where we might find an answer. Here, on an island where apes never trod, not only have archaeologists found the hobbit-like remains of Homo Florenesis — anthropologists have also found an incredibly rich and naturalistic storytelling tradition about ape-men. There is something so specific about these tales, recalling cave burnings to smoke out very violent ape-men, that they just might be recalling some memory of living side-by-side with another species. Could this be where the edge of memory touches our lost cousins? This is especially possible when the rarity of fossilization doesn’t preclude the idea that there weren’t lingering Homo Florenesis thousands of years past the dates of their last known remains. We don’t know. Only archaeology, and time, might eventually tell.

Yet the fact these stories endure today suggests a third explanation: buried deep in the psyche. There is something uncanny about reading accounts of the Flores ape-men, with their tellers even believing they’re still out there, spotted thieving food or by field huts, found dead at the roadside or glimpsed in the higher forests. Might our minds, after so long evolving together, be so strongly wired with the pattern recognition to spot other hominids that we will hallucinate them until the end of our days? Fairies die out only to be replaced by aliens. Hominids from space, this time, not from the forests and caves. Phantom limbs, phantom siblings, still living with us forever in our stories.

If, however, the mythic figures sit atop their dueling perches, guarding the entry point to America’s political psyche, inside the sanctum lies the most sacred relic of all: the US Constitution. Yet that relic is not the guarantor of liberties that most Americans imagine. Rather, it’s the legal scaffolding of an elite-led counter-revolution — the same one that today lets tech billionaires drop power-guzzling data centers into communities that never asked for them.

In individualistic terms, America remains the most economically “free” country in the world, but also among the most atomized, alienated and unequal. Most Americans don’t realize, however, that it didn’t have to be this way. After all, how many have ever heard of Shays’s Rebellion — a massive class revolt led by ex-revolutionary soldiers, one that almost toppled the government and could have saved working people from 230-plus years of Constitutional tyranny?

To be clear, 1776 is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, the Revolution was arguably the greatest democratic uprising in world history. Much of that national mythos is worth preserving. Three cheers for the war against the Brits. Yet if the struggles from Lexington to Yorktown remain the quintessential Anglo-liberal uprising, a genuine David-and-Goliath triumph, selling that narrative has meant omitting what happened to the common foot soldiers of the Revolution itself.

The glorified writers of the Federalist Papers — John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison — explicitly didn’t want mass democracy. During the Constitutional Convention, launched in spring 1787 and convened meant to hammer out the document’s details, Hamilton pushed for a president serving “during good behaviour”. In other words: an elected king enthroned for life, much like the Supreme Court. Hamilton and his friends also pushed for a congressional veto on all state legislation, in effect allowing for total national and elite-led control of local government. That was shadowed by other elitist institutions, notably the Senate and the Electoral College. Voting, too, was to be the preserve of the propertied few: discounting women, slaves, and poor white men, the franchise in the early US encompassed just 6% of the population.

The true heroes of the early US, then, were the Anti-Federalists. An everyman group of farmers, ex-soldiers, and small property holders — none of them have ever received Broadway hagiographies or had their faces plastered on dollar bills. Yet they were the families who fought and died for the Revolution, risking their lives to overthrow the British and who now expected government both by and for the people.

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How did the wealthy merchants and bankers pushing for the Constitution respond? By economically destroying the little guy. Due to governmental dysfunction — and the fact the poor and propertyless were locked out of voting — a large percentage of veterans remained unpaid for years after the redcoats left. Even worse, many had mortgaged their homes and farms to finance the fight for independence, with the government promising repayment that never materialized. Little wonder these men rose up, under the former colonel Daniel Shays, to resist the injustices of debtors’ prisons and restore what they saw as the Revolution’s democratic spirit.

Not that Shays himself was some permanent rabble-rouser. Born not far from Boston, he fought at Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, was wounded in action, and handed a ceremonial sword by none other than the Marquis de Lafayette. It’s a sword Shays was later forced to sell to cover his debts. By the autumn of 1786, the veterans and common folk of western Massachusetts had had enough. Armed bands of farmers — mostly veterans — marched on the county courthouses and shut them down by force, reasoning that a court that can’t convene also can’t foreclose on their neighbors and friends.

And so, for a few months, these insurgents effectively governed the western half of Massachusetts. The Commonwealth’s authority simply evaporated under popular pressure. Then, in January 1787, Shays led roughly 1,500 men against the federal arsenal at Springfield, aiming to seize its weapons and turn them against the state governments, which they believed had been captured by wealthy coastal merchants and big farmers. They never reached the gates. A militia — privately financed by a syndicate of Boston merchants, since the bankrupt state couldn’t afford one — met them with literal cannon fire. Four Shaysites fell dead in the snow. Upon seeing the ruthlessness with which these hired guns pursued them, some of the Shaysites are said to have died from fright. The rest scattered, before being hunted across the hills through a brutal winter.

What would Shays have done if he and his rebels had been able to take the arsenal at Springfield? In an interview with the Massachusetts Centinel, the colonel suggested that, once the rebels were armed to the teeth, they planned “to march directly to Boston, plunder it, and then destroy the nest of devils, who by their influence, make the Court enact what they please”. Given the scale of the betrayal of these revolutionary soldiers — and seeing how American business have dominated the country’s government since — it’s hard to argue against him.

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In the end, though, the country’s greatest ever class rebellion ended in failure. Shays himself was eventually pardoned, though would later die in drunken poverty. But the fright it put into the propertied classes endured. Word of the uprising reached Mount Vernon, and a rattled George Washington was coaxed into running for the presidency. Meanwhile, the rebellion’s shock directly spurred the wealthy establishment’s drive for the new constitutional order, replacing the radically localist politics of the revolutionary era with a system designed to stabilize property relations and restrain popular democracy.

It worked. All the attention on slavery and race in American history overshadows the essential fact that, in most cases, the poor and propertyless were not allowed to vote until the Jacksonian era, some 40 years after the Constitution’s passage. Nor does the document’s malign influence, or the resonance of Shays’s Rebellion, end there. Far from being a quaint historical curiosity, the revolt’s failure was both the spur for today’s legal order and the decisive turning point in American political development: with the Constitution amounting to, essentially, an elite-led counter-revolution where the democratic energies of 1776 were deliberately caged to protect bankers, creditors, and commercial elites from popular pressure. The Presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court — all these elements were explicitly designed to curb democratic energies and ensure that property holders were protected from the “factionalism” of the “mob”.

The anti-majoritarian architecture built in 1789 continues to imprison American governance to this day. Beside the absurdity of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — which allows money to be treated as legally protected “speech” — nothing illustrates this better than the data-center boom. No one except tech billionaires wants these things: certainly not in their own communities. And yet they pop up everywhere, including the now-notorious “Stratos Project” in northern Utah, funded by investor Kevin O’Leary, and which would immediately require more power than the entire state uses in a year. Just like the spread of Walmart in earlier decades, often against the will of the communities the shopping centers invaded, the spread of data centers is enabled by precisely the tyranny of property holders the Constitution was built to make possible.

The shadow of the nation’s Constitutional counter-revolution extends to nearly all the great economic problems of American life. The same logic that crushed the Shaysites — creditor over debtor; centralized elite over localist self-rule; property rights over political rights — runs through American political economy to this day, from the Wall Street bailouts after 2008, to wars fought for corporate interests, to the relentless algorithmic extraction of the gig economy.

If the civics-touting Right remains in hock to the Constitution, the Left’s critique isn’t much better either. For all the supposed radicalism of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ undertaking was merely a continuation of the trend among elite storytellers and academicians who ignore class entirely, and instead seek to turn the Founding into a different kind of myth useful to their political project. For Hannah-Jones and rich readers of the New York Times, certainly, it’s useful to make race and gender — not class — the Founding’s dominant feature.

How, then, might we build a better tomorrow? In the first place, by recognizing that the Constitution wasn’t totally hopeless. The Bill of Rights, of course not pushed by Hamilton, Madison and the other Federalists, enshrined John Locke’s idea of limited government into law, and opened an eventual pathway for liberal democracy globally. In other words, then, the future rests not on the DSA socialism of Zohran Mamdani, nor on the Sanderistas, but on returning to the localist tradition Shays  tried to defend. It’s a tradition Anti-Federalists sought to preserve as much as possible: hence their insistence on an extensive list of governmental “thou shalt nots” throughout the Bill of Rights. Yet if this exists entirely in the realm of what political theorists call “negative rights” — in other words freedom from rather than freedom to — this is ultimately a mischaracterization of the Anti-Federalists and their politics. Without our Anti-Federalist strand, the fight to end property restrictions on the right to vote, which propelled Andrew Jackson into office, would never have been completed. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal probably wouldn’t have been possible either.

If, in other words, fighting the Constitution means encouraging “localism”, that’s less abstract than the term implies. For instance, it would mean turning antitrust law, mostly dormant for two generations, against the tech monopolies, just as trustbusters once stymied the railroad barons. It would also mean encouraging right-to-repair laws, letting people own the machines they buy outright, while keeping banks accountable to the towns they lend in — instead of hands-off regulation-haven states like Delaware.

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More generally, reviving the American Revolution means reducing the power of the national government over the states: both the intention of the 1776 revolution and the only way a true democracy can function. Recall, again, that the revolutionaries were committed to small-“r” republican governance, which meant as many people as possible participating actively and often in the political process. Pretending that the system we have now is a “democracy” in line with the intentions of our 1776 founding is in itself a betrayal.

The time for change, in short, is now. Tech monopolies and their ruthless gaming of the legal system are gutting whatever’s left of the Revolution’s democratic spirit. The trillionaire class that AI’s rise will produce is the final boss stage of the elite-led counter-revolution that began in 1787. As we speak, the elite are exploiting the supremacy of property law provided by the Constitution to ensure technology serves no one but their makers, keeping the few rich and the many surveilled. Technology itself, though, remains neutral. The material conditions of the present — remote work, decentralized production, drone-assisted agriculture — may, practically for the first time since the Revolution itself, revive the localist, democratic spirit the Constitution was designed to suppress.

Whether this happens depends on something the localists have been trying to tell us for 40 years. In his 1985 book Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah warned that a republic organized around private accumulation forgets the language of the common good — and loses the civic muscles self-government actually runs on. To paraphrase Michael Sandel, we have traded the citizen, who helps govern the forces that rule his life, for the consumer, who is merely ignored by them. That trade, in a sense, is the counter-revolution’s deepest victory: a whole people taught to mistake being unbothered for being “free”. The key question now is whether Americans can recognize their own revolutionary inheritance before the counter-revolution completes itself and all working-class children are illiterate, device-addicted serfs who own nothing and “like it”.

If there is a foundational dogma to America’s civic religion, it is that the United States is an exceptional country. The reason we emerged as the world’s first modern democracy, the reason we became the most powerful country in history, the reason we defeated fascism and communism and remade much of the world in our capitalist image, is that we’re somehow special. 

For those inclined to see the world through Christian prophecy, we are ordained by God. For those who prefer to see Enlightenment-style “reason” as the engine of civilization, it was the genius of our Founding Fathers that set us on our path to greatness. For those who are more anthropologically minded, it was the curious Tocquevillian habit of Americans to come together in voluntary associations that set us apart. But all agree that we are a uniquely favored nation.

A wider view of history reveals a more mundane explanation: the reason America became a democratic superpower was its abundance of land. 

The long arc of Western history that led to the birth of the United States did not “begin” at any particular moment, but the collapse of the Roman Empire was certainly a major inflection point. The new kingdoms founded by Germanic tribal warlords on the wreckage of the Empire were less sophisticated than the society they had replaced. They lacked the bureaucracy necessary to tax their subjects as effectively as the Romans had, and without that revenue, they could not raise standing armies. Instead, they relied on volunteer soldiers, and compensated them with the spoils of war and pillage. This included plundered treasure as well as, more importantly, land.

Out of this exchange came the military order of feudalism. The power of a medieval king was measured by the military might of the volunteer soldiers pledged to him — otherwise known as his vassals. These men tended to be experienced warriors who could fight on horseback and who could conscript peasants who lived on their land, by force or by payment, to serve as foot soldiers. Generally, the more land a vassal held, the larger his annual revenue and the greater his army. He agreed to wage war on behalf of a more powerful magnate in exchange for the right to rule over a share of the newly conquered lands that military victory would bring. With that new wealth and power, he could, in turn, attract less powerful vassals into his own service.

But this compensation scheme created an intractable problem for the king, who, in the early Middle Ages, was merely the most powerful warlord in a given region at a given moment. The more land he distributed to his vassals, the stronger and more independent they became. Thus, every vassal was a potential rival, and every fief the king granted to them increased the threat they posed to his hegemony.

The remedy only made the problem worse. The king could secure his throne against the predatory ambitions of his rivals only by waging new wars and conquering new lands to distribute to his vassals as fiefs. It was a vicious cycle: staying ahead of one’s opponents in the short term meant increasing the threat they posed in the long term. On top of that, vassals waged their own wars to amass their own retinues of lesser vassals, and were also constantly trying to build their own military dynasties. Political competition created the conditions for endless war.

The militarized politics of feudal Europe produced an intricate vertical social structure: a long chain of vassals and liege lords connected the lowliest peasant to God. At the same time, however, the competition between warlords created a countervailing ideological force: republicanism.

The core region of feudal Europe was the area that was conquered by Charlemagne in the ninth century, stretching from the south of present-day Italy to the Baltic Sea, and from Bohemia to the Pyrenees. In the early days, aspiring conquerors swarmed to this relatively populated landmass, whose large peasant class could be easily forced into serving in infantries. But eventually, the core became overheated. The power of the incumbent lords became too strong to contest, and competition shifted to the more sparsely populated and up-for-grabs lands of the east and the north.

To effectively exploit these peripheral domains, their new rulers had to encourage settlement — and not just by agricultural laborers. Centuries of military competition in Europe had steadily generated new technologies: plane and chainmail armor, long bows, stone castles and siege weaponry like trebuchets. Artisans were needed to manufacture these products, and they in turn required trading centers. In this way, towns became indispensable to the long-term security of any throne.

Sometimes rulers transferred populations to their territories by sheer force, but more often, they were compelled to offer attractive terms to prospective immigrants. Colonists were granted enhanced property rights and civil autonomy. In the 12th century, the charter of Dublin allowed its residents to administer their own local affairs and judge their own legal cases. They were allowed to form guilds and to build as they wished within the city’s boundaries. Legal innovations spread like mushrooms: a charter in a town in today’s Germany would become a template for the founding of a new one in today’s Poland. A transnational legal network began to emerge, bestowing certain rights and privileges upon urban inhabitants, who became known as “burgesses”, or “the bourgeoisie”.

As the kingdoms of the old Carolingian lands spread to the farthest northern and eastern reaches of the continent, new riverine and overland trade routes emerged, criss-crossing Europe. Trade produced wealth, which kings could tax. These new sources of revenue, along with the development of bureaucracy, began to resolve the problem of the conflicting political interests between lords and vassals. Now, instead of exchanging land for military service, monarchs could pay mercenaries to fight their wars, and even raise standing armies. The Hundred Years’ War of the late Middle Ages was fought largely by mercenaries. But at the end of the war, Charles VII created the first European standing army since the Roman Empire by bringing France’s private military companies, which were typically contracted by feuding lords, into the direct service of the king. The move ignited a brief civil war with much of the aristocracy, as the crown was consolidating at their expense.

Over time, to use Max Weber’s terminology, the crown began to monopolize the use of legitimate violence. Royal domains were internally pacified, and warfare became a matter of conflicts between great kingdoms. Something resembling the modern nation-state became dimly perceptible. 

Pacification was good for trade, and the chartered townships prospered. The republican-minded burgesses flourished with them. But the old feudal class structures didn’t simply evaporate. Warrior knights slowly transformed into domesticated aristocrats orbiting the king’s court. These aristocrats continued to control the land, even while fulfilling no obvious social purpose. Stripped of their military function, they became a parasitical remnant of a social order that no longer existed. Peasants, laborers and lesser aristocrats found themselves socially immobile.

The stage was set for class conflict. The newly consolidated political power of the crown, at its apotheosis in the age of Absolutism, began to chafe against the burgesses with their democratic values.

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But for the discontented burgesses, farmers, and lords without prospects there was the promise of America. In the American colonies, there was arable land for anyone with the gumption to venture into the wilderness and take it. If you could tolerate the backbreaking work of clearing forests and the threat of being massacred by Indians, you could escape the economic stranglehold of early modern Europe’s vampire class. Here, the republican values incubated in medieval European towns and cities were free to spread unencumbered by the dead weight of aristocracy. 

Take, for example, those who would come to be known as the Scots-Irish, though they thought of themselves simply as Irish. Their ancestors, largely Presbyterian, had been transplants from Scotland to Ulster, recruited by Queen Elizabeth I as English-aligned colonists meant to displace the native-born Catholic Irish. Conditions were dismal in Scotland, and the land much better in Ireland, so they came in droves. But once there, they found themselves under the thumbs of absentee English landlords, who leveraged the improvements the new tenants had made to their lands to double and triple the rents they charged them. Feudalism had long since passed, but the laboring classes were still being squeezed by the nobles. 

In the 18th century, the Scots-Irish fled Ulster as readily as their grandparents had once fled Scotland, this time to the east coast of the United States. After landing in Philadelphia, they beat a hasty path into the back country, where they chiseled crude farms out of the mountains and hollows of the Appalachians. Once the nation was unified following the War of Independence, the Scots-Irish pioneers, for better and for worse, became the tip of the spear of American expansionism. 

The conquest of western North America entailed a different kind of warfare than their distant European ancestors had waged in the Middle Ages. The Americans faced fierce resistance from an indigenous population skilled in warfare, but not of the sort that medieval conquerors had encountered in Europe. Indian tribes had not constructed stone castles nor built trebuchets. The Americans could take their land without fielding armies in the tens of thousands, and without reordering their society to produce a warrior class and a servile population that could be conscripted as cannon fodder. The settlers who marched west of the Appalachians to conquer Indian lands largely did the fighting themselves, with the US Army playing only an ancillary role. They furnished their own weapons, and put their own lives at risk. They believed not in oaths of loyalty but in liberty, independence, and natural rights. It was a form of conquest and colonization that was entirely compatible with the old republican values of the European bourgeoisie.

After the West had been settled, the bourgeois ideology continued to prosper. Just as the medieval warlords on the peripheries of Europe needed new settlers to secure their power, the United States had a bottomless appetite not only for laborers but for skilled workers, educated professionals and entrepreneurs to develop the economy of a newly conquered continent. As for the burgesses in the medieval European towns, it was a buyers’ market for labor. And the US government attracted laborers in the same way: by offering economic opportunity as well as political liberties the newcomers were denied at home. With the obvious, colossal exception of blacks in the South, who were still ruled by the vestiges of a European aristocracy that would only be subdued in the Civil War and ultimately defeated in the Civil Rights Movement, American democracy flourished under these material conditions. It continued to do so in the 20th century, as America’s economy boomed, increasing the bargaining power of workers, professionals and entrepreneurs with the state. 

Those conditions, however, have vanished. In an age of urbanization and industrialized farming, land is no longer a productive source of wealth to be exploited at the level of the household. Far from needing to coax migrants into the United States to develop our booming economy, we are stanching the flow to prevent them from competing for scarce jobs. And with Artificial Intelligence rapidly displacing human cognitive labor, the incentives for governments to grant new civil liberties to people in order to secure their commitment to the nation and enlist their participation in the economy is becoming non-existent. Humans are losing their leverage over the institutions that rule them as their labor becomes cheap and superfluous. 

At the age of 250, the United States has long ceased to be exceptional. There is reason to question whether its republican spirit will persist much longer. Far too much emphasis is placed on vague notions of some uniquely American commitment to “freedom” to explain the success of American democracy, and far too little on the material conditions that have historically made democracy here possible: abundant land without a landed gentry. Without these conditions, democracy persists in America merely as a matter of inertia. We should be cautious not to assume it will last. 

Hitler was complying with a public speaking ban issued by Walter Felix Mueller, Weimar’s mayor. Everyone knew the Nazi leader was dangerous. He had tried to overthrow the government in the so-called Munich Putsch just three years earlier. Now, here he was in Weimar, once home to Goethe, and where the German Republic had been founded in 1919, stamping the town’s name on its fragile democratic experiment. Mueller was determined that the cradle of the new democracy would not become its grave. So he silenced Hitler by law — for one weekend in July 1926 anyway. History would soon prove this a futile gesture, one that neither slowed the death of the Weimar Republic nor Hitler’s rise to power.

I’ve spent the last few years studying the German interwar years for my new book, which focuses on the town of Weimar between 1918 and 1939. A century on, we seem to look to this period for guidance more than ever, but one conclusion is rarely drawn: there is little evidence to suggest that the Nazi Party could have been legislated out of history.

This was clear enough that summer day in 1926. Although Mueller’s speaking ban stopped Hitler from addressing his followers in Weimar’s market square, it didn’t stop people from wanting to listen to him. And since the mayor had no power over private gatherings, the Nazis simply held indoor invitation-only meetings instead. Indeed, the very same day that Hitler stood silent on the market square, the Hitler Youth received its name at the nearby Crossbow Society, while in other meetings, central Nazi rituals and symbols were decided. All party publications, for instance, were to be marked with a standardized emblem: an eagle holding an oak wreath with a swastika in the middle. This would later become the official emblem of the Nazi state. Hitler himself also spoke — entirely playing by the rules — behind closed doors at the German National Theater in Weimar: the very birthplace of the republic. In short, Mueller’s ban had done absolutely nothing to stop Hitler, not even for a single weekend.

Despite such evidence to the contrary, many Germans today seem to believe that the lesson from Weimar is that growing public discontent is best tackled by legislating against the parties that channel it. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, whose rapid rise is causing a fair amount of angst in Germany. Haunted by their Nazi past, Germans long believed that there would never again be a significant political party to the Right of conservatism. Now, the AfD is not only occupying that space but is even leading the opinion polls. How should Germany respond? “Learn from history and ban the AfD!” says the far-Left Die Linke party.

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They are not alone. At their party conference last year, pretty much the only thing the deeply divided center-left Social Democrats (SPD) could wholeheartedly agree on was initiating legal proceedings towards an AfD ban because, as one senior party figure put it, “we all have a responsibility to learn from our history.” Even the German President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose role is meant to put him above party politics, asked in a speech last year: “Is it actually possible that we haven’t learnt from history?”, warning that “a party that walks the path of aggressive anti-constitutionalism always had to reckon with the possibility of a ban.”

At the local level, meanwhile, some politicians are trying to tackle the AfD the same way Mueller tried to hem in Hitler. Earlier this year, two Bavarian municipalities issued speaking bans against Björn Höcke, an AfD politician who had planned to appear at campaign rallies. In the end, a court declared this gambit illegal. When Höcke finally spoke, it turned out that his audience now contained people who’d just come to see what the hype was about.

Höcke is a point in case for the argument that legal action does little to diminish the appeal of radical politics. Intense, radical and ambitious, he is infamous in Germany for leading the most extreme faction of the AfD, and has been convicted twice for using Nazi slogans at campaign rallies. Yet Höcke leads one of the most successful AfD branches in the country, with his Thuringian party coming first in regional elections in 2024 and now polling at 38% of the vote share. As a former history teacher, Höcke is conscious of the same history his enemies hope to use to defeat him.

There are indeed many striking parallels between past and present. Thuringia, that central German state where Höcke today has his power base, was pivotal to the rise of the Nazis, as indeed was Weimar, the state’s capital after the First World War. Hitler himself visited Weimar over 40 times, because he found ideal political conditions there despite temporary speaking bans. In many ways, Thuringia became a safe haven for the nascent Nazi movement. Some German states had instituted regional bans of the party from 1922, followed by a nationwide ban after Hitler’s botched 1923 coup. Yet Nazi politicians and fellow-travelers simply stood for election as independents, or in newly formed ersatz parties. In this way, seven far-Right men made it into the Thuringian state parliament in 1924, three of whom were card-carrying National Socialists.

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Due to the parliamentary arithmetic, these Thuringian Nazi MPs were needed to form a  Right-wing majority in the state, and they duly agreed to back the ruling coalition in exchange for a re-legalization of the local Nazi Party. They got what they asked for, forcing a local lifting of the ban as early as March 1924 and granting Hitler’s party a political sanctuary from which to rebuild his movement until the national ban fell in 1925. It’s no coincidence that the first formal Nazi rally, that one with Hitler silent on the stage, happened not in Nuremberg — but in Weimar. The town would, in time, become the seat of the first state government to appoint a Nazi minister, a full three years before Hitler became German chancellor.

Höcke knows all of this — and so do many of his party colleagues. Take the time and location of this year’s national AfD conference. It is being held in Erfurt, which is today the capital of Thuringia. The date for the meet-up is 4 July 2026, exactly 100 years after the crucial Weimar rally of 1926. Make of that what you will, but the AfD certainly doesn’t go out of its way to reject the political legacy of Hitlerism. In fact, it often outright flirts with the phrases, symbols and gestures of the Thirties. The latest example is the federal AfD MP Matthias Moosdorf, who has recently been charged with greeting a party colleague with the Nazi salute in the Berlin parliament.

To be clear, the AfD is not the reincarnation of the Nazi Party. For one thing, it doesn’t have or seek to acquire a private army. By contrast, Hitler’s stormtroopers eventually counted over four million members. Even at the rally in 1926, when he wanted to be seen to stick to the rules, Hitler’s men caused a veritable blood bath in Weimar, provoking brutal street battles. One policeman was shot and wounded on the street, right in front of the train station. So far, there is no sign that the AfD has a comparable appetite for brutal illegality.

That’s another good reason for mainstream politicians to keep their heads — and focus not on the AfD itself but on the causes that have helped it grow. Again, there are parallels to the past. For all its campaigning and consolidating, and for all of Hitler’s personal charisma, the Nazi Party only got 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 elections. Then came the Wall Street Crash, causing such rage and despair that no party ban could have stopped it.

What ordinary Germans wanted most after 1929 wasn’t extremism or ideology: but tangible, drastic and effective reforms to address the misery they found themselves in. That it was possible to absorb such despair — and turn it into optimism by democratic means — is shown by the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President of the United States. FDR came to power in 1933, the same year Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Of course, the comparison isn’t perfect: unlike Germany, the US boasted a long tradition of democratic politics. All the same, both Roosevelt and Hitler ultimately dealt with the same economic crisis. We will never know if a charismatic, capable and democratic-minded politician could have pulled Germany from the brink. But there is nothing inevitable about the way German history turned in the interwar period.

That is doubly true today: the causes for the rise of the AfD are far less severe than those that brought the Nazis to power. Between 1929 and 1933, the Great Depression caused mass unemployment at a time when many German families had only just begun to rebuild from the traumas of the First World War and the turmoil that followed in its wake. Today, the AfD is growing not because of external economic collapse, but because people are frustrated with political choices made by recent governments, primarily on immigration, but also on energy policy, economic reforms and cultural issues. All of these are eminently fixable with reforms centrist politicians could themselves enact. Surveys show, for instance, that the stricter stance on controlling immigration that the current German government has taken has led to this issue being seen as less of a concern by voters.

Instead of burying their heads in the sands of time, German politicians should focus on the here and now, tackling the reasons that cause people to turn to radical politics. Suffocating the fires of discontent is never as effective as depriving them of fuel. The Weimar Republic may be the most terrifying example of a fallen democracy in Western history, but fear shouldn’t tempt its successors into trying to legislate against a repeat. The lessons from Weimar are complex and nuanced — yet it’s clear they don’t boil down to party and speaking bans as guarantors for a better future.

Back then, as the rabbis first struggled to sum up Judaism without a Temple, in what became known as the Mishnah, they preached against the temptations of kingship and Rome. “Love work,” they said, “abhor taking high office and do not seek intimacy with the ruling power.” Today, the Mishnah’s essential portion, The Ethics of The Fathers, reads like an almost incantatory list of generations of exclusively religious Jewish leaders. Originally, it was shocking because of who it omits: the rabbis had written out of history not only King Herod, but the messianic political leaders of the three great revolts against Rome.

The truth is that when it comes to national leaders, Jews have precious few examples to go by, having not held their homeland for over 1,800 years. Which is why it is telling, in the final build up to the war on Tehran, that Benjamin Netanyahu spent time rediscovering those rulers whom the rabbis wished to forget. He has done this by reading a new book,  Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire, by Professor Barry Strauss. “Well, we lost that one,” Netanyahu explained to a reporter about the work. “I think we have to win the next one.”

This is perhaps the most unintentionally revealing thing Bibi has ever said. As his war planning with Washington gathered pace, the Israeli Prime Minister was reading a book about a vast historic reversal — how, in the space of a single lifetime, Jewish royalty went from playing politics in Rome, as their people gathered privileges and respect in the imperial center, to watching helplessly as the legions burnt the Temple and carried off its Menorah, their nation marched into slavery, humiliation and exile. At its core, this is the story of King Herod and the failure of his heirs: how a combination of runaway fundamentalism and diplomatic failure doomed a highly successful people to the status of near outcasts.

You cannot understand King Herod — or the depths of Bibi’s mind — without looking again at a map of Rome. The empire in the east was different from that of the west: not the uniformly subjugated barbarian provinces of Gaul and Britannia, but a patchwork of wealthy, civilized statelets, client kingdoms and provinces. Judea was one of those kingdoms, home to the largest temple complex of the ancient world at Jerusalem. It was a city whose sanctuary was so gilded, writes the inescapable ancient historian Josephus, that in the morning it “cast a fiery light”; so white was its marble that from a distance the sanctuary looked like a mountain capped with snow.

This, moreover, was a city that had produced in the Torah a literary tradition its people believed rivaled that of the Greeks, a city whose diaspora was spread across the known world’s two empires — the Roman, stretching west to the pillars of Hercules, and the Parthian, stretching east to the Hindu Kush, each studded with Jewish trading communities paying their own tithe back to the Temple.

Strauss calls this Judea “in essence a Temple state”; it had become ungovernable by 63 BC, when its elites first appealed to Rome to adjudicate in a civil war within its failing Hasmonean monarchy. Twenty-three years later, after a period of chaos, the Roman Senate made their most promising local ally King of all Judea, then sent him back with military support to conquer his kingdom. His name was Herod.

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This king would become so hated in both the Jewish and the Christian tradition that his actual reign was blotted out. But reading Jews vs. Rome, it is easy to realize what Netanyahu might see in him. It is all about the emperor. Herod, after all, made himself a Roman politician and not just a Jewish one. To avoid the territorial designs of Cleopatra, he sought and won the support of Mark Antony. But after his patron’s demise at the hands of Octavian, known to history as Augustus, Herod had the skill to then become the first Roman emperor’s greatest loyalist.

To succeed in Roman politics, Herod Romanized himself, naming his grandson after Augustus’s favorite general Agrippa, and even becoming president of the Olympic Games. To emphasize his loyalty, he also Romanized his landscape, raising a new city called Caesarea, on the coast south of modern-day Haifa. All this would pay off, not just for him, but for his Rome-educated grandson Herod Agrippa I, who was such an impressive Roman politician that in the chaos that followed the murder of his friend Caligula he installed Claudius as emperor.

There is no way Herod’s precedent was not on Bibi’s mind as he read this book, in those months when he pursued Trump with the most outlandish flattery — a man he has named a settlement after; offered the nation’s highest honors to; and sought to speak to through every Fox and Friends or Hannity. All this as he shuns his own media at home. Bibi knows that his bilingual, Israeli-American political identity, in a country where few in its traditional political-military class speak flawless English, is the source of his power, his ability to play politics in Rome.

Because of how it ended, the very Roman power of the Herodian dynasty has been forgotten. First came Herod the Great, who renovated the Temple, but his large kingdom disintegrated almost immediately on his death. Revolts broke out everywhere against the backdrop of his sadistic divide-and-rule, culminating in the murder of his own sons. But what the empire gifted, it could also take away. The second, Romanized generation, such as Herod Antipas of Galilee who executed John the Baptist, were demoted into ruling mostly as lesser Roman-appointed “tetrarchs” or “ethnarchs” of scraps of their old kingdom.

50 years later, the now extensively Romanized third generation would enjoy a brief resurgence, when Herod the Great’s grandson Herod Agrippa I ruled as King of all Judea: but only for around three years. The fourth generation, such as Herod Agrippa II of Galilee, were demoted yet again to minor clients. They were the last to rule in the land of Israel. The Herodians’ once very real regional influence would leave no mark on history. The Jewish-Roman alliance was doomed.

This is where Strauss’s account becomes a study in failure. Successive generations of Herodians became more and more hated by their people for their Hellenized foreignness. By the end, the rulers could do nothing but hide from their subjects’ religious passions, let alone steer or hope to calm them. It meant nothing that Herod Agrippa II of Galilee ended up fighting on the same side as the Romans in the Great Revolt that began in 66 AD. Nor that his sister Berenice was the lover of General Titus. Maybe he saved Galilee, and she a few of the captives, from worse reprisals, but neither of them could save the Temple nor Judea. Their stewardship had failed. After this disaster, the dynasty continued, but not in Judea and not as Jews. King Herod’s descendants would rule as kings in Armenia and Cetis in Anatolia, or serve as Roman senators, magistrates, and even a consul or two. Yet they did all this firmly as pagans.

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Herod the Great’s heirs failed because they did not keep the zealots close enough to control them. And it is impossible, here, to read Strauss’s account and not see the signature of Bibi’s entire career: the zealots will be my zealots. For 30 years, Israel’s most American, most foreign of leaders has used fundamentalist rabbis and settlers as his auxiliaries and shields. This, in the end, is the political meaning of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. Of course, there is the cynicism, through which Netanyahu will do anything to stave off an election and avoid jail. But there is also a dark pessimism about the Jewish people that glues it all together, a sense that Netanyahu truly believes you cannot rule the Jews except when flanked by their zealots.

This was the Herodian legacy: Judea’s priests driven to hilltop villages in the Galilee, its princes pagans in the courts of Asia Minor. By the end of the Great Revolt in 70 AD, the Jews were now a people without a leadership, their temple and their monarchy in ruins. Incontinent, apocalyptic fanaticism spread like wildfire among the people. Two further revolts followed, in 115 AD and 135 AD. The result was what we would now call ethnic cleansing and genocide. Archaeological work in modern Israel has confirmed a scale of atrocity that shocked even Rome’s ancient historians. By the end of the first revolt, Titus’s slavery and butchery had reduced the population of Judea by a third. By the end of the third, by driving the Jews out of Judea and eradicating their settlements there, Hadrian had reduced it by as much as two thirds. During the second Trajan had, to quote the historian Appian, “utterly destroyed the Jewish people in Egypt”. Their doom, to a reader like Netanyahu, only confirms a conviction that the Diaspora is only safe if Israel succeeds.

In the space of a lifetime, the Jews had not only lost Jerusalem, their great spiritual city with all its treasures, but also Alexandria, their great diasporic port with all its wealth. The Jews were finished. Not as a nation, but as a great people in the ancient world. Their homeland was renamed Palestine — as the Greeks had long known it — to insult them. They were humiliatingly singled out by Rome to pay the fiscus Judaicus, a special tax to the emperor’s coffers and the city’s great temple of Jupiter, in lieu of the old tithe they had once so gladly paid their own temple. A vertiginous fall, in short, from privileges granted by Julius Caesar himself.

I don’t doubt that, reading Strauss’s book, Netanyahu imagines himself as Herod the Great: the only sound intercessor between Rome and the Jews. But there is another, unnerving reading, in which Netanyahu has got it all wrong. By betting everything on the House of Trump, is he not making the same mistake as the Herodians? From educating their children together to tying generations of friendships together, the House of Herod bet everything on the House of Augustus. But that didn’t work so well with the dynasties that came after: the cold military men of the Flavians and the Nerva-Antonines. After all,  dynasties could, and did, fall. What Judea needed, and so obviously lacked, were friends and allies across the Senate and the People of Rome.

Why the Temple was destroyed is one of the great aching questions of Judaism. In Jews vs. Rome, Strauss has attempted to answer it through politics. His own view is that disunity was key. The Jews were factionalized beyond belief, and broken into zealots and Hellenizers, fundamentalists and accommodationists, all at each other’s throats. Fractured like this, the people of Israel never stood a chance against the imperial legions.

And here too Bibi’s rule resembles that of King Herod — and not in a way that would please him. It’s not just the way he has got Trump to bully the Israeli President to grant him a pardon for his corruption trial, nor his benches of Knesset yes men and hate men. It’s also 30 years of stoking endless provocation and division. It’s the hate marches against Yitzhak Rabin, the anti-Arab rhetoric, his attempts to gut the Supreme Court, the relentless march to “baseless hatred”.

This odd phrase is what the Talmud uses to describe the political climate in ancient Israel when it seeks its own answer as to why the Temple was destroyed. And it is a term I recognize when I see Itamar Ben Gvir prancing in the Knesset with a bottle of champagne, celebrating a death penalty unique for Palestinians, as Bibi looks on and smiles.

Netanyahu thinks he is leading with the zealots close; but rather they are leading him. This is a mistake that Herod the Great did not make. Two millenniums later, it is clear that the King of Judea, in his decision to rebuild and glorify the Temple, understood, unlike most of his heirs, something fundamental about the passions of Judaism. In the soul of Israel, they are inescapable and volcanic. And a leader who seeks to be their ruler, must channel them, not follow them. Herod did so in the vast effort to rebuild the Temple. It is by its surviving Western Wall that we still pray. Netanyahu has done quite the opposite, governing by endless concessions to settler construction projects or draft-dodging Haredim. Their demands are pulling him ever closer to splitting the nation, and sparking the fury of Rome.

These are the limits to Bibi’s cynicism and pessimism. For it has no spiritual force to answer the prophetic warning of Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism. Scholem warned that on the far side of so much destruction and displacement, Israel would need to withstand its own impulses and not succumb to what he called “the messianic claim which has virtually been conjured up” — by returning to the land of our ancestors. After 1,800 years, we have abruptly picked up this uncannily familiar history of zealots, client-kings and emperors. And we need to learn from it, or pay the price, once again, for fundamentalism and baseless hatred.

The head of the movement, President Donald J. Trump, is a billionaire, and a proud graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. Before achieving notoriety as a media celebrity, he gained access to a lucrative career in real estate on the back of a large donation from his father. The upper echelons of his administration have been staffed by the well-to-do; key members of his cabinet are in receipt of Ivy League degrees. Trump’s own family has benefited from Presidential power, with close intimates occupying influential roles. In addition, prominent cheerleaders of the MAGA chief include leading tech tycoons like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Partisans of MAGA argue that all this misses the point. The movement may be led by affluence and entitlement, but the program (they say) embodies the values of “middle-class America” — a cohort which includes what Europeans call “the working class”. Hillary Clinton once revealingly derided MAGA enthusiasts as little more than a “basket of deplorables”. But the movement’s demographic makeup is altogether more complex than this offhand smear implies. In 2024, around half of the US electorate, both urban and rural, swung behind Trump, with his support among female, Latino, and African-American voters going up.

While MAGA has inspired loyalty among “ordinary Americans”, it has also garnered acceptance among commercial and financial elites. To hold these disparate elements together, Trump has assembled a broad ideological platform: staples of a “neoliberal” economic program, like deregulation and a low-tax agenda, have been married to restrictions on international trade and opposition to foreign migration into the labor market.

Among the most distinctive components of the MAGA program is its hostility to so-called progressive values, many of these identified as pillars of “woke” politics. A target here is the liberal approach to dealing with discrimination, a persistent theme in US politics since the early Sixties, which now centers on the demand for “equity”. Perhaps ironically, equity is similarly intended to dismantle the prestige enjoyed by presumptive elites. As a tool of reparation, it is supposed to deliver fairness by rectifying historic wrongs. Yet, according to its critics, this mission is blind to the real divisions afflicting contemporary society, not least the experience of economic decline across the American rust belt.

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This disagreement points to conflict over the meaning of elitism. Rival constituencies face one another in a state of mutual incomprehension. Their opposition has shaken standard perceptions of “Left” and “Right”, with MAGA occupying ground once held by sections of the old Left. This includes antagonism towards global capitalism, backing for some kind of industrial strategy, and a raft of protectionist policies. On the other side, self-appointed radicals among anti-MAGA activists organize around the remnants of new left aspirations — backing “diversity” and “inclusion” as antidotes to social hierarchy.

In this way, two factions have emerged in US politics exhibiting contempt for one another while sharing the goal of dismantling select structures of inequality. To advance their cause, both blocs place their trust in a political class, expecting to advance their sectional interests while punishing the undeserving few. In other words, both sides engage the services of political elites to bear down on the supposedly corrupt beneficiaries of the “system”. These elites employ favored rhetoric to fire their respective bases. Democrats opt for sermonizing appeals to hope and cosmopolitan justice while Trump promises to assuage resentments in blunt demotic tones.

With adversaries ranged across the aisles in this manner, it is generally recognized that the level of acrimony in US politics has steadily risen since the 2008 financial crisis, ratcheted up under the impact of social media. But wariness of elites in America has roots going back to the presidency of Andrew Jackson in the third decade of the 19th century. In Jacksonian parlance the “common man” was championed over northeastern “aristocrats”. The crusade against unmerited privilege took a new turn after the Second World War when governing minorities were branded the “elite”. This characterization was popularized by C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, which appeared in 1956.

Mills’ thesis appealed to the popular imagination agitated by concentrations of power in areas that mattered most: in the military, the federal government, and large corporations. This depiction gave an impression of US society as directed by a concerted combination of bosses. Thereafter, “elites” were associated with excessive clout exercised by a narrow oligarchy. But from the start the book was seen as radically simplifying reality. With its stark portrayal of an all-powerful few, Mills rode roughshod over the layered complexity of social life by focusing on the barons at the top. Modern conditions can’t be crudely split into haves and have-nots. In capitalist societies, inequality is not binary but gradually stratified, organized around a continuous division of labor and an elaborately differentiated distribution of property. Between the super-privileged and the disenfranchised, the bulk of society is divided into a vast array of separate tasks, remunerated along an incrementally ascending scale.

Although Mills altered the terms of debate among the American public at large, his argument harks back to older diatribes against elites. As Hugo Drochon shows in his essential new book, Elites and Democracy, such harangues gained momentum at the turn of the 20th century when European thinkers examined the composition of society and its representation by elected elites.

The starting point for Drochon’s story is a troika of thinkers later dubbed “elite theorists of democracy”. Between 1890 and 1911, two Italians — Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto — as well as the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels, set out to analyze relations between rulers and ruled under conditions of mass democracy. Responding to the extension of the franchise in European states — in France, Italy, Germany, and Britain — these figures sought to take the measure of modern politics. Even so, neither Mosca, Pareto, nor Michels shared ideological common ground. Originally, Mosca was an exponent of gentrified liberalism, Pareto a qualified defender of market freedoms, and Michels a supporter of the German Social Democratic Party, at one point attracted to its anarcho-syndicalist wing.

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From these different angles of vision, all three figures worried about the monopolization of decision-making. It seemed that the rise of popular rule was matched by opportunities for charismatic authority. In launching their objections to the prospect of Caesarism, they rightly presupposed the need for a political division of labor. There must, they accepted, be some species of governing structure, staffed by rulers of a given character, and either rigidly persisting or being dynamically replaced.

Drochon recounts how this tradition of commentary impacted 20th-century political science. The American scene in particular split into partisans of elite practice and critics who favored popular participation. Like so many standoffs in academic culture, this tussle soon evolved into a dialogue of the deaf — with “elite theorists” fearing the irrationality of the crowd and “radical democrats” seeking to bypass the state in search of the voice of the people.

As Drochon observes, there is a doggedness about these divergent renditions which belies the changeability of the social arrangements they hope to represent. Instead of “control by elites”, modern capitalist democracy is defined by competition for office and fluctuating classes locked in dynamic struggle. This is not a recipe for egalitarian rule, but neither can it be dismissed as a static oligarchy. Society is divided into a multitude of interests periodically converging to advance a common cause, only to fragment again as the conditions for alignment recede. This leaves us living with the constant rise and fall of elites, partly driven by the shifting divisions churning within their electoral base. The constant remaking of electoral attitudes over the past two decades across the UK and Europe illustrates this fluidity. So too do the erratic fortunes of parties throughout the same period.

The contemporary cast of US politics vividly captures this process. Over a year into the second Trump administration, and cracks are already starting to appear among his loyal adherents. Held together by the forces of an aggrieved nationalism, MAGA shows signs of gradually splintering into camps, with potential clashes in the offing over the Epstein files, the future of AI, and foreign entanglements. Confused messaging around the war in Iran — from J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, and Donald Trump — reflects dissensions over strategies and goals. An inward-looking “America First” posture finds itself hitched to a military machine focused on the wider world with supporters of both tendencies pulled in two directions. In due course, the leading enemy of liberal elites may be remembered as an oligarch-in-chief, with new victims and new culprits serving to mobilize fresh political collisions.

And yet the problem is so much deeper than bad candidates. It’s the problem of a decrepit regime — a collection of functionaries and placeholders, who’ve reaped the benefits of the past 40 years of economic and moral deregulation and are now incapable of running the world which they have made. Like all elites, they developed the habit of backscratching and logrolling. And, like all elites, they soon lost touch with the people beneath them.

That explains the striking number of destructive liberal policies, which have wreaked havoc across the West. San Francisco, a bastion of social liberalism, is so addled with homeless encampments on the streets and drug addicts snorting fentanyl in public, that even progressives have had enough. Sweden, once a by-word for social harmony, now suffers from the highest rate of death-by-shooting in Europe, thanks to the proliferation of immigrant gangs. The British northern cities that powered the Industrial Revolution are plagued, in their ethnic enclaves, by cousin-marriage, honor punishments and grooming gangs. The response of all too many liberal intellectuals to these tragedies is to demand more of the policies that led to them in the first place. The triumphalism of the Nineties has been the common man’s loss.

This has provoked a growing number of intellectuals on both the Right and the Left to proclaim the death of liberalism. The most familiar argument is the Marxist one that liberalism is a ruling-class trick, and that the harsh realities of exploitation and imperialism underlie their treacly words about “freedom” and “democracy”. A more interesting, and more influential, argument is being made by the New Right — many of whom call themselves “postliberals”. They argue that liberalism proved a disaster, not because good ideas were badly applied, but because liberalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.

In his 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, the political theorist Patrick Deneen wrote: “Liberalism has failed because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them.” Liberal regimes succeeded when they were disciplined by traditional ideas about virtue and civility. But their core belief — that we are all rights-bearing individuals, answerable primarily to ourselves — inexorably destroyed the civilizational constraints that gave it strength. Liberal individualism generates self-indulgence and anomie. Equality of opportunity produces a new meritocratic aristocracy that has all the aloofness of the old aristocracy with little of its noblesse oblige.

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The bulk of these postliberals are headquartered in the United States. A group of followers of Leo Strauss, based in the Claremont Institute in Southern California, relentlessly expose the faults of the “liberal regime”. Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a leading exponent of the idea of the “unitary executive”, argues that the job of the state is to promote good government rather than to protect liberty as an end in itself. The US vice-president declares himself to be a postliberal. There are so many products of the Claremont Institute in the White House, the administration, and Congress that they are fondly known as “Claremonsters”.

Postliberalism has plenty of supporters in Britain, like James Orr, a Reform advisor and Cambridge philosopher of religion, and the Reform MP, Danny Kruger, who propose a faith and flag-based conservatism as a solution to the disillusionment of modern life. Both are devotees of Roger Scruton, the late conservative intellectual, who fulfills a similar role to Leo Strauss in British postliberal circles. Far more belong to the Blue Labour tradition, like Maurice Glasman, Adrian Pabst, John Milbank and Philip Bond. (John Gray, the most intellectually significant of this group, has retreated from postliberalism of late.)

Their critique predominates at a time when the current liberal establishment is the most decadent it’s been — when, in the words of the American historian John Patrick Diggins, “few live for liberalism, but many live off it”. This all comes at a time when the forces of illiberalism are stronger than they have been at any time since the Thirties. The world’s second-biggest economy, China, is ruled by a Marxist dictator; its biggest democracy, India, by an illiberal strongman; its most battle-tested war machine, Russia, by a man who wants to bury the liberal order; and its most important liberal power, the United States, is, at best, an uncertain friend of the liberal order that it created after the Second World War. Donald Trump is an instinctive rather than a cerebral politician, but almost all his instincts are illiberal, sometimes astonishingly so. Trump has declared, like an absolute monarchy, that the only constraint on his actions lies in his own conscience. He has not even bothered to pay lip-service to international law in his wars of choice in Venezuela and now Iran and the wider Middle East.

Yet the postliberal influence owes much more to luck than substance. They fail to address the material problems that plague the post-industrial wastelands that they excoriate: Deneen’s follow up to Why Liberalism Failed, called Regime Change: Towards a Post-Liberal Future, is notably short on workable policies. They have no answer to the question: what happens to populism when it’s undisciplined by liberal constraints? The experience of the Thirties suggests nothing good. It is time to mount a defense of liberalism before it is too late.

***

It’s impossible to defend liberalism without starting with a definition of what we are defending. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been associated with the shrinking of the role of the state when it comes to both markets and morality. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair produced a widely admired bourgeois-bohemian (BoBo) synthesis by combining the Thatcherite deregulation of the economy with the Sixties deregulation of morality. The strength of the postliberal argument is that it recognizes this synthesis is now producing more problems than benefits.

But the BoBo synthesis is only one possible manifestation of liberalism. You can have big government liberalism as well as small government liberalism, moralizing liberalism as well as permissive liberalism. (John Maynard Keynes was no less of a liberal than Friedrich Hayek.) All are linked by three core beliefs: that society starts with the individual rather than the collective; that truth is only reached through open debate; that power is so dangerous that it must be divided and constrained. Anything that prevents individuals from flourishing, ideas from clashing, and power from being constrained, is illiberal.

During its long history, liberalism has suffered from several near-death experiences, but it has always revived. It has done this by addressing new problems in new ways while staying true to its fundamental principles. One example is particularly germane to our current predicament — namely, New Liberalism, which emerged at a time in the late 19th century, when the laissez-faire liberalism of the Victorians risked being swept aside by the emergence of a new world of organized trade unions, mass political parties and authoritarian nation states. A group of intellectuals, such as T.H. Green, Leonard Hobhouse, and Graham Wallas, dreamed of a liberal state — more interventionist while not sacrificing the principles of individualism and divided power. A remarkable group of New Liberal politicians followed — such as David Lloyd George, R.B. Haldane, and Winston Churchill, who revived the moribund Liberal Party and built the foundations of the welfare state. The First World War and the rise of Labour eventually led to the Liberal Party’s “strange death”, but liberal ideas were absorbed by both ascendant parties under the influence of John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge.

In the Twenties and Thirties, liberalism risked being stamped to death by jack-booted fascism or communism. “The liberal state is destined to perish. All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal,” proclaimed the socialist-turned-fascist Benito Mussolini. But the Allies proved him wrong by defeating the Axis powers in the Second World War, constructing the Iron Curtain, and remaking the world according to a new collection of liberal principles. In the Seventies, the postwar regime gave way to stagflation and bureaucratic sclerosis only to revive under the influence of the neoliberal revolution.

It’s understandable that people are angry with the liberal establishment and disillusioned with centrist promises. But the alternatives from both the Right and the Left are certain to be worse. During his first term, Trump catered to his billionaire friends, entrenching crony capitalism and passing big tax cuts, while providing his populist base with rhetorical puff balls. He didn’t even make significant progress with his “beautiful wall”. During his second term, with the old Republican establishment sidelined and both postliberal and illiberal thinkers in the ascendant, he is creating chaos in the Middle East, sending stock markets into a tailspin. Meanwhile, in Britain, Reform’s economic policies are an unsustainable mixture of Thatcherism and Left-wing statism.

The radical Left is even more impractical. The Green Party’s policies, so entreatingly presented by Laura Spencer, the victorious candidate in Gorton and Denton, are a JCR laundry list of wishes: spending funded by taxing billionaires, the legalization of drugs and pornography and, almost as an afterthought, nice things for the environment. Not only that, but the radical Left is also blind to the problems created by mass immigration, half-hearted integration, and the development of parallel societies. Spencer not only brushed aside worries about immigration as “racism” but also distributed pamphlets in Urdu and extracted political capital by posturing over the war in Gaza. The noisy fight between the far Left and far Right is often a distraction from collective problems like fixing governments that require concerted effort and careful thought.

The only way forward is to reinvent liberalism just as thoroughly as previous generations of liberal reformers did to address new problems, while discarding established shibboleths if they happen to get in the way. If we fail, we will be swept aside by the radicals of the Left and Right; if we go off half-cocked, we may end up making the problem worse. The last attempt to revive the radical center was made by Emmanuel Macron, who only entrenched and deepened France’s divisions. His failure is not only the result of his divisive, vain and self-glorifying character, but — more importantly — because, as a creature of the neoliberal revolution, he focused on yesterday’s solutions, economic deregulation, rather than addressing today’s problems: the tensions between the center and the periphery, and the failure to assimilate immigrants. Liberals must be bolder and more self-critical than the Man in the Élysée. We must also be more consistent. Such a reinvention must start with three strategies: rethink, reposition, and re-articulate.

First: rethink. Today’s liberals need to break with their four-decade fixation on economic and moral deregulation. The Epstein affair should provide both a reason for such a break and a spur to self-reflection. The Epstein Files have not only exposed how many neoliberal heroes, from tech-billionaires to illustrious economists, have feet of clay, but also the moral hollowness of a philosophy of self-indulgence and self-gratification that lies at the heart of the BoBo culture.

Today’s liberals must also reapply the core principles of liberalism as they encounter old sins in new forms. The tech giants are not only amassing market dominance of a sort that we haven’t seen since the robber barons, but are also using that dominance to misinform and manipulate individual citizens. Left-wing identitarians are offending the basic principles of individualism by treating people as members of groups rather than as unique individuals, even applying different selection standards to different groups, or by canceling people with what they deem to be heterodox opinions.

The biggest weakness of today’s liberals is that they have become the establishment — the heads of Oxbridge colleges, Quangos, the BBC — and they have all the attendant weakness of an establishment. Radical liberals must challenge this establishment with the same vigor with which the Greens and Reform challenge it, but in the name of liberal principles rather than identitarian ones. Why have the heads of universities betrayed the sacred principle of free speech? Why has the grooming-gang inquiry been bogged down in procedure and vacillation? Why is groupthink spreading in NGO circles?

Every successful reformulation of the liberal creed, from the New Liberals, through the managerial capitalism of the Forties, to the neoliberal revolution of the Eighties, has involved the sweeping away of a decadent elite and the creation of a new cadre of reformers. Today’s radical liberals must muscle aside the existing liberal establishment — that is, the Davos establishment — before the populists do it for them. Radical liberals also need to be willing to forge alliances with groups that their elders have made a career demonizing. Conservatives such as Roger Scruton turned out to be right about pornography and libertinism. Some socialists were right about the dangers of the over-concentration of economic power. Liberalism has a wonderful history of reviving itself through unexpected alliances.

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Third: re-articulate. One reason why liberals were so successful in the past is that they were so good at communicating. John Stuart Mill was a master of clarity. Lincoln wrote like an angel. Gladstone held his audiences enthralled for hours. Today’s liberals have entirely lost the art. Officials sound like Soviet-era bureaucrats, with wooden phrases about diversity being our strength taking the place of “the laws of dialectical materialism”. Eurocrats have invented their own language of “attestation” and “decommitting”. Academics write for constipated referees who hold their fates in their hands. Corporations produce bureaucratic blather. The current leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, is better known for his theatrical stunts than any particular argument or opinion.

There are two reasons for this failure: being the establishment, liberals largely talk to each other rather than to the public, academics to academics and Eurocrats to Eurocrats. Being a decadent establishment, they don’t really believe what they are saying. They are repeating formulaic phrases in much the same way as Soviet bureaucrats repeated such phrases — to protect themselves from criticism and curry favor with the even more powerful. The simple fact of breaking with the establishment should be enough to take care of the dead-prose problem: once people start believing what they say, and once they start speaking to the public rather than experts, they discover the language that they need.

Once they’ve recovered their spirit, our reformed liberals need to take to the public square. Diplomats need to be willing to advance the case for open societies and religious toleration in the UN and other such forums. Politicians need to speak out more loudly against illiberal practices such as shouting down speakers in universities, persecuting people who “blaspheme” against Islam in schools, or practices such as arranged or cousin marriage.

What often passes for liberalism today is a ghost of its former self. But liberalism has revived from near-death experiences in the past— and it has revived precisely because liberals have rediscovered their ability to reapply their philosophy to fresh problems and put their arguments into new world. Liberalism properly conceived is the only reasonable solution to the great problems of modernity: how to live together in a pluralist society and how to preserve social cohesion while unleashing individual talents. Ignore the siren voices talking about postliberalism. Resist the superficial glamour of the twin populisms of the Left and Right. It is time to begin the patient but exhilarating work of renewing liberalism for a new age. Centrists of the world, unite!

To stay on the correct end of this axis requires a person to organize his moral energies around a boutique picture of reality. It is a picture that doesn’t even try to comprehend common experience — most pointedly, the experience of receiving millions of migrants from different societies (some of them quite alien to our own), with the attendant dislocations. These include the thinning of the social fabric and a retreat into further isolation — what the sociologist Robert Putnam called “hunkering down” in his study of the effects of diversity.

The ideal of the open society doesn’t simply ignore the downsides of immigration — including rising rates of sexual violence — it gains force precisely as a principled negation of experience. It serves to coordinate elites in the epistemic equivalent of a potlatch: an Olympian disregard for social realities expresses a certain magnificence in those who are able to maintain it. Yet while a traditional potlatch is made possible only by an underlying asceticism (a nobleman must be ready to do without the fine things he destroys), the renunciation demanded by our leaders falls most heavily on those they rule. Embracing the open society is the ultimate luxury belief.

As conveyed by the latter half of  Popper’s title, the idea of the “open society” is inherently polemical. It requires a foil of closedness. “In what follows,” he writes, “the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.” The alternative to the open society, then, is tribalism and magic, or some version of collectivist effacement of the individual. The paradigmatic activity of the open society is “personal decision”.

Popper’s original advocacy of the open society carries over to those who speak today in the idiom of universal “human rights”, as opposed to the civil or political rights that attach to citizens of a particular, bounded nation. Anything bounded is “closed”. If the mindset of human rights is given to moral militancy, Popper’s treatment helps us to see that the agenda of human rights carries with it a literal military corollary.

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Given the date of publication, this military frame of mind is understandable. As Popper writes in the preface to the 1950 edition, his ideas for the book had been germinating for some time but “the final decision to write it was made in March 1938, on the day I received the news of the invasion of Austria”. Clearly, the proximate enemy of the open society that he had in mind was Naziism. That would be the “magical or tribal” enemy. But he also takes on communism, the collectivist enemy. Popper speaks for the third combatant in the conflict, which goes by the conventional title “liberal democracy”. Whatever we call it, it is the regime-type that ultimately prevailed over both adversaries in the longer conflict that began with the Anschluss in 1938 and stretched through the Cold War. Arguably it is neither democratic, in the literal sense of rule by the demos, nor liberal in the 18th-century sense of limited government. Rather, it is “open”.

What interests me is the disposition that animates the ideal of the open society. Those who share it invoke the Nazi threat ritualistically, so 1938 remains important as an emblematic moment. But the open society ideal slipped the bounds of any particular circumstance to become a permanent imperative, never satisfied so long as any concrete, circumscribed political community remains. The end of the war in no way relieved enthusiasts of the open society of their need for enemies.

Both points of polemical orientation for Popper — Nazi racialist tribalism and Marxist collectivism — are forms of human association. The remedy for both, then, is individualism. Popper seems historically obtuse, willfully so, in his failure to register the fact that there are non-malignant forms of association that can provide the basis for social order. He skips straight from the Nazi and communist threats to an equally radical counter-ideal of individualism that is meant to inoculate us against both hazards. In this, he comes across as reactive and simple-minded, unable to conceive of a social order mediating between individuals which would satisfy his ideal of openness.

I believe the problem for Popper is that any kind of order that is already established is external to individual will. (Recall that the open society is marked by “personal decision”.) The freedom of the will is compromised when it is impinged upon by binding associations, such as family or nation, that are not chosen. To be innocuous, any association must be provisional; it must be continually re-chosen on a case-by-case basis as circumstances shift. Accordingly, the open society will be one of disengaged monads who come together episodically for various forms of exchange but have no deep or abiding connection to one another.

Popper recognizes that an open society therefore tends to become one of “abstract relations”. In this he is prescient. “We can conceive of a society in which… all business is conducted by individuals in isolation who communicate by typed letters or by telegrams, and who go about in closed motor-cars. Artificial insemination would allow even propagation without a personal element.” He offers this sketch “by way of an exaggeration” in 1943, but in 2026 it seems less so.

Given this thinned-out anthropology, Popper commends economics as the proper mode of doing social theory, because it treats human actors in their abstract relations of exchange. He condemns sociology — for example, that of Durkheim — for its “dogmatic belief that society must be analyzed in terms of real social groups”. It almost sounds like the fact that they are real counts against them. We are not to dwell on the concrete differences of habit and character among different social groups. Ideally we would not even notice them, as such noticing could compromise our allegiance to the ideal of the open society and its corollary: permissive immigration policy. The open society will be a society of individuals denuded of those qualities they acquire in association, as encultured beings. Openness seems to require positing sameness, so the variety of persons and of peoples can be treated as a mass of interchangeable human resources.

Somehow, Popper and his political descendants have succeeded in attaching the word “democracy”, used as a term of approbation, to this imperative of abstraction and replaceability. A better name for it would probably be “bureaucracy”. Bureaucracy takes as its object of rule what Popper’s contemporary Robert Musil called the “Man Without Qualities”.

Popper recognizes that achieving the open society will require a vigorous imperial project. What he had in mind, writing during the war, is not fully spelled out. But arguably, today’s interventions in the internal affairs of putatively sovereign nations by the trans-national organs of openness would seem to capture the spirit of what Popper had in mind. Such organs include the European Commission, USAID and indeed George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Whatever Popper envisioned, he was discreet enough to make his case for imperialism by historical proxy, treating the Peloponnesian War as a conflict between the open society of Athens and the closed society of Sparta.

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For Popper, any criticism of Athenian imperialism can only be a cover for reaction. “Thucydides himself was an anti-democrat. This becomes clear when we consider his description of the Athenian empire, and the way it was hated by the various Greek states. Athens’ rule over its empire, he tells us, was felt to be no better than a tyranny, and all the Greek tribes were afraid of her.” But Popper, writing over two millennia after events, knows better. All people of goodwill loved being ruled by Athens. Note his pointed misapplication of the term “tribe” to any city that resisted Athens’ enlightened exactions of tribute, or its beneficent control of commerce throughout the Aegean, made possible by its naval superiority.

“[I]t is necessary, I believe, to see that tribalist exclusiveness and self-sufficiency could be superseded only by some form of imperialism. And it must be said that certain of the imperialist measures introduced by Athens were rather liberal.” One expression of Athens’ liberality that Popper points to, which anti-imperialists fail to appreciate, is Athens’ offer to the island of Samos. As reported by Thucydides, the offer was that “the Samians should be Athenians from now on; and that both cities should be one state; and that the Samians should order their internal affairs as they choose and retain their laws.” There is no contradiction here, if the Samians choose wisely — for openness.

What Thucydides says sardonically, bringing out the confluence of Athens’ high moral self-regard with her insatiable need for conquest, sounds very much like how Samantha Power or Ursula von der Leyen might scold the Hungarians today for their recalcitrant independence. But without Thucydides’ irony, of course.

Popper reads backward into the fifth century his own determination to defeat “tribalist exclusiveness”, which requires total hegemony of the enlightened. The word “tribalism” is frequently used by bien pensants to dismiss any insistence on political boundaries as provincialism; as a hangover from a less enlightened stage of human development. The political philosopher Pierre Manent pointed out that “in a deliberately provocative way, the most archaic political form, and traditionally the most despised, becomes the generic name for all political forms and human groupings”. That is, all groupings that fall short of the Universal and Homogeneous State that is to be administered by a post-political clerisy of the open-minded. The most efficient way to combat closed-mindedness is with open borders, global labor markets, and plenty of foreign interventions to keep up a steady flow of migrants and refugees. Invade the world, invite the world.

Popper argues against utopianism, because it leads to totalitarianism. Yet it does not seem to bother him that his hope for a post-political condition is itself utopian and requires a total program; an empire of openness from which no exit is to be countenanced.

It didn’t have to be this way. Long before climate change became widely recognized, a zero-carbon energy source was at hand: nuclear power. Instead of burning molecules, a reactor splits atoms, so no carbon is released. And because a nuclear plant runs day and night, it can compete directly with polluting coal- and gas-fired power stations.

Yet more than 70 years after its debut, nuclear power still hasn’t exactly taken off. Only about 30 countries produce it today. And despite much talk of a “nuclear renaissance”, with fevered talk of floating power plants and better supply chains, its share in the global electricity mix has fallen sharply since climate change rose on the public agenda in the Nineties — from a peak of 17% in 1997 to less than 10% today. Since 2000, more plants have closed than opened.

The dominant narrative about nuclear power now is that it’s an outdated technology we would be better off without. In both Finland and France, building a single reactor took a staggering 17 years — not even counting the time spent securing permits. Both of these “prestige projects” went far over budget.

And so, with the planet heating up, it’s no wonder many experts and politicians argue we can’t afford to wait for the nuclear industry to catch up. Despite the obvious benefits, they dismiss nuclear energy as a classic case of too little, too late. Maybe they’re right. But the problem goes deeper. Nuclear power might, in fact, be a case of too much, too soon.

***

When atomic power entered the scene in the Fifties, the future of energy looked bleak. Across much of Europe, the best coal mines were largely exhausted, and almost every suitable site for a hydroelectric plant had already been used. With the discovery of vast oil fields in Saudi Arabia, a new fuel for the future seemed to have arrived. But oil, too, carried its own risks. When Egypt closed the Suez Canal in 1956, oil supplies suddenly stalled.

Other concerns came from scientists who cautiously warned that the Earth was warming. In 1956, the opening sentence of a newspaper article could hardly have been clearer: “The burning of fossil fuels,” it says, “may have very unpleasant consequences for the global climate in about 50 years’ time.” Two years later, a young postgraduate geochemist named Charles David Keeling set up a measuring station for atmospheric carbon dioxide on a Hawaiian volcano, showing that higher carbon concentrations coincided with higher temperatures.

Thankfully, there was nuclear energy. With nuclear reactors, a country could drastically reduce its dependence on coal, oil and natural gas. Even better, geologists had shown that the resource used in reactors — uranium — was abundantly available. And even though carbon emissions were not yet on the public’s mind, nuclear plants tackled the more pressing problem of smoke and smog. Had humanity finally found an unlimited source of clean energy?

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No wonder nuclear power was heavily promoted. After the war, the global economy was swiftly reordered, sparking rapid recovery. In factories, automation boosted productivity. On the land, fertilizers and synthetic pesticides delivered higher yields. Economies boomed, unemployment fell, and wages rose. For more people than ever, life became more comfortable. Nothing captured this leap into modernity better than the enigmatic appeal of nuclear power.

Just imagine: in countries facing drought, nuclear plants could power desalination, ending conflicts over scarce water. They could also drive large-scale fertilizer production, ensuring fields remained fertile. And nuclear energy promised a revolution in transport, supplying the power for trains, ships, planes and even rockets. The possibilities seemed endless.

The words of Lewis Strauss, a leading figure in all things nuclear, became legendary after a speech, in which he declared: 

“It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly… and will experience a life span longer than ours.”

There was only one catch: the very same technology that powered these new plants was also used to produce the world’s deadliest weapons. During the Second World War, scientists and the US military worked together to turn nuclear fission into a weapon: the atomic bomb. Near the end of the war, it was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A single bomb had never caused such destruction. Governments everywhere were quick to see the bomb’s strategic value. By 1949, the Soviet Union had carried out its first atomic test. With the “red menace” stretching from Berlin to Beijing, tensions soared between the communist East and the capitalist West. Both superpowers now possessed a superweapon shrouded in secrecy.

These were anxious times. Never before had humanity held a weapon capable of destroying itself. If a government leader were to launch such an attack and trigger nuclear war, smoke and dust from burning cities would rise into the atmosphere and clump together, blocking sunlight. Rain would cease to fall. Earth’s temperature would plunge to ice-age levels. Harvests would collapse, and for the survivors, famine would be inevitable.

It was a former military officer — Dwight D. Eisenhower — who offered a way out of this conundrum. Having been commander-in-chief of the D-Day invasion in 1944, the memory of the Second World War was never far from his mind, nor was the looming threat of World War III. When he became president in 1953, Eisenhower worried that society was being paralyzed by fear of total annihilation.  That same year, he delivered a speech at the United Nations General Assembly that would become a turning point in history.

Eisenhower described the immense explosive power of the US nuclear stockpile. How to build such weapons was no longer a secret. This, he warned, was a “danger shared by all”. Then the US president signaled his willingness to scale back the weapons arsenal. He wanted to take nuclear technology out of military hands and put it to peaceful use — in medicine, agriculture and, above all, energy supply.  “The miraculous inventiveness of man,” he said, “shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”

In the wake of Eisenhower’s speech, soon known as “Atoms for Peace”, Washington launched a major charm offensive to showcase peaceful applications of nuclear power. Brochures, posters, films, comics and children’s books spread the message.

It worked. Within a few years, dozens of countries had signed contracts with the United States for reactor construction or the supply of enriched uranium.

Nuclear power advanced rapidly. Its heyday came in the Sixties, when plants were still relatively cheap to build and kept getting larger. No other energy source had ever gained such a large share of the market so quickly. If anything, the future looked nuclear.

***

Not so fast. While public opinion on nuclear power was warming, not everyone joined the chorus. Critics dismissed the utopian dreams. To some, nuclear fission smacked of hubris.

Above all, the shadow of the atomic bomb loomed large. As the Cold War deepened, more and more people realized that nuclear plants were tied far more closely to nuclear weapons than officials had admitted. The evidence was plain: in the United States, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) oversaw both power plants and bomb facilities. The basic physics was the same, and so were many of the people involved.

Although the number of plants surged after the Atoms for Peace speech, the boom was overshadowed by the spread of nuclear weapons. By the time Eisenhower left office eight years later, the global stockpile had jumped from just over 800 warheads to nearly 20,000.

A simple logic took hold: more nuclear power meant more nuclear weapons. After all, the countries that owned the bombs had built the very industry that produced them. Open the door to nuclear plants, and it seemed only a small step to all-out war.

From the start, this connection was clear. In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that enormous amounts of energy were somehow locked inside the atom. Nuclear physics began to take shape as a new discipline once Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy demonstrated the transmutation of atoms — a natural process of radioactive decay that released energy. Some pioneers dreamed that this hidden power could bring a clean and prosperous world within reach. But they also imagined something darker: if the energy inside the atom could be freed, it might unleash an explosion — a huge explosion. In 1903, Rutherford noted: “Some fool in a laboratory might blow up the universe unawares.” The following year, in a lecture to a British Army corps, Soddy warned that whoever managed to break open the atom and harness its energy would possess “a weapon by which he could destroy the earth if he chose”.

The idea quickly moved beyond academia and into the public imagination. In 1913, H.G. Wells, then the most popular science fiction writer, published The World Set Free, a novel envisioning a mid-20th-century war in which both sides wielded a new radioactive weapon of unprecedented power. Wells even gave it a name: the “atomic bomb”.

Fiction became reality. In 1945, the atomic bomb proved it could wipe out an entire city. Soon, nuclear weapons testing became a cause for alarm. Scientists issued warnings: even minor fallout could enter the food chain and weaken human bodies. Some predicted that exposure to radioactive particles might trigger an epidemic of cancer and genetic mutations.

Only decades earlier, the picture had been very different. Exaggerated fantasies of what radiation might do were a staple of books, comics and films. Exposure bestowed magical powers. In the Twenties and Thirties, it was widely believed that radiation enhanced health. Radium became a symbol of vitality. Doctors prescribed it for ailments ranging from heart disease and high blood pressure to arthritis, epilepsy, headaches, diabetes and rheumatism — practically the entire medical encyclopedia. A craze followed. Radioactive ingredients appeared in soaps, salves, bath salts, face creams and hair tonics. You could snack on radioactive chocolate and then brush your teeth with toothpaste laced with thorium, for a sparkling smile.

But it wasn’t all magic. Victims of overexposure felt weak, developed cataracts, lost their hair or became temporarily infertile. The worst damage appeared in doctors and assistants who experimented lavishly without protection. Some tested X-ray equipment by holding their arm in front of the screen. While many of their patients benefited from diagnostic radiation, the experimenters themselves suffered terribly, as it became clear that high doses of radiation damage DNA and cause cancer.

Some comic books cast radiation as a blessing, granting superheroes extraordinary powers. Others portrayed it as a curse, unleashing monsters with deadly rays. This ambivalence was embodied in Superman: his X-ray vision let him see through walls, yet he was powerless against kryptonite’s radiation.

After Hiroshima, the atomic bomb brought these half-buried fears to life. Americans realized that while they could not prevent a nuclear war, they might at least stop nuclear tests. Beginning in the Fifties, protests filled the streets demanding a ban. Eventually, above-ground tests were halted, eliminating most fallout. Yet even as the arms race accelerated beneath the surface, public protests faded. But the fears never fully disappeared.

So what happened? As historian Spencer Weart argued in Nuclear Fear: A History of Images, public attention shifted — from nuclear weapons to nuclear plants. Doesn’t a reactor give off radiation too? What if an accident were to occur? Would a nuclear plant explode like an atomic bomb? And what about the waste? Such questions soon turned into a new goal: banning nuclear power altogether.

Developed in a time of growing distrust of technology and contempt for science, nuclear power became the symbol of needless complexity. There must be an easier way to get energy than splitting unstable atoms of enriched uranium. Nuclear plants were enclosed by fences and warning signs, shrouded in secrecy and danger. Surely, this is not what progress looks like.

Today, supporters of nuclear energy point out that accidents are so rare that nuclear power is as safe as solar and wind. They stress that only a minuscule amount of uranium is needed. They cite calculations showing that all the highly radioactive waste produced worldwide since the Fifties would fit into a single football stadium.

And that murky boundary with nuclear weapons production? For decades it has been tightly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which even received a Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts. Meanwhile, the global stockpile of nuclear weapons has dropped from a peak of 70,000 in the Eighties to 12,000 today.

Critics counter that the shrinking size of the arsenal is irrelevant, since leaders like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un need only one bomb. And while the volume of nuclear waste may be small, it doesn’t appear to be safe when the industry buries it deep.

Then there is the cost. A blizzard of regulations — combined with governments that cancel projects midway or shut down reactors prematurely — has made building a nuclear plant exorbitantly expensive and painfully slow.

This has kept us in a stalemate for decades, with no end in sight. Since the mid-Eighties, the combined share of zero-carbon energy to the global electricity mix has risen only marginally, while the fossil share has grown slightly more. As power consumption continues to rise, producing enough clean electricity will be a formidable challenge.

Leading organizations of climate scientists and energy experts are unambiguous about the role of nuclear power. The IPCC lists it as one of the “technology solutions”. The UNECE argues that climate targets cannot be met without scaling it up.

But who’s listening? Not the politicians who have dedicated themselves to environmentalism or socialism and worked tirelessly to restrict, regulate and reduce the development of nuclear power. And certainly not the campaigners at legacy organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth that have warned about nuclear power for generations. Dropping old ideas is never easy.

And while, among the general public, acceptance of nuclear power is growing, modern liberal societies are hardly the most fertile ground for expanding the nuclear fleet. In densely populated Europe, with its strong democracies, every proposed site for a new plant is bound to face public protest.

For now, the so-called “nuclear renaissance” rests on promises and pledges — words without substance. So far, there is little sign that we can muster the will to build, keep and nurture nuclear plants.

***

Saying nuclear power is not a quick fix goes back decades. Already 50 years ago — long before accidents drove up costs and tightened regulation — experts warned it would be “too late” to meet rising energy demand. It would take at least 25 years to build enough plants to end the crisis. One newspaper even called it “a classic case history of technology that just didn’t make it on time”.

Yet a closer look at history suggests the opposite: nuclear power was always miles ahead of society itself. For one thing, radioactivity was discovered when many doctors still didn’t wash their hands. For another, the atom bomb was dropped in a world where Polish soldiers had recently faced German tanks on horseback, armed with lances and bayonets, while the first nuclear reactor was built before anyone owned a color TV.

Perhaps we weren’t ready for something so disruptive. Perhaps that is why some clung to exaggerated fears while others indulged in naive optimism. It may explain why we still can’t come to terms with nuclear power.

Frederick Soddy foresaw this tension early on. The chemist who, with Ernest Rutherford, demonstrated the mysterious transmutation of atoms in 1900, “fervently hoped”, according to his biographer, “that the control of atomic energy would be postponed until society had become sufficiently mature to take responsibility for this achievement of scientific investigation, yet not postponed indefinitely, for then there would be an inevitable energy crisis”.

But when is society ever going to be mature enough? Even with the current revival of interest in nuclear energy, its proponents still seem to be hesitating. Some call for innovations: building smaller reactors, using thorium fuel, recycling highly radioactive waste, or even betting on nuclear fusion. Advocates hope such advances will ease concerns about safety and waste. More crucially, they expect the new designs to be cheaper, faster and easier to build. Just last week, the US military airlifted a compact reactor across three states — a highly visible showcase of President Trump’s ambition to modernize an industry long seen as stagnant.

Yet the sober reality is that none of this has been proven. By chasing innovation, nuclear advocates risk tossing aside a technology that works for experiments that will take decades to deliver. It is as if they’re getting cold feet.

Others in the pro-nuclear camp argue for sticking with the technology we already have. Yet they seem to overlook that large light-water reactors thrived mainly under central economic planning and state-owned utilities. Scaling up “old nuclear” would require societies to move away from liberalized energy markets — a systemic change that is unlikely to happen. In that sense, they may be the real ones with cold feet, delaying the expansion of nuclear power.

It is frustrating to see climate policy move so slowly, in part because the potential of nuclear power remains largely untapped. Our failure to act swiftly has locked in decades of additional emissions and narrowed the options available to us. Future generations may well look back on this period as a profound missed opportunity — one of the great failures of our time. Still, halting global warming will not happen any faster if we keep insisting that nuclear power comes “too late”.

Of course, anything chained to endless regulations can never be a quick fix. Nuclear power may now indeed come too late to avert some of the worst effects of global warming. But the deeper truth is this: it simply came too early.

Saunders tells the story of one of the more fascinating — and troubling — patronage networks ever developed. From 1947 until 1967 when it was exposed by the muckraking journalists at Ramparts, the Central Intelligence Agency acted as the United States’ unofficial Ministry of Culture, covertly organizing and financing conferences, musical performances, art shows, plays, films, books, magazines, and academic journals as a part of an extensive propaganda campaign Saunders calls the “cultural Cold War”. Originally focused on Western Europe, the cultural Cold War spread to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and came to include domestic operations in violation of the Agency’s charter.

At the center of these operations was the Congress for Cultural Freedom. A front organization based in Paris, it was directed by a taciturn Estonian former salesman named Michael Josselson and a flamboyant Belarusian composer named Nicolas Nabokov, the first cousin of the novelist. This odd couple met in White Russian émigré circles in Weimar Berlin, found their way to US military intelligence during the war, and receive top billing in Saunders’ cast of hundreds. Who Paid the Piper? is as gripping as a spy novel, all the more so for being true.

According to Saunders, the CIA’s main objectives in waging the cultural Cold War were twofold. The first was to counter the Soviet narrative, widely held among intellectuals in Western Europe, that the United States was a soulless consumer society whose way of life was bereft of cultural achievement. The second was to foster and cultivate what became known at the Agency and State Department as the “Non-Communist Left”, a group of former communists disillusioned with the Soviet Union under Stalin, and who could be relied on to rally on behalf of values such as freedom of expression and democracy whenever criticism of US race relations and military adventures abroad was voiced. For these ends, the Agency decided, avant-garde art — atonal music, jazz, modernist literature, and, above all, abstract expressionist painting — would be particularly useful. “High culture,” Saunders writes, “was not only important as an anti-Communist line of defense, but also a bastion against a homogenized mass society.” It was what would allow the United States to lay claim to the mantle of “Western civilization” inherited from Europe after the devastation of the war.

During its first two decades, the CIA was probably the most culturally sophisticated workplace in the country. For its personnel it drew heavily on the brain drain from Europe and from graduates of the Ivy League, especially the aristocrats of Yale; by the mid-Sixties, half of its employees held advanced degrees, and almost a third held doctorates. Nicolas Nabokov was a friend of Diaghilev and Stravinsky; James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counter-intelligence, studied New Criticism and published Pound, William Carlos Williams, and E. E. Cummings in Yale’s literary magazine; British art critic Philip Dodd was not exaggerating when he said that in the Fifties the most perceptive critics of modern painting were to be found in Foggy Bottom. Many who worked at the agency took to their roles as cultural patrons with genuine relish: Tom Braden, assistant to Truman’s Director of Intelligence Allen Dulles, compared his colleagues to the Medici and Renaissance popes.

Initially, the main obstacle to the cultural Cold War were the paranoiacs and philistines in Congress, who, to this day, prefer kitsch to high culture, and for whom the Non-Communist and Communist Left was a distinction without a difference. In 1947, George Dondero, a Republican from Michigan, put the kibosh on “Advancing American Art”, a traveling exhibition supported by the State Department, whose budget was public. “Modern art is communistic,” Dondero said, “because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress.” Meanwhile, another Republican in his caucus claimed that, “If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as the Boulder Dam.” To circumvent such embarrassments, which contributed to the perception the CIA was trying to combat, the Agency came up with an ingenious solution: using a small portion of Marshall Plan funds as an off-the-books slush fund to distribute “candy” without Congressional oversight.

The CIA had more tricks up its sleeve. Recognizing that cultural programs suspected of being astroturfed by the US state would be less effective as propaganda, the CIA laundered the money through a consortium of private foundations — including the Ford, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, whose board of directors all maintained close personal and professional ties to the foreign policy establishment. These, alongside lesser-known foundations, spent the money directly, or funneled it through the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

It was, by all measures, a tremendous success. George Kennan, the architect of America’s containment policy, told the curators at MoMA, without a doubt the CIA’s most significant asset in the cultural Cold War, that he “would willingly trade the entire remaining inventory of political propaganda for the results that could be achieved” by institutions like the museum’s International Program. For America’s “cultural mandarins”, painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were ideal vehicles for the worldview they were trying to promote. Their art “spoke to a specifically anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent, it was the very antithesis of socialist realism.”

When it came to literature, it is estimated that the CIA was responsible, in whole or in part, for the publication of at least 1,000 books, including translations of T.S. Eliot, Chekhov, and Pasternak. It sponsored the staging of a play by Gertrude Stein and film adaptations of George Orwell; it was responsible for the compendium The God That Failed, whose arguments about the Soviet Union are unknowingly regurgitated by Right-wing podcasters today. When the poet Robert Lowell had a manic episode that saw him strip naked and mount an equestrian statue in downtown Buenos Aires, he was straitjacketed and repatriated with the help of the Congress’ man in Latin America, who was acting as the CIA’s “leash”.

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Liberalism's sin was born in the Cold War

By Samuel Moyn

One comes away from Who Paid the Piper? with the impression that there was hardly any important mid-century artist or intellectual who didn’t get a taste of the CIA’s candy. The Beats and the Black Arts Movement seem to have come away clean, but following Saunders’ methods, I looked into the career of my favorite poet of the period, Frank O’Hara, who worked at MoMA’s International Division. I discovered that the “New Spanish Painting and Sculpture” show he set up was financed with a grant from the CBS Foundation, which was headed by the cigar mogul William Paley, a personal friend of Allen Dulles. O’Hara’s itinerary in Spain — which is listed in the first two lines of his beloved poem “Having a Coke With You” — was made possible by a CIA front.

Magazines too, including The New Yorker, were beneficiaries. Dwight Macdonald’s Partisan Review — the great magazine of its era — could thank the intelligence community not only for secret payments, but also for tax-exempt status, improved circulation, and the platforming of its articles in midcult organs like Time, whose VP was then moonlighting as a psychological warfare specialist. No story of the cultural Cold War could exclude the London-based Encounter (the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s flagship journal) co-founded by the New York intellectual Irving Kristol and the British poet Stephen Spender, who comes off as a pathetic, self-deluding ignoramus in Saunders’ account. To name only a few, W.H. Auden, Isaiah Berlin, Jorge Luis Borges, Nancy Mitford, and Bertrand Russell all appeared in its pages.

I finished Who Paid the Piper? with mixed emotions. On the one hand, if we’re going to have a ruling class, it’s better for it to have good taste. There have always been patrons, but what is historically unique about today’s moguls, oligarchs, and financiers is that they show no interest whatsoever in high culture; indeed, things have got so bad that taste is no longer thought necessary to legitimize wealth, or even to distinguish the ultra-rich from competitors. In its long, sordid history as an instrument of that class, the CIA has wasted money on worse things than non-objective art, little magazines, and 12-tone compositions.

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The paradox of free thinkers

By Blake Smith

Today, what are politely called the intelligence and defense communities seem perfectly content to dispense with such niceties as cultural legitimation, and to rely instead on brute force and flooding the zone of everyone’s attention with shit.

On the other hand, in the name of democracy, market competition, and freedom of expression the American state pursued a program insulated from public scrutiny, damaged the careers of artists who were unwilling to play ball, and grafted the thorn of propaganda onto the flower of 20 years of cultural production. In her concluding assessment of the cultural Cold War, Saunders does not mince words:

Behind the ‘unexamined nostalgia for the “Golden Days” of American intelligence’ lay a much more devastating truth: the same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew governments, supported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster. ‘In the name of what?’ asked one critic. ‘Not civic virtue, but empire.’

I had a similar feeling of ambivalence when, shortly after, I read that the Trump administration would be zeroing out the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. State funding is a way for society to show what is valuable to it: the amount of money distributed by the NEA could be found in the cushions of the couches at the Pentagon, and the administration is not getting out of the culture game altogether. Instead it is proposing to shower cash on reactionary kitsch: to take but one example, in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, $40 million was appropriated to build a National Garden of American Heroes, which would feature 250 statues of such worthies as the gun-manufacturer Samuel Colt, the mouse-manufacturer Walt Disney, William “Wild Bill” Donovan (the founder of the CIA) and Sam Walton (the founder of Walmart). Why? According to the text of the 2021 Executive Order 13978 in which the idea was originally proposed, “The National Garden is America’s answer to [a] reckless attempt to erase our heroes, values, and entire way of life. On its grounds, the devastation and discord of the moment will be overcome with abiding love of country and lasting patriotism. This is the American way.” George Dondero couldn’t have said it better himself.

Yet I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed to learn how many imprints, magazines, and artists whose work I admired, in no small part because of their willingness to oppose state policy, had applied for grants in the first place. Although the NEA, founded in 1965, is — or was — an independent federal agency, it is still, like the infinitely more consequential USAID, an arm of US soft power. So often we are blackmailed into supporting dubious institutions because the short-term consequences of dismantling them for the people who are dependent on their funding would be disastrous. Money, as I was saying, is dirty, whether it comes from inheritance, private foundations, or the state; at the end of the day, it is hard to begrudge artists who are doing something more interesting than the market is willing to reward from getting it however they can. A world in which there is both hard and soft power may be preferable to a world in which there is only hard power, but it is important to remember that he who pays the piper sometimes calls a discordant tune.

All the same, we continue to build our national identity not atop hard-nosed studies of our past and present — but on stories of America’s exceptionalism, a pathology that affects both ends of the country’s political spectrum. Each side has its heroes and villains. Yet from a higher conceptual standpoint, these dueling narratives function almost identically. Absent a tragic frame, neither flag-waving exceptionalism, nor its identity-obsessed opposite, can admit that America is defined less by some abstract “idea”, whether the utopian pursuit of “liberty for all” for the Right or racial loathing for the Left, and more by the vagaries of its Anglo-Protestant origins.

Nowhere is this obsession with this mythos of America clearer than how the nation’s political elites view the Founding. One side, after all, insists that 1776 was near-divine — even consulting AI versions of George Washington for insight on the country’s contemporary malaise. The other condemns the founding as genocidal, built on the stolen land of indigenous peoples and the mass enslavement of Africans. Yet both center America’s birth as an epochal event, either as the root of all evil or “the most consequential revolution in history” reflecting “the noblest aspirations of humankind”.

Those last quotes come from the first five minutes of Ken Burns’s new PBS series The American Revolution — but don’t let the patriotic cheerleading fool you. For in the end, the show does a remarkable job of blending what political scientist James Ceaser called “exceptionalist” and “anti-exceptionalist” narratives together into a coherent whole, along the way pleasing patriotic Republicans and subversive Democrats alike. Indeed, that’s rather the point. By crafting a documentary where Left and Right can all feel “represented”, Burns deftly avoids dealing with the roots of America’s problems and how they manifest themselves today, good news for our plutocratic rulers, and bad for the rest of us.

Among the dwindling educated cohort that still watches public broadcasters like PBS, Ken Burns is a documentarian of unmatched achievement. And, to be fair, the reputation is well-earned. Starting with his show on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, he has produced some of the best multimedia historical nonfiction of the last 40 years. He’s proved remarkably popular too. During his watershed 1990 series The Civil War, PBS averaged nearly 14 million viewers per episode, with an unheard-of 39 million tuning in to watch at least one night of the series. As we drift ever closer towards a post-literate society, Burns is now the closest thing the United States has to a national raconteur, pioneering a method of engaging historiographic visual storytelling that’s broadly accurate, frequently engrossing, and capable of bringing both scholars and general audiences to the table.

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Given his reputation, it’s unsurprising that nearly anything Burns produces now will fund the entire PBS operation for years. That’s especially true since the Reagan administration began slashing funding for public broadcasters in the Eighties — cuts that were accelerated during the Gingrich-led GOP Congress of the Nineties. Now, under Trump and Musk’s DOGE, US public broadcasting is effectively dead. In its place, PBS is funded largely by wealthy corporations and foundations. Yet if that’s meant Burns has had plenty of cash to make dozens of programs, on everything from the Vietnam War to jazz, his glittering career hasn’t been critic-free.

Especially to those working within the often-cloistered world of scholarly American history — a nitpicking discipline filled with poorly-paid but self-important individuals — he remains an unpopular figure, representing a dubious strain of “pop history”. The public is his intended audience, not scholars. The obvious corollary, in the university common room anyway, is that everything about his work is suspect, especially for Leftist academics already skeptical of his patriotic references to the revolution’s inherent nobility.

The Right, for its part, does something similar. Spurred on, perhaps, by a sense that his association with PBS represents progressivism manifest — hardly unreasonable given its patrician fans and complacently liberal funders — conservative critics flooded social media to accuse Burns of capitulating to “wokeness”. Much of their rancor focused on two rhetorical sleights of hand early in The American Revolution. The first comes near the six-minute mark of episode one, which describes the Iroquois Confederacy of Native American tribes as a “democracy”. It’s an odd claim to make without the caveat that the Iroquois system was not a liberal democracy as Americans understand the term. Rather, it was something else entirely, a society based on collective land ownership and indigenous values utterly rejected by the Founders.

Yet that pales compared to Burn’s second example of shallow inclusivity, when he implies that Benjamin Franklin’s first call for independence was somehow inspired by the Iroquois. It’s certainly a bizarre claim — Franklin’s politics were clearly far more shaped by philosophers like John Locke — even if it again speaks to the Right’s tendency to bristle at any suggestion that the United States didn’t emerge as a kind of secular miracle.

Ideological grumbles aside, of course, placing the Iroquois Confederacy front and center surely represents a shrewd career move on the part of Burns and his colleagues. In the liberal public broadcasting world, no one is above cancellation, not even Burns. With millions watching, the filmmaker and his colleagues knew they had to please identitarian obsessives, both inside his PBS team and across the airwaves.

More fundamentally, though, Burns’s focus on the Iroquois speaks again to that sense of exceptionalism: in a way that blends the Right-wing cheerleading with its more skeptical Leftist mirror. After all, foregrounding the Iroquois in this way promotes a multicolored pseudo-inclusive version of American exceptionalism, with Burns succumbing to the mythological deification of the country’s origin story: just now with added diversity. Certainly, turning the Iroquois into the true unrecognized Founders feels better than acknowledging that they — and, by proxy, all the indigenous tribes of what became the United States — were crushed, absorbed, or otherwise expunged en route to the stucco-framed dystopia we inhabit today.

What gets lost here, of course, is Unamuno’s sense of the tragic, the recognition that the Thirteen Colonies’ revolt, like every war and revolution, involved brutal violence and shameless cultural erasure. No less important — and contra the Burns contributor who reifies the standard trope of the US as a nation that coheres “not around ancient history, but ideas” — this glibly inclusive framing also ignores the genuine roots of American society and politics.

The fact is that all the ideas embedded in America’s founding governmental structure did not appear as miracles, but rather emerged from a deep and complex Anglo-liberal heritage. This encompasses everything from the Glorious Revolution to the Puritan exodus to frontier revivalism. Even those that arguably weren’t, notably small‑“r” republicanism, were filtered through the Anglo lens of limited government, free markets, and deep suspicion of taxation. Nearly every signatory to the Declaration of Independence was an Anglo-Protestant. Only one, Charles Carroll, was Catholic. Yes, Jefferson and Franklin were Deists, but even that was a genteel cousin of Anglicanism. No less striking, the new United States was profoundly English in its ethnic makeup: especially once you exclude enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples, neither of which were considered fully human by most Founders.

None of this history — ugly, contingent, grounded not in grand principles but in the gloomy depths of the past — is exactly inspiring: and it partly explains why Americans might prefer to wallow in exceptionalism instead. Yet if it’s explicable, it’s also a problem, and not just for the historical record. For in his inability to genuinely analyze our past, Burns is equally unable to reflect on the present, and how the republic founded in 1776 reached the ludicrously dysfunctional spot it now occupies. Forget petty arguments over income tax; this is especially pertinent given our current governing structure, with all its flaws, is basically the same one established way back at the tail end of the 18th century. But because, we are told, it appeared as a kind of immaculate conception, it can never, ever change.

And here, again, we must return to one of the fundamental problems in all American discourse — the one no foundation, documentary series, or identitarian gesture dares grasp. Left or Right, America has no true tragic sensibility. Tragedy requires acknowledging limits, accepting inescapable loss, and admitting that some conflicts cannot be reconciled through uplift or philanthropy. But America’s elite culture, from Burns’ refashioned Founder worship to the donor class’s racial‑and-gender therapeutics, refuses to sit with this truth.

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By Jonathan Kirshner

There are several ways of understanding this. Joseph Campbell, the eminent scholar of comparative mythology, argued that once a culture’s great myths unravel, its leadership soon collapses. With this in mind, it’s easy to see that a mythical founding is deeply valuable to America’s plutocratic elites — ensuring citizens remain loyal, whether loyalty is deserved or not. It follows, meanwhile, that more challenging reinterpretations, ones embracing historical nuance and the sense that one’s gain is another’s loss, are never rewarded by the country’s rich and powerful. That’s hardly surprising — America’s elite has thrived off precisely this status quo. Such connections are implied right at the start of all Burns’s shows. For this most recent one, the list of centimillionaire estates underwriting the project takes nearly two full minutes to recite.

That hints at another, less grandiose reason, why progressive donors might fund cozily exceptionalist documentaries like The American Revolution. At bottom, after all, they endanger nothing of the economic system that allows elites to extract their wealth and accrue their outsized civic influence. It’s an irony compounded by the fact that Burns’s progressivism, if cringeworthy to the Right, is actually not much of a threat to anything that concerns the economic interests of their donor class. The whole fight, like most of the culture war, is one safely contained with the unconscious limits of exceptionalism. One side laments that the Revolution didn’t include women and minorities; the other not so much. “Was the American Founding great — or only great for its time?” That’s the full scope of the debate allowed about our national origin.

There’s a cultural element here too. For one thing, and notwithstanding the sniffiness of progressive academics, shows like The American Revolution allow funders to pose as fighting for “social justice” and righting the wrongs of US history by teaching the viewing public not to be “racist”, “sexist”, or “heteronormative”. It is a posture that flatters them, insulates them, and publicly distances them from the social conservatism most common among the poor and working classes.

By leaning into this cultural distance, meanwhile, the wealthy donor class believe they are properly socializing the Great Unwashed. Funding public programs that foreground “minority” voices allows establishment types to cleanse the reputational sins of family estates. Consider, here, a man like Alfred P. Sloan: a major and consistent funder of PBS programs, and someone who, as the long‑time head of General Motors, tirelessly worked to kill public transit systems all across the United States. Sloan’s cold-blooded campaign to uproot trolley and train systems helped destroy any shot at walkable communities or sane urban planning across most of Middle America. But now that his descendants fund documentaries on the Native American roots of the Bill of Rights, they can believe that the ledger is somehow cleared.

Taken together, anyway, these varied justifications for exceptionalist storytelling all serve the same purpose — helping us avoid seeing the nation as it actually is. A tragic place, pretending to be hopeful. A wounded empire, forcing a smile, performing optimism. A people desperate for meaning in a sea of digital emptiness, which still insists nothing truly irreversible has ever happened. Until we reclaim some ability to face our past without immediately laundering it into a dopey lesson or a posture, America will remain what it is now. A society that cannot tell its own story honestly, because it cannot bear to confront the cost of being itself.

What Decca herself called the “Mitford industry” — an endless stream of books about the fascinating sisters — is still going strong, and anyone entering the scene needs a fresh angle. In the last few months alone, there’s been a collection of Mitford murder mysteries, a graphic novel, and a biography of “Muv”, aka family matriarch Lady Redesdale. The new biographer of the second-youngest Mitford is a Woman’s Studies Professor, Carla Kaplan; and she bravely opts for presenting her material as self-help for socialists. Her heroine is pictured as a model radical, rebelling against her fascist origin story. Or as Kaplan solemnly puts it in her introduction: “Those who seek to become good allies can learn a great deal from Decca’s ways of change.” 

The premise is certainly entertaining. The Mitfords might even say it was extraorder, in their comically exaggerated, nursery-speak way. Perhaps in future it might be franchised for other family members too. Someone could write a book of tradwife inspiration based on Debo (marry alcoholic duke, inherit old castle, start making artisanal cheeses to pay for repairs); or of queer liberation, based on Pamela (be a devoted animal lover; eventually leave feckless bisexual husband for a Swiss-Italian horsewoman). There could even be a book of advice for Groypers based on Unity and Diana. But in the meantime, we have to make do with Troublemaker. It is a lot of fun — because the Mitfords are always fun, whatever else they are. But as a case study for contemporary progressives, it is not a wholly convincing read.

Kaplan tells us that, in moving from England to the States, Decca “transformed herself from isolated aristocrat into engaged, effective ally”. She did so “without the benefit of social media, affinity groups, or retreats” and “before widely circulated essays such as Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” or books such as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist”. Just imagine. What Decca did possess, of course, is an elite contact list and a high-born English accent. This is presumably why, shortly after arriving in the US, she and her first husband Esmond Romilly almost immediately got offered a husband-and-wife column in the Washington Post. “It’s a distinct advantage to be English here,” Romilly noted. “That is if you continue repeating what a wonderful country America is.”

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In the present, Decca surely would have been viewed with more suspicion by her comrades, if only for genetically induced guilt-by-association. Accusing your relatives of being literal Nazis may be overdone these days, but in Decca’s case it was perfectly true. And there would perhaps also have been less tolerance for the variable presence of her moral scruples. On the one hand, she was brave, determined, and effective in fighting injustice, working collaboratively with other communists and socialists in her new Californian home. On the other, stealing seems to have been her favorite form of economic redistribution, and not only from the rich. She took food from cafes, pilfered toiletries and household goods from kindly hosts and benefactors, and at one point snatched “a mattress from a nearby cabin” so she could get a comfortable night camping in a tent.

And she didn’t mind exploiting others’ labor either. During the war, she was employed as a typist at the Office of Price Administration, but couldn’t type, so — as she herself described it in her own memoir — she would wander into the typing pool and pretend to be a boss: “I want nine copies of this by noon, please, and be sure that it’s correctly proof-read.” Later, newly arrived in San Francisco with an inconvenient baby in tow, Decca persuaded her working-class landlady to babysit “and to charge her less than half the going rate”.

It’s not so clear, then, that Decca’s life functions as idealized woke inspo, for oblivious entitlement is never far enough away, even when she is poor. And she’s unlikely to win any posthumous awards for gentle parenting either. Going on honeymoon with her second husband, and faced with the problem of what to do with her two-year-old, the couple took a bus trip, “passing Constancia and her suitcase out the window to a family to whom they’d been given a letter of introduction”. And when her little boy had an inconvenient fever on the day of a house move, Decca simply deposited him at the hospital and rushed off, leaving the nurses “furious”. By the time Kaplan tells us that her subject was “never a helicopter parent”, the information is fairly superfluous. In 1953, she writes, Decca and her husband were both suddenly subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee for a week, and their children were “left to mostly fend for themselves”. What she doesn’t explain how anyone could tell the difference.

Thankfully, the biographer eventually drops the somewhat strained theme of progressive-flavored canonization, and the rest of the book unfolds as a standard issue cradle-to-grave romp. Much of the material is already covered elsewhere. Still, with a subject like this, you can’t really fail: an eccentric, jolly contrarian, improbably popping up like a posh “Where’s Wally?” character during seismic events in American 20th-century history.

For instance: a blazing row with Decca is the apparent reason for Churchill’s recorded bad mood in the White House on Christmas Day in 1941, or so Kaplan speculates. Twenty years later, she turns up in a church in Montgomery, Alabama, listening in solidarity to Martin Luther King preach while a white supremacist mob rages violently outside. Fast forward again, and her popular book about the funeral business, The American Way of Death, is the reason RFK rejects an expensive metal coffin sent for his brother in Dallas in favor of a cheaper one. And after Jonny Cash gives $10,000 to inmates at Folsom State Prison following his famous appearance there, it is Decca, doing investigative work on prison reform, who discovers that the donation had not been honored, and who makes sure the inmates get the benefit.

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There is certainly lots to admire about this life. Decca was staunchly anti-fascist, at a time when fascists were genuinely threatening; anti-racist, when racism really was systematic and institutional. In her work, she was clever, energetic, and irrepressibly droll, a combination which made her a highly effective activist-journalist — perhaps one of the very first. (“Objectivity: I’ve always had an objective,” she would joke, pouring scorn on “pathetic cabbages without opinions”.) Her comic talent is certainly something modern Leftists could usefully emulate. But whether she ever successfully managed what she called the “uphill work” of “escaping from the private Mitford cosmic joke… into the real world of activism, family, and writing” has never been clear to me; and especially not after reading Kaplan’s book.

For the psychological sources of Decca’s politics — first communism, then socialism — remain quite mysterious. It is never really explained why Left-wing thought originally gripped her, nor why it kept such a hold for the whole of her life. She clung to her communism for a while, even after Stalin’s atrocities were revealed. She stuck to her prison abolitionist stance even after a violent sexual assault by a stranger (which she also refused to report, as he was black).

Her relationship with communism doesn’t seem to have been an intellectual love affair. There are few references in the biography to Marxist ideas. And tender-hearted empathy for her fellow humans also seems unlikely. Kaplan notes that a close friend of Decca’s once remarked that she had “a tendency to laugh off one’s problems… not being sympathetic… it’s almost as if she would rather not get involved”. 

What does seem clear is that Decca was “on fire about injustice” and could be intensely oppositional. In this last respect, she does not seem so very different to Unity, the obstreperous Hitler-loving sister to whom she was closest in childhood. Each was infatuated with a vague political ideal, initially neither knowing nor caring about the details. Each liked shocking their elders and causing trouble. Unity was going to join the British Union of Fascists, so Decca picked the communists to be different. 

On the window of their shared bedroom, Unity carved swastikas with a diamond ring, while Decca carved hammers and sickles. Both put their adolescent fantasies into action: Unity running off to join Hitler, Decca going to “fight” the fascists in Spain, though she saw no action. Sisterly rivalries are weird and intense. If Unity had announced to the nursery that she loved Stalin first, might it all have been the other way round?

We are not going to get the answer from Decca herself. She hated introspection: “I don’t think I could ever take myself seriously enough to go grubbing about looking for my soul.” But maybe the real takeaway from Troublemaker is that political obsessions are often like this, no matter what their flavor. You can tell yourself it is simply because you are a noble, principled, Good Person. But maybe it is the expression of a secret personal struggle, one that began long before you even knew what politics were. Maybe it’s a good way of formalizing the separation from the herd of your siblings. Maybe you are just really attached to the image of yourself, reflected back in your family’s outraged blue eyes. 

In the United States, especially, church membership is soaring among the young. The assassination of Christian evangelist Charlie Kirk poured fuel on the fire, but the spark kindled well before that horrific event, and it’s the more conservative churches that have welcomed the bulk of the newcomers. It’s not accidental that young men make up the vanguard in this movement back towards traditionalism. Every social movement with a future worth watching starts by attracting young men, who always seem to be the vanguards of enduring social change.

Why, though, is this shift benefiting conservative Christian denominations? There are plenty of other options for disaffected young men, some of them far more threatening to the status quo than attending Mass, finding Jesus by way of Wednesday night Bible classes, or indeed watching Charlie Kirk videos. Very few of them are making bombs, for example, or shooting at politicians they dislike — in the United States, at least, that has been far more common on the Left in the last few years. I can see several reasons for this state of affairs.

The first, put simply, is that these days conservative Christianity is perhaps the best available way for a teenage boy to shock his mother. I don’t mean this as a joke. A core part of the process by which teenagers define their own identities in contrast to the expectations of their parents is the quest for new and enticing ways to spark parental outrage. Young people half a century ago could still do that by moving further out toward the notional cutting edge than their parents were willing to go. This they accordingly did, and cultures thus lurched Leftward generation after generation.

Now? If a teenage boy says “Mom, I think I’m gay,” he’s likely to be told, “That’s nice, dear.” The same is almost as often true if he says that he thinks he’s transgender, while if he announces that he’s decided to worship some strange pagan cult, his mother may just invite him to the local Wiccan circle next time there’s a full moon. It’s hard to imagine anything more crushing to the teenage ego than being patted on the head and told that your mother approves of your attempted act of rebellion.

By contrast, imagine what happens if that same teenage boy comes home wearing a MAGA hat and announces that he’s just found Jesus. In most of today’s middle-class households, that would evoke a truly satisfying display of parental hysterics. Meanwhile, those teenagers who aren’t quite willing to face so epic a tirade from their liberal parents can pursue a less overt version of the same rebellion, swapping conservative Christian memes with their friends online in much the same spirit that led their parents to smoke cannabis with their friends after school. Cannabis itself and the other erstwhile trappings of Leftist radicalism are now too socially acceptable to fill that role. In our present culture, radicalism has become the conventional wisdom, and so the conservative has become the transgressive.

There’s a second dimension of this shift, which inevitably gets left out of simplistic linear notions of “progress”. Glance back over the history of the Anglophone world and what emerges is a curious alternation of public morals over the course of roughly a century. After the rollicking Elizabethan bawdiness of the 16th century came the Puritanism of the 17th, with its Roundheads and its colonizing Pilgrims. After that came a return to looser morals in the Georgian era of the 18th century, which was among other things a golden age of pornography and saw London get a reputation as Europe’s capital of prostitution; following that, the 19th century made “Victorian” a byword for strident moralizing, and this was reversed in the usual way by the exuberant decadence of the 20th.

Now the 21st century has arrived. The moral license of the 1900s has already undergone sharp restrictions at the hands of feminists, while conservative Christians are taking things further. None of this is accidental. Moral rigidity and moral laxity, in sexual and other contexts, both have their pathologies; there is a middle path of balance between them that avoids the problems of both, but humanity being what it is, this is rarely reached except as a transient stage between one extreme and the other. People of good will, appalled by the noxious consequences of Victorian morality, set the process in motion that led to the Sexual Revolution; people of equally good will, appalled by the noxious consequences of that revolution, are setting processes in motion that are giving the pendulum a good hard push the other way.

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By John Michael Greer

Conservative Christian churches have a great deal to offer those who see the value in moral restrictions, partly because they have so long a history of aggressive puritanism, and partly because they are among the few institutions in the modern world that have consistently pushed back against the liberal moral tides of the last century. It thus makes perfect sense that, as public attitudes swing back toward puritanicalism, conservative churches should become attractive again.

Yet there may be another process at work in all this, one playing out over a far greater timespan. Over a century ago, it was anatomized with mordant clarity by Oswald Spengler, the most accurate and therefore the most angrily dismissed of the 20th century’s students of historical cycles. What we are seeing is the early stages of what Spengler called die zweite Religiosität. The usual translation of this phrase is “the Second Religiousness”, but for reasons I will explain shortly “the Second Religiosity” is a better fit. To understand the way this is taking shape behind today’s headlines, it’s necessary to trace the outlines of Spengler’s unfashionably perceptive theory of history.

It’s crucial, in approaching Spengler, to realize that he was discussing morphology, not causality. Like Newton, he “feigned no hypotheses” to explain why history unfolds the way it does; his quest was simply to show what happens, and to seek a comparative morphology of great cultures that can be used as a basis for prediction, in much the same way that Newton’s theory allowed the accurate prediction of planetary motions. Spengler sought to line up history’s great cultures side by side, and look for the common patterns, in the same way that a comparative anatomist puts the bones of a bat’s wing, a dog’s forelimb, and a porpoise’s paddle side by side, to show that each has the same underlying structure as a human arm. Did he succeed? The jury’s still out, but his predictions so far have proved accurate, while those of his critics have generally flopped.

The Second Religiosity is a core element in both Spengler’s theory and his predictions. Every great culture starts out under the sway of a distinctive religious vision, one that embodies and frames the culture’s understanding of the cosmos. As the culture moves out of its springtime era into maturity, the mythological language of its religious vision gives way to a secularizing trend. The result is an age of reason, in which the old vision is pried loose from its religious setting and turned into an assortment of rationalist ideologies.

The pathbreakers and cheerleaders of the age of reason inevitably convince themselves that society has put its superstitious past behind it, but their ideologies turn out to be far more fragile than the faith they supplanted. Eventually, as the age of reason crashes to ruin around them, people find themselves confronted by chaos, and flee for refuge to the one resource that remains: the traditional religious forms of their culture’s springtime. This is the Second Religiosity, the return to religion that marks the fading of every great culture. The revival of Confucianism as a religious ideology in imperial China after 1100 and the return of India to Hindu faith around the same time are examples well documented in the history books. As for the Western world, Spengler expected the Second Religiosity to arrive sometime soon after the year 2000.

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By Paul Kingsnorth

Whatever the culture, the Second Religiosity always presents itself as a return to the source of a culture’s early greatness. In a crucial sense, however, it’s nothing of the kind. The religion of a culture’s springtime is forged of the shattering impact of transcendent realities on individual human prophets and visionaries. It is accordingly rough-hewn, unruly, and comfortable with contradictions that look like absurdities to the later, more logical consciousness of a later era.

The religion of the Second Religiosity, by contrast, is ordered, formal, and reasoned: all the hallmarks of religiosity, as distinct from religion in any deeper sense. Its goal is to provide a bulwark against inward and outward chaos, and it does this by relying on history rather than on the terrifying transrational shock of direct religious experience. Where the original religious impulse faces the future, the Second Religiosity is always oriented toward the past. The winds of autumn can always be heard whistling through it. Eventually they will tear it to tatters, leaving the ground cleared for the newborn religious vision of some future great culture, but that time is still far off for us.

Just now, by contrast, there are good reasons why the flight from chaos into the Second Religiosity is in the ascendant. The most important of these is the accelerating failure of faith in progress, the unacknowledged pseudosecular religion of our time. Barbed jokes of the “I believe I was promised a jetpack” variety are merely the cutting edge of a broader collapse of faith in progress. This doesn’t merely impact what we may as well call the “Tomorrowland future”: that world of fading daydreams in which flying cars, fusion power and interplanetary colonization all have their natural habitat. Rather, it embraces the entire belief that history must move in whatever direction we think we want it to go.

At the moment, that faltering faith is being propped up by the overblown hype surrounding large language models (LLMs), which are currently being marketed under the misleading label of “artificial intelligence”. This label is a misnomer: LLMs aren’t intelligent. All they do is string together statistically likely sequences of words or other symbols in response to a prompt. Computer scientist Emily Bender has described LLMs as “stochastic parrots”. The phrase isn’t quite apt, because parrots are highly intelligent birds, but the metaphor still has value. LLMs, like unusually stupid parrots, repeat strings of words without any connection to the realms of meaning, purpose, and value that underlie the phenomenon of intelligence.

Yet right now, blind faith in LLMs is propping up more than the mythology of progress. Rather, these overhyped programs are propping up one of history’s great speculative delusions, with the usual concomitants of wildly inflated stock prices and equally distorted investment decisions. Readers who don’t yet know how this ends may find it useful to consult John Kenneth Galbraith’s wry history The Great Crash, 1929, or Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

We are already starting to see close equivalents of Irving Fisher’s famous insistence, nine days before the 1929 crash, that stocks had reached “a permanently high plateau”. While it’s true that the market can stay insane longer than most investors can stay solvent, a speculative bubble on this scale has only one possible outcome. It’s just a matter of when the crash finally hits.

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The future is barbarian

By John Michael Greer

Here again, though, it’s not just the technological side of progress that has crumpled in recent years. One of the odder features of contemporary political life is the way that so few political parties on the Left offer proposals for the future that differ in any noticeable way from the present, and the ones that do — Marxist parties come to mind here — harken fondly back to the dreams of a past era just as enthusiastically as any conservative. More clearly than anything else, perhaps, this shows the twilight of an age of reason that once put grand dreams of the future at the center of its cognitive universe.

The opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States just now is a case in point. The Democratic Party has stopped talking about anything but their opposition to the Trump administration and its policies — this at a time when a huge share of Americans are bitterly unhappy with the state of the country and the government policies that shape their lives. “Vote For Us So Life Will Continue To Suck” isn’t exactly a compelling election slogan, but it’s a fairly good summary of the Democratic platform these days. Trump’s populist movement, by contrast, has specific proposals for change, and is enacting them at a respectable pace despite the concerted opposition of the Washington establishment. This likely accounts for a good share of Trump’s popularity, even among those who don’t necessarily share his opinions.

The same weird sense of stasis appears throughout today’s industrial Western cultures. Consider our popular movies, dominated by remakes of decades-old franchises and dreary morality plays. As another example of the same exhaustion, there was a time when the goal of activists working on racial and gender issues was to heal once and for all the social wounds inflicted by various bigotries. Martin Luther King Jr. was far from the only one to speak movingly of a future in which people of all colors would live together in peace, harmony and equality. That sense of a potential for change has all but vanished from the rhetoric of today’s activists. What they offer instead resembles nothing so much as an unusually dour sort of secular Calvinism, in which the Original Sins of racism and sexism bear down immovably on humanity.

At least Calvinism offered the promise of redemption; today’s activist culture does not. Eternally cursed with the burden of privilege, due to the actions of some few of their ancestors, those who happen to belong to the wrong race, gender, and on and on through an ever-proliferating swarm of categories, can look forward to nothing but endless humiliation and repentance, with no hope of any change to their sinful condition. Thus it’s hardly surprising that a growing number of people so stigmatized are backing away from ideologies of this sort and seeking out a different setting — that of the nearest conservative church — where, whatever else they may find, they can at least hope to encounter a Redeemer.

As this suggests, there is a very real sense in which the vagaries of popular culture in recent years, unbeknownst to their creators, have been setting the stage for the coming of the Second Religiosity. This comes as no surprise to readers of Spengler, or for that matter to anyone familiar with the phenomenon of the return of the repressed. Religion — not in the sense of ideology, but in its deeper and truer sense as the confrontation of human consciousness with transcendent experience — was for several centuries rigidly repressed by the mainstream currents of Western industrial society. Now it is back in force.

Yet it bears remembering that the coming of the Second Religiosity is to a very great extent a leading symptom of that return, not its full expression. In the heyday of the Roman Empire, as the age of reason set in motion by the rise of Greek philosophy imploded in a shower of failed dreams of the world made rational, people across the empire turned back to the established religions of their time, making the traditional offerings to Jupiter, Juno, and the rest of the polyglot pantheon of the ancient world. That was their Second Religiosity, their refuge from the tremendous chaos of their age, and it played an important role in maintaining classical society during its latter centuries.

It did not last, however. While incense billowed upwards to the gorgeous marble statues of the gods and goddesses, new beliefs wholly alien to classical polytheism spread through the crawlspaces of Roman society. A few centuries on, one of them would rise up to overthrow the temples and clear the ground for cultures yet unborn. From the rise of the cult of Osiris in Egypt’s First Intermediate Period to the predominance of Amidist Buddhism in early modern east Asia, it’s a familiar story.

The first stirrings of the same process are doubtless under way, though it would be just as impossible to point to the faiths of the future now as it would have been for a Roman intellectual to pick Christianity out of the turbulent religious underworld of the Roman world and identify it as the inheritor and destroyer of the classical world. It will be a century or more yet before it becomes clear which beliefs seize the imaginations of the dispossessed and disaffected, overthrowing the institutions of our Second Religiosity in their turn. Dealing with that is a task for future generations. What we face now is the resurgence of traditional religion in Western societies that had dismissed it as an outdated relic of a barbarous past. Dramatic changes for good and ill can be expected as that process continues, and the future in which so many thought we would spend the rest of our lives goes whistling down the wind.

You hear it in the friend talking of how public figures they loathe will “inevitably” fall from grace. You read it in writers’ pronouncing about how “future historians will say” whatever they fervently believe right now. And you detect it in talk of how certain things are “outdated” or “not relevant” to “the modern era”: invariably an excuse for the powerful to consign things they dislike to the Dustbin of History.

These assertions all relate to time in a particularly progressive manner: as a vehicle of improvement. This means that, by definition, the future will be better than the past; that which is of the past — and therefore not modern — does not belong and must be removed. Time appears to this progressive style not merely as a succession of moments taking us from one minute to another, but as a redemptive force, clearing out what is wrong in the world and bringing in what is right: newness, change.

Crucially, the idea also gives an exalted role to the person who understands progressivism: the wannabe theorist who claims to understand the sweep of history, seemingly without temporal or geographical limit. He — and it is normally a he — knows how social improvement comes about. He knows what needs to be promoted and eliminated in order for History to move forward. And anyone can take on this role if they get the style right.

This is the case even for those who stand on the anti-progressive side of our culture wars. Earlier this year, the political scientist Eric Kaufmann unveiled the “Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science”. It argues for a “critical approach to progressive social science’s ‘critical’ claims”: including those which relate to systemic racism, sexism, heteronormativity. Progressivism, as Kaufmann has put it, is “synonymous with the hybrid ideology of Left-modernism”, which is located at the overlap of expressive individualism (including avant-garde modernism), cultural egalitarianism and humanitarianism. It is “more Lennonism than Leninism”, he writes, but it is on the wane.

The manifesto is a serious attempt to redirect Western intellectual life, proposing, as Kaufmann puts it, “a reunification of grand theory with positivist social science”. However, this idea of “a Post-Progressive Era” immediately set my progressive radar off. For it presents the intervention both as political (a new initiative seeking to win support) and as sociological analysis: an assertion that what is desired is in fact happening, that history itself is moving in the way proposed.

Besides the Lennon-to-Leninist kind, there is another powerful strain of progressivism in our culture which I think is reflected in Kaufmann’s paper: the Protestant-inflected liberal idea of progress. This form is generally less invasive than “Left-modernism”, albeit it served to justify British imperial expansion and the conquering of North America. Its narrative of ever-rising freedom and prosperity, summed up by Herbert Butterfield as “the Whig Interpretation of History”, first appeared most obviously in Britain before becoming a foundation myth of the new United States.

It has faith in history rather than gripping it by the throat. And it has also tended to trust in power, vesting particular faith in economic power: thereby serving as an Establishment ideology.

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By Giles Fraser

A century ago, in his defining tome The Idea of Progress, J.B. Bury referred to progress as “the animating and controlling idea of western civilization”. He added: “The phrase CIVILIZATION AND PROGRESS has become stereotyped, and illustrates how we have come to judge a civilization good or bad according as it is or is not progressive. The ideas of liberty and democracy, which have their own ancient and independent justifications, have sought a new strength by attaching themselves to Progress… Socialism, at an early stage of its modern development, sought the same aid.”

The progressive style of supporting its desires with predictions certainly gives any creed or proposal a little extra oomph, invoking social power as well as right. This creed isn’t just right but is going to win, the message goes, so you had better get on board or face the consequences. History as progress therefore ends up mobilizing interest perhaps better than any other form of assertion that doesn’t invoke God.

And so we find thinkers and politicos almost reflexively putting themselves and their ideas forward not just as desirable but inevitable: they are not just right, but destined to win. And this is so not just on the progressive Left. Donald Trump has always done this, presenting himself as the ultimate winner in the American style. Nigel Farage tries to emulate him in a more eccentric English manner. Islamists do it too. The Labour peer Lord Glasman, a prominent anti-progressive, recently said of his opponents in the party: “I think their time is gone… It’s changed”: assuming, perhaps, that we have indeed entered a new post-progressive era.

The terms “post-liberal” and “post-liberalism” tap into the same sort of energy. C.B. MacPherson proposed a “post-liberal democracy” as far back as 1964, to push back against liberalism’s anti-democratic tendencies. More recently, John Gray and David Goodhart have invoked it in their writings, as have Catholic thinkers such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. However, as with “post-modernism”, there is an inherent dualism to post-liberalism. Both terms suggest a change, away from modernism or liberalism, as well as implying that this change is occurring or will occur afterwards, later in history. They represent both proposal and prediction, even the statement of historical fact. And post-liberalism is or will be better, more suitable to the times.

In other words, the progressive mindset is so deeply ingrained in Western culture that even anti-progressives show elements of it. It is as if we need to certify our opinions and desires with the findings of sociology and historical analysis to make them somehow valid in a scientific style. It shows a lack of confidence in ourselves and our species: that the society we want, the life we want, who we are, requires “independent” blessing by the forces of history to become real. And the adoption of this style as a social currency leaves us vulnerable to those who are more able to mobilize the forces of social and historical analysis, in academia and other sites of knowledge production: places that remain pretty much dominated by what Kaufmann calls “Left-modernism”.

The temptation is to imitate their techniques. However, the style only really works for those with power to hand, with the baubles and titles, the nomenclature of “expertise”. Notwithstanding how they are linked to change, progressive assumptions serve to justify existing power: offering it a bit of magical authority, with its specialized knowledge of the future.

There is another way, if we are prepared to think, in the frank embrace of politics as politics, to return to what J.B. Bury called the “ancient and independent justifications” of liberty and democracy, justifying measures by what we or the people want (and don’t want): returning to human agency as a legitimate source of political action. Moreover, such a style of thinking would embrace truth in a way that progressive historicizing claims to, but falls short of.

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'Islamophobia' has always been a weapon

By Ben Cobley

Nevertheless, we should admit that there is something in the air: some sort of genuine historical change going on: a passing from one era into another, perhaps. During Trump’s first presidency and 14 years of Conservative-led government in Britain, Left-liberal hegemony was barely touched. Indeed, it seemed to get stronger in some respects. But there are some signs of change now, positive change in certain respects, suggesting a possible new era both for intellectual life and for politics and society more broadly.

A true “post-progressive era” would be something different though, requiring a huge change in the way we think and see the world. It is intriguing to think about how it might look. However, for the moment, we must admit that it is a long way off, that progressivism remains in our existential bloodstream, whichever way we turn: that we are all progressives, really.

I approached one of the soldiers, who peered down at me from beneath his helmet. “I’m rooting for you guys,” I said. “Thanks,” he said, and laughed before remembering he was in character. “We will win!” Before the battle a band of Normans marched past the camp on the way to their headquarters across the field. Saxon warriors heckled them: “Go home, Normans, go home!”

Every year English Heritage hosts a re-enactment at Battle Abbey around the anniversary of the 1066 Battle of Hastings. Every year the Normans ride again, knights on horseback charging into battle behind William the Conqueror; every year the Saxons erect their shield wall, standing firm until the fateful arrow finds Harold Godwinson’s eye. The outcome is predestined, but somehow, watching the re-enactment last weekend, there was still an element of suspense, a bloom of hope that this time the invaders could be repelled.

Why was I rooting for the Saxons, I asked myself? We all were. Throughout the crowd there was an unspoken agreement — a bit tongue in cheek, but there nonetheless — that the Saxons were our guys, and the Normans were not. Some spectators waved mini versions of Harold’s Fighting Man banner. William was played with a cartoonish French accent. The crowd booed him and the Normans throughout the display, as though the battle had happened yesterday and not nearly 1,000 years ago. I thought of George Orwell’s comment, in his essay “England Your England”: “What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots.” Did this instantly recognizable truth about the class system actually reflect a deep hatred of the Norman overlord 1,000 years on? It certainly felt like it.

The announcer narrating the clash was firmly on the side of the Saxons. “Cheer now to put strength into their sword arms,” he shouted during a fierce bout of man-to-man combat. “Cheer now to make sure they throw the invader back into the sea.” When the battle was over, Harold dead and the Saxons decimated, the crowd grumbled at the announcer’s order to cheer for the new king. “There he is, your new lord and master,” the announcer said. “Your taxes are due.”

This was an especially amusing event to watch as an American, and also an educational one. We love to talk about how old things in Britain are. The churches, the pubs — we’re astounded at anything that’s been standing here for longer than America even existed. But it’s not just places: events seem to last forever here too. Living in England, I’ve often thought that it’s this long memory that gives the country its essential stability. The Brits have had enough excitement over the course of history and they’d very much like to avoid having any more. But it also means there are deep cultural nerves running through the nation, and one of these is the memory of foreign invasion from over the sea and the fear of it happening again.

We see this today in the rising anger over small boats, in the flags that line the streets. Resentment over immigration policies has emerged this year as a powerful enough force to potentially reshape British politics, with polls showing Reform UK continuing to gain momentum. This sentiment has also translated into a visible manifestation of national pride: in the past several months, people around the country have raised Union flags and St George’s flags as part of “Operation Raise the Colors”, a social media movement that started in Birmingham.

Patriotism remains a bit of a taboo among British liberals, something a bit embarrassing that has taken on Right-wing political connotations. But glimpses of it can be seen during moments like the Hastings re-enactment, or in other socially-permitted contexts like the World Cup or Royal weddings. It is otherwise kept to a bare minimum by a still Norman-minded elite who prefer to stifle this instinct.

To an outsider, this aversion to patriotism remains a striking feature of British culture. Though this same tendency exists in America in intellectual and Left-leaning circles, it isn’t nearly as mainstream. While American conservatives are more likely to display the flag and revel in patriotic iconography, they don’t have a monopoly on it the way the Right seems to here. To win a US presidential election, you have to love America harder than the other guy. Flag pins are a standard political accessory in both parties. And it remains commonplace for schoolchildren to pledge allegiance to the flag every day in state schools, though they have a constitutional right to refuse. A town displaying a lot of flags wouldn’t be worth remarking upon. On the drive back to London from Sussex, someone in the car remarked on the number of Union flags on show in a suburb we drove through. I hadn’t even noticed.

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By Tom Holland

British liberals have reacted to people raising Union flags and St George’s flags the same way many Americans would to the sight of a Confederate flag. “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality,” Orwell wrote in that same essay. “In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.” Much the same is true today: instead of seeking to understand the deep anger over immigration that is making people want to fly these flags, the focus of British liberals has been on suppressing them, citing the involvement of far-Right activists in organizing the campaign. Social media is full of often quite classist comments about “flag shaggers”. Councilors and MPs call for the flags’ removal to tamp down on “division”. In my neighborhood in South London, I noticed this week that someone had put up a St George’s flag emblazoned with pro-immigration slogans. “There is no such thing as true British culture,” read the all-caps letters printed on the red cross. “This flag was originally made by Saint George — a Turkish/Palestinian immigrant.” (Saint George died hundreds of years before the cross associated with him came into use.)

Whether intentionally or not, the flag campaigners have forced British elites into the unappealing position of disavowing their own national flag for political reasons. If they think it has been successfully co-opted by the far-Right, they only give it more power by fearing it. The cleverer play would be to display the flag as a symbol of opposition to the Right; to accept that people have a desire to feel patriotic and appeal to that, instead of pathologizing it. Lately, there does seem to have been some recognition of the need to reclaim the flag among the country’s liberal power players. Both the Labour and Lib Dem party conferences were festooned with flags, and the Prime Minister has spoken about his pride in all the flags of the UK. But they are playing catch-up against a movement that has much more successfully linked itself to the Union Jack; one that has been more proactive in channeling the down-to-earth Saxon instead of the lofty Norman.

Writers here have always had a better read on England’s Saxon yearnings than politicians. There’s a rich tradition of Anglo-Saxon nostalgia among English writers over the past century or so. In 1911, near the end of the imperial century, Rudyard Kipling imagined a Norman baron’s take on the rugged Saxon: “The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite. / But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right. / When he stands like an ox in the furrow — with his sullen set eyes on your own, / And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.” Here, Kipling depicts the Saxon as the forefather of cherished British values like fair play.

Kipling was writing during a time when Britain still projected itself out onto the world, at the tail end of a period that echoed the terrible greatness of the adventuring Normans. Yet he, like other 20th-century writers who mythologized the Saxon past such as J.R.R. Tolkien, saw something more authentic and fundamental to the culture in the Saxons, who stayed put here and defended their island against all comers. Perhaps this old Anglo-Saxon ache persists today and explains some of what’s happening now — a repressed tribalism with ancient roots that is playing out in modern politics.

At the battle last weekend, I thought about how, a millennium later, the Saxon fans in the crowd are just as Norman as they are anything else. It was an audience no doubt full of Williams, Richards and Henrys cheering for a lost army of Oswalds, Godfrics and Cuthberts. But this didn’t seem to matter. There’s always next year. Maybe the Saxons will finally win.

Charles de Gaulle’s new constitution and the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 were designed to sweep all that away. The most significant powers were given to the president (elected for seven years) rather than a prime minister (dependent on the whim of parliament). In any case, parliament now had less power.

All of this has now fallen apart. François Bayrou was the second person to have been prime minister of France since President Emmanuel Macron unwisely held parliamentary elections last summer. Bayrou had to be sustained by a rickety coalition, a delicately balanced house of cards that he has now upset by calling a vote of confidence in his government. In doing so, he transformed a debate about a particular measure (a budget) into a decision on Bayrou’s government, the President, and the whole state of France.

Bayrou’s hero is a Fourth Republic prime minister, Pierre Mendès France, whose own government lasted for eight months. Modeling oneself on a man who never again held office after his resignation as prime minister in 1955 sounds like an odd strategy. But Mendès’s now famous phrase “to govern is to choose” underpinned Bayrou’s insistence on a confidence vote: it would force the political parties to make hard choices about public finances. A devout Catholic, Bayrou made a moral argument: piling up public debt places an impossible burden on future generations and creates a vicious circle as baby boomers are supported in their dotage by young taxpayers who cannot afford to start families. Mendès, too, was ostentatiously moral and, though he was a secularized Jew, he attracted particular admiration from progressive Catholics.

Yet the comparison with Mendès does not always work to Bayrou’s advantage. Mendès was serious and brave. He jumped from the window of a Vichy prison and made his way to London to join the Free French air force. This gave him a reserve of moral credit that no present-day politician can match. Mendès was a conservative (a liberal in the French sense of the word) in his attitude to public finances but progressive (a liberal in the Anglo-American sense of the word) in his attitude to other matters. The great achievement of his short-lived premiership was to extract France from Indo-China. And so even the student protestors of 1968 admired Mendès — rather as if stoned teenagers at Glastonbury were to chant “Oh George Osborne”. Bayrou has all the unpopularity that derives from his fiscal conservatism without the prestige that goes with a resistance record or support for decolonization.

Mendès was the real deal. The novelist François Mauriac admired both him and de Gaulle but suggested that the more uncompromising of the two when it came to hard choices was Mendès. Bayrou, by contrast, comes across as calculating and false. Some think that he knew that he could not win a vote of confidence and preferred a spectacular confrontation on an issue of principle that would allow him to present his defeat as an honorable one. More cynical observers point out that Bayrou has run for the presidency three times and suggest that he wishes to run again when Macron comes to the end of his second presidential term in 2027. Defeat now allows Bayrou to say “I told you so” about the economic state of France in two years’ time.

Bayrou’s demise reflects broader changes — some of them peculiar to France and some of them significant for most Western democracies. One major shift is in the nature of the French presidency itself. Since 2002, presidents serve five-year terms rather than seven, which has diminished their power to impose long-term stability. While De Gaulle and Mitterrand cultivated a monarchical mystique around their office, François Hollande ran in 2012 promising to make the presidency “normal” and fulfilled this banal ambition so well that he did not even try to run for a second term. Since 2017, Macron has worked hard to restore the prestige of the presidency — he has a taste for political theatre that owes much to de Gaulle. However, more than at any point since 1958, the presidency now seems a political office like any other. Some of those who voted against Bayrou were really voting against Macron and hope to force the President to resign before the end of his mandate.

Changing political communications have also contributed to a crisis in governance. Mendès used radio addresses to appeal directly to the French people over the heads of parliamentarians. Today, with no state monopoly of broadcasting and, even more importantly, since radio and television have lost their grip on public information, politicians like Bayrou resort to launching their own YouTube channels. Unsurprisingly, a 74-year-old man in a tie did not match the appeal of skateboarding cats or the Gen Z media-fluent president of le Rassemblement National, Jordan Bardella.

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Macron’s own decision to found a new party — at first called En Marche and now called Renaissance — has disrupted the party system. En Marche enjoyed a period of spectacular electoral success, but its subsequent precipitous decline has not restored the fortunes of the parties that it displaced. The 577 deputies in the French parliament include members of 11 different groupings. No party comes close to commanding a majority of deputies and no politically feasible coalition could command such loyalty either.

In a strange way, bitter political hostilities were what once made France governable. In the Fourth Republic, there were times when the Communist Party got more votes than any other party — but the understandable desire to ensure that a group expressing unqualified admiration for Stalin should be kept out of power underwrote electoral alliances that brought the other parties together. More recently, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National aroused uncomfortable memories of Vichy and antisemitism. When Le Pen got into the second round of the 2002 presidential election (with just under 20% of the vote), other parties united to support the Gaullist Jacques Chirac under the unappealing but effective slogan “better the crook than the fascist”.

But today, some leaders of the mainstream Right — including the Gaullist former president Nicolas Sarkozy — treat the RN as a party like any other and say that they would not rule out an alliance with it. If there is a political untouchable in France, it is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-Left La France Insoumise. Mélenchon is often denounced for allegedly flirting with Islamism or antisemitism — though, in truth, his party’s policies would have seemed unexceptional on the French Left just a couple of decades ago. Mélenchon’s political isolation is attenuated by an unspoken alliance with the far-Right. Marine Le Pen and Mélenchon benefit from having each other as enemies and from a general sense of political crisis. There will be a kind of general strike — an attempt to “block everything” — on Wednesday. It seems to have originated with social media posts from the far-Right before being picked up by Mélenchon. Revealingly, the Rassemblement National, now torn between a desire to bring down the system and a desire to pose as a potential party of government, has slightly distanced itself from the upcoming protests.

All this means that France is getting dangerously close to the point at which protest parties that trade on denouncing the “system” have attained a level of support that means that the system cannot function without them. None of this would matter if the financial problems to which Bayrou alludes were not real. His opponents say that France’s problems are hardly more serious than those of some other countries (which is not saying much) or that France can still service her debt (which is obviously true until it stops being true). The stability of the Fifth Republic was founded partly on the rapid growth of the Trente Glorieuses. De Gaulle was never a great one for financial rigor (Mendès resigned from his provisional government in 1944 because of their disagreements on this) but he avoided awkward fiscal choices because state finances floated on rapid economic growth. It is unlikely that any future French government will get such an easy ride.

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What happens now? Macron could dissolve parliament, but he is unlikely to repeat a stratagem that proved so disastrous for him last time. His numerous enemies want him to resign. But a Fifth Republic president has a right, some would say a duty, to serve until the end of his elected term. Only de Gaulle resigned before this. Pompidou died in office; Mitterrand served two full seven-year terms, though he was often in agony from the cancer that killed him just months after he left the Elysée Palace. In spite of his unpopularity with both the political class and the electorate, Macron has many strengths. He is still only 47 years old — more than a quarter of a century younger than Bayrou and younger than de Gaulle was in 1940 — and is possessed of extraordinary vigor and self-confidence. The very fact that the constitution prevents him from serving a third term gives him a kind of freedom: he does not have to care about opinion polls or maintaining alliances. However chaotic France’s domestic politics become, the president still controls a domaine reservé of foreign and defense policy, matters that have special importance because of Gaza and Ukraine.

When Italy faced similar circumstances in 2021, Mario Draghi formed a government of technocrats. Things are more complicated in France. The president who chooses the prime minister is himself both a technocrat (like most recent presidents, Macron is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration) and also, unlike his Italian counterpart, a party politician, who would find it hard to present himself as the arbiter of an apolitical solution. Probably Macron will find a prime minister who will stagger through government — obtaining a majority for particular measures without risking an overall vote of confidence. This will suit the centrist parties in the short term — because they defer a parliamentary election in which they would probably do badly. It will suit la France Insoumise and the Rassemblement National in the long term — because they will go into the next presidential election with all the advantages of being the anti-establishment parties.

The British should not be smug when surveying events across the Channel. Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced his Bayrou moment when his government proposed benefit cuts. Unlike Bayrou he did not dare make the vote into one of confidence, but this has not made the problem go away. Starmer seems to enjoy a large parliamentary majority, but the most striking novelty of the last election was the arrival of small protest parties — one of which might conceivably be the largest party in the next House of Commons. Labour looks less like a party than a sprawling alliance of political factions of the kind that would be familiar to students of Fourth Republic France.

It is hard to see how any prime minster, on either side of the Channel, can succeed with an electorate that rejects both public spending cuts and tax rises and with such a fissiparous party system. I suspect that the most pronounced political trend in the next decade or so will be the near certainty that incumbent parties cannot win elections. To paraphrase Mendès France, “to govern is to lose”.

In the US, Congress has quietly walked away from most of its former duties. Major policy changes once came through legislation like the Social Security Act of 1935, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Clean Air Act of 1970, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, or the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. There have been no bills like these for a generation. Today, to the extent that policy changes, it is a result of executive agencies using powers granted by these 20th century laws, or federal judges reinterpreting their meaning. The most significant bills of my adult lifetime were the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, both of 2010, and both were marginal updates to preexisting 20th century bureaucracies.

Even those are beyond the ability of today’s Congress, which is standing idly by as President Trump reforms the government by issuing executive orders to federal agencies. If you took a neutral observer with no emotional attachment to our written Constitution — say, Aristotle — and asked him to describe the role that Congress plays in governing the US today, he would tell you that their job has been reduced to approving the president’s budget requests and bureaucratic appointments, and that they use this power to demand pork-barrel spending in return for the former. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the rise of the European Union has disempowered elected legislatures de jure as well as de facto.

The underlying reason for this widespread political shift is that changes in weapons technology have concentrated military power in the hands of state militaries. Today, governments are less threatened by popular disapproval than they once were. The tacit threat of a popular revolt has been essentially removed. This threat is, historically, the largest check on a state’s ability to override what its people want. It is the ultimate source of an elected legislature’s power.

In Weapons Systems and Political Stability, the master historian Carroll Quigley explained that a society’s form of government is downstream of the balance of military force. When the best weapons system requires expensive equipment used by highly-trained specialists, like a medieval knight with his horse and lance and heavy armor, this concentrates military power into the hands of a small group. On the other hand, when the best weapons system is cheap and can be used effectively by amateurs with relatively little training — for example, muskets or rifles — military power is spread more evenly throughout the population.

Groups which can wield military power will have their interests reflected in the government. This is not an overnight event, with opportunists launching a revolt the second they calculate they have a small advantage. Rather, it’s a gradual and messy process of negotiation and reevaluation, where people pursue their interests, make compromises, quietly push the envelope of what they think they can get away with, and sometimes miscalculate. When a new power center rises, it’s usually incorporated into the existing structure through gradual reforms. Only occasionally will this provoke an outright military conflict — and these rare military conflicts reveal the de facto balance of military power to observers in other nations, helping to guide those negotiations and keep them grounded. Changes in the fundamental balance of military power usually take decades to propagate through the system and bring the balance of political power into a new equilibrium.

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By the late 1700s, guns became widely affordable. With the rise of these amateur weapons, the new balance of military power was much more widely distributed, so over the 1700s and 1800s, revolts and reforms throughout Europe and the Americas shifted political power towards the people. The most aristocratic elements of the United States Constitution were purged over time; the original scheme of an Electoral College formed of wise elites who would use their independent judgment to select the president was almost immediately abandoned, and by the 1830s electoral votes were allocated by popular vote in every state except South Carolina, where the state legislature retained this power until the Civil War. The Senate, too, was originally appointed by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, until the 17th Amendment was passed in 1913. These had been deliberate checks against what the Founding Fathers perceived as the excesses of a pure democracy.

In America and especially in Europe, the new, more democratic political regimes were much more likely to enact policies favored by large majorities of the people. Regimes which overrode the popular will risked popular revolts that could face government forces head-on. These revolts had a real possibility of deposing even strong governments. This period was roughly bookended by the American Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, 1776-1939.

In the 20th century, this phase ended. The weapons system based on amateur-friendly guns was supplanted by a series of weapons systems based on specialist equipment like airplanes and tanks and rockets. Accordingly, since the Second World War, there have been no popular revolts engaging in pitched battles against any first- or even third-rate army. Revolts against real states have been limited to glorified coups toppling governments that lacked the will to crush the rebels even if they had the ability, like the 1989-1991 wave of revolutions that swept away the Soviet republics. Outright warfare has been effective only in places where the government exists mostly on paper, without anything resembling a functional modern state or military, like Syria or Sudan.

The end of effective military revolts can be ascribed mostly to the development of weapons technology that has made revolts largely futile, against even half-coherent armies. But the trend is also reinforced by aging populations. Revolts are driven by young men in their teens and twenties willing to take big risks. These young men are usually overrepresented in a revolt’s leadership, and always do the bulk of the killing and dying. Few 35-year-olds are eager to abandon their settled lives and join an ideological crusade or a wild adventure.

On the other hand, middle-aged men are generally willing to be violent inside a stable institution with a steady paycheck. The average US police officer is around 39 or 40 years old. Middle-aged men are rare in riots and in ideological volunteer armies, which can arise from popular opposition, but common in conscript armies and mercenary armies, which are available only to states. So, as the middle-aged come to outnumber the young, the balance of military power — and eventually also political power — shifts even further away from the people and towards state administrators.

Some military theorists believe that the advent of drone weapons will change the balance towards democratic weapons. Only time will tell, but this seems unlikely. In principle, drone weapons can be used by individuals and small teams to strike at military and government targets while making the attackers relatively difficult to identify, like a roadside bomb which can target more than just patrols. But in practice, drone weapons have been used almost exclusively by state militaries which can marshal the full force of industrial mass production. If there is an earnest drone-based rebellion, it will probably prove feasible for the state to trace back the attackers reliably enough to win the conflict. The 19th century Russian anarchists were able to assassinate state officials not by avoiding capture, but by resigning themselves to it. However, no one can confidently predict the course of future technology, and some future weapon might shift the balance back towards popular military power regardless of what might or might not happen with drone weapons.

The 20th century decline of popular military power, then, led to the gradual but thorough transfer of power from elected representatives, who are somewhat constrained by the popular will, to bureaucracies and agencies able to act however they wish. In other words, within Western states which describe themselves as democracies, the people — the demos — have lost much of their power — their kratos. Elections have become less important in determining the government’s policy, and more ceremonial. 

In the US, the legislature has abdicated effectively all of its power to the executive branch bureaucracies and the Supreme Court, leaving the presidential election as the only vehicle for the demos to exercise kratos — which is ironic, considering that the Electoral College was originally envisioned as the most aristocratic part of the Constitution. The presidency of Joe Biden — especially its latter half — demonstrated that the executive bureaucracies are capable of governing autonomously without the president’s involvement, which is to say, they are capable of governing without any accountability to the demos at all. However, the second presidency of Donald Trump demonstrates that a determined president can still steer the executive bureaucracies, if he chooses. The selection of a single man to steer the bureaucracy (or not) is a thin reed on which to rest a claim to democratic governance.

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Across the Western world, bureaucrats and judges frequently enact major social changes popular among their own class but unpopular among the demos, such as mass immigration, “degrowth” and deindustrialization in Europe, and affirmative action in the US, among many other examples. In contrast, older social changes were enacted mostly by elected legislatures.

This change is most advanced in European states. In the past year, administrators in Romania and France have simply disqualified candidates for national office who favor popular policies over the policies of the administrators, using very thin pretexts. Meanwhile, German administrators, always the vanguard of Eurofederalism, are attempting to do the same without resorting to a procedural fig leaf, openly attempting to suppress Alternative für Deutschland for the content of its platform. Such administrative disqualifications are very likely to become the norm, at least in Europe and perhaps more widely. And why not? The days when a disenfranchised demos might storm the Bastille or defend barricades in the streets are long gone.

Modern street protests, such as those regarding asylum policy in Britain, are at most an exercise in daring the state to look bad by using its invincible might, not an attempt to win a real fight. Lately, widespread dissatisfaction has led to quiet chatter of possible uprisings, but outright civil war is unlikely, because everyone knows the demos will lose to an army that actually fights. If any Western government does fall, it will look more like the fall of the Soviet Union, where politicians and generals chose not to fight because they had lost faith in their own regime and saw no point in defending it.

From Downton to Bridgerton to Saltburn, aristos continue to hog our screens, big and small. But as a class they have been in visible decline. The Whigs — those original wokes — delivered the early blows, repealing the Corn Laws and widening the franchise. Then came the fin-de-siècle pounding: Harcourt’s death duties of 1894, which were the first serious taxes on the rich; by 1946, they had reached a respectable 75%

The interwar years found the aristos properly on the skids, with huge tracts of land sold off. Brideshead Revisited is in great part a whinge about precisely this. In the postwar period, Manny Shinwell, minister of fuel and power and unreconstructed class warrior, pulled the aristocracy down another peg. He requisitioned Wentworth, that preposterous estate of some 365 rooms where guests were issued confetti to mark their trail back to bed à la Hansel and Gretel, and had it torn open for an opencast coal mine. Rhododendrons and holly trees fell like nine-pins before the ripper shanks.

By the Seventies, their kind were truly on the back foot. The V&A’s doleful 1974 exhibition, “The Destruction of the Country House”, invited the public to mourn the plight of the poor aristos. It opened in December, just two months after miners had kicked out Edward Heath, the only instance in postwar European history where working-class muscle toppled a ruling party.

To be sure, there were holdouts. American nouveaux riches came galloping to the rescue of cash-strapped British anciens pauvres through canny marriages. The aristocracy itself was padded out with parvenus: the infamous “beerage” of nouveau peers who had merely brewed enough pints or befriended the PM to warrant their elevation.

Some piles these days host festivals. Noseley Hall in Leicestershire, for instance, was until recently the unlikely home of the psychedelic trance festival Noisily. Then we have the aristocratic rhotacists who stwuggle with their Rs flogging themselves on YouTube, the likes of the Viscount and Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, who scrape a living from posting lifestyle videos for the gawping pleasure of the lower orders.

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The contemporary trend is less marriage than outright sale. Highland acres have been snapped up wholesale by Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish fashion billionaire who is now Scotland’s largest landowner. Meanwhile a great many native landlords, far from being wellie-wearing custodians of tradition, have abandoned their home. The 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, sniggered at English girls as “round-shouldered, unsophisticated garglers of pink champagne” before decamping to France for a dissipated life. Many of his peers now live off private wealth management funds on the Riviera.

But for most aristos, the decline has been grim. Eleanor Doughty’s Heirs and Graces, a modern history of the aristocracy, is a surprisingly candid and stylish peek into that well-heeled world; surprising because her acknowledgements brim with such reassuringly posh names as Lady Celestria Hales, the Duke of Buccleuch, and Thomas van Straubenzee, not to mention her throwaway reassurance that she has one foot firmly anchored in the clubs of St James’s. Still, she lapses into a certain breathlessness at times, succumbing to titular gewgaws: “Though we are friends on Facebook, I cannot help but always call him Lord Derby.” But then, this is the sort of book where Stuart Hall denotes not the founder of the New Left Review but a country pile of that name in County Tyrone.

Doughty parades before us the symptoms of decline: braces of yachts sold, Van Dyck rooms denuded of Van Dycks, visiting grandees of yore replaced by wide-eyed day-trippers with lanyards. One architectural historian noted a Lazarus-like lady of the house who, unable to afford maids, “exuded a sour smell of unwashed clothes” — a mephitic reversal of the old order, where aristocrats wrinkled their noses at the poor.

Worse than the stench, it seems, is their boorishness. Freed from pecuniary cares, one might have expected these families to take up learning or cultivate a little sprezzatura. Instead, they plodded into finance, ignorant of their own collections. Henry Somerset, showing guests his Canalettos, could only remark they were “very like the house”. The decimation of foxes was the only pursuit that quickened his pulse.

The decline in servants worsened things. The half century on either side of the First World War coincided with rising wages. Thousands of footmen and scullery maids took city jobs, leaving aristocrats to fend for themselves. Suddenly Job was less the Old Testament character than a métier one might be forced into. The Earl of Arundel became an insurance salesman after a stint as a Formula 3 driver, Baron Milne a chair-caner, Baron Kenilworth a horticulturist, and the son of the second Viscount Monckton — what else? — a monk. Baron Teviot found a job behind the butcher’s counter at Sainsbury’s before becoming a bus driver. Baron Feversham, for his sins, made porn flicks.

Contact with commoners no doubt proved salutary for these men. For, by and large, the non-working aristocracy has remained insulated from shifts in social attitudes. Indeed, they have effectively sat out the 20th century as if in a time-warp, clinging to arch-conservatism even as the lower orders have embraced progressive ideas. It is no accident, then, that the Lords has always lagged a generation behind the Commons. Women peers only arrived in 1958, amid spluttering opposition from the 28-year-old Earl Ferrers, who moaned: “Shall we in a few years’ time be referring to ‘the noble and learned Lady, the Lady Chancellor?’ I find that a horrifying thought.”

On divorce, too, they trailed behind popular sentiment, sneering long after the rest of the country had stopped caring. There were, it is true, emancipated outliers. Mollie Buccleuch, known as “Midnight Moll”, maintained a sprightly reputation for seduction well into senescence. The 7th Marquess of Bath lived as a polyamorist with 74 “wifelets” while remaining married. But such figures were the exception, not the rule.

Throughout the 20th century, many made a show of ordinariness — roast beef on Sundays, cottage pie on Mondays — in stabs of working-class cosplay that conveniently ignored their own preference for endogamy. Eton in the Seventies could still field classes with two earls and a viscount; another student recalled classmates named Guinness, Charrington, Whitbread, and Worthington: “it made me drunk just to look at them.”

To be fair, there were aristos like Tony Benn, who disclaimed his title, and the red toff Wogan Philipps, the only member of the Communist Party of Great Britain to sit in the Lords. But such class traitors were rare. The majority clung to their exclusivity. At their most accommodating, the Bolshie levellers among them go no further than insisting their tenants address them by their Christian names.

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Aristocratic decline has been good for us proles. Many of its ranks happily disposed of their white elephants to the National Trust, which has done noble work rescuing crumbling porticos and pergolas — though its deferential tone still grates on the average republican who visits such establishments for reasons of architectural interest rather than to admire aristocratic twee. Much of the art was absorbed by our national collections, with Kenneth Clark, the soi-disant socialist director of the National Gallery, astutely scooping up treasures for the people. Back in 1873, a land survey revealed that 710 people owned 80% of this isle. This vampiric monopoly, the statesman John Bright complained in 1871, had “divorced the English from the soil”. It is no bad thing that the monopoly was smashed, clearing space for hoi polloi. Home ownership increased from 10 to 70% in the 20th century.

And yet, for all the decline, the aristocracy persists. Doughty reminds us there are still 796 families with hereditary titles. They hold some 3.2 million acres — three-quarters the size of Wales — and remain, as the great political theorist Tom Nairn insisted, not so much a quaint relic as an active abetter of our “national backwardness”, impeding our progress toward a truly classless society. Even Ken Livingstone, that tribune of municipal socialism, Nairn lamented, was prone to going moist-eyed before the queen in his lime-green hat sporting wobbling baubles — making him resemble “some form of royal bird-scarer”, as The Times conjectured.

Pace Bagehot, Nairn argued, Britain is not a “disguised republic” with its real rulers the modernizing commoners and the ancient nobodies merely for show. Republics are built upon equality among the orders. This has never been the case in Britain. As Nairn puts it: “No amount of fulmination about the immorality and cost of the system can hide a basic truth: the aristocracy is an expression of mass conservatism… People enjoy the monarchical twaddle, and show very little sign of being robotized or brainwashed.” The upshot is continued deference to nobs. The sort of people who fly into a rage when a lumpenproletarian type jumps a Tube turnstile will in the same breath wax rhapsodic about Elizabeth Windsor: yes ma’am; thank you for your service; three bags full, ma’am.

This rings true. The British working classes have never despised the aristocrats as their continental counterparts did. Here, as in sub-Saharan Africa and the subcontinent, deference to bigwigs remains the default mode. Britain’s peculiar solidarity is inverted: high and low are united in despising the middle — with its associations of thrift and moderation, education and culture, museums and literature, its self-preening moral seriousness and pseudo-high-mindedness, dedication to an assortment of causes, disdain for such vices as whoring and heroin. As the working-class comedian Billy Connolly put it: “The serious upper class, the proper bigshots, they’re all nuts and they are a great laugh. The working class are all fucking nuts as well and they are a great laugh. It’s just the middle that sucks.”

It’s fun to épater la bourgeoisie, no doubt, but the worldview has consequences. Britain today suffers the highest homelessness rates in the Western world, the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe, and a public realm in visible decrepitude — drafty homes, leaky plumbing, collapsing trains, a health service on life support. We tolerate this partly because our culture still whispers that some are born to better things. The cult of the aristocracy, and its royal apex, supplies the nation with a pensée unique: a defense of hierarchy, inequality, and indeed decline.

With our love of twee, pomp, and ceremony, we are an anachronistic society, much like the fictional Kakania in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. As Nairn puts it, we live in Ukania — a broken, fractured society held together only by the weak glue of monarchic attachment. Britain’s regions and nations are bound with a royal tint of Ruritanian nostalgia, its protocols and etiquette: misty-eyed guff about past glory, Second World War memorabilia, and endless “yes, ma’ams”. Nations are usually built on a sense of comradeship. Not so in Britain, where a surrogate nationalism has formed around the enchantments of the aristocracy and the Crown — around the “glamour of backwardness”. The Windsor-worshipping queues during Truss’s brief tenure made this plain. It is hard to escape the conclusion that our fascination with the aristocracy has reduced us to a nation of groveling gimps.

That, coincidentally, is the nostalgic-sounding title of Peter Laslett’s great work: The World We Have Lost, published in 1965. Nostalgic only to a point: Laslett tells us at the outset that the world we lost with the arrival of industrialization was “no paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance or loving kindness”. Daily life was as painful as it was tedious. The simplest things required painstaking effort: “drawing the water from the well, striking steel on flint to catch the tinder alight, cutting goose-feather quills to make a pen, they all took time, trouble and energy.” Nor did the Industrial Revolution bring with it oppression or exploitation: all that “was there already”.

The majority was illiterate, and therefore excluded from political and intellectual life. What is worse, early-modern parish records, which Laslett and others had pored over relentlessly, revealed plenty of parents who had themselves signed the marriage register, but whose children were unable to do so: there was no guarantee of linear improvement across the generations. True, pre-industrial life left a greater role for the family, but this should not elicit any pangs of nostalgia either: the family was not only a “circle of affection” but also the “scene of hatred”.

Vestiges of that world can still be found all around us. Its nastier aspects, like the dark side of family life, have been “half-remembered” in fairytales. One crucial feature of pre-industrial society, its obsession with rank, was better preserved in our country than almost anywhere else: “the British go on awarding the symbolic titles”, knighthoods, peerages, and all the rest, as much now as in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

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On publication, The World We Have Lost earned Laslett plenty of enemies. The early-modern historian Lawrence Stone called it “slipshod, muddled, pretentious, and unscholarly”. Marxists especially despised his effort to “entomb” the very idea of a 17th-century “English Revolution”: E.P. Thompson, in his affectedly parochial fashion, sneered at his interest in historical demography, the science which “has of course come from France”. The World We Have Lost was a defense of this foreign science from its many detractors, complementing its new major English center which Laslett helped found, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. 

Laslett himself seems a figure from a world we have lost. At one point, on the fraught question of whether people used to, or even could, have sex in private, he says: “those with experience of living within severe spatial restrictions, such as a man who served as I happen to have done in a grossly overmanned naval vessel, will know that privacy is not entirely a physical affair.” He had an eclectic career of the sort that feels impossible today. During the Second World War, he mastered Japanese at Soas, after which he worked at Bletchley Park, decoding Japanese intelligence. 

As with many of the great intellectuals of his generation — here, too, glimpses of a world we have lost — Laslett had one foot in academia and one in the BBC. His broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme were an important part of his academic strategy; it was there that he issued his call to arms to Britain’s antiquarians to dive into their wealth of local source material, and thereby to construct a vivid picture of the social structure of early-modern England. The French demographer Louis Henry called Laslett’s amateur army “le secret weapon anglais”. Many chapters of The World We Have Lost were initially written as radio broadcasts. Later editions are full of gratitude, and well-earned nostalgia, for the BBC at the height of its Reithian powers.

The “We” in Laslett’s title refers to the English. Although he emphasizes the contrasts between our world today and the one we have lost, he dwells on the few points of common ground. We know what a culture is by observing its habits and customs; we know what English habits and customs are by testing their consistency over time. One defining characteristic of Englishness is the small, nuclear family. This, Laslett was adamant, was not an invention of industrialization, of modernity; in fact in England “there was actually an increase in the tiny proportion of more complicated households in the period of economic transformation”.

Laslett’s later involvement in the University of the Third Age owed something to his belief in the “null hypothesis”, that family organization in England was “always and invariably nuclear unless the contrary can be proven”. He disliked the suggestion that “lonely old people” ought to be “restored to the family, where they belong”, because this was no real “restoration… in the sense of returning to the historical past”: it had never really been customary among the English for the elderly to live with their children.

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Likewise, Laslett identified a consistent English custom of marrying relatively late, in the mid-Twenties. When Shakespeare had Lord Capulet say that Juliet “hath not seen the change of fourteen years”, he was indulging in his imagination and nothing more. Laslett even broaches the possibility that late marriage proved the key to English prosperity, without which the “coming of industrialization… might never have occurred”. The book, and others like it, are therefore of much use when attempting to answer the vexed question of what it means to be English, in a historically grounded fashion.

With the rise of generative AI, one often hears that we are on the cusp of something analogous to the Industrial Revolution. As the English did, or had to do, in the Industrial Revolution, so too are we now forced to ponder what types of labor will endure, and what will fast become redundant. Since so much is downstream of labor, we must consider what changes the coming decades herald for things as basic to us as our households, our families, our social structure.

Already, even without AI, there have been some profound shifts. One of the characteristics of pre-industrial society, as Laslett says, is that the household was the primary locus of economic production; and so it was, thanks to Zoom and furlough, during the coronavirus lockdown. ChatGPT, some say, threatens literacy, or at least makes literacy less essential for social functioning, and Laslett paints a vivid picture of what the illiterate world of our past looked like. Laslett shows us just how much things can change, and how lost our lost world really is. But he also shows us those features of English life which have remained more or less constant for the last thousand years, and which we thus have reason to expect will stay with us. Nostalgia is not usually subject to reason; reading Laslett will hardly cure us of all our dreams of simple, old-fashioned living. But trying to imagine the world we have lost, as it actually was, will temper that nostalgia, and make us appreciate the world we have now. 

This example should remind us that, though people typically associate fascism with Germany and Italy, there is also a French story. Ernest Nolte, one of the first historians to study the ideology, published a 1963 book called Three Faces of Fascism which argued that Action Française, an antisemitic nationalist movement founded in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, was the precursor of modern fascism. Most did not agree: Action Française is a counterrevolutionary movement that lacks the dynamic radicalism of fascism.

That did not stop Zeev Sternhell, a Polish-Israeli scholar, from locating the origins of European fascism not in Italy but in the convergence of the anti-liberal Left and anti-liberal Right in late 19th century France. Yet other historians have debated whether the so-called French Social Party (PSF), a genuinely mass movement which could have won elections in 1940, might be fascist too. It’s surely no surprise that the party’s slogan of “Work, Family, Fatherland” was adopted by the collaborationist Vichy government of Marshal Pétain.

After the collapse of Vichy, extreme Right politics was discredited in France. The postwar populist movement of Poujadism proved a flash in the pan. The extremists who resorted to terrorism against de Gaulle’s policy of accepting Algerian independence had little popular support. It was only in 1983 that the extreme Right remerged as an electoral force, when the Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen, which had its roots in several extreme Right traditions, scored its first electoral victories. Today that party, now rechristened the Rassemblement National (RN), looks a contender to win France’s next presidential election.

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Jean-Marie Le Pen poisoned French politics

By Julian Jackson

This alarming situation is the subject of Ugo Palheta’s Marxist analysis, Why Fascism Is on the Rise in France: From Macron to Le Pen. Marxist interpretations of fascism have always linked it to economics. In the interwar years, the Communist Third International always stressed that fascism was a result of the crisis of capitalism, as the bourgeoisie resorted to extreme methods to preserve its power. The argument was that since capitalism was in terminal crisis, communist parties should steer clear of any attempt to shore up democracy: democratic socialists were as much the enemy as the Nazis. This eased Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany. As for France, the Communists hastily reversed course and allied themselves with socialists and even liberals in the so-called Popular Front. This was an updated version of the old policy of “Republican defense” going back to the Dreyfus Affair — in which parties of different political stripes temporarily joined forces in the higher cause of defending democracy.

Reading Palheta’s book evokes an odd sense of nostalgia, as all those rancid debates of the last century come flooding back. In the Seventies, we are told, the “crisis of capitalism” caused the bourgeoisie to opt for “neo-liberal” solutions: which duly paved the way for “neofascism”. Then, in the Eighties and Nineties, the “triumph of capitalism” allowed the far-Right to revive and take root, before a “crisis of capitalism” “put fascism back on the agenda” by eroding “the foundations of bourgeois hegemony” and pushing the “ruling classes” to opt for more authoritarian solutions. Macron’s “centrist authoritarianism”, we are confidently informed, is the last gasp before fully fledged fascism can emerge in the form of an RN victory. Etc, etc, etc.

In reality, there are significant differences between what was once considered to be “fascism” and the RN. Though one can be legitimately suspicious of the genuineness of Marine Le Pen’s detoxification of her party, it shows no insurrectionary tendencies. There is no sign that it intends, or would be able, to dismantle the institutions of French democracy and impose a dictatorship. The comparison with Meloni in Italy might be instructive here. That said, whether or not one wants to call it fascism, the extreme ethnonationalist and identitarian authoritarianism of the RN is a genuinely worrying threat. Among other things, a planned policy of “national preference” would condition access to social rights, including health care, to those with French citizenship. At the same time, Le Pen may end up actively discriminating against France’s million Muslim citizens, not least in her erstwhile enthusiasm for banning the Islamic headscarf in public spaces.

In a couple of years, then, France could soon be faced with a mix of Trumpism, Orbánism and Pétainism — clear enough from the polling numbers. Between the elections of 2017 and 2022, after all, the RN’s final vote rose from 34% to 41%. It is possible that Marine Le Pen herself may be ineligible to run, unless her recent court conviction for financial fraud is overturned. But her “dauphin”, the inexperienced Jordan Bardella, is no less popular, and his policies are largely indistinguishable from hers.

So how is this threat to be combated? Palheta’s book briefly offers an answer in the last chapter. It proposes establishing “popular, anti-racist and pro-feminist defense structures” and “local committees” to fight for “real democracy”. Etc, etc, etc. Who would organize and mobilize this grassroots activism? The suggestion seems to be that only the populist La France Insoumise (LFI) movement of Jean-Luc Mélenchon offers the “anti-liberal, anti-productivist rupture” that might block the path to fascism. But if Palheta is right that the LFI is the only hope, then there is no hope.

All the same, this depressing prospect does, at least, prompt some thoughts about the history of the French Left in general. In the interwar years, Léon Blum, leader of the French Socialist Party and the most morally inspiring leader in the history of European socialism, desperately tried to hold on to the party’s Marxist ideology: partly because he feared being outflanked by the Communists to his Left. He resisted any “revisionist” ideas that offered a plausible non-Marxist program. All the while, Blum tied himself in knots by distinguishing between the so-called “exercise of power” and the “conquest of power”. Yet what he patently failed to do was reflect on the kind of policies that the Socialists might actually pursue once in power. According to Marxist dogma, after all, this was only a provisional step towards the final revolution.

Those revisionists who tried to escape from this binary straitjacket of reform or revolution were dismissed as heretics. This was the fate of the most brilliant interwar Socialists, the Belgian Henri de Man, who had a wide following in France. The rejection of his ideas pushed him, and some of his followers, toward fascism. He ended up collaborating with the Germans.

After 1945, partly because of the example of people like de Man, the French Socialist Party refused to rethink its Marxist theory while in practice participating in governments that carried out torture in Algeria. There was never in France, as in Germany, a “Bad Godesberg moment”, when the SPD abandoned Marxism in 1959. On the western banks of the Rhine, “social democracy” remained taboo. In 1971, though, the defunct Socialist Party was hijacked and reconstructed by François Mitterrand, a man who had no previous Socialist beliefs or culture. Yet his supreme political skills allowed him to outmaneuver Michel Rocard, the figure in the party who offered a new version of revisionism. Rocard was a representative of the so-called “second Left”, which offered a less statist vision. He had no truck with the rhetoric of a “rupture with capitalism” espoused by Mitterrand, who, for his part, was politically cynical and economically illiterate.

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The result was predictable. Mitterrand, elected in 1981, had abandoned most of his policies within two years, while never actually offering any kind of doctrinal rethinking. He lurched from socialism in one country to ultra-liberalism in less than a decade. This was the beginning of the end of the French Socialist Party. Its death rattle took the form of François Hollande, whose inner Mitterrand prompted him in 2012 to offer some fiery rhetoric about his enemy being “money” — only to completely reverse course within a year of being elected.

This void on the Left offered an opportunity to Mélenchon, a former member of the Socialist Party. Enter La France Insoumise, which performed well in the presidential elections of both 2017 and 2022. Yet if LFI identifies Macron as its main enemy, it is an ironic mirror image of Macronism in that it exists solely as a machine to allow one man to take power. La Meute: Enquete sur la France Insoumise, a recent book by two French journalists, has exposed the party’s authoritarianism, bullying and sectarianism. The slightest criticism of Mélenchon leads to immediate exclusion. This, after all, is the man who once uttered the words: “La République, c’est moi”. Also problematic is Mélenchon’s admiration for Chavez and Putin, and his posturing on the Middle East. One must not fall into the trap of lumping all critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as antisemites: most are clearly not. But Mélenchon goes beyond anything that Jeremy Corbyn was (perhaps unfairly) accused of, not least when his party described the October 7 massacre as “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces”.

The idea, then, that this man, at this moment, offers a path to the “real democracy” that Palheta craves is delusional. That, of course, still leaves the question of how to deal with the RN. Unfortunately, there is nothing better on offer than the old policy of “Republican defense”. The liberal center has moved so far to the Right, in France as elsewhere, that a lot of nose-holding will be necessary. In the years before the Popular Front of the Thirties, the Communists used to say that the choice between the parliamentary center and the anti-parliamentary Right was like plumping for “plague” over “cholera”. However bad things may have become in France today, they are not quite that bad. The choice, for now, is between “plague” — and maybe measles or flu. The RN is definitely the plague.

You could contrive many different ways to interpret this tweet, but in the context of American politics, one of them is impossible to ignore. Both the language of the tweet and the aesthetics of the painting evoke a gauzy, nostalgic white nationalism that has become a subculture of what used to be called the “alt-Right”. Whether this was the painter’s intention is irrelevant. To anyone steeped in the vocabulary of the online culture wars, it’s obvious what the tweet is meant to convey.

Naturally, DHS doesn’t come right out and say it. Like any good shit poster, it leaves just enough room for ambiguity to allow it to answer its accusers with feigned shock and ridicule: how could you possibly infer racism from this wholesome depiction of our common American heritage? But this trolling doesn’t fool anyone. What’s being said is this: some Americans are more American than others. Specifically, those who can trace their lineage in the United States back many generations are more American than naturalized US citizens, or even the native-born American children of immigrants.

The word “heritage” is the giveaway. Among nativist-leaning American nationalists, the term “Heritage Americans” refers to those who can trace their lineage in the US back to the genetic stock of colonial America. To its proponents, Heritage Americans constitute an “American ethnicity” — basically WASP, with a smattering of German, and a sliver of Scandinavian. Some would also count black descendants of slaves as Heritage Americans, though others would not. Those who cannot claim this lineage are presumed to be somehow less American than those who can.

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While DHS can’t say this outright, MAGA influencers such as Jack Posobiec can. A few days ago, at a Turning Point USA conference, Posobiec, aping Trump, claimed that New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a naturalized US citizen, is not, in fact, an American. “This idea that if you just hand someone a piece of paper that makes them American,” he said, referring to US citizenship, “guess what, it’s failed. It’s wrong. It’s not true.” “You are fake Americans,” Posobiec growled, “and we are going to smoke you out, every single one of you.”

A couple of days later, Posobiec’s “fake Americans” net grew even wider. Referring to Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, he tweeted: “This is clearly not an American.” Fateh was born in Washington, D.C., to immigrant parents from Somalia. There is no question of his citizenship status, though Trump’s executive order purporting to repeal birthright citizenship could conceivably change that. (When I asked Posobiec to explain exactly what separates a real from a “fake” American, he replied: “Everyone knows what an American is.”)

What Mamdani and Fateh have in common is that neither of them are “Heritage Americans” — a term that isn’t just legally meaningless, but also historically delusional. The conceit behind it is that the early Americans shared a common culture and set of values. This is because they were mostly English and universally Christian. Therefore, the narrative goes, they were united in their belief in such core Anglo-American virtues as democracy, rule of law, and limited government. Later waves of migrants, like those who went through Ellis Island, were further removed from these shared Anglo-American folkways, but not entirely so, as they were almost entirely from Europe. Since Americans opened their country to the rest of the world in the later 20th century, however, the nation has been inundated with people who are completely alien to American political and moral culture. From that began the dissolution of American society. This is roughly JD Vance’s point of view.

This is all ahistorical mythmaking. There was little that was culturally unifying across Colonial America. Just because the colonists were English and Christian didn’t mean they all got on — in fact, it meant the opposite. In the Old World, Christianity had been the source of endless fragmentation and war for 100 years, while England had been torn apart by those divisions more than perhaps any other country in Europe. These hatreds found their apotheosis in the bloodbath of the English Civil War, whose ripples spread across the Atlantic Ocean to the American eastern seaboard. There, the colonists of Virginia and the greater Tidewater region were faithful servants of the deposed King — many of them had fought for him as Cavaliers. Meanwhile, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay shared the Puritan faith of those who had chopped off the King’s head. What the two colonies had in common wasn’t “shared values”, but deep mutual contempt.

In the Old World, the various regional populations of England despised one another. In the American colonies, they could live apart in mutual disdain. With their newfound isolation and political autonomy, the differences between them became even more pronounced. In New England, the Puritans established a flat, communitarian social order topped by a strong and sometimes authoritarian government. Meanwhile, the Tidewater gentry reproduced the fixed hierarchical order of the English aristocracy as best they could. They in turn were loathed by the anti-statist Ulster Scots of the Appalachian backcountry, who for centuries in Britain had fought for what they regarded as their natural, God-given liberties against the constant oppression and predations of the English and Scottish crowns. The Deep South idealized a Roman-style slaveocracy ruled by oligarchs, while the Quakers of Pennsylvania established a pacifist society based on tolerance and Christian love.

These disparate cultures could not have been more hostile to each other. The unification they achieved under the drafting of the Constitution and Bill of Rights was the result of painstaking horse trading and compromise in the face of a common enemy. Even that wasn’t enough to prevent secession and an American civil war a century later. What finally cohered American civilization, if anything, was the dilution of regional and sectarian identities in the bloody mess of westward expansion — a historical process that involved not just Americans of European ancestry but people from all over the world, from Sweden to Peru to China.

“Heritage Americans” would have you believe that America’s founding was easy, due to the natural cultural affinity and brotherly affection of its people. But this is an affront to America’s history, whose exceptionalism is found in the yawning fissures it overcame, against the odds, through its commitment to democracy. This may sound like postmodern revisionism to the Right, but the fact is that the United States has always been a multicultural society. It’s only through the distortion of our modern eyes that we fail to perceive the cultural and political diversity out of which we forged a nation.

“Heritage” is a relic of feudal Europe, in which social status was a function of one’s bloodline. America was founded specifically to leave all that behind. What united us was not a common history or language or tradition, but a shared drive to seek prosperity for our families through hard work, rather than resign ourselves to our stations of birth. In this commitment, the immigrants who seek opportunity in the US today are as American as those who landed on the Mayflower. It’s those who would replace this American self-conception with an anachronistic caste system based on ancestry who betray the founding ideals of the country.

These days, of course, the truth is more prosaic. Rowdy “bals populaires” can still be found, full of drinking and dancing, the most famous being the bal des pompiers held at the firefighters’ barracks at Port-Royal until 4am (not a good night for your house to catch fire). Usually, though, the arrival of 14 July simply marks the beginning of high summer. Rather than “Vive la France”, you’re more likely to hear “Vous partez quand?” (“When are you leaving?”) in Paris shops and offices. It’s a reference to the grandes vacances that will soon sweep France, reducing all activity in business and politics to the absolute minimum.

And though the march-pasts and fly-overs will still dominate the capital today, this demonstration of confident state power has increasingly faced an anarchic counterpoint. Over the last couple of years, the night of 14 July has seen running battles between the police and youths in the banlieues, with fireworks designed to celebrate the French nation instead aimed at the so-called “forces of order”, as well as schools, libraries and other Republican symbols. These battles took on a frightening intensity in June 2023, after a 17-year-old was shot at a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. Back then, there was some talk of banning the 14 July festivities entirely. That didn’t happen, but this summer, too, there are nightly skirmishes in the cité (council estate) not far from where I live, muffled howls echoing off the graffitied concrete walls.

This is nothing new. Between order and disorder, indifference and activism, 14 July has long been contested territory. The bickering first began in 1879, when a semi-official public festival was held in France to commemorate that epic day 90 years before. The event proved so popular that the Third Republic decided to turn it into an official celebration. Yet then, as now, the problems started with that nastiness at the Bastille, with conservatives instead preferring a commemoration of the more peaceful Fête de la Fédération. Falling on 14 July 1790, it was a suitably wholesome celebration of Republican virtue, and safely free of lynching too.

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In the end, of course, the conservatives lost the debate. From 1880, the anniversary of the Bastille’s fall has been a national holiday. And, in a sense, the violence it recalls is appropriate, given the festival was partly encouraged to promote national unity after the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War. Yet, as the yearly chatter around grandes vacances implies, the French have often been unsure about what 14 July is really commemorating and why. Is it about the institution of the Republic? The French nation more generally? Or is it simply about bloody insurrection, one that famously freed only a handful of prisoners? Notably, there has always been a small but vocal fringe Royalist faction that believes the French Revolution was a mistake and that “Bastille Day” is simply the grubby glorification of proletarian violence.

Interestingly, though, this is not the position of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, which has always proudly embraced 14 July — albeit with rising warnings of anti-Republican “barbarism” in the banlieues. And no wonder: the most shocking recent example of anti-French violence came on 14 July 2016, when a Tunisian terrorist ploughed a 19-ton cargo truck into the holiday crowds at Nice, killing 86 people.

Recent criticism of the holiday has come from the Left. Some have argued that the displays of military might are crassly jingoistic in an age of European unity, even as invitations to Algeria and Morocco cause a degree of post-colonial angst. These controversies have been compounded by absurd exhortations by well-meaning Leftist for Muslims to “pray for France” — on a day, let’s not forget, that commemorates the refounding of France as a strictly secular state.

There has always been an ambivalence in France’s Muslim Community — the largest in Europe — towards Le Quatorze. Hardliners insist that Islam forbids celebrating festivals belonging to non-Muslims, or “miscreants”. There have also been well-intended gestures from moderates such as the Union des Mosquées de France (UMF) who regularly appeal to Muslims to join in with “the spirit of fraternity” in the interests of national unity. The truth is however, that most Muslims of varying shades of piety think that Le Quatorze Juillet has nothing to do with them.

Most significantly, today’s celebrations have come under attack from Left-wing historians, with Patrick Boucheron, a medieval historian at the Collège de France, leading the charge. Boucheron is not only an academic but a media figure in France, regularly appearing on television to expound against French exceptionalism, the idea of the “Great Nation” with a duty to show the world how to live.

Instead, Boucheron argues that French history is merely a component part of what he calls “global history” — the complicated matrix of geography, geopolitics, and colonialism which have together shaped the present. His opponents accuse him of being “anti-French”, using dubious Anglo-American ideas to rewrite French history in favor of diversity. This was a talking point during the opening ceremony of last year’s Olympic Games in Paris, partly scripted by Boucheron, and which depicted the French Revolution, and especially Marie Antoinette, in an irreverent way (the unfortunate queen was shown holding her head in hands, singing a revolutionary anthem). There was also, most provocatively, no mention of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. “The Revolution was violence,” said Boucheron in his defense. “We have to show how it was. We should not exalt it.”

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It’s clear, then, that 14 July has lately morphed not just into a debate about history, or even the legacy of the past on the present. Rather, it has become a proxy for a far broader dispute — about what France is. For their part, Boucheron’s enemies accuse him of being part of a globalized intellectual élite, one which loathes France and its people. Typical here is Loris Chavanette, a specialist of the Revolution. In the pages of Marianne, a Leftist publication skeptical of liberal handwringing, Chavanette argued that Boucheron and his friends helped prod France towards “cultural and moral decadence”. Ignorance of 14 July, he added, “is the symptom of the fracturing of our national bonds”.

Yet for all their diffidence towards the holiday, and even if their own historical knowledge is blurred and unsure, most ordinary French people would probably side with Chavanette and not Boucheron. Though attitudes towards the 14 July are indeed a clear marker of how “fractured” France is these days, whether they think they are celebrating the patrie or the Republic most people still need to feel, even in some vague way, French. At the same time, a recent IFOP poll found that some 63% of French people, although in favor of Le Quatorze Juillet, were unsure of the meaning of the term Republic these days.

And besides, whatever the controversies that surround it, the fact is that the storming of the Bastille is not merely one of the most important moments in the story of France — it’s also a key moment in world history. It’s a totem, still alive in many political cultures across the world, not just Marxist but socialist and liberal too. Despite the apparent cultivated indifference of the French, it is also impossible to imagine France without Le Quatorze Juillet, a sentiment endorsed not only by the French at home but also homesick French expatriates who celebrate it in South Kensington, and other international French enclaves, as fervently as they do in Paris. Just whatever you do, don’t call it “Bastille Day”.

Modern slavery is not limited to remote corners of West Africa. There are reportedly 1.1 million people living in modern slavery in the US, and 122,000 in the UK. Yet the numbers are clear, with the Arab world, and especially the Gulf, now a hub of modern slavery in the 21st century. Echoed in other corners of the Islamic world, Mali included, it speaks to a practice with deep cultural roots — and to how different societies choose to deal with their past in strikingly different ways.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many Westerners tend to focus on their own historical relationship with slavery. But if the triangular Atlantic trade came strewn with blood, it was far from unique in either scale or timespan. Enduring some 400 years until the 19th century, European slavers turned some 14 million Africans into property. By contrast, the slave trade in the Muslim world has been even more enduring. Beginning in the 7th century, and continuing right into modern times, the institution has overseen the enslavement of up to 17 million souls.

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From early in the Islamic experiment, this behaviour has been justified on religious grounds: via the Quran,, the Sunnah, or traditions of the Prophet, and Shari’a law. To an extent, that’s endured until the present. Indeed the most famous — and shocking — recent example of slavery in the Muslim world came courtesy of the so-called Islamic State. During its short-lived, self-declared “caliphate”, the jihadis glorified in raping and enslaving Yazidi women and children, seeing slavery as an essential component of contemporary Islamic government. In 2014, Dabiq, their English-language magazine, even ran a piece on reviving the practice, likening its slave-trading fighters to the Companions of the Prophet almost 1,400 years before. At the same time, Dabiq gave specific instructions on how to share the human spoils of war. “Yazidi women and children,” it said, are to be “divided” among Islamic State fighters, all in apparent keeping with Shari’a law.

Nor was that all. ISIS also set up slave markets: which essentially functioned like brothels. One woman was sold 14 times, to 14 different men, and was raped by 12 of them. Some women smeared their baby’s excrement on their bodies to avoid being bought, while others claimed to have periods or professed to be sick. Some fought back. Many received punishment beatings, or were separated from their children and locked in basements amid rising sewage and the boiling heat of the Syrian desert. One woman’s five-year-old daughter was even hanged from a window for bedwetting. No wonder many of the victims describe their plight as something approaching hell.

ISIS, of course, is the exception rather than the rule: no one would argue that pro-slavery views are widespread across the Muslim world today. As far back as 1990, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation issued the non-binding Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which denied the legitimacy of the institution. Like the ISIS example implies, meanwhile, contemporary voices in favour of slavery tend to be limited to the conservative or extremist fringe. In 2017, for instance, the Kuwaiti cleric Saalim bin Saad al-Taweel declared on his YouTube channel that slavery was “one of the virtues of Islam” since it provided infidels with the opportunity to convert to the faith. A few years earlier, the Saudi government cleric Sheikh Saleh al-Fawzan offered an unequivocal defence of slavery in a secretly recorded lecture. “Slavery is a part of Islam,” he declared, dismissing those who argued otherwise. “Whoever says such things is an infidel.”

As that clandestine recording implies, ISIS are unusual in defending Islamic slavery openly. Yet it is also true that abolition came relatively late in the day. Some of the last nations to abolish slavery include Iran (1928), Saudi Arabia (1962) and Oman (1970). Even relatively secular Turkey only got round to it in 1964, while Mauritania did so in 1981. The fact is that slavery, modern and hereditary, has lingered uncomfortably in parts of the Muslim world. That’s clear enough in the Gulf, where Asian migrant workers from countries like Nepal and the Philippines routinely end up as forced laborers. They may build the skyscrapers, and drive the cabs, and wait the swanky restaurants from Riyadh to Doha. But ensnared by the so-called kafala system, which forbids them from changing jobs without their employer’s permission, they’re also deeply vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. In the UAE alone, there may be 132,000 such workers.

So how is the Islamic world reckoning with the legacy of slavery? It’s a mixed picture, and not entirely encouraging. There may no longer be “a conspiracy of silence”, as Murray Gordon argued in Slavery in the Arab World in 1989. But a recent study of the life of an African slave in 19th century Iran begins with the words: “The history of slavery in Iran has yet to be written.” Writing last year, Zeinab Badawi came to a similar conclusion. While Arab societies benefited enormously over many centuries from “the blood, sweat and tears of African labor”, there has been no public debate on reparations. “The silence,” Badawi adds, “must be broken.”

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Yet if much of the Middle East continues to look the other way, a new generation of scholars has been making important inroads, debating slavery, slave-trading and abolition in books, academic articles and journalism. One good example is Nabil Matar, who’s deftly exposed the legacy of Mediterranean corsairing. The pirates captured hundreds of thousands of Europeans — and Europeans captured large numbers of Muslims, in a multifaith free-for-all — right across the early modern period.

Qatar, for its part, has also started to address the issue directly — albeit tentatively. In 2015, and with Doha under fire for exploiting migrant workers ahead of the 2022 World Cup, it unveiled the Bin Jelmood House. A former mansion, whose courtyard once teemed with enslaved Africans waiting to be sold, the site is now a museum exploring slavery in a global context. According to the museum, the story “begins in enslavement but ends in shared freedom and shared prosperity”. Pretty saccharine stuff, in other words, and hardly a genuine reckoning. You hear similar things elsewhere. “What should we have done?” is how one Arab in the Gulf put it to me the other day. “Everyone was doing it. That was business. Without it we would have starved.”

All the while, survivors of slavery across the Islamic world are battling to reclaim their stolen lives. Last year, I was in Nouakchott, the windswept capital of Mauritania and a repeat offender when it comes to hereditary racialized slavery. Here, in a tiny, sand-blown home of breeze blocks and corrugated metal, I met a remarkable woman called Habi. Like Hamey, she too had escaped decades of enslavement, explaining that it was only once she had been rescued, by her brother in 2008, that she realised she had never truly felt human before. “I’ve dedicated the rest of my life to fighting slavery,” Habi said, her eyes blazing with defiance. But given where countries like Mauritania are right now, she may have her work cut out.

***

Captives And Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World is published by Allen Lane.

The simple truth, too easily forgotten, is that the isolationists squarely won the debate. Europe might still today suffer under Nazi rule had Japan not destroyed isolationism by attacking Pearl Harbor. Stalin’s army could not have survived the Wehrmacht’s onslaught without the American and British help it received from 1941, including 400,000 trucks.

Now, again, American isolationism is a far more potent force than anyone in Europe is willing to recognize. They include a noisy fringe of antisemites, who are more prominent these days because Iran is the prospective enemy and Israel the ally.

But the movement’s roots do not derive from old hatreds, as was true of interwar isolationism, fanned as it was by Irish Anglophobes and German-Americans who had been harassed in the First World War and who cheered Nazi victories from Warsaw to Paris. This time, rather, isolationism is empowered by a perfectly realistic appraisal of the American wars in Indochina, in Afghanistan after 2001, and in Iraq from 2003.

Each of those wars — which added trillions to the public debt and cost the lives of many Americans — began because of a colossal and inexcusable intelligence failure. Those failures, moreover, are even more shocking because the relevant intelligence did not need to be snatched from enemy headquarters by daring feats of espionage. All the White House had to do, from Vietnam to Iraq, was pick up a standard reference book.

Consider President Kennedy, who sent US forces to Vietnam to deny Chinese control of Indochina. So passionate was JFK about his war that he personally chose the Army’s new jungle handbooks right in the Oval Office. But had he instead read a few pages on Vietnam’s history, he would immediately have learned that the very identity of the Vietnamese people had emerged in opposition to Chinese expansionism, so the best way of keeping China’s influence out of Indochina was to send weapons to Hanoi.

That is exactly what President Truman did in 1948, when he ordered that money, supplies and weapons be rushed to Tito who, communist though he was, had decided to keep Stalin’s Soviet army out of Yugoslavia. But Kennedy chose a different path, and many Americans were killed or maimed to fight against the most anti-Chinese nation on earth.

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America lacked intelligence at the start of its Vietnamese adventure — and hardly had more by the end. Why? Because, it seems, to understand foreign countries is just not an American talent, and indeed the hugely expensive “intelligence community” of 16 different agencies barely even tries. The CIA’s officers are the best educated of the lot, but they too resolutely refuse to learn foreign languages, except perhaps bar-room Spanish. One exception are the so-called “language officers”, but they stay at headquarters. Even Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, knew no Arabic at the start of his tenure and refused to learn any thereafter. His deputy also spoke no Arabic, despite the fact that bin Laden used speeches to inspire and direct his followers.

No wonder America’s 21st-century wars were intelligence disasters before anything else. Certainly, America’s entry into Afghanistan after 9/11 was both necessary and unavoidable. Because I had myself designed the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command’s “Mountain Division” Format; had once visited the country unlike almost everyone else in the Pentagon; and also enjoyed a personal friendship with the man himself, I knew exactly what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld planned to do.

First, less than 3,000 US troops would be sent via Uzbekistan to make contact with the anti-government Northern Alliance, still holding out north of Kabul. Once they jointly attacked Taliban forces, and the latter gathered to fight, they would be bombed to pieces by B-52 heavy bombers. After doing that a few times, US troops would travel to known al-Qaeda camps, killing anyone who still remained there. Finally, every US soldier would go home.

Had anyone told Rumsfeld, a practical man who had done well in business, that US forces would remain in Afghanistan for almost two decades, he would doubtless have been horrified. As it was, under Rumsfeld’s successors, the US remained in Afghanistan for expensive but utterly futile attempts at “nation-building”, which included the supply of an ultra-modern constitution complete with a female parliamentary quota larger than the female presence in the House of Commons or the US House of Representatives.

That provided the Taliban with a very strong argument — again one that Pentagon officials could have avoided by reading any book on the country — because very few Afghans, either male or female, believe that women should speak in public, let alone argue politics with men.

And that was just one of several disastrous intelligence failures. When US generals demanded billions of dollars for an “Afghan” army, I argued vehemently against this stupid waste of money, reminding them that the British Indian Army’s loyal and effective troops served in regiments whose manpower was drawn entirely from a single ethno-religious community. Otherwise, I warned, soldiers were more likely to fight each other rather than the Taliban: because no “Afghan” identity truly existed.

Unfortunately, the US-funded Afghan Army, which claimed 180,000 men at its peak, threw together ethnic strangers without a common language, including historic enemies like Tajiks and Pashtuns. This artificial army unsurprisingly surrendered to the Taliban without a fight in August 2021, even as 714 US, NATO and fellow Afghan soldiers were killed by the very Afghan troops who were meant to be their allies.

Every other part of the Afghan state — from the schools to the courts — were just as flawed. All that remains of the $2.3 trillion the US spent on Afghanistan are the Dubai bank accounts of those Afghans clever and corrupt enough to steal the money that would have been wasted in any case. That is ultimately what over 2,400 Americans died for in Afghanistan.

The intelligence failure was even worse in Iraq. Not long before the 2003 invasion, I was called to give my views to the Senate foreign relations committee, chaired by the future President Biden, accompanied by a witness for the Bush administration. In my testimony, still online, I argued that although Saddam Hussein presided over a brutal dictatorship, he was saving lives every day: by keeping the Barzani and Talabani Kurds from killing each other; by keeping the Kurds as a whole from killing their Turkmen neighbors; by keeping Kurds and Turkmen from killing their Sunni Arab neighbors and vice versa; and by keeping Sunnis from killing Shi’as and vice versa — though I did omit the high probability that Shi’a religious dynasties would kill each other.

During my testimony, the administration witness accused me of racism, because I had clearly implied that Iraqis were incapable of democracy, the right of every human. He went on to say that I was doubly wrong because the Iraqis were the best educated of all Arab populations, and included no fewer than 100,000 engineers. When I suggested that a Baghdad University degree could be had for $50 dollars, frame included, I only made matters worse.

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Yet once again, the exchange shows the utter failure of US intelligence. Had the CIA director circulated a simple political study of Iraq, everyone on Capitol Hill would have understood why the emergence of a functioning democracy could not happen spontaneously just by removing Saddam Hussein, and would instead require decades of tranquility and political education.

The CIA even failed to present the simple argument that destroying Saddam Hussein’s forces would allow the bitterly anti-American Iran of the ayatollahs to extend its influence into Iraq — unless the US Army became a permanent Mesopotamian constabulary to contain Iran’s influence.

One soldier who served in Iraq, and therefore learned from personal experience how Americans were sent to fight and die for no reason, is Vice President Vance, who has placed several like-minded officials in key positions. At any rate, these varied disasters neatly explain the rising isolationism right across American political life, even if Trump’s intention is merely to add a few heavy bomber sorties to Israel’s war, thereby denuclearizing Iran for years to come.

Perhaps these new isolationists do not believe Trump. Or else they do, but fear what the Pentagon and the intelligence community will do with his one-night strike plans. Perhaps they fear that after the bombing, there will be more fighting, and even calls for “nation-building” to repair the damage. After all, their fathers were sent to Vietnam because of Washington’s pathetic ignorance, and they themselves served in George Bush’s quagmires.

Most people understand that Israelis are allies fighting for their lives, and are not Vietnamese, Afghans or Iraqis, out to get what they can from rich, naive Americans. More people also know that the Israelis would never want Americans to fight for them, except for a few bomber crews for a single night.

But after years of lies, of foolish optimism by eager, ignorant generals, these new isolationists are determined not to be deceived again. It will therefore take a firm decision by Trump to bring the Iran war to an end, with the destruction of the Fordow centrifuge deep underground — the one thing the Israelis cannot do for themselves without risking the lives of hundreds of commandos very far from home. Either way, Trump himself should emphatically rule out any attempt at regime change, let alone nation-building. You do not need the CIA to tell you that trying will end in ruin.

On that day in 1768, an unsettled throng of around 15,000 people — “an unarmed giddy mob”, according to one chronicler — had gathered outside the King’s Bench prison in London to protest against the imprisonment of the radical MP and journalist John Wilkes. He had been charged with seditious libel for criticizing King George III and the Prime Minister in his newspaper The North Briton. Concerns over freedom of speech and individual liberty were at stake, fueling the crowd’s discontent: troops had been sent to guard the prison in anticipation of trouble. But tensions soon boiled over. A judge read out the Riot Act and ordered the crowd to disperse, but when it defied the order, with some individuals throwing stones, the soldiers turned their guns upon the demonstrators. Among the dead was a blameless publican’s son who was mistaken for a leading agitator, hunted down, and shot dead in error. The incident inflamed popular fury, and sparked wider disturbances all over London. The disturbances were so severe that it was rumored the shaken King contemplated abdication.

Certain common ingredients can be found in incidents throughout history in which the state and the populace have clashed disastrously. They include an intensifying political tension, which finds its flashpoint in a single issue; a large crowd of mainly peaceful protesters, a small minority of whom are bent on violence; the deployment of troops; continuing provocation from an element in the crowd; confused and exasperated official warnings; and finally, excessively forceful military retaliation against demonstrators that results in the death of blameless civilians.

From the Champs de Mars massacre in Paris, 1791, to the grim events of Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972, this pattern repeats itself. And Donald Trump’s decision to deploy 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 active-duty Marines to Los Angeles recreates many elements of these historical clashes. In an unusual presidential move against what he dubbed “violent, insurrectionist mobs”, the troops were drafted in against the explicit wishes of the Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and Newsom’s attorney general, Rob Bonta. Indeed, the LA police chief, Jim McDonnell, said that he was confident that his police department could handle the demonstrations on their own, and that the arrival of the Marines would only make things more difficult.

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The National Guard troops were said to be receiving two days of training on civil unrest in batches of 2,000, including crowd control and the protection of property. It isn’t much time for schooling a force of that size in the nuances of civic policing. Yet, in the past when the military has been enlisted to quell civilian protest, what plays out long-term is rarely the promised imposition of order. Should the gamble misfire, the ensuing casualties instead lead to the rapid radicalization of an even larger number of citizens in outright opposition to the state.

On 17 July 1791, for example, a different National Guard appeared in front of a crowd of up to 50,000 people at the Champ de Mars in Paris. They were there to sign a republican petition demanding the removal of King Louis XVI, who had attempted to flee France with his family in the previous month, and been forced back to the city. Early in the day, a small group of vigilantes in the broadly peaceful crowd had discovered two men hiding, and summarily hanged them in the apparent belief that they were foreign spies. The nervous Paris mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly characterized all the petitioners as “brigands”: he declared martial law, dispatching the National Guard, who ordered the protestors to disperse. When the soldiers were insulted and, by some accounts, pelted with stones, they opened fire, killing between 30 and 50 people.

Thereafter, the working people of Paris abandoned trust in the more moderate revolutionaries who had previously been their leaders: the path was set clear for the rapid rise of the radical Maximilien Robespierre. The latter ensured that, in November 1793, the former Mayor Bailly was executed on a scaffold specially erected for him in the Champ de Mars, a pointed retribution for his role in sending the National Guard there just over two years earlier. The desired restoration of order was replaced by violent radicalization.

As in most situations of this sort, Mayor Bailly — mistakenly, as it turned out — had deemed the introduction of the military helpful for containing unrest in volatile circumstances. Similarly, when Harold Wilson first sent troops into Northern Ireland in August 1969, it was a response to weeks of violent sectarian rioting which had exhausted the capabilities of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a force that was also perceived by many Northern Irish Catholics as biased in favor of Protestants. People were aware even at the time, however, that this seemingly unavoidable course of action was nonetheless fraught with dangers: a Guardian editorial warned that if the presence of British soldiers “can give both police and rioters time for reflection and for tempers to cool, they will contribute to peace. But officers and those who are giving them their orders should have no illusions about the gunpowder keg on which they are now sitting.”

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By 30 January 1972, a large number of metaphorical and literal explosions had already detonated, resulting in the deaths of civilians and soldiers alike. The calculated risk was facing worsening odds. The events of Bloody Sunday in Derry carried broad echoes of St George’s Fields: a banned march, anti-internment protestors demonstrating against unjust incarceration, sporadic stone-throwing and petrol-bombing, a confusion of rioters and peaceful marchers, and an increasingly keyed-up soldiery. After members of the Parachute Regiment shot dead 13 unarmed Catholic marchers, the Northern Ireland conflict intensified sharply: the events were described as the best recruiting sergeant the Provisional IRA ever had. In post-ceasefire Northern Ireland, the lesson has been learned: during the current spate of severe rioting in mainly Protestant towns, the Police Service of Northern Ireland has called for back-up from UK-wide police forces: it has not asked for assistance from the army.

In a historical context, there is something unusual about President Trump’s decision to call the troops into LA: it has not been forced upon him by necessity, but engineered by choice. Indeed, many high-ranking former military figures have expressed their unease. Despite a measure of far-Left violence and the torching of some self-driving cars, certainly worthy of police containment, the current unrest has not remotely approached the level of disorder seen in early-Seventies Northern Ireland. Nor is it comparable to the last time troops were called into LA itself, during the 1992 Rodney King riots in which 63 people died and thousands were injured. Indeed, Trump’s mobilizing of the National Guard in a civilian setting has already had a catalyzing rather than a restraining effect upon public protests, which have spread to numerous cities across the US.

Much of America is now waking up to the profundity of the presidential power-grab. The rather lackluster military parade in Washington on Saturday, in which the Army’s 250th anniversary coincided with Trump’s own birthday, contained less civic vigor than many of the “No Kings” demonstrations in 2,000 cities and towns across America. The slogan itself knowingly harks back to the American Revolution and the rejection of arbitrary authority that sits at the very heart of the United States.

Where can the dispute go next? The potential for further conflagration is still there. The president’s rhetoric before Saturday’s parade — that “any” protestors would be met with “very big force” — made no apparent distinction between violent and peaceful protestors, leaving it to journalists to clarify with his press secretary that he continued to support the rights of the latter. Thus far, the active role of the National Guard has been limited. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prevents the military from being used for domestic law enforcement, and Trump’s order currently sits in a kind of legal limbo: a federal court has ruled that his actions were illegal, while the appeals court put that ruling temporarily on hold. Yet by describing protestors as “insurrectionist mobs”, Trump has been laying the verbal groundwork for invoking the 218-year-old Insurrection Act, signed by President Thomas Jefferson, which allows the president to deploy the military directly to suppress an “insurrection”. It was notably not invoked on January 6, 2021, when pro-Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol, with some violently assaulting the police.

In the US, once described by John F Kennedy as a “nation of immigrants”, the question of immigration has now become a cauldron of contention. But the time-honored mechanisms for solving problems with democratic argument and consensus are being swiftly eroded. The old cross-party courtesies and conventions, which do more than most people realize to oil the moving parts of a nation, are being replaced by open contempt and muscular force: last Thursday a Democratic senator for California, Alex Padilla, was wrestled to the floor and handcuffed for seeking to ask a question during a news conference held by the Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The murder by a lone gunman on Saturday of a Minnesota Democratic lawmaker and her husband, and the attempted murder of a state senator and his wife, was an even bleaker signal of an overheating political system.

President Trump, who avoided the Vietnam draft in his youth due to “bone spurs” in his heels, has now developed a growing escalatory instinct, a taste for combat and constant drama. It is telling, perhaps, that seconds after a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear last July, he began yelling “Fight! Fight!”. A fight needs enemies, and Trump is locating them — not among the world’s despots, but among his fellow Americans. The President is turning up the heat in a country long held together by a unifying national ideal which he is now vigorously dismantling. Is he ready for what he could unleash? Those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland, where democracy did indeed catch fire, can only watch his dangerous game with a sense of foreboding: an elderly child, in a room stuffed with kindling, playing with matches.

Scenes like this played out across the country in the Forties as the long twilight of the British aristocracy plunged into a gloomy dusk. Hundreds of stately homes were demolished or converted into hotels and flats, their owners faced with crippling taxes and lacking the means to repair or maintain them. It was a busy time for James Lees-Milne, the Country Houses Secretary at the National Trust. His diaries show him traveling the country and meeting with families who saw in the Trust the last hope of saving their homes. Everywhere he found the forlorn signs of a dying order: an old man giving the last tour of his gardens; a Viscountess scrubbing the floor of her servantless kitchen; unheated rooms under the “mournful, reproachful gaze of dozens of forgotten ancestors on the walls”.

The Trust wanted to prevent important buildings and landscapes from perishing with the hierarchy that had sustained them. Not every house met Lees-Milne’s aesthetic standards — “A horrible property. I hope it gets bombed,” he writes of one in Kent — and they had to be donated with assets or capital to pay for their upkeep. But dozens were accepted in the following years and decades, among them Clandon Park, transferred to the Trust in 1956. It was a peculiarly British compromise. The country’s leading families were able to preserve the symbols of their former prestige, and many of them stayed as tenants in their ancestral homes. In return, these were formally recast as the common inheritance of the nation. Commoners could stroll in their grounds, marvel at their collections, and nose around their servants’ quarters.

The country house survived as an emblem of enduring Englishness, and it gave the National Trust something of the same familiar, steadfast quality. It is thanks in significant part to these polite artifacts that the Trust membership ballooned from around 7,000 in 1945 into the hundreds of thousands by the Sixties. In 2017 it reached five million. But this year, as the charity marks its 130th anniversary, it appears to be losing faith in its most recognizable asset.

Clandon Park was gutted by fire in 2015. The Trust initially committed to restoring the property, but in 2022 it reversed course, claiming the damage was too great. Instead, it wants to fashion the burned-out shell of the building into a different kind of tourist attraction, installing glass walkways, a new roof and a café. The decision has appalled many lovers of architectural heritage and craft, who insist that restoration is possible. Especially painful is the loss of Leoni’s Marble Hall, a dramatic, lavishly ornamented room at the heart of the house. The stucco ceiling by Giuseppe Artari, teeming with three-dimensional figures and motifs, was a masterpiece in its own right.

The Georgian Group has appealed against the Trust’s plans, and is now waiting to hear whether Angela Rayner, the housing and communities secretary, will agree to reconsider. But the case is already tangled up with a wider set of concerns. “You get the impression they’re well rid of places like Clandon,” says Caroline McAslan, a former volunteer at two National Trust properties. Aslan was also active in the volunteers’ association. She gave up her responsibilities some years ago, out of “frustration with the direction the Trust was taking”. She had observed a shift in the institution’s priorities. “It’s now nature, beauty, and then history,” she says, referring to a slogan frequently used by the Trust. “The houses come in right at the bottom.”

The Trust, which is one of the UK’s biggest landowners, has ambitious plans for nature restoration on its 10,000 square-mile estate; these include planting trees, rewilding land, and changing farming practices. It has also been focusing on social justice initiatives, and on appealing to different audiences, especially urban ones. The Trust has pledged to help 100 towns and cities expand their green spaces, and is partnering with Mind, a mental health charity, as part of its plans for “ending unequal access to nature”.

Meanwhile, the Trust has been looking at its houses with a critical eye. In 2020, it published a bitterly contested report tying its properties to slavery and colonialism, and further projects on these themes have followed. “I think some people would like us to feel more guilty than we should be,” says McAslan of the Trust’s approach to history. It seems unlikely that members who pay almost $100 annually to visit historic buildings were unaware of the darker aspects of their provenance. Clandon Park was probably paid for with the wealth of Elizabeth Knight, who inherited wealth from merchants operating in Jamaica. There is no evidence that this influenced the Trust’s decision not to restore it, though before that decision was announced, a headline on the charity’s website referred to the house as “built on the profits of slavery”.

What is certain is that the Trust’s search for new audiences is changing its attitude to houses. A leaked internal presentation, also in 2020, proposed a “revolutionary” shift away from “the English Country House as a distinctive part of our national heritage”. It called instead for an “audience-led approach” that would make the houses “useful for as many people as possible”. In practice this has meant that, while a number of houses are still presented in a “traditional” way, others are being refashioned with gimmicks and leisure facilities. Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire, for instance, was turned into a “Children’s Country House” with neon signs, a disco, and speech bubbles next to portraits. During the Trust’s post-pandemic layoffs, the experienced curator Andrew Loukes was made redundant because he lacked the ability to “attract new and different audiences”.

Jeffrey Haworth, who was a historic buildings representative at the Trust for 22 years, tells me how the curatorial direction has changed. “Instead of protecting the aesthetics and character and architectural importance of the country houses, it’s all about interpreting things.” Rooms have been insensitively repainted, baubles hung from ceilings, and “modernistic intrusions” such as glass-walled restaurants added to Grade I-listed buildings. According to Haworth, the problem is that “the vital post is missing” in the senior management, namely the post of Historic Buildings Secretary. This may have proved decisive at Clandon Park, where the director responsible for the building’s fate “was bamboozled into believing it couldn’t be restored”, Haworth believes. “He simply wasn’t equipped to make the decision, and yet he had to because there was no one else.”

All this is suggestive of the Trust’s priorities. Haworth notes that under Helen Ghosh, director general at the charity until 2018, there was a feeling “that country houses were wicked, were not the Trust’s core purpose”. Similarly, McAslan says of the current director general, Hilary McGrady, “I don’t think she likes big country houses.” When I asked the National Trust about their approach to houses, they replied that “we will continue to conserve our national heritage to a high standard while looking to balance the significance of our places and collections — and how we look after them — with the public benefit they offer.”

It is difficult to gauge the extent of the discontent at the Trust. The membership has dipped to 5.38 million, from a peak of 5.95 million in 2019-20, and volunteer numbers have dropped slightly over the same period. But there could be other reasons for this. The Trust’s governing council claims a democratic mandate, yet it has undermined its credibility by introducing a digital voting system, “Quick Vote”. This inevitably makes participation difficult for older people, who make up a big proportion of the membership, and tilts the scales by inviting voters to endorse the management’s approved candidates and resolutions — but not the alternatives —with a single click. Restore Trust, a movement established in 2020 to contest changes at the charity, says its own donors number “in the thousands.”

The recent tensions do raise some fundamental questions, though. Is the Trust’s first duty to the public, or to the places it cares for? Does it exist to conserve beautiful and significant things, or to make them serve a greater number of people? McGrady says that she wants the charity to “go back to our roots” by focusing on nature and inclusion, referring to the Trust’s origins in the 1890s with campaigns for public access to rural landscapes and green spaces in towns. Yet the implication that country houses were a later add-on is slightly misleading. Founders Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter were advocating for architectural conservation before they even formed the Trust, and the organization acquired historic buildings from the start. People had been visiting great houses in large numbers since the mid-19th century, as the Romantic ethos of that era had already identified these structures as remnants of a fast-disappearing world. In an age of industry and foreign competition, ownership of agricultural land was no longer a secure basis for financial and political power.

The situation became more urgent after the First World War, when estates were left without heirs or struggled with large increases in death duties. The rise of mass democracy made the landed class an obvious target for taxation, with politicians eager to demonstrate fairness and to raise funds for social spending. Many grand families could no longer afford to keep their mansions running. As much as a quarter of England’s land was sold in four years after 1918, and old manor houses began to be demolished in their hundreds. Some were bought by Americans and reassembled across the Atlantic, a sign of the wealth and power that was draining away from Britain to the United States.

Still, the Trust’s growing involvement with stately homes from the late-Thirties brought contradictions. The group became, as the historian Adrian Tinniswood has written, “a curious alliance of conservatives and radicals… which could number socialists and the nobility among its ranks”. Although it was not immediately obvious, two contrasting moral visions had taken root. One was primarily interested in equality and social progress, while the other saw the conservation of the nation’s heritage as a sacred duty in its own right. The former tended to emphasize nature and public access, the latter countryside and houses. As Lees-Milne wrote of his calling to save important buildings: “My loyalties were to the houses, the families and the National Trust (which I regarded as an instrument of the others’ preservation) in that order.” He makes no mention of the public.

By the mid-Sixties, the cracks had begun to appear. Conrad Rawnsley, grandson of one of the Trust’s founders, launched an agenda that closely anticipated what we are seeing today. He led a successful environmental campaign, Project Neptune, which raised millions in donations, allowing the Trust to acquire hundreds of miles of coastline. He also tried to instigate a members’ revolt against what he saw as an excessive reverence for stately homes. “Should all the great country houses be shown as museums, or should some of them play a more active part in the life of the community?” Rawnsley asked. Through the Eighties and Nineties, similar divisions appeared over hunting and military bases on Trust land.

So the Trust’s activist approach is not entirely new, but it suffers contradictions of its own. As the clumsy interventions at historic buildings show, there is a point at which the effort to reach new audiences ruins the thing you are trying to share. To say that country houses should be for everyone is like arguing that operas should be rewritten for rap fans, or that chess needs to become more like skateboarding. If a diverse society means anything, it’s that people have different tastes. Another problem is that the supposed democratization of the country house appears to be an entirely top-down project. It is not as though these places had to change to stay popular; the Trust’s membership grew over the 2010s, as did visits to heritage sites more generally. Thanks no doubt to productions like Downton Abbey, the allure of aristocracy, and interest in how people lived in the past, remain strong.

Judging by its recent schemes and announcements, the Trust has become carried away in its desire to wrap the whole nation in its loving embrace. This is heritage and nature viewed through the lens of public service delivery; a vision of an NHS for Britain’s soul. The charity’s head of communications places it among those institutions which seek to “apply expertise”, “make decisions to benefit society as a whole”, and through their benign neutrality, “act as roadblocks to extremism”. These may be laudable aims, but they suggest that social purpose comes before specific roles and responsibilities, whether addressing the concerns of the 1,300 tenant farmers on National Trust land, or using the restoration of Clandon Park as an opportunity to train craftsmen and other specialists.

The Trust is also creating the impression that there is something inadequate about its existing audience, which seems unwise for an organization that depends on membership fees and the unpaid labor of volunteers. One former volunteer of 15 years, who asked to remain anonymous, tells me that the Trust’s paid staff and management treat contributions like his as disposable. “Many people gave years, some decades, only to be cast aside by work-shy selfish ideologues.” In this and other interviews, it was clear that workaday frustrations involving timetables and admin burdens are compounded by a more general sense that the ideals of the institution have changed.

I did find that, among most of its critics, there is still a deep loyalty to the Trust, and a willingness to acknowledge good work where it is being done. Unsurprisingly though, those who commit their time and money to the houses regard them as worth preserving not only to be useful to others, but for their own merits. As McAslan says, “volunteers love their work because they value the houses that they’re working in.” Ultimately, what is special about the country house as an institution is its combination of aesthetic and historical interest. With their gardens, artworks and architecture, they remain, as the Marquess of Bath said of his own house in 1949, “a thing of beauty in a drab and dreary world”. And the families which amassed these trophies were, in effect, the governing class of Britain for many centuries. Their stories are therefore worth telling.

Take the Onslows of Clandon Park, for instance. This lineage certainly included some wastrels, such as the 2nd Earl, who much preferred driving his carriage to contributing in parliament, and thought “a good veal cutlet on a plate” to be “a much more rational object of admiration” than fine artworks. But the Onslows also produced courtiers, privy councillors, philanthropists and decorated soldiers. It is the only family to provide three Speakers for the House of Commons. The 4th Earl was a governor of New Zealand and — perhaps more importantly for the average Brit — the founder of Battersea Dogs Home. His son made important discoveries in genetics at Cambridge, despite being paralyzed in a diving accident. And Gwendolen Guinness, the Countess of Iveagh whose bequest allowed the Trust to acquire Clandon Park, was, among many other things, one of the first woman MPs.

When the National Trust took over estates from families like this, it helped to smooth the transition from an aristocratic society to a popular one. It proposed to the masses that, rather than simply forgetting the culture previously enjoyed by a few, they could regard it, in some sense, as their own. Of course many people had no interest in this final act of noblesse oblige, but a remarkable number did. One of the questions raised by the loss of a building like Clandon Park is whether Britain’s cultural institutions still have faith in this covenant with the past, and in the national story it was part of. They may believe that its time has passed; and yet, finding a new story to replace it will be no easy feat.