Northie, the daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, is Gen Alpha’s Adrian Mole. Her debut album — N0rth4evr, released on Friday — is a catalog of the grandiose woes of phase-stricken tweens, recognizable to all former miniature diarists. Powered by the sounds and styles of metal and K-pop, North sings about the ennui of her mega-famous upbringing. In case you didn’t know, it can get lonely “in the back of the Lamb”; in fact, “all this money turn my heart into a black hole”. She rises to these challenges with her father’s hustler braggadocio: “I ain’t steppin’ out unless somebody pay me.” Presumably this pocket money is going towards indulgences more extravagant than Claire’s clip-on earrings and fruity Maybelline lipgloss, but ultimately North is still, if you needed reminding, only 12.

Mademoiselle West’s charmed childhood has been an internet obsession since she was delivered to the strains of Bohemian Rhapsody in West Hollywood in 2013 (Kanye was doing some delivery-room DJing, perhaps the most compelling incident in a crowded field for which he deserved punching). North was described as the world’s most famous baby, a crown shared with our very own Prince George; like a true royal, she was baptized in a cathedral during a tour of Jerusalem. From there, the marketing ramped up: who can forget her musical debut at the age of six at Paris Fashion Week, during which the puffa-coated rap progeny yelled into a mic at a heroically straight-faced row of models: “What are those? These are clothes. What are those? These are clothes.” Ye grinned on stage at his mini-me; Kim wept in the front row. Since then she has starred in The Lion King, collaborated with FKA Twigs and performed two songs at the 70,000-seater SoFi stadium during Kanye’s comeback show in LA last month. And, of course, she’s now released an album.

All the while, like every boundary-prodding preteen, North has been shocking curtain-twitchers with her “too grown-up” look. Black grills on her teeth, long blue wigs, finger piercings, full-beat makeup. Like Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s daughter, 14-year-old Blue Ivy, North has been the focus of much hand-wringing and finger-wagging about the provocative styling of child celebrities. West, never one to pass up an opportunity to swipe at his ex-wife, is thought to have accused Kim of crossing “the line” in allowing North’s at-times eyebrow-raising outfits; a source said he thought his daughter was “way too young to be parading around like this” (on that occasion, in a corset), with threats of “rais[ing] hell with the lawyers”. This, supposedly, from a man who appears to encourage his wife Bianca Censori to go to events in the nude.

But observers who fret about North’s breakneck-speed entry into adulthood, littering comment sections with refrains such as “how about go be a kid” and “this is just sad”, are missing the point. North is precocious in the way only nepo babies can be; opportunities to dance on stage in Rick Owens boots are not forthcoming to most anonymous preteens. Her polished public image and drastic overexposure is the result of inconceivable fame — with its attendant stylists and agents and fixers. But she is also in many ways typical of her age group: her ultra-public childhood has millions of analogs the world over. Online pre-adolescence today is by definition grotesquely stage-managed, publicized, even monetized — and mostly by children themselves. Even those from more conventional homes than North West are fashioning their own digital cults of personalities, with their own curated TikTok shopfronts, their own sullen lip-syncing clips and their own fake-eyelash experiments beamed to strangers across the globe. 

The fact is that childhood as a category was too fragile to withstand the totalizing force of social media. In-built features like the gatekeeping and chastisement of parents, the creativity of boredom, the privacy of loneliness, were traded in for intoxicating external moral codes, constant stimulation and the paranoia of exposure as soon as social media companies established Instagram, YouTube and TikTok as essential presences in young lives. The difficult tween years are periods of excruciating fashion experimentation (in my case, those undocumented crimes involved lace-fringed leggings) and rolling identity crisis: phase after phase, bad outfit after criminally bad outfit. The braces, swoopy side fringes and crippling self-consciousness of those years are formative; to develop personality and resilience, you need privacy. And yet, privacy is no longer an option. Kim Kardashian said of North’s occasional faux pas: “Unfortunately, we made that mistake in front of the whole world.” But really, today, who doesn’t?

North West, Aged 12 and ¾, is treating official album releases like most of us used cringe diary entries that should never see the light of day — but then so are all Gen Alphas, who use TikToks to broadcast to their albeit smaller followings their own middle-school malaise. All this expression jeopardizes the authenticity of feelings and opinions: for many online children today, all private thoughts are subconsciously optioned for public posts, which must result in a strange new self-fashioning. Always mindful of an imagined audience, children’s emotional lives mirror the viral feelings of others. Just as North West sings of “every scar, all the blood”, her “shady” entourage or the loneliness of that Lambo in imitation of her goth faves and her grimmo father, preteens the world over simulate the views and feelings of others. Like North, they perform angst without the required depth of introspection or experience; it’s just cool to do. 

As a great imitator, Miss Westie is a herald for Gen Alpha’s ascent to the public sphere. When her generation becomes the culture-shaping twentysomethings, we should brace for a wave of hollow authenticity: these children are relentlessly expressive mimics trained from infancy to perfect public image. A cohort of copycats. 

North represents the near-universal condition of modern youth: she is what childhood looks like when buffers against the adult world disappear; when that separate sphere of shielded development dissolves. Personally, I like her. The choices she makes — her odd fashion sense, her musical homages to passing obsessions — remind me very much of being her age. She is bizarre and fascinating, and living the girlhood dream. But if you think she is overexposed, thin on talent and fatally overconfident then brace yourself — a whole generation of Norths is ready to rush the stage.

That’s the understanding of the mind that Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) referred to in his (latest) apology for what he described as “a four-month-long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life”. (The apology was issued in the form of a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal.) During this period, Ye identified himself wholly and horrifyingly with antisemitism. He posted images of the swastika on social media; he even bought an advertisement during the Super Bowl directing people to a website that sold swastika T-shirts. He released a song called “Heil Hitler” which sampled a speech by the Führer.

But Ye’s history of antisemitism, and other chaotic and disturbing behavior, goes back much longer than those four months, and so do his efforts to explain it. In 2016, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but he now believes his issues started long before that, as he wrote in the apology statement: “Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the right frontal lobe of my brain. At the time, the focus was on the visible damage — the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.”

The reaction to this was not uniformly welcoming. Some observers have suggested that Ye’s apology is simply an effort to launder his reputation ahead of his upcoming album releases, and regain some of the commercial opportunities he lost during his years of promulgating hate against Jews. Others have said, reasonably enough, that the damage Ye has done is too extreme for forgiveness to be an option. If you’re disinclined to be understanding, Ye pinning his actions on an injury looks a bit like an attempt to evade responsibility.

Nonetheless, what he’s saying has medical warrant. One study found that, in the year after suffering a traumatic brain injury (TBI), 31% of patients developed a psychiatric disorder, and 22% developed a psychiatric disorder they had never experienced before. Neuropathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu told Vanity Fair: “There is no doubt in my mind that the TBI he suffered was a significant and substantial contributory factor to his progressive behavioral and cognitive impairment regarding his impulsivity and lack of restraint on the public domain.” He urged compassion for those with TBI: “They need our empathy and sympathy and not our judgment and dismissal.”

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Don't punish Kanye West

By Hadley Freeman

Standing behind all this is the figure of a man who had the misfortune to become the classic case study of brain injury and personality transformation: Phineas Gage, the American foreman who survived having his head impaled by a metal pole, but was left with scars far beyond the physical.

That Gage lived at all is miraculous. In 1848, while he was working on the railway in Vermont, an explosion forced a tamping iron through Gage’s left cheek and out of the top of his skull, destroying a portion of his brain. The doctor who treated him, John M. Harlow, reported being able to pass “the index finger of the right hand into the opening its entire length”. Harlow kept the risk of infection at bay and, remarkably, Gage recovered his physical health, though he lost the sight in his left eye.

His personality, however, did not come through the experience intact, and this became the most significant part of Gage’s story. “Previous to his injury,” wrote Harlow, “though untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart business man, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was ‘no longer Gage’.”

This “new” Gage was “fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man.”

This may sound familiar to followers of Ye’s career. Since his arrival as an artist in the early 2000s, Ye’s astonishing, generation-defining musical talent has been repeatedly waylaid by bizarre acts of self-destruction, which have become increasingly dark, cruel and inexplicable  over time. It was surprising (but politically semi-coherent) when he went off-script during a telethon for victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to declare: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” It was outrageous but funny when he crashed Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to say: “I’mma let you finish… but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.” This was wild behavior, but wild within the remits of celebrity misbehavior, and it was fun to watch.

But it felt ugly when he escalated the Swift feud in 2016 with the song “Famous”, in which he rapped “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex./ Why? I made that bitch famous.” Adding to the humiliation, the video features a naked body double of Swift. It was, effectively, revenge porn too. There was something vicious, too, about the way he made himself a svengali to his reality star wife Kim Kardashian, posing her in ever fewer clothes. “He’s pimping her,” said a friend of mine at the time. He would do the same thing later, and more disturbingly, to his second wife, Bianca Censori.

When he endorsed Donald Trump in 2018, it was disorienting: how do you go from attacking George Bush Jr over racism, to endorsing the white supremacists’ top pick for president? At Paris fashion week in 2022, he wore a “white lives matter” shirt, alongside his friend (and fellow black Right-winger) Candace Owens. All that, maybe, could be wrestled into a narrative of Ye rejecting identity politics and embracing a role as a provocateur — both things that are not completely outlandish within hip-hop. But when he tweeted in 2022 that he was “going death con 3” on Jewish people, that line of understanding expired.

Something in Ye had fractured, a fracture of personality complete enough that he felt compelled to change his name in 2018. I have spoken to associates of his who feel that the downward spiral began when Ye married Kim Kardashian in 2014 and was absorbed into the circus of her family, exposing him to a kind of celebrity power-gaming that he could neither control nor understand: he was made into a character in someone else’s reality show rather than the protagonist of his own life. I’ve always suspected that the death of his mother in 2007 was his greatest catastrophe. Donda West had been an absolute believer in her son’s greatness: she worked for him, and she protected him from some of the more predatory aspects of fame. When she died aged 58 as a result of complications from plastic surgery, he lost the one person who was able to tell him “no”.

Both those versions of the Ye story protect a “real” Kanye West who existed and made music for a time before a “bad” version of him took over. The new narrative of the traumatic brain injury takes that away: before the crash, there was no Kanye West in the public eye. He was still toiling away for his breakthrough, believing utterly in his own abilities, but unable to get record labels to see him as more than a producer. His debut solo single — the 2004 song that made him a star — was “Through the Wire”, which tells the story of his injury and recovery.

The wire in the title is the one that held his jaw together. He made the song so close to the accident, he’s literally rapping through the wire on the recording, causing him to lisp in an odd, vulnerable way that represented something characteristic about Ye’s art: a shocking capacity for sincerity, a vulnerability within the braggadocio that made him unique. When South Park mocked him in 2009 with the “Gay Fish” song, it nailed that part of his personality completely: the gag in the song is that Ye takes a stupid joke about “fish sticks” so seriously, he reshapes his whole personality around it.

So there is no separating the artist from the illness with Ye. If you love him as a fan, then the only way you’ve ever known him is in his damaged form. Maybe we even owe the art to the damage. Looking at Ye’s career, you could even make the argument that his pathologies made him. Without his impulsiveness, his stubbornness, his imperviousness to “normal” behavior, would it have been possible to achieve all that he achieved? Then again, if he wasn’t an acknowledged genius, would any of these traits have been indulged up to the point of Nazism?

The story of Gage ends badly. In multiple popular accounts, he’s described as growing ever more dissipated, even wicked. Biographies claim he was unable to hold down a job, and was reduced to the undignified life of the freak-show exhibit, always accompanied by the pole that maimed him. But that isn’t quite the picture the archive paints. Much is post-hoc elaboration. Yes, in the immediate aftermath of the accident, Gage is documented as showing many of the behaviors we would now label as “disinhibition”. But it’s also known that in later life, he worked for several years as a stagecoach driver — demanding work that could hardly be done by the wild semi-human he’s often described as. Gage’s accident changed him, obviously, but it did not place him forever beyond the realm of morality. He did, apparently, get better, in mind as well as body.

I cannot argue that Ye deserves forgiveness: that is for the individuals he has injured to decide, from his own family to the global Jewish community. I am not even sure that forgiveness is something he needs from a strictly commercial perspective: the music is so good, Ye has always been effectively cancel-proof. I’m interested less in what the world owes to Ye than in what is possible for him now. If Ye really is a modern-day Phineas Gage, there is hope. The historical record suggests that recovery is possible, with the right support. It may never be complete, but it is real.

The larger question is whether it can be available to someone like Ye. There’s a cruel irony that the biggest block between Ye and stability might be the thing that, for many, disqualifies him from sympathy: his privilege. With so much money, and so many people happy to become enablers in order to bask in his celebrity, there is very little to restrain him. No Donda to tell him when he’s gone too far. No limit to what he can spend in the service of his own ruin. (How many bipolar sufferers must, on learning about the Super Bowl ad, thanked their stars that their manic episodes had never coincided with being a millionaire?) His brain may have been damaged, but nothing can demolish a person like wealth and fame.

Spengler argued that the dominant civilization in the West was on the inexorable downward part of its cycle, and heading for dissolution. I doubt he would have thanked me for punning so egregiously on his magnum opus — and yet, this week, I found myself remembering that work in the context of the contemporary decline, of a different West: Kanye.

West, whose recent torrent of barely-coherent livestream and interview rants attests to an increasingly erratic public persona and possible mental health issues, prompted shock and disgust when he released a new song titled “Heil Hitler”. Launched to coincide with VE Day, it was promptly denounced across the political spectrum as “classic 1930s style antisemitism”, “fascist art”, and “a crude, adolescent chant of racial slurs and fascist glorification masquerading as music”.

So what would Spengler make of this musical work? Would he be Heil Hitlering with Kanye? Some historians draw a line from Romanticism, through Spengler, to the Nazis, notably via the idea that ethnocultural groups share the kind of mystical national consciousness George Mosse called “Völkish moods”. And it’s true that Spengler has since reappeared at intervals, as a touchstone for the Right.

But despite his Romantic literary roots, Spengler himself thought Hitler was “an idiot”, and called the Nazis an “organization of the unemployed by the workshy”. So I doubt he would have seen much of moral or political worth in a hip-hop tune with the chorus line “Nigga, heil Hitler”. And yet his analysis is useful when considering Kanye — offering both short-term reassurance as to what it represents, and also, as you might expect, a longer-term prognosis that is far from happy.

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What’s the point of VE Day?

By Mary Harrington

Spengler died in 1936, but much of his contemporary success and subsequent influence rested on predicting the decline into “Caesarism” that, he thought, would accompany this end-stage “Winter” phase he believed Western civilization to have entered. When the publication of Decline was followed, in short order, by the era of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, Spengler was hailed as a prophet — only to fall out of fashion again as the 20th century wore on and the forces of liberal democracy re-asserted themselves.

Interest in his work tends to revive in periods of turmoil and economic downturn, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the end of the End of History has been accompanied by something of a Spengler revival. But if there’s a sense in which Spengler helps us understand Kanye’s musical development, it’s less in diagnosing his latest single as ominous harbinger of incipient fascism in America. He did predict that “Caesarism” would come in waves, and would doubtless have expected the authoritarians of the early twentieth century to be only the first of these. But even so, Spengler helps us here mainly by revealing that “Heil Hitler” doesn’t have much directly to do with authoritarianism at all. Rather, it sets Kanye’s work in the context of two cultural currents, in both of which Spengler is implicated: first, a Romantic tradition of anti-modernist, usually masculine-coded rebellion; and second the endemic path towards general brutalization that Spengler saw as inherent in end-stage civilization: a brutalization he thought would, in time, give way to a “new primitivism”.

Modernity, in his view, was not the perfection of Western civilization, but the beginning of its “Winter” and herald of its inexorable collapse. The Romantic tradition from which he wrote has been with us more or less since the beginning of this era, in reaction to its character. It’s less a coherent programme than a sensibility: a revolt against everything cold, clean, procedural, and rationalistic that comes with the secular, technological, disenchanting modern worldview.

At its core, though, Romanticism always seeks what is deeper, higher, and more soulful, emphasizing the role of feeling. Goethe’s 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther offers an early instance of such intense emotionality; on publication the book triggered copycat suicides. Half a century later, the same reckless and sometimes self-destructive intensity made Romantic poet Lord Byron “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, and — another century on — prompted Julius Evola, a Romantic contemporary of Spengler’s and father of the modern esoteric far Right, to call for “revolt against the modern world”.

Today this kind of revolt has, itself, become commodified by the modern world against which it rebelled — and nowhere is this more apparent than in the music industry. Most forms of transgression are mere grist to its mill of transgression-as-product: audiences seem only mildly titillated by (for example) Satanic metal bands or drill artists who boast in music of murders, drug deals and other criminal activities.

In this jaded environment, it’s remarkable in a narrow sense that West has managed to find a way to be genuinely shocking. Jewish groups and allies are rightly furious and distressed. And yet the song itself is more driven by inchoate fury than Nazism as such. West says so in the song: “I got so much anger in me, got no way to take it out”. This is, he says, the fault of a vague “they”, who have taken his kids off him and closed his bank account: “With all of the money and fame I still don’t get to see my children”.

So now he wants people to understand his depth of emotion: “Niggas see my Twitter but they don’t see how I be feeling.” And the only way to express his fury is through the only remaining taboo with real shock power. “I became a Nazi, yeah, bitch, I’m the villain.” In context, then, “Heil Hitler” is less coherent ideology than ultimate swear-word: the adult equivalent of a pre-schooler saying “pee pee poo poo”, to get a reaction from his mum.

In other words, the song is pure, distilled essence of male rebellion, in direct continuity with a centuries-old Romantic tradition but today most palpably felt in the noisome underbelly of the internet. Here, especially since GamerGate, a “dissident Right” subculture (aided by a side order of Nietzsche, Evola, and Spengler among others) helped propel Donald Trump into power. “Heil Hitler” is this subculture in musical form, voicing a masculinist backlash whose ripples spread well beyond West’s individual circumstances.

And there’s also a second sense in which the song invites a Spenglerian reading. Writing a century ago, Spengler forecast a future of drab, universal uniformity, in which national differences are largely abolished and life concentrated into “megalopolis” world-cities. In this brutalizing environment, competing peoples would spend their days in repetitive tasks, assuaged by vulgar diversions — until a new primitivism emerged that would eventually drive the collapse of this dying civilization. In Spengler’s vivid formulation: “Money is overthrown and abolished by blood.”

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Donald Trump is the end of Hilarity

By Mary Harrington

Spengler envisaged an end-point where, “The sword is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will”. It’s reasonable to surmise that those cheering on the Trumpian backlash from the depths of the “dissident” internet would understand themselves as aligned with the re-assertion of a martial over a managerial spirit. But what if the internet Nazism as an expression of rage does not, in fact, signal the return of martial spirit? What if it’s just another spasm of brutalization and dissolution, en route to the bottom of the cycle?

If this were so, it would be reasonable to expect any political victory applauded by a dissident caucus not to be followed by much in the way of substantial policy change. And indeed, since Trump’s victory, the so-called “dissident Right” has grown increasingly marginal within the emerging government coalition. The anti-DEI activist Chris Rufo explained why, distinguishing between those effective as critics and gadflies, and those with the temperament for building and cooperation in an institutional environment. “In my opinion”, Rufo said, “we are lacking some of this capacity.” When he made this point on X, one of the first responses promptly illustrated it for him, replying: “I’m kind of like fuck your institutional environment”. It’s a sentiment very much in keeping with “Nigga, heil Hitler”: one of pure opposition.

The clear inference is that what we’re looking at is not some notional revival of institutional Right-wing martial spirit, fascist or otherwise. On the contrary, it’s another iteration of Young Wertheresque emotionality, largely devoid of any clear object or organizational capacity. Kanye West has ironically reversed Hitler’s cultural achievement: not appropriating Romantic tropes for Nazism, so much as appropriating Nazi ones for Romanticism.

The result isn’t a philosophical ideology. It’s undirected rage. The good news, then, is that “Nigga, heil Hitler” probably isn’t an omen of approaching military authoritarianism. The bad news is that the longer-term prognosis this suggests is not much better: just one lurch after another, down the path of moral ugliness and brutalization that Spengler saw as characteristic of civilizational “Winter”.

Spengler might also point out that none of this is to rule out another spate of Caesarism. It’s just to say those singing along to Kanye’s tune are unlikely to be the first to enlist in his army. Put simply: they’re too ornery. “I felt crushed by the system, so I became an online Nazi” has been one of the internet’s drumbeats at least since GamerGate. It took the decline of Ye West to set it to music.

Rick Owens, the avant-garde goth designer, has legions of dedicated, cultish fans — informally known as the Tribe — who not only admire his careful balance of asceticism and esotericism, but embrace his aesthetic as a lifestyle rather than merely a fashion label. He is beloved by the fashion world too, with admirers including Anna Wintour, Vera Wang, and Bella Freud.

Perhaps the most famous of his disciples, however, is Kanye West, who once described Owens as “a major source of inspiration”. He even dressed his first wife, Kim Kardashian, in his designs: the sheer, cream two-piece ensemble she wore to the 2018 CFDA Fashion Awards accentuated her figure in a way that was both grungy and glamorous. Kanye clung to the aesthetic, but he took it in his own ostentatious direction, dressing his second wife Bianca Censori in ever more revealing outfits, where the clothes became secondary to the performance of wearing them — and ultimately wearing nothing at all. Whereas Owens’s designs always seem somehow fresh and cerebral, carefully balancing nihilism with a sense of mysticism, West’s project increasingly lacks any redeeming sense of subtlety.

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By Kathleen Stock

There was a crassness to Kanye and Bianca’s stunt at the Grammys, which was more jarring than the nudity itself. The spectacle was too contrived, too formulaic. If the intention was to titillate, somehow it failed. The stunt seemed, if anything, anti-erotic; it exhibited not deviance or innovation, but just a sense of trying too hard.

It also seemed to pierce the careful equilibrium between exploitation and consensual personal fetish. Soon after, Kanye bragged of “dominion” over his wife, then burst into a series of antisemitic rants and attempted to sell Swastika t-shirts on his website. Fashion and fascism became uncomfortably enmeshed. Whereas Owens once played with dystopian themes, West’s stunts seemed symptomatic of a real personal decline, his wife leaving him days later.

In the backlash that followed, it seemed for a while that Kanye had given kink a bad name. By sliding from a play of domination into full-blown Nazism in a few days, he confirmed the suspicions of BDSM-critics; an enthusiasm for fetish had just masked his more dangerous beliefs and desires. And yet it seemed unfair to conflate the issues too readily; one man’s affection for both kink and fascism did not marry the two.

That same week, I picked up a copy of Anastasiia Fedorova’s book Second Skin, which explains how kink is not just for show or exploitation, but is also a compulsive way to be intimate, to develop oneself, to explore for the sake of exploring. The erotic is “a way of seeing”, and her book is concerned with those for whom fetish is not just a passing fashion or a sly form of manipulation, but a mode of optimistic transformation. “I am not my usual self,” she writes. “I have stepped into unchartered territory, where I can temporarily embody something different.”

It doesn’t have to appeal to everyone: it is not for everyone, and that is the point. In this secrecy there is something rare and therefore covetable. Perhaps this is why the wider culture pays attention and seeks to monetize it; for every counter-cultural movement or community that comes to represent something desired, there is always the risk of dissolution and co-option.

As with Owens’s fashion, it is a challenge to be inclusive and subversive at once, to be successful without one’s aesthetic attracting strange interpretations. In the case of the London kink scene, many of the club nights Fedorova writes about were shut down due to complaints of obscenity, even as the wider culture seemed to embrace a tepid or brutalized version of the same aesthetic. There is a revived conflict over what is allowed and what is not, in clubs and in awards ceremonies, magazines and relationships. Can Censori be naked at a party? Is choking permissible? Can West sell Swastika t-shirts online? Must you scorn the man who licks spit off the floor, must you talk at all? It is apparently all up for debate.

What is accepted or not is constantly being challenged. As the psychoanalyst Darian Leader argues, we learn our romantic scripts not just from the people who have brought us up but also from the communities and culture around us, and even from particular partners. Our wider cultures determine our behavior in sex and love, and crucially what we do and do not allow ourselves and one another. The script can be revised. We need not get caught in repetitive cycles — though many, quite contentedly, do.

When it comes to BDSM, it would be naive to believe that personal sexual practices are contained from the outside world in every such relationship, or that sadomasochistic dynamics cannot be a front for deception and real abuse, or that communication may not always be clear enough to prevent true harm. Played out against a landscape of endemic violence against women and girls, even the most seemingly secure and intimate relationships can be vulnerable to the contagion of the outside world, not to mention the repressed or concealed facets of one another, whether BDSM is involved or not. But it is precisely because we are so influenced by the world around us that we must be honest in exploring our desires, as well as exploring what reviles us and why.

Many of us don’t want to bear witness to another celebrity’s exposure, whether sexual, or political, if it’s not in the script we have passively agreed to. West and Censori broke the social etiquette we were familiar with, and it hit a nerve. When we discuss whether a woman such as Censori could genuinely choose to be a part of a humiliating spectacle, perhaps we are really expressing an irritation that, with the prevalence of visual media, we cannot help but watch it. We, the audience, are part of the spectacle because we can’t stop consuming it. The voyeurism is no longer a choice, and there is no safe word, no exit.

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By Poppy Sowerby

And this is why, conversely, kink is so popular: it offers a way out, new options, an alternative way to be and feel when the media bombard us with pictures of wars and fires, images that seem like it really is the end of the world. We might not really be free, or safe, but in the right light, in some playful unexpected moment, we may feel that we are free regardless. There may be some fleeting satisfaction in this self-awareness.

“Enjoy your symptom!” writes philosopher Slavoj Žižek. This, to me, seems to be at the heart of the rise of this particularly dystopian, hyper-visible brand of fetishism that characterizes our cultural moment. Owens captures a communal neurosis in a way that has garnered him loyal followers, who have found in his fantastical world a mirror of their anxieties, and a freedom from the real world. The fetishized sickness is a contained sickness, a controllable one — a sort of pain management. In this containment, contagion unites rather than alienates its patients.

In psychoanalysis, the “symptom” is a substitute for one’s instinctual impulse that, through repression, has become displaced and distorted, so that it resembles a compulsion or sickness. Noticing or treating the symptom may give some satisfaction, but it cannot fully cure the deeper issue. And yet we can enjoy the symptoms, in a sense; we can probe the things that attract and repulse us, we can understand ourselves a little better through our fantasies.

Owens presents a fantasy world where what we fear is turned into something not only attractive but shared; he takes the ethos of fetishist counterculture and creates a wider movement. But the key to its success is still a sense of mystery and containment, a holding back; too blatant, and at the wrong moment, the spell breaks. Something must always be left to the imagination; some things must stay repressed for others to be enjoyed.

This isn’t the first time the Harlem-born rapper and the Queens-raised President have crossed paths. When Mayers was detained in Sweden in 2019, facing assault charges after a street brawl in Stockholm, help came from an unexpected quarter. At the urging of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Trump, then in the midst of his first term, dispatched his hostage affairs envoy to attend the trial and publicly pressured the Swedish government for the musician’s release. This curious episode exemplifies the complex, often contradictory relationship between the President and African-American pop culture, particularly the strange world of the “rap game”.

Never was this clearer than earlier this month, when Donald Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl. The headline act for the coveted half-time show was West Coast rapper and Pulitzer Prize-winning wordsmith Kendrick Lamar. Playing to a US TV audience of 127 million, Lamar mixed jabs at rap rival Drake with political commentary in the form of a mocking cameo by Samuel L. Jackson dressed as Uncle Sam. The point of this, as The New York Times put it, was to “indict America and white hegemonic power”, and some have praised Lamar for the “hidden messages” aimed at America’s new Right-wing regime.

Before Lamar had paid his ironic homage, however, rap stars Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross, Soulja Boy and Nelly were derided by black Americans as “sellouts” for performing at a pre-inauguration event. In 2017, Snoop had called out his fellow black artists on social media, accusing anyone planning to perform at Trump’s first inauguration as an “Uncle Tom”. “I’m gonna roast the fuck outta you,” he warned eight years ago — yet here he was in 2025, happily performing for the President.

In recent decades, the rap game has become a global entertainment industry powerhouse that goes to the heart of the American Dream, with ex-crack dealer Jay-Z now worth an estimated $2.5 billion. There is therefore a peculiar irony in how Trump — arguably America’s most polarizing political figure — was once hip-hop’s favorite billionaire, then fell out of love with black America, but is now bouncing back as the rap game’s King of Bling. This transformation, spanning the glittering excess of the Eighties to the present-day culture wars, offers a fascinating lens through which to examine America’s complex relationship with wealth, race and power.

The Obama years saw the Democrats solidify hip-hop’s meta-narrative of black empowerment as a political campaign weapon. From his bromance with Jay Z to hosting Nas at the White House, Obama’s hip-hopification of his party paved the way for rappers such as Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B and Eminem to appear or perform at Kamala Harris’s rallies. But while liberal America, and much of the hip-hop community, has assailed Trump ever since he turned his back on the Democrat establishment in the early 2000s, their opprobrium counted for little at the polls. After all, the Trump rap brand has been decades in the making.

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Long before he descended that golden escalator in 2015 to launch his presidential bid, Trump’s name rang out in countless rap lyrics — not as a political hate figure, but as a shorthand for wealth, ambition and ersatz status symbolism. The ultimate embodiment of capitalist success, in other words. Having become a prominent figure in Eighties New York City real estate and business circles, he was a natural reference point for NYC rappers such as the Beastie Boys, who namedrop him on “Johnny Ryall” from their 1989 album Paul’s Boutique.

Trump took off as a rap phenomenon in the Nineties, when he was mentioned in lyrics by the likes of Raekwon and Ice Cube, yet it was the 2000s which really cemented his status as a central hip-hop reference point. Lil Wayne vowed to “get money like Donald Trump”; Diddy rhapsodized about “that Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Bloomberg money”; Yung Joc boasted that “boys from the hood call me Black Donald Trump”. You get the picture.

These name-checks inevitably carry an element of braggadocio, but Trump takes such eulogizing seriously. Indeed, his reputation among rappers has been a key part of his development as a near-mythic figure, above the mundanities of regular politicians. For instance, Mac Miller’s 2011 song “Donald Trump” makes the businessman a central metaphor with lines such as “Take over the world when I’m on my Donald Trump shit / Look at all this money, ain’t that some shit?”

Trump has frequently returned the favor. Aside from lending A$AP Rocky his support, in 2021 the President pardoned Lil Wayne, who was facing up to 10 years in prison; commuted Kodak Black’s sentence for making a false statement to buy a firearm; and pardoned the co-founder of legendary rap label Death Row Records, Michael “Harry-O” Harris, who served 32 years for attempted murder and drug trafficking.

On the face of it, though, these dynamics weren’t merely transactional. They represented a shift in American racial relations, through which successful black figures could access white power structures while simultaneously maintaining their cultural authenticity. Trump seemed to understand this intuitively, playing the role of the white businessman who was “comfortable” with black success in a way that many of his peers weren’t, and even making cameos in rap music videos as far back as 1989.

Trump’s own legal troubles have found an unexpected resonance with America’s black community, particularly within hip-hop culture. His numerous indictments and ongoing battles with the justice system share parallels with the experiences of numerous rap artists who have faced prosecution — from Meek Mill’s probation struggles to Young Thug’s RICO case. This shared experience of what Trump calls “prosecutorial persecution” has created an unusual form of cultural empathy among a growing number of black Americans who see him as an ally.

Trump’s rhetoric about a “rigged system” and claims of selective prosecution echo longstanding critiques from within hip-hop about the bias of the justice system. When he describes investigations as “witch hunts” and prosecutors as politically motivated, he’s employing language that resonates with communities long familiar with discriminatory law enforcement practices. But, crucially, Trump leverages this victimhood by also presenting himself as a strongman. As Ice Cube, an ex-gangsta rapper, said of Trump almost a decade ago: “Rich, powerful, do what you wanna do, say what you wanna say, be how you wanna be — that’s kind of been like the American dream.”

This parallel extends to specific cases. Trump’s criticism of Georgia prosecutors in his RICO case echoes complaints from Young Thug’s defenders. His attacks on the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid employ rhetoric similar to that used by hip-hop artists to critique law enforcement overreach. Even his social media posts about “prosecutorial misconduct” mirror the language used by rappers from Tupac to Jay-Z about systemic bias in the criminal justice system.

Trump’s political strategy has shown awareness of this unexpected alignment. His campaign’s outreach to black voters emphasized themes of systemic persecution and fighting back against establishment forces — mainstays in hip-hop culture. His social media posts often adopt the defiant stance of a man battling an unjust system, a pose familiar to anyone versed in hip-hop’s narrative traditions. And his frequent references to being a “political prisoner” and facing a “two-tiered justice system” resonate with communities which have long made similar arguments.

However, this alignment remains deeply complicated. Critics argue that comparing Trump’s legal troubles — stemming from allegations of election interference, classified document mishandling, and business fraud — to the systemic racism faced by black Americans in the criminal justice system is false equivalence at best and cynical manipulation at worst. Yet the cultural resonance persists, creating an uncomfortable convergence of narratives between unlikely bedfellows.

Of course, mainstream black America is still less than enamored with Trump. For every Ice Cube, there are 100 Kendricks willing to stick the boot in. But the political implications of Trump’s cultural alignment with a subculture that has massive domestic and global reach are profound. His ability to position himself as a fellow traveler in the fight against systemic persecution — despite his vastly different circumstances — demonstrates the power of the rap game’s narrative in American political life. His ongoing legal troubles, rather than undermining his appeal for certain segments of the black community, reinforce it by creating an unexpected cultural solidarity. As Kanye West, Trump’s biggest hip-hop ally, vividly puts it in “So Appalled”: “Balding Donald Trump taking dollars from y’all.” What could be more gangsta than that?

Censori’s outfits have been growing increasingly in need of censorship for some time. In 2023 she was photographed in Florence, trailing after West, clad only in a sheer bodystocking and clutching a purple pillow like a child’s teddy. Then there was the claustrophobic Maison Margiela shroud, all sheer full-face covering and a tire-like collar.

West, meanwhile, stalked next to her in shoulder pads and tights, like a Judge Dredd terrorist with a hooded hostage ready for necklacing. He seems to relish displaying Censori’s beauty, vulnerability, and pliancy, as a foil to his own vaguely paramilitary-tinged and always fully clothed aesthetic — often in dark glasses, and often masked, too, like a bodyguard or executioner. We’re to treat it as high fashion; but her huge eyes, blank face and awkward, near-naked discomfort cry out that something is off.

Creative passion or abuse? Opinion is divided. Early in their romance, West wrote a febrile song called “Censori Overload”, lamenting “no more sex till marriage, and no more drip till Paris”. She has been described by some as West’s “muse”: an inspiration and living artwork. Others find the outfits degrading, and worry that the relationship is abusive.

Perhaps the most liberal interpretation is that it’s just kinky, with West as the “dom” and Censori in the “sub” role and the whole dynamic subject to an unusual degree of public exposure. Certainly West has form for enjoying power and control in relationships: often dictating the wardrobe choices of women he dates, even clearing out ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s wardrobe on camera. He reportedly employs a whole “secret team” to create Censori’s outlandish outfits, as though she’s a living doll, and announced early last year that she would wear “no pants this year”. He gropes her publicly — and, it appears, sometimes demands still more intimate public sexual favors: a 2023 incident in a water taxi in Venice saw West photographed seemingly with his trousers at half-mast and Censori’s head in his lap — prompting local police investigations. At the Grammys over the weekend, West reportedly ordered her to drop the coat with the three words “Make a scene”.

This is all still, more or less, at least arguably within the scope of “lifestyle BDSM”, which is to say a form of long-term couple relationship that never breaks out of “dominant” and “submissive” roles. But advocates of BDSM emphasize that while participants in a “kinky” partnership may agree to a “power exchange” even 24/7, the dynamic itself should be consensual, pre-negotiated and based on mutual trust and communication — with “safe words” giving the submissive party an escape route if it all gets too much. That doesn’t sound like it’s happening here: West reportedly screens her social media, controls what she eats, and even tells her when to go to bed.

So are West and Censori just kinky, or kinky and playing without safe words? And if so, what’s the difference between that and coercive control? But when we set BDSM itself into context, it becomes clearer that its safe, sensible rules for rational perversion can’t be made to apply in this case. Rather, they serve to distract from what’s actually off about this scenario.

As a cultural phenomenon, BDSM only only emerged alongside liberalism itself. As the writer Andrew Klavan has noted, one of the great early innovators in the relativist philosophies that underpin modern liberalism was the Marquis de Sade: also a notorious sexual degenerate and origin of the “S” in BDSM. Downstream of (among other liberal thinkers) his trailblazing, amoral, often sadistic (they named it for him!) advocacy of radical sexual libertinism, a liberal worldview has steadily emerged in which sexual and social norms may be discarded in favor of individual freedom and will.

Especially since the Sixties, we have leaned into that Sadean social picture: one that decries moral absolutes and rejects baked-in asymmetries and social givens, asserting, instead, the freedom of every individual to do what he or she wishes. Among less amoral liberals than de Sade, this tends to come with a side-order of egalitarianism and strictures on harming others. In other words: we should be able to do what we want, provided everyone consents, and we’re all working meanwhile to abolish real-world asymmetries of power.

This is the context in which BDSM makes sense. For it’s a good rule of thumb that whatever is most forbidden will seem especially enticing. It’s thus most committed to egalitarianism — broadly, liberals — who are also most likely to fantasize about domination and submission. The practice of “BDSM” within its usual “safe, sane, and consensual” boundaries, complete with safe-words, creates a space to enjoy the frisson of power asymmetry for liberals otherwise committed to the flattening and disavowal of all such differences.

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And what’s so icky about West’s decision to sculpt his personal life into a de Sadean tableau is that he’s taking full advantage of the now-widespread culture of liberal sexual permissiveness that views BDSM as so perfectly fine it has a UK Ministry of Justice advocacy group. In this culture, Bianca Censori’s treatment can be read as merely “kinky” — and yet West’s treatment of her exploits the fact that social hierarchies never really flattened. Or, rather, that flattening has gone into reverse. Kanye West stands among an emergent post-liberal phenomenon of lords and princes: billionaire titans of a new Gilded Age, who live out, very literally, the internet assertion that you really can “just do things”.

In this context, what’s off about West and Censori isn’t the sexually explicit outfits, or even waterborne BJs. It’s not even West’s evident relish for exposing and exhibiting his obedient consort. It’s the fact that he has selected someone to serve as his counterpart who is unable to play at his power level.

The bestselling soft-porn fantasy Fifty Shades of Grey thrilled countless normie housewives with its romantic-yet-kinky account of the love-affair between dominant billionaire Christian Grey, and loving, submissive Ana. In that book it all ends happily, and Christian Grey falls deeply in love with Ana and doesn’t make her wear a see-through bodystocking in public. But the reality of real wealth disparity in the postmodern age is that, like the aristocrats of the pre-liberal age, the super-rich are “equals” only with others of their own kind. Relative to normies, the idea of “equality”, or even “consent”, is largely an abstraction. They really can just do things, and we can’t. In terms of what this looks like in practice, for socially asymmetric romance, a better mythic model than Christian Grey is the (from a modern perspective, rather rapey) Greek mythology of Olympian gods seducing mortal women: a grab ‘em by the pussy world of simply taking what you want, all horny swans and abduction by bull.

West appears to have come upon Censori somewhat like an Olympian seducing a nymph. Not long after they met, he “married” her, in a private, possibly-not-legally-binding ceremony — a scant few months after finalizing his divorce from fellow-Olympian Kim Kardashian. And the contrast between the two women says it all. Conservatives may curl a lip at the flashy, new-money excess of the celebrity super-rich class, preferring the understated grandeur of old European money; but in the weird world of “high net worth individuals”, Kardashian — who is also a billionaire — is indisputably in the same league of aristocracy as West: postmodern influencer royalty.

By contrast, Censori has neither obviously abundant family money, nor particularly extensive business interests of her own beyond serving as architect-turned-model-turned-living-doll. She is, figuratively as well as literally, all fur coat and no panties. Combined with the ambivalently binding “marriage”, this relative poverty makes her acutely vulnerable: a situation in which domination and submission is less a fun game to play at weekends, than an all-enveloping reality. In theory, she could surely walk away any time; but as the journalist Tina Brown observed recently, there is nothing more corrupting than private jets. So unlike for Queen Kim, it’s easy to see how the costs to Censori of walking away from her controlling prince and his creepy fashion thing could lead her to tolerate more, or indeed wear less, than she would really prefer.

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In this new age of yawning wealth disparities, West’s remodeling of Censori from employee to chattel-wife takes objectification to new levels — all while presenting Censori as wife, controlling her as if she were still an employee, and smuggling the whole queasy cocktail under the cover of possibly-“kinky” sexual liberalism.

In old-money aristocratic terms, then, we might compare West’s choice of Bianca Censori as his project to a duke seducing a maid, then parading her half-naked in public — simply because he can. The new-money volume of objectification and media spectacle makes it something still worse. If we lack the language today to express our disgust at the obvious misuse of power this all entails, it’s because the liberal world has forgotten how to think about real, substantive class hierarchy. With a post-liberal one now fully upon us, in the Second Trumpian Epoch, it might be time to remember.

Imagine having your painstaking investigative work on the cost-of-living crisis or the Ukrainian war sit alongside a piece called “How I freed myself from inherited gender roles and stopped feeling unworthy of my own womanhood”, written by someone called Jeremy. Or imagine opining critically about the role of “disinformation” in a publication which also accuses mainstream media outlets of using a “technique employed in Nazi Germany to silence trans people”. The brave souls enduring these indignities at the hands of their colleagues are the real journalist heroes. Truly, it must be a slog.

Earlier this week, former Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman gave a revealing interview to Woman’s Hour about her time at the paper, describing it as an initially happy marriage but one in which her partner eventually became a “conspiracy theorist”. A few years ago, while Freeman was away on a work trip, representatives from lobbyist organisation All About Trans — who had a close working relationship with Mermaids at the time — were brought in to talk about “how trans people should be discussed in the media”. In the course of their intervention (the chummy flavour of which presumably can be gauged from this piece about the same group lobbying the BBC Newsnight team in 2016), two relatively innocuous pieces of Freeman’s were presented to her colleagues as examples of transphobia, she said.

From then on, her viewpoint was dismissed by colleagues as “mean”. Editors would repeatedly refuse pitches from her about Mermaids or J.K. Rowling on the flimsiest of excuses, while continuing to publish gushing pieces about child transition. At one point, she said, senior management told her that only journalists with relevant specialities, who also happened to be male, could write about the politics of gender. Books by gender-critical authors were uniformly passed over for review, and only a single interview with one such author made it onto the page (that is, with me — albeit in the education and not the main section, and with a lot of anxiety on the part of the section editor as I recall). Meanwhile, as befits a good and obedient Stonewall Diversity Champion, trans memoir after memoir was puffed in the paper, approved mantras were intoned, and stories of wrong bodies and wrongthink abounded.

Though Guardian management were not prepared to send a representative to discuss the matter, in a prepared response read out by interviewer Emma Barnett a spokesperson explained, as if talking very slowly to toddlers, or to Russian citizens during the Soviet period: “All writers work with their editors to decide the topics on which they write. This is a completely standard practice across the media. That is not censorship. It is editing”. It is perhaps hard to understand how such a venerable and supposedly sophisticated publication could have reached this level of audience infantilisation. It’s almost as if they think their readers are idiots.

Actually, I’ve come to think that they do think some of their readers are idiots — a fact which partly explains progressive policing and censorship around discussion of gender identity, as well as other controversial topics too. One reason why someone might talk to a group of people as if they were stupid is inadvertent: namely, if the person is himself an idiot and simply trying to describe the world as he sincerely sees it. Into this category would seem to fall some of the gender lobbyists generally benighting our institutions and instructing newspapers what to write. Recent court cases in which they have appeared as witnesses have afforded ample opportunity to scrutinise the extent of their knowledge of biology, ethics, and childhood development. Pearls of wisdom offered include: “describing any particular transwoman as male is inherently transphobic and abusive, unless that trans person as an individual has asked you to do so” (Kirrin Medcalf, Stonewall Head of Trans Inclusion), and “I am not clear that children come out of the womb with a sex, to be honest” (Dr Belinda Bell, Chair of Mermaids trustees).

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As it happens, I once met the founder of All About Trans, the transactivist body named by Freeman as involved in lobbying the Guardian. Nathalie McDermott, not herself trans, met me for coffee in a hotel near the BBC in January 2019. Our companions were fellow gender-sceptic Graham Linehan and transwoman Ayla Holdom, a patron of Mermaids and consultant for All About Trans. The meeting was initiated by McDermott, who seemed convinced that if only we sceptics could meet the eminently likeable and reasonable Holdom, we would seamlessly extrapolate outwards to anyone else who identifies as a woman for whatever reason, and our strong doubts about things like putting males in women’s prisons or women’s sporting competitions might be quashed.

McDermott also pleaded with us that, if only we would meet some “trans kids”, we would see how “happy” they were and therefore stop worrying about the fact some are being sterilised and having body parts chopped off before they can properly understand what is happening to them. I have no doubt this is genuinely how McDermott saw things: that the fact a minor is happy, right now, is somehow a reliable indicator of her well-being in future years. And when we pressed her on the idea that latent homophobia might be behind some parents’ preference for interpreting their feminine boys as girls, or masculine girls as boys, she attempted to reassure us that she had never ever seen this — as if, again, this was something an outsider could tell from relatively superficial observation.

As I say, some people have cognitive blind spots, however well-meaning. But this can’t be the entire story about those writers and editors at the Guardian. These are supposed to be among the nation’s foremost intellectuals, for god’s sake. Most of them easily grasp such basic points as: personal anecdote isn’t strong evidence; most violence against women is carried out by males; children aren’t able to consent in the way that adults do; there’s societal pressure on young lesbians and gays to be more conforming to norms for their sex. Indeed, if they didn’t grasp this standard progressive fare, they wouldn’t have got jobs at the Guardian in the first place.

Rather than being an idiot himself, a second reason why a writer might treat his audience as idiots is because he suspects that some of them are. And indeed, it seems to me that at the root of Guardian doublethink on trans issues lies some degree of contempt for readers’ intelligence. Moral sophisticates as they are bound to try to be, it seems likely that many of those pushing for an “inclusive” editorial line on trans issues, to the exclusion of other viewpoints, would admit in private that they at least understood gender-critical reservations. Yet it appears that they won’t allow untrammelled voice to be given to those reservations because they fear that if they did, stupid people might be influenced to do bad things because of it. Some degree of technocratic smuggery seems implicit here, and, ironically, probably a class element too. As a highly-educated person with wider expertise and a sounder moral compass than many of your readers, you think it’s part of your job to anticipate the highly emotive and irrational ways in which ignorant people might react to certain bits of information, should they read them, and then adjust the information accordingly.

Nor is this impulse to micro-manage other people’s minds solely reserved for the Guardian’s coverage of transactivism. In a recent piece laced with finger-wagging about Kanye West, no room could be left for readers to decide for themselves what the interplay might be between West’s antisemitic tirades and his bipolar manic episodes. Instead, its author primly informed readers that: “Medical experts have underscored that mental health struggles and bigotry are separate problems.” A few days earlier, a piece by a different Guardian journalist included a near-identical phrase: “medical experts and advocates warn that his bigotry and mental health struggles are separate problems.” Good old “medical experts” — speaking with one voice, particularly skilled at diagnosing bigotry by looking at a person’s tonsils, and always on hand to back up a flailing author who is trying to stop presumed idiots from getting the wrong end of the stick.

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It is true that we live in a time of proliferating misunderstandings and disinformation, and that the internet is largely the culprit. Most interlocutors online are strangers, about which we can tell practically nothing about their credibility or expertise. Authorial intentions are hard to gauge, tone and nuance tend to go missing, and reduced character limits and attention spans make matters worse. But this is all the more reason for broadsheets with large readerships to explore a complete range of viewpoints on controversial matters, relatively unfettered and at length.

And in practice, Guardian readers should be more than able to handle exposure to unorthodox positions, and to make up their minds about them without heavy-handed mental steering. According to its own website, the paper’s audience is skewed towards the social grade of “AB” — i.e. “higher and intermediate managerial, administrative, professional occupations”. Yet at least some of these readers seem not to mind the fact they are frequently treated like foolish children, and even to positively like it. Survey after survey seems to indicate that the paper occupies a uniquely “trusted” position in UK public life. I can only conclude this is because, alongside its editors and journalists, many readers agree with editors that it’s part of the moral mission of the Guardian to avoid inflaming weak-minded people. Though of course, they probably don’t think this applies to themselves.

In 2017, editor Katharine Viner wrote rousingly that one of the core values of the Guardian is “building hope”. In service of this aim, she wrote, “the Guardian will embrace as wide a range of progressive perspectives as possible. We will support policies and ideas, but we will not give uncritical backing to parties or individuals. We will also engage with and publish voices from the right. In an age of tumultuous change, nobody has a monopoly on good ideas.” Despite the overtly moralised aim here, there are still intimations of intellectual openness, at least in theory. Yet in practice, under Viner’s editorship there has been an obvious straitening of perspective, responding to the Left’s growing fear of populism by becoming ever more nannying in outlook, and becoming far too keen to give some readers what they want other readers to hear. When it comes to sowing disinformation, at least by omission the Guardian is now emphatically part of the problem and not part of the solution. Historically so fond of moral missions, it should perhaps get itself a new one, and start trusting readers to be able to think for themselves.

In Silver Linings Playbook, two very attractive and very mentally ill people (Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper) find redemption and love through the power of taking part in a dance competition. (Good news, people with bipolar disorder! No need to take your lithium anymore, you can just embrace the power of the tango.) And finally, most of all, in Girl, Interrupted, there’s Angelina Jolie, barely capable of feeding herself but still able to style her sexily disheveled hair and whack on her smudged eyeliner perfectly. These characters are, the movies all suggest, not crazy like the homeless man who shouts in front of the supermarket. They are simply too sensitive for the cold, tin-eared world.

Some images of poor mental health from my own experience, when I lived in various psychiatric facilities in the Nineties, where I was being treated for anorexia nervosa: the black woman who walked around shouting racist obscenities all day. The man who came into the TV room, dropped his trousers, and started masturbating (to Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, of all people, so you knew he was really crazy). The woman who pulled out all the hairs in her eyebrows and eyelashes. These people did not look sensitive. They looked ugly and sad.

Which brings me to Kanye West, now known as Ye, and probably the most famous mentally ill person in the world right today. West’s mental state has been in freefall for years and he has been talking about his bipolar disorder for a while. His manic behaviour goes off and on, and right now, it is very much on.

This latest episode started with his fashion show in Paris for his label Yeezy, for which he and his models wore t-shirts emblazoned with the logo White Lives Matter. “This is a God thing,” he informed the audience. When Vogue’s global fashion editor, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, criticised the show, West mocked her shoes on social media. Things spiralled from there, with — and I’m condensing here, for all of our sakes — West posting messages in which he accused Puff Daddy/Puff Diddy/Diddy of being controlled by Jewish people, and then he accused his ex-wife Kim Kardashian of hiding his kids from him. He followed these rants by tweeting: “when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Because Jews, he wrote, “black ball anyone who opposes your agenda”.

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The condemnation has been universal. West’s attacks on Karefa-Johnson prompted the model Gigi Hadid to write on his Instagram “You wish u had a percentage of her intellect” and called him “a bully and a joke”. Many are talking about him being “cancelled”, whatever that even means when we’re talking about one of the most famous artists in the world. West’s former friend John Legend and — somewhat randomly — Jamie Lee Curtis have reprimanded West for his antisemitic comments. West, it is generally agreed, needs to be held accountable for his actions.

There has been an enormous amount of talk about mental health over the past two decades. Back when I was in hospital, having mental health issues was embarrassing, as though you were some kind of Jason Vorhees figure from the Friday the 13th movies, or locked in a cell with a muzzle over your face like Hannibal Lecter. Partly thanks to movies like the ones listed above, and partly thanks to better education, things have swung very much the other way.

Now, people talk openly about taking “mental health days” and being “triggered” by unpleasant comments or images, demanding that people make allowances for them and their fragile mind. Twentysomethings talk anxiously about “burn out” and it’s the rare professional athlete who at this point hasn’t talked about his mental health issues — usually anxiety, addiction or depression. Mental illness has become a kind of identity for some people, and it’s a fine line these days between being open about your problems and fetishising them. To discuss your mental health proves you are in touch with your feelings. That you are revealing your true glowing self, beneath the layers society forces on you. That you are self-aware. Sensitive. And special.

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Whatever anyone else wants to say about West, no one can accuse him of not being self-aware about his problems. He raps about “my bipolar shit” and he let himself be filmed having a full manic episode in the three-part documentary Jeen-Yuhs, directed by West’s friend and occasional collaborator, Coodie. I cannot recommend this documentary highly enough, whether you’re a West fan or not, because I’ve never before seen a movie that so clearly charts what a descent into a full-blown mental health crisis looks like.

In the first part, we see West as a young, happy and ambitious producer, desperate for a record deal. In the second part, we see him attain unimaginable success. And then in the third part, his beloved mother Donda dies and West becomes increasingly erratic — hanging out with Donald Trump, talking about running for president — until in one scene, he becomes so manic that Coodie, devastated at the state of his friend, puts down the camera, and turns it off.

This documentary was released earlier this year, illustrating with total clarity how poor mental health has corroded West’s mind and life. And yet despite that, and despite all the alleged hyperawareness of mental health these days, there is a bewildering resistance to seeing West’s behaviour as a symptom of his illness. Rather, people seem determined to see it as a reflection of him as a person.

I’m Jewish, but when I read West’s posts I didn’t feel offended. I just felt sad that an artist so talented is now so clearly out of his tree. Maybe West really does think Diddy is being controlled by Jewish people. Or maybe that reflects his true feelings as much as that man in hospital was genuinely turned on by Richard and Judy. “Being bipolar doesn’t make you racist,” people shout on Twitter. Not necessarily, but poor mental health makes you say a lot of crazy stuff, because it’s not about being sexily impetuous or soulfully sensitive. It’s about being out of your fucking mind. And I get that’s not special or sparkly, but then, tuberculosis is a lot less pretty than some of those Victorian novels made it sound. Illness sucks.

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Why the Tavistock won't talk to me

By Hadley Freeman

Before I went into hospital, I was terrified of a homeless man who hung out near my school and would shout at me about Jesus while I waited for the bus. But I harboured an intense fascination with women like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf — the usual folks overly intense teenage girls tend to be drawn towards. After I left hospital, I realised I’d been making a false distinction, between Good Mental Illness and Bad Mental Illness. Good Mental Illness was the kind I could fetishise, memorising Plath’s last poem, pouring over Woolf’s late letters. Bad Mental Illness was the kind I crossed the street to avoid, because it smelled bad. And yet, mental illness destroyed all these people’s lives, no matter how talented or eloquent. You can’t fetishise one and condemn the other.

Maybe it’s because West is so wealthy and famous that people are unwilling to make the allowances for him that they demand for themselves when they take a mental health day. He doesn’t look the part, because only photogenic teens and twentysomethings with good eyeliner suffer from mental illness, not egocentric fortysomethings who behave like arseholes.

Yet I would bet that many of the same people who are demanding West be held accountable for his actions would be horrified at the idea of sending a mentally ill person who commits a terrible crime to prison. He should be sent to a psychiatric hospital, they would say. That is correct, and the same is true of West. He doesn’t need punishment — he needs help.

The series arrives as Kanye is in the thick of one of the more excruciatingly public divorces of recent times, his Instagram feed a bilious froth of resentment towards Kim Kardashian and her new boyfriend Pete Davidson. He also recently took against Billie Eilish for showing concern for crowd safety, which he somehow interpreted as a dig at his friend Travis Scott.

There’s more where that came from. West’s public life has become an endlessly dispiriting spectacle at the same time as his records have become increasingly hard to love. While he continues to throw giant listening parties for them, and will be headlining this year’s Coachella festival under his new legal name, Ye, his music now “sounds like an afterthought, some extra sounds to have as a treat”, as Pitchfork put it. All in all, it’s not the ideal time for four-and-half-hours of television dedicated to his genius, but that is precisely what makes jeen-yuhs so compelling.

The origins of the documentary are suitably complicated. In 2002, Clarence “Coodie” Simmons jacked in his career as a stand-up comedian and television host in Chicago to move to New York and chronicle the rise of a fascinating new 24-year-old rapper-producer that he had first met four years earlier. Coodie was there for two years, sometimes with co-director Chike Ozah, up to the release of West’s sensational debut album The College Dropout in February 2004.

Had it come out in 2005, the documentary would have charted the birth of a superstar, but West blocked it. “Kanye said he wasn’t ready for world to see the real him,” Coodie explains in his genial voiceover. “He told me he was acting now — playing a role.” Gradually, Coodie was frozen out. The two men didn’t see each other at all between 2007 and 2014 and filming resumed in earnest only in 2019, making the third episode of jeen-yuhs a bizarre and messy coda. To cap it off, Kanye demanded (but did not receive) final approval, so the series has been released without his blessing.

It would be difficult to make a conventional biopic about Kanye because the narrative arc doesn’t land. The classic pop star story goes something like this: ambition, achievement, crisis, recovery, redemption. That redemption might have happened for West with 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 VMAs was such an aggressive breach of celebrity etiquette that even President Obama called him a “jackass”. (It’s remarkable to think that Joe Biden is the first 21^st-century US president not to have expressed a strong opinion about Kanye West.)

The rapper weathered the almighty backlash by hunkering down in Hawaii with three studios full of collaborators working 24/7 on an operatic magnum opus. “It’s never explicitly discussed, but everyone here knows that good music is the key to Kanye’s redemption,” wrote one journalist who covered the sessions. “With the right songs and the right album, he can overcome any and all controversy, and we are here to contribute, challenge and inspire.” There is, however, a big difference between vindication and redemption. West learned that if his music was good enough he could get away with anything — so what happens now that it’s not?

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West is both the most significant and the most polarising artist of his era. Significant because he made hip hop so huge and omnivorous that the beats-and-rhymes model depicted in the 2002 footage now appears parochial. In 2012, the Atlantic described him as “the first true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contemporary American music”. Polarising because he touted his wares with a manic grandiloquence that raised the bar for rap braggadocio. “For some kids right now, I am what Michael Jackson was for me,” he once said, as if Jackson weren’t the crowning example of a sweet, supernaturally talented kid who became destroyed and dehumanised by fame.

I’ve met West on two occasions. The first time was in Los Angeles in 2005, when he was launching his second album, Late Registration. Playfully bombastic, he framed his legendary arrogance as a form of entertainment in its own right: “It’s like I’m walking on this tightrope. It’s like the reason why you go to a circus — it’s more entertaining. It’s like, damn, what if he falls? And if I do make it, it’s like, damn, he made it! But either way you’re saying damn. Everybody else is just walking on the ground.”

The second time was in London, a decade later, between the cyborg roar of Yeezus and the colourful melee of The Life of Pablo. I remember thinking that I’d never met a less relaxed person in my life. He told me he was “extremely fucking happy”, but the only time he smiled was when his mother-in-law Kris Jenner walked into the room with his daughter North. Otherwise, it was like talking to a balled fist.

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You didn’t need to see him up close to witness this hardening and shuttering. Many of the College Dropout songs we see him recording in jeen-yuhs (‘We Don’t Care’, ‘All Falls Down’) are interested in other people, situating West in the broader community of we. He became much less, well, collegiate over the next few years. Even when his albums were as vast and populous as imperial palaces, they had an air of claustrophobia and loneliness, with more mirrors than windows. Paranoia is a species of narcissism after all. On stage, too, he conveyed a terrible solitude. No Glastonbury headliner has ever shown less interest in bonding with the crowd than he did in 2015. We were there to witness a moment, not to share it.

A year later, West experienced a breakdown which led to hospitalisation and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. This partially (but only partially) explains the most chaotic episode in the history of pop stars venturing into politics. It began when he celebrated Donald Trump’s victory during a concert, triggering a chorus of shocked boos. Later, he took to wearing a MAGA hat, posing for photo opportunities with Trump and saying that slavery was a choice: they just didn’t have enough gumption to be free. In 2020, he ran for president himself on a platform that sounded rather like theocracy. He won 60,000 votes.

Even before all this, West mocked his disappointed fans in the 2016 track ‘I Love Kanye’: “I miss the sweet Kanye, chop-up-the-beats Kanye.” Well, the good news is that there are three hours of that guy in jeen-yuhs: performing a daffy Stevie Wonder impression on the porch of his childhood home; gawping like a tourist at the lights of Times Square; giddy with delight when Jay-Z lets him rap a guest verse on ‘The Bounce’.

You can’t help rooting for him because everything was a struggle. He was a hot producer who wanted to be known as a great rapper and his neediness is heartbreakingly apparent. In one mortifying scene, he tries to impress a small boy by reeling off the names of hits he has produced. “Cool,” the kid says politely. A receptionist announces him as “Cayenne West”. Beside the suave virtuosity of Jay-Z or Mos Def, his rapping is tense and effortful, like he’s pushing a boulder up a hill.

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During this difficult period, he had no greater cheerleader than his mother, Dr Donda C. West. He’s talked about Donda often (and named two albums after her) but it’s something else to see her in the documentary, the quintessence of maternal pride, and to observe how boyishly humble he is in her company. “This is so exciting isn’t it? I love it!” she says with a brilliant grin. “Anybody that does something that much and that long and is that good, it’s gotta pay off”. Her death during cosmetic surgery in November 2007 is the decisive rupture in West’s life: the start of the chaos years. In 2015, I asked him what he had sacrificed for success and he didn’t hesitate: “My mom. If I had never moved to LA, she’d be alive”. He refused to elaborate, lest he start crying.

In the documentary, Donda offers caution along with her encouragement: “It’s important to remember that the giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing”. Coodie runs with this metaphor, implying that West took it to heart, but he’s hardly an objective observer. His attempt to wrap up the story with gooey platitudes about God’s plan and friends reunited doesn’t square with what his camera captures, whether it’s a distressing bipolar episode or West delightedly viewing a clip of Tucker Carlson praising his anti-abortion position. The bridge that Coodie tries to jerry-rig back to 2002 collapses because he wasn’t there to document the transition from that Kanye to this one and unpick the rat king of grief, fame and mental illness that brought it about. The narrative doesn’t conclude; it just stops.

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Perhaps the problem is that West really does see nothing when he looks in the mirror, and what reads as preposterous self-confidence is really fathomless insecurity. In 2002, West had every reason to feel thwarted and undervalued, and to turn that frustration into rocket fuel, but that feeling never went away. Having conquered popular music, he had to find new areas in which to be misunderstood (fashion, politics) and new role models to emulate (Walt Disney, Picasso), the result being that he can never, ever be satisfied.

For a long time, that insatiability propelled his music to greater heights; now it distracts from it. Seeing the look on his face as he receives some kind words from Pharrell Williams or plays some tracks for Donda, you have to wonder if this period was as good as it got, before he realised that recognition wouldn’t bring happiness after all. Thus jeen-yuhs becomes a cautionary tale of ambition without end. The unique tragedy of Kanye West is not that he failed but that he could never allow himself to acknowledge that he’d won.

Indeed, so common is this phenomenon that it has become cultural background noise, a mildly irritating hum that can usually be ignored. Only extreme cases of hypocrisy or stupidity rise above the drone — like Joaquin Phoenix dribbling on about artificially inseminating cows and stealing the milk from their babies for our coffee, while denouncing himself as a scoundrel. That speech was so incoherent that it was almost funny and nearly worth watching. But it was also boring and tedious, so not quite.

It did, however, provide plenty of low hanging fruit for people who like to have a go at preposterous “Hollywood liberals”. You know, newspaper columnists, Right-wing bloggers, Fox News hosts. And fair play: such confused ramblings deserve mockery. Yet even as conservatives mock Hollywood types who hold forth on things they plainly know nothing about, they strain very hard at producing their own celebs to hold forth on things they plainly know nothing about.

I had cause to reflect upon this recently after reading a pearl-clutching piece in The Guardian about CPAC. Now that may sound like a machine to help you breathe while you sleep but it is actually more like comic-con for US conservatives. CPAC is decidedly short of celebrities, although they did manage to get the President and his daughter to turn up. So to make up for the shortfall in Right-wing famous people, the organisers had invited climate sceptic teenage YouTube phenomenon (?) Naomi Seibt to attend; The Guardian described her as the “anti-Greta Thunberg”.

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What is an anti-Greta Thunberg, I wondered? Is this actually a thing? The Guardian seemed to think so, and described with some horror this 19 year-old’s doubts about man-made climate change, and her connections to some think-tank I had never heard of, but which the paper seemed to think I should be worried about.

To me it was reminiscent of when I lived in Moscow in the early 2000s and totally obscure acts from the West would turn up to play. The Russians were so starved of actually famous bands that weren’t Deep Purple or Uriah Heep that some of these no-hit wonders became quasi-famous; there was one band in particular called Brazzaville, whose leader had once played on a Beck album or something. Brazzaville played Moscow clubs a lot and appear to still be doing so to this day, even though nobody has the foggiest idea who they are.

Anyway, I Googled about and found that Naomi Seibt has a YouTube channel with a mighty 72.8K subscribers, and a handful of videos including such classics as VON PRINZESSINNEN UND NANNYSTAAT (caps not mine). Amazing stuff I am sure if you speak German, but not exactly “influencer” levels; compare such numbers to, say, Moriah Elizabeth, a young woman who stays in her house all day repairing damaged squishy toys and making videos about it. She has over 5 million followers.

Yet nonetheless there Naomi Seibt was, at CPAC, in The Guardian and also on Fox News, where she was interviewed by Dana Perino, Bush’s ex-press secretary. I saw a slightly awkward yet highly articulate teenager, speaking excellent English, who was repeating things she had heard from adults, while being condescended to by an adult. So maybe she really was like Greta Thunberg.

But as the interview continued, I felt the same way I do when I see Thunberg: concerned that this type of exposure is not good for a vulnerable young person. I thought about the insults lobbed at Thunberg, and worried that Naomi Seibt would become the target of unhinged Twitter shitheads who would see it as their divine mission to destroy her life.

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May Naomi’s brush with the limelight be brief, and may she return to a normal life in whichever German town it is she inhabits. Yet even if she does, the apparent craving of the folks at CPAC for a Greta of their very own, only saying the opposite things, is striking. It was the Right, after all, that produced the first movie star president and the first reality TV show president. As much as they deride Hollywood liberals, so too there is a not so secret yearning that hopelessly uninformed celebs will one day mouth their platitudes instead.

This schizophrenic attitude was perfectly encapsulated by Big Hollywood, a site started by Andrew Breitbart which has since been subsumed into the site that bears his name. Breitbart had worked on the Huffington Post and wanted to create a conservative version, where hitherto closeted Right-wingers in Hollywood could post blogs and begin a cultural revolution.

But it was difficult to get famous Right-wingers to blog, so mostly you got articles attacking Hollywood liberals for their vacuous political statements, while the vacuous statements of Jon Voight, the co-star of Midnight Cowboy father of Angelina Jolie, were quoted again and again as if he were a conservative oracle.

Another problem is that since openly conservative celebrities are so thin on the ground, when they beclown themselves, there is nowhere else to go. For instance, if Joaquin Phoenix gurns and gets sad about baby cows at the Oscars, it doesn’t really matter. There are plenty more Hollywood liberals where he came from, and few are as inarticulate or weird.

But when James Woods — a very good actor, who has appeared in many fine films — comes off as an angry crank on Twitter, or Clint Eastwood talks to a chair at the Republican National convention, well, it kind of sticks in the memory, because that’s your lot. Kanye West turning up at the White House in a MAGA hat does not help the situation. It just looks even weirder.

Similarly, the pro-Brexit celebs — Ringo Starr, Roger Daltrey, Michael Caine and Morrissey — are all legends in their fields, highly regarded for their work. But when grouped together like that, it just looks odd. And lonely. And somehow disappointing.

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It’s even worse, however, when celebrities emerge from within. For instance, the last time I thought about CPAC was when the organisers invited Milo Yiannopolos to speak, only to disinvite him almost immediately when his comments about paedophilia were dredged up. It was always obvious that the Milo story was not going to end well; he was a lonely, needy figure, with few defenders, and aside from his skills at owning the libs, he did seem like a strange guest for a CPAC convention. But then he was gone, and it was back to Jon Voight and James Woods again.

I had a similar presentiment about Jordan Peterson, who is obviously a much more serious and thoughtful person than Milo, but who similarly found himself fighting a lone war on all kinds of things that he hates, while being obviously vulnerable, and definitely working far too hard.  The pressure took its toll, and now he not only suffers poor health but has retreated to Russia to recover — which is not a sentence I ever expected to write.

Thus it seems that being a conservative celebrity can be bad for your health, and frequently for your career. I doubt that they bring that much satisfaction to conservatives either. This sense of settling for ersatz copies, for a less popular version of the thing everybody else has, cannot be very enjoyable.

How much more effective it would be to reject cultural cringe entirely, to double down on denouncing star power, to really mean it when you denounce uninformed celebs, and not just the ones that disagree with you.

And yet it seems that the desire to have your opinions echoed by famous people who know nothing very much is a human need, that cuts across the political aisle. So it is that even in these polarised times, we can still find something to unite us.

It’s pertinent because it gets to the heart of one of the oddities of recent decades. From the Sixties onwards, the satire boom, along with a number of related cultural changes, turned power in the democracies around. Where those who rebelled were once the focus of disapprobation, now it was authority itself that faced mockery and exclusion. Each institution, from Parliament to the law, from elderly MPs to elderly judges, found themselves lampooned for being out of touch, and faintly ridiculous.

To be of ‘the establishment’ turned from being a mark of honour and success, into one of embarrassment and failure — at least a failure of imagination. The same turnaround happened in the arts, so that writers who were thought to be of the old establishment were supplanted by younger, edgier, counter-cultural figures.

The fact that the targets were often far from stuffy or establishment figures themselves didn’t matter, any more than did the fact that some of those who supplanted them were hardly as fresh as they were made out to be. But, everywhere, there was a great sweeping away.

And as the generation of politicians and artists doing the lambasting in their turn aged, as everyone must, so a conundrum of a kind developed. It turned out our institutions were run by people who disliked institutions, our governments run by people who presented themselves as outsiders, and our culture dominated by counter-culturalists.

In short, the culture became dominated by people who had formed themselves by being counter-cultural. The phenomenon is closely related to what George Walden observed in The New Elites as the striking fact that, by the turn of the millennium, we had elites that consisted of anti-elitists.

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In such a situation, what are people to rebel against, and how can they rebel — the culture itself being dominated by acts of  ‘rebellion’? One response that used to be regarded as a joke answer to this serious question has now had a serious response in the form of Kanye West.

I have written about Mr West before, specifically about the tripwire he nicked last year, when he came out as an admirer of the American political activist Candace Owens… and moved from there to an endorsement of President Donald Trump.

These actions, among others, saw West denounced across much of the media (including in The Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates), and he became the butt of many jokes on the almost-without-exception-unfunny US comedy shows. But this week, with the release of his new album, West has shown that he is digging in. And in the process he appears to be showing one way out of the counter-culture culture.

West’s latest is album is called Jesus is King, and as those who have already heard the songs and their lyrics will know, none of the sentiment in that title is of the “fnar-fnar” variety that people might expect. The title is not knowing, ironic, arch, nor some in-joke or parody. It appears to be a serious and sincere expression of the artist’s view, and the performances West has already given suggest that the devotional aspect of the album is sincere.

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At least as significant as the content of the album itself are West’s comments in interviews surrounding the release. For instance, this week he appeared on The Late Late Show with James Corden. Instead of “carpool karaoke”, Corden met up with the rapper on a plane and did an “airpool karaoke”. In an interview between songs, West said some things that stood out because they went so much against what might be expected from such a star.

For instance, he observed how much he had got out of his marriage, and at one point said, “People thought it would be uncool to be married. Then I got married and people were like: ‘Oh, that looks cool’.” Corden chimed in, referring to West’s wife: “No one ever thought it would be uncool to marry Kim Kardashian,” to which West responded “It’s more than ‘cool’. It’s more than ‘cool as hell’ or something. It’s heavenly. It’s great. It’s magnificent. And God is using me as a human being.” He then went on a diversion about his tax returns in the last year, before returning to his substantial point by saying “Kanye West works for God”.

Some have claimed that West’s counter-counter-cultural statements have been timed for maximum publicity around his album releases. And some have implied that these statements (which have included criticising abortion) are, therefore, cynical and not genuinely believed in.

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The charge is a relation of the “troll” or “grifter” charges: that he is saying things he doesn’t believe in order to get attention. Yet nothing in his interviews relating to his new album backs that up, for West has allowed himself to get into areas which cannot possibly have any significant net positive or negative effect on album sales and yet which sit very much in what would appear to be his current set of beliefs.

For example, just ahead of the release of Jesus is King, West did an almost two-hour long interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music. The interview is remarkably wide-ranging, but perhaps most interesting is the fact that it reveals how much West has been thinking about what would ordinarily be described as “small-c conservative” issues. In the interview with Lowe West covers an extraordinary range of issues.

He talks about “the best form of each other” we have as being family. And he goes on to a discussion of community and localism, with even a section on the significance of traditional housing and its role in encouraging and embedding a sense of community.

Many criticisms are bound to come Kanye West’s way over this, but what is important in the wider culture is not just a star of West’s mega-wattage saying things like this — it is that West is pointing a way out of the counter-culture.

Fatherless-ness, homelessness, drug dependency, ultra-materialism and indeed atheism have long been packaged in as the assumed attitudes of the era. To varying extents all moved from being counter-cultural (from the Sixties onwards) into being the assumed culture for at least the last two to three decades.

The question was always “what replaces the counter culture?”. And here, at any rate, is one answer. It isn’t an entirely new culture or a counter-counter-culture — but simply the culture that we knew and which we admired and aspired to until not very long ago.

It had its flaws, of course. But it had virtues too. And it will probably be seen as just one of the many ironies of the age that a rapper should have turned out to be one of the first major figures to show a way back to it.

But as well as asking ‘why?’ we should also ask ‘how?’. Goods and services have to be paid for, so how do some countries manage to buy more than they sell, year after year, decade after decade? The answer is that enough money to fill the gap flows in from other countries – for instance, in the form of loans or as asset purchases. The inflow of capital ultimately pays for the deficit in trade. The corollary is that a persistent trade surplus is balanced by a net outflow of capital to other countries. It has to be, because if were consumed instead (i.e. used to pay for imports) then, by definition, the surplus would disappear.

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Cross-border capital flows matter a lot – arguably more than the global trade that they enable (and result from). For a start they influence exchange rates and interest rates, and hence prices, jobs and wages. The sudden withdrawal of capital from a country can crash its property market, its banking system – indeed its entire economy. (From a Chinese point of view, the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which brought down the decades-old Suharto regime in Indonesia, is a salutary example.) An influx of capital can also be disruptive, fuelling spending booms, debt bubbles and asset inflation.

When capital flows between nations, it’s not just money that budges, but also things such as technological know-how, diplomatic influence and even national sovereignty.

In short, money makes the world go round – especially the kind of money that goes around the world.

When money flows uphill

An economic nationalist like Donald Trump should be at least as interested in the cross-border flow of capital as he is in the cross-border flow of goods and services. Certainly, some of his most influential supporters are very interested. For instance, here’s what the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel said on the subject:[1. Peter Thiel interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business, 16 March 2018; https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IY14NQEJXu0]

“Capital should be flowing from the US to invest in China, and then China should have trade deficits that offset the flows. We instead live in a world in which the money is strangely flowing uphill. The US, the slower growing economy, has the trade deficits and the investments are flowing from poor people in China into the US economy. It’s completely backwards. That tells us something is very strange in terms of the trade dynamics…”

Thiel raises a perplexing issue. One would indeed expect capital to flow from mature economies with modest levels of growth to emerging economies with high levels of growth. After all, investors like to put their money where it can get the biggest return.

So why does money flow ‘uphill’ – that is against the gradient of growth – from China to the West?

Before accusing China of ‘fixing’ the global economy, western governments need to address the distortions caused by their own policies. For instance, while their overall growth rates are low compared to China’s, returns on some investments are rather more attractive. The impact of perverse housing policies on property markets and QE on stock markets, has created a speculative free-for-all. Having supplied so many get-rich-quick opportunities, we can hardly blame foreigners for filling their boots.

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This suits our politicians very well. The influx of foreign cash not only provides a short term economic stimulus, it also helps keep interest rates low – always handy when there’s a perennial budget deficit to finance. Having foreigners buy up our assets requires them to buy our currency, thus pushing up its value, keeping imports cheap and inflation under control (always a worry when interest rates are low).

Obviously this is a disaster for our own exporting industries – and those parts of the country that are especially dependent on manufacturing. Meanwhile, asset bubbles suck the oxygen out of productive investment, as well as pushing house prices out of the reach of young people. All of this will come at ruinous long-term cost, but if, for the moment, it keeps the economic show on the road, our myopic rulers won’t mind.

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That said, Chinese government policy is also to blame. In particular, China’s refusal to reciprocate the West’s openness to Chinese investment in western assets. As Juliet Samuel explains in her documentary, lack of reciprocity is a general theme in China’s trade relationship with the West.

How the savings of the poor changed the world

Then again, the tendency for capital to flow from developing economies to developed ones is not limited to the Chinese case. It’s pretty much a universal pattern, at least in recent decades. This is known as the Lucas Puzzle, which is named after the economist Robert Lucas, who described the phenomenon back in 1990.[2. Robert Lucas, ‘Why doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?’, American Economic Review, 1990] His fellow economists have been trying to figure it out ever since.

There are various theories that apply to various countries to varying extents, but what does appear to be a common factor – and, indeed, the root cause – is that people in emerging economies save a much bigger proportion of their incomes than they do in the West (and thus generate a pool of capital that needs investing somewhere).

Though one might assume that people in richer countries are in a better position to be the bigger savers, people in poorer countries have the greater incentive. If a country becomes rich enough that typical incomes rise above subsistence level, but still too poor to afford a social security system, then its people must save – or starve in old age (which they are now more likely to reach).

Something else that happens to countries when they escape poverty is that birthrates – and, hence, family sizes – come tumbling down, which puts paid to the traditional social security system of having lots of children and grandchildren to support you in your dotage. China’s one-child policy is an especially extreme example of this demographic phenomenon. Introduced in 1979, it coincided with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. The latter freed China’s people to make enough money to save some of it, the former made it essential that they do so.

Finally allowed to profit from their labour (and accumulate savings) the explosion of enterprise from China’s peasantry, took the government by surprise – as Deng himself admitted in 1987:[3. Deng Xiaoping quoted by Jonathan Fenby in Tiger head, snake tails, Simon & Schuster, 2012]

“The result was not anything I or any other comrades had foreseen; it just came out of nowhere.”

Today, it is forgotten that the Chinese economic miracle got its start in the countryside, not the cities – and that it was the spontaneous action of ordinary people, not central government planning that got it all going. However, through its control of the banking system, the state had a monopoly over the use of all those savings – a near-inexhaustible source of artificially cheap capital that was ploughed into the development of China’s industrialised export capacity. Growth thus begat more growth – and the accumulation of ever more capital. So much money, in fact, that not even China’s investment-led economy could absorb it all.

Xi Jinping gets a grip

Whether directed by the state, or by privately owned enterprises, or by China’s burgeoning middle class (only America has more people on salaries of $40,000 and above),[4. Jim O’Neill, ‘Missing the forest for the Xi’, Project Syndicate, 12 March 2018] vast sums of Chinese capital have been invested abroad. For instance, over the last decade, Chinese purchases in Europe include the Greek port of Piraeus, the Swedish car company Volvo, the Swiss pharma giant Syngenta and, of course, numerous helpings of London real estate.[5. Andre Tartar et al, ‘How China is buying its way into Europe’, Bloomberg, 23 April 2018]

Western concerns about China’s shopping spree are, mirrored by Chinese concerns about the outflow of so much wealth. Things got so bad that by 2016 that the central bank was intervening to prop-up China’s currency (how times change).[6. David Dollar, ‘China is struggling to keep its currency high, not low’, Brookings, 26 January 2017]

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Xi Jinping likes nothing more than getting a grip – which he has done with the aid of tighter exchange controls and a shift to a more consumption-orientated economic policy. Fears of wholesale capital flight have subsided. Indeed, the net flow of capital is, for now, in positive territory, i.e. more flowing in than out.

So does that mean that Peter Thiel and Donald Trump can stop worrying? A China that is less export-orientated than it used to be, that won’t let its currency fall too low, and is keeping capital flows in balance, is surely less disruptive than it used to be.

And yet the potential for imbalance is huge. According to Michael Howell, managing director of CrossBorder Capital, China has accumulated $35 trillion in ‘liquidity’ – i.e. savings plus credit. This amounts to 27% of the global sum total – a proportion that has more than doubled over less than a decade, overtaking America’s share.[7. Michael Howell, ‘The loud warning noises from Chinese capital flows’, Financial Times, 19 April 2018]

Tweeting about Donald Trump last month, Kanye West vouchsafed that “we are both dragon energy”.[8. Kanye West, Twitter, 25 April 2018; https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/989179757651574784?s=21] I would suggest that the real ‘dragon energy’ in the world today is the power that the Chinese Government has over such a vast pool of capital.

In this respect, Xi Jinping is the world’s most powerful capitalist – quite a distinction for the world’s number one communist.