Vance, in short, is rediscovering political gravity. And yet he remains the Right’s most viable and promising leader, and will likely retain that status regardless of what happens in November 2026 — or even 2028. Post-Trump, he is the only figure who can hold together a Republican Party that could otherwise easily splinter into four or five mutually suspicious factions. He has maintained bridges to each of these factions, and has learned to address himself acutely to the one anxiety all share, a fear that recently found a name — France.

France functions for America’s various conservative factions as a kind of crystal ball. In the looting, arson, and rioting that tore through major French cities over the past fortnight, America’s conservative groupings see their own future: that is, unless mass migration is halted and, at least to some extent, reversed. In France, they see the tipping point already past. So many culturally incompatible newcomers have piled on, in their telling, that society, properly speaking, is no more. What remains is an agglomeration of strangers, arrayed now in hostility, now in cold peace.

Several years’ worth of public and private conversations with Vance have convinced me that this is his central animating cause, the source of both his fears and his ambitions. The various factions on the Right, he feels, might have their disagreements — among themselves and with the Left — over issues ranging from tech policy to social welfare to war and peace. But all those other discussions must take second place to the complex of issues around immigration, assimilation, demography, and social cohesion.

For Vance, those other disagreements determine the shape of the polity — whereas the migration issue determines whether Americans have a polity at all. As he has repeatedly told me, it’s impossible to build up social solidarity “if society is always in flux”.

Turmoil in France has served as a foil for American statesmen going back to the two nations’ launch as twin revolutionary republics founded on Enlightenment ideals. Among the founding generation, Thomas Jefferson went furthest in championing the French revolutionary cause. As he saw it, the Jacobins had unleashed in the Old World the same spirit that had inspired American colonists: the spirit of a freedom that could no longer accept the yoke of kings and priests.

Yes, Jefferson wrote in a 1793 letter, the French Revolution had had its excesses: most notably, the killing of “guilty persons” without trial (how had they been judged guilty without trial? Jefferson didn’t say). But these excesses were par for the course in a “struggle which was necessary”. So necessary, in fact, that “rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated”, with only “an Adam and Eve left in every country”.

Others of Jefferson’s generation disagreed. Alexander Hamilton, speaking for the conservative Federalists, followed news of the Reign of Terror with great distress. Directly contradicting Jefferson, he argued in 1793 that the difference between the American and French revolutions is “no less great than that between liberty and licentiousness” — between orderly self-government and mob rule.

The French Revolution’s assault on religion didn’t seem to bother Jefferson one bit. But to early American conservatives, it was not only blasphemous, but self-defeating. While far from orthodox in their personal religious belief and practice, the more conservative-leaning Founding Fathers saw virtue as a necessary precondition of self-government, and they held up religion, in turn, as an indispensable support to virtue.

Thus, John Adams observed of revolutionary France: “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.” On National Fast Day on 9 May 1798, instituted by President Adams amid deteriorating relations with the French republic, the head of Yale University, Timothy Dwight, took to the pulpit to warn that “to destroy us, our enemies must first destroy our Sabbath” — as they already had in Paris.

As has often been the case since, America’s geopolitical interests dissolved these ideological boundaries. When it became undeniable that the French Revolution had empowered a new emperor with an appetite for world domination, Jefferson shrank from his earlier Francophilia. In 1802, and now President, he described Napoleonic France as “our natural and habitual enemy”. France’s encroachments on New Orleans, and along the Mississippi on what was then the western frontier, should prompt the Americans to “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation”.

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Through the 19th century, France’s image in America more or less solidified into what it is today: as a place that riots a lot, and whose politics seesaw between the extremes of revolt and reaction. There was an undeniable element of hypocrisy in this reception. Americans had their own volatile divisions, which escalated into civil war in the middle of the century, claiming some 600,000 lives. Class struggle in Gilded Age America and in the early 20th century didn’t look so different from the Paris Commune.

Then again, which quarrelsome couple doesn’t feel better about itself while listening to the family shouting match in the apartment next door? American conservatives have long framed their society’s internal contradictions and domestic rancor as foreign. An entire genre of US conservative thought is devoted to uncovering the European — specifically German and French — roots of progressivism, to the neglect of its origins in Anglo-American liberalism.

Which brings us to today’s French anxieties on the American Right: to US fears of immigrant “no-go zones” and seething multitudes apt to riot when their “paper” country — France — defeats their real homes — Algeria, Morocco — in a football match. Fear of ill-assimilated banlieues encircling major cities like Paris and Marseilles. Fear of Islamo-gauchisme, with the white Leftists mouthing the lofty slogans and the Arab or African toughs doing the nihilistic looting, all while making it clear that their political attachment to France is all but nonexistent.

It’s easy to caricature these fears as overblown, ignorant — or, at any rate, irrelevant. American immigration and assimilation dynamics are different from those in France (and Western Europe more generally). Unlike with the French or the British, Americans haven’t struggled to define a place for the descendants of former colonial subjects — they haven’t had to deal with the transition from empire to nation-state. And it’s a cliché but nevertheless true that US culture is easier to assimilate into precisely because it’s relatively “thin”: the culture of a commercial empire with a voracious appetite for labor and dynamism.

All the same, it’s a mistake to dismiss wholesale the American Right’s current French anxieties. For starters, there is more than a kernel of truth to the American conservative diagnosis. There are sensitive areas in France where the police must tread carefully. There are mosques and imams whose preaching casts into severe doubt the very possibility of expecting political loyalty of certain communities. Take a walk through Parc Georges-Valbon and Saint-Denis into central Paris — I did so at Christmas last year — and you can’t help but feel that the rate of demographic churn is so high that, in certain areas, majority-minority distinctions completely break down, leaving only different minorities mustering different levels of street-level and institutional “strength”. France, such as it is, is something vestigial in these areas, marked only in streets named after long-forgotten saints, kings, novelists.

Riots aside, this generates what I’ve described in these pages as diversity stress: a kind of constant, low-grade anxiety associated with having to negotiate normative and linguistic differences, public-resource competition, and simple unfamiliarity. It challenges people’s expectation of order and familiarity, which is just as much a part of being human as is the taste for novelty.

While the nature and source of the migration differs between Europe and the United States, moreover, the underlying dynamic is the same: the mass movement of people from the Global South to the Global North that began in the postwar decades and was turbo-charged beginning in the mid-2010s (coinciding, for an obvious reason, with the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic)

Why so many in the past decade — more than a million to Europe under Angela Merkel’s Wir schaffen das regime, and some eight million in the Biden wave? Partly to shore up aging demographics and the pension systems that depend on fresh labor; partly because migration is another form of wage arbitrage for employers; and partly (above all, perhaps) because migrants can more easily reach the West, thanks to prosperity in the Global South that allows a growing subset of people to cross vast distances relatively cheaply and quickly.

The upshot of all this is that the migration anxieties that twice catapulted Trump to the White House will long outlast his messy reign. A majority of Americans might disapprove of his handling of immigration, recoiling from the performative cruelty of ICE. But those same majorities still tell pollsters that they prefer the same or lower levels of migration as today (when Trump has already sealed the southern border and drastically cut legal migration and naturalization).

The result is that immigration restrictionism will remain the American Right’s top concern for the foreseeable future. It is the one cause upon which an otherwise notoriously fractious movement can converge even after Trump leaves the historical stage. Today, the movement is divided between five main factions. We might call them the Restorationists, the Tech Accelerationists, the Christian Nationalists, the Populists, and the Catholic Solidarists. All demand less migration, albeit for different reasons and in a different tone.

Start with the Restorationists, those who hope to restore the GOP’s old ideological fusion of pro-business libertarianism, foreign-policy hawkism, and moral traditionalism. Historically, this group was the most amenable to mass migration, not least because it’s what the pro-business donor class insisted upon. But things have changed. For one thing, this faction has been chastened by the rise of Trump and Trumpism, and its most classically liberal elements have more or less defected to the Democratic Party (where they will have to contend with an ascendant democratic socialism).

More important, supporters have come to view mass migration as one of the main drivers of anti-Israel sentiment — and they’re not entirely wrong. Politicians with names like Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani are products of post-1965 immigration, when the United States threw open the gates to newcomers from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The children and grandchildren of those migrants attended US universities where various grievance-studies courses were commonplace, where questioning American exceptionalism was de rigueur, and where campus activism meant backing Students for Justice in Palestine if you, as a member of, say, the Asian and Pacific Islander group, hoped to win support for your own pet causes. This is also why Vance, in a leaked address to the Republican Jewish Coalition, argued that anti-Israel sentiment could be mitigated by cutting migration. He was pushing on an open door: the remnants of the old-school GOP today are far less hospitable to migration than were their predecessors in the Reagan or Bush era.

Which brings us to the Tech Accelerationists — those who believe fervently that America’s salvation lies in staying ahead of China when it comes to artificial intelligence and other frontier technologies. This group, too, could historically be expected to support certain kinds of immigration to fill positions in research, data science, and the like with STEM workers from the developing world who’d work for much less than their American-born peers — and who didn’t dare demand higher wages or organize into unions, since their right to stay was often tied to a single employer.

But this, too, is changing. Like the Restorationists, the Accelerationists have been chastened by the populist tide. Insofar as they wish to remain part of the Right, they have to bargain and compromise with populism, just like every other faction. In December 2024, one of their chief spokesmen, Vivek Ramaswamy — a vocal champion of guest-worker programs — was attacked online after he blamed American cultural mediocrity for tech firms’ reliance on foreign labor (the subtext being that America still needs visa schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Asian, and specifically Indian, tech workers).

Then, too, the rise of AI and automation is rendering many lower-level tech jobs redundant, and an automated economy doesn’t need endless low-wage migrants. Here, too, Vance can bridge the gap between populists and Big Tech: as he told me in a 2024 interview for the New Statesman, immigration restrictionism is the “tech-forward” position, since the easy availability of cheap labor in certain sectors discourages firms from investing in efficiency boosting technologies.

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Of the Populists, not much need be said, since they are the most likely to oppose all immigration, legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled, for reasons that range from economic and cultural to nativism and outright racism. The Christian Nationalists form an adjacent and overlapping faction. They once served as the evangelical backbone of the old GOP but have now gone their own way, having concluded that the bargain with pro-business libertarians and foreign-policy hawks wasn’t worth the candle (the libertarians got their tax cuts, the hawks got their wars, but the Christians who marshaled the votes got… much less).

Largely because Protestantism is Christianity nationalized, this group has never been as comfortable with pro-migration moral universalism as Catholics. In places like Texas, this group’s economic anxieties about migration have blended with cultural concerns over the rapid build-out of mosques and Hindu temples associated with recent migrant flows. When Vance addresses the civilizational discomfiture brought on by mass migration in Europe, he hits this group’s sweet spot.

That leaves the Catholic solidarists (or the Common-Gooders, if you will). This group — in which, cards on the table, I count myself — isn’t exclusively made up of Roman Catholic intellectuals. But they tend to prevail and set the tone. Their objections to mass migration aren’t racial or identitarian — apart from anything else, Catholic doctrine bars that — but practical: mass migration undercuts the wages and bargaining power of American-born workers, squeezes welfare systems, and makes it harder to foster class-based solidarity. Union density in the United States is inversely proportional to migrant flows; for good reason, Whole Foods uses “heat maps” to track the risk of unionization at its stores, with those in diverse, high-migration areas seen as lowest risk, while those in relatively homogenous areas register as high-risk.

Here, again, Vance appears as a bridge figure. His Catholic conversion memoir, Communion, published this year, is in many ways a critique of the old religious Right that preached personal virtue and uplift while neglecting the material and political-economic foundations needed to shape virtuous souls. At one point in the book, he even favorably cites Herbert McCabe, an Irish Dominican friar who sympathetically engaged with Marxism and who once wrote, “The class struggle is not something we are in a position to refrain from. It is just there; we are either on one side or the other.”

Vance’s answer to those who criticize the second Trump administration for neglecting its pro-labor promise is, more or less: stop immigration first. That might be self-serving. But it isn’t illogical, for the same reason that most of the Right’s Solidarists emphasize restrictionism. At any rate, it’s what Vance believes the half of the country that elected him wants.

The danger in this tying of everything to immigration should be obvious. It can look like — and, perhaps for some, it is — an attempt to evade the domestic, homegrown sources of American malaise. But after decades in which discontent with high migration flows was pooh-poohed or written off as bigoted, there remains a lot of political space for addressing what nearly all of the Right’s factions view as a generational crisis. The negative example thrown up by France this month has been too urgent and searing to ignore.

In the years that followed, a few cultural flashpoints brought Islam’s place in America into public contestation. Even so, Bush’s distinction more or less held. But not anymore. Today, politicians and activists from his home state of Texas are promulgating school curricula that underscore the violent dimensions of Islam, mounting fierce opposition to new mosque proposals, and objecting to recent demographic changes in overtly racial and religious terms.

The Lone Star State, in short, is emerging as the central battleground in fierce new debates about Islam, identity, and American belonging. 

It’s easy to dismiss the ferment as just the latest expression of old-school Southern bigotry. And to be sure, the new Texas pushback against Islam is sometimes downright ugly. Yet those who merely wring their hands — including veterans of Texas GOP politics like outgoing Sen. John Cornyn and former Bush consigliere Karl Rove — underestimate the depth and durability of the anger, as well as its roots. By picking these fights, Texas Republicans seek to renegotiate and revise America’s modern immigration order, which dates back to the 1960s.

Consider the newly approved statewide social-studies curriculum, which requires teachers to explain early Islam in terms of “the Prophet Mohammed’s brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes,” and to emphasize the faith’s “normalization of slavery” and “the taking of female captives as harem slaves.” The curriculum must also “describe the teachings of jihad and how these teachings led to the expansion of Islam and the conquest of Christian lands, including Jerusalem, Syria, and Egypt.” As Texas’s Muslim population grows, Republican officials are responding not with accommodation, but by asserting more forcefully the state’s own civic identity and, not so subtly, their belief that Islam is incompatible with Western culture.

Islam isn’t the only target. There was also the recent Texas Longhorns controversy, in which Bo French, a GOP nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, posted on X a photograph of a large section of Indian-American students cheering at a University of Texas, Austin, football game with the following caption: “Social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners. It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.” 

While that post could be written off as one aspiring pol’s edgelording, the Islam curriculum represents a systematic push by the state GOP, with intense pushback from Muslim advocacy groups to show for it. The Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which Gov. Greg Abbott has designated a foreign terrorist organization under state law, has vowed to “overturn” it and to “protect teachers and students who refuse to teach it.”

The deeper issue is immigration — legal immigration, to be precise. Border security and illegal immigration have long been top priorities of the Texas Republican agenda, of course, but the current fight is something new and addresses a slow but significant transformation of American demographics now plainly visible in Texas. 

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In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act abolished the national-origins quota system that had severely restricted immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The law didn’t transform the country’s demographics overnight, but it created the conditions for much larger waves of immigration in the decades that followed. In Texas, the Asian population nearly tripled between 2000 and 2020, swelling to 5.4%, up from 2.7%. In some of the booming North Texas suburbs where these communities have concentrated, the change is even more pronounced. In the Dallas suburb of Frisco, where much of the Asian population is Indian, the broader Census category of “Asian” jumped to more than a quarter, up from 2.3%, over the same period.

For a growing faction of Texas Republican activists, these communities have made legal immigration a cultural question in a way that illegal immigration never has been. That is in part because the demographic change is unfolding in many of the same middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs where conservative voters themselves live. Many of these immigrant communities are also relatively affluent, giving them the resources to invest in permanent institutions of their own, from commercial storefronts and restaurants to mosques and Hindu temples. The result is more immediate and visible contact with people whose religious practices, dress, customs, and social norms are unfamiliar — and seem threatening — to the native population. 

Legal immigration isn’t an entirely new concern in Texas. The state Republican Party had previously called for ending the H-1B program, which allows for the importation of workers whose right to remain in the United States is tied to a specific employer, rendering them particularly pliant and likely to undercut the wages and bargaining power of native workers. By 2024, Texas Republicans had adopted an unusually sweeping legal immigration agenda unlike that of any other state GOP. The platform called for immigration to be limited to levels that “facilitate assimilation,” the repeal of H-1B visas, an end to the diversity lottery and chain migration, and a moratorium on net migration. The breadth and ambition of these demands may make them easy to dismiss as so much rhetoric. But Texas conservatives have repeatedly shown that the state can be a launchpad for policies that reshape the national debate.

But the immigration debate also leads back to Islam. For some Texas Republican activists, it extends to specific religious beliefs and practices they see as difficult to reconcile with American law and culture. They argue that sufficiently large Muslim communities could develop a parallel social and legal order organized around Islamic religious law, or Sharia. The issue has therefore moved beyond the party’s older opposition to courts applying foreign law to whether Sharia could shape daily life within Muslim communities in Texas. In 2026, “Don’t Sharia Our Texas” became a formal grassroots legislative priority, calling for restrictions involving immigration, foreign funding, religious and educational institutions, and residential developments alleged to promote the application of Sharia law.

These ideas have not remained confined to the grassroots. Both state-level politicians and federal elected officials are pursuing government action to address these issues. In Austin, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state agencies and public universities to freeze new H-1B visa petitions while his administration reviews the program. Attorney General (and US Senate hopeful) Ken Paxton has opened investigations into North Texas companies suspected of using sham businesses to sponsor foreign workers.

At the federal level, Texas Reps. Keith Self and Chip Roy founded the Sharia-Free America Caucus last year. It has since grown to more than 60 members, including more than a dozen members of the Texas congressional delegation. Their rhetoric has been unusually direct. Roy has argued that the immigration system must confront what he calls the threat posed by Sharia, while Self has described its spread as a threat to Western civilization. When a proposed mosque came before the McKinney City Council this summer, Self personally urged council members to reject it, warning that “there is no state cavalry coming to save you.” (The council ultimately approved the mosque unanimously because development complied with city ordinances.)

But even the most ambitious efforts to restrict future immigration can’t reverse the demographic change that has already taken place. Texas Republicans must contend with the state as it exists today, and with a younger generation that looks very different from the one that built the modern red state. Between the 2000 and 2020 US Censuses, non-Hispanic whites fell to 40% of the state’s population, down from 52%. Hispanics grew to 39%, up from 32%, while the Asian share nearly doubled (as already noted). The change is even more pronounced in the public schools. Of the roughly 5.5 million students enrolled today, only about a quarter are white, and more than half are Hispanic. Another 13% are black, and nearly 6% are Asian. Public-school enrollment isn’t a forecast of the future electorate, but it offers a striking picture of the generation now coming of age in Texas.

That demographic reality has raised the stakes of what Texas teaches in its public schools.

In September, the Texas State Board of Education completed its yearlong overhaul of K-12 social-studies standards. The curriculum’s new treatment of Islam has received the most media attention, having angered Muslim Americans and revived an old cultural debate over Islam and the West. But the more significant change may be what the standards say about how Texas intends to teach its own history and civic identity to an increasingly diverse generation. The standards place what the board calls a central emphasis on the foundations of Western civilization and the values that shaped the founding of Texas and the United States. Board chairman Aaron Kinsey said the goal was for students to understand the state’s republican form of government and America’s “exceptional place in the world.” The curriculum revision reflects a decades-long conservative project in Texas, in which grassroots activists scrutinized textbooks and pressed the State Board of Education to give greater emphasis to American patriotism, Christianity, and the country’s founding principles.

Underlying that effort is a larger disagreement over what civic education is supposed to accomplish. Conservatives involved in the curriculum fight argue that schools should transmit a common civic inheritance and give students the intellectual foundations for understanding why the American constitutional system developed as it did. But liberal and progressive critics argue that organizing history around Western civilization and American exceptionalism can marginalize the experiences and traditions of students whose ancestors came from elsewhere, as well as leave students unprepared to navigate a globalized world.

At the center of that disagreement is a still-deeper dispute over cultural relativism that pervades liberal and progressive thinking. The conservative critique is that a curriculum too reluctant to make distinctions between political, religious, and moral traditions eventually loses the ability to explain why the American system should command any particular loyalty. To this, the progressive response is that a common national story must teach the histories of other groups so that students can see their own communities represented in what they learn. They claim that traditional accounts of America have too often ignored or minimized the experiences of these minority populations.

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But post-1965 immigration presents a challenge to this familiar progressive response. Unlike black, Native-American, and Hispanic communities, many of the immigrant populations that grew rapidly after 1965 don’t have a long-standing place in the American tradition. The tension is therefore not just simply that there is less of their history to construct and emphasize in the American story. It is also that a world-history curriculum built around Western exceptionalism necessarily makes judgments about the non-Western civilizations from which many of these students descend.

Nowhere is that conflict clearer than in the teaching of Islam. The new world-history standards require students to study Muhammad, the Quran and Hadiths, and the Five Pillars of Islam. But they also give more explicit attention to Islam’s military expansion. The instructions to study the “teachings of jihad” and how they contributed to Islamic expansion and the “conquest of Christian lands” are new, and have been contested by Muslim groups. Students will also study Muslim participation in the medieval slave trade, conflicts between Christian and Muslim powers, and the role of radical Islam in the 9/11 attacks. 

Muslim organizations and some educators have objected to that framing. They argue that it disproportionately associates Islam with conquest, violence, and extremism. They also fear such teaching could contribute to Islamophobia and peer bullying. While these concerns are important, there is also no denying that the multicultural curricula that prevailed in recent decades also didn’t do justice to the truth: Islam has violent scriptures that, taken too literally, have inspired latter-day jihadists and societies that intensely repress women and religious and sexual minorities.

Texas Republicans may thus be taking on the most consequential culture-war fight they have ever attempted. Unlike earlier battles over abortion, guns, or gender, this one confronts demographic changes that Republicans see as a potential threat to their long-term political dominance in the state. Republicans are trying both to slow that transformation through efforts that restrict immigration and to ensure that an increasingly diverse generation of Texans can be taught a common understanding of the history and traditions of the state and country they share. Whether Texas can build that common civic education without taking actions that deepen the religious and cultural divisions it is trying to contain may be the real test of its current fight. A nation undergoing similar demographic transformation is watching. 

This, then, is what a parish council meeting in prosperous Oxfordshire looks like in 2026. A Westminster state that has lost its heartland of Southern England is simply living on borrowed time: and that’s exactly what I’d come to Piddington to see. It is not, now, a daring observation to remark that many of the institutions of the British state — the police, Westminster, democracy itself — have sacrificed their basic legitimacy on the inability of successive governments to visibly control migration, protect the populace from its harmful effects, or square their legal obligations on asylum with the increasingly hostile demands of their people. When even South Coast harbourmasters refuse berths to RNLI boats escorting unwanted migrants, or the Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner can angrily claim that the Government has lost control of its borders, we see the mood of revolt has spread deeply into Britain’s otherwise unflappably centrist middle classes. It is now the Times, and not the avowedly Right-wing press, that forensically dissects the state’s failures on asylum, exposing its practices to public horror and ridicule. The asylum system is already politically dead in this country, just as it is in the rest of Europe. What is now at stake is how much more damage this government is willing to take to itself, to public order, and to the entire legitimacy of the political system, before it signs off power to a new regime willing to publicly recognize this fact.

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With its almost parodically bucolic name, Piddington, a quiet village of 360 people, where the cooing of doves in the leafy lanes is disturbed only by the trundle of Ocado vans, has now attracted coverage from across the world for its planned independence referendum, a project set in train by the Government’s plan to house 1,250 single male asylum seekers in a disused MoD facility on its boundary. In his kitchen, on the other edge of the village, I asked McNally, the brains behind Piddington’s unlikely independence bid, whether locals would accept smaller numbers. “If you want to have a house or [HMO] in here, we’d tolerate it, we’d manage it,” he told me. “But when you’ve got 1,250, we’re going to have to assimilate into their society. And that’s not on and that’s not what we’re going to do.” In fact, subsequent reporting has alleged, the site may house up to 3,500 asylum seekers, outnumbering the villagers 10 to one.

The people of Piddington are right to say that this is an unreasonable demand to make of them. Yet the Government’s logic is, in its own way, hard to fault. The policy of housing boat migrants in hotels has proved wildly unpopular, and has led to mass protests across the country, typically in the wake of sex crimes or other atrocities. Yet the response of dispersing migrants into social housing, typically in poorer areas of the country, has precipitated rioting, as in Belfast or Middlesbrough, as well as a bad-tempered popular mobilization, as in Glasgow, that looks set to fruit into open disorder in the near future. All Whitehall has left, trapped by its legal obligations to asylum seekers, is to corral the constantly accumulating new arrivals into government-owned facilities, ideally near as few voters as possible, and hope for the best. The people of Piddington, and places like it, may not be happy, but they are at least unlikely to riot. For a Labour government in 2026, that’s about the best outcome that can be hoped for.

It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves here of the road not taken. In 2015, at a point when the refugee crisis on Europe’s borders was merely a moral panic for Middle East correspondents rather than the death-knell for the Continent’s postwar order, David Cameron proposed a reasonable and practical solution that would have offered a route to defanging the current crisis before it fully developed. Britain would take in 20,000 Syrian refugees over the course of the Parliament, carefully selecting and vetting deserving families from refugee camps in countries neighboring Syria. That way, the United Kingdom would take responsibility for a modest refugee flow it could reasonably expect to integrate, dispersing them across the country. It would focus its attention on Syrians — whose plight gave the demands to throw open Europe’s borders much of their moral force, even though they transpired to be a minority of those who actually arrived — and evade as far as possible the obvious security risks associated with what was effectively an open European border with the Islamic State. Even more importantly, Cameron’s plan, and its associated proposal of using European coast guards to turn back migrant boats in the Mediterranean, far from British shores, would have sidestepped the destabilization of domestic politics that would result from voters, to say nothing of aspiring migrants, rightly concluding that European leaders had entirely lost control of their countries’ borders.

But in the real world, the open-border activists won out, for too long, over cautious conservatism, and the results were precisely what any reasonable observer could have predicted. As the European architect of all the subsequent disorder (Turkey’s President Erdogan has still largely escaped the popular blame he deserves for overseeing the 2015 flow), Angela Merkel’s reputation has, in the decade since, sunk to its deserved level, for this and her many other sins against our Continent’s security and prosperity. The AfD, in 2015 a minor libertarian party, is yet to find its ceiling. While it is now a given that there is no longer an appetite for open borders, among all but the most marginal zealots, the full effects of the center’s experimentation with their demands have yet to reveal themselves, on either side of the Channel.

In polite and prosperous Piddington, the local reaction to the village’s proposed secession has been a media blitz. But in Dover and Portsmouth, last week saw the first stirrings of a new working-class form of direct action, blockading ports while eschewing uncontrolled violence. It is significant, for adherents of the Ulsterisation thesis of British politics, that the organizer of the coastal protests, Tommy Robinson collaborator Danny Tommo, hit upon the idea for his new Patriot Platform movement after travelling to Belfast during this summer’s riots. Returning home enthused at the concept of black-clad Loyalists working in a disciplined manner to achieve concrete goals, the new approach has taken the place of the mass flag-waving jamborees previously characterizing the English anti-immigration right. But it is also worth noting that the muscle of his new group derives from the already-existing and organically formed local “patriot” anti-immigration groups of southern and eastern England. A militant, working-class mobilization against mass immigration is now a factor in British politics, whether or not Tommo can consolidate his attempt to direct it.

But back in Piddington, villagers expressed open distaste for such forms of street action and open manifestations of anti-migrant politics, indicating divisions of class and political temperament the Government’s electoral rivals may struggle to navigate. “That would perhaps be more of a Bicester thing,” one resident told me, expressing a world of class feeling in terse English cultural shorthand. Middle-class villagers, expressing their fears, spoke in semi-veiled terms, women saying they worry about walking their dogs alone, fathers about letting their children roam free. These stronger statements against immigration itself, rather than the specific site on their doorstep, were uniformly delivered in Oxfordshire accents, though even still, elderly residents with thick burrs worried about skinheads coming down “from Birmingham” to wreak havoc.

For the anti-immigration parties competing to dominate the British Right, consolidating these different class mores into an electoral coalition will therefore prove difficult. To win the country, Reform will have to win over leafy shire heartlands like Piddington, whose voters, like Farage himself, are uncomfortable at the sight of men in black balaclavas taking to the streets. But faced with a gadfly challenger on his Right, in the shape of Rupert Lowe’s Restore, openly supportive of Tommo’s activism, Farage needs to keep an increasingly assertive and rebellious working-class street within his coalition too. The linchpin in holding the two groups together seems to be Zia Yusuf, recently deployed to both Piddington and Portsmouth to express his support for the two opposing forms of rebellion. Perhaps, indeed, Yusuf is more personally comfortable with the more kinetic forms of revolt than his boss: his rhetoric suggests that his role is to say, and do, what Farage does not himself feel comfortable publicly aligning himself with.

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The Piddington independence movement is careful to maintain a public stance of political neutrality, though its adherents, perhaps stung by the schadenfreude their plight has earned from the online Right, were keen to assure me they were not Liberal Democrats. We can assume they will not be voting for Burnham either, or the Greens. The remaining realistic options are then Reform and the Conservatives, and in this Piddington represents a microcosm of the southern English middle classes: unhappy with a dysfunctional immigration system, particularly when its consequences land upon their doorstep, but also uncomfortable with open or overly assertive displays of anti-migration politics.

Rather than the once seeming-inevitability of a Reform government, the impression left by Piddington was that the growing shift against asylum dysfunction in middle-class England may instead revive the fortunes of the Conservatives, increasingly strident against the ECHR, but instinctively closer to the class mores of the centrist political establishment. Reform may have won over the younger online Right, but it may struggle to persuade their true-blue parents. Rather than fomenting anti-immigration feeling, as its opponents imagine, Reform’s success has been in riding a wave of organic dissatisfaction that has, as shown in Portsmouth and Dover, often outpaced Farage’s personal appetite for rebellion.

If Burnham has shown a realistic understanding of class politics in shifting the consequences of asylum dysfunction onto middle-class rural constituencies which will never vote for him, to win back working-class constituencies which still plausibly might, the opening this leaves for the broader British Right in winning over the shires presents more of a challenge than an opportunity for Reform. Piddington offers a glimpse of a country exhausted by Britain’s dysfunctional asylum system, but also of a Right divided on how far it is willing to go to overturn it, a division more expressive of political temperaments, or class tensions, than of desired political ends.

Reform’s analysis of the solutions required, demanding a cultural revolution within the British state as a whole, is deeper and broader than that of the Conservatives, content merely to leave the ECHR they, rightly or not, see as the root of the problem. But Reform has to win over the suspicious middle classes as well as maintaining its shaky hold on the working class; whereas all the Tories are required to do is present a harder edge on immigration while maintaining a public commitment to law-and-order conservatism — a stance made easier for them by Restore forcing Farage to more activist positions than he feels comfortable with, and which are unpopular in the shires. After all, a Cameron government, left in power, might have mitigated the problem before we ever reached this stage of political fragmentation and disorder, in what is surely the least discussed “what might have been” of modern British politics. On paper, the growing mood of middle-class revolt should be a comfort for Reform: in practice, it is likely to be the Conservatives who will use it to win back Middle England. If Burnham is gambling that no single challenger can win both Piddington and Portsmouth, he may yet prove entirely correct.

As a data scientist in the property sector, my first mistake was to ignore these blandishments and insist on trying to achieve something. In 2022 I joined the housing department of one of the London borough councils. Our ostensible purposes were to procure and manage temporary accommodation, to use that accommodation to support homeless applicants, and to find and prosecute rogue landlords. We had also recently absorbed another social housing body and their staff, and were trying to pull these people and teams together into some kind of integrated service.

The challenges we faced, and the tools we had to face them with, were similar to those of hundreds of other local authorities across the country. In the last financial year £2.8bn was spent across England on temporary accommodation, and our own trends in cost were no more alarming than the national ones.

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This week, in keeping with Andy Burnham’s drive for devolution, the Government announced that mayoral authorities will gain powers to call in planning applications and manage public assets. To discharge these new powers, they will lean heavily on councils as their source of information and skills. It is worth taking stock of who we are ultimately devolving power to, and whether they are capable of exercising it. 

In the council office we began each office day with a team ritual: swap mice and keyboards between each of our desks to fill in the gaps and assemble a working computer. IT struggled to replace broken equipment, so we counted it a good day if four out of five computers were usable. Wiser heads knew that if you pretended to have fibromyalgia, a computer would be provided for you in advance. Once you had a working machine, you might be forcibly logged out until you had worked through an HR instructional video, in which cartoon characters and multiple choice questions explained that you shouldn’t leave your laptop out in public. Then at last you could face the horrors of the day.

It started as soon as we picked up a call. The system on which we logged our call records didn’t stop you from saying that a tenant had 38 children, or was 120 years old, or had left temporary accommodation before they’d entered it. So we created more new errors each day in our records than could ever be corrected. Those who find modern life excessively preoccupied with identity would have had a field day with our contact databases, in which a host of columns (Gender, gender, GENDER) had been laid up to store our many genders.

Because we did not have control over this database — and could only amend a single case at a time — we invested ever-mounting effort into training dozens of staff to fix errors manually. Every quarter, they would trawl through our web portal to find and fix, one by one, the small fraction of errors that stopped us making our statutory data submissions to central government. The rest were left to multiply. My suggestions that we fix this broken system and check the data before it was put in were not considered sufficiently accessible or focused on the resident.

People who deal with databases like to use the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”, meaning that if you use them to store any old rubbish, you might not enjoy having to reach back in to retrieve it later. In my experience this understates the problem. As time passes things change inside a bin, and not for the better.

These errors had consequences. Although the amount of housing benefit paid out by the council to temporary accommodation tenants was compounding year on year, we had not taken the trouble to find out how many tenants we were responsible for. The two figures available came from two different databases held by two different subcontractors. Both were irreconcilable, and both wrong. The figure we used for reporting in each case depended largely on whether we wanted to convey a reassuring vibe or a worrying one.

Likewise, because the council had lost the history of our social housing applicants during a migration from one software tool to another, it was impossible to say how long people had been waiting for social housing. No regular check was made on the employment status of our temporary accommodation tenants and, being unable to access data from the Department for Work and Pensions, we could not say what proportion of our tenants were in work. As with the number of tenants, this plurality of truths was often convenient; a grim figure might help us seek more grant money, and a cheerful one demonstrate progress.

Such shoddy record-keeping might have remained a mere embarrassment. But over time it led us to become increasingly unmoored from the reality of our tenants. The result was taxpayers’ money misspent or simply thrown away. For example, we had no process for closing the accounts we set up to bill tenants. One consequence was that the “temporary” storage facility we offered tenants to help them move house was used by some for years, or decades, as a permanent near-free service.

We did not know whether half of our tenants had any local connection or real need to be placed in our borough. Rather than enquire into their circumstances, we kept them in expensive locations. Often these were hotels – though I cannot say how often, as these placements were sometimes paid for by card and recorded in a separate, unknown place. And our system for recording rent payments equated four weeks to a month, with staff turnover too high for there to be any institutional memory of why. I never could find out whether we were therefore charging far too much or not enough — every month, to every tenant.

Our management of public money was no better in big things than in small. This was exemplified by the way the organization handled procurement. Out of curiosity, I requested a copy of our contract with the company that provided our tracking software for homelessness support cases. I discovered that it was about to come up for renewal. No one in the organization was aware of this renewal, whether it was desirable, or on what terms to make it. In the rare cases when an independent decision about data was made, it was made by managers who did not know the difference between a database and a website, were unaware of what data systems already existed, and had no understanding of the need for common identifiers to link different systems together.

Because no single individual knew how the whole system fit together, vagueness reigned. No matter how many people you asked, the truth about who ran a system or how it worked was typically considered ineffable. All I know is that the handful of staff with actual experience of data were never party to big decisions about it. As one analyst put it: “This is one of the countless times my working life has been made worse by decisions about databases which I had no involvement in.”

The role of the data professional, then, was manually to extract wrong information from a broken system they were banned from fixing, omit anything either too flattering or not flattering enough, and arrange for it to appear ephemerally to an innumerate manager in a pointless meeting.

What lay behind this culture of obsessive inattention to detail? Partly, behaviors that undermine public administration everywhere. Rather than pressing forward, bureaucracy tends to grope around laterally. For instance, local government is obsessed with imitation. In our case, it was the function of the “policy officer” to find out and copy anything another public body was doing, especially if it had an intriguing title with the word “strategy” in it. This approach led us to continually update a gray, churning world of unread documents. There would always be a policy document that needed a refresh, or to be turned successively into half a dozen briefings at different levels of abstraction. “This strategy is really more of an action plan.” “This action plan is really more of a strategy.” The continual push by management to make a document the same as that produced by every other public body, to the point of lifting whole sections, made perfect sense in a realm where copypasta had become the only form of credibility.

Local government is also an enthusiastic promoter of “everythingism”, a tendency to require one policy in one area to solve all problems everywhere. It was considered “siloed” to focus discussion on our basic responsibilities, but “open-minded” to link homelessness to climate change or call for total equality of outcomes across society. All meetings took on a standard form: describe every activity currently being conducted as “siloed”, call for a “holistic approach”, and make plans for a further meeting in which these lines could be repeated.

But questions of data are too specific, too technical, to allow for this. The result was a counter-norm we might call “nothingism”. That is, while every area of public policy must be discussed with reference to every other area at the same time, nothing concrete could actually be established, because obtaining data about anything was made impossible. That is not to say people were incurious; in fact they were often very interested in what others were doing, in case it might be useful in their personal quests for power. I recall being upbraided by a junior colleague for being slow to update my office calendar when my wife went into labor. But when it came to sharing information about their own projects, a cloud of unknowing would descend.

Still, people are easier to change than ideas. It might have been hoped that new hires would gradually replace the existing blob with a more advanced generation of staff. But these were not the people sought. In assessing candidates for senior data roles, the criteria were whether they could recall niceties of legislation without prompting, not whether they had any data skills, were competent to procure IT tools, or knew anything about programming. Steady wage compression did not help. Pay settlements in which lower-banded staff get a percentage pay rise, and higher earners a smaller lump sum, have left data staff salaries hopelessly uncompetitive. Whether or not a market exists for policy officers, there certainly is one for data engineers and database admins, and it pays more than any local council.

This creates an incentive to avoid any training in data skills that might lead to council staff being poached. Instead, training is only offered on the aforementioned bespoke, barely-functional tools that have no value to a prospective employer. The result is that programmers are replaced by staff who can perhaps query a database, and these in turn by staff who can hit “refresh” on an old report but lack the skills to create anything new at all.

I eventually accepted that no effort or stratagem was going to simultaneously change hiring, procurement, management, or a general culture of disinterest in whether our programs were reaching the right people or having any measurable effect. Nor did a major systems failure seem likely to cause an awakening; the investigation we were under for widespread maladministration had led only to our spasmodically procuring another parallel IT system.

After three years of fruitless attempts to map (never mind fix) these multifarious problems, I decided to lay the job aside. I went back to doing what I had done before: building data projects in a young team which survives on grant money. It’s true that it’s easier to build a new system than fix a broken one.

Until now, this is how the Mayoral authorities have operated. New, and with a continuous need to justify their existence, they haven’t calcified as councils have into an impermeable bureaucracy.

This should be a reason to welcome one of the Burnham reforms: the granting of powers to regional authorities to overrule local planning decisions. Ironically, the Burnham devolution agenda may work best where it makes public services less local — by allowing mayors to snatch them from unreformable councils!

The rub is that they will depend on local information to do it. The most generous incentives and strongest mandates are likely to founder if they rely on organizations with profound cultural commitments to inefficiency. The only chance of success is to establish entirely new systems and allow the old to wither on the vine. And the old system doesn’t deserve to survive.

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Tenants in bedsits died while we debated whether their social housing priority should be low or medium. The deliberate policy of fragmenting our information across half a dozen broken systems made their personal experience a mystery.

Ultimately, there was something evil in this banality. The culture we worked in amplified our worst instincts and thwarted our best. It took momentary mistakes and turned them into permanent rot, and took a genuine desire for joined-up government and sublimated it into pointless meetings.

Did we do any good? Perhaps, behind the fog, we were making a genuine difference to the lives of vulnerable people. Or perhaps, as the critics say, we were simply allocating workless households to prime London real estate. With no knowledge of where our applicants ended up, we are unable either to chastise failure or to praise success. The truth is impossible to trace.

But Nixon was no victim. While other presidents have engaged in dirty tricks against their opponents, Nixon is the only one to have had his own private criminal gang engaged in burglaries like the break-in of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. On a tape recording from a June 17, 1971, meeting with his aides Henry Kissinger and Bob Haldeman, Nixon can be heard talking about having the Brookings Institution broken into by his goons, to retrieve files that he hoped to use to his advantage. Nixon: “I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

But Nixon’s prison-worthy crimes and his personal flaws don’t discredit “Nixonism” — defined as a governing philosophy, relevant in our day as in his, with three main features:  national-interest realism in foreign policy; economic nationalism in trade and immigration policy; and at least an effort on the part of government to be even-handed between capital and labor.  

From a Nixonian perspective, peace can only be achieved by a favorable balance of power — not by the United Nations or other international institutions, and not by a utopian “global democratic revolution” that replaces all authoritarian regimes. Free trade and protectionism are equally valid national strategies, to be adopted or rejected in the service of strategic industrial sectors and a high-wage workforce. And rather than side with employers against workers, government should act as an honest broker between business and organized labor, in the interest of labor peace and a national home market enlarged by high take-home pay, rather than by high levels of government redistribution. 

Tragically, the rival public philosophy of Reaganism — combining a crusading Wilsonian foreign policy, dogmatic support for economic globalization and mass immigration, and unremitting hostility to labor unions — dominated the Republican Party between the Reagan years and the election of Trump in 2016, to the detriment of both the party and the nation.

Start with Nixon’s realism abroad. In foreign policy, the differences between Nixonism and Reaganism are unbridgeable. Although Nixon worked from the desk of Woodrow Wilson and hung Wilson’s portrait in the Cabinet room next to Lincoln and Eisenhower, Nixon’s view of foreign policy as an arena of great-power struggles and compromises had more in common with that of American realists like Alexander Hamilton, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge and European statesmen like Bismarck, Disraeli, and De Gaulle.

In a 1972 radio address, Nixon told the American people that US foreign policy must promote a “structure of peace” among great powers that rests “on the hard concrete of common interests and mutual agreements, and not on the shifting sands of naive sentimentality.”

Nixon’s predecessors had overcommitted Washington in Vietnam and elsewhere. One response was the policy of “Vietnamization,” generalized as “the Nixon Doctrine” of 1969, which declared that the United States would no longer assume full responsibility for the defense of allies through ground troops. 

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Another Nixonian response to American overextension was his outreach to China as part of a strategy of dividing Moscow from Beijing and thus splitting the communist sphere. The tactic failed to end the war in Indochina while saving South Vietnam, but Sino-American diplomacy paid off in the “second Cold War” of the 1980s, when Beijing was a de facto ally of Uncle Sam against Moscow. Nixon can’t be blamed for the deindustrialization of the United States by China’s aggressive mercantilism, which was supported by unpatriotic American corporations that presidents from Clinton to Obama tolerated after Nixon’s death in 1994.

While Reagan’s defense build-up and proxy wars with Moscow in Afghanistan and Central America contributed to the pressure on the Soviet Union, the implosion of the USSR had other causes: long-term economic decay, rising nationalism among the bloc’s constituent peoples, and Gorbachev’s refusal to crack down against dissent. Reagan’s true foreign-policy legacy wasn’t winning the Cold War; it was grafting the utopian fervor of Woodrow Wilson and other 20th-century Democratic progressives and liberal internationalists onto the formerly realist GOP.

Wilson was literally Ronald Reagan’s middle name, thanks to his father, an ardent New Deal Democrat. And Reagan, a Democrat until 1962, remained all of his life an ardent Wilsonian idealist in his approach to foreign policy. Wilson, in a speech to Congress in January 1917, before the US entry into World War I, identified the goals of American foreign policy as national self-determination, global economic liberalization, and an end to the balance of power: “These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others…. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”

True to Wilsonian ideology, in his autobiography, An American Life, Reagan asserted: “It was our policy that this great democracy of ours had a special obligation to bring freedom to other peoples.” Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served Reagan as ambassador to the United Nations, observed: “The president and many of his principal advisers see themselves as purveyors and defenders of the classical liberal tradition in politics, economics, and society.”

Rejecting the reality of conflicts of interest among states of all kinds, Reagan declared: “People do not make wars; governments do. A people free to choose will always choose peace.” Likewise, Reagan said in his 1986 State of the Union address: “We know that peace follows in freedom’s path, and conflicts erupt when the will of the people is denied.” If this “democratic peace theory” is true, then the only way to achieve a peaceful world is to promote the replacement of every authoritarian regime on earth with a liberal multiparty democracy — by example if possible, by subversion, invasion, and occupation if necessary. Wars of regime change by democratic countries are “liberation,” but not “aggression” (it helps if the would-be “liberated” country, like Iraq, Venezuela, and Iran, has major deposits of oil and gas).

Reagan’s neoconservative allies successfully lobbied for the creation in 1983 of the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-funded organization that has engaged in both overt and covert operations to destabilize or overthrow governments that Washington opposes.  Contrast this with Nixon’s statement: “We would not welcome the intervention of other countries in our domestic affairs, and we cannot expect them to be cooperative when we seek to intervene directly in theirs.”

George W. Bush was as reckless in launching the Iraq War as Reagan was cautious in limiting his administration to small-scale interventions in Lebanon and Grenada. But a prudent Wilsonian ideologue is still a Wilsonian ideologue. There is a direct line from Reagan’s messianic rhetoric to the proclamation of George W. Bush in his Second Inaugural Address: “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Bush’s speech merely restated Reagan’s utopian conception of US foreign policy, evident in the Gipper’s 1985 pronunciamento: “We declared the principal objective of American foreign policy to be not just the prevention of war, but the extension of freedom. And we stressed our commitment to the growth of democratic government and democratic institutions around the world.”

Trade is another source of contention between the rival governing philosophies of Nixonism and Reaganism. Nixon was a bold and unapologetic American economic nationalist. In one of several “Nixon shocks,” Nixon in 1971 dealt with a balance-of-payments problem by suspending the convertibility of the dollar to gold, blowing up the Bretton Woods system that had structured world trade and finance since the late 1940s. 

The other Nixon shocks of 1971 included combating inflation with temporary wage and price controls and imposing temporary surcharges on imports to redress the trade deficit. While these were ineffective, market fundamentalists have been wrong to blame them for the high inflation of the later 1970s, which resulted from the increase in oil prices associated with the Yom Kippur War and the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Just as he found a like-minded geopolitical realist in Henry Kissinger, Nixon found an economic nationalist ally in his Treasury secretary, John Connally, who told a group of economists: “The foreigners are out to screw us. It is our job to screw them first. Thank you for your help.”    

Fervent support for free trade was another traditionally Democratic value that Reagan helped to graft onto the historically protectionist, pro-manufacturing Republican Party. While Nixon the realist was willing to sacrifice the world economy to US national economic interests, for Reagan, as for other Wilsonians, the promotion of global free trade was inseparable from the promotion of world peace. In 1988, Reagan said: “I recognize … the inescapable conclusion that all of history has taught: the freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides of human progress and peace among nations.”

The few cases in which Reagan as president reluctantly and temporarily used tariffs and quotas to protect industries like cars, steel, and motorcycles were deviations from his free-market dogmatism. Again and again, Reagan unpatriotically smeared the American victims of foreign unfair trade practices by mercantilist regimes like Japan and South Korea. In a 1987 radio talk, Reagan blamed American trade deficits on the alleged inferiority of American products: “The way up and out of the trade deficit is not protectionism, not bringing down the competition, but instead the answer lies in improving our products and increasing our exports.”

In a 1987 speech in Cleveland, Reagan asserted that America’s trade deficit was a sign of strength. In 1985, Reagan asserted that the financialization of the US economy was an adequate substitute for the loss of manufacturing when he complained that trade deficit statistics did not count the “billions of dollars of foreign capital” that had been “invested in our government bonds … because we are the best and safest investment in the world today.”

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The harm done by Reagan and Reaganism to American manufacturing was not limited to rhetoric. In 1971, the Nixon administration protected the American textile industry by imposing quotas under the Trading with the Enemy Act. In contrast, Reagan vetoed the Textile Apparel and Footwear Trade Act of 1988, claiming, “This bill represents protectionism at its worst. The supposed benefits of the bill would be temporary at best. Protectionism does not save jobs. Only improved competitiveness can truly protect jobs, yet there is nothing in this bill that would encourage domestic industries to become more competitive.”  

As he had so often done before, Reagan blamed Americans instead of foreign mercantilists for the struggles of American industry in global markets, ignoring the fact that American manufacturers couldn’t compete with foreign cheap labor or foreign government subsidies.  Today, the United States has one of the world’s largest markets for textiles, but 98% of textiles sold in the country are manufactured abroad. 

Americans were shocked to learn during the pandemic that the United States is dependent upon foreign countries, including Communist China, for protective textiles and apparel. Thanks, Mr. Reagan!

In 1970, Nixon sought to defend American shipbuilding from foreign rivalry with the Merchant Marine Act of 1970, which provided a variety of subsidies for the American construction of ships engaged in foreign trade. A little more than a decade later, Reagan eliminated these subsidies for the strategic civilian shipbuilding industry on the advice of his aide Martin Anderson, a free-market extremist who, along with his wife, had been a personal disciple of Ayn Rand — the radical-libertarian guru. In 1977, before Reagan, America had 77 sea-going commercial ships on order. In 2023, thanks to Reagan and his successors who shared his indifference to the survival of America’s merchant marine, the United States had only 5, compared to China’s 1,749.

Finally, Nixonism and Reaganism differ on the subject of the government’s relationship with labor. Because the majority of the people in a modern nation are wage earners, not capitalists or managers, no nationalist politics can be authentic unless it defends the interests of the national working class. And the lack of bargaining power of ordinary workers with most employers requires that employer-labor-market power must be countervailed, either through collective bargaining or direct government regulation.

With most other Republicans, the young Nixon in 1947 voted for the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act that allowed state “right-to-work” laws. But as a presidential candidate in 1960, he declared: “As far as the right-to-work law, itself, is concerned, I oppose any such law nationally.” 

As president, Nixon opposed labor leaders aligned with the Democrats, including Leonard Woodcock of the United Auto Workers, who made it onto Nixon’s secret “enemies list.” But he courted George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, and he sought the support of the Teamsters Union, declaring in 1971: “It is all too often taken for granted that the daily efforts of Teamster union members are a cornerstone of the American economic structure.” In his second term, as part of his outreach to unionized workers, Nixon appointed Peter J. Brennan, of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York, as secretary of labor. 

In contrast, of Reagan’s three secretaries of labor, two — Raymond J. Donovan and Ann McLaughlin — were former corporate executives and the third, William E. Brock, was a career politician from Tennessee. Although he had been head of an AFL-CIO-affiliated union, the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan as president broke with the tradition of earlier Republican leaders like Nixon and Eisenhower and Coolidge who attempted to at least appear even-handed toward management and labor. 

In addition to breaking a strike in 1981 by firing 11,000 federal air-traffic controllers, Reagan stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union, management-aligned appointees whose decisions restricted worker rights and expanded employer power.

To lead the NLRB, Reagan appointed Donald Dotson, who claimed that unions were responsible for “destruction of individual freedom.”

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Reagan, the former “traveling ambassador” of General Electric in the 1950s, did the bidding of his corporate and capitalist backers in promoting right-to-work laws, hampering federal enforcement of worker rights, and seeking to weaken child-labor laws. Reagan also sought to supply American businesses with wage-suppressing mass immigration. In 1984, Reagan declared: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though, sometime back, they may have entered illegally.” 

Reagan repeated the employer-lobby propaganda line that illegal immigrants do jobs that Americans refuse to do at any wage. In a radio address in 1977, Reagan mocked “the illegal alien fuss”: “Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won’t do?”

The major immigration law that Reagan signed, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, was a gift to cheap-labor employers at the cost of American workers. The law provided an amnesty for nearly 3 million illegal immigrants. To deter future illegal immigration, the law created penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrant workers — but thanks to business lobbying, under Reagan and his successors of both parties in the White House, including Trump, employer penalties have almost never been imposed. 

Meanwhile, to ensure that employers deprived of illegal immigrant labor did not necessarily need to hire American citizens and legal immigrants at higher wages, IRCA also increased the number of “guest workers” — a euphemism for foreign serfs with fewer rights than American workers who are indentured to their employers or labor contractors.

Not content with forcing US workers to compete with greater numbers of unfree, poorly paid “guest workers” on American soil, Reagan sought to merge America’s labor market with those of low-wage nations. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan proposed a free-trade agreement between the United States and Mexico that influenced the later North American Free Trade Agreement, under which entire US industries were gutted as employers sought cheaper labor south of the border.  

In his 1988 State of the Union address, Reagan told Congress: “Our goal must be a day when the free flow of trade, from the tip of Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle, unites the people of the Western Hemisphere in a bond of mutually beneficial exchange.”

Reagan’s wish was indistinguishable from that of Hillary Clinton, who in 2016 told Latin-American bankers that her “dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.…”

The Reaganite synthesis of market fundamentalism, mass immigration, crusading democratic globalism, and anti-worker labor policy weakened the United States and contributed to the backlash that brought Trump to power twice. In fairness, the dwindling and aging number of Reagan’s Old Right defenders are correct about one thing: he was “inspirational” and “sunny” and “optimistic.”

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Donald Trump borrowed his slogan “Make America Great Again” from Reagan. But in many ways, he belongs in the Nixonian tradition.

Trump’s aggressive promotion of what he considers the national interest, at the expense of allies and without moralistic rhetoric, is distinctly Nixonian. The first Trump administration’s National Security strategy in 2017 contained the line: “An America First National Security Strategy … is a strategy of principled realism that is guided by outcomes, not ideology.” 

“Out with utopian idealism, in with hard-nosed realism,” declared Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in December 2025, in a speech at the Reagan Library (the Nixon Library might have been a more appropriate venue).

The exception to Trump’s realism is the disastrous Israeli-American war against Iran, which Trump might have avoided had he followed a precept of Kissinger in the Nixon years: “Our interests shall shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.”

In trade, too, Trump is a Nixonian nationalist, replicating the Nixon Shocks of the 1970s with frequent use of tariffs and other shocking departures of his own from the former free-trade globalist consensus.

Long before Trump in 2016 declared that “I love the poorly educated,” Nixon told some of his advisers in 1971 that “when we need support on tough problems, the uneducated are the ones that are with us.” In contrast: “When you have to call on the nation to be strong — on such things as drugs, crime, defense, our basic national position — the educated people and the leader class no longer have any character, and you can’t count on them.” For this reason, Nixon rejected anti-union conservatism and told his staff that it was “vital that we continue to recognize and work with [workers] and that we not attack unions which represent the organized structure of the working man.”

But Nixon’s outreach to organized labor was sincere and consistent, unlike Trump’s, which combines symbolism — like having Teamsters President Sean O’Brien address the 2024 Republican National Convention — with standard Right-wing anti-union policies. And instead of making the case that immigration restriction, by creating tight labor markets, can force employers to raise wages, Trump has appealed to nativist racism, describing most Mexican immigrants as criminals, and accusing Haitians of eating pets, while favoring white South Africans in refugee policy. Instead of insisting on a universal E-Verify mandate on employers, Trump has ordered ICE to forgo raids on farms dependent on cheap labor and expanded programs for unfree foreign guest workers.

Trumpism, then, is an incoherent mixture of Nixonism in defense and trade policy and anti-worker and anti-safety-net policies in the Reagan-Bush tradition. Even worse, Trump in his two terms as president has emulated some of the worst aspects of Richard Nixon, from claiming effectively unlimited powers for the executive branch to weaponizing the Department of Justice and other agencies against personal and partisan enemies.

Overall, Trump has accelerated the rejection by Republicans of the transplanted Democratic globalism of Reagan and the neocons and the party’s return to its historic nationalist tradition.  Just as Nixonism is more defensible than Nixon, a thoughtful version of Trumpism without Trump after 2028 would be better than a disastrous revival of Reaganism.

That is because it has always been a crossroads, the rocky harbor in the heart of the Mediterranean. The Arabs bequeathed the islands their distinctive language, while the Normans began fortifying their harbor. It is said that Ottoman troops, taken hostage after the Siege of Malta, furnished the locals with coffee before even Venetian traders knew of its pleasures. Later still, Malta was French and British. Both contributed to the national character, yet it was the last which endowed Malta with its legal system, a fondness for beer, and red phone boxes.

If foreign influence was one constant in Malta, grinding poverty was another. Even after an Axis siege brought the country close to famine, a lack of opportunities also saw thousands of Maltese men — including my wife’s grandfather — taking their families to the furthest reaches of the Commonwealth in search of work. The maritime heritage of their homeland meant they often found employment in the docks of Australia, Britain and Canada: something which also explains why, when the Maltese came to Britain, they gathered in places like London and Portsmouth. Independence in 1964 brought sovereignty but not prosperity, much as the new state tried to embrace tourism and logistics. So, like Ireland before it, Malta became defined by emigration. Between 1948 and 1967 almost a third of the population left.

Today that history, of economic stagnation and depopulation, is a fading memory. EU membership, and an increasingly globalized economy, means the country has become a hub for not only tourism, but financial services and online gambling too. By one measure Malta’s output per person is now higher than that of Britain, France or Sweden. Of even greater cultural significance, though, is the comparison with Italy. As recently as 1990, Malta’s neighbor to the north boasted a GDP per capita almost 50% higher. But where Italian television, radio and football once offered the island a window onto modernity, today it is young Italians who cross the Maltese Channel in search of work. If you are an ambitious young person in Catania or Palermo, you might hear advice that nobody has proffered for a millennium: go south and get ahead.

Indeed, this economic revolution has been mirrored demographically. The nation that once watched its sons and daughters depart by ship for distant shores now draws workers from across the globe. Today, 41% of Malta’s labor force is foreign-born. First are the young workers filling labor shortages in lower-regulation sectors, from Italian hospitality staff to Indian workers in construction. Then there are wealthy foreigners, drawn by Malta’s favorable tax environment; the country’s millionaire population grew by 74% between 2013 and 2023. Finally there are the internationally mobile companies choosing warmer climes and 5% corporation tax. Last year SkyBet moved to the country, and it won’t be the last British firm to do so.

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All this is doubly noticeable given Malta’s compact size. At the turn of the millennium, the islands were already home to 400,000 people, squeezed into little more than 100 square miles. Since then, Malta’s population has risen by almost half, with one recent projection suggesting it could reach 630,000 by 2030. For all the claims that Britain is overcrowded, an equivalent surge would mean our population approaching 90 million. Nor does this extraordinary trajectory show any sign of slowing. In June 2023, finance minister Clyde Caruana even said the country’s population should rise to 800,000 by 2040.

Combine that with record-breaking tourist numbers — last year saw around seven tourists for every resident, the equivalent of almost half a billion visitors to Britain — and property prices are soaring. The average asking price for an apartment now stands at €414,000: almost 10% higher than a year ago and roughly 16 times the average wage (in England this ratio is seven-to-one). Because this transformation is relatively recent, Malta still enjoys high rates of home ownership. But for younger citizens, the ladder has effectively been pulled up; buying a home, and with it the prospect of starting a family, is increasingly impossible.

That is also new. Just a few decades ago, my mother-in-law and her husband could buy a two-bedroom holiday flat in St Paul’s Bay — Jesus’ favorite disciple is said to have been shipwrecked on a nearby island — despite being a seamstress and bus driver in Portsmouth. Today, such a purchase sounds fantastical, not least for blue-collar workers. Amid all this, the remarkable thing is that Maltese leaders don’t seem too concerned. As far back as 2014, Joseph Muscat, the then-Prime Minister, spoke of Malta emulating Dubai — where 92% of the population is foreign-born — through absorbing unprecedented amounts of overseas labor.

Almost universally, of course, this model has led to adverse social and political consequences. And if, for the moment, the Maltese economy continues to motor, some locals now have doubts. What, they ask, was all of it for? Does the average Maltese family now enjoy a better quality of life? The answer is far from clear — and their worries go beyond just surging house prices.

One of the things the Maltese are most proud of is their language. A Semitic tongue, it remains somewhat intelligible to people in Tunis or Benghazi. Centuries of contact have left their mark in other ways: the Latin script, for one thing, even as Italian words like ciao, allora (‘well then’) and kuċina (‘kitchen’) sit alongside the term “Al Madonna”, cried in moments of anguish. In other words Malta boasts a linguistic jewel arguably unique in Europe: ancient, resilient and deeply bound to the identity of the islands.

It’s ironic, then, that it wasn’t a millennium of colonialism that posed the greatest threat to the idiom — but self-government in an age of globalization. For while Maltese remains widely spoken, and is taught as the country’s official language, it is quickly being replaced by both English and Italian, with the internet and Sicilian baristas succeeding where Mussolini and the Luftwaffe failed. On more than one occasion I’ve gone to a restaurant with my wife — who speaks some Maltese — only to find that the staff can converse only in Italian.

Nor are such moments limited to the tourist traps of Valletta. Ghajn Tuffeiha — you say it “ayn tufiya” — is a stunning beach at the top of Malta and utterly unpronounceable to anyone north of Syracuse. Perhaps that’s why the beach has come to be known as “Singita Miracle Beach“: part of an Italian-owned chain of luxury beach clubs. Once again, all the staff there appear to be Italian. That’s no bad thing if you want a good espresso, but it’s another vivid example of how Malta’s unique culture is being overwhelmed by the forces of global capitalism. Is this how languages die in the 21st century? Not at the end of a Gatling gun, but because of hippy entrepreneurs performing “sunset rituals” using words you don’t understand.

Of course, one could argue that Malta has embraced the Promethean promise of modern capitalism: unleash growth first, solve problems later. Isn’t that the path China has followed for decades — a model that many on the Left, including myself, have praised? Yet Malta presents a more complicated picture. Unlike China, or the USSR, this is a tiny island rather than a continental landmass, boasting a fragile culture and delicate ecosystem. What’s more, despite its economic boom, the island’s infrastructure remains underwhelming. Simply put, the average Maltese has shockingly little to show for decades of development, besides a loss of tranquility and a spot on the beach.

Take public transport. Once upon a time, Malta had a railway. Built under British rule, it operated until the early Thirties and connected Valletta with nearby Floriana. But it would be abandoned as the combustion engine redefined island mobility. Presumably, however, nobody expected that, a century on, Malta would be home to almost half-a-million registered vehicles, making it the world’s most congested country.

What was once a tranquil pearl in the Mediterranean increasingly feels like a giant car park. Perhaps a Maltese Tony Soprano is involved in the highway construction business — because, failing that, the lack of alternative explanations is baffling. Either way, this moment of national prosperity increasingly feels strangely regressive, with growth becoming an end in itself rather than the means to a larger national purpose. As one Maltese commentator lately put it about language, the country spends “huge amounts of money protecting species and biodiversity, so why should it be that the one thing that makes us singularly human should not be similarly nourished and protected?”

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A good question. Being in hock to a certain idea of capitalism, where GDP charts in the back pages of The Economist matter more than a sense of local place, is clearly part of the answer. Another is the European Union, and specifically the Eurozone. Whatever the accomplishments of both, not least for the Maltese exchequer, they have served to fuel a politics of inadequacy in Europe’s south: where being a “normal” country came to mean adhering to the policy prescriptions of the Dutch and Germans. Eurozone membership itself became synonymous with escaping Mediterranean backwardness. As a result, and in order to overcome an absurd inferiority complex, the likes of Greece, Italy and Spain — to say nothing of Malta — sought to do neoliberal modernity better than their northern cousins. The idea of an identity and culture peculiar to the region became either secondary, or something to be actively assailed.

Step back and all this is arguably connected to the tsunami of falling birthrates right across the Greco-Roman basin. Where Maltese families were once large, today they are distinctly East Asian in scale, with the country ranked 224th when it comes to making babies. Perhaps, collectively, the national consciousness has come to regard the future as being tied with economic “development”, and infinity annual growth of 4%, rather than stewarding a sustainable future for Malta’s children and grandchildren.

It would be unwise to say Malta has clear lessons for other, larger countries — least of all on migration (it’s a nation the size of Edinburgh). But it’s also undeniable that Malta has taken certain global trends, visible across the West and beyond, to their logical conclusion. Unlike Maltese, English has hugely benefited from globalization, becoming the indomitable lingua franca of the 21st century. But the obsession with economic growth as an end in itself, and a flattening of cultural difference in the name of a consumerist cosmopolitanism, is just as visible in small-town England as in Melliha or Bugibba.

Indeed, if anything, Britain is further down the line than its one-time Mediterranean redoubt. Here, the boom years have faded, and we are coming to terms with failing to spend our treasure wisely. Despite the economic bonanza of the Thatcher and Blair years, and the jackpot of North Sea oil, we boast barely any high-speed rail or trams, and have failed for decades to build new homes or reservoirs. But Malta also shows how a critique of growth, and recognizing some things are worth more than money, can bridge conventional assumptions of Left and Right. Political scientists call these “post-material” concerns. They are anything but. Issues of identity, collective meaning and spiritual nourishment pre-date capitalism by millennia. They are perennial questions.

As for Malta, it has been blessed by nature and history. And yet, speaking personally, there’s a fascination that lies beyond its monuments and beaches, for Malta exhibits the defining contradiction of our age. Never before have the islands been so prosperous, even as young Maltese feel less able than ever to buy a home or raise a family. And while, after centuries of foreign rule, the country is finally free, its fortunes are ever-more determined by global capital and the European Central Bank. Capitalism wants to flatten what is unique about any place; in the words of Karl Marx, making all that is solid melt into air. But the islands bring to mind the call by Aimé Césaire for a different kind of cosmopolitanism, a “universal rich with all that is particular”. Call it rooted cosmopolitanism, if you like.

Some analysts suspect that Morocco’s sudden lapse in enforcement may be in response to deepening ties between Spain and Algeria — the latter alleged to have sponsored Sahrawi separatists in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. In 2021, Morocco similarly waved through some 8,000 migrants to punish Madrid for hosting a Sahrawi leader. But a related — more insidious — reason for the latest breach is that Rabat is leveraging an increasingly close relationship with the Trump administration and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel.

MAGA has branded Spain Public Enemy No. 1 over its government’s strident posture towards the US and Israel during the Iran war. The socialist government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has refused to allow Washington access to its Rota and Morón military bases, its consistent failure to meet Nato defense-spending targets also fueling MAGA ire. In March, the center-right American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin wrote a policy brief calling on the White House to formally recognize Ceuta and Melilla as occupied Moroccan territory. True to the spirit of Third-World decolonialism, Rubin wrote that Spain was “a colonial power running colonies across the Strait of Gibraltar”.

Within days, neoconservative congressman Mario Díaz-Balart had entoned Fidel Castro, stating that the enclaves were “not in the geographic territory of Spain” and should be “established, negotiated, and discussed between friends and allies”. Similarly, Reuters reported in April that a Pentagon email outlined options against Spain, including Nato suspension; the treaty states explicitly in Article 6 that territories in continental Africa are exempt from collective defense obligations.

For its part, Rabat has since transformed into a vital partner of Washington and Tel Aviv under the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, including Morocco, in 2020. Ironically, Rabat proceeded to leverage the development in the service of its own expansionist aims, with the first Trump administration recognizing Rabat’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.

The dispute over Western Sahara traces back to Spain’s 1975 withdrawal from what was then called Spanish Sahara. Under the Madrid Accords, Spain handed administration of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania; Mauritania withdrew from its share in 1979 after heavy losses to Sahrawi guerrillas. A 16-year war followed, pitting Moroccan forces against the so-called Polisario Front. Rabat eventually built an extensive sand wall — fortified with landmines and troops — partitioning the territory. In November 2020, Moroccan troops entered the UN-patrolled buffer zone to disperse Sahrawi protesters, prompting the Polisario to declare an end to the three-decade truce and a return to armed struggle. The two sides have since traded sporadic strikes along the sand wall.

Rabat has since made inroads on virtually every diplomatic front. Following normalization through the Abraham Accords, Morocco signed a security agreement with Israel in 2021, proving vital for the conflict in Western Sahara; in January, the two nations signed an additional joint military work plan. Then, in February, secret talks chaired by the US brought Moroccan, Algerian, Mauritanian, and Polisario delegations together for the first time since 2019.

In true Trumpian fashion, Morocco announced on Monday that it was naming the Dakhla-Tiznit highway, which runs through Western Sahara, after the US President. Ecstatic, Trump exclaimed on Truth Social: “Thank you to Highly Respected Mohammed VI, the King of Morocco — Such a Great Honor! I look forward to traveling the entire length of this Great Highway someday, hopefully soon!”.

All of this comes as a royal headache for Sánchez ahead of a general election in 2027. His record of raising wages and opposing US and Israeli war crimes has boosted his standing both at home and abroad. Yet a slew of corruption scandals, and a lax immigration policy, have seen his party, PSOE, as well as allies in Sumar and Podemos, consistently trail the Right-wingers of Vox and the People’s Party (PP) in polls.

In recent years, the bulk of low-skilled immigration to Spain has overwhelmingly come from Spanish-speaking Latin America. As a result, negative attitudes towards immigration are rather less pronounced in Spain than other European countries. At the same time, though, Spaniards overwhelmingly oppose illegal migration — especially from Arab and Subsaharan African countries.

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In January, Sánchez’s government issued a blanket amnesty for virtually all illegal immigrants living in Spain. The move, while laudable for granting labor rights to millions of workers, provoked an outcry, with roughly 60% of Spaniards expressing disapproval. Barring overwhelming enforcement on new arrivals, the issue with any such move is that it inevitably incentivizes further illegal immigration.

Sánchez now faces a quandary: clamp down in Ceuta and risk alienating affluent progressives in his coalition, or do little and suffer at the hands of the Spanish Right and the broader public. The former, naturally, is the sounder course. There is, moreover, room for the Prime Minister to maneuver geopolitically while outflanking the progressive Sumar and Podemos’ fantasies of an open-border utopia. After all, Sánchez can credibly accuse Morocco of acting at the behest of the US and Israel against a Nato member. At the same time, he could make a case in favor of overwhelming enforcement against illegal immigration precisely because of the March amnesty.

There is some reason to think that Spain’s famously sly Prime Minister could opt for just such a path, particularly as support for Sumar has collapsed from roughly 13% to 6%, and with Podemos in the doldrums too. The Socialist leader has defied the odds at consecutive elections, favoring high-stakes gambits against his Right-wing adversaries. Nonetheless, the PSOE and its allies have consistently failed to win more voters than the PP and Vox, instead relying on minor, regional parties to govern.

As both Denmark’s and Slovakia’s Social Democrats have shown, the key to Leftist success rests largely on a tough but humane immigration policy. In the wake of the surge in Ceuta, a member of PSOE’s youth wing made a surprisingly sensible plea. “The truth is, I hope this crisis pushes the PSOE to look at the immigration policies of its Northern European sister parties and realize it’s time to move away from what I see as an open-borders approach influenced by the more radical left,” they wrote. “That means protecting those who genuinely need asylum, maintaining secure borders, and avoiding mass regularizations.”

It’s the summer of 2026. Most of Murphy’s fellow Democrats have long given up on the sort of national soul-searching that followed President Trump’s first election in 2016. You remember: that brief window in which Left-of-center pundits and electeds crisscrossed the de-industrialized heartland for clues to why they had lost their working-class base. Soon, though, soul-searching gave way to lawfare aimed at reversing the election’s outcome: Russiagate, the Ukraine phone call, this, that — all futile.

Not Murphy. For several years, the senator has been on something like a spiritual quest: not to find God or himself, but what ails America at a much deeper level than most of the center Left has either allowed or even bothered with. Murphy’s new book, titled Crisis of the Common Good, is the thoughtful, surprisingly well-written, densely researched product of that quest. This, even as Murphy carries a separate persona as a fierce #Resistance liberal on social media and the network formerly called MSNBC. 

Whether these two dimensions can work together, and perhaps elevate him to higher office, is the central question of his career.

Crisis of the Common Good is remarkable for many reasons. For one thing, its pages and notes section are littered with positive references to conservative intellectuals, mostly from the post-liberal-ish corner of the Right. These include the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the American Affairs editor and re-industrialization advocate Julius Krein, the political economist Oren Cass, and, ahem, yours truly.

“I’ve certainly been enamored of the intellectual Right,” he tells me, “and I think there’s a lot of overlap.” In a way, that understates things. Murphy’s deepest project involves translating to American terms and conditions the political tradition known as blue Labour in Britain and Left conservatism in continental Europe. 

Proponents accept the necessity and blessings of market activity. But they’re also acutely aware of the dangers posed by unrestrained capitalism to family, religion, belonging, and community — the goods historically cherished by conservatism. 

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To mitigate the dangers, they turn to social-democratic means, or what Murphy in his book describes as the “social-contract” model of American political economy: business regulation, labor unions, wage floors, industrial policy, jealous guardianship of public goods that private actors can’t preserve even if they want to. The “conservative” or “blue” half of the equation identifies what must be preserved; the “Labour” or “Left” half sets out the means. 

Or as FDR, quoting Macaulay in a 1936 speech, put it, “Reform, if you would preserve,” adding in his own words: “I am that kind of conservative because I am that kind of liberal.” Reform the market if you care to protect society.

The words and speaker are significant. America came closest to adopting a blue-Labour or Left-conservative politics during the New Deal order, roughly from the 1930s through the mid-1970s. To cite one example: the New Dealers’ massive rural-development programs — emergency farm credits, foreclosure moratoria, rural electrification — kept hundreds of thousands of landowning families on farms they would otherwise have lost.

Under Eisenhower and Nixon, the Republican Party upheld these reforms in many areas, and even expanded their logic in others. Then came the neoliberal counterpunch under Reagan and the Bushes. Yet as Murphy is the first to admit in his book, neoliberal Democrats also did their part in tearing down the socially managed capitalism of the midcentury. 

The senator devotes the bulk of his book to chronicling the consequences with anecdotes and data. He organizes his chapters under several “cults” that enthrall Americans: the cults of profit, “everywhere,” technology, consumption, credentialism, and corruption. (The religious undertone here isn’t accidental; surprising for a progressive, Murphy seems to premise his thinking on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally religious animals; all culture is cultus, and some cult or other always commands our obeisance.)

He opens the chapter on the profit cult, for example, by noting how he and his fellow parents are barred from filming their own kids playing hockey by the for-profit entities that now control much of youth sports. Why? Because the firms insist you pay a monthly fee to access footage from their proprietary cameras. 

The example is well-chosen. The small businesses and wealthy donors who once underwrote youth sports in his part of Connecticut did so not expecting to turn a profit, as Murphy notes. They did it because they valued the camaraderie and public-spiritedness cultivated — cultus again — by youth sports. But now, profit-maximizing enterprises have invaded this corner of American life; the days aren’t far when you can place Polymarket bets on high-school sports.

The examples pile up grimly: a lonely teenager who killed himself after an AI chatbot convinced him that he could join her in the afterlife; the class-based stratification of literally every corner of public life ($20 gets you someone who will stand in line for you at a congressional hearing; $100 a night gets you special amenities in the California prison system); the obscene commodification of higher education; and much else of the kind.

In the book — if not always in his cable-news commentary — Murphy frames Donald Trump not as the cause of these transformations and the social alienation to which they’ve given rise. Rather, Murphy treats Trump as a symptom. “Literally the first time I mention his name in the book,” the senator tells me, “it’s in the context of drawing him as a symptom, not the cause, of our spiritual rot.”

The distinction matters, because many conventional Democrats would prefer to frame Trump as a demonic aberration — the easier to avoid the systemic rot the 45th and 47th president has revealed. Says Murphy: “It’s so easy to blame all of our problems on him. He is the main character, and he is, perhaps, an existential threat to democracy, so he’s an important character, and he can’t be avoided. But I just worry that it’s not enough to beat him in an election.” The underlying political, economic, and cultural crises would still churn beneath the surface.

More than that, Murphy is surprisingly willing to acknowledge Trump’s preternatural ability to register and address America’s subterranean ailments, even as the senator vehemently disagrees with Trumpian solutions (such as they are). And while the post-liberal intellectuals of the American Right, he believes, offered useful diagnoses and prescriptions, “my impression is that Donald Trump has effectively obliterated that small but previously growing movement within the party” that sought to re-orient the Right toward worker power and social solidarity. I think that’s overstated but, alas, directionally correct.

So does the Left have anyone who comes close to Trump’s capacity to “get” American discontent? And wouldn’t Democrats have to change course on immigration, especially, if they want to get within striking distance?

In his book, Murphy identifies a sense of place and belonging as one of the goods ravaged by corporate-led globalization and neoliberal capitalism. He rails against the commercial ideology of “everywhere” that runs roughshod over local community — “a belief that efficiency and scale should trump rootedness and place, that it really doesn’t matter where you live so long as you can order the same products, watch the same streaming shows, and follow the same influencers online,” as he writes. 

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But isn’t American discomfiture with mass, low-wage migration — a defining cause for the Trump campaign in 2024 — part of the same rejection of the cult of “everywhere”? 

Murphy seems to bristle a bit at this question. “I hope I’ve put my actions where my mouth is. I spent five months in a locked basement room trying to drag my party to the center on immigration.” He was a major proponent of a bill that would’ve given the president the authority to close the border if average daily crossings crossed 5,000 in a given week. Restrictionists objected — rightly, I believe — that the president already has the statutory authority to shutter the border, while the bill championed by Murphy would have legitimized a huge number of illegal crossings annually as long as figures stayed south of the threshold.

He goes on: “I think you have to have an answer to the existing, often unrestrained migration patterns this country has dealt with over the last decade. It is hard to live in a country where people are different from each other, in which there are so many new entrants. And one of the ways you keep a multicultural, multilinguistic country together is to have clear rules about who can enter — how you become a member of our club, how you become a citizen, how you become a worker. The Democratic Party has been far too casual about answering that question. And I do believe there’s a way for the Democratic Party to be stronger on the question of border security, stronger on the question of a true immigration rule of law.”

Fair enough, but doesn’t the right to call somewhere home also entail the expectation of some stability in who else gets to live there? More to the point, the #Resistance Murphy has joined many further to his Left in calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. What gives?

“Well, you have to have an internal immigration enforcement mechanism,” Murphy says. “You have to have a means to control the border. But he has literally built a personal political police force. There’s no way to just make a few personnel changes and have an actual internal immigration enforcement office that is obeying the law. So, yeah — I’m someone who believes we have to have a way to enforce our immigration laws internally. But I also believe we’re going to have to rebuild it in a different way when he’s gone.”

Perhaps this line — yes to what ICE does, no to ICE itself — is just enough to position Murphy in the sweet spot between a national electorate and where the Democratic Party’s insurgent socialist wing is taking it. Speaking of which, is Murphy planning a presidential run in 2028?

“I mean, I don’t know,” he replies, sounding earnest. “I really don’t. A reporter said to me earlier today, this would not be the book you’d write if you were running for president — because it’s not a book about me. It’s a book about a deeper set of questions about the country. And I’ve had a couple of my friends — who I absolutely know are running for president in 2028 — text me and say, ‘Hey, listen, I think you’ve found a way to frame some things that people have been having trouble talking about, this spiritual rot in the country.’ And, you know, hopefully, if this gives a vocabulary to people to use in 2028.”

In the mid-2010s, Greer was a rising star within mainstream conservative journalism. In 2018, it was revealed that he had written for Richard Spencer’s white-nationalist website Radix a few years earlier, where he made arguments about topics such as the “Jewish role” in promoting multiculturalism. He had already left The Daily Caller for several months before his dox. But henceforth, he would be in essence canceled from movement conservatism.

As Greer points out in Whitepill, his career would have easily survived the revelations about his past today. The things he was saying in 2014 on white-nationalist websites are often scarcely distinguishable from the talking points of major Right-wing influencers and GOP elected officials today. “We know our country’s better than yours,” Megyn Kelly told Haitian immigrants recently, adding: “We don’t want you.… Go back to fucking Haiti.” Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee refers to Zohran Mamdani as “little Muhammad” and demands that New York’s mayor be stripped of his citizenship and deported. Rep. Brandon Gill, meanwhile, has complained about Indians working at 7-11 stores — this, despite his wife being of Indian heritage. 

Greer’s new book is a victory lap celebrating what has been accomplished. The title is a reference to taking the white pill, which in online circles refers to being happy about a given state of affairs, in contrast to the black pill, which signifies the loss of hope — both being a spinoff of the red and blue pills made famous by The Matrix. The lesson of his book is that white nationalists have won. But it leaves the thoughtful reader wondering what the point of this race-based politics is supposed to be.

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Full disclosure here: I have known Greer since his alt-Right days. I wrote for some of the same websites, though my politics have obviously gone in a different direction. I now reject white identitarianism of all kinds. My doxxing came in summer 2023. For this reason, I briefly appear as a character in Whitepill, with Greer using me as one example to demonstrate that by the time my former views were unearthed, people could survive revelations that they once expressed racist and other reactionary views. 

Whitepill is essentially a history of the American Right from the Obama era to the present, with a particular focus on race and identity issues, such as DEI, affirmative action, and, above all, immigration. There is not a lot here that is going to surprise anyone who has followed the news over the last decade: from the rise and fall of the Tea Party to the killing of Trayvon Martin; and from the Henry Louis Gates controversy and the resulting beer summit to then-candidate Donald Trump’s comments on immigrants in his 2015 launch speech and the summer of George Floyd. 

The bulk of the book might be a valuable read for young people not old enough to remember the Obama era, or those who only recently started following politics. But for those of us who have kept up with current events over the last 10-plus years, particularly developments on the American Right, there is limited value in most chapters. 

The point of the book is to demonstrate just how much has changed on the Right. The most interesting parts are the author relaying his first-hand account of the transformation. In 2015, Greer was one of the first people at The Daily Caller to support Trump. It marked him as an outcast, and colleagues thought that it was a joke; he built a “wall” of books around his desk in order to show his support for Trump and his signature border proposal. 

Greer’s takeaway from this is that the mainstream movement’s stalwarts in those days were “lame.” He was, and remains, outraged that conservative activists and journalists were uninterested in race and immigration issues, instead stressing deregulation and free markets. Greer’s alt-Right circle, in contrast, featured “a heroin addict with sociopathic tendencies, an unstable taxi driver who couldn’t control his racial outbursts, and one likely federal agent who tried to recruit us into a militia.” For those who weren’t there, it is useful to stress just how marginalized white identitarian attitudes and adjacent opinions were across the political spectrum in the pre-Trump era.

Now, Greer asserts, most prominent figures in conservatism share at least some of these views. This might be an overstatement. Much of the Christian Right remains theologically immune to the racist appeal, and likewise, there are many who haven’t adopted based signaling and racial slurs in the populist bargain.  Nevertheless, as Trump’s hard-line immigration positions and the quotes above from the likes of Kelly and Ogles demonstrate, the author is correct about the general direction of travel.

He celebrates Tucker Carlson for bringing identity issues to the forefront of American conservatism, and the transformation of the late Charlie Kirk, spending five pages documenting his move toward immigration restrictionism and a pinched account of national identity. He correctly points out that Republican voters are motivated primarily by identity-related concerns, rather than economics, which is what created an opening for Trump and more intellectually minded nativists to take over the party. He’s backed up here by a large amount of political science data, which I’ve written about before.

That doesn’t mean that Greer is completely satisfied with the direction of modern conservatism. He thinks it’s too conspiratorial, for one thing. Indeed, it was Greer who coined the term “Insane Clown Party” to highlight Republicans’ growing fascination with topics like UFOs and Satanic pedophile rings. He also has little patience for religious debates on the Right, perhaps limiting his intellectual horizon, since American Christianity has at various points — and sometimes simultaneously — challenged and upheld white supremacy. 

The bigger question is: what exactly is all this for? This is the question that Whitepill never answers, and Greer’s other work likewise avoids. This book is meant to convince those who, like the author, reduce identity and belonging to race and then prioritize racial identity concerns over all else. For Greer, other issues (such as economics or foreign policy) are of secondary importance at best. They matter only insofar as they might promote immigration restrictionism and defeat multiculturalism. Greer doesn’t like conspiracies or abstract intellectualizing as part of a political movement mainly because they make it more difficult to achieve his larger goals. 

What Greer never does is explain what exactly he believes and why. His project is an insular one, proceeding from the unstated assumption that the reader will agree with him on the importance of winning on the issues white identitarians care about; all that’s left are discussions of tactics and strategy. For example, when Greer addresses abortion, it’s from the perspective that those focused on the issue are causing dissension within the Republican coalition. He calls on pro-lifers to be grateful for what Trump has done, and calls on the Right to tune them out as political liabilities. But what if you actually believe that abortion is murder? He makes no attempt at explaining how abortion issues should fit into the white-nationalist project, except from the perspective of its political impact.

To be sure, he’s honest enough to sometimes acknowledge that his own preferred policies are unpopular, as he does on mass deportation. But in that case, he explicitly says that Trump should do it anyway (which is what pro-lifers want on abortion, too). There’s something unprincipled about this approach to political analysis, though one can easily discern the underlying logic. Greer wants to submit to public opinion — that is, until the need comes to get tough on immigration. Because on that issue the Republicans need to forge ahead and do what’s best for the country.

In order to piece together why Greer believes that identity issues need to be paramount, one has to gather stray comments. He tells us that H-1B visas threaten to harm American workers, and that mass immigration has made cities like Minneapolis “hotbeds of Third-World corruption and politics dominated by ethnic spoils.” But he doesn’t elaborate on these points. One might ask for some data on the H-1B issue, or whether Somalis in Minneapolis, an extremely small portion of new arrivals to the country, are representative of immigrants as a general matter. Mainstream MAGA pretends that immigration leads to much higher levels of crime, but Greer seems aware that this is not true in the aggregate. By not taking up such false narratives, he is left with few tools to make the positive case for his hardline positions. 

It is important to note that Greer rejects the label of white nationalist. To him, though, this rejection simply implies that he accepts the American system and doesn’t aspire to form an ethnostate. However, this is precisely what I would call a worldview that prioritizes maintaining white demographic dominance and cultural primacy. Why else consider every single form of immigration a threat, and why else should anti-white racism, especially after the vibe shift, remain such a high priority? Greer doesn’t explain, but it all makes sense in the context of a racialist worldview.

To Greer, the victory chronicled in Whitepill means that today we can just call this conservatism. It follows that white identitarianism has so successfully swept the Right that Greer doesn’t even feel the need to make the first-order case for his beliefs.   

But that leaves him vulnerable to all sorts of counterarguments (which, again, he doesn’t even bother acknowledging). Even as white identitarianism has ascended, one justification after another for limiting immigration has fallen by the wayside. It was once said new arrivals would boost crime. But crime has consistently fallen — despite some localized disorder and anecdotes that the Trump 2024 campaign pointed to as representative of the effects of immigration (they weren’t, statistically speaking).

Then there is the argument about migrants pushing the electorate to the Left. In her 2015 book ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third-World Hellhole, Ann Coulter argued that nonwhites can be expected to vote Democratic indefinitely into the future; hence, conservatives had to close the border if they hoped to win on any other issue. In 2024, however, naturalized immigrants may well have voted majority-Republican. Now, conservatives are reduced to complaining about competition for tech jobs, despite tech workers not making up any significant part of their coalition, and the American tech industry being such an overwhelming success that it is powering the rest of the economy and putting us at the forefront of the most important industry in the world.

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Some of the MAGA faithful may not see such points clearly, but Greer does. Still, he refuses to intellectually tackle them. Instead, the emotional response to immigration comes first, and justifications are simply put forward on an ad hoc basis. As the intellectual case for restrictionism gets weaker, conservative attachment to nativism only becomes more firmly entrenched. 

The main premise of Whitepill is undeniably true. On the whole, Republicans have moved toward white identitarianism. This being America, even many of our white identitarians are diverse, with names like Nick Fuentes. But there is practically no reflection here on why that is something to celebrate. The worldview presented lacks any larger conception of the good, or a belief in a politics that places an emphasis on virtue. 

To take one example, while Greer laments immigration as a threat to American culture, he is indifferent to the fact that it was his political hero, Trump, who attempted an insurrection. Greer plays down the events of Jan. 6 and ignores the larger context of what we know about Trump trying to overturn the results of the presidential election he lost. What matters is Trump, and the larger Republican Party, as vessels for demographic politics. Even when Greer admirably breaks with his own tribe, as in the case of his denunciation of conspiracy theories, it is a matter of political pragmatism in the service of his larger goals, rather than due to a commitment that honesty and truth are valuable for their own sake.  

Greer has some virtues that are rare among his political tribe. He doesn’t, for example, drink the entire glass of MAGA Kool-Aid. He doesn’t believe that Haitians eat dogs and cats. Nor does he conveniently adopt socialist economic views to oppose immigration. Nonetheless, he is an avatar of a strand of conservatism that centers white identitarianism — without being able or willing to articulate why. 

As a pragmatist, Greer understands that identity politics for white people has worked, and can continue to be a powerful force into the future. But the sad intellectual and ethical state of his type of Right wing politics, and the hollow nature of his attempts to defend what it has become, show why even smarter versions of white identitarianism are degrading and ultimately morally poisonous.

The comparison is well-chosen. Like Gloriana, Mahmood is unmarried; she gives the impression of being singularly devoted to her country. In her manner and speech, she is plus anglais que les anglais. What should they know of England who only England know? Mahmood, the daughter of immigrants from Pakistan, spent some of her formative years in Taif, in Saudi Arabia, where her father was a civil engineer. Prior to 2013, women in Saudi Arabia were prohibited from practicing law. Had she remained there, she would not have been able to fulfill her ambitions. But while Mahmood was in Taif, the United Kingdom, her native country, was governed by a woman — and a woman barrister, to boot. That may explain why Mahmood, unlike her new boss and most of her comrades on the government benches, venerates Margaret Thatcher as a personal heroine.

After returning from Saudi Arabia to Birmingham, Mahmood went up to Oxford to read law. At Lincoln College she was the year below noted PPE-ist Rishi Sunak, who apparently voted for her in a JCR election. Then she went to the Bar, which performed its traditional function of inculcating her with a certain identity and worldview. Her Englishness, like that of many English lawyers, is shaped by an appreciation of the common law. “My parents weren’t steeped in Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, and the Bill of Rights”, she said on being sworn in as Lord Chancellor in 2024; but “they did have a strong sense, arriving here in the UK from rural Kashmir, that this country was different: that there are rules, some written and some not, that we abide by”. Her national identity is made of stronger stuff than Sir Keir Starmer’s “cutting the half-time orange”. Nor is it the watery “values” kind propounded by the Labour Home Secretaries of yore, which strung together a sequence of abstract nouns. Those “British values” of “fairness” and the “rule of law”, Mahmood was saying, are products of a particular culture and history, things that make the country “different”.

Mahmood’s robust civic nationalism means that she passes the “Tebbit test”: in the cricket, she supports England over Pakistan “all the way”. At the last Labour conference she spoke of a “patriotism that speaks, but does not feel the need to shout”, one that “embraces those who trace their roots back in this country over a thousand years, and also those who look like me”. She drew a distinction between her own sense of Englishness and Britishness and a “smaller, more divisive ethnonationalism”. When Zarah Sultana compared her views with those of another Midlands politician with a strong feeling for English history, Enoch Powell, Mahmood reacted with fury. Sultana’s remarks, the Home Secretary thundered, were “beneath contempt”.

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Mahmood characterizes her position as “the patriotism of Orwell”, and she shares Orwell’s disdain for those English elites and intellectuals who “would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than stealing from a poor box”. She therefore takes her patriotic fight to the real enemy, as her friends in Blue Labour see it: metropolitan liberals. Here it helps that she is from an ethnic and religious minority, and that she represents a constituency where problems involving immigration and demographics cannot be brushed aside. Her finest hour as Justice Secretary was her showdown with the Sentencing Council, where she prevented explicit discrimination in favor of ethnic minorities. Her finest hour as Starmer’s Home Secretary was, similarly, a sparring match with Max Wilkinson, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham. Wilkinson made a conventional hand-wringing rebuke of her “cruel” approach to immigration. Mahmood sarcastically expressed envy at his “privilege” for “walking around this country” — his posh, leafy neck of the woods — and “not seeing the division that the issue of migration and the asylum system is creating”.

Then she went in for the kill: “Unlike the Honourable Gentleman, I am the one who is regularly called a ‘fucking Paki’ and told to ‘Go back home’”. She was chided by the Deputy Speaker for her unparliamentary language; that, of course, only added to its effect. It was a fine piece of theater, consummating a long-standing Blue Labour fantasy: a tough-talking, small-c conservative Muslim woman, a “Somewhere” rather than an “Anywhere”, putting the clueless liberal elites in their place. For too long, in the view of Lord Glasman and his ilk, the Labour Party had been in tow to those who dismiss the entire subject of immigration as befitting only bigots. By repudiating Max Wilkinson, Shabana Mahmood was returning the party to its roots. She was Gillian Duffy’s revenge.

All this has, of course, come at some cost on the Left. Mahmood is the least popular cabinet minister among Labour members — a fact which ought to keep in check any leadership ambitions. Her activities as Home Secretary have caused anguish among Labour’s third-sector clientele. The anti-slavery commissioner expressed “deep concern” over Mahmood’s suggestion that modern slavery legislation can give cover to vexatious asylum claims. The Bishop of Edmonton claimed to be “shaken to the core” by some of her proposals. Zack Polanski, who hopes to make inroads among these voters, is licking his lips at the prospect of making her his principal target. Aside from her immigration reforms and rhetoric, the Greens can tap into anger over her perceived betrayal on Palestine — the same anger that slashed her majority at the last election. On the other side of the aisle, though, she has become something of a cult figure. Sir Edward Leigh, the Tory Father of the House, joked that she is “one of the best Conservative Home Secretaries we have ever had”. Danny Kruger invited her to defect to Reform. Michael Gove even confessed to harboring a small crush. Like Elizabeth I, she finds herself swarmed by suitors.

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And like Elizabeth I, Mahmood is a political survivor. Reeves is out and Yvette Cooper demoted; of the three women who woke up on the morning of 20 July 2026 occupying a Great Office of State, by the evening only Mahmood was left standing. Despite Burnham’s decision to keep her on, Labour backbenchers will continue to conspire against her immigration reforms. They no doubt hope that Burnham, the mushy people-pleaser, can be easily manipulated. Angela Rayner has described Mahmood’s reforms to indefinite leave to remain as “un-British” — an audacious attempt to beat the Blue Labourites at their own game. Mahmood’s commitment to her immigration plans is undoubtedly sincere, and she wants to see them come to fruition; presumably Burnham has made some assurances to this effect. But it seems quite likely that, sooner or later, she and Burnham will be at loggerheads — if, that is, the parliamentary party doesn’t erupt in outright revolt against one of them first.

Mahmood might therefore be a political liability for Burnham. Why, then, has he decided to retain her? It was reported that he intended to promote her to Number 11, perhaps even as a means of getting her out of the Home Office. If that was his plan, it didn’t work. Mahmood might not have given him the choice: she was adamant throughout that she would prefer to remain in post. It could be that Burnham recognizes — or his new constituents in Makerfield have forced him to recognize — that the immigration issue can’t be ignored. If that is the case, then it helps him to have someone else do the dirty work — and someone who got the ball rolling under a previous administration. If Mahmood’s reforms ultimately prove to be too much for Labour MPs and members to swallow, he has the option of pinning the blame squarely on her, and even on his own predecessor.

In any case, it makes good sense for there to be a “Blue Labour” presence in Burnham’s Number 10 — whether the one in Westminster, or the one Up North. “Manchesterism”, Burnham grandly declared in the Makerfield campaign, “is the end of neoliberalism”. Nobody is quite sure what this means, if it means anything at all; but “neoliberalism” is a long-standing Blue Labour bugbear, and Burnham’s idea of somehow defeating it with localism, community, and civic pride could just as well have sprung from the mind of Lord Glasman.

Mahmood hails from Birmingham, and represents the Birmingham seat once held by Neville Chamberlain. It is tempting, therefore, to summon the ghost of Neville’s father Joseph. The comparison has been drawn before: Mahmood, like the elder Chamberlain, seems to transcend the usual political divides. The 19th-century Mayor of Birmingham was the great opponent of free trade, the determined champion of protection. Chamberlain-style, community-oriented, interventionist “Birminghamism” seems to suit Burnham’s vision better than “Manchesterism”, which of course referred originally to laissez-faire. In Burnham’s crusade against London and the South-East, it seems only fair for England’s other second city to get its place in the sun.

Mahmood is probably the only Labour politician with a serious chance of carrying out the public will on immigration. Burnham seems, for now, to recognize as much. Mahmood’s task is simple enough: to act unsentimentally while the Prime Minister does his grinning footie lad act, and to absorb all the resultant anger from the Labour Left. He can speak, in his anodyne way, about values, respect, and even half-time oranges. And she can present a more satisfying answer to the question, in law and in culture, of what it means to be British.

Future Works, a co-working space at the end of the Elizabeth Line, is a disconcertingly optimistic upgrade to Wernham Hogg, the paper-merchant setting of The Office. The program today celebrates its 25th anniversary — and still plays an outsized role in the national imagination when it comes to depicting the purgatory of worklife just outside the capital. “The last time something happened around here,” says one 28-year-old product designer with the deadpan voice of Martin Freeman’s Tim, “was when someone shat on the wall outside.”

But these jaded souls, once preyed upon by the likes of David Brent, are slowly being replaced. Now Slough is rallying around the entrepreneurs and thought leaders of Future Works in their bid to become UK Town of Culture in 2028, hoping to pip rival Guildford by pioneering the “creative expression” of a very different England to the one depicted by The Office.

“I’m a networker,” says 31-year-old Varun, one of Future Work’s entrepreneurs, sitting in front of multiple screens in an eerily empty room. As he launches into a pitch for his fintech startup, there are a few stray Brentisms (his favorite film is Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness) but few other signs of the former regional manager of Wernham Hogg. Unlike Brent, he is a boss first and only. He has no real desire to be a friend or entertainer, and certainly no cultural hinterland that might entail an admiration of Ian Botham or an impression of Basil Fawlty.

“Being a founder can be lonely,” Varun confesses when I give him the chance to expand on his workplace philosophy à la Brent. He’s already found himself crying in the toilets due to the stress of running a startup. That angst is appropriate: Slough, after all, doesn’t exactly inspire the more whimsical, rural turn of England’s present comic imagination, with its hits like The Detectorists and This Country. Here you can find Europe’s largest collection of data centers, plonked in the midst of a place that both tops the country’s league tables for income deprivation, and is the most ethnically diverse local authority outside London.

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Downstairs, I try to see if I can find a few Gareths, or even a long-suffering Dawn. But like the notorious brutalist roundabout from the opening credit, many of these familiarities have been replaced. “I don’t think Brent would survive here now to be honest,” says Nilesh, who works as a financial consultant. “We’ve had to make a few tough decisions around firing people because of AI. And I don’t think he’d manage that because ultimately he’s a wimp.” And then there’s the town’s diversity, he says, referencing the scene where David Brent gets two Asian warehouse workers mixed up. “There’d certainly be more of that happening.”

Could the Slough of 2026 still produce a David Brent? It’s a question of national significance, given The Office’s role in depicting a certain idea of England, one that sulks outside the M25, and which is in theory home to most of us, with our dull jobs and deferred dreams. Its geography reflects Brent’s own ambitions. As he put it, “Slough’s a big place and when I’m finished I’ve got Reading, Aldershot, Bracknell.” Yet these sudden London hinterlands are now forming the vanguard of a very different English worklife. Here you can find the ominous megastructures of the AI revolution, bearing down on co-working spaces left to run the less exotic fringes of our globalized services economy, where an anxious churn — graduates, officer workers trying to reinvent themselves, newly arrived migrants — all muddle along together.

Slough, against the grain of its once-terminal drabness, now finds itself the champion of a lackluster kind of Anglofuturism. John Betjeman and his “friendly bombs” have partly got their wish, thanks to Berkeley Homes and logistics developer SEGRO, with many of the brutalist, run-down shopping centers replaced to create a new landscape of self-contained residential complexes. From a distance, some of these plastic mausoleums can be confused for one of the town’s many data centers, which have helped create a peculiar microclimate of isolated despair on London’s far-flung borders.

The irony of Slough’s recent transformation is that The Office rose to popularity in the ebb-tide of the New Labour years, a place where David Brent was left to roam in the mire of a lost future. On the eve of the millennium, Tony Blair pronounced his government had a “thousand days to prepare for a thousand years”. A timescale evidently rushed, as the country became plastered with call centers and the pastiche futurism of “pseudo-modernism”, one that produced a different kind of desperation to the crumbling postwar social contract it was intended to upgrade. For most people, Blair’s “information superhighway” still meant being stuck in an office somewhere like Slough.

And then there was Brent himself. The shock troops of New Labour were the middle managers and the Mondeo Men, those trying to straddle the blokey relatability of the Nineties with the prying managerial togetherness of “The Third Way”. Sue Nye, a Labour apparatchik and wife of the BBC Chairman who championed the programme, thought she was watching a true-to-life documentary: a mistake perhaps brought about by her familiarity with the office of then-Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Once Wernham Hogg had taken hold in the national consciousness, it seemed to pop up everywhere. When Blair visited Slough police station after The Office’s second series, he greeted staff and modeled a drug test with Brentian panache. And so the regional manager from Slough became a sort of pathology for a nation weaned on delusions of grandeur, run by a set of politicians supposed to be delivering the future but who secretly fancied themselves as rockstars, humanitarians, and your own best friend.

Now a version of the future Blair once promised seems to have finally arrived in Slough — albeit one with less comic potential. When Vineet Vijh shows me a script of his updated version of The Office, set in Future Works and co-written to boost the Town of Culture bid, it’s clear that Slough’s attempts to find its feet in this new world have ended up slightly hysterical. And in this it certainly manages to capture the country’s own changing comedic manners, less masochistic and self-deprecating, and more in tune with a different national preoccupation: trying to broker a safe and gentle way for all the different tribes that now occupy modern Britain to get along.

The humor is derived not from everyone being “trapped”, as they were in the Slough of the 2000s, but from what happens “when everyone is free”. Unsurprisingly, there is now no place for Chris Finch, Wernham Hogg’s blokey sales rep, who does not survive the updated sitcom’s desired shift from “office culture to 150 cultures”. He is now a LinkedIn influencer. Comic set pieces revolve around the office’s diversity, both in background and occupation, with running gags involving “pitches every Friday that might change the world” and “flash mobs of dancers” frustrating the efforts of the documentarians. Curiously, despite potentially thriving in such an environment, David Brent is missing entirely.

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“There is something I like to call Schrödinger’s Slough,” says Rob Deeks, a social worker and champion of the town, as I ask him to take me on a tour to see if the new sitcom really does justice to the town. “To outsiders it is simultaneously a drab, gray and dreary place, but then also a vibrant, growing and sometimes dangerous place that no one apparently wants to live in.” When I suggest he might be touching on the broader condition of England, he takes me on a whistle-stop tour: a 10-minute drive that takes in the playing fields of Eton, a busy mosque now serving one of the first estates built to home bombed-out Londoners, and a data center that wafts the smells of cremated plastic into back gardens.

For the town’s population, Deeks suggests this environment can create a peculiar unease, a sense that they’re living in a future that doesn’t really want them. “To be honest,” he says, “I don’t think the people living here have any idea what goes on in there”, pointing to a row of semi-detached houses that back onto a data center where the majority of England’s internet traffic is processed. “Slough is full of people who have just moved here or are just trying to get by. I think this stuff gets put here because you know they’re not going to make a fuss.”

Closer to the heart of Slough, I go in search of some more familiar set pieces from The Office, spots that might spark a bit of life into the town’s new sitcom. “No one goes out anymore in Slough,” say a pair of NHS nurses, implying that there would be no one left in Chasers, the nightclub from series one, for Brent and Chris Finch to chat up. “The people who work just seem to live in their own world, and then there are now lots of people here from places where drinking is not a big part of their culture.” Where would they set a sitcom in Slough now? The two look at each other bemused. “I’m not really sure. Perhaps you can try out the high street, which still has the odd character.”

Vineet Vijh at Future Works warned me not to go to the high street. He insisted it was not representative of his aspiring Town of Culture. It certainly contains past ruins from previous efforts at regeneration. There’s a boarded-up shop, with a flowery facade that reads: “Slough Celebrates Neurodiversity”. Graffitied onto it is an argument about immigration and the odd “Allahu Akbar” in a frantic scrawl.

Much of this will soon be replaced, with Berkeley Homes having bought up the shopping center, promising a residential-cum-leisure-complex it insists will make people want to “enjoy and actually visit Slough”. By 2039, those living in its penthouse will be able to view the Future Works by the Elizabeth Line, and gaze across the M25 towards the shimmering lights of Hounslow and Heathrow.

In the meantime, I spot an unlikely pair outside the derelict shopping center, a man who looks eerily like Chris Finch, who has just lost his patience at the job center. He’s with a woman wearing a black hijab. “Oh fuck off,” he screams at her before marching off. “Don’t worry about him,” she says. He’s just having one of his moments.” And sure enough the pair are suddenly back together, conspiring as they walk briskly up the high street. This odd couple are never going to win Slough its Town of Culture prize, but they’re certainly the makings of a more fitting drama than the one set in Future Works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn’t, in fact, empty. Most of the straphangers had crowded to the ends of the car, leaving a gap of empty seats in the middle. It took me only a second to discern why. Sitting there was a man with a heavy shawl around his head and a stick in one hand. He rocked back and forth, absorbed in self-talk: now muttering softly, now breaking into shrill shouts. The language was maybe Tamazight, but I couldn’t be sure (I’m usually really good at clocking foreign tongues).

The doors closed behind me — too late to switch cars. According to an unwritten rule of subway safety, I should have joined the others at one of the two ends of the car. But I didn’t adhere to the crazy-guy-blast-radius norm, partly because I wanted to read my papers in peace, and partly because I figured the chances of an unpleasant incident were low.

 I figured wrong. As the train rattled through the underground, I’d glance up from my copy of the New York Post and catch the man glowering at me. He kept up his self-talk. His periodic outbursts, formerly directed at the cosmos or God or the gods, now seemed aimed at a specific target: me. First stop, Grand Central — no incident. Second stop, 33rd Street — still nothing, though the growling had intensified. Final stop, 28th Street — home free.

Or not. The man sprang up from his seat in tandem with my motion. Before I could reach the door, he removed the heavy shawl from around his neck and began whacking the backs of my legs. His shouting crescendoed to a mad sputtering rage. The shawl-whacking produced only mild discomfort, and maybe for that reason, my first thought wasn’t escape, but indignation mingled with amusement. For a split second, I just stood there in the door, looking into his deranged, unblinking eyes while the other passengers stepped around me and out. 

Then he raised his stick. OK, now get out.

Amusement and confusion — not really anger — were my initial emotions as I took the short walk from the station to our office. “Crazy old fuck,” I remember saying to myself with something like a smirk on my lips. Next came a set of questions. Why was this foreign person, who couldn’t speak English and was clearly out of his mind, menacing people on the transit system? Which precise path had brought him from his country to the Big Apple? Had he arrived as part of the Biden wave that had flooded the US homeland with an estimated 8 million newcomers, many of them unvetted? Or did he come earlier? And what was to become of him — raging stranger in a strange land — today, tomorrow, a month from now?

More from this author

Pope Leo’s unfashionable universalism

By Sohrab Ahmari

Soon the questions gave way to a conviction, which my mind repeated like a mantra: We shouldn’t have to live like this. We shouldn’t have to live like this. We shouldn’t. . . . I wasn’t unaware that my mantra is popular among the very-online Right on both sides of the Atlantic. This was discomfiting: the line had popped into my head in the same way that an advertising jingle might. It discomfited me still more that the mantra summed up precisely what I felt at that moment, and that it harbored a hard kernel of truth. 

I’d just then experienced an acute case of what I’ve come to call diversity stress or migration fatigue: the pervasive anxiety that attends life in societies buffeted by too much migration and too much diversity. Too much defined as the point at which assimilation falters and majority-minority distinctions evaporate. 

Diversity stress arises from having to constantly negotiate housing-, services-, and street-level incohesion: as we navigate linguistic barriers, normative differences, sheer unfamiliarity, and the potential for misunderstanding, the position is stressful, even if the outcome is relatively “harmless” (as in the case of my subway accoster). As the French geographer and urban theorist Christophe Guilluy has noted, people in such societies “need to manage, day in, day out, a thousand and one ethno-cultural questions while trying not to get caught up in hatred.”

It’s important to talk about diversity stress because it’s much less visible than spectacular cases of violence like the attempted beheading of Stephen Ogilvie by a Sudanese migrant in Belfast this week. Those sorts of cases are relatively — mind you, relatively — rare. They thus allow policymakers who’ve presided over uncontrolled migration to isolate the crisis in a dishonest manner: to speak of a few bad actors who must be left to the justice system to deal with.

What this framing misses is the systemic, low-grade diversity stress that afflicts much of the population as a result of mass migration, and which goes a long way toward explaining why seemingly “isolated” cases can trigger such ferocious eruptions of intercommunal violence. Put another way, if diversity stress weren’t constantly pressing down on society, then it would be reasonable to expect native populations to shrug off the “isolated” cases of ultra-violence. 

In reality, diversity stress isn’t isolated — it’s omnipresent. Its effects, once confined mostly to the working and lower-middle classes, now increasingly ensnare even the upper-middle sectors, those who enjoy the authentic-ethnic-cuisine pop-up restaurants and benefit from the cheap nannies, dry cleaners, gardeners, and the like. 

I fit into the latter category, though if anyone shouldn’t feel diversity stress, it’s me. As my byline hints, I’m foreign-born — an Iranian-American — and speak Persian fluently. My wife is likewise an immigrant, born and raised in China before coming to America as a teenager, lending our lives a nice sort of symmetry. 

Moreover, various mishaps caused my life to take a particularly circuitous path through the class structure: I was born to middle-class Iranian bohemians in the capital, Tehran, but lived in a rural trailer park upon first arriving in the United States. Then, within a decade, the American meritocracy catapulted me to Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers. As a reporter, I’ve broken bread with Romani people in the Hungarian countryside, and with presidents and prime ministers. I can instantly tell whether someone is from Iraq, Egypt, or Lebanon based on how they speak Arabic. I can tell Eritreans apart from Ethiopians just by examining their faces. In short, I embody neoliberal fluidity.

And yet — as my response to the interaction in the subway shows, I am feeling it. It’s the little things, easy to caricature and dismiss by pro-immigration advocates. But they add up.

At some point in the past few years, for example, seemingly Gotham’s entire taxi corps — once made up of African Americans and white-ethnics — was taken over by South Asians, who only made up about 40% of drivers in the late 1990s. Nowadays, when I land at LaGuardia or JFK airports, there’s a nine out of 10 chance that my driver will be South Asian: Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis. And they’re much more likely to have no idea what I’m talking about if I say, “Midtown East, take the Triborough.” Some will simply hand me their smartphones so I can input my destination, which is both alienating and requires me to actively monitor navigation; an exit might be closed for construction, and the driver has no capacity to improvise. Is that the end of the world? No. Nor is it stressful on a conscious level, but as an underlying irritant, it’s there.

Or take pedestrian transit in the city, an increasingly perilous enterprise as electric bikes and scooters have proliferated, and city authorities refuse to regulate these vehicles with even half as much vigor as they apply to cars. On a near-daily basis, at least one of these will zoom past me at a bewildering speed, the rider ignoring the pedestrian walk signal and forcing me to stop at the last minute lest my kids and I get struck. And almost always, the rider appears to be a diminutive Central American migrant racing to deliver a salad bowl to someone working from home like myself. Again, is that an indictment of Central Americans or an event to ruin my day? No, but still my fight-or-flight instinct has kicked in, and there’s a non-zero chance of my loved-ones and I ending up in the hospital. Even if we avoid physical harm, the experience creates diversity stress.

Finally, there’s the presence of burkas and niqabs among Muslim women on the streets and the underground, as well as their Asian medical equivalent, the protective face mask. Such face coverings are normative in parts of the Muslim world and East Asia, respectively, but they aren’t normative in the West. And while Western negative liberty guarantees a right to wear them, their very non-normativeness can be profoundly unsettling. To me, it suggests that I can’t be trusted not to leer at a woman’s face — or that I’m a mere vector for disease, rather than a fellow citizen and party to the social contract. And while I can’t speak for others, I must insist that I continue living in the West in order to live according to Western norms and standards.

This is just a snapshot. There are many other daily experiences of this kind. Any one of them, taken on its own, would be negligible. But taken cumulatively, they add up to a constant sense that everything is in flux, that I have no right to the familiar, or to any sense of stability in whom I’m obliged to accept as a neighbor. I’m also, as a member of the professional class, largely insulated from the worst of the diversity stress. I own a car in the city. I live in a co-op with a doorman, in the serene confidence that the two-bedroom unit above mine won’t suddenly come to be occupied by nine Turkish construction workers, who blast Turkish TV loudly into the night, chain-smoke inside, and don’t take too kindly to complaints.

Native-born working classes bear much more of the stress burden, giving rise to what Guilluy has described as the quintessential experience of mass-migration societies: the tense encounter in the stairway between a member of the old white proletariat and his Tunisian and Algerian neighbors in the suburbs that ring France’s 16 major cities. An American analog might be the experience of heritage African Americans in neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Navy Yards or Roxbury in Boston, which became home to massive migrant-processing centers under the Biden administration. (All things considered, it’s a miracle that the anger stoked by such measures simmered but didn’t boil over.)

The working classes also disproportionately suffer from the economic stresses associated with unskilled mass migration, the way it undercuts the wages and bargaining power of those on the lower rungs of the labor market. The old labor Left didn’t fail to recognize the problem. As Paul Krugman, that arch-reactionary, observed in a 2006 New York Times column, “Many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration.” Because such newcomers “have much less education than the average US worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans.” Moreover, “low-skill immigrants threaten to unravel [our] safety net.” All this led the likes of United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez and civil-rights pioneers Barbara Jordan and A. Philip Randolph to carve out restrictionist positions that scandalize their latter-day heirs.

But the economic stress, I suspect, is creeping up the class ladder. Take America’s competitive housing market. Ever since the 19th century, when the yeomanry tried — and failed — to keep their children living and toiling under the same roof, the American pattern has been for children to strike out independently after a certain age. Intergenerational solidarity, in other words, is thin. 

By contrast, many migrant families maintain thick networks of mutual support. Part of that involves within-lifetime transfers — i.e., the parents downscale their homes, gifting the price differential and other assets to their children while they’re still alive. Thus, between two lawyers starting at the same salary at the same mid-sized law firm (say), the one from a Korean or Chinese or Iranian migrant family will have a much easier time ascending to first-time homeownership (even if this means putting up the parents or in-laws, who then also double as babysitters, making it still easier for the adult kids to grind out billable hours).

But perhaps the deepest source of diversity stress — afflicting the native-born and migrant alike — is the growing illegibility of majority and minority as categories. From a simplistic moral perspective, this is to be celebrated: almost by definition, majorities tend to lord it over minorities; a society composed only of minorities, a highly diverse society, will prevent such oppression. But not so fast. In mass-migration societies, as Guilluy observed, “ ‘the other’ doesn’t become ‘somebody like yourself.’ And when ‘the other’ doesn’t become ‘somebody like yourself,’ you constantly need to ask yourself how many of the other there are — whether in your neighborhood or your apartment building.” No one, he added, “wants to be a minority,” yet that is exactly what uncontrolled mass migration does — to everyone — generating stress.

Societies in which minorities encounter a clear majority are ones that make possible a certain social bargain or exchange: We are this, and you are that, but you can become part of our thing by sharing our burdens, adopting our ways, and, yes, losing part of your old self. 

Without a clear majority — without a kind of social regency, which needn’t be racial — we end up with what one California historian called the “Blade Runner scenario,” after the Ridley Scott dystopian film based on Philip K. Dick’s novel: “the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities” characterized by regular outbreaks of violence followed by “negotiated truce.” In the Blade Runner scenario, straining under diversity stress, I neither have a clear sense of what sets me apart as a minority, nor of my duties and prerogatives as a member of a majority. 

Suggested reading

Belfast after the ‘beheading’

By Aris Roussinos

But what about assimilation? Aren’t we ignoring the great American engine of assimilation, which can expand the majority, rather than living in fear of minorities overwhelming it? It’s true. America is better at assimilating newcomers than perhaps any other nation on Earth. But assimilation takes time, as Barbara Jordan, a Lyndon B. Johnson protégé who went on to chair President Clinton’s commission on immigration reform, noted. Like any engine, the assimilation engine breaks down when the volume of inputs becomes overwhelming.

There are signs that’s happening today. English-language acquisition among migrants, a key index of successful assimilation, is declining. “English proficiency is more common among immigrants who arrived in the US before 2000 than among those who entered the country later,” a Pew study found last year. “Some 57% of immigrants who came to the US before 2000 are proficient English speakers, compared with 47% who arrived in 2010 or later.” 

Things are in even more dismal shape when it comes to ideological Americanization. Already a decade ago, a Hudson Institute study found that immigrants are 20 percentage points less likely than the native-born to consider America a “better” country than others; 30 points more likely to consider themselves “citizens of the world”; 30 points more likely to believe that education should focus on “ethnic pride,” rather than American values; 15 points less likely to support teaching students about America’s founding documents; and so on.

Part of this has to do with decades of multicultural education. As the heterodox Leftist thinker Christopher Lasch noted, schools in the 19th and early 20th centuries emphasized “ ‘Americanism’ and … [the] promotion of universal norms.” This “had a liberating effect, helping individuals to make a fruitful break with parochial ethnic traditions.” Lasch cited as an example the late Norman Podhoretz. The neoconservative godfather was born to Jewish working-class immigrants. His educators saw it as their mission to pull boys (and, increasingly, girls) like him out of their respective parochialisms — into a higher sphere of cultivated judgment, engaged citizenship, and American norms. But by the time Lasch was writing, in the 1970s, multiculturalist education was already winning the day. Such education, Lasch warned, “deplores the disintegration of folk culture and pays no attention to the degree to which disintegration was often the price paid for intellectual emancipation.”

Fast forward half a century, and there is another challenge to assimilation: technology. For the generation of migrants to which Podhoretz’s parents belonged, coming to America meant casting away the Old World and its ways. This was easier to do than it is today, when migrants carry the Old World with them all day long — on their smartphones. Casting away the old is rather difficult for the migrant cabbie or truck driver who spends all day speaking to his relatives back home or watching soap operas in his native language. Or for the Chinese student who finishes her education almost entirely in the company of other Chinese, whether in person or on her WeChat app. Is there a policy fix to that? None that I can think of — other than what voters, especially downscale voters, across the developed world have been demanding for years now: reductions in overall numbers and much greater selectiveness on who’s admitted.

Diversity stress may be difficult to quantify. But it can be rigorously conceptualized as a form of negative externality or transaction cost that must be reckoned in any cost-benefit analysis about mass migration. For too long, policymakers across most of the developed world have ignored this hidden, pervasive cost. It is long past due that they balance the freedom of movement and the growth imperative against the right to the familiar. We shouldn’t have to live this way.

A good portion of their narrow terraced street, which had, until that evening, housed non-European migrants, had been burned out. The migrants had been escorted away in armored Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Landrovers earlier; the houses, and cars outside, were now blackened shells. Taking a photo of the devastation, eerily lit by the blue lights of the emergency services, I tried to persuade a local woman, on promise of anonymity, to grant me an interview. Two burly men, overhearing me, ushered me into a dark corner where they demanded to search my phone’s camera roll, to ensure I had not captured any local faces. Once they were satisfied, the larger of the two men warned me, “with no animosity, like, don’t be asking any more questions. We don’t want any journalists down here.” I understand, I said, but it’s my job. “In this country?” replied his more excitable colleague, “Are you fucking daft? Fuck away off and get on home before you get kneecapped.”

There was, perhaps, no arguing the point. Hostility to journalists was ubiquitous, at least on the Loyalist side. Over the course of the day, in which protests had been announced on social media in a bewildering variety of locations across Northern Ireland, a constant theme had been that no cameras, and no phones, were to be allowed. Protesters had been advised to dress in all-dark clothes, and to mask up: rather than hosting the carnival of livestreamers accompanying many such anti-migrant events in England and the Irish Republic, tonight was to be serious business. What violence there was, rather than aimlessly directed at the police, was to be coldly and carefully targeted against individual migrant homes. Coming home to Belfast from London that afternoon, I had returned to a place of ghostly quietness, where confused tourists wandered past the shuttered shops and bars of the deserted city center. The horrifying attempted beheading of a North Belfast man by a Sudanese migrant, captured on video, would have been incendiary enough in a mainland Britain increasingly host to such horrors; in hitherto untouched Belfast, the assumption was that tonight’s response would be a historic event.

What gave the atrocity its added political piquancy was that it took place in a firmly Catholic, Nationalist area. The symbolism of the attacker being beaten off with a hurling stick, a symbol of Irish cultural nationalism — by a local man named Maitiu Mág Tighearnán — was quickly taken up by new Irish Republican factions firmly set against mass migration. Until now, the governing rule of thumb was that anti-migrant riots are, in Northern Ireland, a purely Loyalist affair, which Catholic Nationalists regard with detached dismissal. But it is increasingly common to hear grumblings against mass migration from working-class Catholics, grumblings entirely absent from their community’s social media and journalistic commentators. Indeed, the locally influential Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), which claims not to be the political wing of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), has recently begun to make its veiled criticisms of mass migration explicit, seeking to capture the turning mood and turn it against their politically dominant rivals Sinn Féin. In its statement delivered on the night of the attack, the IRSP declared its support for a residents’ group protesting the siting of a migrant hostel in West Belfast’s Republican Glen Road, and warned against the silencing of “legitimate working class concerns about immigration” within “communities, who, with zero consultation, have never seen such demographic shifts in their lifetime”.

Northern Irish Republicanism has, until now, been insulated by the country’s post-peace process political system — guaranteeing an increasingly socially liberal Sinn Féin a role in government — from the anti-migration disturbances that have roiled the Irish Republic in recent years. The long-expected moment when that would change appears to be slowly dawning, accelerated by the violent horror of this attack, deep within the Republican inner sanctum. “You wouldn’t expect this happening here, not since the days of the Troubles,” one Catholic woman, smoking a cigarette on the doorstep of her neatly-presented terraced house, told me of the attack sparking the night’s events. “As a mother of young boys you worry what might happen to them, it’s shocking, just shocking is what it is.”

Yet in North Belfast, a patchwork of jealously guarded sectarian enclaves and exclaves, which makes a map of the Holy Roman Empire look manageable, the traditional ethnic conflict is of far greater relevance than whatever new politics is being formed by the decisions of Whitehall officials, who have rapidly turned Belfast into one of the United Kingdom’s prime destinations for asylum resettlement. On North Queen Street, one of North Belfast’s many euphemistically termed “interface areas”, where the two communities abut each other, Catholic Nationalists cheerily watched masked Protestant youths, masked and dressed in black, set barriers alight and fill petrol bombs, the two sides observing each other from a healthy distance. On the Catholic side, commanding-looking men in expensive black SUVs sat overseeing the events, occasionally nodding at messages whispered to them through their car windows.

On the Protestant side, where older women held up placards saying “Women and Children Not Safe In This Area” behind a screen of intimidating masked teenagers, a woman laughed at a police patrol car making a rapid about-turn from the area. “Look at them doughnuts he’s doing,” she said to her friend, “He’s from Divis [a notorious West Belfast Catholic housing estate] flying about like that.” One older man, who appeared to be drunk, angrily tried to pull the bemused driver of a rental lorry, with Southern plates, from his cab, following his awkward and failed attempt to negotiate the unexpected and blazing barricade. No doubt in the new spirit of cross-community co-operation, other Protestants intervened, leading their errant colleague away and giving the driver alternative directions to his destination with a kind of exaggerated politeness rare to Belfast. Unlike previous anti-immigration riots, where the PSNI came under furious and sustained assault, this time round the police were markedly absent, occasionally sending officers in patrol cars to pull burning bins away from traffic intersections, and instead leaving the two hostile communities they are normally at such costly pains to separate to explore each others’ unmediated proximity.

“It’s an excuse for them [Loyalists] to come out, build their numbers and then they’ll attack our community, it happens all the time,” one Catholic man from the fiercely Republican New Lodge told me, while grinding weed for a joint. “We’re all just standing here so, you can see, and they’re all covered up, covered up to their teeth, all black as your boot. Don’t you be going down that side,” he warned me, “they’re a lot more aggressive down there, even though their side supports Britain, you know.” Even still, he added, tonight was something new. “It’s about both sides, you know, the Green and the Orange coming together.” An older Catholic man from the New Lodge, watching the Protestant rioters with his Southern-accented female companion, agreed. “They [migrants] shouldn’t be allowed in this country,” he told me. “We’re keeping our distance there at the minute,” he added, nodding at the rioting Protestants, “but by right we should all be coming together here. They shouldn’t be in this country.” His grey-haired male friend, shaking his head angrily, walked away saying “I don’t agree with you there, mate.” I asked the first man what he thought of his Sinn Féin elected representatives. “Arseholes,” he replied.

Walking down, past burning barricades on the Clifton Circus roundabout overseen by a thin garrison of teenage sentries, I went to a different burning barricade on the staunchly Loyalist Shankill Road, where I met Amanda, a 60-year old woman shouting “Leftie scum!” at an ITV news crew. Though telling me that I “looked like a Leftie”, she agreed to talk to me. “We’re feeling very, very angry, we’re just tired,” she told me. “It just goes from one thing to the next thing, and they’re just all horrible situations. We’ve just come out of the horrible situation of Henry Nowak, and now, this week, we’ll have the young man almost decapitated up on the Antrim Road.” Smoke rose from a new development of executive apartments under construction over the road, which were locally controversial. Indians were buying up all the new flats on the Shankill, which locals can’t afford, she told me, and turning them into Airbnbs. “We don’t want them here,” she added, telling me of her appreciation for Rupert Lowe — an extremely rare cut-through of English politics in Northern Ireland’s insular political universe — and distrust of the insufficiently staunch Nigel Farage. As for the Catholics, she told me, “You know, we fought each other, ever since I was so high,” indicating a point a little off the sidewalk with her hand, “but we’ve had to come together because there’s a new threat from outside the country. When you start bringing in another threat from outside, well, the people are obviously going to have to unite, because we’re being invaded by illegal migrants and immigrants on this side of the community, and they’re being equally affected with the same situation. So, what else are we going to do?”

The idea of Catholics and Protestants uniting against mass immigration is, overwhelmingly, one pushed more by Loyalists than by Nationalists, with the former observing both the rabid hostility displayed by Loyalist activists to expressions of cultural identity like the Irish language, and the frequent violent intimidation of Catholics living in working-class Protestant areas as far more of an immediate and existential threat. Indeed, even Nationalists hostile to mass immigration view any coordination with Loyalists as a strategic catastrophe, gifting ammunition to their pro-immigration enemies within Irish Republicanism. But in the aftermath of the North Belfast atrocity, there has for the very first time begun, though certainly not an alliance, then the first glimmerings of a tentative and distrustful rapprochement. The nightmare scenario for Sinn Féin would have been Catholics rioting against immigrants. That did not happen: instead, working-class Catholics merely turned out to watch their Protestant neighbors riot with an anthropological detachment newly devoid of open contempt. I have never until now heard working-class Catholics, from devoutly Republican areas, talking about the coming together of the “Orange and the Green” with anything other than derision. At Ardoyne Roundabout, one of North Belfast’s most volatile sectarian interface areas, protestors from both communities shook hands and declared amity in scenes that were genuinely startling.

But this is, ultimately, Northern Ireland, where the age-old ethnic conflict is as perennial and inescapable as the soaking rain that drew the night’s events to a close. It is, probably, doubtful that anything will come of the cautious street flirtation, and as July’s marching and bonfire season draws close, we can no doubt expect a reversion to the old ways rather than the ungainly new dalliances of 2026. But, nonetheless, there was something novel and unexpected about the occasion: the working-class communities of both sides, accustomed to hating each other, and increasingly estranged from their political leaders in Stormont, for the first time eyeing each other up, from a distance, like awkward teenagers at a disco. Northern Ireland is an extremely dysfunctional country, though very charming and livable for it: it is entirely unique for both communities to find common cause in blaming Westminster for introducing an unexpected source of random, violent dysfunction to unsettle their old and comforting, formalized one.

I asked her what it was about the Fidesz system she disliked. “It’s about the corruption,” she said, “and selling our country and our nation to the Russians, and stealing our money, and EU taxpayers’ money, and this sort of feudalism that he built.” Beatrix, her niece, nodded along emotionally. “I want to get married and have children,” she said. “We all have good jobs but we don’t earn EU wages. My boyfriend lives in London, and if we lose now I’ll move there and leave Hungary forever. I see this as an election for the EU and against Russia — I’m a European and I don’t want to belong to the East.”

But as polls closed, and the crowds gathered in front of the giant screens showing the televised results coming in, the outcome still seemed to hang in the balance. Government-aligned commentators had made much of what they claimed were strong showings across the country; earlier in the day, turnout had looked strongest in rural areas long seen as Fidesz strongholds, with liberal Budapest only rousing itself to vote in significant numbers in the afternoon. It had been assumed that the initial results would show a strong showing for Fidesz and Orbán, with the true dynamics only revealing themselves late into the night — or even, in case of a close-fought battle, later in the week, once the results from the sizable Hungarian diaspora had been counted. But whatever inner trepidation the crowd felt was not to last long. As each new tranche of results came in, the crowd roared in joy at the victory suddenly unfolding before them, chanting “Dirty Fidesz” and “The Tisza is Flowing”, the motto of their party, named after Hungary’s second-largest river. Fidesz’s vote share in the provinces had collapsed, a source at the government’s rival election night party told me, and the mood there was grim. A Trumpian election night party, Patriots of Europe, was abruptly canceled.

Perhaps this wasn’t the shock it seemed. The evening before, I had attended Péter Magyar’s final campaign event in Debrecen, Hungary’s second city, close to the eastern borders with Romania and Ukraine. Long a Fidesz stronghold, Debrecen was now contested territory. Orbán had pulled large crowds into the city center a few days earlier, but the crowd for Magyar, gathered in the University Square, was larger still. The sight of tens of thousands of Tisza voters, young and old, bearing flaming torches in the lowering night sky and chanting for Magyar’s victory was impressive enough from the middle of the crowd. Seen on television, the sea of fire filmed from above by a drone, it was overwhelming. The speech from Magyar, a fluent and charismatic speaker, was good enough, but the sheer size of the crowd was the real message being sent to the wavering voters watching at home. Provincial Hungary was now in play, Gabor, a 22-year-old trainee teacher from a nearby village told me. “The majority are still Fidesz voters, unfortunately,” he said, “but we are trying to convince our parents and grandparents, and things are definitely changing.” Daniel, a 19-year-old student, agreed. “Hungary’s history has always been pretty bad, to be honest. And now we feel that things are finally beginning to change.”

Back in Batthyány Square, the whole crowd pulsed with a mass intake of breath and then let out a vast roar of victory as the ticker ran across the screen announcing that Orbán had congratulated Magyar on his win, long before anyone expected — such was the scale of Tisza’s victory. Magyar had won a countrywide landslide, and the generation-long political experiment of Orbánism was over, at least for now. Breathless and alarmist commentary, from Hungarian opposition activist-journalists and their aligned thinktankers and commentators in the West, had warned that Orbán would, in the face of defeat, try to hold onto power through some malign dodge or other, whether dragging the election through the courts or staging some kind of provocation to annul the results. But in truth, this was never Orbán’s style: illiberal he may have been, but he was never a dictator, however his opponents framed him. In the end, the genuine popularity that kept him in power for a generation meant too much to him, and when he lost, in a free and fair election, he relinquished power gracefully. 

Even so, it was a historic moment for those gathered in the square, debating what should be done with the man who had shaped Hungary in his image for so long: I hope he goes to Russia, one said; no, I hope he goes to prison, her friend said; no, said an older woman, shaking her head slowly as if asserting the wisdom of age, I hope he stays in Parliament, and is made to answer for everything he did. “We feel the breath of ‘89,” Hanna, an 18-year-old goth, told me. “All our lives, we lived through the Fidesz system, it’s kind of a new breath to see this change. Fidesz never cared about us, until we make children.” Her companion, Milos, agreed. “Thank God, Thank God,” he said, casting his eyes upward. “I really hope we get closer to the European Union, and we can distance ourselves from Russia.” 

This election, cast externally as a battle between liberal Europeanism and something approaching Asiatic despotism, was perhaps swung by hard-nosed domestic rather than broader philosophical concerns, centering on the struggling economy, on corruption that was “simply indefensible”, as one Fidesz insider had previously put it to me, and on the parlous state of public healthcare and social infrastructure. Yet it must be said that the liberal, middle-class inhabitants of urbane Budapest, gathered in the square, some of them waving EU flags as well as the far more numerous Hungarian ones, certainly fit the image of Tisza positively projected by its supporters outside Hungary, and negatively by Fidesz loyalists domestically and abroad. Budapest, which still looks and feels like the polyglot imperial capital it once was, is a liberal city in a conservative country: but the final electoral map made the country as a whole look far more like Budapest than anyone had expected.

Yet Tisza’s leader, a Right-wing nationalist with a far more restrictive stance on legal immigration than Orbán, is hardly the radical liberal Fidesz and its army of MAGA influencers made him out to be. The crowd’s most animated and vehement chant was “Russians Go Home”, a relic of the 1956 revolution latterly applied to Fidesz, but Magyar has already signaled he won’t be unplugging the country from Russia’s cheap and plentiful energy bounty any time soon. Hungary has moved from one version of personalist conservative rule to another, this time round led by a former Fidesz insider with a European focus, ready to unlock Brussels’ long-withheld and sorely missed financial bounty. Magyar’s victory seems less a defeat for the European Right than a generational evolution of it, which — at least in Hungary’s unique circumstances — has brought liberals and Leftists, both political nullities in this country, under its conquering wing. Perhaps that’s why Phil, a 26-year-old voter for the far-Right Mi Hazank party, was calmly philosophical about the new regime, as he watched the crowds of ecstatic zoomers beeping horns and waving flags as if Hungary had just won the World Cup, pulsing Eurodance blaring from car windows. “Orbán was just too close to America, and Hungary is a European country,” he shrugged. “At least Tisza is Right Wing.”

Hanson, a former fish-and-chip shop owner from Queensland, debuted on Australia’s political scene as a dis-endorsed Liberal candidate 30 years ago, around the same time Nigel Farage burst into public view in Britain. In her maiden speech, she warned that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians”. Since then, she’s come and gone as an animating force on the far Right — and the bête noire of the cultural elite — switching targets over the years from Asians to Muslims. Indeed, just last month, she told Sky News that there are no “good” Muslims.

Such views have long kept Hanson on the fringe of Australian politics. At May’s federal election, One Nation won 6% support, concentrated in regional Australia. But within months, its status as a fringe party began to change. By September its standing in the polls hit double digits. In the aftermath of the Islamic State-inspired Bondi Beach Hanukkah massacre in December, which left 15 dead, including a 10-year-old girl, One Nation’s rise is so steep that even cautious pundits are breathless. “I am shocked [by] every poll I see — and I do this for a living,” Australian National University’s political scientist Jill Sheppard told the ABC. “This is not a blip,” added the Sydney Morning Herald’s James Massola, “One Nation’s rise is real.” “Drastic” is how pollster Kos Samaras puts it. One Nation’s surge, he suggests, is “a contagion.” The weekend’s election will be the first to test if the “contagion,” which is as high as 30% in some national polls, translates into actual votes.

The next, and perhaps more telling, litmus test is a federal by-election on 9 May in Farrer, a seat in regional New South Wales vacated by Sussan Ley, deposed last month as leader of the center-right Liberal Party and head of the conservative Liberal-National Coalition. (This fact alone tells you something about the disarray on Australia’s mainstream Right.) Further along, Victorians will go to the ballot box in November. Victoria is home to Australia’s most ardent progressives. Its state capital, Melbourne, is the only one in the country regularly cited by an indigenous name, Naarm; its five-year-olds are encouraged to express a “gender identity” in school. Even here, or maybe especially here, One Nation is going gangbusters.

As with Reform’s trajectory in the UK, One Nation’s surge was initially a response to the implosion of the center right, to which it now poses an existential threat. (Some polls have the Liberal-National Coalition as low as the teens.) But latterly, Hanson has started eating into Labor’s support too. The pollster Samaras, well-versed in the French economist Thomas Piketty’s theory of the “great realignment”, is not surprised. Labor, Samaras has warned, has shed its identity as a party of the working class in favor of the identity-obsessed “Brahmin Left”, with an electoral reckoning only a matter of time. Still, the most jaw-dropping measure of the national mood is the sheer number of Australians who admit to being, shall we say, One Nation-curious. According to a Guardian poll last month, nearly 60% of the country said they’d be open to voting for the party at the next federal election, including nearly half of current Labor voters.

Of course, many of these One Nation-curious voters probably won’t end up taking the plunge; and in any case, raw support for One Nation won’t necessarily deliver them a slew of seats. In South Australia, the minor party surge will likely erode the Liberals’ primary vote to Labor’s advantage. The already enfeebled opposition is confronting the prospect of holding fewer than five of the 47 lower house seats; electoral oblivion beckons.

Still, to concentrate on this risks missing the main point, which is that such things aren’t meant to happen here. Australia’s political sensibility has long been grounded in the center, largely because of structural factors such as preferential and compulsory voting. But national ethos, character — these are also real. We’re accustomed to seeing our distance from Europe and the US as philosophical as well as geographical: radicalism isn’t for us. We like to think we still believe in the “fair go”. We like taking the piss.

A recent Resolve poll offers glimpses of what’s fueling the anti-establishment mood. One person told pollsters, “the major parties are just arguing in parliament about ISIS brides while the world’s burning!” Another was “leaning towards One Nation because at least Pauline loves her country”. The public mood, then, is dark. People are angry at the political class for not focusing enough on a cost of living crisis that was already acute before the fuel shock from the Iran war. And they are angry at the taboo that surrounds immigration, in particular the importing of Islamic extremism.

So Australians are breaking their own taboo against flirting with the feral. Or, more accurately, the definition of feral has undergone a sharp revision since the late Nineties. Let’s return for a moment to Australians’ fondness for taking the piss. Aside from her poll numbers, we also could track the mainstreaming of Pauline Hanson to a seismic shift in the political economy of satire; as in, who takes the piss out of whom. Six weeks after her “swamped by Asians” speech, a TV journalist asked Hanson, “Are you xenophobic?” To which she responded: “Please explain.” The soundbite became late-Nineties shorthand for small-minded racism. “Pauline Pantsdown,” a drag queen, savagely parodied her. Outside the (redneck) Sunshine State of Queensland, people rejected Hanson’s nostalgia for the era of restrictive immigration known as the White Australia Policy, officially only scrapped in the Seventies but already sounding like an echo from ancient history.

Hanson’s first act flamed out by 1998, when she lost her seat. Scandal and infighting plagued her party. She spent 11 weeks in jail for electoral fraud before her conviction was overturned. Then, in 2016, she returned to the Australian Senate just in time for Donald Trump’s first term, now insisting Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Muslims”. While Islam is Australia’s second-largest religion and one of the fastest growing, thanks largely to a steady intake of refugees, the percentage of Muslims in Australia is roughly half that of Britain. All the same, as net migration peaked at 556,000 in 2023 and Australia’s much-vaunted prosperity came under increasing strain, the fragile consensus began to fracture.

The Coalition’s Peter Dutton, who had himself warned in 2018 that people in Melbourne were too scared to go out to restaurants because of  “African gangs,” went to last year’s election vowing to boost housing affordability by cutting permanent migration and tightening caps on international students. The polls were hot for him until they weren’t. Like Canada’s failed populist conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, he was viewed as Trump-adjacent and his rivals weren’t. Steady-as-she-goes is the Australian default. So, Anthony Albanese’s Labor wiped the floor with the Coalition, winning 94 of 150 constituencies. Dutton lost his seat. Still, Labor had secured only a third of the vote — preferences from the Greens, independents and minor parties did the rest. Sound familiar?

Reeling, the Coalition installed the moderate Sussan Ley as its doomed leader. She made ambiguous vanilla pronouncements on everything contentious, including immigration. Within two months of the election, One Nation started its rise.

The Liberals’ traditional base of affluent voters had already embraced the socially-conscious “Teal” independents. Now the Coalition was bleeding support from its Right flank. Defections ensued. Barnaby Joyce, the florid former leader of the National Party of Australia and deputy prime minister, jumped ship to join One Nation, citing disagreement with the party’s stance on renewable energy and immigration. In November, meanwhile, Hanson had turned up to the Senate dressed in a burqa (she did the same thing in 2017). Critics decried it as a divisive stunt. Then came the Bondi attack and suddenly her alarmism about Islamist terrorists didn’t seem all that foolish. Unlike Australia’s Prime Minister. In the days after the attack, Albanese only spoke about the failures in gun control and the extremist threat from neo-Nazis. As former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg said in a lacerating speech from the massacre site, “if you’re unable to say those words — radical Islamist ideology,” then you can’t begin to address it. Albanese was forced into announcing a public inquiry into the Bondi massacre and antisemitism more broadly.

But while “Albo” often struggles to read the public mood, he’s gifted at what he calls “fighting Tories”. And certainly at “wedging” them. His legislative response to Bondi — gun control measures together with tougher hate speech penalties — rankled dissidents in the rural-based Nationals and spelled the beginning of the end for Ley. Last week, the Nationals’ leader David Littleproud humbly resigned. “I’m buggered,” he explained.

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Amid all the drama, there came a point when our household started following One Nation’s animated satirical web series titled — you guessed it — Please Explain. It’s funny. It takes the piss out of everyone in Canberra. Somehow, Hanson had amassed enough cultural capital to become the one cracking the jokes at the elites’ expense. Her recently released A Super Progressive Movie, features “King Albo”, his transgender “daughter”, and the relentlessly persecuted hero, Pete, a “cisgender straight white male”. It had achieved its aims even before its release, when iTunes pulled Holly Valance’s theme song and a Melbourne cinema canceled its screening on staff “safety” grounds — before un-canceling it. As for its content, the movie is most interesting for its critique of the Left’s obsession with race. A running gag has the “Naarm” brigade trying to fit in with what they assume are the cultural norms of the redneck outback..

When a party knows how to make people laugh, it knows how to tap the zeitgeist. To downplay the relevance of this is to live in a fantasy universe, and a dangerous one at that. But Hanson’s rise is — forgive the cliché — no laughing matter. She is simultaneously a beneficiary and a driver of political fragmentation and polarization; a warning sign of the ailing health of Australian democracy.

During Hanson’s first act, the Coalition joined Labor to starve One Nation of preferences in an attempt to beat back the overt racialism she had introduced to the political discourse. We don’t know what they’ll do now. In any event, the Nationals’ new leader, Matt Canavan, seems more willing to take Hanson on. He has attacked her no “good” Muslim remark as divisive. Angus Taylor, the new Liberal leader, was more limp. Caught between a rock and a cliff face, he took power backing a reduction in “bad immigration”. “The starting point for me is values,” Taylor recently told a conservative think tank. “Are these people going to come to this country and bring the hatred and violence of another part of the world onto our shores?”

This is all very well — but it’s Albanese who really needs to adopt such a line. More than that, he needs to signal that he won’t be cowed by sections of Labor’s constituency and a broader Left inclined to go soft on political Islam. On this score, he might follow the lead of Labor premiers. Chris Minns from New South Wales, has warned the pro-Hamas brigade “Australia is just not the country for you”; South Australia’s Malinauskas has meanwhile expressed disgust at the platforming of an arguably pro-Hamas writer at the taxpayer-funded Adelaide Writers’ Week (she was later disinvited and the event was canceled).

It falls on Albanese — who else? — to restore trust in the institution of government at a volatile, combustible moment. Because as Hanson’s opponents scramble to calibrate their message, the One Party leader remains as abrasively authentic as ever. A management coach, writing in the Australian Financial Review, remarked on her faltering style of speech and why it works for her. “The tight throat, the shallow breathing, the quaver that appears under pressure,” suggested Louise Mahler, “is congruent with her message…She sounds exactly like someone defending territory.”

It’s time the leaders from Australia’s political center began defending theirs.

By now, some of the Right-wing radicals in Trump’s MAGA coalition must be likewise wondering what it was all for. Trump was going to end foreign military adventures, and clamp down on low-wage and illegal immigration. But now America appears to be two weeks into a war of choice in the Middle East, and has just announced plans to ease restrictions on the H2A visa, which allows American farms to hire foreign seasonal workers. 

How did we end up here again? The whole point of Trump, to his base, was supposed to be ending forever wars and clamping down on immigration. And in fairness, Trump really has reduced American expenditure in Ukraine, and has been more effective than his predecessor on some aspects of migration. Notably, Trump has reduced crossings at America’s southern border by an order of magnitude. 

But his administration’s attempts to find, detain, and deport those already in the US have been more of a mixed bag. The White House boasts of over 600,000 deported and a further 1.9 million “self-deporting”, claiming negative net migration to the USA in 2025 for the first time in 50 years. But other policies have been less effective — or had more impact in the media than on actual numbers. Notably, high-profile standoffs between ICE officials, migrants, and protesters across progressive strongholds such as Minneapolis and Los Angeles have been received with distaste everywhere except inside the Right-wing filter bubble, especially after the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. 

This combative approach arguably did more to catalyze domestic opposition to immigration enforcement than to deport migrants. Critics have pointed out that Barack Obama managed to do more actual deporting over his presidency than Trump has to date, without all the “security theater” and controversy. 

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But if the argument has focused on ICE, Trump’s real sticky wicket is low-wage labor. I’m just about old enough to remember when the Left considered immigration a workers’ rights issue, and Left-wing old-timers such as Bernie Sanders can still sometimes be found pointing out that the biggest beneficiaries of mass migration are the corporations that use foreign labor to depress domestic wages. In this context, as Matt Stoller noted recently, a leader whose goal really was mass deportations might begin not with high-profile street raids, but by quietly targeting the corporations that employ illegal workers. And yet, under Trump there has been much hue and cry about criminals, and considerably less about raiding construction firms, warehouses, or farms. 

Against this mixed report card, recent changes to seasonal worker visa rules have been received with outrage by Trump’s migration-restrictionist base. And no wonder: last year, Trump officials promised a “100% American” workforce enjoying “higher wages and better benefits”, and a deportation programme with “no amnesty” for farmworkers. So why is he reneging on this now? 

It’s perhaps fairer to see this policy as evidence not of betrayal but of a wicked problem — one that is, in truth, faced by most Western economies. The technical term for the dilemma is “Baumol’s cost disease”, which describes the way productivity doesn’t increase at the same pace, in every sector. This causes problems over time, as even low-productivity sectors still have to raise wages, unless they want all their workers to leave. This means that wages in sectors where work can’t easily be automated either become increasingly unaffordable, or else the sector itself becomes bizarrely costly. 

Classic examples are healthcare, childcare, and education. The high-touch human component in such work can’t easily be automated, and because of this has become increasingly cost-pressured and expensive over time. But the same dynamic also applies to some aspects of food production, especially where a task is routine but also requires delicacy and human judgment. Across agriculture in general, innovation has rendered many kinds of work much more efficient; but while you can do this with plowing or crop irrigation, it’s much more difficult to do the same thing to (say) harvesting strawberries. 

Here, Baumol’s cost disease is rampant. So what is a farmer to do when national average wages have risen to the point where it costs more to pay strawberry-pickers than you can earn selling the strawberries? The answer, latterly, has increasingly been migrant workers from countries with lower wage expectations. Fruit-picking robots do exist, but not every farmer has a spare £150,000. And in any case that pays a lot of wages — especially where these are low-wage foreign seasonal workers, or illegal migrants willing to work cash in hand for a pittance. 

Already last year, as Trump’s border reforms began to bite, American Big Ag was warning last year that Americans would not be willing to do this work. This is sometimes treated as excuse-making, or expressing contempt for native populations. But a more neutral explanation is that farmers can only afford to pay wages at a level well below what would be necessary for subsistence in modern America. And as they’re not offering this, Americans don’t want the work. This is Baumol’s cost disease in a nutshell. 

The only way to change this would be to increase farmworkers’ wages sharply, which would in turn either mean farms went bankrupt or the price of food would have to go up. Perhaps unwisely, last year the New York Times tackled this dilemma by warning that Trump’s border policies would end up by forcing up the price of avocados, prompting much derision about coastal libs and their luxury problems. But the core of the argument stands even for those who don’t care for guacamole; after all, pushing up the cost of farm labor and thus of farm produce, doesn’t just affect avocados. It affects the whole grocery basket, for everyone. And while it’s possible to get by without eating avocados, it’s not possible to get by without eating. And along with ending forever wars and lowering immigration, the third leg in Trump’s electoral stool was tackling the cost of living. This is not compatible with doubling the cost of a weekly grocery shop by tossing a bomb into the economics of farming. 

This is all now further complicated by Trump’s war in Iran. Trump insists — or at least, insisted in February — that inflation is falling. His media opponents disagreed even then; since the war in Iran began, oil prices have fluctuated so dizzyingly that many economists have given up trying to make predictions beyond a weary expectation that the overall effect is likely to be inflation. 

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As a major energy producer, the United States is somewhat insulated from these effects, at least by comparison with Europe. But gasoline and diesel prices have risen in the USA as well, with knock-on effects throughout the economy. We can assume that this will in turn push the cost of living in the wrong direction for ordinary Americans. And we can perhaps understand that Trump might be reluctant to pile further misery on his electorate by clamping down on the only relief available to the cost-diseased fruit picking sector — foreign seasonal workers — and thus spiking the cost of living still further. 

Animal Farm is usually read as a warning about the theory and practice of communist revolution. But perhaps Trump’s looming failure on all three legs of the MAGA electoral stool — wars, migration, and prices — points to a still bleaker reading about the futility of revolutions full stop. After all, even though prices and low-wage immigration seem linked by the wicked dilemma of Baumol’s cost disease, bombing Iran would seem, at least to an outsider, to be optional.

Indeed Trump campaigned on not taking this option. And yet here he is, again. Meanwhile the sheer variety of half-baked Trumpian rationales offered so far for the attack suggests he’s just decided to do it, and is throwing explanations at the electorate in the hope that one will stick. 

It is tempting to conclude either that he’s bonkers, or that a reason for the attack exists which is not available to the general public, and that perhaps wouldn’t be accepted if it was made known — but which, once you’re in the driving seat, is inescapable. This is the only possible explanation for the way presidency after presidency ends up in the same place, and the same conflicts, even after insisting they won’t. 

Would it be fair to say, in the pigs’ defense, that the structural pressures of their role in the overall farm nudged them, by degrees, into patterns of behavior that increasingly resembled the humans they deposed? Is that an excuse, or just an explanation? Either way, it bodes ill for any putative future revolutionaries hoping to seize the machinery of some state or other, and point it in new directions — including every populist government-in-waiting currently aspiring to emulate Trump by reforming, restoring, advancing, or otherwise making their own country great again.

For if such dilemmas exist, then even the most well-intentioned pig will, once he takes the role of the farmer, eventually become him. In this sense, the New Right’s revolutionaries have discovered, unhappily, that you can’t both promise lower food prices and also lower migration without eventually disappointing someone. Similarly, it seems at least possible that comparable wicked problems exist in foreign policy, such that bombing Iran seems as necessary and prudent from inside the White House as it seems from without a reckless betrayal of the base. 

But in a sense, too, we should hope that this bleak reading of Animal Farm is true. For the only other possible explanation is bleaker still: that Trump simply doesn’t care about his base, and perhaps never really did. 

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.

Such arrangements are the subject of A Better Life, a new novel that sends up migrant-hosting in New York City. The book’s author, Lionel Shriver, is a writer of literary thrillers, and has never been one to shy away from the big political issues. She was an early and brave voice of dissent against political correctness and “own voices” in fiction. And she was canceled in 2016 for wearing a sombrero during a speech defending the fiction writer’s right to “be an appropriator par excellence” because stealing, prying and presuming are essential tools of the trade. A Better Life takes a harsh view of precisely the type of Brooklyn woman Holley represents.

The novel’s main character, Gloria Bonaventura, is a divorced bourgeoise liberal in the arts. In response to New York’s Biden-era migrant crisis, Gloria takes in Martine, a migrant from Honduras. In Shriver’s eyes, Gloria is silly and a little desperate: she has a business hand-knitting stuffed animals and cashmere “packers” for transgender men, and spouts obtuse clichés: the migrants, she says, “just want to participate in our democracy, work hard, and raise a new generation of Americans”. The novel is written from the perspective of Gloria’s adult son Nico, a self-described incel who is still living at home, unemployed, four years after his college graduation, and who resents the intrusion of Martine into his home. Gloria soon describes Martine as a member of the family, but Nico fears his mother is being taken in.

Shriver is a smart and compelling writer, a cut above most novelists working today. By mining the headlines on the migration crisis, she produces an excellent thriller. Martine, it turns out, has criminal gang-member relatives who prey on the book’s liberal do-gooding characters with ease. The set-ups are funny — Gloria stocks Martine’s kitchenette in the basement with a bougie spread of “salted almonds, rosemary potato chips, whole-grain crackers and corn nuts,” for example, and puts the fluffy towels for company and “Cornish hedgerow” bath gel in her guest’s shower. And the plot twists are satisfying, but the novel also asks potent questions on migration. What is lost when we invite “too many” others into our country? Who really belongs here? And if we’re being taken advantage of, who is at fault?

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Through Nico, the incel son, Shriver explores such questions. He’s not, as the cliché might have it, a hateful racist, but rather a young man who, after a youth of promise and privilege, has become strangely stalled in life. He is living in his mother’s home while drawing money from a small inheritance, and has the explicit goal of doing nothing. He watches YouTube, orders DoorDash and has a standing date with internet porn every night at midnight. He believes that he’s happy: in his view, his peers are empty strivers; his mother and sisters are moral neurotics; and by contrast his activities are a rational response to his comfortable economic situation.

The migration wave, however, creates the competitive conditions that finally encourage Nico to pursue a more fulfilling life. Martine’s arrival pushes him out of his basement room and back to his childhood bedroom, forcing him to confront his failure to launch. Then, her surly and possibly dangerous brother Domingo moves in, intimidating Nico out of his own living room, and causing him to contemplate his manhood or lack thereof. After an escalation of violence and intrigue, it’s a toss-up as to who “deserves” Nico’s mother’s Brooklyn mansion: its original occupants, or Martine and her crew.

Shriver allows herself an extremely non-PC ending (the immigrants are everything we feared, basically), but the book’s larger take is ambivalent. Nico’s father, Carlin, a Right-wing journalist, laments that whites of European origin are being replaced (not a conspiracy theory, just a fact, he says) by people they have nothing in common with. Carlin’s friend Vernon, a documentary filmmaker, expands on the point, arguing that “the country’s been so successful not because it’s so ‘diverse’ but because it is, or used to be, relatively homogeneous.” However, if Nico is a symbol of the whites of European origin in the 2020s, this vaunted European “culture” has devolved into entitlement, DoorDash and masturbation — so the argument feels perhaps deliberately weak. As one of Martine’s friends puts it: “Migrants do all the work? Then USA belong to migrants. Maybe you Americans are the freeloaders.”

The novel appears at a time when illegal migrants have once again become a flashpoint in America. But while it succeeds at giving voice to ideas that are usually forbidden in the Left-leaning world of literary fiction, its various forms of satire, especially the characterization of Gloria, are limiting. It’s enjoyable to poke fun at an imaginary insufferable liberal woman, but it’s simply not true that one side of the debate is wholly ridiculous: nothing is ever entirely black and white. And the ways in which the women who host illegal migrants aren’t ridiculous are worth exploring.

In addition to Holley, I spoke with two other Brooklyn women who have also hosted migrants at some point since 2023: Louise Bauso, a high-school teacher, and Sarah*, a social worker. Bauso is the founder of Red Hook Mutual Aid, a “hyper-local” neighborhood organization. At the height of the migration crisis in 2023 and 2024, she tells me, men, mainly from West Africa, who were being housed in the Brooklyn Navy Yard not far from her Red Hook neighborhood, would be lined up 25 deep outside her organization’s free store.

Bauso ended up taking in two asylum seekers from Guinea, boys aged 18 and 16, in the winter of 2023-2024. As she describes it, they’d somehow started “diligently” messaging the mutual aid line every day, asking for assistance with transfer to a youth shelter. They were soon due to lose their spot in an adult city shelter, because the city at the time had a 30-day rule. When you had stayed for your allotted 30 days, you had to leave and be re-admitted, a process that could take weeks. On the day the Guinean teenagers lost their housing, they called Bauso. She met them for the first time at a coffee shop. They’d been turned away by all the city agencies, Bauso says, and “they said, ‘We don’t have anywhere to go, we don’t know what to do. It’s cold’”.

She took them into her 850-square-foot railroad apartment with few interior doors, where they slept on her sofa on and off for three months. “It was an extreme thing to do,” she says, “and not everyone understood it.” When pressed to explain her choice, she says, “They were literal children, and so young-looking. They had to stay with me. I had nowhere to send them.”

Bauso says the experience was “definitely complicated”. She was never afraid for her safety: “These are young Muslim men. They pray every day. They are really trying to be good, good people.” But she had to teach them to cook and clean, and the need in the city was so great that eventually she found herself putting up as many as five migrants at a time.

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The women I talked to had different takeaways from their experience hosting. For Holley, those 18 months were enriching. Reflecting on her relationship with Babacar, Holley says: “I love him; he’s like a son to me.” “I only had one child,” she says, “and it turns out I had room for more.” Holley and her husband have become friendly with Babacar’s large extended family over Zoom, and hope someday to go to Dakar to meet them. She wishes more people were aware of the ongoing opportunities to help. In particular, there is a short supply of Americans willing to be legal guardians to minors.

For Sarah, the experience was a little more difficult. She hosted a Guinean man in his early twenties for eight months after he lost his place in a shelter. She enjoyed hosting, she tells me, and her guest was no trouble, but her teenage daughter wanted her privacy back. Eventually, due to lack of patience from family members, Sarah had to tell the young man it was time to find another place. She still has regrets about asking him to leave. “I’m sure he was confused by it,” she says. He now has documentation allowing him to work, and has two jobs and an apartment with a roommate. He and Sarah still keep in touch. His tax documents came to Sarah’s house, and they recently attended a chili cook-off together.

What strikes me about all these stories is the reordering power of direct personal charity. All of these women, when presented with a crisis, made a choice to do something. They may all share a commitment to social justice, but the larger issues of the kind we debate online, and that Shriver brings to life in her novel, felt much less present in their retellings than the moment of human need, and the innate human desire to respond. All three spoke of the unfolding situation of a particular person, rather than an ideology. Holley’s reasoning — “We had a spare room and he needed a room. It was really just luck” — was typical.

To encounter a human being in a situation of crisis, and to stop to help them, is a rare moment of stepping outside our usual self-centeredness, and it tends to be oddly humbling. And every woman I spoke with seemed humble — not flighty, not silly, not entitled, not like Gloria. They didn’t say so, but they did something that, in the Catholic tradition at least, is a virtue — and is even more virtuous when it isn’t named. An understanding of this virtue is missing in A Better Life. “Charity” of a direct personal kind doesn’t offer a simple answer to the contentious question of what to do about immigration policy — or at least it won’t to everyone — but in practice it equalizes us, and creates common ground. To dwell on it in a real way, acknowledging its concreteness and its challenges, but also its value, would make a better life for migrants and citizens alike.

*Some names have been changed at the subject’s request. 

A haphazard Kamala Harris campaign plucked Walz straight from cable news, where he was effectively defining the Trump-Vance ticket as “weird” throughout the mid-summer of 2024. Clips of Walz — a Midwestern Dad seemingly straight from central casting — were going viral on social media during the heyday of Couchgate: baseless allegations that JD Vance had once engaged in sexual activity with a couch. Indeed, just one day after Harris named him to the ticket, Walz referenced the meme about Vance’s supposed lust for living-room furniture. 

“I can’t wait to debate the guy — that is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up,” Walz smirked. “See what I did there?” (Vance was widely regarded as the winner of their debate.)

It was an early sign that the second-term governor might not have been as wholesome as depicted. As the country acquainted itself with Walz, the signs became impossible to miss. In retrospect, it’s remarkable the Harris campaign ever took a gamble on a man with Walz’s record — though unsurprising in the context of the Democrats’ Biden-era hubris. 

On paper, Walz had characteristics that made the consultant class swoon. He was a teacher, a veteran, a football coach, a gun owner, a father of two from the Upper Midwest. Like the uncle you catch up with every Thanksgiving, Walz was affable and balding and fluent in sports. 

Vibes aside, Walz had also pursued a progressive agenda in a rural state. This made him an enormously attractive pick for Harris, who was herself a perfect embodiment of the party’s rudderless direction in 2024. Democrats needed to maintain the Biden coalition by appealing to suburban voters and winning back some of the white working class that Hillary Clinton lost, while also keeping young voters and activists energized.

Walz was slightly less popular than Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Harris’s other option for the ticket, but a 54% majority of registered voters in Minnesota approved of his job as governor. As Walz ascended to the top of the ticket, multiple outlets profiled his shift Left-ward since serving in Congress. “How Tim Walz Went From ‘Blue Dog Democrat’ to Progressive Champion,” ran a headline from National Public Radio.

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CNN enumerated the items in Walz’s progressive agenda: “codified protections for abortion access; restored voting rights for felons who’ve completed their sentences; driver’s licenses for people regardless of their legal status; a state child-tax credit; free public college for families making less than $80,000 annually; protections for gender-affirming care; and a paid family and medical leave program.” Most Democrats couldn’t pull that off with a 54% approval rating, so national Democrats saw in Walz a relatable “prairie populist” who could sell the Harris campaign’s cultural progressivism to middle America. 

Enter “Tampon Tim.” Trump World immediately neutralized Walz’s efficacy as a critic of “weirdness” by calling attention to a bill Walz signed that required public schools to provide tampons and pads “to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students.” In other words, Walz put tampons in boys’ bathrooms; Trump knew just how to brand him. 

A closer examination revealed other obvious red flags. Despite being heralded as a white-working-class whisperer, the governor did poorly outside Minnesota’s deep-blue urban centers in both his 2018 and 2022 races, losing most rural counties handily. Pundits and consultants may not fully realize how wealthy and how progressive the Minneapolis suburbs have become. A re-election landslide in Hennepin County won’t translate to support from swing voters in the Rust Belt. 

Walz’s record included a burgeoning fraud scandal of massive proportions among the state’s Somali community; 70 people had already been indicted in the Somali fraud ring by the time Harris tapped him. The record also included Walz’s memorably horrific response to the George Floyd riots of 2020 that permitted the state to burn rather than allowing police to intervene; inconsistencies in his military record; and a deeply strange affinity for China (he made a whopping 30 trips to China over the course of three decades, including on his own honeymoon). 

If anything, Harris may have caused a net drag on her campaign by adding Walz — and that wasn’t an easy thing to pull off, since few people’s votes are influenced by veep picks. As Republicans battered Harris with “Kamala is for they/them” ads, it didn’t help Democrats that “Tampon Tim” attacks only reinforced some voters’ impression of the ticket as being out of touch.

When Trump mounted the comeback of a lifetime and easily defeated Harris, Walz went back to Minneapolis with a bruised ego but also with national name recognition and clout in elite spaces. He slimmed down and dressed up. Yet by November, just one year after Walz was at the top of national politics, everything started to crumble. 

Conservative media had for years sought to draw national attention to swelling fraud allegations among Minnesota’s sizable Somali community. During the pandemic years, Somali scofflaws in Minnesota escaped scrutiny by weaponizing identity politics, fraudulently accepting millions of dollars in taxpayer funds that were supposed to be distributed to children and other vulnerable Minnesotans. As governor, Walz presided over the bureaucracy that allowed this to happen despite clear warning signs. 

Federal investigators, for example, uncovered massive fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services, as well as federal child-welfare and autism programs. Indicted and convicted conspirators, for example, would recruit Somali children into autism therapy services — even if a child didn’t have a diagnosis — facilitating fraudulent claims. Parents reportedly received monthly kickbacks ranging from $300 to $1,500 per child, with some allegedly threatening to go to other fraud networks unless their rates were increased.

After City Journal and County Highway published exposes around Thanksgiving, The New York Times published a lengthy investigation of its own into the scandal. The headline was devastating: “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch.” 

From there, the story took on a life of its own, both in mainstream media and Right-wing social media. Walz responded by taking responsibility and claiming to have cracked down on fraud while also putting up identitarian deflections: he talked about “white men” and said the Somali community was not to blame, even as some Somalis disagreed. 

The war of words between Trump and Walz heated up. As the scandal broke into mainstream spaces, Republicans saw an opportunity for high-profile immigration enforcement in a sanctuary city with clear-cut immigration problems. Trump launched “Operation Metro Surge,” dispatching thousands of ICE agents to the Minneapolis area and pledging to arrest “over 10,000 criminal illegal aliens” in the area. 

The Associated Press notes that Trump “has repeatedly linked his administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota to fraud cases involving federal nutrition and pandemic-aid programs, many of which have involved defendants with roots in Somalia.”

The eyes of the country have been focused on Minnesota since the fraud story led to the ICE surge. While polling is hardly going in Trump’s favor, the picture emerging of Minnesota is one of a state in chaos — not unlike what unfolded in the summer of 2020 under Walz’s supervision. 

On Jan. 5, Walz shocked the political world by suddenly — and angrily — dropping his re-election bid, connecting his decision directly to the attacks he’d sustained, starting with the recent wave of fraud coverage. According to Axios, it was actually “fellow Democrats” who applied the “mounting pressure” that forced the governor’s hand. 

Just two days later, Renée Good died in her car, shot by an ICE officer on duty as part of Trump’s crackdown. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti died during an interaction with Customs and Border Patrol. Between the incidents, organized activists disrupted a Baptist worship service, drawing more criticism that Walz and his allies were inciting raucous disruptions that left ordinary Minnesotans vulnerable. 

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Walz, for his part, has practically begged anti-ICE rioters to remain peaceful — to no avail. While it’s clear the public is not cheering on Trump, anti-ICE disruptors are also causing property damage and creating a sense of general bedlam, producing viral moments on a near nightly basis in clashes with federal officers. 

After Pretti’s killing stirred up days of escalating confrontations, Trump and Walz tried to smooth tensions. Both sides claimed victory. Trump yanked Gregory Bovino, the face of the operation, out of Minneapolis. A MAGA pundit claimed that “Tim Walz and Jacob Frey bent the knee and local law enforcement is doing their job” as police made arrests shortly after Walz and Trump spoke. 

For Walz — whose fame rested on the idea that he could be the adult in the room, a normal Midwestern Democrat fed up with MAGA’s bullshit — the turn of events must sting painfully. 

Perhaps the most devastating rebuke of Walz’s career came on Monday from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After Pretti’s death, Walz lectured in a Sunday news conference: “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody is gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.”

The Holocaust Museum called this deeply offensive, releasing a statement the following day that read: “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as anti-Semitism surges.” 

Walz, the embodiment of “Minnesota nice,” the man so relatable he could supposedly sell a progressive culture war to the white working class, was finally revealed to be reckless, divisive, and incompetent. The party’s over. The Walz balloon is now a sad piece of plastic lying on the floor. 

Then it all curdled. The so-called Arab Spring empowered elected Islamists in some countries while plunging others into state failure and civil war. As if that weren’t dispiriting enough, Twitter, the same app that had rallied global solidarity for the movement, soon revealed something else: that the denim-clad, smartphone-wielding Arab dissidents were rarely liberal or democratic; indeed, when it came to hating the West, the “seculars” often outdid the Islamists.

No one embodied this dark turn better than Alaa Abd El-Fattah, the Egyptian blogger whose recent arrival in Britain so “delighted” Keir Starmer and his government. The 44-year-old El-Fattah — who’d spent the better part of a decade in and out of prison in his home country over his violations of restrictive protest laws — was a leading activist in the Arab Spring. He’s also an inveterate hater of Jews, America, and white people, and has publicly entertained violent fantasies about all three groups.

Starmer’s government made it a “top priority” to obtain El-Fattah’s transfer to Britain. The cause célèbre was also pushed by the likes of Judi Dench, Brian Cox, and Joseph Fiennes. El-Fattah had further support, it seems, from a small army of Whitehall bureaucrats, who in 2021 managed to secure a UK passport for him (on the dubious grounds that his grandmother had given birth in Britain decades earlier).

The resulting fiasco is an unanswerable indictment of the entire human-rights apparatus and worldview. Which is to say, it’s an indictment of the world that gave birth to Starmer’s career.
But El-Fattah’s history should not have come as a surprise. In the fall of 2014, when I was working as a London-based editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, the European Parliament’s United Left-Nordic Green Left bloc nominated El-Fattah for the Sakharov Prize, named after the Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. I knew of El-Fattah by reputation, having researched the Arab dissident for an anthology I edited on the Arab Spring. El-Fattah for the Sakharov Prize? That was moral madness.

As I wrote in a Journal editorial urging reconsideration of the award, “Mr. Abdel Fattah may have been brave in confronting authoritarianism in his own country. But his rhetoric on Israel and moderate Arabs is another story. ‘One should only debate human beings,’ he tweeted in 2009. ‘Zionists and other imperialists are not human beings.’ In late 2010 he tweeted: ‘Dear zionists please don’t ever talk to me, I’m a violent person who advocated the killing of all zionists including civilians’.”

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There was more, as the editorial noted: “‘My heroes have always killed colonialists’, Mr. Abdel Fattah tweeted in 2010, linking to a news article marking the death of Abu Daoud, the Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes. In 2012 he wrote: ‘Assassinating [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat isn’t something that should shame a man, but instead honor him.’”

The editorial, published in America’s largest newspaper by circulation, had the intended effect. El-Fattah’s name was withdrawn from the Sakharov list. “We get results,” one of my bosses noted in a triumphant internal email. I could scarcely imagine that, a little more than a decade later, the odious El-Fattah would be fêted by liberal elites once more, this time in Britain. And on an even grander scale that would include the right to call himself a “Briton”.

This, despite the man’s manifest hatred for his adopted land. He has repeatedly referred to the British as “dogs and monkeys”, for example, and urged Londoners to burn Downing Street. He has “joked” about taking over towns and “rap[ing] ur women” — just the sort of thing British social cohesion needs amid the backlash over migrant hotels and grooming gangs. And he’s called for killing all police, “hating white people”, and the “random shooting of white males”.

Much milder rhetoric than El-Fattah’s can get native-born Britons prosecuted and sometimes jailed by their government. That the same government would fight for El-Fattah, and even celebrate him, is intolerable. It renders the reality of two-tier treatment crystal clear.

It is now being briefed that the Prime Minister was unaware of El-Fattah’s tweets and regards them as “abhorrent”. Yet Starmer’s plea of ignorance does not exonerate him. After all, he pressed Tory governments on El-Fattah’s status while in opposition without apparently doing any digging into his background, not least the circumstances surrounding the withdrawal of the Sakharov nomination. But more than that, the El-Fattah affair is the logical terminus of the Prime Minister’s whole worldview: one in which empty proceduralism and rights talk substitute for moral and political judgment.

We live in a complex, multipolar world, much different from the bipolar Cold War order that gave rise to Helsinki Watch, Amnesty, and the whole model of human-rights politics that formed Starmer. In such a world, advocates either end up acting hypocritically (why champion Russian dissidents, but not those jailed by allied regimes like Saudi Arabia?). Or else they maintain consistency — free everyone, everywhere — and end up championing nasty figures like El-Fattah.

Amid the West’s internal agonies over immigration, assimilation, and social cohesion, moreover, bringing over the wrong sort of person can have explosive effects, as the Starmerites are no doubt learning to their chagrin. Their human-rights politics reflect the internal confidence and stability of the West in those late Cold War years. Things were so good “here” that we could afford to worry about poor souls trapped “over there”.

Movements like Brexit and Trumpism, however, showed that all was no longer happy and stable in the Western heartlands; that while elites had been busy pursuing the politics of human rights and liberal expansion abroad, millions had been left behind materially at home. What did a name like Jamal Khashoggi mean to a Rust Belt car worker pushed into wage, health, and retirement precarity by the “blessings” of free trade?

As the British public, if not the British government, could immediately identify, one of the aggravating features of the El-Fattah affair is the cheapness with which he acquired a British passport. Fawning Left-wing coverage is more likely to note that El-Fattah delivered human rights lectures in prison than that he obtained a passport only in December 2021, via his mother. Suddenly the “dogs and monkeys” were of use to him.

Most dangerously, the willy-nilly granting of a UK passport to a hater of the West debases the whole notion of British (and Western) belonging. It confirms the worst suspicions of those who insist that the legal processes of immigration and naturalization mean little to nothing when it comes to genuine loyalty to Britain and the West. If the Starmer government retains a scintilla of prudence, or even the most basic instinct for political self-preservation, it must revoke El-Fattah’s dubious passport and send him home. And if that results in further jail time for El-Fattah in Egypt’s brutish prison system, that should be his concern — not Starmer’s, and not the British people’s.

“Antisemitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred,” he says, “have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting.” If that were the end of it, Vance would be a typical politician of an earlier age, and we likely wouldn’t be sitting down for an interview in his library at the Naval Observatory in Washington.

Vance isn’t typical. About to take off for the Christmas vacation, America’s first millennial veep is dressed in a crisp button-down and fleece vest with dark denim. His getup strikes a sharp contrast with his old-timey surroundings, lined with leather-bound books by and about vice presidents. His own memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is among the newer additions; a medieval-style painted crucifix stands out from the shelves.

More to the point, Vance is acutely sensitive to subterranean political and cultural shifts which until recently only registered on the seismometer known as the internet, but which are starting to remake the world aboveground. Fuentes — who has called Second Lady Usha Vance a “jeet” and labeled the vice president a race-traitor for marrying her — is but one jagged spike on the seismic wave. And to Vance, not even an especially pronounced one.

Says Vance: “I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated, and frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.” That is, the Hitler-praising Groyper king functions as a useful foil for pro-Israel hard-liners in the Right’s raucous internal debate over America’s alliance with the Jewish state.

The debate descended into out and out civil war last week at a gathering of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, with Ben Shapiro denouncing the podcaster and Vance ally Tucker Carlson — and being denounced, in turn, by Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly, representing the insurgent Israel-critical camp. The vice president tells me he hasn’t yet watched the dueling speeches but thinks it’s healthy for the debate to continue. In his own address to TPUSA Sunday, Vance glossed over the controversy, rejecting “purity tests.”

Tucker Carlson, for example, gets a robust defense from Vance. “Tucker’s a friend of mine,” he tells me. “And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus.”

He goes on: “The idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it.”

What’s really afoot, he thinks, is “gatekeeping”, and people are “trying to settle their own ideological scores” — especially with respect to Washington’s policies in the Middle East.

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“I happen to believe that Israel is an important ally, and that there are certain things that we’re certainly going to work together on,” Vance says. “But we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel, and that’s OK. And we should be able to say, ‘We agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’ Having that conversation is, I think, much less comfortable for a lot of people, because they want to focus on Nick Fuentes.”  

Fuentes thus refracts — and, with his noxious rhetoric, distorts — a legitimate discontent. Says Vance: “99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy. I think we ought to have that conversation and not try to shut it down. Most Americans are not antisemitic, they’re never going to be antisemitic, and I think we should focus on the real debate.”

What about Fuentes’s promotion of an overt white racial politics, complete with liberal use of the N-word? Is Vance worried by that stuff? Yes — but he believes there have been far worse offenders who got away with racial politics in recent years, because their version of it was aligned with elite prerogatives and progressive moral hierarchies.

“Let’s say you believe, as I do, that racism is bad, that we should judge people according to their deeds and not their ethnicity,” he later adds. “Is Nick Fuentes really the problem in this country? He’s a podcaster. He has a dedicated group of young fans, and some of them have been shitty to my friends and family” — not least, Mrs Vance. “Does that annoy me? Of course. But let’s keep some perspective. For the past five to 10 years, I’ve watched one-half of our political leadership go all in on the idea that discriminating against whites in college admissions and jobs is not just OK, but affirmatively good.”

He goes on: “If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.”

Then, too, Right-wing racialism is, in large part, a reaction against bipartisan elites who for decades maintained a porous border, with the flow of newcomers surging to a flood under the Biden administration. “That necessarily leads to the destruction of social cohesion in the country that I love,” he says. “Ethnic rivalry and balkanization is the inevitable consequence of these things. You don’t have to think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t, but it’s a predictable consequence.”

But wouldn’t Vance’s own children — Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel — be treated with contempt in the Groypers’ ideal America? The difference, for Vance, is once more about possession of actual power to effectuate policy. “If you look at my kids — half white, half-South Asian — they were among the most discriminated against in the entire elite-college and jobs hierarchy under Joe Biden. And the Left explicitly promises to bring that hierarchy back if they ever again get power.”

Calling out some of his likely opponents in the 2028 contest, he adds, “It pisses me off that Fuentes calls my kids ‘jeet,’ and I appreciate that Ro Khanna would never do that. You know what pisses me off a million times more? That Ro Khanna, AOC, and Chris Murphy would deny them jobs and opportunities because they have the wrong skin color.” (Khanna, the Indian-American California lawmaker, has said he’d be “fine” with his kids being disadvantaged by race-based affirmative action.)

All of this raises a deeper question: who counts as a “true” American? For many on the hard Right, the fashionable answer is “Heritage Americans”. That category excludes anyone who arrived after the initial wave of Anglo settlement, sometimes defined as narrowly as the Mayflower and its descendants. This treats as lesser citizens not just recent arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but also Ellis Islanders like Italians and Jews, possibly even the Scotch-Irish.

What does Vance make of Heritage Americanism? He worries it poses more questions than it answers. “Is a Heritage American somebody who’s from the late 17th century [or] the late 18th century?,” the vice president asks. He tries to strike a balance between credal nationalism — Americans are people who believe in American ideals like liberty and equal justice — and thicker notions of belonging, emphasizing shared language, culture, and history. Both, he says, have something to them.

The Heritage Americanists, he argues, grant too little to the credal aspect. “We take ourselves to be on a very unique national project,” he says, “a project that is very unusual compared to what the European nations were doing at the time, to what other nations in the world were doing at the time. We believe in the fundamental dignity and equality of every human being.”

Pure credal nationalists, meanwhile, forget that people are more than their abstract commitments: “Do I think that somebody who came to the United States 15 minutes ago has the same understanding of American culture and American identity as somebody whose family has been here for 10 generations? No. Of course, I don’t believe that, because human beings are complex, and part of knowing a culture isn’t just believing certain things, but actually living in a culture, absorbing it.”

Contra the Heritage Americanists, Vance believes that culture and identity are transmissible over time. “The racial nationalists — or anybody else who wants to say that it’s purely genetic or purely having some connection to the late-17th-century Mayflower descendants — what they ignore is that people can accumulate it over time. [It] doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea that we have to be a static nation of people who came or who are descendants of those who came on the Mayflower, I think that’s not consistent with American practice, either.”

I ask him if he’d countenance differing legal treatment for the Mayflower descendant versus the person who received his passport 15 minutes ago. “No, no!” he replies. “Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago, or you got your citizenship or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally.”

But: “I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants — even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people — you do change the country in some profound way. . . . The problem with American immigration over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people, too quickly. And if the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”

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For a much longer span, of course, it was religion that defined Western identity, with Christendom encompassing a patchwork of nations otherwise at each other’s throats. Can faith still serve as a sort of moral glue today, in societies that are fast descending into what used to be called the “Blade Runner scenario”, after director Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi dystopia that portrays 21st-century Los Angeles as a city divided among polyglot ethnic formations arrayed tensely against each other?

“When I talk about America having some common culture,” Vance says, “I think Christianity is very much at the heart of that. With the exception of Jefferson and a couple of others, most of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians. . . . There’s a lot about Christianity that is very useful, even if you’re not a Christian. I think Christianity gives us a common moral language. You saw that in the Civil Rights Era, you saw that during the Civil War. It was one of the ways that we were able to actually come together as a nation, post-Civil War: that shared Christian identity.”

And yet, religion often clashes with contemporary politics. Vance’s own spiritual leader as a Roman Catholic, Pope Leo XIV, takes a much more universalist approach to questions of immigration and assimilation, and has reportedly deputized the US bishops to counter the Trump administration’s hawkish border policies. How does Vance reconcile his religious leader with his political positions?

While he welcomes the Vatican’s voice in international affairs, he thinks of its counsels as one moral lens that must be applied alongside other perspectives. The Bishop of Rome “is not going to be looking at an immigration policy with the same prudential lens that I have on.” The “dignity” of would-be migrants is part of it. So are “the wages of workers” and “the social cohesion of the United States of America.”

“Balkanization and ethnic hatred,” reflected in the rise of the likes of Fuentes & Co., are thus mostly symptoms, to Vance’s mind. Moralizing denunciation, in his telling, will do little to address the underlying disease. Critics will no doubt see his reluctance to draw brighter red lines as a political strategy: taking care of his Right flank ahead of a 2028 presidential campaign. 

He is certainly careful about whom to denounce and on which grounds. Still, I walk away from JD Vance’s home concluding that the position he espouses — the need to renegotiate questions of immigration and belonging to avoid a descent into even worse ethnic strife — is a sincerely held expression of his worldview. Whether it can be translated into a responsible politics will be the big test of the next few years.

UnHerd subscribers can read the full transcript of Sohrab Ahmari’s interview with JD Vance here.

 JD Vance: Yeah. 

 SA: Where are we with the process, and whom do you view as the main obstacle to getting across the finish line? Is it the Russians, the Europeans, or the Ukrainians themselves?

 JDV: Well, look, there are challenges with all three groups. I mean, I actually got an update from our negotiators this morning. So the breakthrough that I do feel that we’ve made is that all of the issues are actually out in the open. There’s [initially] a little bit of a game of obfuscation, of hiding behind fake issues, not actually revealing your hand. And you see that with everybody in tough negotiations. And what we’ve seen from the Ukrainians [and] the Russians over the past couple of weeks is there is this real sense of what’s non-negotiable [and] what’s very negotiable. 

I think the Russians really want territorial control of the Donetsk. The Ukrainians understandably see that as a major security problem, [even as] they privately acknowledge that eventually, they’ll probably lose Donetsk — but, you know, eventually: it could be 12 months from now, it could be longer than that. So that territorial concession is a significant hold-up in the negotiations — that terrible territorial concession, I should say. 

I think that there were other somewhat more minor issues. Who controls the [Zaporizhzhia] nuclear facility? Can it be jointly controlled? Does it need to be controlled by one or more side? What ultimately happens with with ethnic Russians who are still in Ukraine? What happens with the ethnic Ukrainians who are still in Russia? Ukrainians who are currently in [Russian-occupied] territory but want to live in Ukraine? How do you facilitate that? And many of the Russians have asked similar questions. 

And then there’s, of course, a question about reconstruction, which I think, the Ukrainians are understandably very focused on, and the Russians are somewhat less focused on. And we’re just trying to work through all these things. And so I would say that any particular group right now is a barrier. I do think that everybody has participated, at least in the last few months, in the negotiation in good faith. Obviously, some of this stuff gets played out in the press because people are trying to push their PR leverage. I tend to see that as just the nature of the game, I don’t hold that against anybody for selectively leaking or sort of saying, ‘This provision is too pro-Russia’ or ‘This provision is too pro-Ukraine.’ I just sort of see it as inherent in the nature of the negotiation. 

We’re gonna try to get this thing solved. We’re going to keep on trying to negotiate. And I think that we’ve made progress, but sitting here today, I wouldn’t stay with confidence that we’re going to get to a peaceful resolution. I think there’s a good chance we will, I think there’s a good chance we won’t. 

SA: Pope Leo made some remarks, using pretty harsh rhetoric, suggesting that President Trump wants to break the Western Alliance structure or to sideline the Europeans? What would you say to that?

JDV: Look, especially as a practicing Catholic, I always try to be respectful to the Vatican. It is a diplomatic force for good, completely aside from its religious role. But look, I disagreed with what the pope said there. I think that that’s a particularly Euro-centric view of these negotiations. We’re not trying to destroy the European Alliance, we’re not trying to divide Europeans against one another. What we’re actually trying to do vis-à-vis Europe is to encourage them to be a little bit more self-sustaining. 

I think their economic policies have produced very broad-based continental stagnation. Their immigration policies have caused a significant backlash from the native population. I think that Europe doesn’t have a very good sense of itself right now, and you see that reflected in various measures of economic and cultural stagnation. We want Europe to reinvigorate itself. We want it to be much more self-sufficient, much more self-reliant. And look, the reality is, America sprang out of European civilization. We are fundamentally descended from a lot of European ideas. . . . That’s why we want a stronger Europe. We don’t want a weaker Europe. And we think that our views and our policies are, hopefully, trending in that direction, helping the Europeans where we can help them, but a lot of this is something I think the Europeans have to do themselves. 

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SA: But there’s a bit of a paradox there, isn’t there? Because on the one hand, the administration says that America in the past too often lectured the world on moral values and so on. And yet the National Security Strategy document that was recently published made certain claims about what Europe should be like civilizationally. So even to get them to be where we want to be, we still have to lecture them.

JDV: We have much greater cultural, religious, and economic ties with Europe than we do with anywhere else in the world. That is just the nature of things. And so I do think that we’re going to have certain moral conversations with Europe that we might not have, for example, with a Democratic Republic of the Congo, because there is this sense of shared history and shared cultural values. To tie it back to a more specific or direct American interest, France and the United Kingdom have nuclear weapons. If they allow themselves to be overwhelmed with very destructive moral ideas, then you allow nuclear weapons to fall in the hands of people who can actually cause very, very serious harm to the United States. 

SA: What sort of ideas?

JDV: I think there are, for example, Islamists-aligned or Islamist-adjacent people who hold office in European countries right now. Right now, maybe at an extremely low level, right? They’re winning mayoral elections, or they’re winning municipal elections. But it’s not inconceivable to imagine a scenario where a person with Islamist-adjacent views could have very significant influence in a European nuclear power. In the next five years? No. But 15 years from now? Absolutely. And that is very much a very direct threat to the United States of America. So I do think there are ways in which the moral conversation does absolutely bleed into America’s national-security interests. 

I just think that we want Europe to be strong and vibrant. I want Europe to be a place where Americans can go and visit, where there’s cultural sharing; Europeans are coming to American universities; Americans are going to European universities; where our militaries are fighting together, training together. That is impossible without some sense of a cultural foundation. The United States and Europe have that, but there’s a risk of losing it over the long term. 

SA: Turning to domestic politics and this tangle of issues around immigration and American belonging: it’s really sharply dividing the American Right. Just recently, as you know, a pair of dueling visions was presented at TPUSA by Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. . . . 

JDV: I’ve heard, though I haven’t seen their speeches yet. 

SA: . . . And a lot of people want you to weigh in on one side of that, and they want you to denounce directly the Groypers and maybe Tucker Carlson for entertaining the Groypers. Will you?

JDV: First of all, I don’t think Tucker Carlson is a Groyper. 

SA: No. 

JDV: Tucker’s a friend of mine. And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus. I can express substantive disagreements with them, but I find the idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it. 

I think that there’s a certain amount of gatekeeping where people are trying to settle their own ideological scores, and that’s what’s really going on here. 

On some of the broader issues, anti-Semitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred, have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting, and we should call that stuff out. 

SA: So you disavow Fuentes?

JDV: On Fuentes, I’ve criticized him in the past, but let me be clear: anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat shit. That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States. And my attitude towards anybody, again, who is calling for judging people based on their ethnic heritage, whether they’re Jewish or white or anything else, it’s disgusting. We shouldn’t be doing it. [That said,] I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated — and frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel. 

Now, I happen to believe that Israel is an important ally, [and] that there are certain things that we’re certainly going to work together on. But we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel, and that’s OK. And we should be able to say, ‘We agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’ Having that conversation is, I think, much less comfortable for a lot of people, because they want to focus on Nick Fuentes instead of on: why is Nick Fuentes gaining popularity or gaining notoriety? . . . Because 99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy. I think we already had that conversation and not try to shut it down. Most Americans aren’t anti-Semitic. They’re never going to be anti-Semitic, and I think we should focus on the real debate. 

[On Fuentes’s racism,] let’s say you believe, as I do, that racism is bad, that we should judge people according to their deeds and not their ethnicity. Is Nick Fuentes really the problem in this country? He’s a podcaster. He has a dedicated group of young fans, and some of them have been shitty to my friends and family. Does that annoy me? Of course. But let’s keep some perspective. For the last five to 10 years, I’ve watched one-half of our political leadership go all in on the idea that discriminating against whites in college admissions and jobs is not just OK, but affirmatively good. Sometimes South and East Asians get caught up in this, too. If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.

That same political movement, the Left, has also promoted wide open borders that necessarily leads to the destruction of social cohesion in the country that I love. Ethnic rivalry and balkanization is the inevitable consequence of these things. You don’t have to think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t, but it’s a predictable consequence of what the Left has pushed for years.

Let’s bring it back to the personal: if you look at my kids — half white, half-South Asian — they were among the most discriminated against in the entire elite-college and jobs hierarchy under Joe Biden. And the Left explicitly promises to bring that hierarchy back if they ever again get power. It pisses me off that Fuentes calls my kids “jeet,” and I appreciate that Ro Khanna would never do that. You know what pisses me off a million times more? That Ro Khanna, AOC, and Chris Murphy would deny them jobs and opportunities because they have the wrong skin color.

SA: How do you define what it means to be an American? Obviously, you and I both reject the economic-zone account of America, and that has not brought us to a great place. But how do you react to a term like ‘Heritage American’?

Well, one, is a Heritage American somebody who’s from the late 17th century [or] the late 18th century? I think that it’s like a lot of these things, there are questions of definition. But, I mean, look, let me say a few things about this. 

Number one, do I think that there is something credal at the heart of the American identity? Absolutely! We take ourselves to be on a very unique national project, a project that is a very unusual compared to what the European nations were doing at the time, to what other nations in the world were doing at the time. We believe in the fundamental dignity and equality of every human being. That’s one of the reasons why I think Americans are just not a racist people. Black people don’t hate white people, white people don’t hate black people — that’s a good thing. 

That said, do I think that somebody who came to the United States 15 minutes ago has the same understanding of American culture and American identity as somebody whose family has been here for ten generations? No. Of course, I don’t believe that, because human beings are complex, and part of knowing a culture isn’t just believing certain things, but actually living in a culture, absorbing it. That happens multi-generationally. It happens over time. And so I guess my own view is a fusion of the two: it’s to recognize that human beings are inherently creatures of their time, of their place, of their family, of their community. And so we should expect that people who have a longer connection to the United States of America are going to understand it differently than somebody who came here on a tourist visa 15 minutes ago. We should also understand that believing certain core things, being able to express certain core democratic values is part of being an American. 

One last thing I’ll say about this is, I think there’s a tendency to try to over-intellectualize this stuff. When I talk about shared cultural traditions, shared practices, living in a country and sharing it with your neighbors and your community members, a lot of that is not stuff that you can teach in a book, right? It’s about: which sports teams do you follow? And what do you eat for dinner? And how do you communicate with your neighbors? It’s the cultural lingo that is dominant among certain generations, but not in other generations. It’s music, it’s art. There’s a whole host of things that make it. And I think the credal nationalists, the mistake that they make is thinking that you could absorb American culture just because you have the right ideas in your head. And I think that the racial nationalists — or anybody else who wants to say that it’s purely genetic or purely having some connection to the late-17th-century Mayflower descendants —  what they ignore is that people can accumulate it over time. [It] doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea that we have to be a static nation of people who came or who are descendant of those who came on the Mayflower, I think that’s also not consistent with American practice, either. 

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SA: But in terms of legal treatment, the person who got their passport yesterday versus the one who does trace ancestry back 10 generations — they don’t get different treatment, right?

JDV: No, no! Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago, or you got your citizenship or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally. I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants, even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people, you do change the country in some profound way. And so, so much of the immigration debate, I think we try to create these very firm categories. And the reality is that America does pretty well assimilating people, so long as it’s a small number of people, and they’re given an amount of time to assimilate. The problem with American immigration . . . over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people, too quickly. And if the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ 

Somebody said to me recently that Gordon Wood — who’s sort of a famous historian [and] a credal nationalist — he thinks that we should cap the number of foreign people in the United States of America at 15%. Well, if you believe that, you’re acknowledging that there’s something about the American identity and character that has to be formed over time. You can’t just drop tens of millions of people into the country, expect them to believe the right things, and think that America won’t be changed for the worse because of it. 

SA: Can Christianity ease some of today’s identity tensions?

Yeah. Well, I think that, look, this is a much longer conversation, but I do think that when I talk about America having some common culture, I think Christianity is very much at the heart of that. With the exception of Jefferson and a couple of others, most of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians, and particularly, the people who were influential in each of the individual states were incredibly devout Christians. And that’s an important part. And I think there’s a lot about Christianity that is very useful, even if you’re not a Christian. I think Christianity gives us a common moral language. You saw that in the Civil Rights Era, you saw that during the Civil War. It was one of the ways that we were able to actually come together as a nation, post-Civil War: that shared Christian identity. I think that it gives us a way to actually understand our own sins as a nation, but also have forgiveness and grace towards one another. I think it’s very hard to have a concept of forgiveness and grace that is not rooted in some Christian idea. 

And so I think a lot of the woke wars of the early 21st century are because we had a sort of Christian moral language that was completely divorced from actual Christian moral practice. And, you know, the wokesters, they got a lot wrong. But the thing that they got most wrong is they had no account of grace and forgiveness, and that was completely deranging to American culture. 

SA: How do you balance the demands of your faith and your public responsibilities. We talked about how the pope has disagreed with you on Ukraine, and also on immigration. It must be incredibly difficult to navigate these tensions. It can’t be easy.

You know, I guess that I don’t think that it is that difficult, the balancing. When you ask yourself, what should America’s immigration policy be? Well, that’s a fundamentally moral judgment. Because I’m a Christian, Christianity influences that. And you have to ask a bunch of prudential questions, too, about how many people your country can absorb, who should be here, who shouldn’t, what’s in the best interests of the people who are already here in the United States of America? So you just have to balance a number of prudential and moral considerations, but that’s true in almost any vector of any person’s life, right? I mean, I think a person who’s a business leader or a worker at a factory or a mom or a dad, you’re constantly balancing the moral and the prudential and trying to ensure that you’re making smart judgments, but also moral judgments. That’s how I try to live my life, and when there are tensions, like, for example, when the Church criticizes our immigration policy, I try to remember that the Church has one moral perspective. I don’t think it’s right, by the way, to say, ‘Oh, you know, they should stay out of politics.’ I think unless your politics is informed by some moral judgment, it’s going to be very, very broken. 

[But] the pope in the Vatican, in Rome, is not going to be looking at an immigration policy with the same prudential lens that I have on. Yes, we have to treat people with humanity and dignity. Yes, we have to protect our borders. I’m also trying to protect the wages of workers. I’m trying to protect the social cohesion of the United States of America. I’m trying to ensure that we don’t have the rise of balkanization and ethnic hatred, which can happen when you have too much immigration too quickly. And so, yes, I take my Christian faith and moral teachings [seriously], and I also try to apply them in a very messy, real world that I live in. 

Read Sohrab Ahmari’s account of his interview with JD Vance here.

Having fled her home in western Ukraine in the early days of Russia’s invasion, Iryna recalls the warm welcome received at first. Locals offered food, homes, and clothing to the more than 1.5 million refugees who poured over its border. “We were treated very kindly,” she says. Yet just in the last months, the mood has shifted alarmingly.

Iryna is far from alone in her anxieties. Several other women I met at a UNITERS Foundation center, a charity in the Polish capital offering support to Ukrainians, spoke of similar fears. One pensioner from war-torn Zaporizhzhia was even pepper-sprayed outside an optician’s. “Now I try not to speak Ukrainian on the streets. If there are gatherings of Poles, my son recommends I stay away and watch out for myself.”

Hostility is surging. The center’s windows have been smashed several times, and state funding has now been terminated. In Przemyśl, a rail hub by Ukraine’s border, the mayor removed the blue and yellow scarf from a big teddy bear in the Christmas market after an outcry. In the Baltic coast region, a school teacher called his Ukrainian teenager pupils “scum”, while other youngsters spat on and beat the refugees so badly that one was left with a broken nose. One pupil also reportedly played recordings of bombs falling on Ukraine while yelling “time to hide” at his victims.

Poland is far from unique in seeing rising resentment to refugees. But these are people fleeing a neighboring country riven by war, not some distant land with an alien culture. Moreover, Poland too is a country that suffered from Moscow’s repression for decades — it shares Ukraine’s loathing of Russia and helped lead Europe’s initial response to Vladimir Putin’s assault on Kyiv. But attitudes have changed and show how bitter political struggles over the future, often entwined with unresolved perceptions of the past, are erupting across the West. Sensitive historical fissures underlie this transformation, combining with an all too familiar catalog of modern issues — disinformation, migration, populism, security, technology and trade battles — to create a highly combustible political environment.

“This is not yet a catastrophe but it is a new challenge for us,” says Miroslaw Skorka, chairman of the Association of Ukrainians in Poland. “For Poland, the story about victory over the Ukrainians was very important for post-war communist identity. So even during that explosion of support in 2022, a part of the population stayed silent. Now there is a schizophrenia: we need Ukrainians in the labor force to work and help grow our economy, but immigrants get scapegoated in schools and on the streets.”

Living on our island nation, with borders that have been fixed for centuries, British people often forget the turbulence endured by those living in the regions that historian Timothy Snyder has called the “bloodlands” of central and eastern Europe. Thousands of ethnic Poles were murdered in the Second World War by nationalists seeking to create an independent Ukraine, then many Ukrainians were in turn killed in savage retaliatory violence. In 1947, after the communist takeover, about 140,000 Ukrainians — including Skorka’s family — were forcibly moved in Operation Vistula from their homes in south-eastern regions to western areas taken from Germany in order to break up their community and curb support for insurgents, resulting in much hardship.

This left lingering historical sores on both sides — and these have been inflamed by resurgent nationalism, divisive politicians and the Kremlin’s adroit abuse of social media to spread discord in democracies. The sharp decline in sympathy for Kyiv is highly significant in a country that spent years warning complacent politicians in the West about Moscow’s expansionism, and that moved rapidly to bulk up its own armed forces in response to Putin’s aggression. Recent surveys of Poles have indicated that the majority oppose their neighbor joining either Nato or the European Union, and almost half want to reduce military support.

According to Marta Prochwicz, deputy head of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Warsaw, the nation remains united over its core approach to Russia. “Poland is as anti-Russian as Ukraine — it’s practically impossible to find pro-Russian attitudes in Poland. At the start of the war, the public mood was very supportive. Because of the common threat, the automatic, knee-jerk reaction of the party in power was to give military equipment to Ukraine straight away.”

When Vladimir Putin attacked Kyiv, the ruling party of Poland was the conservative Law and Justice (PiS). It had governed since 2015 and presided over a period of controversial judicial reforms, an abortion ban and the harsh anti-LGBT rhetoric. Yet faced with a looming election and the strong threat from the rival liberal party, led by former EU president Donald Tusk, PiS tried to fire up voters with populist policies and stunts. They unsuccessfully demanded Second World War reparations from Germany, backed farmers protesting against cheap grain flooding the market under an EU deal designed to help Kyiv, and urged Zelensky to apologize for wartime massacres by nationalists 80 years earlier.

Despite Tusk’s party winning the subsequent election, the stirring up of those issues had lasting effects. Farmers protesting at the border, and the increased talk of exhuming graves of massacre victims, started to turn the mood against Ukrainians. Donald Trump’s return to the White House accelerated these changes.

This year’s bitter, hard-fought presidential contest also saw the unexpected victory of populist historian Karol Nawrocki, an independent backed by PiS. Nawrocki opposed Kyiv’s accession to the EU or Nato until “important civilizational issues” for Poland were resolved — referring to the wartime massacres by Ukrainian nationalists — while proposing to give Poles priority access to benefits, doctors and schools.

This has led to tussles with Tusk over extending support to refugees, although the prime minister — weakened by his party’s failure to win the presidency — has ruled out sending troops to back a ceasefire in Ukraine. Last month, Nawrocki agreed for “the last time” to extend legal status for Ukrainians until March, leaving their future uncertain. This is despite studies suggesting that more Ukrainians work in Poland than in any other European nation and that they generated 2.7% of the country’s GDP in the last year. Meanwhile, sabotage attacks and September’s drone incursion into Polish airspace rattled many citizens — especially after two Ukrainians linked to Russian intelligence were identified last month as suspects behind some rail blasts.

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The flood of people over the border highlights how Poland — with its fast-growing economy and rapid post-Soviet modernization — has transitioned from a nation of emigration to one that offers alluring prospects as well as sanctuary. After Russia’s invasion, the million Ukrainians who came to Poland, joining the 1.3 million already there, were typically from more middle-class backgrounds than the earlier waves of “invisible migrants” working in low-paid jobs in fields and factories. Yet as one screenwriter with three university degrees tells me, she decided it was better to return home and endure Putin’s bombs than to be repeatedly offered cleaning jobs. “It is not a problem to clean some toilets — but it is a problem if I have to do this for the rest of my life.”

Now a new influx of men aged between 18 and 22 is further fueling concerns, given reports that at least 100,000 men have reportedly left Ukraine after the ban on adult males going abroad was lifted in August. Among them is Roman Melnyk, 22, an English teacher from Kyiv I met at Warsaw station. “This is my first day abroad in my whole life,” he says, explaining that even his soldier father had urged him to leave their war-torn country. Yet these refugees have been less warmly received than predecessors. “We should not allow Ukrainians of military age into Poland,” was the response of the far-Right Confederation party. “Poland cannot continue to be a haven for thousands of men who should be defending their country, yet burden the Polish taxpayer with the cost of their own desertion.”

In contrast with the war’s early days — when the Polish president received a standing ovation in parliament for declaring that Ukrainians were not refugees but guests — polling now shows that opposition to accepting Ukrainian refugees is at its highest (at 45%) since responses started being recorded following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. And most Poles now believe too much assistance is being offered, saying benefits and health care should only be offered to refugees working and paying taxes.

Research has also shown that the words most associated with Ukrainians on social media are “demanding” and “cunning”. One analysis found that 94,000 anti-Ukrainian posts appeared on X in just over four months this year, often linking Ukrainians to sabotage attacks in Poland or anti-Polish atrocities in the Second World War. Pro-Russian accounts have also blamed Ukraine for the recent drone incursions. And these stories feed neatly into Russian disinformation narratives, which the army has described as a key part of Russia’s strategy of “cognitive warfare”.

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Putin’s disinformation tricks have undoubtedly intensified the political divisions and hostility toward refugees. During the presidential campaign, for instance, seven cities received fake emails supposedly from Ukrainian House, a leading cultural and support center, seeking consent for demonstrations in support of Nawrocki’s main rival. It emerged later they included a word left untranslated from Russian. “How can you be a Polish nationalist and repeat divisive narratives that obviously have their roots in the Kremlin?,” asked Ben Cope, the NGO’s director of programs.

Yet Olena Babakova, an academic, journalist and migration researcher who moved from Kyiv 17 years ago, believes it is wrong to overestimate the Kremlin influence. “I often attend meetings with Polish politicians and when I ask why relations are poor, they blame Russian propaganda. And it was the winning presidential candidate who said the Polish NHS should develop an algorithm to automatically move Ukrainians to the end of the line for doctors so Poles could be first. If that is not racist, what is?”

She argues that refugees get scapegoated for wider economic and political failures. These are all familiar issues being discussed from Washington and Westminster through to Warsaw. Yet toward the end of our conversation, Babakova unwittingly echoes the British-Hungarian writer Gitta Sereny, who wrote about the complicity of a similarly passive society that refused to confront uncomfortable truths in darkening times.

“I have friends who tell me they limit their public presence in cafes, supermarkets or on the street in order not to be insulted,” Babakova says. “It is not that all Poles are anti-Ukrainian but the voices of a hostile minority, perhaps about 20%, have become so loud while the majority stays silent. Ukrainians who tell me they have experienced hate speech and violence always say the biggest problem is not that they were assaulted — but that everyone around them was silent.”

Some were wearing Christmas hats and one woman was selling them, though many were also convinced that the festival’s spirituality had been downplayed in favor of secular commercialization. To get to this gathering, attendees had walked down Whitehall from Trafalgar Square, which is currently displaying an elegant wooden nativity scene, a giant menorah and a sculpture on the Fourth Plinth featuring the faces of hundreds of trans and non-binary people, which seemed a fitting reflection of our confused public realm.

They had come at the invitation of Robinson to sing carols and, they said, to put the Christ back in Christmas. In September, I had watched tens of thousands march down the same street for a protest organized by the former EDL leader in which Christianity took a surprisingly prominent role. Demonstrators brandished giant wooden crosses and framed photos of Charlie Kirk, who had been shot just days before.

By contrast, the carol service was to be a more intimate affair, with around 1,000 in attendance. The crowd was genuinely diverse, with many fervently devout Africans trying to recruit to their own churches and noticeably fewer young white men than at a typical Robinson march.

Like Robinson, many of those at the service had little time for the Church of England. Steve Edwards, sitting in a collapsible chair as he ate a chicken bake, said he found the Church of England disgusting. “It’s full of wokeism,” he told me, a Union flag flying above him. “I went to church as a kid but it was not my choice. I don’t go now.” The advertisements about the carol service had been clear that it was not a political event: it was solely about celebrating Christ and Christmas. For Edwards, however, there was clearly a political resonance to such an act. “I think my prime motive for coming is to defend Christmas against the Muslim hordes and eroding of our culture,” he said. “It’s a day out, but a useful day out.”

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To the left of the stage stood a group of women wearing pink who had been campaigning in Havering against the housing of asylum seekers. Kim, a founder of the group, said that, although she was a Catholic, she did not consider that to be related to her activism. She was also not opposed to people practicing other religions, she insisted. “They can have theirs and we can have ours,” she said. “The key word is love: everybody should love each other.” There were limits to that love, however: the women were clear that they did not wish to have undocumented and uninvited small boat migrants in their town.

Soon enough, the service began. Instead of a pulpit, there was a temporary stage on a trailer flanked by large, white crosses and garlanded with tinsel. Preachers reading extracts from the Bible alternated with musicians, including Doolan’s band and Star, a young black woman with a mellifluous voice. The crowd sang along to the hits — from “Come All Ye Faithful” to “Away in a Manger” — and speakers exhorted us to pray for persecuted Christians in Nigeria and Pakistan.

Several of the speeches drifted from theology to politics. Liam Tuffs, a long-term Robinson wingman, declared that he had not been a Christian himself but that he planned on pumping religious content out from his social media channels in 2026. “Young Bob”, a 17-year-old activist with a mop of hair, spoke of how he had become depressed and suicidal at secondary school as he committed the sin of atheism and other “sinful acts”. If it were not for Jesus Christ, he said, he would not be here. If it were not for Jesus Christ this nation would not be great. “And wouldn’t it be great to see this nation restored back to its ancestral roots?” he asked to cheers.

Walking among the crowd was Robert Wallace, who claimed, when we spoke, that had been to prison in five countries. He said had swallowed balloons of drugs to smuggle them. He spoke of how he had sunk into alcoholism and casual violence and lost himself for a time to a kind of madness that took over his life. But now he has rediscovered Christ and been born again. And so, he and his brother, John — both short men with greying hair buzzed low — found themselves at the carol concert.

Born 18 months apart, the pair look as if they could be identical twins. “When we were younger we went to Sunday school and church,” said John. “A lot of people lost that root. Now they’re turning back.” For the brothers, Christianity represents their childhood and a lost Britain of innocence and moral rigidity. “We used to run around outside and pray,” Robert said. “Then, when I came out of the army, we [Britain] were in Europe. Our country is flooded. It’s changed.”

With their lives of sin and winding journey to Christ, the pair were not so dissimilar to the man who had brought them to central London. Though raised by an Irish Catholic mother, Robinson has said he was not religious himself growing up. When dark had fallen and the carols were over, he finally took the stage. The crowd pushed forward a little and began chanting his name, as if forgetting for a moment that this was a religious festival and not a rally.

Robinson spoke of his hatred for Britain’s Anglican establishment. “When I started [the English Defence League] in 2009, the Church stood against us in every city we went into,” he said. “The Church leaders stood and opposed us. That drove me away from Christianity. In fact, I hated the Church for them betrayals. We, all of us, were their lost sheep. The way they’ve acted this week [by criticising Robinson as divisive] is the reason churches are empty.”

It was only during a recent stint in HMP Woodhill that he began speaking with a chaplain and studying the life of Jesus. Then, he was visited by Doolan, a former musician who — by his own telling — spent his life partying and sinking “endless cocktails of drugs” before he stumbled across a Sunday service and, struck by its beauty, was driven to repent. Thirteen years later, Doolan is a pastor at Spirit Embassy, a Pentecostal church led by a charismatic Zimbabwean prophet. His band is a regular feature of Robinson’s rallies.

Speaking to me a few days before the carol service, Doolan said that he had sat with Robinson inside prison and talked for two hours about the Gospel, a spiritual awakening he believes is taking place in Britain, and the importance of Christianity to our national history. “He said that he’d always felt a presence when he was going through, you know, hard times or heavy persecution or whatever it is that he’d been going through,” he said. “There would always be a feeling of something willing him to continue.”

With two prison guards standing over them, Doolan led Robinson through a prayer of salvation. The former English Defence League leader, a veteran of a Luton hooligan firm, convicted of assault and fraud, who once bragged on camera that he could score gear anywhere in the world, admitted his sins and asked Jesus to enter his heart.

The carol service, which Doolan was heavily involved in organizing, was aimed in part at helping others follow Robinson’s path. Standing amid the tinsel and the crosses, the activist proclaimed that “something great” is happening in Britain. “I’ve seen it at each one of our Unite the Kingdom events as I saw the cross start playing prevalence, as I saw ‘Jesus is king’ [banners], and I felt something happening and I felt it again today,” he told the crowd.

Not every Christian in attendance was willing to take this change of heart at face value, however. As I watched a series of Bible readings on stage, I was approached by two young men, one German and one English, from a non-denominational church in London. “Tommy is not really a Christian,” said the German. “He doesn’t follow the Bible.” While he could not know the contents of Robinson’s heart, he said, he did not believe he had truly renounced sin.

The duo were at the protest to evangelize to those who believed in God but were not yet practicing Christians. The faith, the Englishmen said, had saved his life. With the Union Flag pulled over his shoulders, he launched into a denunciation of the nation’s spiritual values. All men in this country care about, he said, is chasing women and going to the pub and doing bumps of coke. If he had not found Christ, he would still be doing the same, he added.

The vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Tooting, who coincidentally is called Angela Rayner, was handing out leaflets with an AI image of the nativity featuring black people, Muslim women and three white men wearing Union Jack T-shirts gazing at baby Jesus in his crib. Only one in 10 people at most would take a Christian flyer outside a train station, she told me. Here, almost everyone was willing to accept them. She hoped she might be able to convince fans of Robinson that everyone was welcome in the Church of England.

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Earlier that day, another group of Christians had gathered outside St Paul’s Cathedral to counter Robinson’s message. I watched as they staged a nativity scene in which two people playing Joseph and Mary sat in a small rubber dinghy. Behind them, about a dozen others in smart coats, woolly sweaters and hiking boots were singing hymns and holding banners that claimed Jesus as a refugee. “Love your neighbor,” read one, in red letters, with another below adding, in black spraypaint, “that includes the ones in hotels”.

Walking about in front of this display was Krish Kandiah, an evangelical leader and founder of The Sanctuary Foundation, a charity that supports refugees into work and housing. He is, I suggested to him, exactly the kind of Christian Robinson professes to revile. The former EDL leader had only recently become religious, though, Kandiah said. Robinson had clearly not yet developed a real understanding of Christianity.

“We need to help Tommy get to the heart of the faith,” he said. “The Bible is very clear that every human being had intrinsic value and worth.” While Kandiah accepts that some people fear immigration is out of control, he also believes that Britain has the capacity to help those in need. “We need to work out our responsibilities to them,” he said.

Kandiah said he was concerned that people were using the Christian message to gain followers for cynical reasons. “It is hard to understand how Christians of good faith can hate on people and promote division,” he said. The scale of the messaging operation coordinated over the past week by the Church of England and other mainstream Christian groups implies they are deeply concerned that Robinson’s position might catch on.

The feeling of resentment and suspicion is mutual. When Dame Sarah Mullally was named as the next Archbishop of Canterbury, Robinson retweeted a statement she had made backing the Black Lives Matter movement and wrote: “their churches will stay empty, a Christian revival will grow on the streets. Masculine christiany is coming not this weak drivel.”

The idea that Christianity is experiencing a revival in Britain is one shared by many worshipers who both love and hate Robinson. A report published by the Bible Society earlier this year claimed that church attendance had surged since 2018, driven in particular by young men. “People are giving church a try, or something has drawn them back in again,” the Evangelization coordinator for the Diocese of Westminster, Teresa Carvalho, told The Guardian. Others have questioned the value of the society’s evidence, however. David Voas, an emeritus professor of social science at UCL, has pointed out that its report was based on unreliable opt-in surveys rather than probability sampling. The Church of England and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales record shrinking turnouts since the pandemic.

When I spoke to Doolan, the musician-turned-pastor, he said he had witnessed growing Christian faith. This was evidence, he argued, that I could expect to witness, in my lifetime, the arrival of the Antichrist, who will take control of a one-world government. The “masculine Christianity” advanced on Saturday, under which the Church’s move towards liberalism on borders, gender and sexuality would be reversed, may therefore be one element of a Christian revival, even its driving force.

After Robinson spoke on Whitehall, there was time for one last carol. Attendees held plastic candles with electric lights aloft and began to sing “Silent Night” amid a reverent quiet. For those in attendance, though vastly smaller in number than previous Unite the Kingdom rallies, this was the start of an epochal shift. Next year, Robinson said, he would host the same event again and, he claimed, he would pack out Trafalgar Square. Then the Church of England would really have something to worry about.

It means we should now be asking the question: what if the UK reaches Net Zero immigration before the next election? This seemingly outlandish suggestion could well dictate the future of British politics. The Boriswave is over; might the political ripples it caused (including the meteoric rise of Reform) now lose their momentum?

The Right-leaning media’s reaction to the ONS report, somewhat ironically since their paramount complaint is that immigration is too high, was to downplay the reduction and instead focus on a new panic about the higher levels of emigration of British nationals. Isn’t it time to cut through the “cope” and examine the facts?

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This alleged “exodus” of British nationals certainly merits closer inspection. The Telegraph in their splash, claimed that the ONS data revealed young British workers were fleeing Labour’s high-tax regime. These youngsters, they speculated, have been “flocking to Australia” and to the “Middle East, where remote working is allowed”. For their part, the online Right asserted that the data laid bare the ongoing replacement of highly skilled white British workers with low-skilled foreigners from incompatible, faraway cultures.

Both narratives are precarious, to put it politely. There is no doubt that some skilled professionals are leaving — wealthy lawyers and bankers are constantly tempted by Abu Dhabi; ambitious entrepreneurs will obviously want to take their startup to the US, if it is doing well; and our junior doctors have long been swapping the grinding NHS for a better-paid stint in Australia. The competitiveness of our economy is a serious cause for concern; but these professional emigrants do not amount to hundreds of thousands in a year. Let’s be serious: 18-year-olds  from post-industrial British towns aren’t leaving in their droves for Abu Dhabi to become digital nomads.

The ONS emigration statistics are, to be frank, pretty sketchy. Emigration is far harder to measure accurately than immigration — mainly because British passport-holders don’t need a visa to leave. In years gone by, the ONS would have used something called the “International Passenger Survey” to account for those departing the country, but it was notoriously unreliable. So now instead they scan the population for people who have gone dark and ceased to have any contact with the state — if, after a year, there is still no sign of them, the presumption is that they have emigrated. Since this new methodology was introduced in 2021, there actually hasn’t been much fluctuation in numbers: there has been no sudden surge in emigrating Britons. Complicating accurate measurements are the ‘Neets” who have simply disappeared from the states radar. It can be hard to tell the difference between them and those people who have actually left and as a result all sorts of guessed adjustments come into play: some of these presumed emigrants may just be people lost to the system; others will be young people going abroad to study, and who will return.

Most significantly, though, what everyone does seem to have ignored is the fact that many of the emigrating “British Nationals” will be immigrants or children of immigrants who have acquired British citizenship but have decided to return home. We know the main reason emigration numbers are so high in 2025 is that a chunk of the Boriswave migrants are choosing not to stay — 286,000 immigrants from outside Europe permanently left the UK in the past year alone — and, in addition, Europeans who settled in the UK pre-Brexit are still leaving in large numbers. If an immigrant has acquired citizenship and then chooses to go back to their country of origin, they are still counted as one of The Telegraph’s “exodus of young British workers”.

While the ONS does not provide details of what portion of the emigrating Britons are naturalized citizens or children of immigrants, thankfully there is another migration dataset we can look at, compiled every four years at enormous expense by the United Nations. If you look at their 2024 Global Migration Database and compare that census of British migrants around the world with the 2020 figures, you can see more clearly what is happening: 72,000 more British nationals have settled in Poland (an increase of nearly 40%) and 23,000 more British nationals have settled in Romania since 2020. It seems quite reasonable to conclude that these are Polish and Romanian immigrants to the UK who have returned home along with a British passport and in some cases a British family. The next big hotspot for emigrating Britons is… Bangladesh! Nearly 13,000 Brits have moved there in the past four years. Unless young Billy from Kent has decided, along with thousands of his friends, that Bangladesh is the new land of economic opportunity, these emigrants will be naturalized British citizens with Bangladeshi ties. By contrast, only 3,259 more Brits are living in the UAE than four years ago, and the numbers moving to America are up by only 1%.

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The reality is: not all immigrants want to stay in Britain forever. Last week’s report from the ONS made that clearer than ever. And this underlying level of emigration will continue to affect net immigration numbers in the coming years right through 2029. It is hard to think of a single metric that could be more important at the next election.

Political pressure will persist, even with net migration at this lower level. Right-wing commentators are correct to observe that 900,000 arrivals in a year, notwithstanding 700,000 departures, is still much too high for most voters to bear. It was partly anxiety about a roughly similar level of immigration that led to the Brexit result in 2016. A figure of 200,000 net still means an additional one million people every five years — and our current mix of immigrants is now dominated by those from outside Europe, whereas pre-Brexit it was mainly Europeans. Asylum seekers are also at an all-time high of over 100,000 (nearly half of whom arrived on small boats) and are still hard to expel once they’re here. Anxieties about assimilation are well-founded. So, for now, there is still plenty for Reform UK to campaign on. But if the downward trend were to continue, things might start to look very different.

Reducing immigration is like fixing a roof with multiple leaks: each entrypoint is a distinct challenge, and the biggest entry-points are the legal ones. It was, after all, Boris Johnson’s relaxing of rules around care home workers and international students bringing over family members that led to the huge rise in numbers in 2022-2024, and credit for addressing this should go, unfashionably enough, to Rishi Sunak. His government’s changes to the rules concerning care workers, in October 2023, and international students, in January 2024, are the single biggest reasons for the end of the Boriswave. Further restrictions introduced in March and April 2024 are now having an effect: the key long-term visa grants in the latest quarter are down more than 50% since Q1 2024. Consider it Sunak’s parting gift to Keir Starmer.

The Labour government has continued the tightening, raising the minimum skills and salary thresholds for skilled worker visas — and this also is having an effect. Home Office data show that applications for skilled-worker and health-and-care visas are down to a new low. In October 2025, there were only 600 health-and-care visa applications, compared with a high of 18,300 in February 2022. In January 2026, there will be a further tightening, paired with a much longer 10-year wait for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), which is expected to further discourage applications.

Data analyst James Bowes, from the University of Warwick, now forecasts that these shifts, combined with the long-tail effects of earlier waves of immigrants now leaving, could push the UK into overall net negative immigration by as early as this time next year. Madeline Sumption, director of the Oxford Migration Observatory, is more skeptical, and tends to think that the net figure is more likely to rise gently as the boomerang from the Boriswave settles down. In any case, if Keir Starmer has any desire for a surprise comeback, he should be obsessed with this goal — and be fully supportive of his Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.

Many things could yet derail this trend — chief among them a panic lurch to the Left by Labour after the May elections— but it is clear what the game-changer now looks like. For Nigel Farage and Reform UK there is now the chilling possibility of another Pyrrhic victory — just like the Brexit campaign before it — in which the change to national policy they campaigned for so effectively takes place, and that success removes the principal reason for their existence.

Later that year, Mahmood stood on a podium at the Labour Party conference and excoriated “pale, male and stale” politicians. As an opposition MP, she was often seen holding “Free Palestine” placards. But now, as Home Secretary, Mahmood is the politician who must grasp the nettle of Britain’s asylum reforms. She is the minister Keir Starmer has chosen to implement the “Denmark-style” reforms he hopes will restore public faith in the collapsing system: making it harder for refugees to settle, and foregrounding the expectation that receiving asylum is a temporary measure.

At first, this seems an odd mix of task and person. Mahmood’s detractors, especially those on the Left, might call her a hypocrite. Her cheerleaders, especially those on the Right, have hailed her as a realist and a strident moral decision-maker.

But it is clear that Labour sees her as the only politician capable of delivering these changes and averting a post-budget electoral collapse next May. In this respect, she is really the consummate “Blue Labour” politician — a perfect example of the strange, shadowy and seemingly contradictory impulses on her wing of the party: namely the “Politics of Paradox”.

The paradox here is that to save the overall moral legitimacy of the asylum system, the Government must implement a series of changes that make it seem less compassionate. Changes that are by turns symbolic, well-intentioned, unrealistic or inhumane will hopefully restore trust in the system with the public: and allow things to carry on more or less as they were. This is what the Danish center-left have achieved, so why wouldn’t it work in Britain?

The “Politics of Paradox” was coined back in 2011, when Blue Labour founders Maurice Glasman and Jonathan Rutherford collected together a series of seminars under the title The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox. It was part of a spirited attempt to give the party an intellectual framework that could help it understand Gordon Brown’s defeat in 2010 — an attempt to return Labour to the history of class politics from which it had come unmoored.

Even then, years before Brexit, Labour was becoming a political party run by and for globalization’s winners — progressive activists and the aspirational social elite. This was the paradox: Labour presented itself as the party of affluent urbanites and the information economy, when it was really a party of ex-mineworkers with broken lungs.

The Labour leadership of the time were alive to these apparent contradictions. The foreword to The Labour Tradition, written by then-leader Ed Miliband, emphasized the “need to rediscover the tradition of Labour as a grassroots community movement”. The essays demonstrated that close social ties and bonds, family, and a concept of place were central to working-class identity and key parts of the Labour tradition. The authors evoked proud traditions of ground-up politics that could stretch back through the artist and socialist William Morris, through the 19th-century founders of the Labour Representation Committee, to the democratic activists murdered at the Peterloo Massacre and beyond — all the way to the proto-socialist Levellers and Diggers from the English Civil War. These traditions disdained elitism, metropolitanism and hierarchy. Instead, they celebrated ordinary family life. That was what Labour should pin to its mast. That, so the theory went, was its real identity.

But here was another paradox. To proclaim this turn against elite metropolitanism, lifelong professional politician Ed invited his brother and fellow Oxford University graduate David Miliband to donate an essay. Editors Marc Stears (Oxford University) and Stuart White (Oxford University) invited extra contributors, adding to content taken from the seminars held at Oxford University. These included the privately educated think-tank director Philip Collins (Cambridge), and the now former minister James Purnell (who had at this point returned to the think-tank career he had held between his spell at Oxford and his period as a Labour minister). These were the people — all members of the intellectual elite — who became the scions of Labour’s working-class voice and identity, warning against the gentrification of the party. But remember, this wasn’t hypocrisy. It was paradox.

It didn’t immediately change the party. The General Election of 2015 found Ed Miliband’s Labour embracing the paradoxical politics of radical timidity and slumping to defeat. Under Momentum’s influence, Labour offered a radically outstretched middle finger to the working class and lost twice, in 2017 and 2019. But the pendulum has now swung back again. The paradox-handling technicians are back behind the steering wheel.

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For this, they have Morgan McSweeney to thank — the Labour fixer who cut his political teeth battling the BNP in Barking and Dagenham, and said to be a long-term Blue Labour acolyte. McSweeney reached the top of Labour democracy through the think-tank-cum-organizing-project, Labour Together. The initiative was set up to try and tie Labour’s dysfunctional factions together through the difficult Jeremy Corbyn era and its aftermath.

But what started as a grassroots project later became a sink for big donor funds. The organization jettisoned any staff who bought into its original mission of unity — and instead became oriented around breaking up the Labour family rather than keeping it together.

Paradoxically, however, this was the only realistic way to get a class politics that didn’t completely neglect non-metropolitan England back into the Labour Party. Polling showed Labour members far from the general public on almost every issue. Any Labour member on the ground understood that the party had become utterly dominated by graduates in large cities, particularly London. These were people whose politics were representative of their insular social milieu. People from places that applaud themselves for processing asylum seekers, before shipping them off to post-industrial England’s poverty hotspots.

So a platform of pledges was developed to present the Starmer leadership as “Corbyn in a suit” — and therefore amenable to the arty member selectorate. It included a pledge for “Full voting rights for EU nationals”, as well as promises to “Defend free movement” and to “End indefinite detention and call for the closure of centers such as Yarl’s Wood”.

The platform was then quietly discarded in its entirety. Keir Starmer took over Labour and nobody got what they voted for. Selections for Labour’s parliamentary candidates in 2024 produced a party more packed with professional politicians, lobbyists, Spads and elite professionals than any Labour government in history. You might think this cohort would have the decency to be the quiet foot soldiers they were selected to be, chosen over binmen and bus drivers and nurses with more “challenging” affiliations to trade unions — but they aren’t playing ball. They seem angry. They were never told this was going to happen.

What would the Chartists referenced in The Labour Tradition think of this strategy? Maybe they’d shrug: “It’s a paradox”.

As for McSweeney, he no doubt understands, in light of these asylum reforms, that the Danish Social Democrats are the only Left-affiliated party in Europe to have won back working-class voters from the populist Right. However, it’s not clear if he has read the details of Mette Fredericksen’s party’s success. Fredericksen led the change from the front, and did so for years. Her changes were not carried out behind closed doors — but were done with conviction and consent.

After the working class abandoned the Danish Left, the Social Democrats rigorously re-assessed its attitudes and biases. They produced a pamphlet called “Just And Realistic” (Retfærdig og Realistisk) that was distributed to members. Frederiksen led a debate that scrutinized her party’s losses: heavily and transparently. This produced a new strategic, moral message: “You are not a bad person because you do not want to see your country fundamentally changed. And you are not naive because you want to help other people live a better life.” And she made sure to deliver on the second part of that message.

In government, the Danish Social Democrats practiced some of the most aggressive tax-and-spend policy in the world. Their returning working-class voters at the next election prioritized welfare, the economy and the environment. Immigration and asylum issues became a much less salient electoral issue for every party voter, save the now irrelevant populist Right. With these issues off the table, the focus landed on the economic policy that is the neglected pillar of Blue Labour thought — indeed, which is so far almost completely absent from Labour’s governance.

Instead, we have an approach that’s more “Blue Labour on immigration, Tony Blair Institute Labour on economics”. It has produced an industrial strategy that ignores Britain’s neglected towns and struggling heavy industry, ignores the mutual ownership models that are a socialist tradition, and instead favors cash bungs to American AI industries located in major cities. Having carried its “Ming vase” over the electoral finish line, pledging almost nothing, Starmer’s Government has found itself with no mandate to raise tax — and unable to raise money from the ever-fewer winners that characterize the most regionally unequal, unmeritocratic economy in the developed world.

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In Denmark, Frederiksen’s party had one of the most egalitarian, socially mobile, secure and radical societies in the world to fight for after the debate on asylum. What will Labour have, besides the prospect of calmed markets?

The victory of soft Left candidate Lucy Powell in Labour’s deputy leadership election shows that the party’s infrastructure isn’t really able to manage the kind of paradox it is being asked to tolerate. The current administration is on notice. The lack of effort to convince its internal structures has come back to haunt Starmer. The local elections in 2026 will be a day of reckoning.

The Labour leader’s only real attempt to develop a rhetoric vaguely similar in tone to the Danish Social Democrats in his “Island Of Strangers” speech was excoriated by the party’s members and voters, and later rescinded. He has never understood, let alone made, an authentic Left-wing argument against an asylum system that drains a foreign aid budget intended to save children from malaria. This is money that instead now lines the pockets of corporate behemoths like Serco. Starmer is now the least-popular prime minister, among pollsters, since records began. Most of Labour’s members want him to leave.

Mahmood may represent Labour’s last attempt to magic back those voters they claim to represent: the angry, disempowered and downwardly mobile, living in areas that have been neglected for a generation. People who should be on Labour’s team but are on Reform’s. Certainly, in this world of paradox, where class politics is imposed by Oxford PPE graduates, those voters haven’t been given their own voice in the party machinery. Since Angela Rayner’s departure, there is no prominent Labour politician that has had a “real” job.

If this last conjuring trick fails, it might well be that Labour’s only option is to concede that its working class traditions are dead. To beat Reform now may mean trying to ditch First Past The Post, to run another Brexit referendum alliance of educated urban graduates and middle-class professionals, absorbing Lib Dem and Green votes.

The middle class graduates that Labour came to depend on know the Labour they want — and they are annoyed. As it is, Labour has begun to resemble a scene in Armando Ianucci’s In The Loop, where James Gandolfini’s military general remarks that if you fight a war and have no soldiers left “it looks like you’ve lost”. If you claim a politics based around class relations, and working class people aren’t part of it — but a lot of the elite are — well, you know the rest. The next Labour leader will need to figure out what in this project, a battle against the odds for the party’s soul, is worth saving.

“The Government is shifting,” Blue Labour founder Maurice Glasman agrees. With the Labour brand “very toxic” — particularly among the staunchly proletarian and provincial petty-bourgeois voters attracted to the populist iconoclasm of the New Right — not changing course would consign Labour to a future as one half of a despised duopoly. Yet, Glasman adds, things can change fast. Mahmood is trying her best to make sure of that. But in doing so she is engaging in a dangerous game, less “ming vase” and more bull in a China shop — decisively alienating one half of Labour’s base while desperately chasing the other.

Labour’s base has, of course, evolved over time, alongside the contours of Britain’s shifting class dynamics. In the interwar period, George Orwell identified a strand of middle-class, radical intellectualism resolutely detached from the culture of the broader labor movement, one that displayed a proud antipathy towards the quotidian culture of the nation at large. “England is perhaps the only great country,” he said, “whose intellectuals
 are ashamed of their own nationality.” The bourgeois radicals, Orwell added, “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”.

In a similar vein, the pre-war dockers’ leader Ben Tillett drew a distinction between “matter-of-fact, fighting trades unionism of England” on the one hand — and “the hare-brained chatterers and magpies” on the other. Such divides die hard. In his novel The Night-Soil Men, the recent fictionalized tale of Labour’s foundation, Bill Broady has the salt-of-the-earth Bradfordian and early Labour minister Fred Jowett lament the presence of a “raffish metropolitan crowd” in his fledgling proletarian party. The intellectuals, for their part, could dish it out too. In the Sixties, Tom Nairn, a thinker of the Marxist New Left, happily bemoaned the conservatism of an organization that brought together two late-Victorian traditions: Fabian bourgeois liberalism and stolid trade unionism, the latter influenced by religious non-conformity and primarily concerned not with world revolution but the protection of its crafts.

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This friction, then, between an effete elite and the mass membership of the broad labor movement, has always existed. And indeed it’s a dynamic that has arguably made Labour a more malleable, pragmatic socialist party than its Marxist continental cousins. After all, Labour’s postwar governments combined economic radicalism, nationalization, and trade union power with a respect for The Crown and the House of Lords. As Clement Attlee observed, it was in the constitutional monarchies of Britain and Scandinavia that the greatest advances towards democratic socialism had been achieved, not least because of the continuities of symbolic power and national representation that remained amid class struggle. Yet as the influence of trade unionism and the old, grassroots cultures of the organized working-class has declined precipitously, so Labour has morphed into a thoroughly liberal-progressive party, with an often toxic brand, redolent of all the hectoring, right-on, detached habits of modern managerial officialdom.

In Mahmood and Blue Labour’s reading, a primary source of this toxicity is down to what the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has called a trahison des clercs — a treason of the Left-wing intellectuals, especially regarding the fraught politics of migration. Labour, in this telling, has abandoned the labor interest, leaving aside the working class as its primary political agents. Instead, it has embraced what Marxism Today used to call “a rainbow coalition” of different interest groups: students, public-sector workers and identitarian socio-cultural tribes. Since declaring “the forward march of labor halted” in the late Seventies, during a period of steep deindustrialization, the Left’s leading theorists claimed there was no alternative but to seek new electoral alliances by “hegemonizing” ethnic minorities, the feminist movement, LGBT activists and the counter-cultural youth, all under the benevolent leadership of bourgeois-bohemians.

Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council was the living embodiment of this shift. It signaled, he said, the arrival of “the post-1968 generation” into a dominant position in Left politics. His first tenure in the capital saw County Hall “swarmed with young punks, skinheads, Rastafarians and a host of other Londoners”, according to one of his thoroughly New Left contemporaries. While these developments enraged a Labour leadership focused on persuading working-class Thatcherites back into the Labour family, they also found critics among the far Left. The “Mersey Militants” who controlled the Liverpool Labour Party at the time accused the London crowd of being “loony” “middle-class intellectuals”, in the words of their most prominent spokesperson, Derek Hatton.

The contemporary Labour Party, as part of these transformations, has adopted what Streeck calls a “cosmoliberalism” not shared by large swathes of the public. “Modernization” turned it from a part of the demos to a party of Davos. Most of its MPs have followed the same familiar path: university; a think tank, corporate consultancy, law, or public affairs; and onwards to Westminster. That’s why they all sound like they work for Deloitte — because many of them really did. And, for Streeck, it’s the Davos-style “cosmoliberal” mindset that sees working-class skepticism of free movement of labor and capital as a kind of betrayal of “international solidarity”. Indeed, the progressive activists who dominate the institutions of the modern Left are the only social segment who appear unconcerned with the recent historically unprecedented waves of mass migration, or with the “woke turn” of the last decade. Brexit, in their reading, is a racist project. Restrictionism on migration is always more-or-less Powellite. Opposition to unfettered globalization, or support for a return to a more national economy, is horribly passé, or maybe even Trumpian.

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Mahmood is trying to put paid to all that. Last week, I described her speaking style as “tepid”. The Birmingham MP is barely known outside the party, and as one of the mooted contenders in the unofficial race to succeed Keir Starmer, I found her previous media performances unconvincing. But, on Monday, setting out plans to emulate key aspects of the Danish Social Democrats’ hardline approach on migration, she was anything but. This was a cabinet minister in command of the House, more authoritative at the despatch box than any politician so far this Parliament. The Home Secretary is on a self-proclaimed “moral mission” to restore faith in a broken system: and, from her rhetoric at least, it’s hard to doubt her.

But she will struggle, and faces three major impediments. The first are the legal challenges her plans will likely provoke, not least at the European Court of Human Rights. That is a body which has rigorously applied its expansive interpretations of what it calls a “living document” to prevent convicted paedophiles from being deported lest it disrupt their “right to a family life”. Our own domestic legislation, the Human Rights Act, buttresses this lopsided liberal legalism. And that brings us on to the second impediment — the Prime Minister. After all, it was a fastidious application of exactly that kind of legalism that gave Keir Starmer a high-flying career at the bar. For all his lack of a grand meta-narrative, he remains at heart a vaguely progressive North London lawyer. More than that, he lacks focus. One can never be certain which particular Starmerism we’ll be offered on any given day. Possessing no vision of his own, his politics seemingly depends on whoever he’s just spoken to.

And yet Mahmood’s third impediment is perhaps the strongest: the Labour Party itself. Many of its parliamentarians, its activists, and its supporters will be bitterly opposed. This isn’t surprising, for Mahmood has merely fired the starting gun on Labour’s latest round of internecine civil war, an endless conflict centered on divergent conceptions of the very soul of the party, about who Labour is ultimately for.

Today’s polling shows the party way behind among almost every demographic except one — the privately educated. Labour’s safest seats are now, in reality, not in the so-called “heartlands”, or “left behind” Britain, but in the dynamic metropoles. Here, the rainbow coalition lives on. But the cities operate on what Glasman calls “the Deliveroo economy”. A salaried “creative class” are all-too-comfortable with unskilled mass migration, for the abundance of cheap workers it provides to drop off their takeout, or staff their care homes — a permanent, affordable service class, whose presence can be celebrated as a marker of superior virtue and liberal tolerance.

For Labour’s romantics, the fact that the party has been captured by that particular urban milieu is a source of profound shame. To quote Clause Four, after all, Labour was founded “to secure for the workers, by hand and by brain, the full fruits of their industry”. But we have passed from an industrial past, through to a grimly post-industrial present. When Labour was founded, Britain made around a third of the world’s steel. Now we make around 0.3%. Instead, we send emails, sell coffees, pump our housing market. Service work dominates. Almost half of school-leavers go on to university. The economists refer to this model as “cognitive-cultural capitalism”, and a smug generation of Third-Way politicians promoted it as something they called “the knowledge economy”.

But Labour, say the romantics again, shouldn’t exist for graduate professionals, but for genuine workers. The mass production and assembly lines may have receded into memory, or at least been offshored to the Far East. Yet the armies of non-graduate workers remain, only now in warehouses, retail, call centers — all in aggregate as estranged from the modern party as ever. To that extent, then, Mahmood’s immigration plans represent a real, decisive shift aimed at recapturing Labour’s putative real people. Glasman tells me that, in addition to her plans on immigration, Mahmood “is strong on the Left flank”. She’s “an economic nationalist, basically”, he says. “She wants to see the primacy of the national economy, and serious reindustrialization.” This is about a fundamental restoration of secure, unionized work in domestic industries located outside the unaffordable, service-dominated urban centers.

Unfortunately, such a politics has not yet been much in evidence from either Labour in general, or from Mahmood in particular — though it is sorely needed. There has been no per capita or real wage growth in almost a generation. It’s clear, today, that the knowledge economy and John Prescott’s refrain that “we’re all middle class now” was a chimera, built on credit and unsustainable financialization. University no longer offers a pathway to bourgeois respectability. The downwardly mobile graduates are themselves revolting, hurtling towards the alluring purities of “eco-populism”. As for the desperate post-industrial proletariat, it’s increasingly flirting with the populist Right. Is it any wonder, given all this, that Labour is in a near-constant state of identity crisis? The awkward reality is that its original class base, with which it has formed a nostalgic attachment, in fact no longer exists, or at least not in the way it once did. Rather than appealing to a cultural imaginary gleaned from an LS Lowry print, or a Ken Loach film, Labour must therefore relearn how to speak to the average man and woman in non-metropolitan, new-build Britain.

Could it look overseas for help? The Danish Left’s clampdown on asylum and migration has been credited with seeing off the threat from the Right. Its message to working-class Danes was conciliatory. “You didn’t leave us, we left you,” said the slogan. But it hasn’t been plain-sailing. The Social Democrats have just lost control of Copenhagen for the first time in over a century, ceding power to an eco-socialist outfit — and portending, perhaps, the fate of Labour’s equivalent cosmopolitan tribe abandoning it for radical-liberal pastures. If Denmark is what success looks like, then, there’s a serious trade-off. Mahmood’s gamble is based on the hope that she can reconnect her party with its working-class roots, wooing them back into the fold. If that means sacrificing the trendy, gentrified parts of the big cities, then so be it. A calculation has been made that most urban Labour constituencies are still classed as “safe”, whereas Reform-leaning seats tend to be more marginal. Glasman tells me that “the key feature of this era that we’re in now” — a period of deglobalization, economic upheaval and populist revolts — “is that the working-class vote is decisive”.

Not everyone is convinced. Even a sympathetic MP tells me that “our electoral coalition is so upside-down that maybe a Blue Labour pivot is impossible”. But Mahmood’s wager is brutally simple: that Labour can no longer claim to be the party of workers while treating the politics of borders with liberal disdain, all while viewing the nation-state as an anachronism. She is betting that the people Labour was built to serve still want a government that protects them — not a globalized free market that dissolves them. If she is right, she may yet drag her party back into congruence with one side of its base. But that comes at the price: the hemorrhaging of votes in the citadels. The stakes of the game are existential, as the soul of the party is up for grabs yet again. And this time, it may be the last chance anyone gets to claim it.

Engel allows Italian-Americans and Greek-Americans and other lesser breeds into the Heritage America tent, notwithstanding that it “was a significant sociopolitical mistake” to admit “the type of people that came here during the Ellis Island generation.” The likes of Andrew Cuomo, it seems, will be tolerated — but only if they “are ethno-culturally tied to the ethos and spirit of the United States prior to its definitional transformation into a Propositional Nation after World War II.” (Maybe there should be a lustration process, in which swarthy Ellis Island Americans ritually denounce Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.)

According to Engel, Heritage America “includes the blacks of the Old South (like Booker T. Washington), though it repudiates any instinct that some of them have to leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time. It also includes integrated Native Americans with the same stipulation.” Ah, there are stipulations. So black and Native-American membership in Heritage America is conditional on their agreeing with Engel’s ideology — otherwise, no Heritage for them. Meanwhile, “peoples like Indians, or Southeast Asians, or Ecuadorians or immigrated [sic] Africans are the least capable of fitting in and should be sent home immediately.” Under the New Order, then, Vice President JD Vance will have to visit his Indian-American wife and mixed-race children in South Asia.

All of this turns my thoughts turn to an important question: Am I a Heritage American?

My earliest ancestor in the New World, according to family tradition, was a Scottish pirate who practiced his trade in the Chesapeake Bay in the early 17th century, following the founding of Jamestown. In 1648, another ancestor, Thomas Lane, was one of 47 people “transported” from England to labor on the plantation of a gentleman who had been granted 2,350 acres in Virginia that had been carved out of “Indian lands” only three years earlier. His descendant William Lane Sr. became a wealthy slaveowner in Fairfax County and a captain in the Virginia militia during the American Revolution.

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By Michael Lind

One Tennessean ancestor of mine fought at the Battle of New Orleans under Andrew Jackson and died of a disease contracted in camp. Another had his farm in Georgia burned by Union forces during Sherman’s march in the Civil War. Still another ancestor, a member of the US Cavalry, was shot while fighting Indians on the western plains during the Civil War; he survived and came to central Texas as part of the federal Reconstruction forces. The family heirlooms I own include a small arsenal: a stiletto dagger; two flintlock pistols and a powder horn; a vintage Colt Walker revolver; some Civil War minie balls and a grenade; the sword given by the Army to my great-grandfather, who served in the Spanish-American War.

Last but not least, after the Civil War, my great-great-great grandfather, a Texas cowboy, proposed to his bride by handing her a letter from horseback before he rode off to join a cattle drive. And a distant relative of mine in a collateral line was Wyatt Earp, the legendary lawman of O.K. Corral gunfight fame. Sounds pretty Heritage-y to me.

But those are all maternal ancestors. On my father’s side, I am a third-generation Swedish-American, and according to Pastor Joel Webbon, another white-nationalist firebrand with growing influence these days, “first-generation immigrants can never be true Americans. But neither can [the] second generation, even if born and raised here.”

He has a point. It takes diasporas a while to dissolve, if they are not replenished. My Swedish-born great-grandmother would ask her children, when they brought home friends from the one-room prairie schoolhouse, “Ar de svenskar eller Amerikaner?” (“Are they Swedes or Americans?”)

Then again, the immigrant Swedish-American pioneers and their children were white and Protestant, and they cleared land for small family farms. One of my ancestors on the Swedish side worked as a cowboy on a cattle ranch. Heritage or Hyphenates?

To complicate matters further, I am also one-eighth Jewish (the Union cavalryman shot by the American Indian during the Civil War was an Austrian-Jewish immigrant). Can Jews be Heritage Americans? According to Pastor Webbon, America is “not for Hindus. It’s not for Muslims. And it’s not for Jews. It belongs to Christians.” Non-Christians “can be in the car … but they don’t get to drive.” Now I’m worried that my driver’s license will be revoked in the Heritage American Regime.

My identity crisis deepens. To be fair, I have been confused about my racial identity for most of my life. According to the US Census, I was born a simple “white.” But then, in the 1970s, the federal government resolved that I’m a “non-Hispanic white,” a term made up by the Census in those years as a catch-all encompassing every white ethnic group that doesn’t know how to make good tamales. Under the Biden administration, the Census added a new category, “Middle Eastern and North African,” or MENA, that includes many ethnically Jewish people (in addition to Persians, Gulf Arabs, Levantines and Mesopotamians, and Amazighs, among others). Am I still a non-Hispanic white, or, as a one-eighth Jew, am I a MENA?

Confusing matters further, under halachic law, I am Jewish because my mother’s mother’s mother was Jewish. And yet under the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, I would have been classified as a non-Jewish Mischling of the second degree, rather than a Jew.

Bottom line: I don’t know whether I am a simple white, a non-Hispanic white, a MENA, a Jew, a second-degree Mischling, or a Heritage American.

Let’s turn from biological race to American culture. According to Ben R. Crenshaw, a doctoral student at Hillsdale College and another race-Right theorist: “Liberalism only ‘worked’ in America because these [white British Protestant] identities were commonly known and accepted… Thus, if America hopes to regain her strength, to preserve her historic people and way of life, and not be plundered of her wealth and inheritance by international pirates, then she must recover her own identity politics. She must ask and answer with force and conviction what her identity is. And then, she must have the political will to once again practice a politics of exclusion and preservation if she hopes to remain America much longer.”

Who knew that everything good in this country was done by my old-stock ancestors before all those non-British Europeans at Ellis Island and recent immigrants from elsewhere in the world arrived and screwed everything up? Is there a club I can join, like Sons of Heritage America? A secret handshake? Discounts on Heritage Americana on sale at the local Cracker Barrel?

I have to confess that I like the idea that, if I qualify as a Heritage American, citizens of other ancestries should ritually offer their thanks to my progenitors. It would be nice if, when I am on an airplane, the pilot would announce: “We have a Heritage American on the flight today, please give him a round of applause.” And I would smile benignly as strangers shook my hand, saying, “Thank you for the service of your British Protestant ancestors.”

To be honest, though, I’m not convinced my British ancestors really deserve to be retroactively thanked for taking part in a heroic, visionary effort to found a new society. Most of them just wanted to buy land and maybe slaves and make money. Many of my colonial-era English ancestors in the 1600s seem to have been indentured servants, brought over as contract laborers to work for fixed terms for this or that Southern tobacco farmer with a headright granted by the Crown, before obtaining their freedom.

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As for the Scots-Irish in my family tree, they didn’t cross the Atlantic from Northern Ireland in the 1700s because they had a bold spirit of adventure and wanted to wrassle bears, wear coonskin caps, make moonshine, and invent NASCAR. They were victims of rising rents charged by English landlords who gentrified Ulster, after having used the Scots-Irish as their shock troops in subjugating and ethnically cleansing the Catholic Irish.

As far as I know, neither my English nor my Scots-Irish ancestors before 1776 had any intention of creating a nation-state organized as a democratic republic that would be independent of the British Empire and a beacon of liberty to the world. Only a few zealous Puritans in New England had grand visions of the American future, hoping that the saints of New England would launch the conversion of humanity to Calvinism — not liberal democracy.

To be fair, pan-racial categories like non-Hispanic white and “MENA” and Asian and Pacific Islander are just as absurd as the idea of a pan-white, pan-Christian, or pan-Protestant Heritage American. The political scientist Eric Kaufmann has observed that the US system since the 1970s has been one of “asymmetric multiculturalism” — pan-racial categories get to have their own official “cultures” and “traditions” and “symbols,” but that is not allowed for whites — sorry, non-Hispanic whites.

Forget, for a moment, domineering white Christian nationalism. Why not allow symmetrical multiculturalism, in which the color white is added to the rainbow in a non-aggressive way?  Why not White Pride Week and White Heritage Month and a White History Museum on the national mall, where tourists can learn about the many contributions to our country of white Americans like George Washington and Thomas Edison and Lady Gaga?

The problem is that many stereotypically “white” cultural traditions are not, in fact, white in their origins. For centuries, despite division along the lines of racial castes, American culture has been a mixed-race melting-pot culture. The archetypical corn-fed Midwestern farm boy was fed on maize, developed originally in Mesoamerica by Native Americans. Barbecue? From barbacoa, a loan word in Spanish from the Taino Indians of the Caribbean for a meat smoker.

The American cowboy is a version of the Mexican vaquero, from his lariat (la reata) to his chaps (chaparreras) to his boots. In the 1950s and ’60s, a majority of American suburban houses were ranch-style homes, popularized by Cliff May, whose one-story designs with patios (another Spanish word) were inspired by the homes of his Spanish and Mexican ancestors in California. The banjo? An African instrument, brought to the New World by slaves and popularized among whites by 19th-century minstrel shows.

If you throw out everything in white American culture except colonial-era British Protestant imports, you’re left with — what, exactly? Boston baked beans? Buckled shoes? So maybe we should think twice before inventing Kwanzaa for white people.

Like pan-racial “cultures,” pan-racial political solidarity of any kind is rare in the United States. The slowly eroding bloc voting of black Americans is the exception to the rule. Though tilting toward Democrats, Hispanics and Asian-Americans have long divided their votes between the two parties. So have so-called Heritage Americans.

The Patriot and Loyalist factions in the Anglo-Protestant majority fought each in the Revolutionary War. A few generations later, Northern Anglo-Protestants and Southern Anglo-Protestants fought in the Civil War, which killed more Americans — mostly white Protestant Americans — than all other US conflicts combined.

Plus, white Americans have always been found in rival parties. In the 2024 election, white voters, who made up 71% of the electorate, were pretty evenly split, with 57% voting for Trump and 42% voting for Harris. To the perpetual dismay of white nationalists, the political divisions among white Americans — regional, religious, cultural, class-based — have always defeated any pan-white consciousness, even in the most racist eras in American history. Though a few of its members may infiltrate the Republican Party now and then, the fringe Right will remain on the fringe because there is no chance that normal, sane white Americans will ever be persuaded that they must set aside their other differences and unite in politics against domestic racial and religious minorities and nonwhite and non-Christian immigrants.

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Darryl Cooper, the online autodidact who provoked outrage when Tucker Carlson let him spread his revisionist views about Nazi mass murder, made this obvious point in a podcast with the nativist writer Scott Greer: “Most of the Southern racialists I know are closer to neo-Confederates than white nationalists, and don’t labor under the illusion that they share much of a common destiny, let alone a common identity, with Portland hipsters or Upper East Side Jews, or even liberal Yankee elites, for that matter.”

Given the many divisions among Heritage Americans, the United States isn’t going to become a white Protestant ethno-state any time soon — certainly not under President Trump, with his Jewish in-laws and Jewish-convert daughter. Indeed, the only way in which the GOP can hope to obtain a sustainable political majority is to build upon the gains made by Trump in the 2024 election among working-class Hispanic and black voters.

Contra the Heritage Americans, the racial divide is weakening in US politics and giving way to the “diploma divide” among all races. Nothing could undercut the growth of the Republican coalition more than toleration by mainstream Republicans and conservatives of fringe white nationalists, who have podcasts and fly-by-night churches and rural compounds, but no significant number of voters behind them. To quote Tennessee lawmaker and frontiersman David Crockett, a Heritage American if ever there was one: “That don’t make sense. It don’t even make good nonsense.”

Two weeks earlier, the pope instructed the American bishops to take a stronger stance in defense of migrants caught in the Trump administration’s dragnet. The pontiff suggested that he would “love” to see a statement from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, according to one bishop who attended a meeting with him. Another attendee reported that the pope would like to see the US church speak “forcefully and in unity” on migrants’ rights.

Already, many individual US bishops and Catholic groups are doing just that. Yet for such interventions to prove fruitful, the Church must take a more holistic, nuanced, and, indeed, Catholic approach: one that takes into account not just the needs of people moving out of the Global South, but also the limitations of the Global North; not just the dignity of the migrant, but also that of workers and the poor in recipient countries; not just the threat of Western xenophobia, but the imperative to ensure a decent baseline of cultural cohesion.

To be sure, there is much to object to in Washington’s stance: the White House posting photos on X (formerly Twitter) of  “deportation porn” of rows of men being flown out in shackles; the government’s foot-dragging when ordered by the courts to facilitate the return of a man who had been mistakenly deported to El Salvador; the difficulties in getting pastoral care to illegal immigrants being held at the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in Florida; and much else of the kind. These are among the excesses for which the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts can justly be criticized.

But with immigration enforcement as in other areas, abusus non tollit usum — the abuse of a thing does not negate its proper use. And when we neglect the proper use in order to avoid abuse, we risk falling into an opposite extreme error. 

As the bishops themselves sometimes acknowledge at least in passing, the general policy of enforcing immigration laws is legitimate. And while the Trump administration’s efforts have been excessively harsh at times, the surge in illegal immigration under President Joe Biden was so massive that any attempt to reverse it was bound to seem draconian by comparison. It is contrary to reason and justice to speak as if only Trump’s critics have a moral leg to stand on.

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By Kat Rosenfield

It is also contrary to the Church’s own longstanding teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that prosperous nations are obliged “to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin.” But it qualifies this by adding that such nations are obliged to do so only “to the extent they are able.”  

And the Catechism goes on to say: “Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws, and to assist in carrying civic burdens.”

The Church acknowledges, then, that a nation may put conditions on immigration, that it need not take in all those who want to enter it, and that those it does allow in must follow the law. 

The Catechism reflects the longstanding teaching of the popes. For example, Pope Pius XII, while commending the United States for its generosity toward immigrants, observed in 1946 that “it is not surprising that changing circumstances have brought about a certain restriction being placed on foreign immigration. For in this matter, not only the interests of the immigrant but the welfare of the country also must be consulted.”

The economic needs of its own citizens are among the considerations a government may weigh when determining how many immigrants to let in. In a 1996 address, Pope St. John Paul II affirmed that “illegal immigration should be prevented” and that “the supply of foreign labor is becoming excessive in comparison to the needs of the economy, which already has difficulty in absorbing its domestic workers.” Likewise, in a 2011 address, Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged that host countries also have a “legitimate concern for security and social coherence” so that “states have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers” and “immigrants … have the duty to integrate into the host country, respecting its laws and its national identity.”

And in a 1988 document from the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, we read that “it is up to the public powers who are responsible for the common good to determine the number of refugees or immigrants which their country can accept, taking into consideration its possibilities for employment and its perspectives for development, but also the urgency of the need of other people.” Overly heavy migration waves, the document warns, can lead to “rejection,” especially when “another culture is perceived as directly threatening the identity and customs of the local community that receives them.”

Note that the Church here explicitly affirms that it is not churchmen, but rather “the public powers who are responsible for the common good” who have the right and responsibility to determine how many immigrants to let in. Note, too, that the Church acknowledges that in making this determination, public authorities may take account of economic considerations, as well as those having to do with social and cultural cohesion.

The legitimacy of this concern for national identity is something that has been affirmed repeatedly in the Catholic tradition. In his book Memory and Identity, first published in 2005, John Paul II affirmed that the duty of patriotism is an extension of our obligation to honor our parents, and writes: “Patriotism is a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its natural features. It is a love which extends also to the works of our compatriots and the fruits of their genius. Every danger that threatens the overall good of our native land becomes an occasion to demonstrate this love.” 

Several popes have been quite frank about the social problems that can develop when a minority cultural group fails to assimilate to the larger culture in which it resides. For example, in the encyclical Pacem in Terris, Pope St. John XXIII observed that “these minority groups, in reaction, perhaps, to the enforced hardships of their present situation, or to historical circumstances, frequently tend to magnify unduly characteristics proper to their own people.  They even rate them above those human values which are common to all mankind, as though the good of the entire human family should subserve the interests of their own particular groups.” He went on to call for such groups to associate themselves more closely with the majorities among whom they live, and not to harness their identity to separateness.

Pope Francis, too, acknowledged the problem. In a 2016 press conference, he noted that while “hearts must not be closed to refugees … those who govern need prudence … A political price can be paid for an imprudent judgment, for accepting more than can be integrated.” Non-integration, Francis warned, leads to migrants becoming “a ghetto. A culture that does not develop in relationship with another culture, this is dangerous.”

Most recently, Pope Leo XIV, in an address in which he praised Italy’s generosity to migrants, immediately went on to underscore “the importance of constructively integrating those arriving into the values ​​and traditions of Italian society.” 

Yes, there are yahoos and jingoists who go beyond a healthy love of country to a sinful hostility towards people of other nations. But it is unjust and uncharitable to accuse all of those who are concerned about the cultural cohesion and economic needs of their own country of harboring this dishonorable motivation.

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How American is the Pope?

By Alexander Lucie-Smith

For its part, the Church has treated immigration as it does every other major question of public policy: not just a matter of individual rights and dignity — though these are indeed important — but also of duties to the common good of the whole. Thought of this way, the Catholic position on immigration doesn’t lend itself well to simplistic “pro” or “anti” posturing.

The truth is that there are two, equally Catholic sides in the debate over immigration. One side thinks that the imperative to welcome the migrant is what most needs emphasis today. The other thinks that preserving law and order, and the economic well-being and cultural identity of the nation is what is currently most urgent. Both can appeal to moral premises rooted in the Catholic tradition. Their dispute is about how best to balance the various relevant considerations under contemporary circumstances — a matter of prudential judgment about which reasonable people can disagree.

In the 21st century, that prudential determination must take into account new realities: such as the fact that many of today’s newcomers are economic migrants relying on strained asylum systems to get through borders; and the fact that developed economies are already bereft of high-wage, reliable manufacturing jobs, pushing many native-born workers into service sectors buffeted by even cheaper migrant labor; and the identitarian turmoil wrought by decades of high migration and failed assimilation. 

The bishops have a pastoral obligation to acknowledge the concerns of both sides, rather than speaking as if only one side is truly Catholic. It is precisely when people think their legitimate concerns are not being taken seriously that they are most tempted to fall into extremism. In his essay “A Defense of Patriotism,” G. K. Chesterton warned that when a nation does not cultivate a sober “patriotism of the head and heart,” it will sink instead into a thuggish chauvinism “of its fists and its boots.” 

The remedy to this excess is not to retreat to the opposite error, but to insist on holding the middle ground — the true patriotism described by St. John Paul II as a part of the Fourth Commandment to honor father and mother. “What we really need for the frustration and overthrow of a deaf and raucous jingoism,” advised Chesterton, “is a renascence of the love of the native land. When that comes, all shrill cries will cease suddenly.”