Well, of course not, you are saying — don’t be silly; don’t be absurd! How were we responsible, or able to intervene in that beautifully calculated slaughter? It was just a movie, spasms on a screen, in another realm. The motel called itself Fairvale in northern California. Try looking that up. It doesn’t exist.

But I can’t help wondering whether watching from the dark has groomed us in our cold-blooded helplessness. Is it that in preferring to watch, we have felt the advancing grip of our distance, or apathy?

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Does America deserve a happy ending?

By David Thomson

***

It was the summer of 2026 — so hot in so many places, with the water running low — but there was a chill in the air.

This is how it felt. On some mornings you could say, it can’t be long now. In every amiable Fairvale we told ourselves the writing was on the wall. His approval ratings were slipping down, in the mid thirties by then. His iron support was turning rusty. His people were growing bored with him. So many were feeling short of money while he kept boasting of how rich and golden he was. His crucial gift, his energy, was on the blink.

The best year we’ve ever had! He said.

Wait for the next election, we promised ourselves, and see the joyous return to order. Is that what you said to your children, in your shower, or to yourself? As if all the spilled water and blood could be coaxed back in the bottle, and the screwtop made tight again. The way things always worked in the past.

After all, how could the greatest nation on Earth (that phrase is copyrighted, but I’ll take a chance with it) sit back and let a monster of greed and self-glory run amok? How could we not see that he was a champion in the contest for the worst ever, reliable only in being wrong about everything, a leader who hated us (because we were not him — the gravest offense in the gaze of Narcissus)? How could we stand living with him when our one protection was not a court or a congress but his constant incompetence?

No one could deny much of this. We had had time enough to get to know him. Hadn’t we voted for him twice? Hadn’t that made our idiocy clear? Wasn’t that a glimpse of our apathy, just sitting in the dark watching it all happen? Saying there’s nothing I can do.

In that summer of 2026 there was a lassitude, as if it was hard for us to get up out of our seats in the dark. We were so accustomed to whatever went on, like people in a theater watching the movie play, and knowing that some machine was grinding it out so that there was no point in crying “Stop!” or intervening. You see, no matter how profoundly the spasms on the screen may move us — and we have had lovely moments; remember Fred Astaire — still we cannot get into the picture and dance with Fred. We are only onlookers when maybe we went into the dark and took our seats hoping we were significant.

So we would be alright again (never mind great) — because to be alright is so sweet, and a chance to relax. The most annoying thing he had done was simply to block the alright and the have a nice day. He had killed ease and relaxing. He had imposed a suppressed nervous breakdown on all of us, a mixture of dismay and exhaustion, a broad daylight darkness that was always there as our phone — that faithful screen — broke the news and our hearts every day.

So lassitude set in, and we told ourselves to make the best of things before he was over, before proper transmission was resumed. And sometimes we were a little wry and fatalistic — irony can be rather cute, and it passes the time — as if to admit we knew, beyond reality and metaphor, how we were truly in the dark.

And it was part of that dark that the forces on our side could seem fragile or achingly tired. So many of us were reduced to “unsubscribe” just to be free of the daily plea of candidates who wanted a mere but constant $3, our signature, or a hundred stallions (with a matching grant for oats and the blacksmith), to maintain the fight that had to be fought. There was a decline in the number of people who turned out for more protest marches, and even marches themselves stopped happening. After all, it was a hot summer and there was allure in going to the beach and watching the endless ocean. A worry had arisen, who knew if it might be the last beach of your life? It was the summer of The Odyssey, but we stayed home.

Home was not going well, however. The organization of the opposition party — our people? — was reported in disarray. The party, the official set-up, had funding troubles. Candidates were abandoned because dead bodies and ideas had been sniffed out in their closets. The possible leaders (those who might be a new HE!) were measured in their drawbacks. And in the anxiety to win whatever contest it would be, we realized that so many suitors to Penelope were actually unsuited — because they were gay, female, black, old, young, radical, alive. Was there not one person, halfway photogenic and vacant, who could be reckoned charismatic enough to fit the bill? “How can anyone be charismatic yet vacant?” you ask. We’re getting there.

Hadn’t Joe Biden once slipped a notch or two past cognition — past being able to admit that he was no longer equipped to be our leader? Vacancy is a tricky thing. How was our opposition and vitality to get over that fatal failure, and face itself in the mirror as fit to be on a screen delivering the speeches?

***

How was any Fairvale to digest the whispered rumor that our defining laws — the documents of the great project — were like a cheese with so many holes. It was not just a matter of repeating the adage that democracy was the best of all the worst forms of government. Was it a matter of understanding that our electoral system was poised for corruption, interference and all the injunctions and dead ends that would nullify a fair election? Was it possible that the foundational principles of American originality were humbug?

More than that, wasn’t it likely that he — under pressure — would see that his only move was to declare some state of emergency. With a court that would back him up, as was its habit, or in an emergency so complete that the court itself might be retired?

There were Fairvales that said this was impossible, or ought not to be allowed — or what are we meant to do? In Fairvale the majority opinion was that it would prefer not to. Prefer not to do what? Whatever. The lassitude overlapped with a premonition of defeat or concession. Some said the protest marches are beside the point. The only thing that would impede the monstrousness was a general strike. What is that? It is a time when some kind of “everyone” takes to the street, abandons their role in the economy, and sits down on the ground to block the intersections in traffic, business and social media presence.

“You mean I have to get up and not sit down?” we ask. “I can’t stay seated in the dark? I have to take the chance that I will be seized and beaten by uniforms, that I may be arrested and put in hideous cells? That’s not very nice.”

But it may need to be done in such numbers that the arrests make their own jam of bodies as they become more than all the ICE camps can contain.

By then, or even a little sooner, he may have addressed the nation, and said he had the answer — hasn’t he always had the answers so that we were supposed to ignore the science of questions? But what he needs is an ultimate state of emergency, one that trumps all the others. A United States of Emergency. And he is not always an idiot. So he may come to the sad conclusion. “That’s what they’re telling me,” he’ll say (he can do gravity in his lamentation sing-song voice) “that the best thing about a war in a shithole desert region is that you can drop a big one without the damage getting out of hand.” Do you believe he has the grace, the charity and forgetfulness, that would hold back from that? That would prefer not to? Having to decide is a big gamble.

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Meet America's MAGA exiles

By James Billot

Yes, you’re right, you can smell satire in the morning, like napalm. I’m playing at Apocalypse – and that movie genre is more popular than ever. (We can kill millions now that it’s only CGI; aren’t you nostalgic for Michael Corleone telling Robert Duvall they could kill anyone?). So summon your last courage in taking on the gamble of saying it won’t really happen, will it? Isn’t it pretty to think so?

If that amounts to realism, or madness (at the end, we won’t know one from the other), it may be clear that since 1945 at least we have been playing a game called Distractions. It has amounted to a steady face off between those who have and those who have not, between a handful and the multitudes. Or even him against all of us. I know, it’s sort of Marx Brothers that the American project should come down to a God against the rest of us. Christopher Nolan guessed it: the gods are coming home for a finale.

In our rising dismay, we don’t have to go to the movies. The big shows are out there all around us, with simple punchy titles, like Epstein or Iran. They have all been blockbusters for a weekend or two, before they get edged out for the next coming attraction, that might be Warming, or AI, or … the latest comedy? I’ll predict, it’s Arizona getting 40% less water. Let’s call it Dry.

Of course, this is fantasy, a noir romance. It could have its weekend. But the desert is waiting and watching our show. It knows it has always prevailed.

***

“Let me get this straight. Are we talking a movie or a series?”

“We’re still open at this point.”

“Open makes me nervous.”

“These are unsettling times. Christian Bale is interested in playing the producer.”

“The guy who’s putting the show together?”

“And we open it just as Trump goes into retirement.”

“This is farce, noir farce? Help me with the concept.”

“We’re saying screwball disaster.”

“And the producer, our guy, he’s having a breakdown?”

“When he has the time. Being on deadline keeps him busy.”

“Tell me about that.”

“It’s high comedy with a shot of horror. Or vice versa. We’re going to fit Olivia Wilde in.”

“Who does she play?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll cook up a girl.”

“I don’t believe I’m sitting here talking about this.”

“Got it. That’s why we want Seth Rogen playing you.”

“You’re sure Trump would do this? He looks so tired now.”

“For a ton of money he’ll do it. He wants to keep his movie going. You know how many twenties there are in a ton?”

“He’ll want script approval?”

“Know what he said — he can make you laugh — he said, ‘Makes no difference. I never follow the script.’ ”

“How many is it, in a ton?”

“Nine hundred and eighteen thou.”

“I am seeing it as a movie.”

“How so?”

“You can’t do the end of the world as a series. Not if you want to be renewed. That’s 18 mill?”

“He’s cheap at that price…”

***

Is there a political equivalent? This could perhaps explain why Labour has decided, amid an omnicrisis of state capacity, public finance, social cohesion, cost of living, and basic legitimacy, to launch plans that include uncapped new routes for migration, legalizing tent cities, and making normal parenting illegal. Why now? Are they insane? Have they become infected by the political equivalent of Cordyceps unilateralis?

But it only looks to bewildered normies as though our government is plowing ahead, for unknown (perhaps fungal) reasons, with policies guaranteed to make everything infinitely worse including its own approval rating. It’s really the climax of a long-standing shift in the way states conceive of themselves, one that began decades ago. It’s just that the Left saw the trend earlier, and is better-poised to exploit it — especially where, as in Britain today, decisive leadership is otherwise lacking.

The last time we saw such blatant opportunism was in another leadership vacuum, as eerie as our current nightmare interregnum: the Biden administration. Even as Democrat staffers hailed the increasingly clearly faltering 80-year-old Biden as leader, and signed “his” proclamations using an autopen, the power-vacuum created by his age-related decline facilitated a program with that unmistakable zombie-fungus feeling: as though the polity everyone thought they still lived in had been covertly hacked and re-programmed.

We might call the agenda doing the re-programming Cordyceps politicus. Wherever it infects a body politic, it sets out to replace clear boundaries and accountable force with horizontal networks, mercurial and overlapping sets of rules, and an authority that recedes from accountability. The classic culture-war battles it produces are usually boundary-related: opening borders, expanding citizenship to everyone, dissolving sex categories, muddling child and adult, defunding police, emptying prisons. But C. politicus is not libertarian. It calls certain acts crimes — it’s just that the crimes are different. Shoplifting is tolerated, but you could be de-banked for the wrong opinions (as Farage was), or have your kids taken off you for knowing sex is immutable.

Though here I’m giving this sensibility a baroque, fungal name, it’s not new. Its most prescient theorists, in fact identified it more than three decades ago: the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. In an essay written all the way back in 1990, Gilles Deleuze drew on the work of his close collaborator Felix Guattari to argue that methods of control exerted in the information age radically invert those of the previous era. This older model, he suggests, was exhaustively documented by Michel Foucault as disciplinary societies, developed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Disciplinary societies are characterized by “spaces of enclosure”, each governed by its own laws, such as the family, the school, the hospital, and the barracks. All these are in turn enclosed by the nation-state, whose laws govern all.

Deleuze argued that the disciplinary model has been obsolete since World War II, superseded by forces including, centrally, digital computing in order better to serve the mercurial needs of capitalism. Deleuze, being French and a theorist, doesn’t have a very detailed material account of this, though Marshall McLuhan might ground it in “electric simultaneity” or, more recently, Jacob Siegel in “the information state”. But however you account for it, the shift dissolves previously clear boundaries, replacing them with something more porous and flexible: less a boundary than a mesh or network.

In the wake of this shift, all those spaces formerly defined by clear rules separating inside from outside now only maintain the appearance of this form. In truth, though, they’re just shambling along, evacuated zombies, “until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door”. In Deleuze’s account, then, the ant was a zombie long before the fungus infected it.

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As for the “new forces” themselves, he describes these as societies not of discipline, but control: a new form of social organization, where formerly well-defined institutions become porous, nebulous, and immaterial. A society of control defines who (or what) is or isn’t included, not via gates and fences but access codes. And instead of agglomerating “individuals” into boundaried “masses”, the idea of “individuals” itself is dissolved into overlapping datasets. Institutions become de-materialized, porous, and edge-less: the corporation replaces the factory, continuous education replaces school, and ankle tags replace prison.

What does that look like in policy terms? Perhaps most controversially, a radical softening of national borders. Under Biden, that meant a torrent of people flowing into the USA from everywhere on earth, in many cases simply recorded by border guards who caught, documented, and then paroled them against future immigration hearings. Similarly, much as C. politicus simply didn’t recognize the principle of maintaining a hard border in Texas, nor does it do so now, at England’s coastline. Here, we find that for every boundary erected, another access point opens: Labour makes noises about tackling Channel migration by “smashing the gangs”, perhaps even including those of its members alleged by one smuggler to operate inside the UK government; all while quietly dropping the ban on small boat migrants obtaining citizenship.

In almost the same breath, the Home Office announces another set of boundaries grown porous, another set of clear hierarchies replaced by networked, situational, and unaccountable power. Universities, businesses, and “community groups”, we hear, will now be able to sponsor and house an uncapped number of “refugees” at taxpayer expense. Members of the public, meanwhile, will be drafted to hear asylum appeals.

Should these new arrivals exit their taxpayer-funded lodgings, too, they can pitch a tent wherever they like. Another new initiative will de-criminalize rough sleeping, following the model first pioneered in Democrat states during the Biden years. The Government will repeal the 1824 Vagrancy Act, which allows police to move on rough sleepers. In its place, a slew of initiatives will provide housing, tackle organized begging, and funnel resources to homelessness charities.

The track record of “housing first” initiatives in the USA might invite some to wonder at the wisdom of this proposal. And just as cynics are already wondering whose vested interests will be furthered by this seeming devolution, or how much these “community groups” will overlap with longstanding Labour sectarian lobbies, we might also wonder how much funding this programme will funnel to yet more Labour client NGOs. Regardless, here again the governing theme is the dissolution of discipline into mercurial, networked control.

At the border, the issue is not how to manage arrivals, but whether the border should even exist as such, and to what end. This is, fundamentally, a contest between the disciplinary and control models. The disciplinary model treated as self-evident the idea that illegal migrants should be expelled, and where they were expelled to didn’t really matter. The control model, though, doesn’t have an inside or outside: from this vantage-point, the idea of someone being “illegal” makes no sense. Instead, problems arise when people are “undocumented”, meaning the system cannot properly manage access, resources, and flows.

We see the same all-transforming shift in new legislation that directly challenges the final, most central “disciplinary” institution of all, on Deleuze’s list: the family. A draft bill announced over the weekend proposes to criminalize “conversion practices”, which is to say therapies that aim to alter someone’s felt sense of sexual identity — in terms that will, if passed, criminalize parents for refusing to assent to their child’s assertion of cross-sex identification. The only carve-outs are for doctors, meaning this Bill places parents legally on a less authoritative footing than medical practitioners as regards their children’s lives and wellbeing — despite having birthed, raised, and loved them from the start.

This is a regime that simply doesn’t view the family as a meaningful institution. The same was already clear in recently-announced plans to restrict social media for children — with enforcement responsibility placed entirely on tech firms, via face-scanning and digital verification. Parents simply don’t figure. The clear implication is that, as in “conversion practices”, parents are simply not viewed as having a special or trustworthy authority, in relation to their kids.

But perhaps this makes sense — for this model also muddles the boundary between “child” and “adult”, to a degree that renders adult authority suspect by extension. Now, kids are competent to consent to puberty blockers at 11, but not to scroll TikTok until 16, whereupon they can vote, but not vape. And parents aren’t trusted to enforce any of this. The meme circulates about brains not maturing till 25. Nothing makes sense, at least if you’re expecting the disciplinary model of individual responsibility at a clearly-defined age. But it does make sense within the control model, which sees none of us as an “individual”. Instead, we’re an aggregate of overlapping datasets and access codes; there simply isn’t a general concept of “old enough”, just a series of case-by-case assessments.

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Keir Starmer’s lethal legacy

By Mary Harrington

Lest you were hoping that a future government might come along and reverse all these policies, the final icing proposed for Andy Burnham’s cake is the return of Sue Gray, and an aggressive devolution program. If delivered, it will end the Parliamentary sovereignty that still clings to British government, a hangover from our heyday as a disciplinary nation-state and still on the constitutional books even if under-used. The proposed alternative is a permanent regional committee-ism that locks the Blairite settlement in forever: a perfect recipe for the special pleading, clientelism, and infinite regress of accountable power that characterizes C. politicus.

Can anything save us? Yes, but also no. If Deleuze is right, this has been coming for decades. Everything he predicted in 1990 is happening now. And even in America, where a legislative fightback has been underway since 2024 against the Left-wing version of C. politicus, that hasn’t exactly brought back the old, industrial nation-state. The same fights about citizenship and migration are ongoing; the data centers are still being built; the power still, now, rests with Big Data and assorted more or less fully realized forms of network state.

If the real, underlying shift is the one away from an industrial society to one of information, no amount of railing against the Left will bring the old world back. But though it might be grounds for gloom, it needn’t cause us to despair. Ultimately, if Deleuze is right, the disciplinary, nation-state Britain is already long gone, and attempts to revive it a waste of time. But even if there’s no escaping the society of control, it doesn’t follow from this that everything must be ceded to oikophobes and genderists.

There’s plenty of work to be done by thoughtful Right-wingers in elaborating what it might mean to map Deleuze’s post-border model to the good, the true, and the beautiful. It need not necessarily follow from permeable borders, for example, that humans everywhere are precisely interchangeable. Less abstractly, we might just be less weird about pointing technologies of control at (for example) tackling criminal gangs.

Most centrally of all, the reason we shouldn’t despair is that there was already an England, long before the disciplinary nation-state “Great Britain” was ever composed. I see no insuperable reason why there won’t also be an England, after its demise. As long as we remember we’re not datasets, but human souls, no zombie fungus can fully consume us.

Ultimately, Biden settled on his vice president, Kamala Harris, following through on his post-George Floyd aim to add a nonwhite politician to his ticket. Harris had flamed out as a presidential contender and ended up an ineffectual VP; her struggles in the White House incentivized Biden, despite his senility, to attempt another presidential run. If the physicists are correct, surely there is an alternate universe in which Vice President Big Gretch eased out Biden in early 2024, seized the nomination, and stopped Trump in his tracks.

But we don’t live in that universe. In ours, Whitmer has remained governor of Michigan, where she’s waffled on whether she will run for president come 2028. On paper, she would be viable: a two-term governor from a swing state with a real track record of beating Republicans. If she did take the plunge, she would receive plenty of media attention and wouldn’t struggle to fundraise. Unlike California’s Gavin Newsom, she doesn’t govern a state that produces many unflattering headlines. Opponents couldn’t point to any great homelessness crisis, natural disaster, or affordability crunch occurring on her watch.

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By Ross Barkan

A Whitmer presidential campaign would, however, be a test case for a kind of politics that is growing more alienating by the day: relentless and unapologetic support for artificial intelligence. If Whitmer ran for president, she’d be the pro-AI candidate in whatever pro-AI lane exists. Few governors have catered more to the industry than Whitmer, whether it is championing tax breaks or ramming through massive data-center projects that have drawn local backlash — the kind that, shockingly, hasn’t seemed to rattle Whitmer at all. In 2026, developers have scoped out at least 16 data-center sites in 10 Michigan counties, according to an MLive tally. A massive $16 billion data center in Saline Township, which just broke ground, has been a signature Whitmer project, generating intense grassroots opposition.

Across America, Democratic and Republican politicians are growing more skeptical of AI. Red states like Florida, Utah, and Oklahoma have enacted regulations on energy use for data centers, as have deep-blue ones like California and Washington. New York passed a one-year moratorium on data-center buildouts. Maine, Idaho, Nebraska, Oregon, and Washington now regulate what chatbots can communicate to human users. The polling points the way toward more aggressive regulation: half of all American adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited, according to a Pew survey from last year. Merely 10% say they are more excited than concerned.

Yet the term-limited Whitmer has been a tireless AI champion, as has the Democratic frontrunner to replace her in the governor’s mansion, Jocelyn Benson. Read any release from Whitmer’s office, and it is obvious that she views the AI expansion as a job-creating opportunity that can’t be passed up. The Saline Township data center being built by Oracle and Related Digital, she promises, will yield 2,500 union construction jobs, more than 450 ongoing jobs on the site, and 1,500 more across the county. “This investment from Oracle and Related Digital sends a simple message to anyone who wants to build the future — you can build it in Michigan,” she enthused.

Yet there are several intractable problems with data centers that Whitmer has mostly waved away or vaguely promised to address in the future. Electricity bills can surge. The water supply can be endangered. There is the noise and pollution generated from the diesel-powered backup generators. And there is a great risk, too, if AI amounts to a bubble. Hundreds of billions have been spent on a technology that remains unprofitable, and if a reckoning ever comes, towns and rural areas across the country will be left holding the bag: half-built centers, farmland wrecked for no purpose.

Hence, why prominent politicians of the Left and the Right have grown more skeptical of AI.  The likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley — representing the socialist Left and the populist Right, respectively — have positioned themselves as fierce industry opponents. Candidates for office have seen their fortunes rise just on the strength of their willingness to regulate AI. But Whitmer is cut from a different cloth. In some sense, this might be because she represents an older wing of the Democratic Party, one that remains deferential to corporate power. As both Harper’s and the nonprofit news site Bridge Michigan have pointed out, Whitmer has, since taking office in 2019, spent nearly $1 billion in taxpayer cash on corporate incentives that have delivered on only a fifth of the promised jobs. In 2024, she backed legislation to grant total exemptions on sales and use taxes for large-scale data centers, overcoming opposition in the state legislature.

In Michigan, AI companies have forged a close relationship with the dominant utility, DTE Electricity, which is eager to do big business powering the data centers. While Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat like Whitmer, has lambasted DTE for its frequent demands for rate hikes, Whitmer hasn’t been nearly as outspoken. DTE is a prolific donor in the state; Whitmer has been, naturally, a beneficiary of its largesse, bagging at least $550,000, according to Detroit News. Jocelyn Benson — the secretary of state and Whitmer’s likely successor — is married to Ryan Friedrichs, a vice president for Related Companies, not only the firm behind the Saline Township data center, but a major donor to Benson’s campaigns.

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By Michael Lind

Top Michigan Democrats are compromised enough by the data-center and utility lobbies that it fell to Tom Leonard, a former leading contender for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, to speak out against AI’s conquest of the state. Leonard called for an end to tax breaks for data centers, as well as a one-year moratorium on building new facilities. He has since dropped out, and if Michigan experiences a blue wave akin to the 2018 midterm that swept Whitmer to the governor’s mansion, Benson will probably end up the next governor.

And while the next US senator from Michigan will have far less say over the future of data centers than the governor, the fight over AI has divided the Senate primary, too. Abdul El-Sayed, the Sanders-backed progressive candidate, has called for AI companies to be regulated as public utilities and criticized his rival, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, for supporting Whitmer-endorsed data-center tax breaks in the legislature. Meanwhile, Haley Stevens, the congresswoman who is the most conservative of the three Democratic contenders, has generally defended the AI industry in the context of national security and competing with China.

For Democrats nationally, especially those who over the years have fawned over Whitmer and the political operation she’s built in Michigan, there will be the question of what kind of party they want to form. If Whitmer plunges into the presidential race, she will be the Democratic warrior for AI. If she doesn’t, others might take up the cause in the name of innovation. But they would be wise not to ignore actual voters. An AI revolt is brewing in Michigan, and it is headed anywhere else where data centers are proliferating. The AI Democrat, like the AI Republican, may only be able to survive for so long.

Be honest: you can’t tell. Hunter, the former-addict son of Sleepy Joe Biden, is Succession’s failson made flesh. In the HBO series, Kendall (played by Jeremy Strong) is another damaged and furious second son, a meme-literate ex-crackhead who specializes in spectacular curtain-pulls, exposing the soiled halls of power to the hate-watching public. Biden, who resurfaced on X last week to celebrate seven years of sobriety before embarking on a trolly tirade against the Trump administration, is experiencing his KRoy rebellion moment: after holding a patricidal press conference calling his father Logan Roy a “malignant presence, a bully and a liar”, Kendall sets about plotting a sick social-media persona for the PR battle to come. His vision: “Good tweet, bad tweet, cool tweet, get-on-the-right-side-of-history tweet.” 

The purpose of Kendall’s too-online self-image is to broadcast edgelordy, trauma-inflected truth, dine out on family mythology and turn acrimony into audience capture. This, too, is the instinct of Biden: he too has no independent role, no electoral mandate and no coherent program, only his identity as the weirdly magnetic fallen son. His natural medium is not the Burisma boardroom (the Ukrainian natural-gas company to which Biden was accused of selling access to his father in exchange for an executive role) or the courtroom (he graduated from Yale Law and worked for the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner before an extensive lobbying and business career). It’s the internet, that great hospice for aggrieved nepo babies with axes to grind. X rewards crashouts — posters by turns pathetic and lucid. Hunter, like Kendall, is confessional, vindictive and showmanlike, looking to expose the corruption of his father’s Washington world while benefiting from it. 

Hunter’s apparently spontaneous return to social media coincided with the release of his stepmother’s much-criticized memoir View from the East Wing, in which Jill details the fraught final stretch of Joe’s cursed presidential campaign, his prostate cancer diagnosis and ailing cognitive condition. In the memoir, Hunter’s role is as an exposed nerve for parents under pressure; his addiction and legal troubles are subsumed in the earnest Biden tableau, part of a family’s struggle. The X Hunter comes from a less stage-managed and more chaotic place — perhaps in huffy response to the media clucking around Jill’s book. It began with a mic-tap on 19 May: “I’m Hunter Biden. You’ve never actually heard from me.” Get in, losers: next stop Truth Town. Then came the aforementioned tweet on 1 Jun celebrating his sobriety, to which one Xeeter responded with the infamous conspiracy theory that Hunter left a bag of coke in the West Wing in 2023 during his father’s presidency (a Secret Service investigation never found its owner). “It most definitely was not [mine]. I would never have forgotten my drugs,” was his banger reply; it has 246,000 likes and counting, making a bigger splash than any official or dignified confession — such as his 2021 addiction memoir Beautiful Things — ever could. Several Hunter Home Truths followed, with a focus on the Trumps. On 5 June, he posted: “[Jeffrey] Epstein didn’t hang himself. The Trumps and Epstein were best friends for decades.” Ventriloquizing Kendall, he explained his MO: “Be yourself. Radical honesty. No fucks given, no fucks taken. Everything else is just noise.” Realtalk straight from Little Guy Lane. 

Along the way he cuts through with serious Recovery Realness: “I smoked crack. I would never have wasted cocaine by putting it up my nose.” When a user reassuringly called “Least Retarded Liberal” accuses him of being “part of the Epstein class”, he pleads to the “exact opposite” with a Bukowski-worthy grope for anti-glamor: “I wasn’t on a private island smoking crack. I was at the Super 8 off I95 in West Haven. Very different class of people, and with more integrity than any of those people.” Like any white-bread Yalie ironically slumming it with the povvos at Popeyes, Hunter thinks he’s communing with the Real America; he doesn’t get that with the click of his fingers he could have switched the strip lighting of a budget motel for the tinkling pianos of a Georgetown steakhouse. Searching for crack rocks on the soiled floors of Super 8s isn’t the flex you think it is when the deep-pile carpets of DC were a phone call away. But the often-insufferable language of recovery provides all the Real Boy cover he needs: like his HBO hologram Kendall Roy, Hunter tells himself he’s more authentic than his privileged peers because he’s been a junkie.

And just like Roy, Hunter sees the revelation of the “real him” as an important moment for a waiting America. In a tweet from Sunday — one of many, by the way — he addresses his “haters”, promising “total transparency. Finally on my terms. Not yours.” Yet Biden is one of the most tragically overexposed figures of the 21st century — compromising material allegedly from his laptop was leaked to Maga figures and the New York Post in 2020, and chaotic images of drug use, sex and other humiliating acts have circulated ever since (the scandal has a strange afterlife as a feature on gay X, where posters thirst over his nudes). All this lends him a strange nihilistic freedom: the worst is surely already out there — and besides, he was pardoned on gun and tax cases by his father shortly before he left office, meaning he is immune from related federal charges between 2014 and 2024. Go nuts!

Hunter’s sense of injury has long family roots; his personal struggles lie along a continuum of clan tragedy. Joe Biden’s political story began with catastrophe: in December 1972, just weeks after being elected to the Senate at 29, his first wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi were killed in a car crash. His sons Beau and Hunter survived but were badly injured; Biden was sworn into the Senate from Beau’s hospital bedside. The widowed young father commuting home from Washington to Delaware every night became the picture of resilience, of moral authority. Then, in 2015, Beau died of brain cancer at 46. He was the golden son: attorney-general of Delaware, Iraq vet, the natural political heir. Hunter was the surviving son under impossible pressure; he was the anti-Beau: a damaged addict, a liability. Since then, like the Roy boy, he has veered between rebelling against the family empire and identifying as its chief victim. 

All this pulls focus from the bone-dry Democrats because unlike them, Hunter isn’t bloodlessly boring: his persona is not focus-grouped but fuming. This enfant terrible aside, Maga has mainly had a monopoly on wildcards: its streamers, memers and reply guys have always snubbed the institutional sobriety of professional Dems. Hunter provides the chaotic charisma otherwise seen as copyrighted by loose-cannon Trump kids, or Hillbilly Vance, or the million digital demagogues who n-word their way into the social-media rage cycle every day. Hunter is a drop of deranged water in the desert, precisely because his tirades reek of 2am. 

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For Hunterheads, who appear to skew young, Dem and male, Biden isn’t a political force as much as a fandom object — endlessly quotable and beyond embarrassment. These guys don’t love Hunter as straightforwardly as Maga fans love Trump; “loving” Hunter isn’t about endorsing or agreeing with him, just thinking he’s hilarious. Hunter’s fanbase fetishizes his damage and laps up his anti-pious spirit. But this distance poses a new danger: detachment and the wafting away of accountability. “Did Hunter cash in from his father’s power” is not being asked; “did you see his last tweet” is.

Meanwhile, Hunter’s return to social media has perturbed Republicans, who have come to see him as a malign symbol of Democrat decadence and corruption. But in terms of real political influence, they surely have nothing to fear from this slightly mad scion spitting facts to the lounge lizards of X. As a Washington dynasty, the Bidens are donezo; Hunter may be gunning for the Trumps on the Epstein scandal but as an effective court jester he is unlikely to shift the dial in the midterms. 

If Hunter Biden is Kendall Roy, what does that make us? Well, spectators. Fans. “He got me feeling like Lana Del Rey,” said one. This is not the mentality of a voter. Voters expect outcomes from Washington — lower taxes, abortion rights, border control, healthcare etc. Fans, however, demand only drama: continued installments, villainous turns, betrayals, quips, catchphrases. We want our politicians to resemble HBO prestige-television characters. We enjoy the parasocial sense that we know Hunter Biden intimately, we like following his self-flagellation and watching him pants his enemies. Politics is slow, procedural and boring; becoming fans prods us awake with plot twists. The reason the public keeps up with Hunter’s mental X timeline is that these days nowhere does the drama of wounded heirs, ailing patriarchs, revenge, secrets and humiliation play out better than in real-life politics. Well, not unless Succession gets another season. 

And what of it? Well, in time we might watch the Democrats reorganize themselves around the sordid appeal of figures like Hunter, lauding charisma, humiliation and narrative propulsion above expertise and competence. This has already happened within Maga. The Biden boy, like second-term Trump, is enacting a revenge fantasy; both, to the watching “fans”, are not ridiculous but iconic. This should worry us. My advice to Hunter: remember how Kendall Roy gets on. It’s not pretty. 

An inconclusive failure, then.

Yet instead of asking why America’s war in Iran has been a failure, the better question is: why would anyone expect any major American war, anywhere in the world, to be a success? Far from being an isolated instance that can be blamed on Trump’s incompetence, this war is only the latest in a series of American expeditions that drag on for years, only to backfire and empower US enemies. From Korea to Iran, the story of American military policy since World War II has been one blunder after another, in which tactical achievements are followed by strategic defeat.

It is popular to blame the American president’s bad decisions or personal traits for such fiascos, but the history of major American strategic failures since 1945 can’t be explained solely or even primarily based on the performance of leaders from Truman to Trump. The underlying cause of America’s strategic tragedy — its chain of short-term tactical successes followed by strategic failures — is what experts describe as the American Way of War — a failing style that future American leaders must seek to reform. 

Like President Barack Obama before him, Trump was elected in part because he was viewed as an alternative to the hawks who brought about the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq. And just as Obama proceeded to launch new American military campaigns in Libya and Syria, so Trump in his second term has brought about the war in Iran, with immediate consequences for the global economy, caused by rising prices for oil, that are far more consequential than were the global consequences of the Korean, Vietnam, and Afghan wars in the eras in which they were fought.

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But the pattern isn’t all that different from those earlier adventures. The Korean War, which caught the United States by surprise, began with Communist North Korea’s invasion of the Western-aligned South on June 25, 1950, influenced by an American blunder: Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s exclusion of South Korea from America’s defense perimeter in Asia, in an unwise speech on Jan. 12, 1950. 

Stalin was quick to take advantage of the invasion, urging Mao’s Communist regime, which had seized power in China a year earlier, to enter the war. The result was a bloody stalemate that Stalin, the sponsor and supplier of North Korea and China, kept going in order to drain American resources. At the same time, Stalin orchestrated the parallel war of Soviet-backed Vietnamese Communists against American-backed France in Indochina. Only after Stalin died, on March 3, 1953, did his successors in Moscow negotiate the partition of Korea and Vietnam with the United States and its allies in 1954. At the cost of more than 36,000 American fatalities and more than a million Korean lives, Washington was only able to restore the former division between the two Koreas at the 38th parallel.  

The tense, armed truce in Korea has persisted to this day. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese Communist regime and its South Vietnamese insurgent allies, backed by the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, fought to establish a united Vietnam and succeeded in 1975, after a failed Americanization of the conflict that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans dead, as well as those of some 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese, plus more in Cambodia and Laos. The great-power victor of the Vietnam War was the Soviet Union, which for the remainder of the Cold War turned Vietnam into its largest military base outside of Eastern Europe. 

The all-out invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the United States, following the earlier, limited Gulf War of 1991, similarly resulted in an “own goal” for Washington. Undertaken along with the war in Afghanistan, in the aftermath of 9/11, the US invasion caused Iraq to disintegrate along ethnic and sectarian lines into anarchy, in which al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other Islamist organizations flourished. Instead of bringing to power a pro-American democracy that would permit permanent bases on Iraqi soil, the war replaced Saddam’s secular Baathist regime with a satrapy of Shiite Iran. Last January, Iraq declared that the withdrawal of US forces from its territory was complete.

Obama, elected in part on the basis of his opposition to George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War, then led America into new military quagmires in Libya and Syria. In 2011, NATO, led by the United States, deposed Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi. The result has been continuing fragmentation and anarchy in Libya. In Syria, beginning in 2014, Washington perversely waged a low-level war simultaneously against both sides in a civil war — Islamist militants, on the one hand, and the government of dictator Bashar al-Assad, on the other. Once again, the American strategy backfired. At the end of 2024, Assad and his family fled to Russia. Syria’s president today is Ahmed al-Sharaa, an al-Qaeda warlord whom the US until 2025 had named on its Specially Designated Global Terrorist List.  

This brings us to the war in Afghanistan (2001-2021), the longest war in American history. The purpose of the war was to topple the Taliban, the Islamist faction that had provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden and his allies before the 9/11 attacks. The result? Following years of warfare under the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, the Biden administration beat a chaotic retreat in August 2021. The victor is the Taliban, which came to power and has imposed a repressive Islamist regime, stripping women, ethnic minorities, and dissidents of rights and carrying out public floggings and executions for crimes including  “illicit relationships.” 

What is striking is the frequency with which major American wars have ended by bringing US enemies to power or allowing them to remain in power. Today, following the deaths of more than 80,000 American soldiers, and millions of Koreans and Indochinese, North Korean Communists aligned with Beijing and Moscow rule North Korea, while Vietnamese Communists rule united Vietnam. Syria and Afghanistan are governed by former anti-American jihadists.

In the case of Korea, it can be argued that the 72-year truce was a partial success that has allowed South Korea to develop and flourish. Even so, North Korea has nuclear weapons with which it threatens America and its East Asian allies, has deployed thousands of troops to fight in Putin’s war in Ukraine, and continues to tie down American military forces in Asia. 

To these humiliating American strategic failures, the Ukraine war might soon be added. In 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden declared, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Today, Putin is still in power and Biden is out of power. The Ukraine War, which has been prolonged as a result of Western military and economic support for Kiev, is likely to end at some point in Russian control of both Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine — yet another embarrassing and costly strategic defeat for the Uncle Sam.

“But other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” Compared to the strategic defeats of US foreign policy in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, US strategic victories in the last seven decades have been few and far between. The most significant strategic victory came with the success of the US strategy, shared with post-Maoist China, in arming insurgents to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1989 — a policy that did not require the commitment of any American troops. The United States and its NATO allies, with minimal coalition losses, and together with Russia, also helped to bring an end to the wars of the Yugoslav Secession by 1995. Otherwise, the few US strategic victories in recent decades have involved small-scale interventions, both peaceful and violent, in America’s western hemisphere sphere of influence — Panama (1989), Haiti (1994), Venezuela (2026).

All of this can be attributed to the American Way of War, which is shaped by the goal of achieving maximum military objectives with minimum American fatalities, due to the US public’s aversion to significant losses, not only of draftees but also of professional American soldiers in combat. To minimize American losses, the United States has long relied on technology, hoping that air power and conventional big-unit warfare will break the will of enemy regimes.

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During the Korean War, the United States dropped more bombs on the Korean peninsula than were dropped in America’s entire Pacific campaign during World War II. In Vietnam, instead of engaging in a classic, low-level counterinsurgency campaign, Uncle Sam relied on bombing and air-support by helicopters against insurgents and North Vietnamese infiltrators in South Vietnam, and deployed defoliants and herbicides like Agent Orange to destroy South Vietnamese forests and crops. In Afghanistan, the United States sought to minimize the loss of pilots by using expensive drones. In all of these cases, America’s advantages in high-tech industrialized warfare failed to prevent strategic stalemate (Korea) or total defeat (Vietnam, Afghanistan). Given these historic precedents, it comes as no surprise that America’s initial tactical successes in the war against Iran, including the massacre of Iran’s top leaders and the degrading of much of its military capacity, have failed to dislodge the repressive Islamist regime or end the conflict.

The unsuccessful American Way of War is not merely technological, but also political — a category that includes both domestic US politics and geopolitics.

In domestic politics, when a president launches what is hoped to be a brief, successful war, there is often a “rally-around-the-flag” effect (though this has been missing in the case of the US-Israel war against Iran). If there are American casualties, however, over time the rising number of body bags and the perception that no end to the conflict is in sight lead the American public to turn against the war, to the point that most Americans come to prefer abandoning the effort and “bugging out” to further losses in blood and treasure.

But even after the public has turned against a war, domestic political factors can result in its prolongation for years — or, in the case of Afghanistan, for decades — through multiple presidencies. On the one hand, wartime presidents are mindful of rising public opposition to a doomed war. At the same time, they fear that they or their party will be accused of weakness and defeatism by hawks in both parties and will suffer electoral setbacks. So in order to avoid blame, presidents from Johnson to Bush, including Trump in his first term, have flinched from withdrawing from a quagmire and passed the disaster to a successor in the White House who can serve as the scapegoat for American military defeat.

American domestic politics, then, makes it politically easy to start wars and hard to end them.

At the geopolitical level, American leaders’ lack of commitment provides an advantage for US enemies. What is a vital interest for the enemy — the survival of the North Korean regime, the conquest of all of Vietnam by Communists, the survival and if possible the triumph of the Taliban — is only a lesser interest for Washington. In the case of enemy dictatorships, the existential threat is personal. A lost war may mean execution, imprisonment, or exile for dictators and their allies and families.

To be sure, America’s war leaders pretend that the United States, like its enemies, has vital interests in the foreign war, often invoking memories of the Nazis and World War II or warning of “domino effects” throughout a region or nuclear mushroom clouds rising above American cities. But this has proved insincere: Washington has refused to mobilize the country for all-out war, eschewing means such as regimentation of the economy and a wartime draft, suggesting that the threats haven’t been existential, after all. 

The underlying problem, then, is the American Way of War itself, with respect to both military means and strategic ends. Since World War II, there has been a mismatch between America’s reliance on high-tech, air-power-intensive, big-unit warfare and the actual requirements for success in many low-intensity conflicts, as well as a mismatch between American public opinion and the trigger-happiness of much of America’s bipartisan political elite.  

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The American people and American politicians alike prefer a war like World War II, which for the United States lasted only four years and ended with total victory and regime change in the enemy countries. At the same time, the US Army would prefer to fight Field Marshall Rommel in North Africa, with few collateral civilian casualties, and the US Navy would prefer naval battles far from centers of population. What Americans want is a limited war in which a complete victory against demonized or genuinely demonic enemies is possible. When that cannot be achieved, war is unpopular with American civilians and soldiers alike. There is no appetite for brutal, protracted, low-level counterinsurgency campaigns in foreign mountains or jungles, where enemy soldiers and civilians are intermingled. 

It’s unlikely  that Americans will ever support the transformation of the US military into a permanent colonial-style constabulary specialized in assisting proxies and fighting or assisting insurgencies in broken countries around the world. In light of this, the only way to avoid repeated strategic failures is for there to be much higher domestic political obstacles to American presidents’ tendency to resort to war. 

But Congress lost control of the process for launching war to the executive branch in the Truman years; there has not been a formal declaration of war by the United States since 1942, when Congress declared war against Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, having earlier declared war against Japan, Germany, and Italy following the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. The launching of new and failed wars like those in Libya, Syria, and Iran by presidents like Obama and Trump after they campaigned as relative doves proves that it is still too easy for American presidents to drag America into war and still too hard for presidents to get out.  

Breaking this sad pattern of repeated, large-scale American strategic and military failure will require Washington to align its foreign policy with the values of most Americans, not simply replacing one dove-turned-hawk with another in the White House.

The pandemic dumped jet fuel into the growing counter-disinformation machine while extending its controls into the physical world. That brought the information state into people’s everyday lives. This was something different from the drama of false allegations about Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia that plagued the Trump presidency. Though Russiagate dominated the news cycle, it was essentially a political crime against abstractions like the “rule of law” and the “democratic process.” Normal people who did not devote their time to scrolling newsfeeds could mostly choose to ignore the sordid Trump-Russia drama. Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates removed the “normie” exemption.

The senseless cruelty of preventing people from attending outdoor weddings and visiting sick relatives in their final moments. The images of authorities in New York City placing locks on children’s playgrounds. Authorities in Venice, California, using bulldozers to shovel thirty-seven tons of sand into the city’s iconic skatepark to prevent kids from playing outdoors. Prolonged school closures that isolated children and caused generational learning losses, hurting poor and disadvantaged kids worst of all. The brazen flouting of these restrictions by the upper classes and political elites. At Barack Obama’s 60th birthday party, for instance, where the former president and his hundreds of celebrity guests on Martha’s Vineyard danced with their faces exposed while the army of workers hired for the event were forced to wear masks. The fact that the technique of lockdowns was imported into the United States from the authoritarian surveillance state of China, where the virus originated. The even more galling fact that mere discussion of the virus’ origins was labeled a racist conspiracy by the most venerated institutions of science and journalism.

By imposing excessive and arbitrary policies while attempting to conceal vital information about the pandemic, the state provoked a public backlash. In turn, government officials treated the backlash not as legitimate democratic dissent, but as proof that unregulated misinformation was fueling domestic extremism. They responded by doubling down on the same policies, tightening their information controls, and imposing new methods of digital cancellation like “debanking” that cut off people’s access to their own financial accounts. Official repression and popular revolt fed off each other in a cycle that radicalized both sides and laid bare the realities of mass manipulation and digital dependency in the information state.

***

On February 15, 2020, as people were just learning about Covid, the World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous.” His statement came almost a month before the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared a pandemic. The “infodemic” not only preceded the physical pandemic, it was, in the words of the world’s foremost health authority, “just as dangerous.”

The following month, all the major tech platforms — Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube — released a joint statement pledging that they would be “jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus” while also “elevating authoritative content”.

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“The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise,” wrote Klaus Schwab, head of the Davos-based World Economic Forum (WEF), in a book published at the start of the pandemic that announced its aims in the title, COVID-19: The Great Reset. The global surveillance network Schwab described had a second purpose. Beyond detecting the spread of new viruses, it could monitor the information environment and shape the public’s response to new policies. Yet the category of “authoritative information”, which would supposedly prevent future “infodemics”, was less reliable than its name suggested.  

Members of the public who had eyes to see could not help but notice that whatever the experts vehemently declared about Covid could be reversed a day later. Health authorities like the WHO and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were often acting on incomplete information to rush out policies heavily influenced by political considerations in the name of “science”. Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of Google subsidiary YouTube, said her platform’s publishing policy called for “removing information that is problematic”. Examples of problematic information she named included people advocating vitamin C and turmeric as cures for the coronavirus and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations”. Meanwhile, the WHO frequently changed its recommendations, which meant the meaning of misinformation changed from day to day.

By following its own rule, Google would have been forced, at various times during the pandemic, to ban posts that advocated wearing masks, that characterized the virus as highly contagious, or that suggested that it might have come from a laboratory, since all those went against official stances taken by the WHO. The CDC was similarly inconsistent, changing its policy on masking at least three times in the span of two years. The agency originally discouraged their use before endorsing it, then finally acknowledging that the cloth masks most Americans used could not stop the fine aerosols that spread Covid — a fact that Anthony Fauci had privately acknowledged at the outset of the pandemic in a February 2020 email.

Despite the inconsistencies of the public health authorities, experts from the disinformation field proved flexible enough to enforce every new pronouncement as if they were both moral imperatives and matters of settled science. When Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton suggested that Covid-19 could have escaped from the Chinese virology laboratory in Wuhan at the epicenter of the outbreak, he was swiftly attacked by journalists who all seemed to use strikingly similar language. The Washington Post labeled the idea of a possible lab leak a “conspiracy theory that was already debunked”. A reporter who was then at Politico accused Cotton of “spreading rumors… that were easily debunked within minutes”, while The New York Times chided Cotton for spreading what it called a “conspiracy theory.” Given the apparent consensus, Facebook banned users from discussing the lab leak theory under its misinformation policy. That May, The Washington Post’s top fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, wrote that it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a lab. A year later, Kessler published a new article explaining “How the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory Suddenly Became Credible.” And a short time after that, Facebook quietly reversed its policy, posting a notice that read, “In consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”

In June 2020, the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, sponsored the creation of a nominally independent organization called the Election Integrity Partnership whose mission was to monitor and remove election-related misinformation online in the lead-up to the November election. A consortium of four groups (two universities, a private defense contractor, and a Washington think tank), the EIP’s mandate, according to one of its founders, a former chief security officer for Facebook, Alex Stamos, was to “try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves”. With more than 100 employees scouring social media sites for speech that they deemed misinformation and flagged for suppression or removal by the tech companies, the EIP did the kind of work, according to Stamos, that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations” to do on its own.

Immediately after the election, one of the four groups that made up the EIP, the Stanford Internet Observatory, spun off into a new information-monitoring initiative called the Virality Project. In a seamless transition from elections to public health, the project collaborated with the surgeon general’s office and the CDC while policing social media for what it labeled vaccine and pandemic-related misinformation. One email sent by a Virality Project staffer to multiple social media companies recommended that the platforms take action even against posts that described “stories of true vaccine side effects”, specifically “true posts which could fuel hesitancy”. 

Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.

Without any public deliberation or legislative debate, without any formal amendments to the Constitution, the authority to censor that which was true but deemed harmful had become the law… not quite of the land, but of the society online that was ruled by code. The more arbitrary the health policies became, the better they propped up the authority of the information regulators.

***

At 77, Joe Biden was the oldest major-party candidate to ever run for president, and it showed. Heading into the November 2020 election against Trump, he looked unsteady, even feeble, in his limited and carefully stage-managed public engagements. Biden’s voice would trail off mid-sentence. He would forget what he was talking about or refer to someone who had died as if they were still alive.

Given his frequent verbal gaffes, blank stares, and ghost-white pallor, there were concerns about his health and mental fitness for office. But the powerful fact-checking bureaus in the press dismissed these concerns as Right-wing conspiracy mongering, misinformation, and ageist discrimination. One Homeland Security bulletin leaked to the media detailed an alleged Kremlin plot to manipulate American voters by spreading “unsubstantiated allegations” about Biden’s declining mental health.

With the election only a few months away, Biden’s campaign announced that he would not hold any public campaign rallies due to Covid-19. Biden added, in an offhand comment to reporters, “This is the most unusual campaign I think in modern history.” Not long after that, Biden won a most unusual election.

After losing the election, Trump spent two months challenging the results and stoking the fury of his supporters with a manic “Stop the Steal” campaign that mixed reasonable questions of electoral interference with absurd and wildly irresponsible claims that prodded at the fragile basis of civic peace. The effort culminated on January 6, 2021, when a large pro-Trump demonstration that had assembled in Washington, DC, to challenge the election results splintered off into a riot at the US Capitol building. Ugly scenes of Trump supporters rampaging around the Capitol and fighting with police officers blanketed the news.

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In a symbolic register, the images of protesters dressed like Vikings marauding inside the Capitol building were uniquely threatening to American democracy. But, despite the symbolism, the riots were disorganized and ineffectual. Moreover, January 6 fit into a larger pattern of political violence that had played out over the previous year. The nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which had taken place six months earlier, were orders of magnitude larger and more destructive than the pro-Trump riot. Nineteen people were killed in violence connected to the BLM protests, which spread to more than a hundred cities across the US and caused over $1 billion in damages.

And yet the elite establishment overwhelmingly supported the BLM movement and sympathetically pandered to its demands such as defunding the police. Nancy Pelosi, the powerful Speaker of the House, posed for a photo op kneeling in a brightly colored African kente cloth to show solidarity with the protesters. Public figures who for months had vilified public gatherings as deadly superspreader events suddenly celebrated the sight of tens of thousands of demonstrators crowding in the streets for BLM marches. One petition signed by more than 1,200 health officials declared it incumbent on members of the medical profession to offer “unwavering support” to the protesters. The ruling tech platforms, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, all vocally endorsed and amplified the BLM movement.

In contrast, the response to January 6 was as swift and decisive as any political fallout in recent history. One day after the Capitol melee, Facebook banned the sitting president from posting on its platform. Then Twitter banned Trump permanently, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence”. PayPal and its subsidiary Venmo blocked the accounts of individuals and groups involved in organizing the pro-Trump demonstrations, as well as a Christian crowdfunding site raising money for the protesters. GoFundMe announced that it would remove fundraisers promoting conspiracy theories and “misinformation” about the election. 

To be sure, one could reasonably argue that the threat posed by rioters storming the Capitol and threatening to overturn the election justified the response. That was a political judgment. But the coordinated campaign of digital disconnection reflected a profound transformation in the American system of government. It exposed the outline of a new power structure that operated outside of the formal government by controlling the strategic heights of the information space. A cartel of Silicon Valley tech companies had accomplished in days what Congress failed to do over four years: it shut Trump up and silenced his movement. For a while, at least.

Biden’s inauguration a week later came as a mere formality. The first Trump presidency ended the moment he lost his means of speaking directly to the public, which social media had initially provided, propelling him into the White House, and then unilaterally revoked. The invisible hand of the information regime, once it decided to reveal itself, simply hit mute on the most powerful man in the world. In doing so it revealed an essential rule of power in the digital age: sovereign are they who control the information.

This is an edited extract from The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, by Jacob Siegel (Henry Holt & Company).

Written by the British political philosopher Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism made a fairly simple and convincing argument: after the collapse of real socialism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, there no longer existed enough imagination inside the West to actually bring about meaningful political change. Evidence of that thesis was hardly in short supply back then, either: the bankers on Wall Street had just broken the economy, and the only “solution” on offer by president Barack Obama and his European counterparts was to bail the bankers out with taxpayer money so that they could go on doing whatever it is they had been doing. Nobody went to jail; the banks were “too big to fail”, and even Obama himself seemed to have no clue what to do about it. Some rules were put in place to try to prevent similar risky behavior in the future, rules that have either been or are in the process of being dismantled today. A more permanent fix was never in the making.

If anyone back then thought that the inability to come up with systemic fixes in America was simply down to the personal failings of Obama himself or the people around him, the Euro crisis that followed in the wake of the Great Recession would soon put such thoughts to bed. European politicians all faced the same conundrum of a structurally flawed economic and political system, and like the Americans, all they could think to do was to kick the can down the road. To fix the Euro would have required deep overhauls to the entire structure of the EU, and that was simply too much work. Instead, European politicians bailed out the bad banks and left the bad banking system in place, fully aware that in doing so they were simply guaranteeing even worse problems down the road.

All of that was part of the ethos back in the late 2000s and early 2010s; we had the perfect system, there was no other alternative, but the system was also breaking apart and nobody had any idea what to do about it. The horizon had closed, the debates were over, and we now lived at the end of history: that might have been an exhilarating thought to an older generation watching the Berlin Wall fall down and the Iron Curtain finally part, but to the millennials some 20 years later, it was nothing but stifling.

And it wasn’t just stifling to the Left, as it would turn out. Mark Fisher, waging a long-term battle against depression and other mental health issues, would end up dying by suicide in early 2017. In an ironic twist, his death came at precisely the moment in history that a dark horse candidate in the 2016 Republican primary — an erratic showman and real estate mogul by the name of Donald J. Trump — would upend the entire American political establishment precisely by saying all the things that nobody else would or could. The Iraq War was stupid; US globalist economic policy had destroyed the American working class and hollowed out the country; of course, he also talked about Mexico sending “rapists” and criminals as well, which only further polarized the debate.

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The entire American political class of 2016 agreed: there was no alternative; the way we had been doing things was the only way to do them. Yet Trump, in an electoral coup that nobody believed was even possible, boldly stood up and called their bluff, and his voters absolutely loved him for it. The era of capitalist realism was over; rather than shirking from or cautioning against an active political imagination, Trump and those around him now invited people to dream, and to dream big. Less than 10 years after Fisher wrote Capitalist Realism, the book had been rendered obsolete: for the generation of young intellectuals on the Right who flocked to the banner of MAGA in 2017 and thereafter, the future promised nothing but freedom and opportunity.

Eight years into the Trump era, the ghost of TINA, “There Is No Alternative”, is if anything even more distant than it was in 2017. Americans today are invited to imagine pretty much anything: mass deportations of tens of millions of people, a no-holds-barred war against the administrative state, a wholesale effort to “Make America Healthy Again”, a total revolution in geopolitics, economic policy, and so on. We now speak of building cities on Mars, or abolishing income taxes entirely, or of boldly going back to the economic patterns and policies of the Fifties or, even, 1890s. Such scandalous dreams would have been utterly unthinkable during the dour Obama years, where a minor fix here and a minor nudge there — all overseen by properly vetted, apolitical “experts”, of course! — were hailed as the only practical mode of governance.

Having said all that, there is actually an obvious contradiction built right into the Trump era that replaced the capitalist realism that Mark Fisher criticized. If one looks at the past eight years — with power passing first from Obama to Trump, then from Trump to Biden, and then from Biden back to Trump — and looks underneath the hype and the rhetoric, the actual political story is one of subtle continuity. Rhetorically, Trump and Biden always agreed on one thing: that they were like night and day, completely opposed to each other, and the choice between them was the choice between two radically different sets of policies for America.

But this is simply not true if one actually looks at the evidence. Take the idea of tariffs: many would say they represent the most central feature of what makes Trump “different” from his predecessors. Yet in reality, tariff policy has been an area of remarkable political continuity since 2016; it is only in the world of political rhetoric that a conflict between two different, distinct “sides” actually exists.

To illustrate this, Trump originally broke from political consensus in his first term in order to slap tariffs on China, a policy move that Biden loudly ridiculed as idiotic and counterproductive. But when Biden replaced Trump in the Oval Office, he did not abolish Trump’s tariffs at all. Quite the opposite: he spent his entire administration furiously iterating and expanding upon them. Fast forwarding to 2025, and Trump’s shocking “liberation day” tariff announcements were at first greeted as a sui generis bit of policy; an idea so radical, far-reaching and/or stupid that it couldn’t have been dreamed up by anyone other than Trump. But in reality, Trump’s tariffs were themselves an iteration of earlier Biden policy. Biden’s White House had spent the years since the Ukraine war devising a new economic model where countries would be divided into friendly, neutral, and unfriendly “spheres”. The older, Clinton-era model saw economic globalism as both a means and an end unto itself; the more free trade there was, the better off America would be. Against this discredited model, Biden, as well as national security advisor Jake Sullivan, proposed tying trade access to America much more tightly to both national security concerns and to the economic health of America’s middle class.

The Biden attempt to fuse national security, geopolitical brinkmanship and re-industrialization at home was then given practical shape in the various semiconductor tariffs and regulations that Biden launched during the second half of his term. Biden much preferred import and export controls over blunt tariffs, but the goal was clear: isolate China, and use the large economic heft of the United States to bring geopolitical allies into closer alignment.

To put it plainly, the tariff policies of the second Trump administration simply continued where Jake Sullivan left off. The goal was unchanged, but they now merged with Trump’s long-standing obsession with tariffs. Of course, rhetorically, neither side would ever admit to any overlap whatsoever, and partisans of Trump would say that his tariffs are all about bringing back blue collar manufacturing jobs. But that is clearly just an excuse, and an unconvincing one at that: Trump and his administration are constantly declaring that being on America’s side, or agreeing to geopolitical concessions, will be the only way to access the American market going forward. Moreover, the tariff rollout was never coordinated with American industry. Nor does there even seem to be anyone inside of American industry willing to defend them. Indeed, why should they? Once you declare that you can’t make a trade deal with Canada if they recognize Palestine, or that Brazil will have to eat massive tariffs unless the corruption charges against former president Jair Bolsonaro are dropped, you are no longer doing industrial policy; you are using tariffs as a tool of geopolitics, carving out “friendly” and “unfriendly” trade zones just as Sullivan and Biden had hoped to do more fully in their second term.

The same criticism can be levied against the Ukraine war, and Trump’s strenuous declarations that this war is actually “Biden’s war”. In point of fact, the Ukraine conflict is the collaborative project of both Trump and Biden, with a minor assist from Barack Obama’s second term. While Obama’s state department famously supported the Maidan coup of 2014, Obama himself was an opponent of funneling arms to Ukraine thereafter, reasoning that Ukraine was very far away from the US and very close to Russia. It was under Trump’s first term that the official buildup of Western weaponry inside Ukraine began, and when Biden assumed office, he simply continued where Trump had left off, furthering the project of building up Ukraine as a bulwark against Russia. Biden might have been the one to actually eat the cake of the Ukraine war, but it was Trump who warmed up the oven.

Of course, the same pattern is now repeating itself yet again: the drawdown in arms deliveries to Ukraine that Trump is now bragging about actually started under Biden, simply because the US was running out of more weapons to send. Conversely, the strategy of trying to strangle Russia, or at least force it into a peace settlement through the application of tariffs that Biden devised, has not been abandoned by Trump. Instead, it has been scaled up to levels that Biden himself was unwilling to contemplate. Biden considered secondary tariffs on India to be far too geopolitically reckless — India being an important potential ally in any future showdown against China — and so it took Trump, the supposed “anti-war” candidate, to implement the policy that the “warmonger” Biden wouldn’t sign off on. Indeed, the joining of China, India and Russia together into a loose alliance against American bullying is a geopolitical disaster of the first order. None other than Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan himself, has recently been seen in Indian media bemoaning Trump’s destruction of America’s diplomatic standing. Similarly, after spending the entirety of Biden’s term attacking him for being far too aggressive and quick to use military force, Trump has now authorized more military strikes in the first year of his presidency than Biden did in his entire four-year term; has massively ramped up the war against Yemen (only to then surrender in the face of growing ammo deficits) and now banging the war drum against Venezuela.

Trump promised “mass deportations”, but in his first month, the number of deportations wasn’t even up to the level of Joe Biden and is no better than Obama’s. Trump promised to fix the deficit, only to then immediately return to business as usual. Trump promised an end to DEI policies, but has arguably acted to expand the bureaucratic and NGO apparatus he inherited from his “woke” predecessors; all that Trump has changed is that this apparatus is now focused on very intrusively policing antisemitism and/or criticism of Israel.

The above list might naturally appear as just another partisan litany of complaints aimed against the sitting president. But none of this is actually meant to be a criticism of Donald Trump. Logically, if there’s no difference between Trump and Biden, or between Biden and Trump, then both candidates have failed to do what they promised their voters. Biden told the Democrats that a vote for him would be a step away from Trump’s fascist mania; Trump boasted that once he became President again, the woke insanity and globalist policies of Biden would be things of the past. In the days of Obama and Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, the problem was that there was only one door, one alternative, one way to do things. Now, there are a million different doors, each one more fantastical and colorful than the last, yet somehow they all lead to the same place in the end. The depression Fisher pointed to is gone, now replaced by white-hot anger, yet the policies still do not change. How much of an improvement is this really?

Indeed, at the time of writing this, rumors are now swirling of yet another direct continuation between Joe Biden and Donald Trump: that of failing health, and underhanded attempts to cover that situation up. Trump, just like Biden, has been dogged by an increasing number of minor health issues: swollen ankles, visible bruising on his hands, the occasional moment caught on camera of dragging one leg or seemingly having trouble walking straight. Taken on their own, they amount to very little, but they have been the topic of an increasing amount of gossip as of late. After being missing in action for three days for undisclosed reasons — leading to a rapid acceleration of the rumors around his health — Trump was pictured golfing.

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What is so telling about this tide of rumors about Trump’s health has very little to do with whether Trump is or was genuinely sick or not. Rather, it is the sense that even here, nothing in politics actually seems to change between the parties. The shameful and genuinely destructive coverup of Biden’s failing health was attacked viciously (and for very good reason!) by Trump and the Republican party; yet it seems like a foregone conclusion that most or all who did so would be ready to close ranks and defend their guy doing the same thing. If Joe Biden did it, why can’t we?

Far from standing on any principles, or being concerned with real, material change, the political battle inside America — and to a great extent the rest of the West as well — has become unfathomably bitter at the same time as it has become increasingly imaginary. Trump’s supporters may just be ready to fight just as viciously on behalf of a medical coverup as they once fought against it, and if one looks at the Epstein affair, the MAGA movement has shown an ability to perform impressive heel turns: from considering the release of the Epstein files a huge priority to bemoaning it as a “democrat hoax”. Regime change wars might have been what led America down its current downward spiral; but after a decade of railing against those wars, Trump’s defense secretary now refuses to rule out another one against Venezuela. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Where partisanship is concerned, reality no longer seems to matter much. As the amount of people employed in American manufacturing continues to fall — US manufacturing has now actually been contracting for six months straight! — the White House’s official X account is putting out AI-generated pictures of blonde, rugged construction workers, boasting about the ongoing “blue collar boom!”. Supporters of Trump cheer this wholly imaginary boom; opponents point to the real-world numbers only to be quickly shouted down. Of course, the day the shoe ends up on the other foot, it will be Republicans’ turn to talk about real world numbers, and the Democrats’ turn to shout them down. Inside the imaginations of both sides, a great war is being fought for the future of the country, with stakes that have never been higher. Outside of that imaginary battle, the empire haltingly plods along like it always has, seemingly powerless to reform or change course. Far from being a product of Trump or Biden’s personal flaws, this state of affairs seems unlikely to change no matter what candidate ends up being thrust into the Oval Office. Congress is simply too sclerotic, America is simply too broke, and the bureaucratic state itself is too slow and lacking in capacity to really make things happen. China spends a few years to build a science fiction-esque maglev train line; America spends a decade to replace old Amtrak trains with new ones that are somehow still slower than the old ones.

The reality of decline is increasingly hard to escape at this point. In fact, the more each side resorts to populism and scapegoating, the worse the decline seems to be. Political polarization and the aggressive scapegoating of the other side now looks like the political equivalent of “empty calories” — a deeply unhealthy non-solution that just makes you worse off the more you indulge in it.

Mark Fisher’s dour, colorless age of capitalist realism is now decidedly over, though the man himself never lived to see it. Today, in the age of fake numbers, endless AI slop, and rabid partisanship shorn of even the slightest pretense of principles or intellectual honesty, that fact seems less like a blessing than it once did. After realism, we now live in an age of disconnected fantasy; yet for all that has changed, true political alternatives seem as elusive as ever.

So asked Ben Meiselas of the MeidasTouch podcast of Joe Biden in December in a rare one-on-one sit-down, conducted during Biden’s lame-duck period, as he and the nation awaited President Trump’s return to the White House. By then, Biden resembled a shambling zombie from the film 28 Years Later, and he squinted and slurred his way through an incoherent answer that boiled down to: Nope, no regrets.

His rant sounded quite Trumpian in its detachment from reality, including a claim that his term would end with an Israel-Gaza peace deal. Yet the hangdog-faced podcaster didn’t challenge it or follow up. He simply nodded and moved on to the next scripted question he had written down in a notebook. Meiselas looked like a man who had won the lottery to interview a sitting president and didn’t want to blow it. You could almost see affirmation in Meiselas’s eyes: You’re doing great, Mr. President. Keep going.

Welcome to MeidasTouch, the popular “news-influencer” show where every hour feels like amateur hour. It’s essentially a booster club for Democrats disguised as just-the-facts-ma’am independent journalism. Since Hollywood and establishment media failed miserably to help elect Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024, the Democrats have been desperately searching for their own Joe Rogan — a charismatic and outsider everyman who resonates with young men and can gently steer them toward Team Blue. What they’ve got instead with MeidasTouch is nearly the polar opposite: it’s anti-Trump infotainment starring three earnest Millennial brothers — Ben, Brett, and Jordan Meiselas — with little charisma and no chill, peddling content that appeals to news-addicted liberals.

The MeidasTouch bros claim that their brand is “pro-democracy,” but somehow that only aligns perfectly with one side. It’s no coincidence that years before they interviewed Biden on their podcast as journalists, the Meiselases were raising money for him. Launched in the spring of 2020, MeidasTouch almost immediately became a DIY SuperPAC helmed by the three Long Island brothers: Colin Kaepernick’s lawyer (Ben), a video editor for the Ellen show (Brett), and a marketing executive (Jordan).

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Their early batch of anti-Trump digital ads spoke the language of outrage fluently, and the brothers positioned themselves not just as commentators, but combatants in an existential bloodsport. The prize: America’s soul. Within months, they’d raised $5 million for the 2020 election cycle. A Rolling Stone investigation concluded that MeidasTouch’s anti-Trump ad campaign “was a huge waste of donor money, and its tweets weren’t persuading swing voters.” MeidasTouch responded by threatening to sue Rolling Stone and demanded that the magazine apologize and pay its legal costs. (The MeidasTouch brothers didn’t respond to UnHerd’s request for comment.)

Their digital network grew steadily over the four years that followed — but exploded once Trump took office for a second term. In the first quarter of 2025, MeidasTouch was the fastest-growing YouTube channel in terms of net new subscribers. It made splashy headlines in February, notching 57.5 million downloads and surpassing Rogan’s 51.5 million for the No. 1 podcast. The bros got there by posting multiple times daily, all rapid response 10-minute segments featuring the search-engine-friendly word “Trump” in the title.

Their success is proof that a media empire can be built almost solely on white-hot Trump hate. To listen to it is to enter a world where the president is a mindless buffoon, an Inspector Clouseau type who destroys democracy like it’s a vase accidentally knocked off a pedestal, but also even more than that: a moral aberration, a threat to civilization itself that must be denounced at every turn lest it be “normalized.”

Every YouTube thumbnail is a scream declaring Donald’s impending downfall — “Trump gets publicly HUMILIATED in the WORST TV appearance of all time” or “Trump LOSES IT as MAGA Burns IT ALL DOWN” — repackaging every political development into content gold. The hyperbolic headlines rarely match reality, but the dopamine loop is deliberate and constant. Play the video. Share the tweet. Feel the rage. Repeat. They’re like the #Resistance’s unholy marriage of the dystopian online-game-show host MrBeast and MSNBC — equal parts law school, cable news, and YouTube reaction video.

MeidasTouch is part of a sprawling digital-media #Resistance ecosystem, in which every news cycle presents a fresh reason to panic and post. The historian Heather Cox Richardson writes Substack essays that feel like bedtime stories for liberals about how history’s lessons all point to Trump trying to wrench America back to the pre-Civil War era. The Bulwark dresses up neocon-friendly centrism in moral urgency against MAGA. Well-dressed progressive commentator Brian Tyler Cohen condenses news stories into slick TikToks.

These are the town criers for the terminally online, warning us that Trump is coming (again), and only your retweet and subscription can stop him. There’s no room for dissent, no appetite for introspection, no curiosity about voters who drifted from the Democratic Party and why they might have done so. The hate machine needs both conflict and clarity. In a recent video, Brett Meideles said that Trump makes problems worse 99.9% of the time, but then quickly corrected himself. Oh, actually, it was 100% of the time.

Their growing audience has often been dubbed “BlueAnon,” because they’re also prone to conspiratorial thinking — similar to the Right-wing variety, QAnon — when it suits them. An Economist/YouGov poll found that 41% of Democrats still believe Trump didn’t legitimately win in 2024. About a third think the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pa., might have been staged. They’re also the fastest-growing demographic of gun owners, doomsday preppers more likely to holster their weapons in farmer’s-market tote bags than camo. This isn’t just fringe paranoia; it’s become the dour mood of a base that now sees even The New York Times or NPR as suspiciously neutral. In their eyes, objectivity itself has become complicity. They want media that picks a side, and MeidasTouch is happy to oblige.

The irony, of course, is that the same people who decry disinformation and cultishness on the Right have created a mirrored pathology: an all-consuming fixation on Trump, his every utterance, tweet, and indictment. If Trump is indeed the Boomer ego in human form — a gaudy, narcissistic amalgam of generational hubris — to his critics he remains the gravitational force around which their media diets, anxieties, and identities orbit.

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For many Millennial children of aging liberals, it’s become a running joke; there hasn’t been a family dinner or phone call in years without Trump somehow being invoked. “We’re providing a comforting place where we’re channeling people’s feelings during a real difficult time,” Meiselas told the Times. Still, MeidasTouch is hardly providing comfort — it’s churning out addictive ragebait and telling viewers to “Join the Meidas Mighty,” the podcast’s version of Swifties for Trump haters.

Flattening all Left-of-center commentary into anti-MAGA rants is a copout. Instead of grappling with the real and urgent reasons why Democrats are so unpopular in 2025 — housing costs, health-care failures, stagnant wages — their content is the podcast equivalent of jamming fingers in their ears and yelling “Trump!” at the top of their lungs. It’s red meat for the haters, but it doesn’t build coalitions or expand the base. If anything, it drowns out the figures and institutions that are trying to do the slow, difficult work of organizing around positive policy change. Their brand of algorithmic outrage might rally clicks, but it does not build up alternatives to Trump World.

Once this kind of hyperventilating partisan media was the sole dominion of the Right with the likes of Fox News and Breitbart. Now, sadly, it looks like the future for centrist liberals. America has plenty of legitimate beef with the old, fussy mainstream media. But we’ll miss it when it’s scrapped for parts and replaced by the new algorithmically optimized online media machines.

Where art thou, Brian Williams?

Tariffs come and go; the deal to end all deals with Russia over Ukraine came and went; the vow to end the war in Gaza is as if it had never been made; Canada, Panama, Greenland, an Iran “deal”: whither? Musk is riding high, he’s withdrawing, he’s back, he’s gone; he and Trump are over, the media and social media convulse in sound and fury, all of it signifying… what exactly? Cabinet secretaries prove their authenticity by their lack of merit, then don white coats of anti-expertise and proceed to euthanize the “deep state”.

After months of turbulence, the sensation of being tossed about in a heaving sea gives way to the feeling of being rocked insensate. Behold the new American dynamic: the frenetic-anesthetic. And yet it seems that behind nearly every outrageous policy announcement is one ultra-mundane goal, cruel as its consequences often are: to save money. Has there ever been an autocratic regime whose principal instrument of terror was to withhold funds? Isn’t that what parents do?

Cecil Rhodes declared: “I would annex the planets if I could.” Trump would monetize them. To hell with even the pretext of la mission civilisatrice. Civilization merely gets in the way. So do politics and policy. When Max Weber observed the disenchantment of the modern world, he had no idea a Trump would rob science and reason themselves of their power and replace them with business. Trump’s deals, after all, require little wit, culture, intellect, knowledge. Or politics. Or policy. That’s all liberal elite stuff. The President’s diehard supporters, convinced they have been swindled for generations by puffed-up eggheads with no vitality below the waist, are delighted.

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The only constant in Trump’s scatter-brained reign is his self-promotion as he sells the American presidency off, bit by bit, in cryptocurrency. His face now appears on a giant banner hung over the front of the Department of Agriculture (of all places). More banners, to be draped over other public buildings, are said to be in the works. He posted a picture of himself as Pope. He is throwing a nearly $50 million military parade to celebrate his birthday this month. At a recent Oval Office meeting, the President of the United States was hawking hats that said “Trump Was Right About Everything!” Enthralled by the idea of war, though averse to an actual war, he is, incredibly, sending thousands of troops, spy planes and two warships to the border with Mexico. But don’t generalissimos take land, like Putin, instead of keeping people out of it? Well that’s where Greenland comes in.

And yet it seems that the massive military presence on the border, like the illegal deportation of immigrants to other countries, and the abduction of foreign students off American streets, and the threat to suspend habeas corpus — that it is all simply meant to fascinate Trump’s followers, and to terrify his critics. You could be next, citizen status or not. Thuggery with a policy-face.

Trump straddles America in the manner of an erotic asphyxiation. The choke-release-choke-release rhythm of his tariffs characterizes the dynamic of his regime. He brings the country close to some type of crisis that will bring relief through clarity, releases, then tightens his grasp again. Just when you fear Trump is going to come through on his administration’s threats to suspend habeas corpus, the cornerstone of American liberty, he posts an insult to Taylor Swift, then follows that with a threat to Bruce Springsteen, who had been critical of Trump. What is the word for disgust mixed with relief? There is no word for that. All the cascading historical analogies aside, there has never been, as Trump himself might say, a phenomenon like this: malevolence, ignorance, greed and open corruption moving together in seamless harmony in a still-functioning democracy.

At this point, the question of opposition to Trump is moot. The Democrats hold powerless minorities in Congress. Sanders and AOC rallies attract mere low tens of thousands of the faithful. The civil rights March for Jobs and Freedom on Washington in 1963 drew hundreds of thousands of people; so did the 1967 March on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. Today, everyone is on their screens. And the media would rather obsess over the former president’s afflicted prostate than seriously and steadily address the current president’s corrupt and unstable mind.

Something has to give, and it’s this: the Democratic and democratic opposition has to abandon its educated reserve, its decorous outrage. It has to adopt a post-apocalyptic strategy. It has to begin, as Trump began, outside norms, beyond bounds, and from scratch, “lie down where all the ladders start”. Heaven knows, the Democratic Party has unlimited wealth, as Kamala Harris’s candidacy showed. They have the means to start from scratch.

The first thing they can do, then, is act like what they have become, a government-in-exile, and not like a gaggle of atomized, disconnected elected officials. They need to hold a weekly, if not daily, press conference that mirrors the form of those mind-blowing news conferences led by Trump’s fealty-bot, Karoline Leavitt. They need, first of all, a press-secretary-in-exile who will present a perfect counterpoint to Leavitt: earthy, unscripted, independent, funny, honest, open and not on the verge of exploding.

Now, the opposition’s press secretary has to be the face of something. Obviously the Democrats are not about to choose the representative of their party at this juncture. There is too much ambition, too much rivalry. And that’s what primaries are for. Let them, in lieu of that, settle on a quorum of a few figures whose steady presence will establish itself, regular press conference after regular press conference, in the mind of the public. Let them start with Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of red Kentucky, a promising hybrid of (seemingly) true Christian morality, broad and deep liberal sentiments, and almost earthy American rectitude. Bring in Tim Walz, Ruben Gallego (and try to win back Hispanic voters from Trump) and Connecticut senator Chris Murphy.

Naturally our quorum will insist that they would never question the authority of an elected president. This will establish the morality of their challenge to the authority of this American president. The goal is to fascinate, as Trump has fascinated. You do that by making the act of watching you, and listening to you, an original experience.

Jettisoning any association with celebrities will help — how depressing that for liberals the fact that Biden didn’t recognize George Clooney at a crowded dinner is the definitive proof of his mental decline. The Left needs ordinary-seeming figures like Trump — but with substance and principle — to outperform Trump’s self-burlesquing swagger and rise to the outsize audacity and originality that celebrities are so good at counterfeiting.

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Most crucial — and controversial — of all: at a time when the least powerful people are in danger of losing access to food, medical care and basic income thanks to the big, beautiful bill, this is no time for empty symbolism. No time for another Kamala Harris. The fact is that Trump and his white MAGA legions are the response to black Obama. It’s almost as simple as that. So, appalling and even repellent as it might sound, in 2025, the Democrats are going to have to steel themselves and keep it, mostly, white. For now. If you want to defeat the MAGA obscenity that regards blacks as inferior, Jews as sinister, immigrants as “vermin”, women as wombs and housekeepers, run circles around it. It’s not pandering. It’s what the Chinese call “Chi Sau”, the trick of using an opponent’s force against them. (They do it surpassingly well, especially when the opponent obliges at almost every turn.)

I write — or so I flatter myself — as an Old Left, cosmopolitan Jewish intellectual who would want nothing more than to see a Ras Baraka/Elizabeth Warren — or vice versa — ticket. (Baraka, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, is, to my mind, the most original and authentic politician in America.) I also write at a time when Harris, who lost both the electoral and the popular vote to Trump is, mind-bogglingly, leading in polls for who should be the Democratic candidate for president in 2028. This will only lead to certain defeat again. So make like the Trojan Horse, and find a white candidate who will empower America’s diversity instead of a token candidate who will pay lip service to the “rainbow” and betray it in the end. See what happens. If the Democrats sweep the midterms, then, by all means, open the doors to politicians of every stripe. Just be sure to elevate the content of character over the self-flattering pieties of identity politics. Harris didn’t lose because she was a woman of color. She lost because that’s all she was.

Liberal pundits repeat, ad nauseam, the cliché that what people want from the Democrats is “ideas” and “vision”. They want to know what Democrats “stand for”. But in this moment, people want nothing of the kind. People want big, baggy, flattering and unthreatening concepts like “make America great again” that they can fit all their ordinary feelings and frustrations and aspirations into. They don’t want “ideas” about what other people “stand for”. If people wanted “ideas” showing what other people “stand for,” they’d be forming human cordons around Harvard and Columbia. They want stories bursting with vivid, clarifying, and, yes, entertaining sentiments. They want people in government they can imagine relaxing with. Give them someone they can relax with who isn’t an unhinged buffoon.

Trump once spoke of his intention to make every day of his presidency an episode in a TV drama. He has succeeded at that, brilliantly. The Democrats must do the same. They must start pouring all their dollars into the one strategy that will save the republic: an ongoing story that will reflect Americans’ ordinary feelings, frustrations and aspirations. A story that will, all at once, refute Trump’s, push it into the margins, and offer a riveting, satisfying alternative.

Here is an idea for a timid time of no ideas: an epic campaign commercial to end all campaign commercials. Something, unfolding in episodes, that will run, day after day, for months. It will have a representative American personality at the heart of it. An everyman for our time. It will tell an ongoing story, episode after episode, about this fictional, exemplary figure as he passes through his days and nights on earth. Screen it on TV, cable, TikTok or somewhere new, and show him suffering from illness, striving to make a living, worrying about his children, sacrificing for his children, confused and concerned about the future, celebrating life’s small triumphs and enduring life’s setbacks. Make the exemplary figure a male because, well, that is now the decisive segment of the American electorate.

Construct this episodic epic the way a great story is constructed: conflict, suspense, resolution. In this mad, unfocused time, give people the inherent rationality of a tale; make them focus intensely on something that will be dear to their own experience; that will gather up and order the loose ends of these chaotic days. In every respect, structure it like a simple, straightforward story. A tale that anyone would tell anyone else at a bar, in a park, on a train.

Amid the narrative arc tell other stories: show Trump boasting, Trump spewing middle-school insults and abuse, Trump hawking Teslas on the White House Lawn; Trump cavorting with the wealthy and the powerful; Trump contradicting himself; Trump barking at Zelensky; Trump’s regime fawning all over him; Trump allowing his insecurity to erupt when asked to respond to the charge that “Trump Always Chickens Out” (the fragility of his ego is breathtaking); Trump golfing, golfing, golfing — all of this as the Main Character struggles, suffers, grieves, endures.

A mortal life is a tale; the opposition has to return to life and tell a simple, undogmatic, non-didactic, existentially gratifying tale.

D.H. Lawrence wrote about the power of novels to tell stories: “They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.” Like it or not, a tremulating tale got America into this mess. A better tremulating tale might help get us out of it.

In fact, in response, Biden authorized not one but two military campaigns. The first was Operation Prosperity Guardian, which aimed to combine US naval power with a coalition of willing states to protect shipping and break the blockade. That fast turned into an embarrassing debacle, as most of the coalition partners walked away and ships kept getting hit by Houthi missiles. And so, in January 2024, Operation Poseidon Archer was launched, which involved British as well as American aircraft attempting to bomb the Houthis into submission. Here again, the operation was unsuccessful, doing almost nothing to dent Houthi attacks or open up the Red Sea to shipping. But even then Biden was blamed; the mighty US military was being held back somehow. Thus, the natural conclusion was that once Trump was in office, the gloves would come off.

Biden’s critics were actually half right. Once Trump came in, the gloves did come off. Operation Poseidon Archer was followed by Operation Rough Rider, in March of this year, which attempted to show a new, much more muscular American military response against Houthi targets in Yemen — for all of six weeks. For six weeks, US warplanes pounded Yemen around the clock, with rare and expensive stealth bombers flying missions out of Diego Garcia in support of carrier-based aircraft. Yet once those six weeks were up, Trump proudly announced that Yemen had “surrendered” and that there was no more need for the US to keep up the bombing. A ceasefire had been brokered by Oman. This was trumpeted as a glorious victory for the US military, with the Houthis finally promising to not attack US ships anymore, and America graciously returning the gesture.

Of course, Trump didn’t mention the terms of the “surrender”. The Houthis only had to stop attacking American ships in exchange for America stopping the bombing; they were free to continue blockading the Red Sea or firing missiles at Israel. America, in other words, had given the Houthis carte blanche to carry on the behavior that was the reason America had gone to war in the first place. Thus, to call this deal a surrender was entirely appropriate; it’s just that it wasn’t the Houthis hoisting the white flag.

It is very commonplace to blame reversals and even defeats in America’s various wars of choice as merely a matter of lack of will. If America really wanted to win, it would win, the story goes; the failure of the US is just one where it never commits the force necessary to finish the fight. But today, that excuse rings hollow. Trump’s Operation Rough Rider, unlike Biden’s operations, utilized many of America’s most limited, expensive, and advanced weapons to try to bring the Houthis to heel. And still it surrendered. The lessons here are thus quite bleak. America’s preferred and increasingly only viable method of warfare — aerial warfare — is no longer cost-effective nor practical. But the US has no alternative modes of warfare to fall back on, which means that its days as a military hegemon are probably coming to a close.

To understand just how big a mess the air war against the Houthis has turned out to be, it’s important to understand a very basic rule to US military inventories. For while, on paper, America has 11 nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, an impressive figure that far outstrips any other country on the planet, that top line figure is barely relevant in practice.

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For comparison, look to the United Kingdom. The UK has two large aircraft carriers, putting it near the top of the international leaderboard when it comes to the ability to project military force. But as anyone with any familiarity with the Royal Navy can tell you, that number does not tell the real story. The number of carriers the UK can actually deploy is far lower, a number which is fairly close to zero. For while the ships exist, the Royal Navy lacks the crew, the planes, the escorts, and the logistical capacity to actually put them to use for any length of time in a real war. The UK Navy has become something of a Potemkin village, where superficial on-paper strengths hide a catastrophic reality of deferred maintenance, insufficient budgets, and lack of personnel.

Though the situation for the US Navy isn’t quite as dire, in practice, the problem is the same: it cannot realistically put more than two to four carriers to sea at any given moment. The ability to surge capacity in times of crisis is limited, because the various reserve components of the US armed forces have catastrophically atrophied. If you discount the American carriers that are slated for the scrapyard, or those currently lacking a functional nuclear reactor, or those which are tied up in deep maintenance, the number of active, usable carriers is roughly a third of the on-paper number. Half of those carriers were being used against the Houthis.

But carriers are not the only example we ought to look at. For Operation Rough Rider, the US Air Force contributed some six B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, arguably the most advanced (and by far the most expensive) airframe in the US arsenal. At first blush, this seems like only a fraction of America’s power, because it has some 20 such bombers in its inventory. But a closer look at these planes suggests that those six used in Rough Rider very likely represent the entire working inventory of US stealth bombers. Because B-2s haven’t been built for decades, the only way to keep them operational is to cannibalize other B-2s for spare parts: as a result, a large number have been functionally scrapped and cannot ever hope to fly again. Only half of US bombers even qualify for so-called “mission capable” status on an average day, a status which doesn’t actually mean that the plane works; it simply means the plane isn’t completely broken and inoperable. Only two thirds or fewer of those mission capable planes can hope to qualify for what the US military instead classifies as “full mission capable” status. “Full mission capable” is your standard Pentagon-speak; it means the plane is in working order, has nothing broken that’s really important, and can realistically be used for what it was built for.

From carriers to stealth bombers, the pattern here is fairly clear, and it is further corroborated by testimonies from inside the Pentagon itself. America essentially pulled out all the stops to attack the Houthis, waging an extremely expensive and intensive air war against a militia controlling most of Yemen, the fourth-poorest nation in the world. The cost to operate a B-2 stealth bomber is extremely high on a per-hour basis; and their fragile stealth coating is not particularly fond of the warm, salty sea air at Diego Garcia. You don’t send in all of them unless you really mean business. America also committed roughly half of its active carriers, spent a fortune in land attack and air defense missiles, and it even cannibalized ammo stores and air defense systems from the Pacific theater of operations for the sake of the operation.

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But as the stories of the campaign start leaking to the press, it’s clear that none of this effort did anything good. The US couldn’t establish air supremacy, meaning it couldn’t risk flying its older, non-stealth planes for fear of losing them. This itself might seem like proof that America was once again just not trying very hard; for what kind of war is it when you’re not ready to accept losses? But the problem is, America can’t afford to replace planes that get lost and pilots that get killed. This is not a problem of cowardice, but of force generation: even if the US military suffers zero losses due to enemy fire in the years ahead, it is still slated to shrink precipitously. This shrinkage and loss of capacity is just due to America’s planes and ships wearing out, with not enough workers, dockyards, engineers, and dollars to replace them. As America burns through its massive military inheritance bequeathed by Ronald Reagan and the Eighties arms race, there is no plan to replace it. For the US military, avoiding casualties is not a matter of caution or cowardice; it is the result of a total inability to replenish the force.

The result of this American Achilles’ heel has been an extremely expensive reliance — when it has come to defending the Red Sea — on so-called “standoff” weaponry; cruise missiles, for example, that can be launched from far enough away that anti-air fire won’t be a threat. But even then, there were problems: according to leaked reports, even the vaunted F-35 stealth fighter had to dodge incoming anti-air missiles on at least one occasion. In Operation Rough Rider, the US deployed many of its most rare and bespoke weapons, such as the AGM-158 JASSM (Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missile) as well as heavy, specialized bunker-buster bombs. Again, by all accounts, this had little effect. Partly, this was because the US kept losing so many of its MQ-9 reaper drones, which come with a price tag north of 30 million dollars apiece, and which were supposed to provide the intel to ensure the bombing campaign found its targets.

When Biden first lost interest in defending the Red Sea against the Houthis, people were aghast. Not doing enough was akin to telling the entire world that the US was too weak to keep the Suez channel open. But Trump, after berating his predecessor, has also walked away, and de facto recognized the Houthi’s control of the channel. It would seem that the US doesn’t actually have many cards to play.

Trump could have sent another carrier to the region in support of his operation, bringing the total up to three. But this would hardly have made much difference to the air campaign because the problem with this offensive wasn’t lack of deck space or fighter sorties — US planes were too wary to go anywhere near Yemen’s air defense, and even stealth jets were reportedly not entirely safe. The problem was the lack of standoff munitions which can be deployed from a point of relative safety. But these are so expensive and so limited that there is no budget to replenish them when stores are depleted (a single JASSM with a 450 kilogram explosive warhead comes in at slightly under a million dollars). Wargames show the US running out of most or all such critical munitions in a matter of weeks or even days in a real conflict against a peer enemy such as China.

Even worse, much of the US military’s most advanced weapons systems are dependent on components and materials such as rare earths from China, which has already started imposing harsh export restrictions in order to slowly choke the life out of the US military industrial complex. In practice, the US does not have the economy to produce the weapons used for aerial warfare at any sort of scale, and this has only been hidden from full view because the military has coasted along on an aura of invincibility.

As the appetite for ground warfare has waned, the allure of quick, cheap and easy air campaigns has grown. But air warfare is no longer what it once was. Operation Rough Rider was supposed to be a decisive show of force against an under-equipped, internally divided third-world nation. Instead, it ended up looking like the last hurrah of a truly antiquated form of warfare, unable to cope with cheaper and better anti-air weapon systems.

All of these limitations make the current talk about a new bombing campaign against Iran utterly surreal. Iran is far bigger than Yemen, with a much more robust air defense network. Moreover, the distances involved are such that carrier-based aircraft, even when launched from the very shores of the Persian Gulf, can’t actually reach places like Tehran and return on a single tank of fuel. Fighter-bombers will need aerial refueling over the Iranian interior, and tanker planes are slow, easy to spot on radar, and pretty much defenseless. Even attempting to destroy the Iranian air defense network will take huge amounts of precision standoff weaponry, which the US cannot practically replace, even if it weren’t struggling with a massive fiscal crisis and soaring bond yields. The critical parts of Iran’s nuclear program are kept under hundreds of feet of solid mountain; the US, using the heaviest and most advanced weapons in its entire arsenal, did not succeed against the much shallower Houthi bunkers and missile storage facilities in Yemen. All of the problems that forced America’s tacit surrender of the Suez canal would be writ large — and be far more lethal — in any campaign against Iran.

With exploding deficits, a growing internal political crisis, and a slowly collapsing military, America is a leopard that lacks the wherewithal to even attempt to change its spots. The generals know that the jig is up: the old model is broken, there is no new model coming, and nobody has the energy left to do much about it all. And so, this massive crisis of US military power is playing out in the vein of Ernest Hemingway’s comment about the course of his own bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly.

Once upon a time, there was always a bigger plane, a more advanced high-tech future weapon, yet another trick up the Air Force’s sleeve that you could point to in order to silence the doubters. But those days are over. The gravity of what happened in Yemen will only assert itself once the political class is ready to deal with the new world we are now living in: one in which the US has no new military rabbits to pull out of its hat, and those that it does have simply aren’t enough to get anywhere close to victory.

When did the Biden cover-up begin? Last week, Axios published audio files from the 2023 investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, in which Biden is questioned about his recollections. The recordings are both pitiful and shocking. Never mind America’s nuclear codes — in them Biden sounds like he might struggle with the TV remote.

The audio was released just ahead of reports that Biden, now 82, is suffering from aggressive prostate cancer. I wish him a speedy recovery — but this is unlikely to be aided by publication this week of Original Sin, a new book by CNN political anchor Jake Tapper. The book documents Biden’s physical and cognitive decline during his presidency — along with concerted effort by aides and sympathetic media to smooth over this decline, allowing Biden to continue in office. Amid this slew of revelations as to Biden’s frailty, and the extent of the cover-up, both allies and enemies are asking: how did this happen?

Watergate was long mythologized as a foundational moment in modern American politics. Its scandalous impact, coverage, and the eventual resignation of Nixon in 1974 were so profoundly formative of an age, in fact, that these events spawned perhaps the quintessential political-scandal suffix. Appended to any noun, “-gate” has come to denote a political brouhaha that generates so much media noise it triggers major change, such as a leader’s resignation: such as, recently, the “Partygate” that scotched Boris Johnson in 2023.

The original Watergate turned on a break-in at the building where the Democratic National Convention had its offices. It transpired that the burglars were working on behalf of Richard Nixon, then Republican President, and were trying to gather information on his political rivals. The administration sought to cover up the burglary; this was discovered; Nixon was impeached, and press coverage of the trial became a galvanizing national event, eventually leading to Nixon’s resignation.

At the time, this was hailed as a victory for the American system of checks and balances. On taking power, Gerald Ford declared: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.” And in this sense of affirming “a government of laws and not of men”, Nathan Pinkoski recently argued, Watergate had a permanent impact on public consensus concerning the extent of presidential power: one that has boiled to the surface again in the Trump era.

The central issue sounds abstruse, but cuts to the heart of what the president’s role should be: so-called “impoundment“, which is to say whether or not a president has the right to curtail funds that have been granted by Congress, but not spent. Impoundment grants the president a partial veto power over programs he doesn’t like, a tool used extensively by Nixon. In turn, the events of Watergate played a key role in restricting it, via the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.

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The current administration wants to take back that control. Trump-aligned impoundment enthusiasts, such as OMB’s Russ Vought, argue that without returning this power to the president, the American state will remain helplessly in the grip of unaccountable patronage systems, stuffed with Left-wing partisans. A key aim of the Trumpist project, then — so Pinkoski has argued — is succeeding where Nixon failed: in restoring the power of the elected president, by curtailing the growth of bureaucratic fiefdoms and their financial patronage networks. Several of changes brought in by the Trump administration’s shortly after inauguration, such as shuttering USAID, were achieved using impoundment.

Nixon looms large for the opposing consensus, too. When, in February, five former Treasury chiefs published a statement protesting Trump’s DOGE initiative, it included a shocked reference to Nixon’s use of impoundment. Meanwhile, the publication of this protest in the New York Times points to Watergate’s second, related long-term impact: crystallizing the 20th-century mass media’s self-image, as a force holding power to account.

It was the press that uncovered the Watergate story, and as the investigation proceeded further, details were leaked on an ongoing basis: a symbiotic relation between officials and public reporting that has remained a feature of media and politics ever since. As Nixon’s trial unfolded on television, and in press discussion, it became a mass-participation event, that itself came to be understood as a new type of democracy. Writing in 1973, the essayist Mary McCarthy framed this public engagement with the trial as a kind of nationwide townhall meeting: “The story was being told, democratically, to the entire population, which was discussing it, democratically, as if at a town meeting […] in every city I arrived at, the local papers were full of Watergate.”

Turbocharged by the new, digitally-mediated pace of political debate, Trump’s first election was accompanied by a fragmenting and increasingly partisan and polarized media landscape. In tandem, many once at least formally neutral outlets grew increasingly partisan, seeing themselves as activists as much as reporters. “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, the Washington Post’s slogan, was adopted in 2017 during the furious early years of press #Resistance to the first Trump presidency.

But being an active participant can cut both ways. Two years into the Biden presidency, the 2022 MediaFest conference invited veteran Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to give a keynote, in which they reiterated how reporters must “Always dig deeper”. Watergate, they suggested, proved how the press was key institution of American democracy, alongside the courts, the legislative branch, the executive branch, and Justice Department, ready to spring into action to restore normal functioning when faced with a “criminal president”. Woodward and Bernstein made explicit the parallel they were drawing, between Nixon and Trump: “Not just that [Trump] was a criminal president,” Bernstein said, “but that he was the first seditious president in our history.”

Meanwhile, ordinary Democrats could see what the press refused to acknowledge. Two weeks after MediaFest’s celebration of digging deeper in the name of democracy, Democrat activists launched a campaign headed Don’t Run Joe. Norman Solomon, its campaign director, told Tapper: “It was not rocket science or political science to know that Biden should not run again. It was hidden in plain sight.” But a press still boastful of its Watergate legacy was determined not to dig deeper.

These stark facts will doubtless amplify the murmur of Watergate revisionism already discernible on the Right. The scandal used to be held as proof of the need for strong institutional curbs on presidential power, and of the crucial role played by the press in holding power to account on behalf of the people. Democracy, in this reading, comprised a kind of continual plebiscite, convened via TV and newspapers, mediating between rulers and ruled. Revisionist accounts, on the other hand, depict Nixon as unjustly framed, victim of a deep-state coup enabled by federal bureaucrats desperate to thwart his efforts to reassert presidential power. In this telling, Nixon was brought down because he was using federal impoundment as a policy tool to regain control of the federal bureaucracy, and in particular posed a threat to the power and vested interests of the foreign policy Blob. Building on these arguments, some today argue that the Right should not just revisit Watergate — but view Nixon as the blueprint for Right-wing revolution.

Meanwhile, it goes without saying that those for whom “democracy” requires sharp curbs on presidential power, and an activist press shaping public debate, are not keen. But however they feel about the prospect, these institutions are themselves on the cusp of their own Watergate. We have a press that was happy enough, in the Seventies, to challenge a president deemed too powerful — but which didn’t lift a finger, in our era, to challenge one who wasn’t powerful enough. Who was, in fact, a mere senile figurehead for who knows what agenda, or whose interests. It is a staggering scandal. It has perhaps only remained relatively muted so far, because so few in the media want to think about the mirror it holds up to that industry’s role in public life.

So was the Right right about Watergate all along? I dare say history, or perhaps just more shouting, will eventually settle that matter. In the meantime, though, lest anyone is still laboring under the misapprehension that the result of this reckoning will be more truth or journalistic integrity: don’t bet on it.

The 20th-century mass media may be facing a reckoning, as agents of democracy. That reckoning can’t be separated from the digital revolution that first fractured the media landscape, creating the first Trumpquake in 2016, then brought him back in 2024, the first “podcast election”. Bluntly: there is no longer any such thing as a nationwide democratic townhall of the kind imagined by Mary McCarthy to have been conjured by Nixon’s televised trial.

Some imagine that this change can only be for the better; and certainly events to date suggest it has critically damaged the mass-media machine with which consensus was once formed, but which failed to defy gravity in the case of poor, ailing Biden. But I would not bet on it. In the aftermath of the consensus machine, the 21st-century’s increasingly AI-enhanced digital public discourse grows more hallucinatory by the day. I see nothing less partisan, or more truthful, waiting in the wings.

Last week the Biden era’s devotion to reality-as-fiat climaxed not with a bang, but an internet whimper: an apparent effort to meme an amendment to the US Constitution into force, by posting about it online. This bizarre moment saw Joe Biden (or, more likely, someone else writing on his official account) announce that the Equal Rights Amendment is “the law of the land” — even though the National Archive declared in December that it was not.

It was the perfect finale to a regime characterized from its inception by eerie fakeness: what Nathan Pinkoski recently called “a simulacrum of a functioning progressive presidency”. This order treated as stage-managed and artificial even meetings normally understood as living, relational politics. Donors, for example, were given scripted questions to read out at supposedly private meet-and-greet events.

Between Biden’s increasingly obviously scripted appearances and the accumulating visual evidence for his frailty, conspiracies proliferated. He was characterized as fake, played by actors, or even computer-generated. Such claims were easy enough to “fact check”, but they conveyed a fundamentally true intuition: Biden was a cipher, and no one knew who was really in charge. Consensus just seemed to coalesce, as if by otherworldly telepathy, often followed by policies everyone was assumed to agree with, and which you’d then be ostracized for questioning.

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This sense of rule by a headless, faceless and monolithically ideologically aligned swarm was characterized by writer Curtis Yarvin as “the Cathedral”: an architecture of political coordination that comprises journalism plus academia, NGOs, foundations, the permanent bureaucracy and other institutional actors. In Britain we might just call this “the Establishment” and shrug; but as David Samuels showed recently, the digital revolution turbocharged a specifically modern, progressive American version of this “Cathedral” to such potency, that its partisans seemingly came to believe they really could re-write reality just by posting.

The phenomenon gained momentum through the early 20th century with the Obama-era discovery that digital communications could be wielded to transform public opinion in progressive directions, using an activist technique known as “permission structures”. This method of persuasion, developed by consultant David Axelrod, induces people to vote against their own prior convictions, by convincing them they’ll gain moral standing among their peers by adopting the approved viewpoint.

To those who grasped the method, social media provided a powerful new tool for engineering political permission structures. The resulting consensus-manufacture machine then swiftly ate the legacy press, reaching a peak of ideological dominance during the Covid years. At its ascendancy, the moral outlook that came bundled with this approach was perhaps best encapsulated by the famous “In This House, We Believe…” lawn sign: a utopian creed associated with the progressive knowledge class, mainly because it’s largely those rich enough to delegate the material side of life to underlings who cannot see its obvious shortcomings. Its moment of peak hubris (and, arguably, a crucial nemesis) was encapsulated in its adherents’ adoption of the belief that someone could become the opposite sex simply by verbal declaration: as though words really were magic spells.

And if there’s a lesson from the pitiful end of the Biden simulation, in a wholly ineffectual attempt to make lawn-sign type updates to the US Constitution via blog post, it’s that this mechanism always had hard limits. Around this time four years ago, I glimpsed a harbinger of these limits, in the strange story of Hilaria Baldwin. Hilaria, wife of the actor Alec Baldwin, was accused of having spent a decade pretending to be Spanish — even though she grew up in Massachusetts. Even four years ago, this read as a cautionary tale for the reality-engineers: no matter what you say, if the gap between “Hilarity” and reality is too large, eventually someone will point this out and the whole thing will implode.

And so it has transpired with the civilization-scale Hilarity that was the Biden simulation. The first and most significant crack in its architecture came the year after Hilaria-gate and the (simulated) Biden inauguration: the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk. Musk then promptly fired most of the website’s Trust and Safety team, released documents revealing the website’s routine government-requested censorship, and unbanned Right-wing accounts including Donald Trump himself. And this triggered a cascade which culminated in Trump‘s re-election.

It’s not quite right to say that the information-repression mechanism broke, and allowed reality to shine through. The alteration in tone and content since Twitter was rebranded as X has not been principally in the service of “facts”, as such. But Elon bought the Cathedral’s Rolls-Royce permission-structure machine, retuned the engine, and took the silencer off the exhaust. Now a vehicle meticulously assembled under Obama, and driven with reckless hubris by Biden’s carers, is full of tipsy anons and doing doughnuts in the public square.

What will reality look like, once the dust settles on their antics? There is reason to expect at least a correction toward pragmatic engagement with the world as it is and away from Hilarity’s progressive dream of the world as it should be. Signals include Trump’s skepticism toward Net Zero, already prompting a cascade of corporate indifference to its once sacrosanct green edicts. American foreign policy shows indications of an analogous turn away from liberal internationalism; a shift with uncertain geopolitical implications, but that would at least mean an end to the “peacekeeping” bellicosity characteristic of the “global policeman” stance.

And, importantly, from almost the moment he became President, Trump signaled an explicit re-orientation away from utopian gender politics, declaring in his inauguration speech itself that “as of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female”. He also signed a Day One executive order legislating against the notion that sex is a matter of verbal fiat rather than physiological reality.

In this context, the effort to meme the ERA into the constitution is a powerfully symbolic damp squib. For while Trump surely owes his new mandate prosaically to reality — notably prices, Ukraine, and the southern US border — it was Hilarity’s gender politics that came to stand totemically for that regime’s faltering grip on the facts.

In this context the ERA was also totemic, as a longstanding flagship cause for the liberal-feminist Valkyries of progressivism — America’s “Affluent White Female Liberals” or AWFLs — since it was first proposed in 1923. And it stood for reality-as-fiat in that the ERA’s wording would have enshrined in the US constitution an assertion that the sexes are always interchangeable: the OG effort to re-engineer reality using language. Thus, as transgenderism followed logically from the ERA’s liberal-feminist claim that men and women are always interchangeable, AWFLs slid into their Hilarity-era position as the noisiest and most self-righteous caucus in its favor.

And now the whole thing is in ruins. Even the efforts to revive a Women’s March (now renamed, and I’m not making this up, the “People’s March” because the organizers refused to define “woman”) drew barely a tenth of the 2016 numbers. “Vibeshift” doesn’t really do justice to the seeming completeness of Hilarity’s rout. But it would be naïve to imagine we can escape unreality altogether — or that the incoming administration would want to. Handing a different group the keys to the Current Thing machine is not at all the same as dismantling it.

Consider: media titans who until recently operated in lockstep with progressive consensus are hurriedly updating their bylines in line with the new normal. The house journal of Yarvin’s “Cathedral”, the New York Times, signalled its change of stance recently by interviewing Yarvin himself; the Grey Lady has also parted company with several longstanding columnists and brought on board new voices such as James Pogue, long a well-connected observer of the New Right and its paradoxes.

Similarly, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has opted to PR-blitz himself a new backstory as — if not exactly Right-wing — at least Right-curious. More substantially, Facebook has replaced the erstwhile Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, as head of global affairs with the former Bush staffer Joel Kaplan. What we are witnessing is, in other words, less a dismantling of the reality-formation apparatus than an imperial-scale reshuffling of its moral sensibility. Likewise, the long-running TikTok saga is less about banning the platform, than ensuring American control of its propaganda power. We shouldn’t necessarily expect any of this to result in more reality.

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But we might, perhaps, benefit from a change of utopia. What scotched Hilarity was how disappointing its utopianism was in practice: a blend of idealism and leveling-down that grew increasingly unpalatable in the atmosphere of scarcity and suspicion that succeeded the Global Financial Crash. By contrast, the Trumpian caucus has no shortage of grandiose visions — at least off the record, after a few beers.

There’s a lot about those visions that trigger my skepticism. And the real reality of Trump 2.0 is likely to disappoint many of his true believers: expect ambivalent dealmaking on actually realist hard-policy questions such as NATO, mass migration, and how best to manage America’s oligarchs to be richly gilded with “real” Trumpian Ws on gender and DEI.

This aside, though, having a vision at all surely beats the pod and the bugs. And the incoming regime has one characteristic we should all welcome: personalism. When the progressives tried to save democracy and bring about their vision of utopia on earth, what we got was Hilarity: democracy-like simulacra as a skinsuit for managerial tyranny, all enforced by a distributed digital propaganda machine. Against this, the new Trumpian order may have many flaws but Trump is obviously and irreducibly real and human. That is the point of him.

So with his coronation, we leave behind Hilarity, hopefully for good, along with its dogma, its shrillness, and its glass-eyed Presidential golem. In its place I expect politics to remain mostly as technocratic, de-materialized, unequal, and fractious as ever, and perhaps in some ways just as unreal — but now, at least, with a chance of re-centering human thought and needs in human politics. There is a great deal of mopping up to do, but the 21st century is upon us. Bring it on.

Consider New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, who wrote in December 2017, not even a year into Trump’s presidency: “As this hideous, discombobulating year comes to an end, the Resistance offers one reason for optimism… Trump became president despite the will of a majority of the American people… Inasmuch as Trump is able to force his agenda on an unwilling nation, it’s because of a breakdown in democracy…”

That’s strong stuff. It’s the language of an extreme political crisis, in which a criminal figure exploits weak political structures, seizing power in order to establish an authoritarian regime. The only hope is what Goldberg calls “the Resistance”, a brave collection of private citizens and public officials who strive together to “hold the line against authoritarianism”. You think of Mandela and Navalny, men whose willingness to sacrifice their lives for truth and for their societies offers a light at the end of history’s dark tunnel.

And here is Goldberg just last week writing about the various public officials Trump and his nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, have said they intend to investigate and prosecute once Trump is in the White House. Goldberg writes that “Biden should pardon them all, along with pretty much everyone else Patel has singled out by name and those who worked on the Jan. 6 committee”. Goldberg isn’t alone in making this argument. Even as people are being liberated from Assad’s prisons after years of torture and isolation, imposed upon them for standing up to the regime. Biden’s aides, and Biden himself, are considering granting immunity from Trump to some of the most powerful and richest individuals in America, a consideration that would be inconceivable if many of these people had not made it clear that immunity was what they desired.

Whatever happened to the Resistance? To the rows upon rows of lawn signs that sprang up in besieged and beleaguered liberal enclaves, signs exhorting their well-heeled, super-insulated residents to stand up to Trump? Where is the deafening clamour that rang out of every nook and cranny of the Left-liberal establishment, right up until the moment when Trump won back the White House, resoundingly and conclusively, last November? Did the “existential threat”— a phrase used ad nauseam by liberals since 2016 — Trump posed to democracy suddenly become downgraded from “existential” to a mere threat, just at the moment Trump’s Republicans took both the White House and the Senate?

In 2016, Trump won by a hair. By December 2017, he was “authoritarian” only in the hollow rhetoric of an ugly temperament. A plaything of laws, customs, rites, and politics that he did not understand, Trump had struggled to gain any kind of stable footing as president. He had not signed into law a single piece of legislation seriously undercutting the liberal agenda.

On the other hand, by December 2017, the woke revolution, existing only by virtue of its fiction of standing up to Trump’s “existential threat”, was on the verge of taking over the country’s major cultural institutions, as well as its educational establishment, from kindergarten on up. So gratifying and rewarding was the “opposition” to Trump that Goldberg could actually make the false claim, in the New York Times no less, that Trump had become president “despite the will of a majority of the American people”. In fact, Trump had won a legitimate US presidential election. And far from forcing themselves on “an unwilling nation”, as Goldberg wrote, the Republicans retained control of both Houses of Congress, giving them both Congress and the presidency for the first time in 12 years.

Further reading

Trump's conviction is an assault on democracy

By Michael Lind

Leave aside Goldberg, whose husband, a longtime paid political consultant to Democratic political campaigns, only stands to gain professionally from the apocalyptic political fantasies his wife gins up in her columns. Why, when Trump posed no actual threat to democracy in 2017, but when, in the alarmist liberal perspective that has reigned for eight years, he does in fact pose a threat to democracy now, do Goldberg and other liberals cry “Run for cover!” instead of “Resist!”

Why, from 2016-2020, did liberals compare Trump to Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Pinochet and Juan Peron, when he had done nothing to remotely justify the comparison, but now that Trump has truly consolidated his power and, by way of certain Cabinet choices, made clear his autocratic intentions, why does his mere blustering about revenge provoke calls for immunity rather than calls for heroic “resistance”? Was it easier to “resist” Trump when he posed no threat than it is now, when, having the support of the country’s majority, tech titans, the banking and finance sectors and even widening swathes of the media, he — again, along the lines of the erstwhile “resistance” — poses a true threat? Doesn’t more power mean the greater threat, which would require the greater “resistance”? Or is it the very fact that Trump has so much power now that has cowed the liberals, who worship power, into submission?

“Resistance” really shouldn’t be that hard. Trump’s threats to prosecute his enemies have no real basis in any plausible reality, any more than his threats to deport millions of people are within the realm of logistical and legal possibility, any more than he can get Putin to leave Ukraine before he takes office, any more than he can “make America healthy again” by putting a man who has no medical or scientific background, and who is opposed to vaccines, in charge of Americans’ health. But all Trump has to do is say “Boo!” and the former members of the “Resistance” begin to tremble. Perhaps it is the overwhelming nature of Trump’s victory in November. Liberals, who pride themselves on knowing how to please by playing by the rules even as they break the rules, simply cannot bear being unpopular.

It’s not just the liberals. Olivia Troye, who worked as an advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, ran to the New York Times to inform them that she had received a letter from Kash Patel’s lawyer threatening to sue her if she did not retract criticism she made of Patel on television. “I haven’t committed a crime,” she told the Times. But, she said, “these are very different times. Is [a pardon] something that we’ve considered and are concerned about? Yes… I have not done anything wrong, and I haven’t committed any crimes, and that’s where it’s a complicated issue. These are unprecedented times.”

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The Democrats' biggest lie

By Lee Siegel

It’s hard to fathom what exactly Troye, Cheney, Romney, Adam Schiff and all the others on Patel’s list have to fear to begin with. In Troye’s case, Patel is a public figure; short of libelling or slandering him anyone can criticise him in any way they want, in any venue they want. Troye needs to loosen up. Cheney herself has stated that “no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis” exists for an investigation of the January 6 congressional committee. At the same time, she pointedly has not said that she would not accept a pardon, or blanket immunity, unlike Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman turned Trump adversary, who has said flat out that he would refuse Biden’s protection.

As for the other reason Trump’s putative targets say they fear being investigated, which is that such investigations would entail expensive legal representation, these are some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country. You would think that for the sake of the “Resistance” they would welcome high-profile investigations, even lawsuits; that is, if there is a single judge who would not dismiss such a lawsuit as frivolous. The example of their persecutions would indict Trump in the eyes of most Americans, and their standing up to Trump would serve as an inspiration. Look what standing up to and defying his liberal persecutors did for Trump. It returned him to the presidency.

Surely Liz Cheney, a war-profiteer’s daughter, who enabled the horrendously destructive lies her father told that dragged America into an invasion of Iraq, has the grit not to run when the going gets unpleasant. It was Liz who bravely jumped to her father’s defence when Nancy Pelosi criticised Cheney pere’s support of torture. “Mrs. Pelosi’s problem,” Cheney heroically intoned at the time, “is that her spine doesn’t seem to reach her brain.”

At first glance, it is baffling that such powerful people, always so eager to brandish their principles, especially before a camera, would allow the possibility of immunity to be raised with Biden rather than choose to inspire their fellow Americans by defying Trump. It is bewildering because, in doing so, they make it unnecessary for Trump to actually go after them. By opening themselves to a pardon that would protect them from Trump, they make it seem like Trump has already brought them to heel. He doesn’t have to investigate or prosecute them at all. Apply yourself to this seeming riddle of self-defeat, though, and the clouds of perplexity begin to part.

“Immunity” is what the liberals who made it their profession to pursue Trump from pillar to post always wanted in the first place. They desired the moral immunity that comes with presenting yourself as morally outraged; the professional immunity that accompanies the display of superior virtue; the intellectual immunity that you get when cries of “existential threat” mask your intellectual mediocrity. Woke is, essentially, the endless pursuit of immunity by robustly crying affliction, portraying yourself as good by calling other people evil, and aloofly professing “kindness” and “caring” at every abstract turn. No longer certain that they can obtain that sort of immunity in Trump’s America, some of the country’s most prominent liberals now seem to hope it is conferred directly.

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How Trump crushed Obama's legacy

By Lee Siegel

Receiving immunity from Trump is certainly less expensive than paying for it. Ask Mark Zuckerberg, who, having been threatened with jail by Trump, has just paid protection money to the president-elect in the form of a $1 million donation to his inaugural fund. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon has just forked over the same amount of money to the fund. You remember Bezos. His newspaper, the Washington Post, adopted as its motto “democracy dies in darkness” in 2017 as a response to Trump’s presidency.

So much for the “fascist” threat posed by Trump, who just appeared on the cover of the echt-liberal Time magazine as its “Person of the Year,” followed by his Time-sponsored appearance at the New York Stock Exchange, where he rang the opening bell to thunderous cheers and applause. So much for “holding the line against authoritarianism”! Especially now, when a rising autocratic tendency on the Right in politics — the same tendency on the Left has already killed culture — is becoming, actually and really, “existential”. But, then, like compartmentalised people, compartmentalised political and media coteries never tell anyone the truth.

Yet on Monday, with Democrats still reeling after their unimagined electoral loss against Trump, they woke to the astonishing news that Biden had broken his promise. But should anyone have been surprised by the volte-face? In many ways, this was just the final flourish in the disastrous failure that has been his entire presidency.

Biden was a political no-hoper even before he got to the White House. He only won the presidency thanks to two outsiders unbalancing the political system: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. As the 2020 presidential election loomed, the Sanders campaign emerged even stronger and more organised than in 2016. And, for a short while, it seemed like the progressive outsider might genuinely run away with the nomination. At this point, facing both Trump in the White House, and an insurgent from inside their own party, Democrats closed ranks and essentially crowned Biden their champion.

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What revolutionary France can teach Elon Musk

By Malcom Kyeyune

Yet faced with the nightmare of Trump to their Right, and Bernie to their Left, Democrats started rewriting the past. Biden was the father of the nation, the successor to George Washington and Abe Lincoln; he is a visionary the likes of whom hasn’t been seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the reforming zeal of Lyndon B. Johnson. Never mind that Biden’s extreme pettiness, vengefulness, and covetousness were extremely well-known on Capitol Hill as far back as the Nineties and that even Barack Obama once quipped that you should “never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up”.

The political Left of the Democratic party — which hated and openly ridiculed Biden in 2020 — was passed a new hymn sheet. And then even Obama started singing from it. All of this was a lie, of course. But people couldn’t cope with the truth: America was burning.

The idea that Joe Biden was the man to put out the fire — that he would restore America to its former glory — was always a madness. All the same, it’s extraordinary to see how he has fanned those flames. The things he was elected to “fix” have simply got worse. Consider foreign affairs. It’s certainly true that the world is exhausted by the shambling corpse of the “rules-based” international order. But by his own action, Biden has made America’s diplomatic position worse by its action in Ukraine, the Middle East and over Nord Stream.

He’s also screwed the American economy. His inflation reduction act was supposed to combine muscular action on national security with concern for America’s working men and women, all in the form of re-shoring industry and greening the economy. But the IRA has proven to be yet another costly boondoggle, filled with roads and bridges to nowhere and subsidies that never seem to pay out. Like at the State Department, meanwhile, the fundamentals at the Fed make for bleak reading. Inflation is up, re-shoring is down, while the US military becomes ever more dangerously dependent on Chinese manufacturing.

Obama was right: never, ever, underestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up. But all these failures pale in comparison with a secondary much more subtle, almost spiritual failing of his presidency.

Ever since 2016, the sickness eating away at the American body politic has been cast in openly moral terms. Donald Trump is a bad, evil person, and it is his personal failing that’s slowly corrupting the land. This was always a dangerous fantasy: far from being the cause of the country’s problems, Trump was merely its symptom. Yet between his vulgarity and his vindictiveness, it was easy for liberals to blame the former businessman’s personal conduct for the slow unravelling of the American Empire. The lawfare against him during his first term, and the attempts to keep him off the ballot after 2020, all assumed that the Democrats were simply morally superior.

As a parting gift, Joe Biden has finally crushed this shallow morality tale. The forgiveness he’s shown his son is arguably the farthest-reaching pardon in all American history. The closest parallel is the pardon Gerald Ford offered to Richard Nixon — but even that only spanned the years Nixon was in office, rather than the entire decade bequeathed to Hunter. No less important, Nixon was actually president during Watergate, and could potentially be excused for thinking that the illegal things he did were legitimate exercises of power. It’s clearly much harder to make that case for Hunter Biden, a private citizen condemned for drugs and guns. Even worse, the start date of the pardon — 2014 — coincides with the time that the Biden clan got really involved in very shady dealings inside Ukraine. The fact that he is immunising his son from corruption charges that he himself is deeply tied up in is partly an act of Joe Biden pardoning himself.

What the Biden clan has accomplished here is banana republic-style corruption, pure and simple. Moreover, after using lofty rhetoric about how democracy was on the ballot, Trump was an evil fascist, and the future of America itself was imperilled, we now know that Biden went deliberately out of his way to sabotage the Kamala Harris campaign — out of sheer bitterness. So, either Biden never believed any of the stories he was selling, or he wilfully sought to doom America out of sheer meanness. Whatever the case, the upshot is clear: the Biden hagiography won’t survive even half a year of him being out of office, and people will need to reckon with the ashes of its political culture. Perhaps, finally, they’ll grapple with the idea that their problems can’t be blamed on the powers that be. The failures are too systemic for that.

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How Biden channelled his MAGA spirit

By Matt Huber

Unfortunately, root and branch reform now looks unlikely. The temptation to conjure fantasies and blame the moral failings of the enemy is too easy to resist. And it applies to both sides of the political divide. For just as America’s problems could not be fixed by attacking Trump or his supporters, the problems with the US military cannot possibly be solved by launching a crusade against “the woke”. Nor yet can the impending US sovereign debt crisis be prevented simply by skewering only the programmes that liberals are fond of.

Though it seems like Biden himself either did not believe in (or care about?) the rhetoric coming from himself and his party — that democracy was on the ballot, that the republican values of America were being destroyed, and that another Trump win could usher in a new era of political dysfunction — it’s not necessarily true that these were all just fantasies. The Trump years did see a massive loss of small “r” republican virtue in the US, though it’s very much up for debate whether Trump was the perpetrator or the victim of that process.

From 2016 to 2020, it’s quite easy to say he was the victim, but will that hold true for 2024 to 2028? With all the lawfare, the internecine fighting inside the US bureaucracy, and the general lack of trust and growth of polarisation, Republicans may be more interested in revenge than reconciliation. And revenge can be very, very seductive, especially when you’ve given up on actual reform: if you don’t believe that the US budget deficit can be closed, or the Empire can be saved, at least you can have some fun seeing your enemies suffer on TV.

The question for Democrats, then, is what they will do now that they’ve temporarily been shorn of their moral self-righteousness. But this applies to the Republicans, too. Will the incoming Trump administration be strong enough to resist the tempting morality tales that so bewitched the Bidens? Will the Republicans, now that they are faced with almost insurmountable structural problems, fall for the quick expedient of simply blaming them on the moral failings of the other side? We probably won’t have to wait very long for our answers.

I’m talking, of course, about the 1980 election. Though I could mean 2024. For in their Republican triumph and desolate Democratic failure, the contests are remarkably similar. That’s clear wherever you look, from the focus on hostages, variously in Iran or Gaza, to how Trump and Reagan tapped into the concerns of young people and the middle class while Harris, like Carter, relied on exhausted (and exhausting) invective while offering nothing more substantive themselves.

Not, of course, that smart historical dovetail is merely a matter for historians. On the contrary, it offers hints about how the defeated Left-wing of American politics may yet revive. For just as the Democrats absorbed the lessons of 1980, readjusting their message, returning to the White House, and ultimately dominating the political scene until Trump’s first victory in 2016 — so too must their modern successors relearn the practical policies that made their forebears so potent.

That earlier Democratic revival, culminating in the liberal dominance of the Nineties, wasn’t really about any single policy. Rather, to quote former party activist Ted Van Dyke, it was about “being more in tune with the voters’ thinking”. Unlike the miserable Harris campaign, or indeed those waged by Carter, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale, what became the New Democrats focused not on vague appeals to “values” or “joy”, but on winning. With brilliant communicators like Bill Clinton, as well as the early Al Gore or Gary Hart providing youthful energy, they spoke both common sense and empathy, managing to reach New York liberals and hard-nosed Southern bubbas.

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California's woes were born in England

By Leighton Woodhouse

What a contrast with today’s Democratic Party, led by a senile old man, and stalked by progressive mediocrities such as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Living in their own universe, they have little idea of what Main Street thinks, drawing instead on the progressive culture increasingly dominant in classrooms, offices, the media, and indeed the government bureaucracy itself. Their outreach to the masses consisted largely of tapping hyper-partisan celebrities. It’s a message that fell on fallow ground everywhere from suburbs and exurbs to smaller cities — basically anywhere in America that looks set to grow over the coming decades.

Far more even than Obama, in short, people like Clinton understood Americans in ways reminiscent of Truman and Reagan. That, in turn, was reflected in the post-Eighties policy agenda. Turning away from Carter’s missives about national malaise or arguments for green austerity, they instead embraced economic growth, personal responsibility and colourblind racial policies. Rather than back the policies of green lobbies or civil rights activists, they embraced a kind of Fabian liberalism. As a fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute, I witnessed this approach first-hand, as we attacked Democratic Party bromides on issues such as racial quotas, criminal sentencing, trade and education, often to the consternation of traditional party constituencies.

What of Democratic policy in more recent times? Biden’s huge expansion of government did boost some special interests, notably green and race grifters, as well as wealthy stock and property owners. But Bidenomics failed to lift up the bulk of the working and middle class, even as inflation hit hardest among the least affluent. One-in-four Americans fears losing their job over the next year, even as roughly half now think the vaunted “American Dream” of home ownership has become unattainable, particularly in coastal cities.

This divergence, of both policy and personnel, has had stark consequences. By shifting to the centre, Clinton undermined Reaganism while once more becoming competitive in parts of the South and Midwest. These days, though, the Democrats are electoral poison across much of the country. That’s clear enough when you consider the success of their opponents. Trump more than doubled his margin among working-class voters, enjoying a lead over Harris of more than 10%. He also gained among other traditional Democratic voters, including Jews, Asians and even some African Americans. Perhaps 45% of Latinos, arguably the most critical voting bloc in the land, stumped for Trump too. That’s a record for a Republican: in 2012 the GOP candidate managed under 30%.

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America's destiny lies in the New South

By Joel Kotkin

And if that should make grim reading for liberals, surely the most galling thing is that many Democrats don’t even seem willing to face facts. With their base in the professional classes, the federal bureaucracy and the media, the party now operates with almost Stalinist conformity, using influencers to lambast their opponents with a ferocity even the Man of Steel would have appreciated. Party supporters seem out-of-touch too: a recent poll of urban professionals found their views on everything from meat consumption to freedom of speech differs drastically from those of most Americans.

This Manichean mania has led progressives not to rethink but assail. As Van Jones, a long-time Democratic operative has observed, once voters choose wrongly, they’re dismissed as racists and fascists. It goes without saying that this kind of selective scapegoating is not a workable political strategy.

Not that the situation is hopeless. Look backwards to the Eighties and contemporary Democrats will find a clear roadmap for the future. First, they should move away from identity politics. To regain primacy, they’ll need to row back on progressive ideas such as transgenderism, reparations and racial quotas, all backed by no more than 30% of Americans. Second, they must focus on economic growth and opportunity. Unlike Biden, Clinton understood that expanding government for the sake of it is pointless. Rather, he favoured tax policies that would spark growth, and poured billions into law enforcement to address the popular concerns over crime.

Whatever one thinks of them, meanwhile, redistribution of income, universal healthcare and higher taxes on the corporate elite are all popular ideas. Especially given Trump will doubtless oppose these measures, they seem like good ways of peeling off his base.

None of this will be easy to achieve in practice. Nowadays, reformers face an ever more strident progressive base — one whose whole raison d’être is destructive identity politics. MSNBC’s Joy Reid, whose inanity epitomises an entire ideology, is already blaming white women for failing Harris. Activist Democratic women, for their part, blame the vice president’s defeat on misogyny among the multi-racial unwashed.

In the first instance, then, the Democrats must find their Clinton, someone who can bridge the gap between more radical progressives and the big money people who fund the party. Fortunately, there are signs that new leaders are emerging, politicians brave enough to break with the progressives on issues such as immigration and fracking. That includes John Fetterman and Josh Shapiro, both Pennsylvania senators, as well as the New York congressman Ritchie Torres. Together with Andy Beshear in Kentucky, they’re far better harbingers of a revived party than rich boy virtue signallers like Gavin Newson (California) or J.B. Pritzker (Illinois), both of whom have done a masterful job of undermining their own economies.

There’s other good news for the Democrats, with much of the country clearly primed for a return to the centre. Los Angeles, Oakland, St Louis, San Francisco, Buffalo, Seattle — in all these cities, far-Left candidates have been squashed by more moderate alternatives. So too were Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, two members of the “Squad” decisively beaten by more traditional Democrats. A dozen Soros-funded district attorneys, ominously radical in their approach to criminal justice, were similarly turfed out.

No less important, the Democrats must realise that their Republican rivals are far from invulnerable — this is the first time in 20 years that they have won the popular vote. No less than the Left, the Right is plagued by its own lunatic fringe, particularly on issues like book bans, guns, and abortion, which in different ways tend to alienate independent voters. The record of the cacophonic GOP House majority is hardly enviable.

Trump, being Trump, is bound to make things easier for reasonable Democrats. His grave personal faults will make a repeat of Reagan’s “morning in America” unlikely. More to the point, Trump will struggle, as did Biden, with increasing global instability and the country’s bewildering concentration of wealth. Trump, then, may offer bigger profits and lower taxes, but as the heir to fortune and worshipper of mammon, he remains an unlikely leader of a “people’s party” that reflects what most people actually need and aspire to. As their electoral successes vividly prove, the New Democrats understood just that.

“You worked with [segregationist Senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said in a 2019 debate. “And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”

It was an effective assault, abetted by the element of surprise. Above all because busing had disappeared from the national conversation 50 years ago. Biden, in the one off-the-record moment of his that makes me actually like him, turned to his debate neighbour Pete Buttigieg as soon as the cameras were off and said: “Well, that was some fucking bullshit.”

But Harris’ salvo was indicative of a general schism within the Democratic Party — and it’s telling that, according to a Politico article on the incident, she was willing to sacrifice a future career with a Biden administration in order to make this point. The Seventies revealed fundamentally different strains within the Democratic Party. The past half century may be thought of as a time loop of the Dems rehashing the same debates — not least because so many senior figures in the party were also around at that time. Perhaps Harris’ catastrophic loss in the 2024 election can be thought of as the end of that cycle.

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The march of Kamala's brides

By David Samuels

In the Seventies, the Democrats protected a fraying vision of the Great Society. Courts appeared to cement liberal principles into law, but public confidence in what was essentially a social democratic state was dissipating. The Republicans, in their period of exile at the time, withdrew from that system altogether with the famous formulation “government is the problem”. But the Democrats found themselves pulled in different directions — and continue to be all these years later.

Back then, the progressive wing of the party felt that it was on the cusp of a kind of cultural Götterdämmerung — finally putting to bed the monsters of America’s past and ushering in a more socially equitable society. That narrow success was symbolised by the vanishingly slight margins of victory in Roe v. Wade (1973), which used a somewhat tangential legal argument to close off the abortion debate, and in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), in which affirmative action survived through the highly ambivalent opinion of a single Supreme Court justice. But the Reagan Revolution and the gradual Rightward turn of the courts meant that progressives have had to fight tooth-and-nail since then for the kinds of social gains that for a brief moment in the Seventies seemed like they might materialise through popular will. Those causes included the long battle for gay and lesbian rights, which finally culminated in the Supreme Court’s 2015 support of gay marriage; the battle against restrictions on pornography and sexual harassment; and the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment, which had at one time seemed a foregone conclusion and then was fought out in a guerrilla campaign before finally being abandoned sometime in the Eighties.

To the extent that the short-lived Kamala Harris movement had a coherent theme, it was about going back to this moment in time in the Seventies, when the momentum stalled for social progressivism, and trying to start the clock up again. It seemed providential that Harris ascended to the top of the party not long after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and that she made abortion rights the sole substantive issue of her presidential campaign. But Harris’ attack on Biden in the 2019 debate is maybe even more revealing. Harris wasn’t actually advocating for busing — which had been deeply divisive among liberals and was essentially a dead letter after a 1974 Supreme Court decision — but she felt that it was crucial to carry the torch. She symbolised the lost progressive cause, which could finally move forward.

Elsewhere on the progressive wing of the party, the focus wasn’t so much on 1973 or 1974 but on 1980. Bernie Sanders ran his two races for the White House on a notion that the United States had made a catastrophically wrong turn with Reagan’s election. That turn pulled the plug on a social democratic system and ushered in an era of runaway capitalism and rampant inequality. Sanders, in various speeches and statements, has been completely explicit about his political chronometry. “Over the past 40 years there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the very wealthiest people in America,” he wrote in 2021. In 2014, in what would become his standard campaign pitch, Sanders said: “We have a lot to learn from Democratic socialist governments that have existed in countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway.” The point is that the Scandinavian countries never went down the Reaganite/Thatcherite road.

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Donald Trump: new media king

By Sam Kahn

It may seem surprising then that Joe Biden — the stick-in-the-mud villain of Kamala Harris’ framing — ended up, while in office, embracing a great deal of Sanders’ rhetoric and perspective. In announcing his 2021 Executive Order on Competition, Biden’s language was pure Sanders. “Forty years ago, we chose the wrong path in my view, following the misguided philosophy of people like Robert Bork, and pulled back on enforcing laws to promote competition,” Biden said from the White House. “We’re now 40 years into the experiment of letting giant corporations accumulate more and more power… I believe the experiment failed.”

Biden’s sudden adherence to a Sandersesque vision of government was comprehensible, according to the antitrust advocate Barry C. Lynn, in terms of generational memory. “I’ll admit, it’s a little funny to imagine Joe Biden as the striding guardian of liberty and light,” Lynn wrote in Harper’s. “But I’ve also long felt it somehow made sense. He is, after all, among the few politicians old enough to know where previous generations hid the key to building a fairer democracy and a better common future.”

And the centrist side of the Democratic Party, which houses Biden, has had its own fraught relations with the national dysfunction of the Seventies. Jimmy Carter, in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of 1979, put into vivid terms the breakdown of the Great Society vision. “We’ve always believed in… progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” Carter said. “Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

He knew that the problem was deeper than any individual issue. “The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways,” he said. “It is a crisis of confidence.” But, in terms of policy, what Carter actually did was to begin the dismantling of the Great Society and to pave the way for Reaganism. Historian Richard Aldous has argued that Carter can be considered “the first Reaganite”, introducing the deregulation, focus on supply-side economics, and broad tax cuts that would later be widely associated with Reagan. Carter’s mode of governance can be considered a sort of pastoral mourning for the Great Society as he was in the process of burying it. That approach didn’t work electorally, but it got a new look in the Nineties with Bill Clinton’s Third Way and his sub rosa embrace of Reaganism. The difference between Carter and Clinton was mostly tonal. Carter, for instance, committed adultery “in his heart” while Clinton did it in reality and promiscuously; Clinton buried the Great Society enthusiastically where Carter had done so mournfully.

The centrist side of the Democratic Party can be understood, then, as accepting the Reaganite turn but with a nod to what-might-have-been from a social standpoint. Hillary Clinton largely ran her race for the presidency on the notion of shattering the glass ceiling — a term that was introduced in a speech in 1978 — and that became a brutally vivid metaphor when she unwisely hosted her 2016 election night party under a glass ceiling at the Javits Center. It is a ceiling that has remained unshattered.

The Democrats aren’t the only ones who are caught in the squabbles of the Seventies. Senator Mitch McConnell — who has long been the dominant Republican figure on Capitol Hill — has dedicated his career to his “long game” of building a conservative Supreme Court. It’s a quest that has been widely interpreted as a reaction to his formative experiences with the liberal-leaning courts of the Seventies. With a conservative advantage in the Supreme Court, with Roe and Bakke overturned — and now with Donald Trump defeating Harris — the long war of the Seventies can finally be said to be brought to a close. The conservatives won, totally.

That’s a very bitter pill to swallow on the progressive side of the aisle, but in a way it may be a blessing in disguise. What it means is that the Left no longer has to dedicate itself to propping up a Great Society that has atrophied away; or to advancing progressive causes that, we now know, will never get past a conservative Supreme Court. The Left at least has the advantage of being jolted out of its time-warp and of looking at the political landscape with fresh eyes. However the Democratic Party reconstitutes itself — and it must reconstitute itself — it can do so with new faces and with ideas that speak to a very different era. The Seventies, at long last, are over.

The challenge the Democrats face now is whether the public will ultimately be beguiled by their razzle-dazzle, or whether the effect of making so many audacious, hard-to-swallow moves in so short a period of time will be that none of them are ultimately believable. But that is a problem for another day. With Donald Trump looking like a bona fide hero, and their own candidate looking like a corpse, the Democrats had their backs up against the wall. They left Chicago with a spring in their step, their heads held high, and a new Queen.

Once the nets slung across the ceiling of the United Center were finally empty, after burying the likely next President of the United States, Kamala Harris, her running mate Tim Walz, and their respective families beneath a giant pile of red, white and blue balloons, it was clear to everyone in the arena that they had witnessed political magic. It wasn’t Harris’s acceptance speech, which was a solid B or B+, with most of that grade being awarded for simply fulfilling its purpose. By not being an obvious failure, the speech plausibly established Harris as a fresh character who might, maybe, if everyone closes their eyes all together and wishes on a star, transcend the scorched-earth narratives spun by Joe Biden and Donald Trump — two ancient political dinosaurs who probably remember the birth of the sun.

The truth is that Harris was there, too — having in fact been serving as Biden’s Vice President for the past three and a half years. But no matter. No one really holds Harris responsible for anything, the Democrats are betting, in part because she left so little visible imprint on events. The fact that few Americans have any real idea of who Harris is means that she could plausibly be branded as whatever people say they want right now, while Donald Trump, an ex-President whose imprint on the public consciousness is indelible, could be framed as the man responsible for all the bitterness and bad feeling that the country hopes to transcend through the magic of — what is her name again? — Kamala Harris.

It was telling that on the last night of the convention, the script doctors were still writing bits in which small children taught the audience how to pronounce their candidate’s name: “Kah-Mah-Lah”. The absence of name recognition this late in the game is a problem, yes — but is one that can be solved with a big-enough media megaphone. Luckily for them, the Party owns one.

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So, who is Kamala Harris again? Looking at her face on the United Center Jumbotron, one of the first things one might reasonably notice is that, nearing 60, she is, objectively, a strikingly beautiful woman, in a profession in which neither men nor women are particularly known for their physical charms. Saying that someone in Washington is attractive is like saying someone in Hollywood is a deep thinker. A heavy discount is assumed. As the old chestnut goes: “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.”

The truly remarkable thing about Harris’s face, though, is how unfamiliar it remains to most Americans. The American political system is a machine for rocketing obscurities like Arkansas governor Bill Clinton or first-term US Senator Barack Obama or reality game show host Donald Trump to the heights of global power, but the reality of wall-to-wall media exposure means that each of these figures, or at least their brands, was a known quantity by the time they were nominated. For the better part of the past century, every major party candidate has slogged through the psychic and practical tests of two solid years of speeches and fundraising events with mega-rich donors and political bosses and ordinary union members, then winning a majority of delegates in hard-fought national primaries punctuated by three or five or seven lengthy debates with dwindling numbers of other candidates, before stepping out in the front of the general public as the Next New Thing.

Kamala Harris has done very little of that. Her abortive 2020 presidential campaign was a flop, and she dropped out of the race before a single vote was cast. Added to the ticket at the apparent behest of the Democratic Party’s eternal leader, Barack Obama — reportedly over the strong objections of Jill Biden — Harris had a single, forgettable vice-presidential debate with Mike Pence, which did neither one of them any favours. Thanks to Covid, the rest of the Biden-Harris campaign was nearly void of public appearances; upon taking office, Harris was probably the least-familiar vice president in modern American history.

The candidate’s past four years as Vice President have done little to make her more familiar to people living outside of Washington DC. A flurry of welcoming attention at the beginning of Biden’s Presidency was followed by a thankless appointment as the Administration’s “Border Tsar”. The disaster that followed was greeted with a series of negative profiles in reliably liberal outlets, which suggested that Harris was a capricious, unlikeable boss who had trouble retaining staff and was out of her depth in a policy role. Rumour also had it that she drank during the day. The Vice President was then shunted out of the spotlight — under the assumption that further large-scale public exposure was unlikely to do either her or Biden any favours.

That was true as recently as the end of June. When whispers about Biden’ cognitive decline became louder in the wake of his disastrous June debate performance against Donald Trump, whispers about dumping Harris from the ticket, which had circulated earlier in Biden’s presidency, began to gain more momentum. Some party figures began talking about an open convention, at which a familiar, tested figure like Hillary Clinton might ignite the enthusiasm of the party faithful.

Instead, through a mysterious mechanism that can be found nowhere in the US Constitution or Democratic Party by-laws, it was Joe Biden, the sitting President of the United States, who was forced off the ticket in July, only a month before the convention, which just happened to be held in Barack Obama’s political hometown of Chicago. Having an open convention was judged to be undesirable, or impossible. Instead, Harris would be the Party’s nominee, and the convention delegates — whose choice of candidate ostensibly reflects the democratic will of the Party — would rubber-stamp her candidacy by Zoom, avoiding any possibility of messiness inside the convention hall in late August.

As far as marriages go, the match between Harris and the Democrats was more of the five-week shotgun wedding variety than a romance for the ages. And with the wedding coming up fast, the Party’s new bride needed a makeover. In the three weeks before the convention, Harris was duly transformed from a surly, almost forgotten loser in DC power games to a shining new star whose watchword was “joy”. But all of that was a prelude to the great unknown of Chicago. Would there be riots? Would Kamala laugh in a way that alarmed the nation? How to squeeze so many plot reversals into such a short period of time, without fracturing the space-time continuum?

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As for the question of who Kamala Harris truly is, the answer was that even the overwhelming majority of her fervent supporters couldn’t care less. Before July, there were no fervent Kamala Harris supporters. In reality, Democrats aren’t voting for Harris, though they may learn to love her over time; they are voting for the Democrats, which is a powerful political vertical that can draw upon the best image-making talent in the country. The goal that the entire party could agree on was beating Donald Trump, which was the thing that Harris’s acceptance speech was engineered to achieve.

The first section of that speech was a masterpiece, which Harris inhabited perfectly. Written in a classic American voice, at once soaring and plainspoken, and inflected by newer immigrant stories, it told of Harris being raised along with her younger sister Maya in a working-class neighbourhood in gritty Oakland by their tough-minded doctor-mother who travelled all the way from India to America to cure cancer. There were touching memories of moving trucks, before the family found a home in a middle-class neighbourhood where a host of friendly neighbours stood ready to help out whenever Mom worked late.

No doubt the details of this story are all verifiable. But as an autobiographical narrative, they served to elide as much of Harris’s upbringing as they revealed — the early estrangement between her parents, culminating in a bitter divorce and custody battle, which was followed by her mother moving Harris and her sister from Oakland to, of all places, Montreal, where the official language is French. There was little mention of her African-American heritage, which the Party chose to emphasise through her sister Maya’s more performative blackness and hairstyle. What happened to her relationship with her father after she was a toddler? Are they at least on speaking turns? Didn’t her mother die of cancer, instead of curing it?

As prime-time soap opera, the Harris story still has some kinks to work out. From the cheap seats at the top of the arena, though, it was possible to imagine during the first quarter of the speech that one was watching history being made, like during Obama’s inaugural Convention speech in 2004, or his acceptance speech in 2008. We were watching something new, or at least the unveiling of a promising new product line, targeted particularly at the Party’s core demographic of single women, with growth potential among married women, too — Obama Lite.

Then it all came crashing down, thanks to whoever on the script-writing committee decided to abandon positivity and recycle old attack lines against Donald Trump, which is the type of work that is best left to surrogates at the wedding party. No one wants to hear the bride herself go negative. Harris’s manner audibly changed while delivering the attack lines, and her voice became unpleasantly insinuating and cynical. The writing itself was lazy, and made the candidate seem unpleasantly like a hack. The spell was broken.

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After digging herself into a hole, Harris then managed to climb out, by passionately, and with real feeling, endorsing both Israel’s right to real security and unlimited American backing and armaments, and, at the very same time, the absolute right of Palestinians to freedom and self-determination, presumably in a free and independent Palestinian state. That both these miracles can be achieved at the same time, and in fact make each other possible, is one of the magic formulas of American Middle East diplomacy that have no apparent basis in reality. But for a moment, Harris made the pairing seem convincing. More importantly, in doing so, she conveyed strength, passion and toughness.

One takeaway for the Party’s script writers should be that Harris is at her best when conveying strength. She sounds like a warrior. That’s because she’s a prosecutor at heart rather than a social justice advocate or a deep thinker. Conversely, she sounds worst when she seems cynical about the law, which is a professional risk of being a prosecutor, or when she tries to explain geopolitics, or spout poetry. Leave that stuff to Obama, who held the crowd in the palm of his hand on Tuesday night by uttering bromides about ending political division that might have been recycled from decade-old National Public Radio shows. It worked, though, because Obama wields his stiletto in the dark, and his level of political skill and feel is off the charts.

All told, the Chicago Miracle, as it will doubtlessly be known, was a reality-fracturing magic act, akin to seeing your grandmother get up from the dinner table and flawlessly replicate Olga Korbut’s famous “Doom Loop” from the 1972 Olympics. Less than two months ago, the Democrats looked to be in bad shape — and that was before Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and responded by pumping his fist in the air and yelling “Fight!”. That was magic, too.

Now a greater magic act has happened: Joe Biden is gone, and the three and a half years of his failed Presidency are gone along with him. As speaker after speaker emphasised, Trump represents the past, while the Party represents the future. Trump represents himself, while the Party represents us. The rhetorical opposition is an effective one. Magically, the Democratic candidate plausibly represents change and the people fighting against power, when the Democrats themselves are in fact the party in power.

The crowd helped, too. The green-haired gender gremlins, antifa rioters masked in keffiyehs, and accusatory and divisive racial rhetoric — all of that was magically banished. It was as if someone somewhere had flipped a switch, or threatened to cut off the checks to the Party’s radical organiser class, and made the Democrats the party of normal Americans again. Everywhere you looked in the United Center on Thursday night, there were Americans of all races and creeds waving the American flag and breaking out into spontaneous chants of “USA! USA!”. Moreover, the chants seemed entirely sincere. Yes, the people in the hall would dutifully follow the party wherever it led, but it turns out that most of them are more comfortable expressing pride in their country and waving the flag than they are in calling for abolishing the police or demanding that public-school children use genderless bathrooms. Maybe all the weirdness and seeming insanity of the past eight years was just a bad dream, or the product of some kind of Right-wing AI deepfake manipulation.

Or maybe the Party image-makers, faced with the sudden disintegration of the agreed-upon pseudo-reality in which Joe Biden was running the country so successfully that he was on the verge of becoming the greatest American President since FDR, used the awesome machinery at their disposal to construct a new pseudo-reality in the space of five weeks, and then jammed it into everyone’s brains. Yes, we lied to you non-stop for the past three and half years about who was running the country, and what we were actually up to — but cross our hearts, we are now telling you the truth. Kamala Harris will make tough decisions about a more compassionate and inclusive merit-based American future of opportunity while defending freedom around the globe Also, she’s a beauty queen. Also, we love football.

Faced with such wonders, the brain can’t help but rebel against familiar sensory inputs. Did I just see that? Of course not. Except, it’s right there in front of me. Is the world that I can see, feel, and touch real? Or is it simply a guided projection, engineered by unseen and potentially malevolent forces. And if nothing is real, why not believe in what everyone else also wants to believe in. Perhaps the safest choice, under the circumstances, is to hover somewhere between belief and disbelief while hoping that the people in charge of the big show come up with an even newer, better script once Donald Trump is finally gone.

Nor was her vice-presidency enough to secure her candidacy. Far from it, given the unpromising electoral record of that most peculiar office, not inaccurately described as “not worth a bucket of warm spit” by John Nance Garner, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president. In fact, in all of American history, only seven vice presidents were elected to the presidency (eight replaced a dead president). This reflects the habitual role of vice presidents: emphatically not presidents-in-waiting but rather politicos serving as symbolic figures who are selected to attract voters that the president cannot attract with his policies.

In Garner’s case, those voters were the good ol’ boys of Texas and the South who might not otherwise vote for a New York patrician who was also a liberal. In Biden’s case, those voters were women: so much so that he felt it necessary to announce the sex of his vice president without first selecting a plausible candidate. Indeed, Senator Elizabeth Warren initially thought she had secured the position, but Biden’s most important backer during his painful primary season — after losing badly in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, America’s most senior black politician, Rep. James Clyburn, came to the rescue — demanded that the woman should be black. For Biden, Harris was the obvious choice because she was still new in the Senate and had little power of her own.

Having chosen Harris, he then proceeded to ignore her, just as each president before him had ignored his own vice president, so that it was only very recently that Harris was given a definite task: to stop the embarrassing and politically disastrous immigrant flood at the border with Mexico, which had started when Trump’s rather effective control measures were revoked during the very first days of the Biden Presidency.

What ensued was also embarrassing: having been appointed the “Border Tsar”, Harris did not stay in Washington to re-activate the controls that had worked so well under Trump, but instead travelled to Guatemala to earnestly tell would-be immigrants: “Do not come! Do not come!” Yet nothing changed at the border, which continued to be swamped — until Biden reactivated Trump’s measures as the election was approaching, when the numbers duly fell.

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This is why, only a short time ago, the very same outlets that are now filled with joyful enthusiasm for Harris featured the grave warnings of anxious Democratic gurus, whose editorials urged her swift replacement by Biden. Unsurprisingly, Biden ignored those suggestions. As his own physical strength waned, Harris gained a very important new role in the White House: the best possible reason to keep Biden in the White House.

What happened next could not possibly have occurred if there were not a single directing hand behind the scenes. Suddenly, the very same voices from Nancy Pelosi down, who had just told the American people that Biden was fit and ready to win in the upcoming elections and rule for four more years, said the very opposite: that Biden should immediately announce his withdrawal from the elections. Nor is it any mystery who pulled the switch: Barack Obama, the only American President of recent times who has continued to live in Washington DC after leaving the White House — and it is not for the Potomac river-fishing that he has stayed there.

With the Biden White House staffed by officials who had served Obama for eight years (Biden’s own followers from his decades in the Senate are all dead or retired), his former boss could control policy directly, as he certainly did via Robert Malley (now removed for a security violation), who enforced Obama’s injunction that the US should never strike back at Iran, not even if Iran attacked US troops in Iraq and Syria. But except for Iran, Obama was much more focused on politics than policy; and when he saw Biden faltering, and then outrightly falling in debating Trump, he started the process that would swiftly lead to Biden’s abandonment of his re-election campaign — even though he had no solution for the Kamala Harris problem.

Obama had definitely not wanted Harris in that position, fearing that she would come under attack for her San Francisco career launched by an older mayor who was also her romantic partner. After Biden had locked himself into his vice-presidential choice of a black woman, Obama proposed his former National Security Advisor, Susan Rice. But even the faithful Biden could not accept that: in his own eight vice-presidential years, Biden often tried to influence foreign policy only to be overruled by Obama’s appointees, who knew very much less than he did after his decades of attentive service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And none was more arrogant with him than Rice. And so, even faithful Biden would not accept her, which meant that Obama could ensure Biden’s withdrawal, but not his replacement with his own candidate.

So, what is the party left with? Because Kamala Harris did not win even one primary, and her vice-presidential role was more unremarkable than most, it is possible, just possible, that this week’s gathering will not unfold as a Chinese Communist Party Congress, and one or more delegates will call for a choice. And because there are in fact candidates ready and waiting among the Democratic governors, eight of them women, an open convention need not devolve into chaos or coup — but rather into a democratic election.

These days, people are much more alive to the possibility that conventional wisdom might not apply to highly unconventional cases. This is good because, in many respects, the 2024 cycle is far more unusual than 2016.

This was true even when the race was still Trump versus Biden. It had been over a century since a former president last squared off against a sitting president (in 1912), and nearly 70 years since the last time two presidential candidates had a rematch. Both Trump and Biden were unprecedentedly old for presidential contenders, and other candidates were deeply unpopular. Everything, it seemed, was to play for.

However, even with Biden out of the running, this is still an extraordinarily unusual contest. Most obviously, substituting one’s candidate — as the Democrats did last month — is largely unheard of in US presidential contests. Precedents from abroad suggest that, because this is a tactic usually deployed by parties heading for certain defeat, candidate substitution typically improves a party’s performance, but not enough to change the overall outcome of the race. But sometimes — as in the case of Jacinta Ardern replacing the previous Labor Party candidate in New Zealand — it does flip the election.

It’s also unclear how to think about incumbency in this cycle. As a result of various psychological tendencies, incumbents are often strongly advantaged in electoral contests. However, this benefit does not seem to transfer to vice presidents or other chosen successors. In this race, then, Kamala Harris is not an incumbent.

But might Trump be? It’s hard to know. In previous cases where former presidents (Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt) have run for re-election after a spell out of the White House, they were running against direct incumbents — currently sitting presidents — so the advantage of their presidential experience likely washed out. In this case, Trump is running against someone who has never served in this role. Hence, if there is an incumbency advantage this cycle, it likely favours him. But Trump was the direct incumbent in 2020, and he lost anyway (the only time since 1980 that the winning party failed to stay in power for at least eight years).

Moreover, beyond the idiosyncratic structural nature of the race, both Trump and Harris are highly unusual contenders. On the Republican side of the equation, the candidate is a twice-impeached former president who recently survived an assassination attempt. Since he was last on the ballot, Trump has also been convicted of multiple felonies with myriad other criminal and civil cases pending. The last time a major presidential candidate was in a remotely similar position of legal jeopardy was when socialist candidate Eugene Debs ran for office from prison during the 1920 election.

With respect to the Democrats, Harris’s candidacy marks only the second time in US history that a woman or a non-white person was at the top of the ticket for one of the top two political parties. It also marks the first time in more than a half-century that a presidential candidate who was eligible to run for re-election decided not to stand.

For now, this seems to be paying off. And it’s now suddenly the case that Trump — who previously oriented his whole strategy around exacerbating voter concerns about age and fitness — is the oldest candidate to run for the presidency. His opponent is roughly two decades younger than him; his running mate is half his age. Voters are now deeply concerned about Trump’s age, health, mental acuity and viability in office — concerns that are especially salient because his VP choice is one of the least popular picks in modern history. No one wants J.D. Vance to be President. Even Trump isn’t prepared to say his running mate is well-suited for the job.

Moreover, Harris’s history as a prosecutor, which was a deep liability in the 2020 Democratic primaries, seems advantageous in the current cycle, in which the “Great Awokening” of Democratic voters has run its course, public concern about crime and safety is high, and her opponent has recently been convicted of multiple felonies. For better or worse, Kamala can lean into security or “law and order” frames with abandon. She’s already been piloting this with great success, declaring that she has dealt with “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain”. In that same speech, she continued: “Hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

However, despite Harris’s obvious virtues, her appointment also entails significant risks and liabilities. For one thing, much like Biden and Trump, her approval ratings and general favourability have been consistently underwater. And for another, few have forgotten her dismal performance in the 2020 primaries. And as well as being vulnerable to accusations of being extremely liberal (but also, insufficiently Left), her political instincts leave much to be desired. For instance, despite her tough prosecution of non-violent drug offenders, Harris has previously joked about her own history of pot use. In the process, she tied her consumption of illegal drugs to her Jamaican ethnic background, leading her own father to publicly condemn her for trafficking in stereotypes. She’s also famous for serving up incoherent word salads when speaking without a script.

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The biggest wildcard for Harris’s nascent campaign, though, is her leadership style. Over her time in California politics, Harris earned a reputation of being a cruel boss whose organisations operated in a dysfunctional way and with unusually high turnover. In one striking instance, she pushed an employee who resigned to sign an NDA agreement in order to receive a severance package, despite having been publicly opposed to this practice. Her tenure as vice president has also been marred by vicious struggles among her staff, alleged mistreatment of employees, and extraordinary levels of staff attrition — over the past four years, she’s had markedly higher levels of turnover than Trump did. The problems have been so persistent and severe that the White House has even been forced to publicly address them. Among beltway insiders, this chronic dysfunction has sown doubts about Kamala’s ability to successfully spearhead the Democrats’ 2024 presidential campaign, or to effectively govern should she win.

And yet, so far, Harris has benefitted from Trump’s lack of substantive knowledge about her background, positions and liabilities. Rather than focusing on any of the genuine weaknesses described above, he’s tried to portray Harris as unintelligent, weak, and not black enough. Other Republicans have called her a DEI hire; J.D. Vance, meanwhile, has previously referred to her as a “childless cat lady”.

But these kinds of attacks are unlikely to stick. In fact, they echo precisely the kind of thing that has been alienating prospective Democratic voters from their party over the past decade: a focus on niche identity and “very online” discourses over the bread-and-butter issues that voters actually care about. Incidentally, these lines of attack also exemplify what many have consistently found unpalatable about the Republican nominee: his pettiness, his lack of basic decency, his inability to conduct himself in a manner befitting his office. No one should underestimate Trump’s ability to snatch a defeat from the jaws of victory.

It is also the case, though, that Harris probably won’t be able to rely on her opponents’ incompetence forever. It’s not enough for her to coast on the current positive shifts. If she wants to win, she needs to continue making gains.

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At present, prediction markets continue to project Trump as the likely winner in November. Nate Silver’s electoral forecasting model (which outperforms markets) paints the race as essentially a toss-up. One thing that’s critical to note about these probabilistic portraits is that, while they aren’t terrible for Harris, they aren’t spectacular either — and these may be her finest moments in the entire electoral cycle.

In the coming months, Republicans will likely sharpen their attacks and recalibrate their campaign around their new opponent. While she’ll probably receive a boost once she picks her running mate this week, the honeymoon phase of Harris’s candidacy will likely taper off among voters (and in polls) after the Democratic National Convention. Meanwhile, Harris’s organisational efficacy will be acutely tested as a likely brutal campaign wears on — even as challenging world events, like the ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza, lead people to pay closer attention to her leadership style.

All of which is to say: no one should take the Democrats’ current gains in the polls as evidence that the election is in the bag. The presidential race will likely continue to be volatile all the way to the finish line. Indeed, if the aftermath of the 2020 election was any indication, there could be chaos all the way through Inauguration Day. We’re condemned to live in interesting times. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Arguably, Biden delivered on Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” promise. While Trump’s 2016 election victory represented a rhetorical break from neoliberalism, Trump’s policies — most notably tax cuts and a perniciously offensive form of deregulation — are better seen as the last gasps of the neoliberal order. Only under Biden did policy actually start to adopt a “post-neoliberal” hue , characterised by a kind of America First protectionism focused on domestic manufacturing and infrastructure investment. As a recent profile by Christian Lorentzen describes the economic and geopolitical outlook of Biden’s main advisors, Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken: “They would be like Trump, only progressive.”

Yet if neoliberalism is what Adolph Reed Jr defined as “capitalism without a working-class opposition”, Biden’s approach did not seek to reanimate this opposition as much as ventriloquise it to the benefit of a corporatist project meant to save the country from Trumpism. The brutal reality is that, on the heels of punishing inflation and disastrous foreign policy, working-class voters are still leaving the Democrats in droves. And crucially, come November, such an outcome might give Trump an opportunity to remould Biden’s post-neoliberal project and secure the realignment of American politics to the populist Right for decades to come.

Nowhere is this clearer than in climate policy. Many hailed Biden as America’s first “climate president” and his administration claimed to take a “whole-of-government approach” to solving the climate crisis. Admirably, Biden broke decisively from neoliberal climate policy: most notably the kind of carbon pricing solution Barack Obama tried in vain to pass through Congress.

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For economists and other professional-class proponents, putting a price on carbon — or internalising the externalities of climate pollution — was “smart policy” and offered an elegant technocratic fix. These advocates never much cared that there was no popular base for increasing the cost of energy. Even worse, the policy was easily ridiculed by the Right, whose entire argument was that climate change was a liberal plot to destroy jobs and make life more expensive. Such policies have been roundly rejected in the ballot box and in the streets. By contrast, Biden’s climate policy was not framed around a carbon price or tax but rather in terms of investment in the energy and other infrastructure required to decarbonise. Instead of making fossil fuels more expensive, the goal was to use “industrial policy” to make clean energy cheap.

Not only did this approach signal a break with neoliberal economists — it also split from a stale wing of the environmental NGO and activist community who saw climate politics only in terms of opposition to fossil fuels. The modus operandi of these advocates was blockading pipelines and calling for bans on fracking, fossil fuel-burning cars and boilers. But opposing energy that nearly everyone still relies on in their everyday lives is bad politics. Indeed, a large majority of Americans (69%) claim they are not “ready to phase out the use of oil, coal and natural gas completely”.

Finally, analysts are waking up to the fact that decarbonisation is much more about building entirely new infrastructure — such as electricity generation units, transmission lines and public transit — than banning fossil fuels. As such, in the suite of legislation passed between 2021 and 2022, the Biden administration centred what the Financial Times’s Rana Foroohar calls a project of “re-industrialisation” or what Ezra Klein calls a “liberalism that builds”.

This impressive approach to climate policy managed at last to partially overcome the antagonism between environmentalists and labour unions. As Foroohar put it, Biden’s industrial policy is “most beneficial for groups such as the steelworkers, electrical workers and other industrial unions”. A winning climate coalition must include the very workers we need to build a green future, and Biden’s policies encouragingly pointed in this direction.

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The Biden administration also departed significantly from the green orthodoxy that decarbonisation is simply a matter of moving to “renewables”, most notably solar and wind farms. Labour unions are highly sceptical of such an approach — not least because, in the words of one union official, solar and wind installation jobs are “a lot of transient work, work that is marginal, precarious and very difficult to be able to organise”. Rather, the Biden administration took an “all of the above” strategy that included a commitment to some risky technologies such as nuclear power, carbon removal and advanced geothermal. A notable example is the creation of a “Hydrogen Hub” in Philadelphia, which will establish a foothold for labour unions in a landscape marked by deindustrialisation, poverty and decline.

However, despite all Biden’s achievements, Trump is still predicted to win the election, and on the climate front, emissions continue to increase. While Biden clearly hoped that his investment programme would help to build a popular coalition able to stave off Trumpism, the reality is most Americans have little idea it exists. According to a poll by Heatmap news, “nearly 60% of voters said they knew little or nothing about the Inflation Reduction Act”, and other surveys suggest the same.

Part of the problem is that Bidenomics has all the marks of BlackRock — not of Biden, as it has centred private capital over muscular public sector ownership or planning. Its approach had two pillars: first, “the plans” from Elizabeth Warren’s progressive campaign, and second, Wall Street, led by BlackRock alumnus Brian Deese, who saw the opportunity to align the state with efforts to paint finance green through “Environment, Social, Governance” (ESG) investing.

This approach mobilises what Daniela Gaborb calls the “derisking state”, aimed at using government largesse to entice investments from the private sector in the form of lucrative tax credits. This means that when these investments hit the ground — and let’s be clear, most have not — they don’t plant the flag of the Biden administration in left-behind communities. Instead, they touch down under names such as Micron, Hyundai and NextEra.

Contrast this with the New Deal Works Progress Administration or the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built massive, socially useful infrastructure projects emblazoned with Franklin Roosevelt’s visage. Or the New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps, which hired millions of unemployed young people to plant trees and repair the soil. The message was clear: here was a government that would directly solve public problems. In comparison, Biden’s rebrand of the Civilian Climate Corps is hiring mere tens of thousands of people and nearly all the work has been outsourced to non-profits rather than being undertaken by a remade public sector.

That said, the progressivism of Biden’s economic policy cannot be denied, given its commitment to prevailing wage standards, incentivising investment in fossil fuel communities, and, above all, full employment. Yet this was always a top-down affair, and there is scant evidence that these policies resonate much with ordinary people. With inflation still rocking household budgets and eating into modest wage gains, progressive Biden-partisans are digging in their heels: “But look at the numbers! The economy is so good!” For America’s working-class majority, however, the economy does not feel so good — and that is all that matters in the election.

And so we encounter a situation where a betting person would predict Trump winning and perhaps the Republicans winning both houses of Congress. If this happens, many of Biden’s industrial and infrastructure investments might reach fruition in the first Trump term. Climate advocates are most worried about the likelihood of Trump reversing much of Biden’s climate progress — particularly around culture-war flashpoints such as electric vehicles and renewable energy. But perhaps the more menacing scenario is that Trump is able to take credit for the Biden agenda. Some might even say it was originally the Trump agenda: reviving manufacturing and investing in American infrastructure. Imagine Trump rallies at factories opening their doors with thousands of new industrial jobs, or Trump affixing his MAGA brand to new visible investments in roads, bridges and electric grid infrastructure, just as he printed his name on millions of Covid relief cheques in 2020.

A second Trump term, unlike the first, might actually credibly enact the post-neoliberal Trumpist agenda — all thanks to Biden, who lacked a political strategy to assure it for the Democratic Party. Given that we are likely in a period of political “realignment”, with echoes of the Seventies’ swing towards the Republicans, the risk is that such an outcome could keep Right-wing populists in power for decades to come.

Of course, Trump can still lose. If he does, Democrats should remember that progressive policy alone cannot automatically generate the mass working-class politics needed to create a lasting majority in the 21st century. Rather than giving Wall Street or Donald Trump all the credit for radical Democratic infrastructure projects, Kamala Harris might be wise to plaster her face all over them.

Both men have been touched by death, but both have been in denial about it. Old age is death’s way of creeping up on you discreetly, diplomatically, getting to know you bit by bit rather than confronting you eyeball to eyeball, but Joe Biden refused to acknowledge this fact. He seemed not to recognise that breaking into a pathetic little trot every time he spotted a camera isn’t the same as being fit for office. Instead, we were treated to the indecent spectacle of an elderly man clinging to power with his fingernails until his colleagues intimated that they would break his fingers if he refused to let go. At least Shakespeare’s Lear knew when to call it a day. Like money, power is a substitute for mortality. It insulates you against incapacity, which is why Elton John once asked an assistant to stop the wind from blowing.

Trump has also had his encounter with death, which may still break upon him like a divine epiphany and pierce him to his core. As they say in Ireland, however, one wouldn’t bet the farm on it. The bleeding from his ear wasn’t staged, though as Agatha Christie was aware, to nick yourself in the ear lobe is the best way of feigning an attack, since you bleed profusely but from a part of the body that doesn’t have much of a function. As far as bringing Trump any spiritual insight, however, the incident might as well have been faked. The former President shows all the hubris of a man who is a stranger to death, and who is therefore deeply dangerous. Only by being mindful of one’s own mortality can one feel solidarity with the frailty of those around you, and thus protect them from the aggression of others and oneself.

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Keir Starmer's phoney social democracy

By Terry Eagleton

If this isn’t quite the way Trump thinks, it is partly because sickness and death are even more un-American than Marxism. They mark the limits of human existence in a nation for which the will is boundless. “I can be anything I want” is the kind of mindless cant one hears rather more of in California than in  Cambodia. Peter Thiel, another American coffin-dodger, has compared what he calls “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual” to “confiscatory taxes” and “totalitarian collectives”, suggesting that death is as much an affront to individual freedom as a Stalinist state. It’s the metaphysical equivalent of a wealth tax or public ownership.

Likewise, Madonna said recently that she doesn’t think about her age. She may be in for a nasty surprise in 20 or so years’ time. Capital is accumulated for a whole range of reasons, but one of them is as a defence against the absolute loss which death signifies. Because there is no end to amassing the stuff, it is a secular version of eternity. Freedom is infinite and indomitable, whereas death shows us up as fragile and finite. Trying to cheat it may soon become as familiar among the superrich as trying to cheat the tax collector.

One Silicon Valley mogul has spent a colossal slice of his $125 billion fortune on various technological stratagems for defeating death. It’s a logical enough project, given that death threatens to strike meaningless a lifetime of piling up wealth. The wealthy are like unlucky gamblers who stack up a fabulous fortune and then lose it in a split second. The members of Joe Biden’s church wear ashes on their forehead on Ash Wednesday as a sardonic comment on those who unconsciously believe that they are immortal, and who thus pose a Trump-like threat to the rest of us. “Ignorance of death is destroying us,” complains a character in Saul Bellow’s novel Humbolt’s Gift. Those in hell are those who are unable to die.

From Oedipus to Lear, tragedy is the art form in which those who overreach themselves have to be broken in order to experience their mortal limits. Only by confronting the nothingness of death and destitution, in however symbolic a form, can they turn from fantasies of omnipotence to the constraints of reality, which includes their fleshly bonds with others. If there is a guardedly affirmative quality about the tragic, it’s because being broken can lead to a rebirth and remaking, though without any guarantees up one’s sleeve.

Some of the survivors of the attack on the World Trade Center seem to have undergone such a transformation. Having passed through death as through a flame and emerged somewhere on the other side, they found that their sense of the brevity and fragility of life was enhanced, and along with it the need to explore it in all its depth and richness. Trump’s life, by contrast, is neither rich nor deep; he just hopes that it will never end, insofar as he considers the matter at all. Everything else — capitalism, cheeseburgers, trophy wives — must remain exactly the same, while he himself lives on to infinity. Since the religious idea of eternity no longer has as many takers as it once had, infinity can plug the gap.

People like Trump find it almost impossible to die because death demands that you give up absolutely everything, and those who are too deeply invested in the status quo can’t extricate themselves from it in order to do this. This is why the Christian Gospel sees the rich as having a problem in getting to heaven. We are accustomed to giving up this or that — steak, smoking, sex six times a day — but to yield the very self which gives these things up seems inconceivable.

Paradoxically, that self is present in the very act of thinking of abandoning it. It’s easier to face oblivion if you have known love, which also requires a certain self-surrender in the name of an enhanced existence. Those who can love can die. Trump seems to find difficulty with the former, which may well prove a problem when he comes to confront the latter.

Love is one of the ultimate forms of realism, recognising that the other who seems part of one’s very being is actually autonomous, and acknowledging that one will die is the other major form that realism assumes. It means living ironically, in the sense of being bound up with human affairs while keeping one eye on the fact that in the long run none of this will really matter. This isn’t quite the same attitude as that of the schoolboy in the Woody Allen film who refuses to do his homework on the grounds that the universe will eventually collapse. The ironic shouldn’t be confused with the nihilistic.

There is, however, a nucleus of truth to be rescued even from nihilism. “Nothing will come of nothing,” Lear warns Cordelia, but as usual he is mistaken. On the contrary, the lesson of tragedy is that something will only come of nothing — that only by being stripped of one’s grandiose illusions and being hauled through hell will you be able to live with any degree of authenticity. To add an extra touch of gloom, there is no assurance that one will survive this radical deconstruction of the self. Lear doesn’t, and nor do most tragic protagonists.

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The shot that created a martyr

By Lionel Shriver

It is a viewpoint which most liberals and conservatives find too bleak to be believable. Surely things aren’t so dire that they need to be remade from the ground up? In the end, what distinguishes radicals from their political opponents is exactly this claim. The human situation is a great deal worse than the bright-eyed liberal will concede, but at the same time more open to improvement than the sceptical conservative will acknowledge. Is radicalism more optimistic than liberalism and conservatism? The answer is an emphatic yes and no.

Both Trump and Biden should read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, despite the fact that the only books Trump is said to possess are ones he is colouring in. Swift’s novel contains an account of a race of creatures known as Struldbruggs, whose hell is the fact that they have been granted the gift of eternal life but not of eternal youth. Their first three decades are cheerful enough, but around the age of 30 they fall into a depression that lasts until they reach the age of 80. At this point, they are afflicted not only with the usual follies and infirmities of the elderly, but with an extra dose of vices which arise from the appalling prospect of living forever. They are peevish, opinionated, covetous, envious, morose, vain, garrulous, incapable of friendship and dead to all natural affection. At the age of 90, they lose their teeth, hair, ability to taste and most of their memory. Reading becomes impossible because, by the time they have arrived at the end of a line of print, they have forgotten how it began. These wretched creatures linger on for all eternity, deformed, diseased and demented.

There is, in short, one thing worse than death, and that is not dying. It’s a lesson which not only Biden and Trump, but the nation to which they belong, need urgently to learn.

Her ascent, however, signals more than just a nominal shift. In the corridors of Washington DC, it will represent a rapid transfer of power, much of it beyond view, among the operatives, donors and advisors filtering through her presidential campaign.

How Harris will differentiate herself from Joe Biden remains a mystery. It is likely she will run on many of the same policies and accomplishments of his administration, and with the aid of many of the same party organs and supporters. More revealing will be the decisions Harris makes over who she brings into to advise her campaign. As the saying goes, popularised in the Reagan administration and later by senator Elizabeth Warren, “personnel is policy”.

In her ill-fated 2019 bid for the presidency, Harris’s campaign was chaired by her sister, Maya Harris, whose husband, Tony West, is an influential voice in Silicon Valley and a major fundraiser for Democratic politicians. West’s then title at Uber — chief legal officer — belied his outsized role at the company. In the years following the 2020 election, he helped to engineer Uber’s successive political victories over organised labour.

Harris is also in negotiations with Bearstar Strategies, a consultancy firm that is largely unknown in DC but presides over California’s political scene. Known for their cunning use of deep “opposition research” and sensitivity to culture-war issues to market centrist, business-friendly causes and candidates, it was Bearstar strategists who shepherded Harris from her perch as the state’s attorney general to the Senate and her last presidential campaign. And it was Bearstar strategists who, over the past decade, elected a cadre of prominent Democrats in California, while simultaneously advising the state’s largest corporations on political strategy. Until last year, California senator Laphonza Butler also worked for the firm, where she advised Uber on its campaign to avoid classifying drivers as employees. In other words, far from the extreme liberal the Trump campaign is preparing to run against, Harris’s advisors and donors have long embodied a more West Coast style of moderate power politics.

In recent days, GOP campaigns have produced videos clipping Harris’s remarks from her 2019 primary campaign. At the time, she veered far to the Left, pledging support for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal; she even suggested she might consider abolishing the immigration enforcement agency (ICE). But a look at her inner circle reveals few, if any, radicals. A number of Harris’s former closest aides — Yasmin Nelson, Meaghan Lynch, Andy Vargas, Michael Collins, Michael Fuchs and Deanne Millison — have taken jobs in the world of corporate lobbying since parting with her. Indeed, while Harris is keen to feed off the iconography of civil rights marches and activism, Leftists have never held a place at her side in her 20 years in elected office.

Perhaps unsurprisingly her initial campaign recruitment efforts reinforce this trend. Take, for instance, reports that she is attempting to recruit Obama administration alumni Karen Dunn and David Plouffe. Both choices suggest a far more pro-business line than the popular Harris narrative. Plouffe previously advised Uber, while Dunn is the lead lawyer representing Google in its antitrust lawsuit filed by the Biden administration. If hired, they will join Eric Holder, who served as Obama’s attorney general before becoming a corporate advisor at the law-lobbying firm Covington & Burling, and has now been chosen by Harris to vet her potential running mates.

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Kamala Harris is painfully out of her depth

By Lionel Shriver

At its core, this is a very Californian way of doing politics. Governor Gavin Newsom — who served alongside Harris in San Francisco when he was mayor and she was district attorney — also owes his election victories to Bearstar. His leadership style bears a striking resemblance to his former colleague: just like Harris, he panders to the Left, but governs largely from the centre. In 2019, in an attempt to mobilise progressive votes in his gubernatorial primary, Newsom promised the moon to the Left, campaigning on single-payer health care and a “Marshall Plan” to build huge tracts of new housing. Once in office, however, both goals fell by the wayside.

Nine years earlier, during her first bid for attorney general, Harris campaigned in a similar fashion: she promised a crackdown on corporate criminals, much to the delight of Left-leaning voters, but enforced the law sparingly once in office. Most contentiously, she eschewed cases against big business, declining to criminally charge financial industry firms such as OneWest Bank, which had been accused of fraudulent foreclosure practices and PG&E, the utility giant that ended up killing eight San Bruno residents with a gas pipeline explosion. As the New York Times later noted, PG&E had retained the services of Harris’s political advisors at a previous iteration of Bearstar Strategies. Elsewhere, Harris’s much-touted environmental justice unit, cast by her as an unprecedented initiative to crackdown on polluters dumping hazardous waste in low-income, racial-minority neighbourhoods, did nothing of the sort. Her office instead prosecuted a few small-time defendants and left major business interests off the hook.

Of course, political campaigns are always filled with lofty policy promises delivered on the stump. But amid all the waffle and misdirection, a leader’s true motivations can still be gleaned from their choice of personnel. Obama famously pledged to get tough on Wall Street’s “culture of greed and scheming” in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis — but his choice of veteran investment bankers to staff his administration correctly signalled that he would never criminally prosecute a single large bank responsible for the meltdown. Likewise, Trump’s most serious hire — the free-trade sceptic Robert Lighthizer — made clear his intention to upturn America’s lumbering trade policy.

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California's elite crowns its own AOC

By Lee Fang

As for Biden, the President’s most significant appointment may turn out to be his selection of Lina Khan to chair the Federal Trade Commission. Khan has reinvigorated the once-forgotten federal agency and used it to forge a new path, discouraging scores of corporate mergers, cracking down on private equity and bringing new lawsuits against pharmaceutical firms and tech giants. Yet perhaps even more pivotal was Biden’s decision to select a team of Russia hawks to set his European policy: Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor and, until recently, Victoria Nuland at the State Department. Their apparent reluctance to negotiate with President Putin could continue to impact America’s global standing long after Biden exits the White House.

Either way, it would be misguided to overlook how America’s winner-takes-all presidential system, coupled with its professionalised form of entertainment-politics, can encourage an unjustified focus on the presidency as a single person. In reality, the role is a team effort of hundreds of managers. The 2.5 million or so civilian employees of the federal government, along with the 2.2 million military personnel, ultimately answer to about 4,000 presidential appointees tasked with carrying out the Oval Office’s agenda. And with each new administration comes the power to replace those 4,000 managers.

Biden’s cabinet is carefully mixed, for better or worse, with progressive and conservative-leaning Democrats — a balance that reflects the President’s preferences as a leader. But Harris is less of a known quality. Faced with this reality, we can only look to her inner circle. There, with its deep ties to Silicon Valley and the business wing of the Democratic Party, the real vision of Harris 2024 starts to emerge.

During his visit this week, the Israeli prime minister could meet with Kamala Harris — but to what purpose? Even if she had the bandwidth to focus on the Middle East, she would be best advised to avoid any kind of substantive utterance. In an election that is likely to be close, “niche voters” matter greatly, particularly those who care about Israel and Gaza. And based on her time in office, we know how Harris handles difficult challenges: through evasion, inaction, and lots of beaming smiles. Indeed, she has already implemented that approach vis-à-vis Netanyahu. In a move that will be welcomed by the anti-Israel contingent, she has “declined” to attend his address to Congress; and in a nod to the pro-Israel lobby, she also stated that she will meet with him privately.

As Netanyahu negotiates Washington’s corridors and backrooms, he will no doubt be hoping for hints of how the two possible next administrations are likely to deal with him and with Israel. Trump, who last night announced his plans to meet with Netanyahu, can be expected to be blunt. But it will be more difficult for him to glean what a Harris administration would mean for him, as well as his rivals abroad. So, in honour of his visit-in-vain, let us speculate.

In her first speech as Biden’s designated successor, Harris went full-on fulsome: he has achieved more in his one term than other American presidents managed in two; his legacy is unmatched; yadda yadda. Since she has no policy profile of her own after four years of unmatched invisibility, we can only take her at her word — and project onto her the basis of Biden’s policies, plus what we know of her personality.

If we take a good long look at Biden’s presidency, one theme emerges with startling clarity: indecisiveness. This was a man who was uncomfortable with leadership and instead was constantly scanning for approbation. As a result, some initially sound policies failed, some good ideas died on the vine, and the riderless horses of ideology and emotion were given their head.

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, for instance, Biden expressed strong solidarity with Israel. But then pro-Palestinian factions (and even some pro-Hamas voices) on American campuses and in portions of the Arab-American electorate erupted in protest. What was “Genocide Joe” to do? Biden’s formula was something for everyone, and nothing for all — except a big bill.

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The first lesson of diplomacy: karma's a bitch

By Cheryl Benard

Weapons and aid to Israel continued, accompanied by preachy admonitions to exercise restraint. The humanitarian concerns for Palestinian civilians were assuaged by his Potemkin Pier: a floating piece of expensive engineering nonsense that promptly failed and had to be expensively dismantled, as all the technical experts warned from the start. The proposed peace plan — a permanent ceasefire that any Israeli interested in survival could hardly agree to — was already floundering. The months just before a US presidential election, let alone one of such exceptional volatility, are unlikely to produce a breakthrough.

A similar picture emerges in relation to Ukraine. True, Biden has been steadfast in his support for Kyiv — steadfast, but indecisive. From the day Russia invaded, the Ukrainians and Zelensky knew exactly what weapons and support they needed to protect their population and their infrastructure. Biden gave it to them — but in staggered deliveries, dribbling it out across the terrible months, wasting the momentum of the early counteroffensive and contributing to the grinding, bloody and no longer hopeful slog this has become. A negotiated settlement that includes territorial losses for Ukraine seems inevitable. Can anyone picture Harris as a tough negotiator against Putin?

Next stop: Afghanistan. By the time Biden became president, this conflict was sucking up far too many resources. Kudos to him for recognising that and continuing with the troop withdrawal that had been initiated by Trump, instead of seeing it as a partisan issue. But a troop withdrawal of that magnitude has to be properly prepared and executed. You don’t start by shutting down your defensive capabilities while relying on a civilian airport in the middle of a city full of desperate people. Even then, a prompt reaction could have saved the day. When the Afghan public started mobbing the airport, flights should have ceased immediately and the airport shut down until a process was in place. The Taliban were cooperating at that point, happy to see us leave and willing to facilitate our departure.

But with the US media slamming Biden for “abandoning” our Afghan allies, his response was to ramp up the speed of the evacuations, which, predictably, caused a stampede. The chaos was an open invitation to Isis, who promptly attacked, killing 13 American soldiers who had been given the hopeless task of guarding Abbey Gate, plus 170 in the roiling Afghan crowd. Those were the only US casualties during the entire two years of withdrawal negotiations and implementation, and they were completely avoidable.

The list goes on. Essentially, Biden “gave” Iraq to Iran, by abandoning his own initial assessment of the situation. The result was exactly what he had feared: sectarian conflict, Shi’a dominance, and an Iranian influence verging on total control of the Baghdad government. Biden even sold out the one little piece of his plan that was working: the semi-autonomous Kurdish region. There, an enthusiastically pro-American population, plus a Christian minority that the Kurds had generously integrated, were repeatedly ignored, rebuffed and denied support by the Biden administration. By way of appreciation, Baghdad is now preparing to ignominiously evict our remaining troops.

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What Biden got right

By Edward Luttwak

As our final example, we must cite his choice of VP. Even if Biden deluded himself that he was up to a second term, and that the voters would agree, he knew that at some point his vice president would become his party’s candidate for the highest office. Yet by what measure of merit could he possibly have thought that Harris is the one? When he chose her, her popularity was so low and her fundraising appeal so non-existent that she had dropped out of the 2020 election months before the Democratic caucus. Observers decried her propensity to randomly change position on key issues. She had, and still has, no foreign policy experience, and did not use her time as vice president to develop a discernible identity beyond what is now being celebrated by some: her race and gender.

Faced with negotiating with such a figure, let alone Biden himself, Netanyahu may be wishing that he, too, had Covid and could go into isolation. Angry Israeli protesters sent him on his way at Ben Gurion, and even angrier American protesters are besieging the Watergate Hotel, where he is staying. Huge demonstrations are expected outside of Congress, with the demand that he be arrested. His hope, in the considerably different circumstances of just a few weeks ago, had been for a statesmanlike reception and substantive talks about a hostage release and ceasefire with an option to continue the degradation of Hamas’s power.

Biden may want one final accomplishment, some kind of Middle East deal. But can a lame duck and an ICC-wanted leader unpopular at home pull off a win? Don’t hold your breath.

America’s presidential cycles, dubbed “The Circus” by a Showtime docuseries, have only recently become punishingly absurd ultra-marathons — the 2024 presidential election cycle officially began with the first Republican debate — 444 days before election day. Parties used to choose nominees at quadrennial summer conventions at which delegates from each state would gather to nominate a presidential ticket. Then over several hot summer days, candidates debated while insiders took stock of their political chops and electability. These conventions were essentially primaries writ small and in-brief. Delegates voted. Nominees were chosen. And the consequent presidential campaigns were measured in days (approximately100) — not years.

But choosing presidents via these closed sessions of party insiders understandably had its detractors. And in the early 20th century, good government progressives felt the need to challenge the monopoly power of party bosses. And so, the goo-goos, as the press labelled them, established presidential primaries. Reformers believed primaries would curb the power of party bosses, ease corruption, and make democracy more responsive to popular sentiments. By 1916, 20 scattered states hosted presidential primaries. But dubbed “beauty contests” by journalists, the primaries held no actual power. A candidate could prove their electability by winning one, but that state’s convention delegates were not required to support them. Voters turned out sporadically. Most candidates ignored them.

In postwar America, however, that calculus changed. In 1930, fewer than one-in-five Americans held high school diplomas; a paltry 3.9% graduated from college. By the Seventies, those numbers had tripled. Meanwhile, per capita GDP had nearly quintupled. In this milieu, a new mass demographic was born, the educated middle class. A mix of economics and vocation, the educated middle class are lawyers, engineers, teachers, doctors, and journalists. Not quite rich but comfortably affluent, they were blessed with leisure time. And this class no longer treated politics as spectator sport — they wanted to participate. Participatory democracy, to them, ensured greater accountability.

In 1952 their presidential candidate, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, challenged Harry Truman in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Folksy, cerebral, and media savvy, the Tennessean clubbed the sitting president, 54-46%. The drubbing forced Truman into retirement; Kefauver went on to win 12 of 15 primary contests. But Kefauver never stood a chance of being nominated. Party bosses knew a secret the larger public did not — the Tennessean’s alcoholism. Kefauver’s boozing was prodigious even in an era in which crapulence was the norm. The party bosses won out. But Kefauver made the primaries, and the educated middle class, matter.

Instead of Kefauver, Democrats, at the 1952 open convention, nominated Illinois Governor, Adlai Stevenson. Generations before Barack Obama, the Illinoisan tickled the educated middle class to their cockles with stirring rhetoric. Forgetting Kefauver, they dubbed themselves Stevensonians, and flocked into the Democratic Party. In so doing, the educated middle class gained power in the Democratic Party far beyond their numbers.

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Kamala Harris is painfully out of her depth

By Lionel Shriver

While primary contests did matter, convention delegates still possessed the ultimate power to choose a nominee. In 1960, erstwhile Stevensonians boosted John Kennedy to primary wins. This, along with Kennedy’s charisma, pushed party bosses to relent. But eight years later, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who never even entered a primary contest, took the nomination over Senator Eugene McCarthy, who had split primary wins with the assassinated Robert Kennedy. Outraged at the disregard of primary voter sentiment, young protesters in league with old Stevensonians tore Chicago asunder. Afterwards, activists championed the 1970 “McGovern reforms”. This fundamentally changed the nominating process. Starting in 1972, the reforms made primaries and caucuses binding. If a candidate won a state contest, delegates were compelled to support them at the convention. “The Circus” was born.

Party bosses no longer ruled; But the educated middle class did.

On average, 27% of registered voters turn out for primaries. And these voters are overwhelmingly from the educated middle class. In any election, the college degreed are 50% more likely to vote than a high school graduate. But this is even truer for primaries. The standard primary goer is twice as likely to have studied beyond a bachelor’s degree as the average voter. So the McGovern reforms, far from a democratic revelation, have given the educated middle class an outsized voice in American politics. More partisan and ideological than the normie voter, they donate, volunteer, and vote for candidates who reside on the ideological edge of their party.

Well-intentioned, the McGovern reforms gave birth to our hyper-partisan presidential politics, the toxins of which now flow downstream to contaminate even local races.

Yes, the Democrat’s normie-in-chief, Joe Biden, won the 2020 nomination. Covid and the spectre of Trump prematurely curtailed the primary season. With every other major contender, except Pete Buttigieg, vying for the Brahmin Left’s vote, Biden had the normie lane to himself.

But there is nothing sacrosanct about the present system. In clinching the GOP and Democratic nominations, Trump and Biden won approximately 10% of all voters in the 2024 primaries and caucuses. This is scarcely “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”.

But an open convention would be a television show without a script. Delegates, on live national television, debate and mull the strengths and weaknesses of the major candidates. Every state delegation votes. Those votes would be weighted to each state’s overall population. It is the candidate’s job to woo the delegation. The first candidate to win a majority of delegates votes, 1,990, votes nabs the nomination.

Presided over by the educated middle classes, primaries offer only the illusion of direct democracy and legitimacy. Whereas a motley collection of 4,672 convention delegates, mostly officeholders and activists, is an imperfect, yet reasonably fair reflection of the Democratic ranks. Women, minorities, union members, and local party officials comprise the delegate ranks. The nominee, by necessity, will be someone with appeal to the party’s diverse ranks. The novelty of an open convention will bring other-worldly ratings. The eventual nominee will be awash in campaign funds.

But the political geography is clear. To win, a Democrat must sweep Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. A ticket combining the popular Democratic governors of two of those three states, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, possesses an enormous homefield advantage. An open convention will allow Democrats in the coming weeks to vet candidates and weigh all possibilities. In the coming weeks, delegates will watch televised debates. They can even attend a live campaign event and sense the crowd’s electricity. They have plenty of time to assess the cut of a candidate’s jib and how that jib is received by their Democratic friends, family, and party ranks.

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What America can learn from 1924

By Michael Cuenco

Ninety-two years ago, in 1932, Democrats met in Chicago, to nominate a president. The global economy was in freefall. Fascists were on the march. After several rounds of convention ballots, Southern, Northern, conservative and progressive Democrats coalesced around FDR. In an era before the Internet, jet airplanes, television, or Zoom, Roosevelt ran a successful 100-day national campaign, from a wheelchair.

Next month, Democrats, like 1932, convene in Chicago. The stakes are jarringly similar.

An open convention is Trumpism’s Kryptonite. Trump feeds on political cynicism. The fission generated by actual democratic competition is a living, tangible negation of Trump’s nihilism.

An open convention offers the best and final chance to nominate a president who, like the Biden of old, understands normie lives and speaks fluent Middle American. That, and only that, can beat Donald Trump.

Pining over what might-have-been is more the stuff of poetry than of politics. Yet this is an apt juncture at which to reflect on the obvious alternative to today’s shambolic state of the Democratic party, which now, three and a half months before the election and under a month before its August convention, doesn’t actually have a candidate for president. I last wrote here about my fondness for parallel universes, so check this one out.

After forcing himself to watch the same YouTube videos that the public has been hooting over for years — of his own halting, rambling, often incoherent and ungrammatical performances from earlier in his term — a truly heroic elderly president honours his implicit 2020 promise to his colleagues and constituency. Thus, in January 2023, he announces that he has no intention of running for another term. This long lead time allows a range of candidates to throw hats into the ring — you know, all those names numbingly repeated ever since Biden’s train-wreck debate as demonstration of his party’s “deep bench”. Fingers crossed that in our parallel universe at least one of these candidates in a highly competitive primary season is not a lunatic dicks-in-women’s-sports progressive who therefore has a great chance of beating Trump.

In this fantasy, too, the Dems don’t put Biden’s idiotic diversity hire VP through a hasty rinse cycle, but instead acknowledge that even a large proportion of Democratic voters detest the woman. Oh, Kamala runs, all right, but she doesn’t do that much better than when she ran for president the first time, then proving so unpopular even in her own state of California that she bowed out before testing herself in a single primary. Never underestimate the far-Left-led party’s capacity to utterly misread the electorate and nominate some Witless Woke Weirdo — but at least this scenario allows for the possibility that a sensible centrist freakishly squeaks through. In which case, Trump is toast.

But back to reality! There’s been much talk about an “open” Democratic convention, in which a crowd of presidential aspirants duke it out — nicely, of course, never emitting a discouraging word about their lovely but perhaps ever so slightly misguided opponents — hence garnering excited media attention and rousing a disgruntled, resentful electorate out of their torpor of resignation to become riveted by the suspense over who will emerge as their saviour in November.

Yet given that the superior pols at the top of the “Democratic” party don’t really believe in democracy but more in noblesse oblige — a.k.a., “Yo, voters, don’t worry your pretty heads about who runs the country” — this “open” proposition is a longshot. It’s unlikely that folks so convinced that they always know best will leave the nomination to chance. I’m hardly sticking my neck out here, much less distinguishing myself as some sort of analytical genius, by regarding the nomination of Kamala Harris as almost inevitable — although I would love to be wrong.

Like the majority of American voters, I am a “double hater”, and it’s telling about this election that the tag months ago became a set expression. As I’ve been engaged for over a year in an exhausting internal battle over which presumptive major-party presidential candidate I revile the more, maybe you’d expect that the withdrawal of at least one of these bêtes noirs would make me happy. It doesn’t.

If Kamala Harris takes Biden’s place at the top of the ticket, I’m still a double hater, and I’m still agonised over which presidential candidate I revile the more. She’s an intellectual lightweight — and I’m being polite. She cannot think on her feet. I’ve never heard her say anything original or observant; at her best, she simply recites the party line. At her worst, she’s too lazy to memorise the party line, for she has a history of not bothering to do her homework before official appearances. Much like Jill Biden, she often resorts to the persona of a kindergarten teacher. She comes across as a fake, and most voters — most people, even children — are keenly attuned to artifice. (Trump is an asshole, but at least he’s genuinely an asshole.) She has a reputation as personally unpleasant, helping to explain why she’s run through staff like disposable cutlery.

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Kamala is an atrocious orator. Should she secure the nomination, her vapid, meaningless, repetitious, and asinine rhetoric during her vice presidency has gifted the Trump campaign with a series of upcoming TV adverts that will be not only devastating but winningly hilarious. Brace yourself for whole 30-second spots that do nothing but splice episodes of Kamala’s signature nervous cackle back-to-back.

Kamala’s approach to her primary remit in the administration, the chaos at the southern border, hasn’t been merely ineffectual, but non-existent. There has been no approach. Memorably, when pressed a while back why she’d never even visited that border, she let loose her typically inappropriate cackle and said, “Well, I haven’t been to Europe, either!”, seeming to regard the riposte as sparkling repartee. She’s repeatedly assured the nation that “the border is secure”, in yet another instance of Democratic “gas-lighting” so commonplace that we’ve got sick to death of the word.

Kamala pushes the whole progressive DEI schtick. You can hardly blame her, since it’s an obsession with “identity”, competence be damned, that got her where she is today. The sole reason Biden picked the woman for VP to begin with — who had, remember, all but called him a racist during the 2020 debates — was her status as a triple token: female, check, black, check, and as a cherry-on-the-sundae sweetener, South Asian, check. As a president, she’d be so painfully out of her depth that the progressive hard leftists who’ve clearly manipulated Biden’s policies are probably salivating, because controlling Kamala’s agenda could be even easier.

Much as any self-possessed, moderate, not-Trump Republican could have wiped the floor with Biden in November, a self-possessed, moderate Democrat could still wipe the floor with Trump. Kamala Harris is not self-possessed and not moderate. She is a prime example of the way affirmative action puts the Peter Principle on steroids, elevating a worse-than-mediocrity to high office, and now to such a giddy position that she’s in contest for the highest office in the world. A Harris v Trump election in November would likely be tight. A political middle-of-the-roader such as the now-independent Senator Joe Manchin (thanks for the suggestion, Ross Douthat), who almost single-handedly kept a lid on some of Biden’s fiscally ruinous legislative excesses, would surely beat Trump by a landslide — though Manchin is regarded as a traitor in Democratic circles and is doubtless not a realistic option.

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All the post-debate drama, the confusion, the what-now? as of Sunday afternoon, and the rushed, cynical makeover of Kamala Harris from millstone around the ticket to the second coming: it’s all Joe Biden’s fault, because he shouldn’t have run for another term from the start. It’s also the fault of innumerable enablers in the administration, in Congress, and in the media, who were all smug in their collusive certainty that they could run a potted plant for president and none of the sad little people who cast their ballots would ever notice it wilts when in need of watering.

I’m sure the high-stakes theatre has been fun to follow from a distance. But the one thing you’d think I’d get out of all this tumult is relief from the draining tug of war between two unacceptable choices in my head. Instead, after a second assassination attempt on a presidential candidate this month — a metaphorical one that finally succeeded — I’m left still disgruntled, still resentful that no one is likely to be on the ballot for whom I can vote without holding my nose, and still dismayed that we Americans are apt to be choosing between two prospective leaders, neither of whom is by any stretch of the imagination qualified for the job.

The contrasting modus operandi in each case reveals a deeper struggle over how public life itself should be ordered. Should government comprise a named leader, clear hierarchies and acceptance that the final recourse for power is physical force? Or should it be softer and more collegiate, with a focus on consensus-formation rather than chains of command, and a more indirect means of dealing with enemies? If you believe the former, so the theory goes, you’re probably more Right-wing; if you believe the latter, likely more Left-wing. Both sides, meanwhile, increasingly map these sensibilities onto an emergent sex disparity in political affiliation, in which the Right is increasingly masculine-coded, and the Left feminine-coded.

The attacks on Trump and Biden correspond to this divide, too. What Trump faced on Saturday was a straightforward attempt at assassination in the masculine key, which is to say direct, violent and focused on a prominent individual. By contrast, the attacks on Biden since his poor performance in that debate two weeks ago constitute female-coded aggression at its most refined: whisper campaigns, anonymous character attacks, efforts at draining away social support and rendering someone a pariah.

But lapsing into this well-worn “gender-war” groove would mean missing the deeper disagreement, between individual agency and collective forms — and, also, the ways the two poles are more complementary than they think.

There really are well-documented differences between the way men and women approach social organisation that map crudely onto Republican and Democratic sensibilities. Though there are of course plenty of outliers, men are more likely to prioritise in-group cohesion, clear hierarchy and competition with out-groups; women, by contrast, are less violent, more cooperative and less committed to a defined in-group. The sexes also manage conflict differently: where female-typical disagreement often happens obliquely, for example via whisper campaigns or social ostracism, male-typical conflict is much more likely to be direct, confrontational and sometimes violent.

Trumpian Republicanism places more emphasis on hierarchy, open confrontation and prioritising the interests of the in-group — America — against competing out-groups, while setting great stock in a charismatic leader. The Left, by contrast, treats overt hierarchy with suspicion, often conflating it with “systems of oppression”, and prefers to emphasise “inclusivity”. The Democrats also evidently place considerably less stock in individual leadership. Otherwise they would not have devoted so much effort to denying Biden’s increasingly obvious frailty, maintaining an illusion of him being in charge sustained only by tight choreography and well-rehearsed lines plus a conspiracy of silence.

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As their ostensible leader became an ever emptier vessel, who did the Democrats imagine was running the show? The question is perhaps more: does anyone have to? This debate, over how much (if at all) individual leadership counts, has emerged as one of today’s core political divides. On the Democratic side, the choreography around Biden suggests many didn’t believe it mattered much: after all, much of the machinery of state is on autopilot most of the time anyway. In this view, presidential decline is less significant than it might appear, not least because the permanent bureaucracy has plenty of ways of thwarting a president who makes poor decisions. So it wouldn’t be such a big deal if Biden had dementia or some other impairment, because the self-driving machine is there: a benign exoskeleton, with the power to sustain even a faltering leader at something like his once-formidable best.

This form of anonymous, procedural power, which I’ve characterised elsewhere as “swarmism”, has emerged as a central feature of post-liberal governance. To supporters, it’s innocuous: just well-designed institutions functioning as they should. Opponents, though, have less complimentary names for it. The Trumpist firebrand Steve Bannon, for example, denounced its structures at the beginning of Trump’s first term, as “the deep state”, while the neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin calls its organs of communication “the Cathedral”. But wherever you stand on its merits, perhaps its most salient characteristic is — as one critic put it recently — “power without responsibility”. The swarm is, by definition, a system in which processes, groups, institutions, guidelines, committees and so on proliferate, without the buck ever stopping anywhere or with anyone.

In its wake, many of the bitterest disputes today concern how far one can really extend such unaccountable power. How far should leaders (or indeed anyone at all) have freedom to act, and corresponding responsibility for their decisions? It’s ultimately a metaphysical question, with implications for everything from prison policy to the battle between Great Man Theorists and structuralists in historiography — and one in which the trend, for some decades now, has been away from the individual.

Even Left-wingers who dislike the utopianism and moral stridency that often accompanies this have found themselves increasingly marginalised in progressive circles. Meanwhile, many on the Right have begun to link the idea of the swarm with feminisation of the public sphere. For proponents, the implicit (and sometimes explicit) argument then follows that we need only expunge femininity — or perhaps, quite literally, women — from public office, and all will be right with the world again.

Is this right? Well, there is some correlation between women’s entry into the workforce, and the emergence of swarmist politics. But I don’t think this is as direct as proponents of “repealing the 19th” like to imagine. After all, the reputation “assassination” by gossip, smear and ostracism now being waged against Biden may be feminine-coded in its methods. But are we seriously arguing that such political takedowns were unheard-of until women entered public life? Millennia of court politics would suggest otherwise.

When much of this supposed “feminisation” cashes out as technologies that level the employment playing-field between the sexes, anyone who was really serious about re-masculinising the West would be campaigning for a large-scale return to subsistence farming. Nothing separates the sexes like manual labour. Oddly enough, though, most prefer to blame those features of high-tech society they dislike on women. Accordingly, resistance to the technocratic governance of today’s increasingly networked and functionally gender-neutral society is now coded masculine and Right-wing, with Trump as its figurehead: sworn enemy of the swarmist order. Should he be elected again, analysts report, he will prioritise gutting the “deep state”, which is to say all those self-driving bureaucracies. At a rally last year in Texas, he confirmed this in apocalyptic terms, saying: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.”

This aspiration is denounced, in turn, by swarmists as not just mistaken but evil: tantamount to fascism. From this perspective, anyone trying to reclaim individual leadership from the self-driving machinery of state is by definition a malign would-be dictator. And while the screeching about Literally Hitler is surely overdone, we might ask as well: are the swarmists really as hostile as they make out, to the authoritarianism they condemn?

To my eye, the fixation on incipient totalitarian Trumpism betrays as much desire as fear: a thirst for precisely the kind of power Trump is accused of seeking — just qualified by the caveat that its exercise should be faceless and procedural, rather than indexed to one capricious individual. Meanwhile, among more pragmatic technocrats, the turn against Biden serves as tacit admission that an explicitly self-driving administration remains politically unacceptable — emphatically so to the American electorate, but also to many within the Democrat camp. Some form of leadership figure is still required, even if this is mostly theatre.

On the other side, meanwhile, after the weekend’s events, Trump is being hailed as avatar for all those who still resist the faceless swarm. He has emerged from this attack as a one-man embodiment of Great Man Theory, baptised in his own blood by an assassination attempt not of the figurative, collectivist, indirect sort but the old-fashioned, violent, individualist kind.

And yet we might ask his supporters: be honest, how much of this so-called “feminisation” should be rolled back? I suspect even the most ardent opponents of swarmism would choose an “assassination” attempt in the feminine key now faced by Joe Biden, over the one Donald Trump just survived. The former might threaten your self-esteem, your social circle, or your reputation; the latter is more terminal. I dare say few want sexed polarity enough to swap desk work for manual labour. And this goes, too, for a great many features of 21st-century civilisation that rely for normal functioning on institutions, processes and bureaucracies. Only the most unhinged swarm-hater would seriously seek to gut them all.

It’s doubly fitting, then, that the half-senile avatar of faceless managerialism should himself face a swarmist political attack from his own side. Fitting, too, that his individualist opponent should be attacked the old-fashioned way: as an individual, by an individual. But if history is any guide, we won’t need to choose between these two modes of political assassination: both have always played a role in the cut and thrust of politics.

And by the same token, too, the swarm and the Great Man continue to need one another. The former may seem unstoppable; but without a head it’s blind and chaotic. And even the greatest of Great Men needs a team; needs bureaucrats, even. The struggle now convulsing America may look dramatic, but the two sides are far closer than they imagine.

The hippies are mostly gone now, but the old hippie saying now has a new air of relevance about it. For what goes for LSD and magic mushrooms also goes for political polarisation and violence.

Even as many now celebrate Trump’s miraculous luck, and see his survival as a sign from God, such enthusiasm seems badly misplaced. The bullets destined for Trump ended up killing a completely innocent person sitting in the bleachers, and severely wounding at least one more; this was hardly the work of a merciful guardian angel. Still, there’s a surreal quality to the photos of Trump standing defiant, blood streaking across his face. Had they been part of a work of fiction, they’d have been dismissed as too on the nose, too unrealistic. In America’s ill-fated 2024 election cycle, truth has become stranger than fiction.

When one looks at the sombre reactions to this assassination attempt, it’s hard to avoid a certain sense of absurdity to it all. The shock, grief and dismay at what has happened is very real, and it is extremely bipartisan. Yet nobody can really pretend to be surprised. In fact, this shooting is singularly unsurprising: America has spent the last eight years warning about the unique evil of Trump; the Democratic Party’s re-election slogan is literally that “democracy is on the ballot”, and that if Trump were to win, a new era of fascism and darkness is sure to descend on the country. Thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of marginalised people’s lives are supposedly at risk; what then is an assassin’s bullet or two, given the enormity of the stakes?

It is no wonder, then, that the mood in America at this point is one of despondency and depression. Having already bought the “ticket”, people are becoming immensely uncomfortable with the way the “ride” is going. The same people who — either jokingly or seriously — talked about how someone needed to put a bullet into Trump now recoil in horror at the reality of political violence, like a kid playing too many violent video games and foolishly thinking this means he knows what real violence is like.

For a short while, most people in America are likely to try to back away from the brink, to dial down the rhetoric, to cool the talk about how the sky is falling and the other side is out to destroy everything you hold dear. And this seems to be exactly what is happening right now, on both sides of the aisle. Joe Biden himself has called for calmer tempers and cooler rhetoric: in America, differences should be settled with ballots, not bullets. Trump himself seems eager to play along: a recent Axios article laid out just how much this brush with death seems to have changed Trump’s thinking. His speech at the Republican national convention has been completely reworked in the aftermath of the failed assassination: apparently it is now aiming at trying to preach a message of political unity rather than further division. For now, both sides of America are talking about peace, love and understanding. It is their first time doing so in many, many years.

But as much as people would like this new era to last, it can’t — and it won’t. Political division isn’t merely a product of bad thoughts; often, they are the surface level symptom of much deeper issues within a society. And the sad truth about America today is that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump — as well as every other actor in the political system — completely depend on this kind of rhetoric. They cannot make do without it for very long, no matter how much they would wish to turn a new leaf. The real problem in America today is that the political system has simply been hollowed out; it is no longer capable of delivering solutions to either side of the partisan divide.

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Biden himself now has historically low approval ratings and a supermajority of Americans think he is mentally unfit to serve another term. The only tool left in his toolbox is to talk about the other guy; without doing so, without stressing just how dangerous the enemy is and how thin the margins are, he has no chance. But the same goes for Trump. None of his voters really believe that he can drain the swamp, or reform the system, or somehow halt America’s very dangerous drift into insolvency and economic chaos. For them, too, all that’s left to talk about is the evil of the other side, and how sweet revenge will be.

In truth, for a well-functioning society, a bit of violent rhetoric here and there really isn’t a big deal. It is only when the political elites lose control of the situation — when they can no longer maintain the military, fix the roads and bridges, keep the economy running and manage the state in such a way that it doesn’t drown itself in an ocean of unpayable debt — that such rhetoric leads to violence and blood in the streets. But America’s elites have lost control of the situation, and now they are waking up to a nightmare they’ve unwittingly created. There is not a single American politician today who even pretends to have a plan — much less a solution — for the massive fiscal time bomb located at the heart of the current system. Social unity is completely incompatible with economic bankruptcy: when things truly fall apart, political elites can either admit that the entire political class has failed and needs replacement, or they can try to blame the other guy. Unity is a luxury; one that the American political class can no longer afford.

One can certainly sympathise with the deep, profound sense of regret and sadness that is now visible among the American political class and punditry. But political violence and psychedelic mushrooms follow the same rules in the end: there are no takebacks, no mulligans and no refunds. Once you buy the ticket, you have to take the ride all the way to the end. All you can do, no matter how bad things become, is to sit back and try to endure.

To even begin to understand it, you first have to understand the arc of contemporary mores. To put it crudely: behaviour that was once publicly unacceptable is now tolerated, even embraced. Trump’s abusive language and threats didn’t come from nowhere. America’s famous radical individualism has burst its last restraints. It is hardly a surprise that a major American political party will be anointing an apparent sociopath its king when, for example, some American schoolchild somewhere could still be responding to the TikTok challenge, “Slap-a-Teacher”. Trump didn’t drop from the sky. He grew out of a coarse transformation of American life.

Or to put it another way, just as liberal culture long ago assimilated a culturally avant-garde nihilism — moving from Dickens to Kafka to Fifty Shades of Grey — the conservatives are experiencing their own upheaval in morality. Liberals have Quentin Tarantino’s revels in meaninglessness and violence. Hard-Right conservatives can now be entertained by Marjorie Taylor Greene’s social media posts encouraging the execution of Democratic leaders.

This Right-wing assimilation of once subversive values and sentiments, however, had a long gestation. For the fringe energies on the Right — the calls for violence, the paranoia, the nativism, the xenophobia — to have come bounding into the mainstream, two things had to happen. The Right had to shift its attention from political issues to cultural ones. And culture had to become a highly personal, idiosyncratic matter. The disappearance of a mass culture, and the rise of countless streaming niches, has had an incalculable effect on politics. People no longer stand around the proverbial water-cooler talking about the TV show or the movie they saw the previous night. Now they sit in their cubicles and watch on their screens recaps of what they saw the previous night. And few people saw the same thing as other people. A good part of Trump’s appeal is simply that he is someone who gets lots of people to poke their heads out of their cultural niches and pay attention to him, the way people used to go en masse to a movie theatre instead of sitting home alone in front of their screens (where they are now all following Trump). This great divider is also, for masses of people, a great uniter.

The story of the contemporary American Right is a tale of fringe to mainstream, of a long, slow embrace of what was once unacceptable. It took some time, but an adversarial energy was its mother’s milk from the beginning. Today’s take-no-prisoners, radical American Right was born in opposition to the New Deal and to what appeared to be Soviet communist threat. The Right has been and will always be a counterpunch. Trump is a born counterpuncher.

In the Thirties, class was the focus of both Right and Left. With the legislative triumph of FDR’s New Deal, though, the liberal idea of material hardship as something to be ameliorated by the state established itself, forevermore, as the dominant political ideology in America. The Right-wing counterpunch occurred quickly. But it found no real outlet in national politics, fulminating instead in print and in the new medium of radio. It was exemplified by the ideas of Father Charles Coughlin, the radical Right’s chief demagogue at the time. Coughlin was a pastor in a small Michigan town who had turned sharply from a supporter of FDR and the New Deal to a vicious opponent of both, using radio broadcasts and a magazine he published called Social Justice, to attack communism, bankers, and Jews. Coughlin began as an advocate for the economically disenfranchised, but his Left-populist rhetoric gradually evolved into pro-Nazi tirades. At his height, his broadcasts had a staggering 30 million listeners — he was proof of concept for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson. Though Coughlin’s sentiments found no political platform, their incendiary quality threatened public order, especially after America entered the Second World War. The federal government shut down Coughlin’s magazine in 1942 for violating the Espionage Act, and the Catholic Church put an end to his radio broadcasts at the same time.

Coughlin had been silenced, but his enmity toward liberalism seethed under the surface of American life. Yet as the New Deal became a welcome permanent condition for most Americans, as the country grew prosperous after the Second World War, and as accelerating industrialism slowly eroded the moral fabric of small-town America, Coughlin’s focus on class lost its pull. Enter Senator Joseph McCarthy, who replaced class consciousness with an obsession with seditious elites. This shift in emphasis was a virtuoso move. McCarthy’s anti-communism provided an intellectual style of its own for the masses of people alienated by the liberal intellectual class. McCarthy became a sort of cultural mandarin from below, simply by virtue of his attacks on the cultural mandarins who ruled from above. This was the first step, by the Right, out of politics into culture.

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McCarthy was exposed during the televised 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings as vapid, venal and heartless. And as a result of its tribune’s public discrediting, the Right lost much of the following McCarthy’s conspiracy theories had won for it and settled back into the political margins. There the fevers McCarthy had unleashed were soon embraced by the ill-tempered John Birch Society, which represented the return of Father Coughlin’s dark populist zeal. Like the Tea Partiers and MAGA enthusiasts who eventually followed them, Birchers blamed moderate elites in the Republican party, just as much as Democratic elites, for an expanding universe of entitlements — and also for the seemingly unstoppable growth of international communism. William F. Buckley, routinely praised for purging the conservative movement of its extremist fervors, in fact gave the Birchers an appreciative wink as he finally, and with finely calibrated ambivalence, seemed to usher them out the door in 1965 with a series of scathing editorials that he published in his weekly magazine, National Review, at the time a highly influential force in conservative life. After all, Buckley’s seminal 1951 God and Man at Yale lambasted cultural elites across the political spectrum in a way that held great appeal for the Birchers.

Coughlin’s original economic populism had never caught on with conservatives, who were, and always will be, the party of banks and big business. But with Buckley’s book, a strenuous argument for replacing the teaching of secular humanism in universities with the propounding of Christian principles, the Right found its most powerful appeal and its true purpose: the battle over who owns American culture. The shift from the conservative pursuit of class conflict to its pursuit of a culture war was almost achieved. Once you draw a bead on the liberal elites, the liberal elites train their attention back on you. The result is that you share their visibility, and their glamour. Bob Dylan in 1962:

So I run down most hurriedly
And joined up with the John Birch Society
I got me a secret membership card
And started off a-walkin’ down the road
Yee-hoo, I’m a real John Bircher now!
Look out you Commies!

The American radical Right was well on its way to being mainstreamed.

The Left, clutching their Gramsci, followed a similar path, as they embarked on their long march through the cultural institutions, mainly the universities. In 1989, the Catholic conservative Michael Novak published, in Forbes magazine of all places, an essay titled “The Gramscists Are Coming”, in which he urged conservatives to adopt the principles of Gramsci’s Kulturkampf — what Gramsci called a “war of position” — in order to head off the Left’s incursions into culture.

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Three years later, at the 1992 Republican convention, the Right-wing Catholic populist Patrick Buchanan — Father Coughlin with an urbane, smiling face —declared: “There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” The cosmopolitan Buchanan was shrewd about empowering people who felt left out by the ruling elites: he gave them an intellectual framework of their own. A “cultural war” is, after all, a form of culture. The Right-wing motion from politics to culture was complete.

In response, the Left’s grip on the universities hardened into identity politics and “political correctness”, the ancestors of today’s “woke” crusaders. And in response to that, but mostly to the election of the country’s first black president, the Tea Party briefly rose to prominence, bringing the virulent sentiments of Father Coughlin and the Birchers, which had always lingered on the fringes, into the Republican mainstream. Yet the Tea Party’s feral energies were too much, it went too far in its refusal to compromise in Congress — and wiped itself out.

Trump would later incorporate the Tea Party base into the GOP by elevating the Tea Party’s cultural animadversions — they, like Trump, believed that Obama had not been born in the US, and that he was secretly a Muslim and a socialist — over its radically libertarian economic agenda. Trump played down his radical free-market economic agenda — it pretty much went without saying for a GOP candidate who was also a successful businessman anyway. Instead he played up a rhetorical Grand Guignol of feral sentiments. He abandoned the Tea Party’s intransigence over the budget. And made a bullying, derisive intransigence the substance of his politics. Trump is the only American president to be loathed by liberals, not for his policies and actions as president — as Nixon, Reagan and Bush had been — but simply for being an asshole.

Nowadays both Right and Left accuse the other of inflaming passions over culture to conceal an economic agenda; but with the triumph of neoliberalism, the economic agenda of the two sides has become strikingly similar in many respects. The war over who owns the culture, though, is where the irreconcilable differences lie. Not over tariffs on China, or managing Social Security, or even the need to curb illegal immigration. There is middle ground on all those issues. There is no middle ground over the belief in the fungibility of biological gender, or the certainty of the existence of inherent racism, or the issue of whether to teach both to children in school. The emergency in the way people expect their most intimate realities to remain constant is what is largely inspiring them to protect Trump from the destabilising assaults upon him.

Surprising as it may sound, the culture war in America has been, to a meaningful degree, a clarifying, sometimes bracing, dispute in the absence of the communist menace on the one hand, and of a shared water-cooler culture on the other. But America’s culture war has now, like pretty much every public experience in America, begun to vanish into the labyrinth of the American psyche.

Just as late capitalism has made the commodification of psychological life — Mark Zuckerberg is the Cecil Rhodes of our time — its last commercial frontier, American politics now is more and more a matter of mental states; no wonder that Taylor Swift’s lyrics often sound like middle school meets Munch’s The Scream. It is fitting that the entire country should be obsessing over the fraying synapses of its two presidential candidates. Ideology is out. What you think people are actually thinking behind the veneer of what they want you to think they are thinking, as you are trying to figure out what you actually think or should seem to be thinking yourself: that is in. Unmasking deep psychic truth, once the project of high art and modern sociology, is now a common reflex.

Forget all the talk about the administrative state, and the deep state, and Hayek and Strauss and Agamben; forget libertarianism, and Catholic integralism, and neo-conservatism, and the Claremont Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, and Project 2025, and the slick, hustling Right-wing New Dealers. Think instead of that great emblematic American experience: driving on a highway.

Everyone is a centrist behind the wheel. You drive according to the speed limit when you have to, exceeding it when you are alone or when everyone else does. You mostly stay in the middle lane, or in one of the middle lanes, changing to the left lane to pass or to the right lane to exit the highway. So long as everyone else driving near you behaves in the same way, everything goes smoothly. Your life is fine, it will be fine, all will be fine. There is no reason to think or feel radically different about anything. All of sudden, though, someone cuts you off. You fly into a rage and want to follow them to wherever they are going, pull them out of their car and beat them into extinction. In much the same way, patriotism and ideology instantly vanish from the minds of soldiers in battle, who care only to survive.

As American life fills with conveniences, inconvenience begins to feel more and more like a broken promise. Responsibility itself comes to be experienced as a betrayal of free will. In this carnival of sovereign impulses, the space between politicians — and every public figure; think of those postgame press conferences in which athletes have to atone to viewers for their mistakes during the game — and the people who elect them disappears. It’s not enough to vote someone out, or vote against them, when they cut you off, as it were. You have to destroy them. Ideology is irrelevant, except as someone’s pretext for enraging you, and as your pretext for striking back.

The rise, in Europe, of fringe parties in the mainstream, is one result of a democratic politics that regresses, more and more, to the appetites of the individual. In America, where the sense of community has always been elusive, such bespoke politics, if you will, is becoming more and more prevalent. You might also call it streaming, or niche politics. Something for everyone; nothing for all.

This atomised political consumerism is why, professed liberal amazement and outrage to the contrary, there is nothing contradictory about an American Right in which Mitch McConnell and Marjorie Taylor Greene share the same (ultimate) fealty to Trump. Having its roots in opposition to the New Deal, then to godless Ivy-educated elites, and now to progressive commandments to transform human life from the genitals, to the kitchen, to the highway, the American Right, like any person ruled by anger, is open to the most intense emotions, no matter how contradictory. In a blurry, mentalised time, Trump’s own anger is downright enlightening for many people.

In Milwaukee, Trump will continue to capitalise on the American Right’s movement from fringe to mainstream, from politics to culture to psyche, and turn himself into a syncretic masterpiece. He is, all at once, a fractured Picasso and a reassuring Hudson River landscape; a Buckley-like cosmopolitan exerting a clownish appeal to born disrupters and, in the eyes of prim liberal elites, “losers”; a convicted felon who can now present himself as an American anti-hero on the order of Christ himself. And, to top it all off, the Democrats are becoming, before everyone’s eyes, the party of sclerosis, dishonesty, concealment, and sanctimonious hunger for power.

That is to say, the erstwhile party of the New Deal is now retreating into the shadows, while the party of Father Coughlin has emerged from the shadows once and for all and, short of the Lord himself intervening with Josephus Bidenarius Caesar, ready to take centre stage.

Erotic, I thought. The hottest words a woman could ever speak to a man. “We did it, Joe.”

It roused and upset me all at once. Here was a moment I would never experience. No woman would ever tell me I was going to be the next President of the United States.

I can’t speak for Donald Trump, but I guess he must have been pretty upset too. Not only because Biden winning meant that he had lost, but because no one was ever going to say “We did it, Donald.”

“We”?

Is there such a word as “we” in the small, cruel Trump lexicon? With whom would Trump ever share a victory? There, in one brief clip, as Kamala Harris’s joy exploded into the phone, was the tragi-comedy of Donald Trump’s whole existence: the thing his crazed-egoism would exclude him from forever — the sound of warm companionable laughter. The music of sharing.

At the time I half-wished the world would end there and then. Not only so that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden would be spared the inevitable anti-climax of what “doing it” entailed, but so that we too could go to sleep with the sweet smell of success in our nostrils. “If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy,” says Othello when he is reunited with Desdemona. Some moments are so incontestably happy — seeing a beloved’s face after a long absence; writing the last words of Middlemarch or Little Dorrit; beating Donald Trump — they should not be spoiled by any aftermath. See Naples and die.

To ask for Biden to step down is to remember him as he was and conserve his past victories against the havoc wreaked by time. You would think that very thought must have crossed his own mind more than once. Only losers want a re-match. Tell him that, Jill. Tell him to sit in his chair, put his old feet in a bucket of Radox therapy soak, smoke a cigar, sip an Irish whisky and drop off, savouring the glory that was. Tell him not to give Trump even a sniff of getting the last laugh. Unless, of course, there is some jealousy of Kamala Harris in play and this time Jill wants to be the one who says “We did it, Joe.”

But there is another way of looking at this. The reasons Biden should not go on are, if we choose to take the world ironically, the very reasons he should stick it out. Even slurring his words at 81 he makes more sense than Trump ever did at 40. Despite his lapses and confusions, with Biden you feel his words had meaning once upon a time. They reach back to a world of intelligibility he once moved in. They are what’s left after a catastrophe. They are the noble ruins of an edifice that once stood proudly. With Trump, on the other hand, nothing is forgotten because nothing was ever there. He is not the trace or ruin of anything grander. He is the ruin of a ruin.

So how about staying with Biden for the sake of keeping faith with what he no longer is? I hold this to be a principle that should guide us with the old generally. Yes, their slowness of gait is exasperating if you happen to be behind them on a crowded street; and yes, waiting for them to form a coherent answer to a question you haven’t asked can make you feel your own life blood is ebbing away. I know. I am one of the slow myself. But if the alternative is the young pushing you aside as they run marathons in the park, whizzing past on e-bikes which they discard when they’ve run out of places to speed through, like children throwing toys out of the window and, when it comes to serious matters, jumping to conclusions which are invariably erroneous, then give me the old any time.

Where is the virtue of youth if it’s wasted on acceleration and where is the virtue of acceleration if there’s nowhere we want to go tomorrow let alone today? When the young know nothing, we have a duty to revere the old who at least took the time to know something once.

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But it’s not only for lacking youth and urgency that the 81-year-old Biden matters. We value him, no less, for the absence in him of a single oratorical gift. In a world of shysters and liars, Biden can proudly boast he is neither mountebank nor rabblerouser. Ask yourself what heart Biden ever quickened into rash action. That’s right — you can’t recall one. Neither can he.

Consider the times we live in. On marches and in protests all over the world the gullible gather, mouths open, eager to be told what extremist position to take up next. Did any good ever come of a political rally? The public speaker who can’t be heard, who freezes and forgets his lines, is a Godsend in an inflammable world. “So I ask you, comrades, to join me in condemning . . . something or other, I can’t remember what. Good night, go home, love one another, and don’t forget to feed the cat — or do I mean the dog.”

Armageddon is only round the corner whatever we do. So let’s shut the jabbering world up and send time into reverse. Let’s pretend that the words “We did it, Joe” haven’t been spoken yet. “We’ll do it, Joe. One fine day we’ll do it.” This way, at least, we’ll have something to look forward to.

***

This essay first appeared on Howard Jacobson’s Substack.

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.