Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty once boasted the world’s finest erudition — Erasmus, Archbishop Whitgift, and the “greatest scholar that England or perhaps that Europe ever bred”, Richard Bentley. Now it’s the kind of institution that “challenges itself… to think more deeply about race and to learn from those who have been marginalized”. A few years ago, Jordan Peterson was offered a visiting fellowship; a gaggle of students and academics ensured that this was abruptly rescinded. When Peterson was re-invited to Cambridge some time later, a group within the faculty, calling itself “Divine Dissent”, resolved to expose the “alt-/far-Right influence” in their midst. They doubtless had a particular character in mind.

James Orr, Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty, is best known to the world as JD Vance’s “British sherpa“. He has recently acquired a further title: Nigel Farage’s Svengali. He has been dipping his toes into turquoise waters for some time: his think tank, the Center for a Better Britain, is housed with Reform HQ at Milbank Tower, and has been busily supplying the intellectual foundations for Farage’s wider project. Orr might be to Farage as Keith Joseph was to Thatcher, or Anthony Giddens to Blair. As Farage’s senior adviser, Orr’s principal task is to prepare for government.

The Britain which Farage and Orr hope to inherit has, it would be fair to say, seen better days. It is plagued by sporadic bouts of violence; its social contract seems to be falling apart; there is little economic growth to speak of, and even less any notion of national ambition or self-belief. The British people are responding to the hanging sense of gloom in various ways: some by throwing their lot in with Zack Polanski or Zarah Sultana; others, who made their presence felt at the Unite the Kingdom rally, by committing themselves to a renewed kind of Christian nationalism. Orr is convinced, like many, that Britain’s present crisis is fundamentally spiritual. Who better to cure the nation’s souls than a Cambridge divine?

Orr has already been engaged in some soul-curing closer to home. Not far from Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty is Orr’s sprawling estate. The Catholic writer Rod Dreher once excitedly described it as a “form of the Benedict Option”, putting into practice his recommendation, in his book of that name, for Christians to retreat from the world and form communities of their own. Orr, for his part, jokes that Orr’s home is a “Right-wing Mecca”. The whole place sounds almost like a Cambridge college, perhaps even a “safe space”: somewhere for young people of a particular disposition to rub shoulders and nourish their minds, far away from the Harry Potter shops and Progress Pride flags that have taken over the city center. Clearly it is not quite Benedictine: it’s more like a Cambridge Asturias, preparing for an anti-woke Reconquista. Half the Right-wingers at Cambridge seem to have moored themselves there at some point or other, lodging in huts in the garden like a revolving cast of Catholic gnomes.

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Orr is very much a man of the establishment. Like Boris Johnson, he grew up in Brussels and read Greats at Balliol; in the intervening years, he was the year above Rishi Sunak at Winchester. He is a devout follower of Sir Roger Scruton, whose bust watches over his home and whose Legacy Foundation he helps to run. What sets him apart among Scruton’s many scions on the conservative landscape is his fluency in both languages of the contemporary Right. Here his middle-agedness is an asset. With the old Tory patricians, he can harp on about faith, family, flag, freedom, and “common sense” — although, since his jump to Reform, he has been able to speak about the “dinosaurs” more freely. He is equally in his element with the younger, hard-edged “new Right”, which is laser-focused on immigration and views all else as a frivolous sideshow. When interviewed by Steven Edginton on GB News, Orr is at ease in such “very online” matters as “Yookay Aesthetics”. He endears himself to his interviewer with his knowledge of Lee Kuan Yew quotations and his roster of statistics about demographics. It’s hard to imagine a “postliberal” of the old school launching into the conversation with such gusto.

At one point in that interview, Orr laments that Cockney English is in decline. His affection for Cockney may help explain his improbable friendship with Tom Skinner, who describes Orr as “one of the most educated geezers” he knows. Orr’s mission in Reform is to bring in talent, and Skinner has been touted as a potential standard-bearer, even perhaps a London mayor. Interviewing Matt Goodwin on his podcast, First Light, Orr worries that Reform has a personnel problem, and urgently needs to attract bright young things to prepare for government. One wonders whether there will be any Orr-backed alumni on the ballot in 2029.

But strange things are afoot on the religious Right, especially on the younger end. The self-declared “Reactionary Catholic Zoomer” Connor Tomlinson, who is close to Liz Truss and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and boasts almost 100,000 followers on X, questions whether those adhering to “any faith other than Christian”, or belonging to “any ethnicity besides British”, should be allowed to hold public office.

Then there’s the Reverend Calvin Robinson, who, like Tomlinson, is an affiliate of the Lotus Eaters podcast, and who has spent the last few years jumping from one Christian domination to another. Earlier this year he was defrocked by the Anglican Catholic Church in America for doing what appeared to be a Nazi salute at the National Pro-Life Summit. Tommy Robinson, meanwhile, loudly proclaims that he has found God, and what remains of UKIP marches under the Cross. In reaction, perhaps, to rising sectarian politics under other guises, Christian nationalism is now finding form on the fringes. Fearing that Reform might follow suit, Neville Watson — until recently the party’s only black branch chair, and himself an evangelical Christian — has decided to quit.

Towards the end of his conversation with Edginton, Orr expresses some reservations about the more radical elements. He is eager to disavow any conspiratorial thinking about mass migration. Nor, he maintains, did it ever occur to him or his fellow Wykehamites in the Nineties that the teenage Sunak was anything other than English. In response to Edginton’s insistent call for mass deportations — he tends to close his interviews this way — Orr insists that Farage has to “broaden out” and can’t “keep throwing red meat to the base”. The Caerphilly byelection has since proved the point: Reform must be careful not to frighten too many people into tactical voting. Part of Orr’s task will be to rein in the overexcitable youngsters, for pragmatic as well as conscientious reasons.

Orr might, however, compound Reform’s problems. Farage’s closeness to the Trump administration is already a millstone around his neck (he will be painfully aware of what happened to Pierre Poilievre in Canada): 55% of British voters dislike the American President. Orr’s buddy Vance is running at net disapproval even among Reform voters; of those who supported the Conservatives last year, 68% views him negatively. Nor will Reform be much helped by Orr’s views on social policy. His opposition to abortion under all circumstances is shared by only 6% of the public — hardly the stuff of a populist mass movement.

American conservatism is off-putting to the British mainstream in part because of its religious style. The gaudy enthusiasms of the evangelical Right are liable to produce an aesthetic revulsion in the British observer; something of this was conveyed even by Orr himself, when he remarked, of Charlie Kirk’s memorial extravaganza, that it was “not quite how we do things in Britain”.

Ultimately it would not be in Reform’s interest to become, or to be seen as, a “Christian party”. Indeed, the nonreligious currently outnumber Christians among Reform voters. The politics of the established church, meanwhile, are far more “Divine Dissent” than Orr: observe the recent furore over graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral, criticized by JD Vance, and Farage’s quarrel with the Archbishop of York. Britain’s actually-existing Christian politics, then, it is not one that Right-wingers tend to care for.

Orr is but the latest conservative Christian public intellectual to find himself swimming upstream in this manner. As another resolutely Right-wing Cambridge don, Maurice Cowling, once recognized, “the habitual sensibility in contemporary England is post-Christian or anti-Christian [and] it will require both intellectual effort and an effort of the will if it is to be modified”. Cowling was hopeful on this score, but it must be admitted that it hasn’t happened yet for a reason. There is plenty of effort and plenty of will coming out of Orr’s farm, but their fruits will find little appetite among the secular British public.

Yet there is at least one significant difference between Cold Wars 1.0 and 2.0. In Cold War 1.0, ideological dispute between Left and Right mapped directly onto geopolitical conflict. The First Cold War was a trial of state strength, measured in terms of military might and the extent of a country’s diplomatic influence. But it was also a competition between social systems, political visions and rival ideologies: the capitalist markets of the West versus the socialist command economies of the East. It was a trial of whether competitive, multi-party liberalism could extract more political legitimacy from its citizens when compared to communist single-party states. The trial, then, was about more than innovation in weapons systems; it also involved questions of individual rights and state legitimacy.

By contrast, the ideological fissures of today’s cold war do not clearly map onto these international rivalries. Instead, they yield a much more complex picture of political tension and geopolitical rivalry. It is true that China is still ruled by a Communist Party that won power back in 1948, but China is not the champion of Leftism in the way the USSR was. There is now a stock market in Beijing — China’s third stock market, after Shanghai and Shenzhen — and, by some reckonings, China has more billionaires than the US itself. Many of these billionaires made their fortunes after China began to enmesh its economy with the world’s. The USSR was part of Comecon, the autarkic trading regime of the Eastern bloc that kept its members sequestered from the wider world economy, but the Chinese and US economies are deeply intertwined. This much is evident from the complexity of the tariff negotiations currently underway between the two countries’ trade negotiators. 

At the same time, the two powers’ navies menace each other in the Pacific. The tensions between the countries are real, but so is their inter-dependence. Each side represents one of the two wings of global capitalism, with industrial capital concentrated in China and finance capital in the US. While Donald Trump has been vocal in accusing China of stealing American jobs and exporting poisonous fentanyl to US consumers, he and his administration have been relatively muted in their political criticism of the Chinese regime. This makes sense when one considers that China, like the US, is capitalist, and that China, by the same token, offers little ideological challenge to US global leadership. Ironically, as China’s industrial might has grown, its ideological influence has diminished. Red China was never ideologically more powerful than in the heyday of Maoism, when China was much weaker. Back then, Red China sought to inspire a global guerrilla war among the Third World’s legions of poor peasants, also claiming the allegiance of student radicals on Western campuses. (Impressed by China, the Black Panthers notoriously sold copies of Mao’s Little Red Book in order to raise money for guns.)

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Today, China’s infrastructural investments are helping those countries of the Global South convert their poor rural folk into urban city-dwellers. But former Western Maoists such as Bernard-Henri Lévy have become neo-conservatives, obsessed with bloody crusades to spread democracy to the Middle East, while China quietly consolidated its rise. 

In Cold War 1.0, Maoist ideological excess compensated for China’s relative weakness when compared to the military might of Soviet Russia. Today the roles are reversed: it is Russia that now occupies the relatively weaker position in the new Sino-Russian alliance. Predictably enough, it is Russian leader Vladimir Putin, more than Chinese leader Xi Jinping who has put most effort in trying to cultivate his own state as an alternative ideological pole in the international system. Putin rails against Western hegemony and has tried to style himself as a champion of global conservatism and family values against the spread of transnational Western liberalism. Yet Putin’s ideological reach is even more limited than that of Chairman Mao. His posture is fundamentally reactive and defensive, and his cultural defence of the Orthodox Church and “Russian world” will, by its very nature, have limited reach beyond Russia itself. While Trump is slowly tightening the noose of anti-Russian sanctions in an effort to induce a ceasefire in Ukraine, it is unsurprising that the White House has expended so little effort in criticising Putin’s vision of the crabbed, distempered Russian bailiwick. 

So where, if not between China and the US, or the US and Russia, can we find the key ideological battle line of Cold War 2.0? The line does not run so much between East and West as within the West itself: between the US and Europe. That the US is fighting an ideological cold war with Europe is most obvious in the diplomacy of Trump’s vice-president, J.D. Vance. Vance unleashed the opening volley in this ideological attack in his extraordinary speech delivered at the Munich Security Conference in February, when he calmly and methodically took apart the dismal record of European states on individual liberty and democratic rights. He criticized EU interference in the Romanian presidential elections of the previous year and even named the British anti-abortion activist Adam Smith-Connor, arrested in 2024 for silently praying outside an abortion clinic. In doing so, Vance adopted the same manner and tone that American leaders adopted when speaking out about the squashing of popular opposition in the Eastern bloc and the maltreatment of Soviet dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov or writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Following his speech, Vance met with Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) leader Alice Weidel — a figure of obloquy for the European liberal orthodoxy. On his current holiday in the Cotswolds, Vance has not only once-again criticized the British record on free speech, he is also meeting Robert Jenrick — the dissident rival to the current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.

When was the last time that a Chinese or Russian dissenter achieved the renown of Smith-Connor, by virtue of being cited in a speech by a major US political figure? The barbs do not come from Vance alone. Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, has criticized the German state’s suppression of the national-populist AfD party as “tyranny in disguise”. EU leaders rallied together against Vance’s assault, with former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz defending continental restrictions on free speech. The German foreign office even took to X to criticize Rubio for interfering in Germany’s internal affairs. This is to say nothing of the years of bitter invective that have been hurled by European politicians and commentators against Trump ever since 2016. They have denounced him as a pro-Russian stooge, a demagogue and a fascist — only to downplay such remarks years later. Even Trump, who has mostly left the international ideological battles to Vance, embarrassed UK prime minister Keir Starmer on his recent private visit to Scotland. The mere mention of free speech by Trump was enough to induce gurning, tortured denials from Starmer.

There are some important differences between the former cold war and its new pan-Atlantic counterpart. When Western leaders denounced communism in the first cold war, they did so by arguing that the Soviets’ centralized economy, and appropriation of private property, was necessarily a totalitarian enterprise. Vance, by contrast, takes the Europeans to task for falling foul of their own ideals rather than realizing some larger sinister purpose. More recently, he has also accused Europe of engaging in civilizational suicide through its unwillingness to halt mass migration. The historically unprecedented inflows represent not only a divergence from the legacy of the Western civilization shared by the US and Europe, but a flouting of the elites’ democratic compact with their people. Repeatedly, voters have indicated their exasperation with the scale of mass migration; repeatedly, they have been ignored.

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Vance’s ideological confidence, as he suggested in his speech in Munich, rests on the democratic mandate won by Trump. Barracked by Vance and his colleagues, European leaders react defensively, for they are more used to bureaucratic haggling in the committee rooms of Brussels than dealing with European voters. As with any cold war, both sides recoil from full-frontal assaults: they beat hasty retreats, seek to patch up relations and make assurances of enduring alliances. But there is no mistaking the underlying political drift.

This Euro-American ideological cold war reflects the underlying political and even economic divergence between the US and Europe. Not only does the EU cling to its outdated political model — that of a supranational trade bloc designed for the technocratic regulation of globalization — it also remains ideologically and strategically committed to the economic policies of that bygone era, too. At the top of the EU’s agenda remain multilateral free trade deals, deindustrialization and expensive renewables. By contrast, the Trump administration is wielding a strong democratic mandate in its effort to re-industrialize North America behind tariff barriers that penalize Europe. It is expanding its use of fossil fuels and reducing its reliance on renewable energy.

Ideological crusades abroad, including Vance’s, always reflect domestic needs. In this case, MAGA’s desire is to assert national interests over the liberal globalism championed by the Democrats. That Vance can afford to launch an ideological cold war on Europe reflects a hard material reality: Europe simply matters much less to the US in Cold War 2.0 than it did in the first cold war. Vance can afford to be so pointed in his criticisms of the liberal, globalist EU because he knows that Europe needs America more than America needs Europe. The EU is dependent on the US for both its security and its energy, but offers little to the US in its struggle with China.

Whereas the first cold war fused ideological and geopolitical rivalry into one great bipolar stand-off, Cold War 2.0 seems like it will be characterized by financial multipolarity (as the primacy of the dollar is gradually eroded), geopolitical bipolarity (between China and the US), and ideological tripolarity, between the populist-democratic US, the liberal-technocratic EU and a conservative Russia. As an island nation formally independent of the EU, Britain — like other middle powers — might find that this new world order is rich in opportunities. It also benefits from lower tariffs than those imposed on the EU. But seizing such opportunities also requires a willingness to duck and weave in pursuit of our national interest, and, so far, our stubbornly globalist uniparty has been unwilling to show much political dexterity. For Britain, as for many other states, seizing the national interest will require internal political renewal.

Unsurprisingly, neither proposed mental construct landed very well with President Trump’s populist-nationalist base, and Ramaswamy was soon duly shuffled off to a term of exile in Ohio. In the one view, “America” is merely a glorified economic zone, just one part of a “competitive global market” in which labor and capital flow freely. In the other, America is a professional franchise whose sole objective is to maximize winnings. In both cases, America is viewed as analogous to a corporation. In such a corporation, management’s only responsibility is to profits; it has no inherent responsibility to employees or their wellbeing, something of interest only insofar as it translates into productivity.

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The corporate machine views employees merely as interchangeable human resources, to whom it owes no loyalty. Indeed, if it is to effectively devote itself to profit maximization the company can afford no permanent relational bonds with any of those who work for it, as it must be able to fire or replace them based on cold utilitarian calculus. There are thus few experiences employees find as irritating as that common workplace psyop in which management proclaims the corporate office to be a “family”. Employees know implicitly that it is natural affections and iron-clad mutual loyalties, or at least strong relational bonds, that are precisely what distinguish a family. Their corporate employer, in contrast, won’t hesitate to dump them by the wayside the moment they fall into the wrong column of a spreadsheet. For their part, employees are liable to return the sentiment and retain no lasting loyalty to the company – though perhaps plenty of resentment.

What angered many about the two CEOs’ comments was that — like so many among today’s elite class — they displayed no sense of loyalty or obligation to Americans as a nation. A nation is not a corporation. A nation is a particular people, with a distinct culture, permanently bound together by shared relationship with place, past, and each other. A house becomes a home through the relationship with the family that lives in it, a connection forged out of time and memory, between the concrete particularity of place and the lives of a specific group of people present, past, and yet unborn. We can say this house is home because it is our home. In much the same way, a country becomes our homeland because it is ours — and the we of that “ours” is the nation, which transcends geography, government, and GDP.

Unlike a corporation, a nation really is much like a family. And, like a family, it is characterized by strong relational bonds that are covenantal, not contractual. A nation establishes moral obligations of solidarity and subsidiarity that cannot be simply abandoned. Much as we naturally would, and should, put our own children’s lives and wellbeing ahead of others’, a nation is obligated to distinguish its own from others and to put the wellbeing of its own first. If it fails to do so, then it can no longer remain a nation any more than a family could remain a family were it to try to extend the fold of its care equally to all humanity. Only once our immediate duties to those closest to us are fulfilled can concern for the good of others be rightly extended further outward. And though we may choose to adopt a child into our family, we cannot as readily toss them. We cannot, say, swap out our child for a different one who is more likely to get better grades in math class or willing to perform chores for a lesser allowance. A nation-state is no more justly able to replace its own people or neglect its unique obligations to them simply because doing so seems more profitable or convenient.

Yet a family is hardly built on obligation alone. A healthy family is founded, ordered, governed, and sustained by love. It is love that binds its members together, forges their sense of responsibility, guides their conduct, and directs their proper care for one another. And it is love that directs us to rightly set our concern for these particular people above others, in the proper ordo amoris, or order of loves.

Love is not, cannot be, universal. It is born in particulars and defined by distinction. Should we say we love our neighbor, yet we do not love him for himself — with, or despite, all his unique eccentricities — but only insofar as we claim to love all people in the abstract, then we do not really love him. We cannot love our wife because she is a woman; we can only really love a particular woman. Thus, we believers find we must have faith that even the infinite God loves each of us in particular, numbering the very hairs on our heads; for his love to extend no further than to the mass of humanity as a species, as to a mass of sparrows, would be cold comfort indeed.

We love those people and those good things which are distinct and special to us, and those that are particularly our own all the more, but this hardly implies that we must then automatically hate all others. We do not hate other families’ children just because we love our own. Still, this twisted logic is today widely ascribed to one important expression of love: love for our own nation. Yet this is indeed what it means to be a nationalist: to love one’s own nation, in much the same way (if not quite as deeply) as one loves one’s own family.

As C.S. Lewis observed, patriotic love for one’s nation grows organically from that which is most local, familiar, and meaningful to us — from our love for our family, our land, and our community. From “this love for the place there goes a love for the way of life” of our nation, in all its many common particularities, all tied up together. In the case of Lewis’s England, “for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it”.

None of this implies that we then desire to impose this particular way of life on the rest of the world. But it does mean that none should be surprised that men might lay down their lives to defend their own nation as their own, and for no other reason. They do so for the same reason they would lay down their lives to defend their children, or their friends: because they love them. Common loves are the source of common loyalties, and of common life. As Lewis reminds us (paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton), “a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he could not even begin to enumerate all the things that would be lost”.

Yet, at least among our ruling classes, this natural reciprocal love between nation and citizen, which sustains our countries and our societies, seems to have long since frayed. This is no great shock, given that in our age the very idea of nationhood is itself decried, or outright denied, the nation-state stripped of the nation, the world reduced to a network of special economic zones. A man cannot love a special economic zone. Nor can its administrators possess any special feeling for its temporary inhabitants.

This grim status quo is no accident, however. It is the result of a deliberate, 80-year conspiracy against love, conducted out of fear. As I’ve argued elsewhere, after the Second World War, with trauma and totalitarianism haunting the world, the American and European leadership class resolved that these evils should never again threaten society. And they concluded that the emotional power of nationalism had been the central cause of the 20th century’s catastrophes, leading them to make anti-nationalism the cornerstone of the liberal establishment consensus that came to dominate culture and politics after the war.

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The philosopher Karl Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community writ large, labeling it disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda”, and smearing anyone who cherished his particular homeland and history as a “racialist”. Theodor Adorno, who set the direction of American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of the “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man inexorably toward fascism.

But the aversions of the post-war elite grew deeper than a philosophical anti-nationalism. As R.R. Reno writes in The Return of the Strong Gods (2019), the visceral imperative became to fully banish all the “strong gods” that fueled conflict, meaning all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies”. Strong bonds and strong loves of any kind — of family, nation, truth, God — came to be seen as dangerous, as sources of dogma, oppression, hatred, and violence. The peaceful and prosperous “open society” that the post-war establishment set out to instantiate would, as Reno puts it, “require the reign of weak loves and weak truths”, with all dangerous sentiment subordinate to the rule of cool rationality and tepid impartiality.

In this belief, post-war leaders embraced the legacy of Thomas Hobbes, who had viewed the wars which upended his own century as a product of the state of nature — the “war of all against all” — that constantly threatened to emerge from the pride and spiritedness (thumos) of mankind’s base natural personality. He saw the solution to this risk as man’s submission, out of fear, to the absolute power of a political leviathan — but also to an anthropological project, a program of metaphysical reeducation to turn man’s eye away from any summum bonum and downward toward only the fearful summum malum of struggle and death. As Matthew Crawford has succinctly explained, Hobbes believed that “any appeal to a higher good threatens to return us to the horrors of civil strife and must be debunked”, all our spirited passions and “vainglorious self-assertion” drained away so that we can consent to rule by Leviathan, “King of the Proud”.

With Hitler having firmly established himself as the summum malum of the post-war order, the liberal establishment embarked on their own version of Hobbes’s political-anthropological project. Seeking to dissolve the traditional “closed society” they feared was a breeding ground for authoritarianism, this “open society consensus” drew on theorists such as Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, and weaken bonds. New approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativize truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character development, cast doubt on authorities, vilify collective loyalties, break down boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of moral and relational bonds. Soon only economic prosperity and a vague universal humanitarianism became the only higher goods that it was morally acceptable to aim for as a society.

As government joined forces with post-war psychoanalysis, this program of subtle social control soon solidified into the modern therapeutic state — a regime that, as Christopher Lasch noted, successfully “substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic — to ‘scientific’ study as opposed to philosophical and political debate”. This removal of the political from politics lay at the heart of the post-war project’s aims. Its central desire was to reduce politics to mere administration, to bureaucratic processes, legal judgments, expert committees, and technocratic regulation — anything but fraught contention over such weighty matters as how we ought to live, organize society, or define who “we” are.

Public contention over genuinely political questions was now judged to be too dangerous to permit, even — indeed especially — in a democracy, where the ever-present spectre of the mob and the latent emotional power of the masses haunted post-war leaders. They dreamed of governance via scientific management, of reducing the political sphere to the dispassionate processes of a machine — to “a social technology… whose results can be tested by social engineering”, as Popper put it. The operation of such a machine could be limited to a cadre of carefully educated “institutional technologists”, in Popper’s words, or rather to Hegel’s imagined “universal class” of impartial civil servants, able to objectively derive the best decisions for everyone through the principles of universal Reason alone.

>The result was the construction of the managerial regimes that dominate the Western world today. These are characterized by vast, soulless administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance and “harm-reduction”, and a technocratic elite class schooled in social engineering and dissimulation. In such states the top priority is the careful management of public opinion through propaganda and censorship, not only in order to constrain democratic outcomes but so as to smooth over or avoid any serious discussion of contentious yet fundamentally political issues, such as migration policy.

Meanwhile, the common people of such regimes are practically encouraged to live as distracted consumers rather than citizens, the invisible hand of the free market and the inducements of commercial and hedonistic pursuits serving not only profits but a political function of pacification. It is preferable that the masses simply not care very much — about anything, but especially about the fate of their nation and the common good. That sort of collective consciousness, transcending self-interest and seeking higher order, was after all identified as a foreboding mark of the closed society.

Here, then, can we see the long historical roots of the open, neoliberal state pointed to as an ideal by Ramaswamy and Musk. Innocently or not, these libertarian-leaning businessmen’s conception of the polity is almost indistinguishable from the “post-national state” that devoutly Left-wing leaders such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau have set out to devolve their countries into. The “globalism” so often decried by populists is neither Left nor Right but the logical product of the rationalist universalism embraced by the 20th century’s post-war consensus. It is the inevitable result of treating people, and peoples, as interchangeable units in a mechanical system — that is, of regarding them without any distinguishing sense of love.

But, as is increasingly obvious in our turbulent 21st century, our loveless machine-states are deeply unstable. It turns out that attempting to remove all bonds of affection from politics introduces some fundamental problems of political order. Most important, it has delivered us a leadership class essentially incapable of responsible leadership.

The noble classes of the pre-modern world’s closed societies were still capable of displaying a real sense of noblesse oblige: of having a sacred obligation to and responsibility for the people they ruled, because they were theirs. Though modern cynics may dismiss this sentiment as a myth, it was often genuine. It is a striking fact, for instance, that the last real generation of Europe’s aristocratic elite was disproportionately savaged in the trenches of the First World War, the flower of its youth voluntarily marching off to die leading from the front in defense of their nations at a significantly higher rate than ordinary soldiers. Eton, the nursery of the British aristocracy, lost more than a thousand of its students during the war — a 20% casualty rate compared to the army’s national average of 12%.

Today, our elites no longer betray any similar sense of special obligation to their people. But then we can hardly expect them to, given that all the strong bonds of loyalty that once tied them to their countrymen, transcending divides of wealth, education, and class, have been severed. They conceive of themselves as meritocrats, of no special birth and therefore no special responsibility. More importantly, they have been taught from birth that they ought not even conceive of their nation as particularly their own or to love it any more than any other portion of humanity; their self-conceived domain is one without borders, the global empire of the open society.

Whom does government serve? This is perhaps the most pressing question of politics. In theory the leadership class that rules us is supposed to represent and govern on behalf of the common people and their best interests. This is meant to be precisely what distinguishes our regimes from tyranny, “tyranny” in the classical lexicon meaning rule for private gain rather than for the common good. But no one can truly represent or act rightly for the wellbeing of another if they bear no particular concern for them. It is love, and only love, that can really guarantee that anyone acts in the best interest of another when they could do otherwise. Love is the only force capable of genuinely liberating us from selfishness.

It is a modern conceit that those with power are kept restrained, uncorrupted, and ordered to justice and the common good primarily by lifeless structural guardrails, by the abstract checks and balances of constitutions and laws. The ancients would have maintained that it is far more important that a king be virtuous, and that he love his people. And is this not plausible? Fundamentally, a father doesn’t treat his children well, refraining from abusing or neglecting them and raising them rightly, just because he obediently follows the law or some correct set of rules and standard operating procedures. He does so because he loves his family, and from that love flows automatically a spontaneous ordering of all his intentions toward their good. He would do so even in the absence of externally imposed rules. Love is an invisible hand all its own.

It is this invisible hand, not that of the market, that is so glaringly absent from the heart of our nations. If ours seems a cold and callous age in general, our ruling class, characterized by its indifference and our societies by division, dissolution, and despair, surely this lack is the real cause. As Reno writes, “the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems”. With today’s elite “unable to identify our shared loves —unable even to formulate the ‘we’ that is the political subject in public life — we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica”.

The enlightened man, the conservative Russel Kirk once noted, “does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success…” Nor does he hold any foolish political “intention of converting this human society of ours into an efficient machine for efficient machine-operators, dominated by master mechanics.” What he recognizes instead is that “the object of life is Love.” And, so, he knows, what’s more, “that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt”.

If the countries of the West are still capable of renewal, that renewal will come only when our leadership classes recover an uncorrupted love for the particular people — the nation — over which they govern and commit to placing their wellbeing first. We are fortunate then that, in the hearts of some of them at least, this recovery seems at last to have begun.

One clear reason is economic: Mass low-wage migration depresses wages, especially on the lower rungs of the labor market. Progressives would do well to come to grips with this reality, even as the Trumpians would be wise neither to overstep their mandate nor to limit their policy to showy and polarizing deportation actions.

To see why, it’s worth examining the history. Between 1965 and 1995, the share of Americans who favored lower immigration rates rose to 65%, up from a third. The shift in attitudes corresponded with a dramatic rise in low-skilled legal — and especially illegal — immigration. Migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border reached 1.64 million in 2000, more than double the rate in 1980 (the 2000 peak would be surpassed under Team Biden).

Mass illicit immigration was and continues to be a feature of the neoliberal model that first took hold in the Seventies. The neoliberal order establishes the primacy of the market over state and society by promoting the free flow of goods, capital, and, crucially, people (that last element is often omitted by progressive critics of neoliberalism). Unsurprisingly, the decade that saw the highest volume of illegal immigration was the Nineties — an era of unfettered globalization, deregulation, and free trade epitomized by the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Nafta facilitated the exploitation of cheap labor south of the border by outsourcing manufacturing jobs to Mexico. The agreement was also devastating for Mexican small farmers, who couldn’t compete with subsidized US agriculture. The resulting mass of indigent farmers migrated largely north into the open arms of American agribiz—the same force responsible for ruining their livelihoods. In 1990, the share of illegal farm workers in the United States was just 12%. By the turn of the millennium, it was about half, where it has remained since.

Until the 2010s, many Democrats embraced a comparatively hard line on illegal immigration, in keeping with the party’s working-class base. In his 1995 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton lamented how “the jobs [illegal immigrants] hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants”.

Back then, it was free-market Republicans like Ronald Reagan who celebrated the exploitation of illicit labor in jobs “Americans won’t do”. Never mind that these jobs were overwhelmingly occupied by Americans prior to the arrival of millions of illicit workers. Never mind, too, that native-born workers still form the majority of the workforce in sectors with large numbers of illegal employees, such as construction, household labor, dry cleaning, and landscaping.

An earlier generation of labor leaders and social democrats viewed mass illegal migration as one component in a broader suite of policies, including outsourcing and union-busting, meant to squeeze wages. United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez, for example, repeatedly denounced illegal migration and would make a point of alerting the authorities to employers hiring such workers. In 2007, Bernie Sanders said: “On one hand you have large multinationals trying to shut down plants in America, and on the other hand, you have the service industry bringing in low-wage workers from abroad”. The result: “wages go down”.

Negative sentiment toward immigration is driven by the net volume and type of immigration to a given country, dividing native populations from newcomers over wages, skills, and cultural background. The last variable, culture, is mercifully less salient in the United States, given the country’s spectacular capacity to assimilate migrants. In sufficient numbers, though, low-skilled illegal immigration necessarily provokes a backlash, including in cases where migrants and the native-born otherwise lack meaningful cultural differences.

To be fair to open-borders advocates of the Left and the libertarian Right, public opinion had been comparatively indifferent to large volumes of low-skilled legal immigration until recently — that is, except among Republicans. Plus, despite high overall immigration, illegal immigration declined dramatically after 2000, with border crossings plateauing at around 300,000 a year in the 2010s. By this point, the Nafta shock in Mexico gave way to the low-growth but resilient Mexican economy of today, leading to a 90% reduction in illegal entries by Mexicans. Mexico’s role as a source of outmigration was soon eclipsed by the likes of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Successive presidents also oversaw crackdowns at the southern border and boosted deportations. The Obama administration instituted family detention, deporting 2.9 million people in its first term and 1.9 million in its second. By comparison, the first Trump administration managed 1.5 million deportations, including a smaller proportion of violent criminals.

Then came the social-justice revolution of the mid-2010s, which consummated the Democratic Party’s capture by college-educated professionals. Mantras such as “no human being is illegal” gathered strength in Democratic circles as activists denounced Obama as the “Deporter in Chief”. The progressive zealots got a boost from Trump I, the cruelty of whose child-separation policies did wonders for the cause of limitless migration. Despite the first Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy, illegal immigration remained unchanged up until the pandemic; pandemic-induced travel restrictions caused overall immigration to fall near zero in 2020.

At that point, more Americans (34%) favored increased immigration than disfavored it (28%) for the first time. Emboldened in their opposition to Trump, Democrats excised what little immigration dissent remained in the party. Having previously called open borders a “Koch Brothers proposal”, Bernie Sanders embraced a moratorium on deportations and called for decriminalizing border crossings under pressure from the liberal press.

The Biden administration followed suit, announcing a temporary pause in deportations and adopting a near limitless interpretation of asylum law. While a global surge in immigration was to be expected following the end of pandemic restrictions, voters correctly interpreted Democratic policy as offering an unprecedented incentive to would-be migrants. At least 10 million foreign nationals without legal permanent status entered the country since 2021, per the Congressional Budget Office, the most of any four-year period in history.

In June 2024, Biden backtracked, issuing an executive order barring migrants from soliciting asylum when average daily encounters exceed 2,500. The result was a decline in monthly crossings by around 80%. The move was supported by minorities and working-class voters but abhorred by affluent progressives. Indeed, by the end of 2024, monthly crossings were lower than under Trump prior to the pandemic.

So here we are. The question now is how tough immigration enforcement should be, and whether Republicans — and eventually, Democrats — will once again overreach in their respective preferences.

The starting point for the debate is a simple proposition: namely, that mass deportations are entirely justified, representing a return to Obama-era deportation policy. Under Biden, a total of 1.49 million newcomers were removed — a shockingly paltry figure, given the total number of unlawful entries. Currently, Team Trump seems to be prioritizing the 1.4 million migrants who have received final orders of removal. Logistically speaking, it will be difficult to deport even this number anytime soon.

The goal of the new administration should be to craft a lasting immigration policy benefiting American workers. This will require gaining buy-in from Democrats where possible. Improving the asylum system requires sending a signal to migrants they are certain to be deported unless they have a credible claim of asylum. At the same time, employing more immigration judges for the current asylum backlog is eminently desirable and an area where Republicans could work with Democrats. It’s counterproductive for the sitting president to antagonize deportees’ receiving countries — however obnoxious their leaders may also be.

A points system based on migrants’ skills — ideally similar to that used by Canada prior to the pandemic — should also be adopted. While it’s true that Americans have historically tolerated high levels of low-skilled immigration, restrictionists are correct that chain migration doesn’t ultimately serve the national interest or workers. Shifting from family-based to skills-based migration would go a long way toward taming the anti-immigration fervor of the GOP base.

During his first term, Trump expanded Obama’s family-detention policy in an effort to deter migrants of all stripes. This and later family separation was what resulted in the administration’s failure to deport more violent criminals than its predecessor: Trump I turned public opinion against itself. Disturbingly, Trump’s proposal to expand migrant detentions in Guantanamo Bay suggests a willingness to double down on past failures, though the administration appears to be prioritizing removals with infractions beyond just illegal entries thus far.

Further, the Remain in Mexico policy was a marked improvement that helped curtail the 2018 spike in illegal immigration, whose revival will similarly benefit the current asylum backlog. Contrary to progressive critiques, Mexico as a whole isn’t unsafe, with many migrants residing in vibrant metropolitan areas while they solicit asylum. Then as now, the policy’s success will turn on Trump’s willingness to maintain a productive relationship with Mexican leaders.

Like her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has displayed a willingness to work with Trump, making record arrests of migrants and drug seizures, as well as constructing facilities to receive deportees. Having cajoled Mexico (and Canada) into substantial action, the effectiveness of the president’s tariff threats cannot be denied. Given his decision to impose tariffs anyway, however, it will be hard for either country to justify continued cooperation with Washington.

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Republicans should also note that their rationale for a military intervention in Mexico directly contradicts the premise of the Remain in Mexico policy. If carried out, an invasion would fuel a migratory catastrophe. If or when Mexican cartels’ recent terror designation is taken to its logical conclusion, the resulting torrent of actual refugees would undo decades of declining illegal immigration from Mexico. Trump could, instead, aid Sheinbaum’s proposal to expand the recently inaugurated Maya Train into Central America, a prospect certain to deter migration by creating jobs and fueling development.

Finally, if Trump is truly serious about deterrence and American workers, he should support the passage and aggressive enforcement of mandatory E-verify. Forcing employers to confirm the immigration status of workers — and making an example of those that don’t — would go a long way in curtailing migrant exploitation and raising wages for native workers.

Progressives should back these efforts. As it is, their simultaneous defense of unrestricted low-skilled immigration and opposition to H1B visas serves the class interest of their professional constituents. After all, the exploitation of H1B workers directly undercuts the bargaining power of high-skilled college graduates—the same group that benefit from a ready supply of undocumented maids and landscapers. But this policy mix has proved deeply unpopular with the non-college majority that decides US elections.

In the same vein, it’s telling that the immigration rhetoric of populist Republicans — such as Vice President JD Vance — echoes that of pre-Trump labor Democrats. This isn’t to say that the comparably oligarchic Republican Party is truly representative of working-class interests. It does, however, speak to the changing nature of both parties’ coalitions.

Progressives can continue dismissing the impact of illegal immigration on wages — relying, ironically, on the same neoliberal economists they would otherwise condemn. The reality, however, is that working-class voters will continue to believe that their wages will be undercut by foreign workers willing to work harder and for less than they would.

Democrats should recall the counsel of the civil-rights icon Barbara Jordan: “For the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process”. For their part, Republicans should avoid an overestimation of their mandate that has and likely will once more empower their progressive enemies.

Vance’s faith is more conventional than his grouping with Candace Owens or Nick Fuentes would imply. He has explained that what drew him to Catholicism was not its miracles or traditional versions of its liturgy, but its social teaching: the pointed questioning of free market economics that has lured other post-liberal politicians and thinkers. Catholicism gave him a way of understanding human beings that was “simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral” — an ethical holism more satisfying than his childhood Protestantism or the frenetic pursuit of status by the professional classes. Ironically enough, the only “weird” thing to occur on his journey towards conversion was a tiny miracle in defence of the current Pope. Just before his conversion, Vance had been sitting at a hotel bar, defending Francis against the criticisms of a conservative friend, when a wine glass popped off the shelf and smashed on the floor, shocking both men into ending their discussion.

The effort to separate wild from mainstream strains of Catholicism may in any case be misguided. What if weirdness is not an aberration from, but the essence of any faith? The New York Times columnist — and Catholic convert — Ross Douthat has mused that explanations of religions that emphasise their social or psychological utility cannot account for “religious experience in the wild”, which is “much weirder…and more destabilizing” than we could have predicted. Everything from fairy stories to the close encounters of modern Americans with UFOs suggests to him that the core of any faith, “the real place where all the ladders start”, is “revelation crying out for interpretation”. A gospel miracle or a flying saucer are both clues that the world and the minds with which we interpret it are “much stranger than the secular imagination thinks”.

You do not have to share Douthat’s fervent Catholicism to consider that the call of the weird expresses deep-seated dissatisfactions with modern life. In a thoroughly disapproving essay on post-liberal thought, the centrist historian Mark Lilla reflected on why so many of the university students he meets are embracing pungently reactionary kinds of Catholicism. These converts have correctly sensed the “malaise — call it cultural, call it spiritual, call it psychological” — into which our rule-bound and incredibly online Western societies have fallen. Like the questers of the Sixties, they are rebelling against the “air-conditioned nightmare” of modern life, which tends to depression and suicide.

The appeal of rewilding religion is evident in two new books from writers of very different temperaments. The weaker of them is a lurid but strangely enjoyable manifesto by the journalist Rod Dreher, a professional controversialist whose flight from the secularised United States has taken him to Viktor Orbán’s Budapest. Dreher, an old friend of Vance who witnessed his reception into the Church, has grumbled about the attempts of Democrats to label him as weird. Yet in Living by Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, he argues that religion can only save us from our modern ailments by unleashing its stranger side. The problem with modern societies is that they are not weird, but WEIRD societies, a social sciences acronym for “white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic”. The rise of print culture, the Reformation and market capitalism combined to turn their citizens into anxious strivers who value only money and refuse to accept realities that cannot be described in the language of scientific and instrumental rationality.

Technology has worsened our detachment from all that is tangible and corporeal. Dreher, an over-sharer who likes to present himself as the worst of sinners, checks his phone first and last thing at night. Growing up in steamy Louisiana, he admits that he’s never liked going out into nature much, preferring to live mentally online. He worries that internet addiction is turning us all into Gnostics, early Christian heretics who maintained it was possible to detach the soul from the body. Our selves crumble into competing distractions. By fostering a bodiless selfhood, the internet encourages “transgenderism”. He claims that Chat GPT girlfriends have persuaded people to break up with their wives or launch assassination attempts on the late Queen Elizabeth II. We are what we watch: when Lil Nas X films himself twerking with devils, he tempts us to go over to Satan.

Despite these silly claims, Dreher does evoke powerfully enough the spiritless detachment that has infected even convinced members of mainstream churches in the United States. In a previous book, Dreher called on Christians to embrace the “Benedict option” and withdraw from the godless society around them. But it seems as if the lure of technology has been too strong: even the devout feel locked out from spiritual realities, cut off from a “sustained felt connection to the living God”. Bathed in the light of their screens, they have lost what the German theorist Hartmut Rosa has called “resonance”, a connection with an unpredictable and so revivifying natural world.

How then can Westerners touch grass? Dreher’s answer is simple: surrender the critical faculties that bar our access to wonder and believe what people tell us about encounters with other worlds. These experiences are not always comforting. Many of Dreher’s stories concern demonic possession. Take Emma in Manhattan, whose marriage with Nathan is on the rocks because she has been possessed by an evil spirit. Dreher watches her snarl at a Catholic priest who drops by for a consultation with her, armed with a fragment of the True Cross. Dreher even has his own tangles with demons to report: when he is in Rome for the funeral of Pope Benedict XVI, a chair he was sitting on mysteriously topples and breaks in half.

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In Dreher’s mind, the future lies with “strong religions” that enlist us in this constant battle between good and evil. One of the reasons why Dreher — who is that most American of figures, the serial converter — dropped Roman Catholicism for Eastern Orthodoxy was his conviction that its rites retain the mystical but also the very bodily link between the physical and supernatural realms. It is one he thinks that other churches abandoned in the rush to experiment with Zoom services during Covid lockdowns.

His case for strong churches rests on the fact that the rise and consolidation of Christianity often owed less to rational argument than to stunning displays of power by apostles and saints, which pay no heed to modern distinctions between the natural and the supernatural, the probable and the impossible. Yet he builds his argument on the weird present as well as the Christian past, suggesting that faith can profit from counter knowledge and altered states. Encounters with UFOs stir him just as they do Ross Douthat. He respects thinkers who have fused Ufology with theology, by suggesting that the Church’s miracle stories obscurely record past visits from advanced intelligences. Though he scoffs at “hippies”, Dreher coyly lets on that taking LSD as a college student revived his sense of the world’s beauty and so revived his faith in God.

Perhaps Dreher’s craving for high-octane experience has more to do with the vapid yet remorseless quality of life in North America, rather than modernity itself. Every time he leaves America, cheerfulness breaks through. The visionaries he meets in Irish villages, Budapest bars or in ravishing Italian towns manage to log off and find wonder with much less drama than the tormented seekers of the United States. Dreher’s own epiphany comes on a holiday in Jerusalem, one of the “thin” places where wonder seems closer than in humid Louisiana. Reeling from a divorce, he takes part in the Miracle of the Holy Fire at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, feeling an unbounded exhilaration as he moves his hand unhurt through the flames passed around by the Orthodox clergy. He keeps a photograph of his grinning face at that moment on his smartphone — it is tough to kick the habit.

While he may abhor capitalism, Dreher retains a thoroughly American trust in market forces. If the West’s spiritual consumers are not offered a religion of wonder, then they will load something even stronger and more occult into their carts. If not Christ, then Baphomet. It is curious to find that Pope Francis shares this zero-sum reading of the West’s exhausted secularism. At a recent general audience, he remarked — then being no less online than the rest of us, posted on X — “Our secularised world is teeming with magicians, occultism, spiritism, astrologers and satanic sects. If we kick the devil out the door, he tries to return through the window.”

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The English philosopher Simon Critchley, who works at the New School in New York City, is a very different person to Dreher: agnostic and fastidiously precise rather than folksy and antic. But he shares his sense that modern life is rubbish, especially after the Covid lockdowns, and that the “weirdest and most dubious” forms of religious life might allow us to escape from it. He begins his book On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy with dark ruminations on the state we are in. “Reality presses in on us from all sides with a relentless force…The world deafens us with its noise…we feel miserable, anxious, wretched, bored.” As a result, we crave “ecstasy”, which is “what it feels like to be alive when we push away the sadness that clings to us”. This leads us to “mysticism”, which opens up “the possibility of ecstatic life”. To be a mystic is to decouple the conscious self to which you are “riveted” and re-enter the living flow of reality.

You do not need to be wildly religious to practice mysticism, but it helps. Although Critchley’s book is free from flying wine glasses, snapped chairs and demonic possession, he does spend a lot of time introducing us to the visions of the isolated, starved ascetics of the Middle Ages. In the late 14th century, Julian of Norwich, one of his heroines, hoped to die at the age of 30 and so emulate Christ’s agonies on the cross. However, she changed her mind at the sight of a bleeding crucifix, which provoked a 12-hour spell of further visions. She rose from her deathbed and spent the next decades writing in obsessive detail about this healing rapture.

Why admire — or even seek to emulate — such clearly pathological behaviour? Critchley’s answer is similar to the one offered more than a century ago by the American philosopher William James in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience. James knew that we could always give psychological or physiological explanations for the weird things “sick souls” such as Julian claimed to have seen or heard. But to medicalise such experiences does not exhaust their value: they can still bring information about reality that might be denied to better adjusted but limited minds. Critchley, who respects mystics not just as visionaries but as excellent writers, argues that they can show us sad moderns how to pass out of yourself and into some wider unity. Christians might think of this as union with God, but not everyone must. James called it letting in the “tremendous muchness” of reality. Critchley’s mystics get to that place by practising the subtle arts of negation and paradox. In the chase to find God, they end up losing him but also themselves — and so feel free.

The dark spaces of Julian and her mystic peers sound rather like Douthat’s place where “all the ladders start”. But Critchley doesn’t want to collapse these wrenching possibilities into merely religious experience. While the joy and release that arise from mysticism can come to suffuse everyday existence, he isn’t interested in extrapolating an organised religion from them, which could guide our moral lives or order our society. As most of us are not and will never be religious theists, our moments of sweet release must have other sources. Poetry and still more music — he likes Kraut Rock — seem the most promising of these to Critchley. It is slightly disappointing to find that his promise of joy peters out into such tasteful and private glimpses of transcendence as streaming the new Nick Cave or rereading T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Then again, mystical literature has always been better at framing problems than offering easy answers. We cannot hope to swiftly or permanently escape the state many of us are in. The best we can do perhaps, before rushing to write off other people’s beliefs or experiences as weird, is to reflect on the social and psychic pressures that have generated them and bear down on us all. Maybe it is time to enlarge, rather than to celebrate, what we consider to be normal.

It would be easy to look at the flailing state of Trump’s campaign and pin the blame on an erratic candidate, or bad advisers, or, as so many have done, single out J.D. Vance as the source of the misfortune. But the fault lies neither with Trump nor Vance, nor any single individual. Instead, we must look back to the foundations of the modern conservative movement, for it is arguably the persistence of a distinct political culture rooted in those formative years that holds back the growth of the Republican coalition.

Since its emergence in the industrialising America of the 19th century, the Republicans had been the party of the buttoned-down business and professional classes, embodying hegemonic political capital. The Democrats encompassed those opposed to this hegemony, be they populist farmers and organised labour, rival blocs of provincial capital, and after the Sixties, the new social movements with their subaltern identities and subversive lifestyles. By 1972, they were the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion”. Yet even as the party coalitions rested on these coordinates, the first signs of a realignment began to take place — blue-collar workers started to show a propensity to vote for Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

There was a time, therefore, between the Seventies and the Nineties, when both the ascendant yuppies of America and working-class hardhats could be kept together in the Republican coalition. As long as they could be focused on a common enemy. In those years, thinkers on the Right found such an enemy in “the New Class”, not dissimilar from its conceptual counterpart in leftist discourse, the “professional managerial class” (PMCs).

The New Class trope has ever since played a central role in conservative demonology; they are defined by their college educations (usually in some airy liberal arts field) and extremely liberal (or “weird”) social views, but above all, by their perch as administrators and functionaries in bloated, non-competitive bureaucracies like government, academia, legacy media, and NGOs. These “verbalist elites” were a self-perpetuating caste of privileged mandarins; unlike the yuppies and the hardhats, they were insulated from risk and never got their hands dirty, residing instead in an immaterial realm of symbols and abstractions. The idea of the New Class was thus a convenient foil for conservative rhetoric on both free markets and social conservatism.

The American Right sought to organise itself around fighting this mandarin-dominated liberal establishment, whose control over public-sector and cultural institutions had to be overturned before the liberation of the still-virtuous private sector could be accomplished. Enter the rise of aggressive new conservative institutions meant to take back power in Washington: multimillion-dollar think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute looked not just to crafting policy but to credentialing whole cadres of conservative appointees who could fill executive and legislative offices; while journals like National Review set the moral tone of conservatism.

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For a time, it worked: the movement succeeded in shifting the policy agenda to the Right from the Reagan years onward. But it also came at a cost: hitherto, conservatism had largely relied on businessmen who got into activism to oppose measures they did not like. In the postwar era, businesses started to outsource this work to full-time activists. Where there had once been conservative professionals, there were now professional conservatives, represented by the likes of National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. This shift had profound effects on the character of conservative politics, which would become intellectualised as never before. This left the movement vulnerable to real-world shocks which its theoreticians could not comprehend.

The first of at least two shocks took place in the Nineties: Democrats started to syphon private sector professionals from the GOP under Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” who enthusiastically embraced the financial industry while remaining socially liberal; this jumpstarted the trend of educational polarisation. The next generation of yuppies thus had less reason to stick with Republicans when they could join the newly dynamic and glamorous Democrats. The Right was losing the battle for cultural prestige, thanks in no small part to the very same free market forces they unleashed, which greatly incentivised female labour market force participation and downgraded the social importance of families; hyper-financialised capitalism’s destabilising effect on culture had been wilfully overlooked. Around this time, the Republican Vice President Dan Quayle’s attack on sitcom character Murphy Brown prefigured Vance’s war on “cat ladies”, and for a time Quayle, too, seemed “weird” in light of that decade’s changing sensibilities.

A radically deregulated financial sector along with an over-hyped tech sector supercharged America’s transformation into a post-industrial and post-material simulacrum, precisely the kind of environment in which New Class-type functionaries thrive. Indeed, the line between the old New Class and the private sector PMCs of the new frictionless economy would become increasingly blurred. The sclerotic financial and tech sectors at the heart of the system ceased to be competitive in any classically capitalist sense and had come to resemble the same immovable Leviathan conservatives saw in the public sector, with an abundance of make-work “bullshit jobs”, overseen by authoritarian HR departments.

The failures of this status quo helped to put Trump in power, the second major shock. But the Trump administration suddenly veered away from its populist promise of 2016 and instead doubled down on free market fundamentalism, enacting policies that disproportionately benefitted the same corporate sectors responsible for the dysfunction. On top of this, it leaned heavily into social conservative causes, like abortion, even as popular attitudes have moved considerably towards a new centre-ground. What happened? The answer lies with the same professional conservatives, who staffed that administration and the Congressional GOP.

The Right’s apparatchiks had been frozen in the unchanging logic of their own stultified institutions, which upheld the inviolability of both free markets and social conservatism (while refusing to seriously acknowledge the tensions between them), independent of any changes in the larger social context. In effect, they became “Right-PMCs”. For the sprawling conservative think tank ecosystem in which they are bred is now no different from the rest of the New Class-dominated economy: NGO-like bureaucracies that live off donor generosity merely issue credentials and manage a vast symbolic economy of abstract ideas and officially sanctioned moral virtues. Conservatism Inc. became functionally identical to the same progressive academic establishment its polemicists routinely attack, only with one set of cultural and ideological signifiers swapped in for another.

And while these failures have de-legitimised many of the old think tanks in the eyes of younger intellectual conservatives, being college educated Right-PMCs themselves, their only response has been to come up with an alternative underground symbolic economy based on the circulation of edgy memes and reactionary ideologies. This so-called “dissident Right” merely wishes to reproduce the existing Right-PMC ecosystem but outfitted with Nietzschean and “based” dogmas instead of traditional conservative ones. But it is no less stamped by the same conceited intellectual culture that marked postwar conservatism: its advocates, like Buckley, tend to be effete, elitist, and eccentric; and many of the colourful “alternative lifestyles” (to use a euphemism) associated with the New Right arise from these reactionary online currents.

America’s cultural politics may thus be reduced to a struggle between two sets of symbol-worshipping PMCs: the overwhelming progressive majority of PMCs who coalesce around the Democrats and the Right-PMC minority who influence the Republican side. Both have beliefs that regular Americans would consider weird, but like competing sects of Brahmins in Vedic Age India, their battle is to settle whose religious doctrines and deities can appeal most to the masses of normies who toil in the fields; and the winner gets to call the other side weird. However, conservative attempts to beat progressive PMCs at this game of ruling through the maintenance of cultural-symbolic hegemony, while letting the material world decay, have come up short time and again. Probably because their rivals in the liberal establishment are far more disciplined, astute, and well-resourced.

Republicans ought to play a different game entirely. They should reclaim their historic role as the vanguard of entrepreneurial capitalism by cobbling together a coalition of economic self-interest between the two classes who are least vulnerable to ideological capture by college-educated elites: small-business elites (who tend to be very wealthy but uncultured) and the working class. In other words, an unlikely alliance who could help to reground the economy in the material realm, away from the rule of Brahmins. But this would require the Right-PMCs to restrain their own Brahmanical impulses: shifting their focus from waging endless culture war to forging a political economy that can serve this coalition’s practical interests, something they have so far proven incapable of doing. For the problem of the Brahmins on either side of the ideological divide is a classic one. As Right-PMC icon Reagan once said, it’s not that they’re ignorant, they know so much that isn’t so.

Ohio is America in many respects: a land of race and religion, LeBron James and the Tafts. And it is the epicentre of the new democratic world we are about to enter: the home of J.D. Vance and the Rust Belt rebellion. Ohio is the state that voted for Barack Obama, twice, and then for Donald Trump, twice. It’s a place that was once a swing state and could be again — but isn’t.

To understand America, you must understand Ohio; and so, four years ago, I travelled from the Ohio River in the south to Cincinnati, Columbus and Canton — before finally landing in Youngstown, the old steel town made famous by Bruce Springsteen. “Here in Youngstown; Here in Youngstown; My sweet Jenny I’m sinking down,” he wailed in 1995, foreshadowing the political upheaval to come.

By now, such laments have almost become passé, the story of modern America we all know: the hillbilly elegy that explains Trump. “Youngstown was steel, nothing but steel,” my old colleague George Packer wrote in The Unwinding. “Everyone here owed their life to the molten pour of iron… Without it, there was no life.” And yet, the steel disappeared in 1977 and it wasn’t until 2016 that it voted for Trump.

Before my trip, I’d ploughed through Phillip Meyer’s American Rust, set just across the border from Youngstown in the hills of western Pennsylvania. It’s a book that captures that sense of decline that has wormed its way into the bones of both northern England and the American Midwest. “You wanted to believe in America,” says one of Meyer’s characters, “but anyone could tell you that the Germans and Japs made the same amount of steel America did these days.” Here was the reflex that lies at the heart of the new post-liberal conservatism: “If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country,” as President Trump declared in 2018.

This is the message that Vance brings to his ticket — a statement of economic intent. “The effects of globalisation have hollowed out America’s industrial core,” Vance wrote recently in a joint op-ed with Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s former Trade Representative and potential future Treasury Secretary, who also happens to hail from Ohio. “When the manufacturing jobs moved out, a host of social problems moved in: family divorce and breakdown, child abuse and neglect and opioid addiction.” A similar message could have been delivered by any Labour or SNP politician since the Thatcherite industrial collapse of the Eighties. Yet it is now a message more likely to be heard on the Conservative backbenches.

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In his maiden speech last week, Nick Timothy, the new Tory MP and former Downing Street chief of staff under Theresa May, pronounced the death of the old economic consensus. “We don’t make, do or sell enough of what the world needs,” he claimed. “From low pay to regional inequality, poor productivity to funding public services, all the things we worry about are symptoms of this wider problem.” In Timothy’s view, Britain needs a new economic consensus. “We need to challenge Treasury orthodoxy and think beyond the intellectual limits of ideological liberalism,” he said.

Occasionally, you hear an odd centrist chastise this kind of message. Yet, it would be wrong to consider this new strain of conservatism as some kind of ideological aberration for either the Republicans or Conservatives. Both parties, in fact, have their roots in protectionism: the Tories in Disraeli’s support for the Corn Laws and the Republicans in Civil War tariffs. To understand why, come to Ohio.

Canton was once the home of William McKinley, the last Republican president to be assassinated, and a descendent from what the Americans like to call the “Scotch Irish”, much like Vance today. These Protestant Irish settlers are the original “hillbillies” — the “Billy Boys” from Ulster whose hero was and remains King Billy, or William of Orange. There is deep historic irony, then, in Vance’s conversion to Catholicism, which seems to have been largely missed.

McKinley today remains a largely obscure figure, lost in the sunken years between the Civil War and the Great War of 1914-18. Even the memorial to him in Canton has an air of forgotten grandeur to it. Yet, McKinley’s presidential victory in 1896 remains a pivotal moment in American history, ending decades of political deadlock and ushering in a period of Republican domination which only came to an end with Roosevelt’s victory in 1932. At the heart of McKinley’s election victory were the twin issues of protectionism and the dollar — two issues which have once again been thrust under the spotlight.

In 1896, it’s worth recalling that it was the Republican Party that was the party of protectionism and sound money — backed by the white middle-class protestants of the north and African Americans of the south (and beyond). The Democrats, by contrast, were the party of segregation, free-trade and “free silver” — a policy designed to help inflate away the debts of the many small farmers who formed the backbone of the party, along with the new Irish and Italian immigrants in the north (a policy with faint echoes of J.D. Vance’s ideas today). To the Republicans, they were the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion”.

That year, it was the Democratic candidate for the presidency who was the fiery populist: William Jennings Bryan, a pin-up of the forgotten man raging against East Coast elites, international speculators and the gold standard — the “cross of gold” upon which the American farmer was being crucified, as he put it. Here, then, was the caricature of an American populist: Trump before Trump, though one whose populism was rooted in a furious opposition to protectionism. To defeat him, the Republicans chose McKinley, a unity candidate for change who could appeal beyond the old Republican base.

For Karl Rove, a one-time Republican election guru who has written a history of the 1896 election, McKinley’s victory was pivotal — not only because it won the argument that year, but because it created a new coalition for the Republicans that would keep the party in power for much of the next 36 years.

With Trump and Vance playing the role of insurgent populists today, questioning the core principles of American industrial and monetary policy, the stakes of this election feel eerily similar. Yet, Harris does not appear to be a McKinley figure — and Trump, unlike Bryan, has already shown he can win. The question today, I think, is which party will be able to follow McKinley in reaching out beyond its current electoral base to create a new wider coalition that can break the deadlock in America.

In Rove’s account of the 1896 election, he offers a number of key lessons for the Republican Party’s triumph — many of which are applicable today. First, McKinley did not skirt the big issues but addressed them directly, including the one considered to be his opponent’s core strength: Bryan’s advocacy of Free Silver. Today, it seems that Trump’s core strength is his “America First” economics — his opposition to free trade. The choice for the Democrats today, then, is whether to accept this in an attempt to neutralise it, or to take it on as McKinley did of Bryan in 1896. Do the Americans want to risk a return to inflation?

Second, McKinley also offered himself as “a different type of Republican” who realised he needed to broaden the party’s appeal to a whole series of states once considered safely Democrat. Once again, today’s Democratic Party seems unwilling or unable to adopt this strategy, focused instead on securing just enough electoral college votes to win. Harris does not seem like the kind of candidate capable of winning over crucial swing-states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or, of course, Ohio. Those I spoke to in Ohio said there was no reason why it could not be a swing state again, rather than a solid Republican bastion. It just required the Democrats to listen and compromise more than they currently seemed willing.

Finally, McKinley defined himself as a unity candidate facing off against an increasingly divisive Bryan campaign that “attacks… anyone who disagreed with him”, as Rove put it. Biden was able to play this role against Trump in 2020. Obama adopted the same message in 2008 and 2012. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, didn’t see the need — and abjectly failed. For both parties, the lesson here isn’t hard to glean.

From Canton I went to Youngstown, where it was hard not to be shocked by the scale of the city’s degradation: the abandoned plots, the ruined roads, the general sense of abandonment. I couldn’t help but think of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, set in Detroit in the Seventies. “All that was left of the old neighbourhood was empty land,” one of his characters complains as he crashes over a bridge to his death. “It seemed that most of the city was gone.”

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Yet this was only one part of the city. The story less often told about Youngstown is that of the suburbs and surrounding towns, which are far from abandoned and dying but very much still alive. Here I found a region filled with small factories and office blocks, neither poverty-stricken nor a land of plenty. Here the golf clubs were filled with old auto workers and union men who were once Democrat but no more, living in neat bungalows with nice cars on the drive, with their children nearby, no longer working the furnace but as teachers or office workers. According to my guide Tom Maraffa, a retired professor at Youngstown State University, this was where Trump had flipped things.

A little further out, one town sticks in the memory, a place so American it could be nowhere else. Not London or Oxford, but Colombiana. If the modest suburbs were the places Trump had flipped, Colombiana was always his — not filled with angry MAGA supporters, either, but driving ranges and country clubs, small businesses and nice cafes. The Republicans here might have preferred a candidate a little less brash, but considered the Democratic Party so wildly out of touch they would never consider switching sides.

Earlier this week, when I spoke with Tom again, he lamented the state of American politics and its coverage in the US media. I was intrigued how things had changed since my last visit. The state, he felt, remained in an odd holding pattern. The old union men now voting for Trump were still not entirely sold on the Republican Party, but the Democrats were not offering them much either. “Fundamentally, Trump speaks to people who are tied to their places and want them restored,” Tom told me. In contrast, he felt, “the Democratic Party has become the party of the educated ‘placeless’”.

It’s a mood that was captured by Springsteen in Youngstown. “From the Monongahela valley to the Mesabi iron range; To the coal mines of Appalachia, the story’s always the same,” he sang. Almost 30 years later, both parties face the same challenge: are they bold enough to rewrite Springsteen’s “story”? If so, Ohio is the place to start.

Looking at the names being floated over the past week, there are two possible successor generations: Generation X and millennial. Yet of those being touted — Vice President Kamala Harris, Governors Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, J.B. Pritzker and Andy Beshear, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — only one, Buttigieg, does not belong to Gen X (while Harris, born in 1964, straddles the line). This is a shame. For while there is little doubt that the United States is overdue for generational change, it is not at all clear that Gen X embodies the kind of change that America needs.

Both these generations have been known to chafe under the suffocating domination of their Boomer predecessors; and both have gone through phases of rebellion against the same. Yet there are also crucial differences: one generation came of age in the heyday of globalisation, before Y2K and the other reached adulthood at the tail end of it around the 2008 crash. This has resulted in two distinct forms of political consciousness. As a consequence, beneath the question of which geriatric party establishment shall hold the keys to power in the next four years, a more important one looms: which generational value set will prevail over the next 40? For the present era is a one of paradigmatic transition: the days of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush are at a close, but what will replace it is still far from certain.

To answer this, we must return to the Boomers. Born after the war, this cohort grew up amid the greatest expansion of middle-class wealth ever recorded — the product of the dynamic industrial economy left behind by the G.I. generation. By the Seventies, however, it began to stagnate, and their response was to build a new economy based largely on financialisation, real estate and tech. As a result, between 1983 and 2023, average house prices rose by 500% and the value of stocks as measured by the S&P 500 benchmark index grew by 2,800%. Cheap credit, free trade, and a tech-driven productivity boom in the Nineties combined with these trends to give the impression of an economy growing in leaps and bounds. And it paid dividends, mainly for the Boomers, who got to keep the lion’s share of the gains, amounting to half the nation’s assets ($78.3 trillion in 2023), even as later events, such as the Great Recession and the reckoning over “the China Shock” exposed the growth of this era as illusory and unsustainable.

By the 2020s, as Boomer retirements accelerate, Gen Xers and millennials are set to inherit this wealth, in what’s been dubbed “the Great Wealth Transfer“. To what end this wealth is deployed will be the defining question of the next paradigm. And it is here where the divide between the Gen X and millennial political value sets come into play.

The romantic self-image of the Gen Xers is grounded in traits such as independence and stoicism: they were the “latchkey kids”, or as Rich Cohen put it in Vanity Fair, “the last Americans schooled in the old manner [who] know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds”. In their youth, anti-political cynicism formed the basis of their own counter-counterculture against the passé idealism of the Boomers.

Yet in its maturity, around the turn of the millennium, this cohort failed to produce a properly political expression that was practically distinct from the post-Reagan status quo, which they could only assent to, notwithstanding the directionless anti-corporate currents of the Clinton years or the anti-war movement of the Bush years. After all, these were peak “End of History” decades and the free market appeared to be humming just fine. Though not as socially mobile as the Boomers and despite having had to deal with recession in the early Nineties, Gen Xers still benefited from the boom times that followed; they had an overall easier time starting careers, forming households, and joining the middle class than the later post-2008 millennial cohorts. The same individualist ethos extolled by the likes of Cohen or Bret Easton Ellis worked well within the parameters of the highly atomised post-industrial paradigm that existed before the big crash: Gen X could afford to retain the apathy and detachment of their youth because, structurally speaking, there were little to no stakes.

Of course, Gen Xers were, like everyone else, affected by the Great Recession. But by this point, their institutional conservatism had arguably been baked into their generational character; and it would, in any event, have been unlikely for them to develop revolutionary aspirations in middle age (something left to the millennials). In the contest for a Biden replacement, this conservatism is discernible, albeit very subtly concealed, in the stances and rhetoric of the Gen Xer candidates.

In a recent New York Times interview, for instance, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, born in 1971, made her case for generational change: “We recognise that our parents’ generation has had a lot of excess. So I’m hopeful that we can really move the needle, whether it’s bringing down our nation’s debt or ensuring that we are active when it comes to climate and solidifying and protecting individual rights.” Here, strikingly, Whitmer’s unit of analysis remains “individual”. She also lists the debt as her leading issue, reflecting a scale of priorities unchanged from Boomer liberalism’s high noon in the Nineties, when fiscal rectitude, environmentalism, and social progressivism were the orders of the day.

Listening to Newsom, Pritzker or Harris, one also struggles to find awareness of political horizons outside this paradigm. Indeed, it may very well be that the whole idea of thinking in terms of material economic structures is anathema to the Gen X as well as the Boomer mindset, having been conditioned against that possibility by the “post-materialist” abundance of their formative years.

Contrast this with Buttigieg’s words when he was last a presidential contender in 2019: “A lot of this is the consequence of what you might call the Reagan consensus… The empirical collapse of that supply side consensus, I think, is one of the defining moments of this period… It turns out a rising tide does not lift all boats. Not on its own.” Where Whitmer has “the individual”, the unit of analysis here is “the paradigm” — that is, the web of structures, norms and rules which set the range of possibilities for most Americans.

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In recognising the passage of paradigms, Buttigieg is arguably closer to fellow millennials on the progressive, post-Occupy Left and the heterodox “New Right” than he is to his ostensible fellow centrist liberals from the Gen X cohort. While late Boomers like Barack Obama and Gen Xers like Jake Sullivan might have also acknowledged the need to transcend Reaganism-Clintonism, they have often had to come to their conclusions through reflection. But what is merely theoretical to them is all too real to most politically conscious millennials, who grew up in the wreckage of the old order. Unlike the Gen Xers, their youthful rebellions were explicitly political on both ends of the ideological spectrum.

In particular, there is a compelling parallel between Buttigieg and fellow millennial rising star (and prospective Trump VP candidate) J.D. Vance. Both hail from de-industrialised hinterlands, are veterans of Bush-era forever wars, and have expressed desires to break from their parties’ Boomer-era orthodoxies on political economy, even as they continue to hold opposing views on social issues. It recalls the dynamic between Clinton and Bush: they might have disagreed on abortion or gay rights, but the common denominator between them — support for financialisaton and globalisation — nonetheless underpinned the last consensus.

And today, so too might the common denominator between the millennial Right and Left give rise to a new consensus based on de-financialisation and national re-industrialisation, a worthy goal to which the flow of American capital and investment may be directed, as “the Great Wealth Transfer” begins to unfold. Unlike the Boomers, who sucked the world dry, or the Gen Xers, who failed to do anything about it, the millennials may yet leave a better and fairer country to those that follow in Generations Z, Alpha, and beyond. The elevation of a president from this generation, from either party, would likely hasten the realisation of this hopeful future.

At issue is the very nature of populism. The 38-year-old Vance, a Republican who emerged from Appalachian poverty to serve in the Marines and attend Yale Law School, epitomises the grassroots radicalism of the Scots-Irish in America: anti-elitist, culturally conservative, sceptical toward draconian climate policies and hostile toward China. Ryan, after 20 years as the Democratic representative from the former industrial stronghold of Northeast Ohio, touts a more traditional, pro-union, but also firmly anti-globalist politics.

The state’s size, and its location in the politically volatile Midwest, render it a critical battleground. Ohio is home to 11 million people, making it the seventh largest state in the union. It has all the basic components of 21st-century America: challenged, largely minority cities such as Cleveland and Toledo, relatively prosperous Cincinnati, an emerging boom town in Columbus (the university town that also serves as state capital), and a vast array of rural towns and villages.

Ohio may no longer be the decisive “bellwether” of America — it has been trending Republican for over a decade — but it is still a competitive state. Veteran political scientist Herb Asher notes that despite its GOP leanings, Ohio remains open for Democratic challengers in a way that is hard to imagine in deep-red states such as Texas. In Ohio, successful Democrats are not gentry types like California Governor Gavin Newsom, but hard-bitten, pro-working class New Dealers like Senator Sherrod Brown. Ryan is cut from much the same cloth. At a time of heated polarisation, he has cast himself as a folksy, open-minded family man who puts country over party.

To his credit, Ryan has been willing, at least on the campaign trail, to declare his independence from Democratic orthodoxy. He has supported fracking and opposed Joe Biden’s student-loan forgiveness scheme. He has praised Trump’s protectionism and opposition to China. He does not much appeal to the tech-and-finance elites who now dominate the Democratic Party — one reason, suggests Midwest scholar John Russo, that he has been slow to attract big donor money.

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Vance, by contrast, is not a great candidate. On stage, the hillbilly turned intellectual and venture capitalist is rigid and off-putting — you would rather sink a couple of bourbons with Ryan. Even Vance’s populism seems less people-friendly than Ryan’s. Vance’s biggest blessing, and greatest curse, is Donald Trump, who carried Ohio twice, and whose endorsement saved Vance in a hard-fought Republican primary. Like many conservative intellectuals, Vance opposed Trump at first but then quickly cosied up to him after he won. Ryan has not hesitated to make hay of this about-face, saying that Ohio needs “an ass-kicker not an ass-kisser”.

The outcome of the race will depend on two swing demographics: working-class whites and suburbanites. According to Russo, the fall-out from the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, combined with the increasingly rancid stench of Trumpism, could alienate affluent suburban voters, particularly in burgeoning cities such as Columbus. “The middle-class suburban moderate voter is the key for Ryan,” Russo notes.

If the American economy were not experiencing massive inflation under a Democratic president, Ryan would most probably win. But, like other Democrats, he is haunted by the state of the economy under Joe Biden. Crime, on the rise in Ohio cities, is another vulnerability. Vance has also tried to score points by associating Ryan with Biden’s border policies, which the Congressman has criticised but not opposed. But perhaps the most effective Republican talking point is that Ryan has raised campaign funds from some of the biggest distributors of opioids — this in a state that has been devastated by the opioid epidemic. Yet here, too, Vance has his own skeletons in the form of a failed non-profit he set up to combat addiction.

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Ultimately the decisive issue may turn out to be energy. Much of Ohio’s recent resurgence has relied on massive growth in the state’s natural gas sector, which has boomed as the vast Appalachian basin has increased production fivefold since 2010. This has proved not just a spur for direct employment, but has also attracted investment into the state. In 2020, Ohio gained more than four times the total investment than California. Perhaps the biggest boon has been Intel’s proposal to invest $20 billion in a new chip plant in the Columbus suburbs. And just this week, Honda and LG Energy Solutions announced a $4 billion car battery plant in another adjacent county.

Much of the credit for this growth must go to Republican Governor Mike DeWine, whom Democrat Asher describes as “a non-Trumpster”. He is on his way to a landslide re-election; this form of Republicanism — conservative but not crazy — has also characterised current Senator Rob Portman, a pragmatic Republican who in 2016 won 300,000 voters more than Trump could muster in the state. But DeWine also does not have Donald Trump on his back, and is not running against anyone as effective as Ryan.

Ryan’s key problem lies with the increasingly progressive, climate-obsessed Democratic Party. Even as he describes fracking as a “great opportunity” to blue-collar audiences, Ryan also supported Biden’s drilling moratorium and opposed legislation to deregulate the permitting process for oil and gas pipelines. He even embraced the anti-fossil fuel jihad of the Green New Deal.

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If he loses, Ryan can thank the influence of these coastal, establishment initiatives. “Tim must deal with national Democrats who are a drag on his campaign,” Asher notes. “They are seen as anti-exploration and anti-pipeline. These positions are less popular here than in California.” Ryan’s riposte, labelling Vance a “San Francisco phoney” seems a bit desperate when hurled at someone who, after all, grew up in one of Ohio’s most hardscrabble communities, served in the Marines, and then chose to return to his home state. Ryan has to hope there’s not an early onset of the cold winter that will see much higher heating prices, further highlighting the energy issue.

Many working-class Democrats, notes long-time consultant Ruy Texeira, rightfully see the current green policies essentially as an abandonment of their interests and communities. But just as Vance can’t ditch Trump (who has been losing support in the state), Ryan is stuck with Pelosi, Schumer and Senator Bernie Sanders. Ryan’s earthy Left-populism may be appealing, but Biden’s standing in the state is about the same as in deep-red Texas. The winner in Ohio will be the candidate who can overcome the burden of their political affiliation — an indictment ultimately of both national parties, and their contemporary detachment from flyover America.

There are countless opportunities for petty embarrassment on the campaign trail. In a small event space in Troy, Ohio, Team J.D. Vance faces a familiar one: empty chairs. In a big venue, a half-full room is forgivable. But if the Hillbilly Elegy author turned Ohio Senate candidate cannot fill a dozen or so seats at this mid-afternoon stop of his “No BS tour”, what hope does he have come polling day?

To the relief of his staffers, people eventually trickle in. When the headcount ticks past some unspecified face-saving threshold, Vance strides through the door. The 37-year-old is bearded and broad, dressed in jeans, shirt and jacket. He is, by the standards of a high-profile Senate candidate, notably unpolished when it comes to glad-handing on his way to the front. After some throat-clearing jokes about the cost of Easter chocolate (“Inflation is real, ladies and gentlemen”), Vance launches into the stump speech that he hopes will carry him to victory in one of the most closely watched and aggressively contested primaries this cycle, and then, come November, win a spot in the Senate.

Ever since he announced his candidacy last year, Vance has adopted a pugnacious, sometimes trivial, tone online. This has been jarring to see from the author of an affecting memoir about growing up the son of a heroin addict among poor Scots-Irish Appalachian transplants in southeastern Ohio, who then defied the odds to join the Marines and graduate from Yale Law School. To take an especially witless example from his Twitter feed: “Let Trump back on. We need Alec Baldwin tweets,” he joked shortly after the actor accidentally shot and killed a woman on set in January.

Vance has received plenty of attention — and opprobrium — since he announced his Senate bid last summer. Not because of his change in tone, but because he has, in the years since Hillbilly Elegy was published, moved from being a conservative critic of Donald Trump to an avowedly pro-Trump stance. This conversion risked leaving him stranded: loathed by the establishment into which he was welcomed six years ago; mistrusted by GOP primary voters bombarded by his rivals with reminders of his past criticisms of the former president.

He has made this leap with a sobering, dark message: a substantive but bleak account of power in America that is light on partisan, issue-of-the-moment cheap shots. The man making his pitch to Ohio voters in Troy is a far cry from the very online culture warrior of his social media threads. “I want us to be a country again where a normal person can support a family of five on a single middle-class wage,” he says without much zeal, before telling a story of industrial decline, off-shored jobs and energy policy failure that, he says, means “we now depend on people who don’t like us very much to make stuff that we need.”

Then he gets to the part of the message with bite: “Our idiot leaders decided to do that to us. And I hate to use that term but sometimes it’s important to be direct about what’s going on… Our leaders have played a very dangerous and, I think, very ugly game with the American people. They’ve decided that they’re going to divide us against each other and distract us with constant appeals to race, to sex, to gender, to everything other than what I really think matters in this country.”

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Vance’s political conversion is usually presented in personal terms — from anti to pro-Trump. Aware of the liability that his past Trump comments undoubtedly are in this race, Vance tends to respond to suspicion from Trump supporters by emphasising his approval of the man and his administration. “The only thing they have against me is, you know, ‘J.D. is Never Trump’,” he had told voters at a campaign stop earlier in the day in Miamisburg before expressing his regret at “stupid things” he had said in the past.

But the Trump focus disguises a deeper transformation. Woven through Hillbilly Elegy, which was published in 2016, is an orthodox conservatism that places the blame for the endemic social problems from which its author escaped at his community’s own doorstep: its habit of worklessness and shirking of responsibility, among other cultural defects. “We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese,” writes Vance. “These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance — the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach.”

Vance the candidate isn’t so shy about pointing the finger. Announcing his Senate run last year, he told supporters that the success of his book meant that he had met some of the “very wealthy” and “very powerful people” who “call the shots in business and in government”. Exposure to these elites, Vance said, had taught him that “you have leaders in this country in government and in business who don’t think they owe anything to the country that made them who they are”.

When I spoke to Vance after he had finished talking to voters in Troy, he identified “three big issues: trade, immigration and foreign policy”, where the GOP needed to learn from the populist revolution that Trump led. “I think most Republican insiders, consultants, and leaders world love to go back to a 2004-style Bush Republican Party. I don’t think our voters have any interest in that at all,” he said. “The question really to me, and in some ways the question in this race — and it’s a ten-year conversation — is whether the instincts of our voters, which are much more closely aligned with Trump, find their way into actual Republican politicians.”

***

It isn’t just Vance’s high-profile conversion that has made the Ohio senate primary so closely watched. The race has become a proxy battle for the future of the American Right. Not Trump versus anti-Trump, or the establishment versus the populists, but competing visions of post-Trump Republican politics. His two main opponents are perfectly absurd modern Republican archetypes.

Josh Mandel, 42, still looks like the schoolboy who wanted to be a politician when he grows up that he very obviously was. His internet antics make Vance’s social media use look reserved: Mandel fell foul of Twitter’s policy on “hateful conduct” for asking in a poll which “illegals” would commit more crime, “Muslim terrorists” or “Mexican gangbangers”. His Senate campaign has married outlandishly hardline cultural conservatism and Trumpist razzmatazz with the substantive foreign and economic policy of the Republican old guard. He is the candidate for Trumpism as an aesthetic choice, not a policy platform.

Vance’s other big threat is Mike Gibbons, a septuagenarian investment banker who has splashed his own cash on the race, and preaches a libertarian, trust-me-I’m-a-successful-businessman brand of Republican politics. Vance may have national fame, but Mandel and Gibbons have proven to be tougher primary opponents than they might seem. Gibbons has deep pockets and Mandel has high name recognition among primary voters in the state. “Bestselling author isn’t what it used to be,” quips one strategist involved in the race.

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Compared to the alternatives, Vance stands for a return to the substantive populism with which Trump launched his assault on the Republican Party. Yet in many ways, the story of the Trump presidency was of a truce between the populists and the establishment on a range of issues: whether it be taxes, regulation, the judiciary or foreign policy, Trump gave the establishment concrete wins, often to the dismay of those in the vanguard of the insurgency.

Vance would be happy to tear the GOP peace treaty up. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s preferred strategy of running on nothing more than the dangers of the radical Left in this year’s midterms is anathema to a candidate offering a wide-ranging diagnosis of America’s problems. Only one sitting US Senator, Josh Hawley of Missouri, has endorsed him. “Most of the people serving in the senate have been in the same system for 30 or 40 years,” Vance tells me. “And I just think there’s this massive discrepancy between where voters are and where most senators are, but it’s going to close and it’s going to close pretty quickly.”

Vance is the most high-profile of a group of Republican candidates who have the backing of tech billionaire Peter Thiel. In their esoteric mix of nationalism and libertarianism, the PayPal co-founder’s own politics can be hard to pin down. A prominent Trump supporter in 2016, he was less enthusiastic about his re-election bid. But, as with Vance, at the heart of Thiel’s worldview is a profound critique of an elite he sees as decadent, unpatriotic and incompetent. He soon became Vance’s biggest backer, aiding his bid to the tune of $10 million in donations to the super PAC Protect Ohio Values.

Luke Thompson, the executive director of Protect Ohio Values, says that it’s possible to overstate how far Vance has travelled politically. “He used to think the people in charge were stupid or misinformed, now he thinks that a lot of them are actively evil,” he tells me. Explaining his change of mind on the former president in Miamisburg, Vance told voters that “Trump revealed a corruption in this country that I think I was naive to”.

Those who turned to Vance as their go-to Trump-voter whisperer have not taken his political conversion well. One-time fellow anti-Trumpers have dismissed him as a “pathetic loser poser jerk” and lamented his “silly yet detestable moral collapse”. If anything, by missing the sincerity of Vance’s conversion, these attacks underestimate the threat he poses.

But how surprising is his political journey really? Hillbilly Elegy’s success was part of a brief moment either side of the 2016 election when at least a small section of bien pensant America was chastened by Trump’s rise and the dangerously wide gap between different parts of American society that it revealed. But the moment for mutual understanding, which Vance in many ways personified, would soon pass. Everyone picked a side and dug in. Including Vance.

“I’ve learned that the very traits that enabled my survival during childhood inhibit my success as an adult. I see conflict and I run away or prepare for battle,” Vance writes in his memoir. He has certainly done the latter since entering politics. And, contrary to accusations of grift, Vance’s Senate bid was a risky move. “Do you realise how good he had it?” says one friend. “If he loses, it’s over. His reputation is gone. And he knew that when he launched.”

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For months, it seemed like it might not pay off. Vance had failed to rise to the top of a crowded field. Not that he was anything other than bullish when I asked him about his chances. “If our numbers are correct, I’m gonna win and the only reason I would lose is the perception that I may attack Trump.” When we spoke, three weeks before polling day, the big question was whether the former president would endorse any one in race or stay neutral. “Trump and I get along well,” he told me. “We’re getting to the point where if he is going to get involved, it probably has to be soon. But I’m not going to guess on it.”

He wouldn’t need to. Four days later, Trump announced his endorsement of Vance. “Like some others, J.D. may have said some not so great things about me in the past,” said Trump. “But he gets it now, and I have seen that in spades. He is our best chance for victory in what could be a very tough race.” With the endorsement came cash — Thiel poured millions more into the election bid — and the sense that the gamble had paid off.

In a TV ad amplifying Trump’s endorsement, the narrator introduces Vance as “marine, author of Hillbilly Elegy, president Trump’s endorsed America first conservative.” The journey was complete. The candidate looks into the camera and says: “Trump fought back and so have I.”

In backing Vance, Trump has taken a risk of his own: choosing a side in a contentious, close and high-profile primary. A week after his endorsement, a group of Ohio conservatives wrote to the former president asking him to reconsider. “Unlike the other candidates in this race, J.D. Vance has not developed relationships with Republican voters and grassroots leaders that are crucial to win,” read the apparatchiks’ letter. “This endorsement of J.D. Vance is a betrayal to not only your Ohio supporters but Trump supporters across our great nation!”

On Saturday, Trump and Vance appeared at a rally near Columbus. It was Trump’s rise that turned Vance into a star in 2016. Six years on, their fortunes are intertwined once again, with Vance hoping that the Trump endorsement gets him over the line, and Trump betting that a Vance victory demonstrates his enduring power among the Republican electorate. “I want to pick somebody who is going to win,” Trump said introducing Vance on stage. “And this man is going to win.”

What bothered me was the extent to which several high-profile populist conservatives were seeming to reflexively side with the cruel Russian autocrat. I watched as Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance defended Putin, or adopted the Kremlin’s critique of Ukraine. The country was a “pure client state of the United States State Department” said Carlson. “Spare me the performative affection for the Ukraine” said Vance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

These interventions, made as Russia began an invasion that looks set to result in the deaths of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, look high risk and low reward. These commentators are undermining the credibility they have accrued for taking bold stances on the “security and identity” issues their base really cares about. Namely: wokeness, the border, crime and defending national heritage.

This is a real shame for populist conservatism in the United States. During the height of progressive moral panics such as the Covington Boys, George Floyd protests or Rittenhouse trial, Tucker’s show was an oasis of sanity. It was, too, on exposing campus craziness and anti-white rhetoric in institutions, or the scale of illegal immigration. He defended the legitimacy of Americans who wanted to regulate the pace of ethno-cultural change and protect social cohesion, taking immense flak from the great and the good. Others, such as Glenn Greenwald, highlighted the blind spots and biases of progressive organisations and tech firms. Most American politicians and legacy media outlets failed to cover these issues objectively.

And yet, when it comes to a suite of other problems, the incisive logic of the sceptics and their marshalling of evidence yielded to sweeping neo-Marxist conspiracy theories about a manipulative power elite. This became evident during the pandemic, a tricky new challenge in which experts and politicians had to optimise between death rates and freedom. While governments and public health bodies may have got the balance wrong, and overreached with mask mandates, such a complex issue does not lend itself to maximalist claims.

Instead, the difficulties of policymaking during the pandemic demanded building a patient case with data and arguing for the dial to be turned a bit towards greater personal autonomy. Indeed, the politics of anti-lockdown libertarianism has not paid off for those, such as Nigel Farage, who have attempted to campaign on it. It was never a populist position.

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Another tricky issue which is largely tangential to populist voters’ concerns is foreign policy, where, even with Putin issuing marching orders to unprepared conscripts, populist elites continued to carry water for this killer. Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, and Viktor Orbán all, at various moments, spoke warmly of him. While it is legitimate to make a realist case — as John Mearsheimer has done — for tempering Ukrainian demands and accommodating reasonable Russian security concerns, the inability of some to reject the moral equivalence of Ukraine and Russia was glaring.

What lies behind this bizarre empathy toward Putin’s thuggish regime?

First, there is an important disconnect between Right-wing populist elites and their audience. Populist elites compete with mainstream intellectual elites, yearning for an overarching meta-theory to rival progressive liberalism or libertarianism. Many also desire a modicum of politically-correct respectability and thus try to pretend they are motivated by a desire to speak for the downtrodden. This typically results in a neo-Marxist mélange focused on globalist power elites and their manipulation of the masses. All of which pushes populist intellectuals toward grand theories of global economic and political order that bear little relationship to what national populist voters and audiences actually care about.

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Steve Bannon talks endlessly about the perils of free trade, Davos and the working class, despite the fact the data shows very clearly that cultural attitudes and views on immigration, not material deprivation, are what predict support for Trump. Likewise, Brexit elites such as Boris Johnson or Douglas Carswell, with their libertarian dreams of a sovereign free-trading Britain, are strangely disconnected from actual Brexit voters, who were — like Trump voters — mainly motivated by a desire for less immigration and slower cultural change. The more Brexit voters glimpse the real Johnson, who cares nothing for these things, the less connected they feel to him.

Populist elites have developed a fixation on global elites and institutions as self-interested scheming actors, and have become obsessed with mobilising opposition to the globalist juggernaut. Rather than viewing the problem as a western cultural-Left worldview which repudiates national tradition and elevates a cult of victimhood, we are treated to conspiratorial musings about the “Great Reset” and elites in Davos, Geneva or Brussels. My limited experience, having given talks at some of these institutions, is that the more international the organisation, the less woke it is. Yes, western high culture permeates global institutions, but these are nodes rather than the epicentre of the problem.

Once convinced of their neo-Marxist grand theory, some populist elites, fired by hostility to the rules-based liberal world order, feel compelled to develop an anti-western foreign policy. “Enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic carries them toward Putin’s Russia and quasi-illiberal democracies such as Hungary. An isolationism which originally sprang from the valid concern — after protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that American nationhood not be defined by missionary democracy promotion has mutated into support for autocracy.

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The perception that Russia is a masculine, white, Christian country unafraid to stand up for its traditions forms part of its appeal to conservative populist thinkers. “Putin ain’t woke,” Steve Bannon said last month. “He’s anti-woke.” The Russian President’s 2019 interview with the Financial Times, when he declared that liberalism has “become obsolete” clearly impressed many Western conservative populists. Against Drag Queen Story Hour and self-flagellation about the sins of the past could be set Putin’s macho, Christian, nationalist Russia. Clearly, some populist elites took the bait.

Yet any honest appraisal of Putin’s Russia would reveal that its religiosity is weak, immigration substantial, and the Eurasianism of Putin and Alexandr Dugin would readily trade cultural homogeneity for more territory. Moreover, as the Russianist Edwin Bacon observes: “Eurasianists embracing Orthodoxy identify themselves as having far more in common with what they would call other traditional faiths — notably Islam, and principally Shi’a Islam — than with other Christian churches.” Putin’s Russia is a ramshackle, corrupt, aggressive despotism. It is not “really hot stuff” as Donald Trump put it once. It is not a post-woke paradise.

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Populist elites also appear to like Russia because it has spurned liberalism, failing to appreciate that wokeness, whose sacralisation of minorities is used to restrict liberty, is best resisted by liberal arguments. They confuse procedural liberalism, which has been vital for the West’s success, with Left-modernist values such as celebrating diversity and change, which developed much later and are not central to liberalism.

As a ‘rational populist’ and liberal nationalist, I maintain that the values of the median voter should be reflected in policy, but that those tasked with carrying out such policies should be guided by science, analytic logic, and expertise. The problem with many Western elites is not their technical skills, but their post-national woke values, which spring from religious rather than rational wellsprings. While populist commentators correctly skewer the progressive pieties of the elite media and political class, the anti-globalist conspiracy theorising of many needs an urgent reality check. Populist pundits and politicians should resist the urge to stake out contrarian positions on every news item, tacking instead to the centre ground on side issues to avoid losing support for core issues.

Hopefully the Ukraine crisis can serve as a wake-up call, drawing them back toward the cultural problems their base actually cares about.

You would expect that kind of statement from a “defund the police” advocate, but Rittenhouse is a former youth police cadet whose support for “Blue Lives Matter” was used to try and paint him as a racist and far-Right extremist. His world-weary cynicism about the FBI, expressed as Carlson nodded along approvingly, signals a major shift in a central axis of American politics.

Distrust of federal law enforcement was, until quite recently, a markedly Left-wing attitude, but it now represents a baseline among Republican voters. In February 2015, a Reuters poll found that almost 84% of Republicans reported a “favorable” view of the FBI. By February 2018, only two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, a different Reuters poll showed 73% of Republicans agreeing that “members of the FBI and Department of Justice are working to delegitimise Trump through politically motivated investigations.” Imagine how those same people feel now, after Special Counsel John Durham’s indictments have exposed the FBI’s role in perpetrating the Trump-Russia dossier fraud.

What does it mean when America’s law-and-order party comes to see law enforcement, along with much of the federal government, as fundamentally illegitimate? The answer is being worked out by a crop of Republicans whose project is to extend the politics of Trumpism beyond Trump. Blake Masters, a close business partner of tech investor Peter Thiel who’s running for a Senate seat in Arizona, has called for “standing up to the bureaucratic national-security state.” In a campaign ad, Masters describes a nation under siege from within, “up against a media that lies to us, schools that teach our kids to hate our country, and corporations that have gotten so big, they think they’re bigger than America.”

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There are clear echoes in that message of Steve Bannon, Trump’s original campaign manager and another Thiel associate, who championed a war against the administrative state on behalf of American workers. Bannon lasted less than a year in the White House, but he now runs one of the most popular podcasts on iTunes, War Room, which has more than 100 million total downloads. In an appearance on the podcast this week, Masters told Bannon: “I consider that you simply don’t negotiate with terrorists. And I believe the Democratic Party, Schumer, Pelosi and Biden are holding us hostage.”

Masters, along with two other Thiel-backed political candidates — Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, who’s running for the Senate in Ohio, and Army Special Forces veteran Joe Kent, a self-described “Trump endorsed America 1st Congressional candidate,” who’s running for a House seat in Washington state — distinguished themselves from other Republicans by offering early and vocal support for Rittenhouse.

It’s easy to see why, since the Rittenhouse trial seemed tailor-made to illustrate the premises of their brand of populist nationalism. A young, working-class, white Trump supporter, Rittenhouse was subjected to a public smear campaign in which President Biden himself impugned him as a white supremacist in a campaign video. Meanwhile, the state prosecution deflected attention away from the evidence supporting Rittenhouse’s self-defence claims and onto his motives by suggesting that he had come to Kenosha looking for trouble — despite the fact that Rittenhouse could be seen on video, shortly before the shooting, offering medical aid to Black Lives Matter protesters.

As the prosecution bumbled its way through the trial and got publicly scolded by the judge, it only further proved the point of those who see an American regime spanning the upper layers of government, media, and business that is not only illegitimate but incompetent, run by emissaries of a “clown world,” as a popular phrase on the Right has it.

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“Think about what this says about our disgusting elite leadership in this country,” Vance said in a video message recorded days before the Rittenhouse verdict. “If we don’t defend this young boy who defended his community when no one else was, it may very well be your baby boy that they come for.” The day Rittenhouse’s acquittal was announced, Masters tweeted: “This case reminded us that our justice system, like every other institution our ancestors built, is under siege, and that the besiegers are very close to victory.”

The rallying cry of the “Rittenhouse Republicans,” which at times approaches the rhetoric of revolution, is that the ruling class has become parasitic on the lives of ordinary Americans. “We despise our government & corporations benefiting from the security & labor of our working class solely for the benefit of elites who have no loyalty to our nation, rather they despise us & are using the wealth they generate to fund our decline,” Kent recently tweeted. Both Masters and Kent say they think Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.

Aside from the specifics and symbolism of the Rittenhouse case, publicly supporting him makes sense in terms of the demographic changes in the makeup of the major political parties. While Wall Street business executives and upper middle class professionals now overwhelmingly back the Democrats, the Republicans have, by default as much as by choice, increasingly courted the working class. Over the past decade, the party’s biggest gains have been among white voters without a college degree, and in the 2020 election, it made some inroads with voters of all races without a college degree.

Trump’s conception of a power struggle with the U.S. “Deep State” saw a contest between the voters’ elected representative and the shadowy forces controlling the levers of government behind the scenes. But for Kent, Masters, Vance, and the other aspiring heirs of Trumpism, the state itself is the enemy. Their efforts, like Trump’s, are directed as much against Republican orthodoxies and the Beltway establishment as against Democratic policies. Gone is the old conservative divide between “good” institutions like the military and the corporate boardroom and “bad” ones like the media and teacher’s unions. “Our military leadership is totally incompetent,” Masters said recently in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan. “Our top generals have turned into woke corporate bozos,” he tweeted, “and our troops deserve better.”

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But where Trump’s approach was visceral and inseparable from his singular personality, his would-be successors are more sober and more ideological. They are also supported by the kind of political infrastructure that was conspicuously lacking in the chaotic and chronically understaffed Trump administration.

Masters, Vance, and Kent are all political newcomers between the ages of 35-41, and all three are backed by funding from Thiel. The Vance and Masters campaigns both received $10 million through super PACs, while Kent got $5,800, the legal limit in his race. Their vision for America, broadly aligned with the post-libertarian ideas Thiel has espoused over the past decade, calls for a secular, nationalist politics of the common good. The greatest threat to the American people, they say, is the unchecked power of the Democrat-dominated administrative state and the transnational corporations operating under its auspices.

The conventional script for beltway Republicans in the pre-Trump era called for limiting the power of government and letting social policy be set by individual choice and market mechanisms. But for the national populists and conservatives of the new post-Trump Right, that laissez faire approach simply cedes power to woke corporations and lobbying interests. The only way to reform the state is to take control of it and replace current ruling class functionaries with a new elite that will serve the interests of working and middle-class Americans.

“The end goal is human flourishing,” Masters recently told the journalist Peter Savodnik. “You want a strong middle class in America. There’s a whole set of values and a whole lifestyle attendant to that. I think that’s a goal, and I think too many conventional, you know, business Republicans they’re agnostic on that. They don’t care what the consequences of their policies are.”

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It now remains to be seen whether Masters and the others can win. In Ohio, Vance is battling it out in a tight primary race against the state treasurer, Josh Mandel, another Trump supporter from the party’s increasingly crowded populist wing. In Arizona, Masters was trailing behind the state’s Attorney General Mark Brnovich 27% to 9% in a recent poll. But Trump, who previously called Brnovich “lackluster” for refusing to order an audit of Arizona’s 2020 election result, only entered the race a few weeks ago, with a scheduled appearance at a fundraiser for Masters. In Washington state, a poll from early November shows Joe Kent leading both the Democrat, Brent Hennrich, and the six-term incumbent Republican, Jaime Herrera Beutler, who broke with her party and voted to impeach Trump, in his House race.

With poll numbers for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at historic lows, the Democrats are looking exceptionally vulnerable going into the 2022 midterm elections. The crucial question for the Rittenhouse Republicans is how far voters want to go in rejecting the current system. So far, the most visible repudiation of the Democrats has come from the Virginia governor’s race, which was won by Glenn Youngkin, a classic C-suite Republican. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the firebrands of the new Right isn’t from Democrats but from the push by the leaders of their own party to restore the Beltway consensus.

Yet there are signs that the old version of bipartisan centrism in DC may be unsustainable. A recent Harvard poll of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 found that 39% overall believe American democracy is in trouble. That’s a significant segment of young voters, but what’s notable is that the disillusionment was far more pronounced on the Right. More than half of young Trump voters think America is a “democracy in trouble”. Nearly a quarter, 22%, believe it has already “failed”.

By contrast, positive freedom is the sort of liberty that various forms of un-freedom make possible: the freedom expressed by your fingers dancing up a keyboard is made possible by years of disciplined practice; the freedom of running a marathon is made possible by years of not smoking or drinking or lazing about on the sofa. As the lonely commitment-phobic bachelor may someday come to realise, you can pay a very heavy price for choosing the wrong sort of freedom.

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Liberalism is the politics of negative liberty. And it cuts Left and Right — broadly speaking, going Left on culture and Right on economics. On culture, it seeks to dismantle the cultural impediments to minority flourishing and emphasises the importance of individual choice. It is pro-gay and pro-choice. Many are comfortable with all this, but become distinctly less comfortable when words such as “family” and “motherhood” are considered to be a part of the whole apparatus of oppression and in need of deconstruction.

On economics, liberalism seeks to dismantle the barriers to free trade. With free-market capitalism, the human subject has broken free of the restrictive chains of tradition and religion, those of place and community, those of the family, even of one’s own biology. And with the inevitable forward march of globalisation; the collapse of restrictions on capital flows and financial deregulation; the disintegration of nation state borders, soon the values of the unencumbered self would stand victorious over the whole earth.

A few years after the collapse of the Berlin wall, Francis Fukuyama was so confident that Western liberal democracy had become the only show in town that he declared history to be over — and at its zenith stood the liberal subject triumphant.

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He spoke too soon. Whether history will record its crisis as the financial crash of 2008 or the Trump/Brexit revolts of 2016, liberalism is no longer as cocky as it used to be. Despite its many undoubted gains, liberalism is now recognised as coming with a heavy price tag. In the name of negative freedom, it hollowed out many of the conditions of human flourishing: the solidarity of community, the importance of place and roots, spirituality and religion, the family, the nation state.

Post-liberalism is the attempt to resurrect many of these ideas, not because it is hostile to freedom, but because it seeks to articulate a deeper sense of freedom: positive freedom.

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The peculiar thing about post-liberalism is that even though it aligns with many (perhaps even the majority of) people in the West — Right-wing on culture, Left-wing on economics — few, if any, mainstream political parties have moved in to occupy this space. Gramsci could so easily have been talking about the present moment when he said that a political crisis “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born”.

The following is an attempt to stake out something of an intellectual tradition for post-liberal thought, as it has expressed itself over the last 50 years or so. These are, for me, the top 10 texts that could help us consider the present moment in post-liberal terms.

1. After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre

Top spot must go to Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981). A former Marxist turned Thomist, MacIntyre argued that the moral inheritance of the Enlightenment — the crucible of liberal values — was to strip human life of a sense of purpose or teleology. When morality is rendered merely a question of individual choice, the moral life becomes grounded in nothing other than subjective opinion. And on this flimsy basis, it has struggled to survive.

The choice we have before us, MacIntyre claimed, was Nietzsche or Aristotle (or St Benedict). He prophetically expresses the Gramscian moment as us waiting not for Godot but for a new “doubtless very different, St Benedict”. By which he means, the “construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness”.

Another book worth reading alongside After Virtue would be John Gray’s Enlightenment’s Wake. Having been a J. S. Mill scholar for much of his academic life, Gray knows the enemy better than many of its proponents (Mill is a poster boy of classical liberalism). Given the preponderance of religiously minded people in the post-liberal quadrant, it is worth noting that atheists like Gray can equally flourish in this space.

2. Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen

Second spot is shared by two very contrasting approaches, one from the Right and one from the Left. Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) is a bracing attack on the borderlessness of the liberal self. It argues that what was designed to promote freedom instead undermined the very conditions — social, educational, religious — that made genuine freedom possible.

Deneen defends the importance of social institutions, from unions to churches to the family, that sustained human flourishing. And he points out that as human beings come to see themselves as fundamentally separate from each other, only the increasing power of the state can impose order on anarchy. Ironically, then, in the name of (negative) freedom, liberalism stimulates the state into greater acts of control.

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By contrast, Nancy Fraser’s essay in American Affairs ‘From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond’ (2017)  carefully articulates how progressive liberalism came to form an alliance with neo-liberal economics, to create what she calls the progressive neo-liberalism of the Clintons and Blair.

Not only does she show how the populism that catapulted Trump into the White House was built upon a dissatisfaction with this alliance, but also, more philosophically, how Left and Right liberalism are brothers-in-arms — a fact that is currently most obviously expressed in the woke capitalism of Silicon Valley and Big Tech.

3. The Road to Somewhere, by David Goodhart

The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart (2017) is credited with the introduction of the important terms ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’ to distinguish between those who are bounded and rooted in place, and those who are mobile and rootless. Many smarted at this distinction, with its implication that those who have benefited from social mobility — or, at least, geographical mobility – have expressed some fundamental lack of loyalty to their community.

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Theresa May’s well known comment: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere” presses further on this sensitive spot. But there is little doubt Goodhart’s terminology illuminates a central aspect of the populist complaint against liberal politics. This book can be usefully paired with Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, first published in English in 1952.

4. Hillbilly Elegy, by J. D. Vance

The defence of these ‘somewheres’, often derided as small-town, small-minded ‘deplorables’ is vividly captured by J. D. Vance’s brilliant Hillbilly Ellegy (2016), a sympathetic portrait of his upbringing in the Ohio rustbelt.

Likewise, Christophe Guilluy, in his The Twilight of the Elites (2019), describes how France has been fundamentally divided between the economically successful metropolitan centres and the un-chic periphery — a distinction he uses to explain the whole gilets jaunes phenomenon.

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5. Red Tory, by Phillip Blond

In the UK, the post-liberal moment was anticipated by Phillip Blond in his Red Tory (2010) and later by the Blue Labour movement. In the old terms of Left and Right, both were seen as political cross-dressers. Both regard capitalism and socialism as equally flawed, preferring instead something more like an economics of distributivism, where economic activity is subordinate to human interest — see Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State (1912). For a quick guide to Blue Labour you could do worse than listen to Maurice Glasman’s Confessions or read Adrian Pabst’s The Demons of Liberal Democracy (2019).

A post-liberal reading list

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6. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, by Michael Sandel

Earlier philosophical attempts to expose the limits of liberal politics included the development of communitarianism, associated with thinkers like Charles Taylor and (his student) Michael Sandel. Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) is a more difficult book than one might expect from Radio 4’s user-friendly ‘public philosopher’, but it is an important milestone in the tradition — not least in the way that Sandel takes on John Rawls, in many ways the master thinker of 20^th century liberalism.

And, qua Rawls, a special mention here must go to Katrina Forrester’s recently published In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019). But for my money the two great books of this tradition are Taylor’s magisterial Sources of the Self (1989) and his brilliant little polemic The Ethics of Authenticity (1992).

7. Theology and Social Theory by John Millbank

There is no doubt that post-liberalism — in contrast with many other 20^th and  21^st century ‘isms’ — has an influential and functioning theological wing. John Millbank’s Theology and Social Theory (1990) is a formidable statement of the argument. It is noteworthy that Phillip Blond began as a theology academic, Red Tory being in many ways an extension of the whole Radical Orthodoxy school that included people like Millbank and Rowan Williams.

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Within the church itself, it is Catholic social teaching, growing out of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) and latterly expressed by Benedict XVI, that has proved to be especially influential. From Dorothy Day to Rod Dreher, it is not possible to capture the influence of Catholic social teaching in simple Left/Right terms. These are all Christian references, but pretty much all systems of religious belief carry both pre- and post-liberal convictions.

8. Why Love Matters, by Sue Gerhardt

Family life is often the entry point of former liberals into a more post-liberal sensibility. Having children often necessitates a certain rootedness, but also the lack of choice involved in who your children are or who your parents are exposes the limits of the liberal idea that we are all contractually related.

Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain (2004) by Sue Gerhardt is an important take on the science of early mother/child relationships. Pretty much anything by Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby on attachment would fit well under this category.

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9. The World Beyond Your Head, by Matthew Crawford

The tradition which follows up on John Ruskin’s emphasis on beauty also feeds into post-liberalism. Roger Scruton on architecture, Jane Jacobs on the importance of neighbourhoods, and increasingly those who try and capture something of the dignity and spirituality of work.

Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head (2015) is a brilliant diagnosis of the way in which the liberal Kantian self finds it hard to concentrate in a world of perpetual distraction.

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10. Prosperity without Growth, by Tim Jackson

Finally, the environment. Here, above all, the liberal idea of continuous and perpetual growth runs up against the distinctly post-liberal idea of the existence of limits. Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth (2011) is of particular interest here. But the person I would read first is the Kentucky poet/farmer Wendell Berry. The World-Ending Fire (2019) is an astonishing collection of essays; The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977) is a work of genius.

This list is very much my own. Others will point to how much has been missed out. But if I were to design a kind of post-liberal curriculum, this is where I would start. In the UK, probably the most successful attempt to translate these ideas into some sort of political programme is that of the SDP’s New Declaration.

But despite the fact that many people exist within the quadrant it describes (Left on economics, Right on culture) it is still struggling to break through. It’s perhaps because it’s easier for the Right to break Left on economics than for the Left to break Right on culture — which is why the Conservative and Republican parties may be more amenable to this sort of thinking than their opponents. But even this is not a natural fit. Which brings us back to Gramsci. The old is dead. The new is yet to be born.

Fortunately, we made an early call. Many who made a similar decision later on found themselves at the mercy of Uber, facing huge price hikes. Apparently, the Uber algorithm, more sensitive than the local cab company to the fluctuations of supply and demand, sent prices through the roof. A similar power cut in March 2018 meant that stranded commuters were faced with Uber price surges of up to 500%.

Suggested reading

The battle for the Tory Party's soul

By Peter Franklin

Amongst the most disturbing lessons that my father attempted to teach me as a child was that something is worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. There is no such thing as intrinsic value, he maintained. Value is simply a function of supply and demand.

Well, I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. For the kindly Muslim taxi driver that took us home, the algorithm was pretty simple: the job was worth his time plus his costs plus a reasonable profit. Our misfortune was not something to be exploited by a profit-maximising algorithm. And I thank him for that.

Now it may have been entirely incidental that our cab driver was a person of faith. And I absolutely do not put his behaviour down to the fact that, as a believer, he was a better person than those greedy, pagan executives over at Uber. But what I did wonder, as we trundled down the M1, was whether we had been the beneficiaries of a world-view in which things do, in fact, have intrinsic value.

The Uber algorithms, perfectly embodying the spirit of market forces, make all value beholden to fluctuations of supply and demand. Here, nothing is fixed. Everything is relative. It’s a metaphysics, of sorts. Or perhaps – because it’s so wholeheartedly materialist – an anti-metaphysics. Capitalism represents the triumph of the immanent – that there is nothing to human value except the ebb and flow of human behaviour. Value is not rooted in anything transcendent, beyond the continual drift of human desire.

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When will Uber feel the techlash?

By Marshall Steinbaum

This is why, at a philosophical level at least, capitalism and religious belief are fundamentally enemies. The former is inherently relativistic and free-floating, the latter rooted in a view of the world where there are immutable and stable values.

I mention this little story only because it sits neatly alongside a movement that seems to be gathering force, especially in the US, in which conservatives – and often religious conservatives – are ousting socialists as some of the most thoughtful critics of capitalism. Last year Peter Kolozi, an academic at the City University of New York, published a timely historical survey of the long tradition of anti-capitalism within US conservatism. To those who have become used to conservatives being capitalism’s most high-profile cheerleaders, this notion may seem odd. But there is no necessary connection between conservatism and capitalism: indeed, there is a strong case that they are antithetical. And that case is re-emerging.

For instance, as Kolozi points out, conservatism in the post-Bellum American South looked suspiciously upon capitalism as a northern phenomenon that threatened the traditional structures of community life. This was a version of conservatism that sought to maintain a form of life built upon racial privilege. And most of us are glad it was destroyed.

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Can America's national conservatives reunite the nation?

By Oliver Wiseman

But the South’s experience of capital’s power to destroy traditional community structures – for good or ill – formed an important part of the traditional conservative tradition (often known as paleo-conservatism) and its attitude towards capitalism.

As Kolizi explains, this tradition came to be obscured by the Cold War. Given the threat posed by communism, anti-capitalist conservatives threw in their lot with free-market conservatives, united against a common enemy. But the end of the Cold War, the 2008 financial crash, worries about globalisation, and the collapse of faith in the market’s ability to sustain community life – often code for church and family – has exposed old divisions within the conservative family. Thus people like Fox news presenter and Trump supporter Tucker Carlson are beginning to say things like this: “Market capitalism is not a religion. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families isn’t worth having.” Damning the “mercenaries” of the capitalist class, Carlson called for:

“a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement.”

This could almost have been Bernie Sanders.

More from this author

Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

The conservative case against capitalism is built on three basic differences between the two ideologies.

First, the obvious point. Conservatives like to conserve. By contrast, capitalism is the most powerful change-agent the world has ever seen. Karl Marx had it right when he explained capitalism in the opening chapter of The Communist Manifesto:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

To those who are capitalism’s most vigorous moral proponents, this is its virtue: creative destruction. When what is being destroyed is a society of racial superiority, as with the American South, that is a good thing. But when what is being destroyed is a whole infrastructure of mutual care and support – family, unions, church, stable communities – then we might think very differently.

The second difference is the one alluded to in my taxi story: capitalism’s anti-metaphysics – or, to use Marx’s expression, the profanation of the holy. It is not incidental that religion has played an important role within the conservative tradition. For religious belief locates value beyond the to-ing and fro-ing of human desire, beyond human subjectivity. God is the fixed point around which human value turns.

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Why we all need a share in capitalism

By Tim Bale

But hang on, weren’t the religious right of the Regan era, for instance, capitalism’s biggest fans? Yes, but this was more to do with their pathological hatred of Soviet Communism and its programmatic atheism. During the Cold war, the Christian Right imagined that their enemies’ enemy – capitalism – to be their friend. The new style anti-capitalist conservative of the Carlson variety believes this alliance to have been short-sighted.

Third, anti-capitalist conservatives maintain that the moral life is a communal and necessarily rooted activity. They put particular value on loyalty to place and kin as necessary constituents of moral formation and of human flourishing.

In this regard, they have begun to whisper to each other that the global reach of multi-national capitalism is undermining the very basis of moral existence and human happiness. Capitalism severs people from their roots, treating human labour as just another commodity to be moved around the world at the service of supply and demand.

Suggested reading

The world after Trump

By J. D. Vance

These new-look conservatives have a totally different feel to the ones that progressives have been used to dealing with. Take someone like Kentucky farmer and contemporary poet Wendell Berry. Radically committed to the environment, a lyricist of human rootedness, implacably hostile to technology, broadly Christian, in many ways he feels more Left than Right, yet his moral vision fits more comfortably within the old tradition of Southern Agrarians than it does within that of the progressives.

Or take American writer Rod Dreher, more obviously on the Right, yet whose Benedict Option advises a withdrawal from the values of capitalism:

“what has been missing from capitalism for a long time is any sense of morality, care for neighbor and community, and love for the “other” that Christianity absolutely demands, but that this current iteration of capitalism says is foolish.”

The US TV Series American Gods is premised upon the idea of a war between the old Gods of religion and the new gods of technology and celebrity and finance. This is the war that a new generation of American Conservatives have now joined. J. D. Vance, for example, the Conservative author of Hillbilly Elegy, was baptised a Catholic last week. Agreeing with Carlson, he has asked: “What happens when the companies that drive the market economy — and all of its benefits — don’t care about the American nation’s social fabric?”

Even Vance, a venture capitalist, is wobbling in his faith in the redemptive potential of corporate finance. I suspect that is why he has chosen the old gods over the new.

Ironically, it is progressives – the Clintons, for example – who continue to look to the gods of finance to drive us all towards the sunny uplands of a bright new world. Historically, it is liberalism that was formed alongside capitalism, and liberalism – especially classical liberalism – that shares the same basic assumptions about the freedom of the individual. That is why, for instance, woke liberalism and Silicon Valley capitalism sit so neatly together. And why, to the bafflement of many on the traditional Left, the case against capitalism is now being made more forcibly from the Right.